 Beauty’s ability to free our minds of determinations explains an apparent paradox. On the one hand, beauty does not produce knowledge or build character (NA XX, 377/E 147). But on the other hand, precisely because beauty accomplishes nothing, “something is achieved”; when our drives are brought into harmony, our will can actually choose freely. So defined, the aesthetic state is “the most fruitful of all in respect of knowledge and morality”; by committing neither to form nor to matter, it contains maximum potential for both (NA XX, 379/E 148). “This lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and vigor”, Schiller says, “is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us”; after witnessing such art, we “shall with equal ease turn to seriousness or to play, to repose or to movement, to compliance or to resistance” (NA XX, 380/E 149). In facilitating this condition, beauty gives us the “gift of humanity itself”, Schiller says; it is our “second creatress” (NA XX, 378/E 147–8). Our status as finite creatures means that this state will remain only an ideal that each particular art—music, painting, sculpture, etc.—must struggle to approach in its own way (NA XX, 380–1/E 149–50). But all genuine art will produce a state of equilibrium that puts the will in a position of maximum power and self-determination (Beiser 2005: 155).