The Fruit and Lebensgefuhl - Blake Bauserman

 I would like to make one final note on Ransom's interaction with the fruit and tying it to Gadamer's writings on Heidegger's inquiry into the nature of art.

Gadamer writes, "What sets the beautiful apart cannot be exhibited as a determinate knowable property of an object, but manifests itself in a subjective factor: the intensification of Lebensgefuhl (life-feeling) through the harmonious correspondence of imagination and understanding" (219).

Later down the page, Gadamer talks about how the judgment of taste is not knowledge, yet it is not arbitrary. This phrasing perfectly mirrors the interaction between Ransom and the fruit. His "common reason" tells him to taste the fruit again. It practically begs him to, but something he cannot put his finger on triumphs over this impulse and moves him to back away. To further add to this, when tasting the fruit, Ransom is at a loss for words, describing an experience of a new genus of pleasures, something so far removed from normal experience. On the outside, when he does not truly experience the fruit, it is simply yellow with a rather tough rind, but he has not experienced it, nor its beauty. Yet having tasted of it, his eyes are opened, and the fruit and its magnificence surpass its physical attributes, later becoming an experience entrapped within his mind. I believe this fullness, which would turn the fruit, compared to a symphony, into a vulgarity is what Heidegger's Lebensgefuhl is best compared to.

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