[336] that I didn't immediately realize that in these peasant scenes, pointed by the Dutch painters, there is one element of power of being^a, which I always praise in my lectures, namely vitality, besides rationality or intentionality. It is an expression of life, vitality^b, in its not destructive but uninhibited self-expression. And for this reason, I showed this picture at that time, and now I show a similar

picture to you, in order to feel what perhaps the artist felt when he painted it, namely his joy, joie de vivre (as the French call it), his ecstatic joy about this kind of ecstatic togetherness. It is the same in the two others I showed you. In all these cases it is the vitality of social inter- relations shown uninhibited by conventional repressions. And this is the profounder meaning of these pictures. 10) Rembrandt^c: DESCENT FROM THE CROSS--Here we come to another kind of vitality-- something soldierly--perhaps his most famous, most understandable picture of Rembrandt, 11) the NIGHT WATCH, it is usually called, and is something which gives, in the same way as the others (but on a level of a not festival [?] direct[ly?], but anyhow something very near to it, although it has a solder soldier element in it) the same kind of vitality expressed in the tremendous power of light and shadow, as used by Rembrandt in most of his great pictures. It is as if the

philosophy of light, which was the great philosophy of nature of the Middle Ages and is not so far removed from some of our presentday [sic.] philosophies of nature, as if this power of being^d which we find in the miraculous phenomenon of light is brought into the surface of such a picture.