King of the Flights

This antithesis between the awful certitude of will-driven instinct and the fancy-prone irresolution of human reason provides the animating tension of "Hawk Roosting." The "hooked head and hooked feet" of the predator represent, like the human brain, organic "objectifications" of the rapacious will, but they are free from the "falsifying dream" that debilitates the brain and causes it to send delayed or faulty commands to the extremities by which it survives. One aspect of this "dream" is the tendency to construe surroundings aesthetically rather than strategically. Phenomena that we find pleasant or exhilarating - "the high trees. . . . the air's buoyancy and the sun's ray" - are "of advantage" to the hawk in its hunt for prey. Schopenhauer finds enormous value in absorbed aesthetic contemplation precisely because i...