Mad Lust

There is no rationality, only that which my mind creates. Or rather, the rationality of eternal, sovereign God is inconceivable to finite, fallen me, but, being in His image and being fallen, my mind will attempt to seek a wholeness, to create closure. It is necessary to touch impossibility in order to come out of the dream world. There is no impossibility in dreams – only impotence (p. 95). The links that we cannot forge are evidence of the transcendent (p. 95). Monsters, monsters, monsters. It cannot, it is a false closure, a false rationality, one that refuses extremes and miracles for the sake of continuity. It is Gödel. But surreal “operating at each moment the synthesis of the rational and the real. Without fearing to place in the word “real” everything irrational it can contain until further notice.”

“It is in the surprise created by a new image or by a new association of images, that we have to see the most important element of progress in the physical sciences, because astonishment excites logic, always rather cold, obliging it to establish new coordinates.”

So everything is strange and being that you are unique (p.81) you are always expanding, unfamiliar, and loveable, poetry, insofar as poetry is the new association of images, blooms between your every moment as you go, line by line, moment by moment, expanding infinitely until you stop – it is you in a red blouse, naked, a gray blouse. Or, if poetry is lack, it is the green grass between you and I, it is/// “I need just to touch you for the quicksilver of the sensitive plant to bend its harp upon the horizon. But provided we stop a moment, the grass will turn green again, will be born again, after which my new steps will have no other goal then to reinvent you. I shall reinvent you for me, since I desire to see poetry and life recreated perpetually.” But again and again and again, across that distance, that lack… “That the absolute gift of one being to another, which can exist only in reciprocity, be in the eyes of everyone the only natural and supernatural bridge cast across life itself…” Everything is strange. We must not forget this. It is beautiful that it is strange, perhaps even because it is strange, but we must not let it’s beauty which becomes our love for it let us forget it is strange, we must love it while remembering it is strange – our loving it does not make it familiar or finite or, least of all, ours. Through our love, we may touch it, but not hold it. Our love for it is that supernatural bridge that allows for contact, but to forget it is strange is to be unprepared for the moment when Eliot’s brown river god comes smashing our illusions of non-isolation. Simone Weil says the function of language is to make connections, is to walk across that green grass, to set it to moving – it is sad that the air is always between us. It is also nice.

Hericlitus and river girls you never see again.

Desire is impossible: t destroys its object. Lovers cannot be one, nor can Narcissus be two. Don Juan, Narcissus. Because to desire something is impossible, we have to desire what is nothing.

p.99 – The contradictions the mind comes up against – these are the only realities: they are the criterion of the real. There is no contradiction in what is imaginary. Contradiction is the test of necessity.

Man’s great affliction, which begins with infancy and accompanies him till death, is that looking and eating are two different operations. Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat.

That which we look at here below is not real, it is a mere setting. That which we eat is destroyed, it is no longer real.

Sin has brought this separation about is us.

Appearance has the completeness of reality, but only as appearance. As anything other than appearance it is error.

We must try to love without imagining – to love the appearance in its nakedness without interpretation. What we love then is truly God. (p. 54)

sensuous and formal drives

man as purely sensuous drive is "nothing but a unit of quantity, and occupied moment of time-or rather, he is not at all, for his personality is suspended as long as he is ruled by sensation, and swept along by the flux of time." (man as finite being)

the sensuous drive "awakens and develops the potentialities of man, it is also this drive alone that makes their complete fulfillment impossible."

"Supressed nature soon resumes her rights, and presses for reality of existence, for some content to our knowing and some purpose of our doing."

formal drive "proceeds from the absolute existence of man, or from his rational nature, and is intent on giving him the freedom to bring harmony into the diversity of his manifestations, and to affirm his person among his changes of condition."

sensuous drive furnishes cases
formal drive gives laws

"...once you confess truth because it is truth, and practice justice because it is justice, then you have made an individual case into a law for all cases, and treated one moment of your life as if it were eternity." (objectification, ideology, the following of certitude instead of that which one is certain of - fascism)

when the formal drive and the sensuous drive act with each other in harmony, Schiller states that it is here we experience the "greatest enlargement of being: all limitations disappear nd from the mere unit of quantity to which the poverty of his senses reduced him, man has raised himself to a unity of ideas embracing the whole realm of phenomena." and here, Schiller continues "time with its whole neverending succession, is in us."

person & condition

person - eternal, enduring (infinite)
condition - temporal, changing (time, finite)

Schiller sets up a relationship that reminds me much of Proust's understanding of reality. "We pass from rest to activity, from passion to indifference, from agreement to contradiction; but we remain, and what proceeds directly from us remains too." (Schiller, p 115).

"The person therefore must be its own ground; for what persists cannot proceed from what changes. And so we would, in the first place, have the idea of absolute being grounded upon itself, that is to say, freedom. The condition, on the other hand, must have a ground other than itself; it must, since it does not owe its existence to the person, i.e., is not absolute, proceed from something. And so we would, in the second place, have the condition of all contingent being or becoming, that is to say, time. "Time is teh condition of all becoming" is an identical proposition, for it does nothing but assert that "succession is teh condition of things succeeding one upon another."

"Only inasmuch as he changes does he exist; only inasmuch as he remains unchangable does he exist. Man, imagined in his perfection, would therefore be the constant unity that remains eternally itself amidst teh floods of change."

"...most characteristic attribute of Godhead, viz., absolute manifestation of potential (the actualization of all of that is made actual). "

"There proceed two contrary challenges to man, the two fundamental laws of his sensuo-rational nature. The first insists upon absolute reality: he is to turn everything that is mere form into world, and make all his potentialities fully manifest. The second insists upon absolute formality: he is to destroy everything in himself that is mere world, and bring harmony into all his changes. In other words, he is to externalize all that is within him, and give form to all that is outside him. Both these tasks, conceived in their highest fulfillment, lead us back to that concept ofGodhead from which I started."

With all of this I am brought to consider the challenges face through the act of 'giving form' (intellectual "out-take[?]") while pressed against the tendency to turn form into world (sensuous intake). this brings me further to conclude that in respect towards a Godhead, we must deny extending ourselves out of our own sensuous nature and immerse ourselves into the 'moral realm' (heavenly, holy, sacred realm) while extending ourselves from there outward- so that all that ebbs (inward) and flows (outward) is a manifestation of God's ultimate purpose and divine will. This is our greatest challenge as artists (as persons) and our highest calling. (seek first his Kingdom...)

non-objectification

"This pure rational concept of beauty, if such could be found, would therefore-since it cannot derive from any actual case, but rather itself corrects and regulates our judgment of every actual case-have to be discovered by a process of abstraction, and deduced from the sheer potentialities of our sensuo-rational nature. In a single word, beauty would have to be shown to be a necessary condition of human being. From now on, then, we must lift our thoughts to the pure concept of human nature; and since experience never shows us human nature as such, but only individual human beings in individual situations, we must endeavor to discover from all these individual and changing manifestations that which is absolute and unchanging, and, by the rejection of all contingent limitations, apprehend the necessary conditions of their existence. True, this transcendental way will lead us out of the familiar circle of phenomenal existence, away from the living presence of things, and cause us to tarry for a while upon the barren and naked land of abstractions. But we are, after all, struggling for a firm basis of knowledge that nothing shall shake. And he who never ventures beyond actuality will never win the prize of truth."

(non-objectification) - if you 'venture' outside actuality by your own means you will venture into falsehood (ideology, objectification). If you tune in to and open up to the supernatural (beyond actuality) you make yourself available to transcendent truth (platforms, non-objectification).

taste and freedom

schiller writes in his 10th letter about the opposing forces of taste and freedom.

"in almost every historical epoch in which the arts flourish, and taste prevails, we find humanity at a low ebb, and cannot point to a single instance of a high degree and wide diffusion of aesthetic culture going hand in hand with political freedom and civic virtue, fine manners with good morals, refinement of conduct with truth of conduct."

limits of the particulars, deceptions of the whole

"One-sidedness in the exercise of his powers must, it is true, inevitably lead the individual into error; but the species as a whole to truth. Only by concentrating the whole energy of our mind into a single focal point, contracting our whole being into a single power, do we, as it were, lend wings to this individual power and lead it, by artificial means, far beyond the limits that nature seems to have assigned to it. Even as it is certain that all individuals taken together alone, have managed to detect a satellite of Jupiter that the telescope reveals to the astronomer, so it is beyond question that human powers of reflection would never have produced an analysis of the infinite or a critique of pure reason, unless, in the individuals called to perform such feats, reason had separated itself off, disentangled itself, as it were, from all matter, and by the most intense effort of abstraction armed their eyes with a glass for peering into the absolute. But will such a mind, dissolved as it were into pure intellect and pure contemplation, ever be capable of exchanging the rigorous bonds of logic for the free movement of the poetic faculty, or of grasping the concrete individuality of things with a sense innocent of preconceptions and faithful to the object? At this point nature sets limits even to the most universal genius, limits he cannot transcend; and as long as philosophy has to make its prime business the provision of safeguards against error, truth will be bound to have its martyrs." (Schiller p. 103)

fragmentary specialization=>lack in cosmic purpose

within or without

Schiller refers many times to interior and exterior.

interior is the mind, the imagination, the ideal, perhaps even the spiritual and or the supernatural. All is within is the higher.

exterior is the practical, the material, the empirical and narrow pedantry. All that is without is the lower.

Schiller prescribes that the former is much too high to discern the particular while the latter is much to low to survey the whole. However it is this tension or "antagonism of faculties" which brought about the inevitable 'progress' of humanity; fragmentary, yet unavoidably so.

man as idoeology of the state, state as ideology of man

Fourth Letter on the aesthetic education of man (excerpt):

"Every individual human being, one may say, carries within him, potentially and prescriptively, and ideal man, the archetype of a human bing, and it is his life's task to be, through all his changing manifestations, in harmony with the unchanging unity of this ideal. This archetype which is to be discerned more or less clearly in every individual, is represented by the state, the objective and, as it were, canonical form in which all the diversity of individual subjects strive to unite. One can, however, imagine two different ways in which man existing in time can coincide with man as idea, and, in consequence, just as many ways in which the state can assert itself in individuals; either by the ideal man suppressing empirical man, and the state annulling individuals; or else by the individual himself becoming the state, and the man in time being ennobled to the stature of man as idea."

As Schiller relates the the ideal in an optimistic light, as it were to drive us towards the moral realm through intellect and reason, I tend to disagree in the sense that ideologies set up false expectations and disallow potential development through experience and "listening."* Rather than trying to move man upwards from the ground (by his own power) we ought to begin unerstanding man through transcended (holy) spirit. By God alone may we be lifted up (in Christ alone there is freedom) and in order to do so, we must deny our self first and recognize our need of redemption. Schiller relates to the conditions of nature and the sensuous as driving forces that suppress and deny man their inherent freedom. To this I would say that man's understanding of freedom is primarily a historical understanding, instead of an eternal one. We think freedom means the ability to do and act as our free will desires- what a worldly misunderstanding! Freedom is a certainty that we are redeemed, covered and lifted from eternal condemnation. I can wake up an be sure that God is still on the throne- what freedom! Schiller understands freedom as coming out of nature- perhaps through a varied form of natural selection so it seems through his third letter. If nature were to be the origin of man, and freedom the origin of man then it seems a bit counterintuitive that nature would now seem subject as well as man and yet we continue to deny a power outside of these two things, unless of course we call it the "moral realm." What a disintegration of God, ironically thorugh reason which Schiller attributes the capacity for freedom. Without God it seems reason becomes a tangled mess with loose ends all over the place.

letter five

"Civilization, far from setting us free, in fact creates some new need with every new power it develops in us. The fetters of the physical tighten ever more alarmingly, so that fear of losing what we have stifles even the most burning impulse toward improvement, and the maxim of passive obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life. Thus do we see the spirit of the age wavering between perversity and brutality, between unnaturalness and mere nature, between superstition and moral unbelief; and it is only through an equilibrium of evils that it is still sometimes kept within bounds."

thrid letter (continued)

Our overcoming our physical tendencies while attempting to move closer towards God (or perhaps Schiller's so called "moral realm") is a critical matter of understanding. This is not to say that we need to know fully the entire picture, however it is important the we become aware of and take grasp of our relationship to Man, Nature and God in order to draw nearer to each. With each relationship there comes with it a lack (either emotional, physical or spiritual). Through lack in one, we ought to draw closer to the others as they are all bound in form. As we continue to mature we begin to recognize just how significant our understanding of these three essential relationships shape and mold us. (and often times, vice versa: objectification)

Our relationship to the physical and the moral: "is a question of abstracting man's physical character its arbitrariness, and from his moral character its freedom; of making the first conformable to laws and the second dependent upon sense impressions; of removing the former somewhat further from matter, and bringing the latter somewhat closer to it; and all this with the aim of bringing into being a third character that, kin to both the others, might prepare the way for a transition from the rule of mere force to the rule of mere force to the rule of law, and that without in any way impeding the development of moral character, might on the contrary serve as a pledge in the sensible world of a morality as yet unseen."

letters on aesthetic education of man: excerpt from the thrid letter

what separates man from nature is that "...he does not stop short at what nature herself made of him, but has the power of retracing by means of reason the steps she took on his behalf, of transforming the work of blind compulsion into a work of free choice, and of elevating physical necessity into moral necessity."

Man (reason) came from nature (sensuous) [which came from God (moral)]: in the following excerpt from Schiller's third letter on the aesthetic education of man, he justifies man's destined reason as independent and free from its origins while personifying an almost accusatory character upon (sensuous) nature. The following is an important configuration of our transformation from a natural state into a moral one:

Out of the long slumber of the senses he awakens to consciousness and knows himself for a human being; he looks about him and finds himself--in the state. The force of his needs threw him into this situation before he was yet capable of exercising his freedom to choose it; compulsion organized it according to purely natural laws before he could do so according to the laws of reason. But with this state of compulsion, born of what nature destined him to be, and designed to this end alone, he neither could nor can rest content as a moral being. And woe to him if he could! With that same right, therefore, by virtue of which he is man, he withdraws from the dominion of blind necessity, even as in so many other respects he parts company from it by means of his freedom; even as, to take but one example, he obliterates by means of morality, and ennobles by means of beauty, the crude character imposed by physical need upon sexual love. And even thus does he, in his maturity, retrieve by means of a fiction the childhood of the race: he conceives, as ideas, a state of nature, a state not indeed given him by an experience, but a necessary result of what reason destined him to be; attributes to himself in this idealized natural state a purpose of which in his actual natural state he was entirely ignorant, and a power of free choice of which he was at that time wholly incapable; and now proceeds exactly as if he were starting from scratch, and were, from sheer insight and free resolve, exchanging a state of complete independence for a state of social contracts. However skillfully, and however firmly, blind caprice may have laid the foundations of her work, however arrogantly she may maintain it, and with whatever appearance of venerability she may surround it--man is fully entitled in the course of these operations to treat it all as though it had never happened. For the work of blind forces possesses no authority before which freedom need bow, and everything must accommodate itself to the highest end that reason now decrees in him as person. This is the origin and justification of any attempt on the part of a people grown to maturity to transform its natural state into a moral one.

yet, despite this transformation, "...physical man does in fact exist, whereas the existence of moral man is yet problematic. If then reason does away with the natural state (as she of necessity must if she would put her own in its place), she jeopardizes the physical man who actually exists for the sake of a moral man who is as yet problematic, risks the very existence of society for a merely hypothetical (even though morally necessary) ideal of society."

With this complex relationship in mind, man is both bound to his sensuous nature while constantly moving towards an inevitable moral character. It is necessary that this relationship is unavoidable and that man continue to fall back into the sensual or he would lack that which completes his human makeup. I am reminded here of man's sinful nature that pulls him toward repentance so that he might be lifted up (into what Schiller might refer to as the moral realm).

good and or evil

"As far as his interest is concerned, it makes no difference if he intends to take his heroes to take his heroes from the class of pernicious or of good characters, since the very measure of power required for good can quite often, for that reason, be demanded in something evil. When we make aesthetic judgments, we focus far more on power than on its orientation and far more on freedom than on lawfulness." (Schill, On the Pathetic, p. 67-68)

This perhaps could contribute to the moral argument against santiago sierra's work. Why is his work so striking? Perhaps this is because we are more drawn towards its power of influence towards our moral capacity opposed to the moral found in its performance.

between comedy and tragedy

"Maudlin emotions, those merely tender stirrings, belong to the domain of what is agreeable, and fine art has nothing to do with this domain. These emotions simply gratify the senses through a kind of diffusion or lulling, and they refer solely to the outer, not to the inner state of the human being. Many of our novels and tragedies, especially the so-called dramas (something between a comedy and a tragedy) and the beloved family portrait, belong to this class. Their only effect is to empty the tear ducts and pleasurably alleviate the vascular system. but the spirit goes away empty and the nobler power inside the human being is in no way fortified by all this."

My response to this in regards to Christian art is as follows:

Christian art typically succumbs to the sensuous in that it desires to express the connection of the human to the divine. To express that connection however will forever turn up inadequate due to its mere agreeable nature. As many sermons attend to our sensuous nature, so also does our understanding of God. And when we subject our understanding of God into an object form, it has little to do with our actual relation to the divine. Hence, Christian art often falls under the category of kitsch when its aim is transcendence.

This note refers specifically to our discussion on Tusday (June 9, 2009) about our ability to "explain" God. Our art ought to be punctums, entry points, windows, platforms, and stairs into the realm of the supernatural. Too many times, we make work that acts as mirrors back into society. They only move people closer the the natural, material realm, even if it is an attempt to depict the supernatural. God imitated, depicted, reproduced is no God at all- what have we done to the name of our Lord? Forgive us of our vanity and may we extend our beings through our art rather than continue in our vain attempts to create something new. We do not need to make you look attractive, we merely need to make ourselves and our work available for you to work through. (e.g. platforms for potential).

propriety

Nature makes the first demand on human beings (the sensuous, dependent)

Reason makes the second demand on human beings (the moral, rational, independent) - it is a person's duty not to let nature prevail over him but rather to master it.

In this way, Propreity is permissible to make the thrid ddemand on human begins (overlapping sensuous and the moral, the act of rationality upon the sensuous).

confront or avoid

it is important for us to confront our sensuous nature and not merely avoid (or repress) the sensuous. we must feel suffering in order to overcome it through our independence of it via moral nature. There is a need for passionate suffering.

"Nowhere does the Greek seek his glory by dulling the suffering or by indifference to it, but rather by enduring the suffering with every feeling for it." (Schiller, On the Pathetic p. 47)

pathetically sublime

...two main conditions must be met for the pathetically sublime: first, a vivid image of suffering, in order to awaken the emotion of compassion with the proper strength, and second, an image of the resistance to the suffering, in order to call into consciousness the mind's inner freedom. Only by virtue of the first condition does the object become pathetic, only by virtue of the second condition does the pathetic become at the same time something sublime.

From this basic principle flow the two fundamental laws of all tragic art. These are first: portrayal of the suffering nature; second, portrayal of moral independence in the suffering.

the unknown (the extraodrdinary and the indeterminate)

the unknown is a source of fear more than hope and to be sure, that is fear guided by the preservation instinct.

The darkness is not terrifying in itself, but it is the mind left open to the unknown (possibility with defenselessness) that terrifies us. as soon as danger becomes clear, a considerable part of the fear disappears. The terrifying makes capable the sublime.

Homer:

There lie the land and the city of the people of Chimer.
Constantly they grope in the night and fog, and ne'er
Does the God of the shining sun show them a beam of
light;

Instead, these wretched people lie enveloped by terrifying night.
odyssey (eleventh song)

creation and extension

notes on our conversation

transparency
associate transparency with honesty, cleanliness
envelopes for polaroids/screen printed forms
binding envelopes
supplimental writing
latitude/longitude/direction/time
post modern romantic and the iphone
infinite/finite
the sky
maps/mapping
creating/extending
punctum/points of entry
we ought not try and 'attract' people to God, God already does that
rather, we ought to just create a punctum/platform/window/a point of entry for God to be experienced.
aesthetic experience is just one way for us to draw closer to God.
it is our calling to create these opportunities, these platforms for a sacred experience
steps/stairs
up/down
earth/heaven- sky=everything beyond our comprehension, earth we tend to subject
etymology of explain
overlapping thoughts
God can only love himself, love (I love my wife because I see God in her, God loves her because God is in her)
tragedy and the aesthetic experience vs. the actual experience -removal and consciousness (schiller)

schiller's free will in relationship to the divine and the sublime

through religion, our instinct to survive is put at ease. Immortality cannot contribute anything at all to the representation of death as a sublime object. the sublime disappears as immortality prevails. (the sublime is never based upon the satisfaction of our instincts).



If the image of divinity is to be practically (dynamically) sublime, then we have to tie the feeling of our security not to our existence but rather to our principles (for Schiller, this refers to the external, moral realm).

"...divinity could never as a force act upon the will.

editor: "in religion in general, throwing oneself down and adoring with contrite gestures full of fear seem to be the only appropriate behavior in the presence of the divinity, behavior most peoples have also accordingly taken up. but, he continues, this fram of mind is not at all necessarily bound up with the idea of the sublimity of a religion. The human being conscious of his own guilt and thus having cause to fear is not at all in a frame of mind to wonder at the divine greatness. Only when his conscience is clean, do those effects of the divine power serve to give him a sublime idea of the divinity, inasmuch as he is then elevated above the fear of the effects of this power through the feeling of his own sublime disposition. He stands in awe (Ehrfurcht), not in fear (Furcht), of the divinity. On the other hand, superstition feels only fear and anxiety toward divinity, without esteeming it. Out of such feeling there can never arise a religion of uprightness, but only ingratiation and the solicitation of favor. Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Analytic of the Sublime.

Schiller goes on to discern free will as free will only when we recognize it as such (the preservation-instinct, or our intelligible self - that which is in us which is not of nature and distinct from our sensuous side so that we might become aware of its self-sufficiency, its independence).

freedom of will is only a moral freedom, never a physical freedom.

magnificent - to overcome what is fearful
succumbing to the fearful w/o fear = sublime

on representation of the sublime

three realtionships:

power of some natural object (objective, physical power)
relation of this power to our capacity to resist it physically (our subjective, physical impotence)
relation of this power to the moral personwithin us (our subjective, moral superiority)


all three elments must be combined in every representation of the sublime.


again, it is important to note here that the sublime must be a representation, or else we will succumb to our sensuous nature apart from recognition toward the moral realm. Hence the importance of the aesthetic experience and the experience of the play over music and literature.

schiller's free will

"...with the help of reason, we maintain our independence from nature in two senses: first, because (in a theoretical sense) we pass beyond natural conditions and can think more than we know; second, because (in a practical sense) we set ourselves above natural conditions and, by means of our will, can contradict our desires. When perception of some subject matter allows us to experience the former, it is theoretically magnificent, something cognitively sublime. A subject matter providing us with the feeling of the independence of our will is practically magnificent, a sublimeness of character" (p. 23)

theoretically sublime: cognitive instinct contradicted by nature as an object of knowledge. (merely as an object that should have expanded our knowledge) - Kant refers to as the "mathematically sublime"


practically sublime: self-preservation instinct contradicted by an object of feeling. (a power that can determine our own condition) - Kant refers to as "the sublimity of power" or "dynamically sublime"


self preservation instinct is because of the cognitive instinct in relationship to our (physical) external environment. Warning is given to self preservation in the form of pain or furthur, fear.

instinct

i. the instinct to represent things to ourselves (cognitive instinct or Vorstellungstrieb). Concerns Knowing. Relationship to external things.


ii. the instinct for self-preservation (Trieb der Selbsterhaltung). Concerns Feeling. Relationship to internal things.

on the sublime

sublime

whenever the object is presented or represented, our sensuous nature feels its limits, but our rational nature feels its superiority, its freedom from limits. Thus, we come up short against a sublime object physically, but we elevate ourselves above it morally, namely, through ideas.

as sensuous beings we are dependent
as rational beings we are free

When nature stands in contradiction to our instincts and drives, our dependency is revealed through our rational nature (at which point it no longer acts as free, but subjected)...

on imitation

The object of our sympathy must belong to our nature

The action must be conceived within the realm of freedom (moral, external)

suffering as well as its sources must be communicated completely within a sequence of events

must be realized in a perceptible way through action; unmediated.


imitation must be differentiated from narration or description. Here, Schiller places the drama above music (depicts feelings) and literature (describes feelings)because it is without narration. it is spontaneous, it is action. but more imporantly it still retains the quality of being separate from actual experience; it is aesthetic. Removed so we may be conscious observers. This is the unique quality of art.

conflict of suffering

Finally, the images of the suffering must work on us incessantly if they are to stir up a high level of emotion. The passion produced in us by others' sufferings is a state of coercion from which we rush to free ourselves and it is all too easy for the illusion so indispensable for compassion to disappear. For this reason, our minds must be forcibly fettered to these images and robbed of the freedom of tearing themselves away from the illusion prematurely.

Varition, in and out of suffering, is imperative for combating against the effects of habit. The spontenaity of suffering keeps our minds sharp and in continual urge to act. O' how easily we move from empathy to apathy.

The great secret of the art of tragedy consists precisely in the skillful management of this conflict [suffering and without suffering] there the secret is revealed in its most brilliant light.

on narration

Schiller brings up an interesting issue in art and narration.

Quite often the narrative presentation also transports us from the state of mind of the person acting to that of the narrator, thus interrupting the ilusion so necessary to the sympathy.

This reminds me of poorly written artist statemetns, or tag boards posted next to works of art. Giving away too much of the story, interrupting our chance to connect with it. Spoon feeding is for infants so they might understand the necessity of sustainence. But continual mothering disallows a child to grow. We musn't rely on receiving answers, but rather coming to them through our own cognition. Otherwise we are all children ("The Great Beast" of popular culture). Once again bringing me into the facilitation of building platforms for potential.

tragedy is an untied not

Tragedy eleveates our sensuous (internal) emotions outward and above into the realm of morality (external)

This sublime spiritual disposition is the lot of strong and philosophical minds who, through assiduous work on themselves, have learned to control the selfish instict [sensuous, internal]. Even the most painful loss does not drive them beyond the sort of composed melancholy that is always capable of being combined with a noticeable degree of pleasure. Only such minds, who alone are capable of separating themselves from tehmselves, enjoy the privilege of taking part in themselves and feeling their own suffering in the gentle reflection of sympathy [morality, external].

what separates the moral from the sensuous is choice. For Schiller, choice is what elevates our sensuous (material) instinct into the moral realm (self control, discipline).

The pleasure that sorrowful, tragic emotions give us originates in the satisfaction of the urge to act. but in this regard, too, it is not the number, nor the liveliness of the images, nor even the effectiveness of desires in general, but rather a specific type of image and effectiveness of desires in general, but rather a specific type of image and the effectiveness of a specific desire, produced by reason, that lie at the basis of this pleasure.

empathy corresponds directly with the urge to act. Schiller comapres tragedy with the "untied not" which is a beautiful picture of aesthetic pleasure within a certain lack of something to be desired. Open-endedness is an important function of tragic art. We must leave the viewer with something to desire, something to act upon, something to change- guiding him or her into the realm of morality.

freedom and the transcendental way

freedom and "unconditional practical law" (ultimately, the moral law of treating persons as ends and never simply as means) reciprocally imply each other. Someone is free if and only if he or she acts, not on the basis of nature's determinations or knowledge of them, but on the basis of that ideal. Schiller refers to this as the transcendental way.

"transcendentalism" can only occur after modernism.

philosophy of Schiller

Schiller is a modernist with classical underpinnings.

classical: looks to nautre for inspiration and to humanity in its infancy, to the Greek world, for guideance; art's task is to recover and sustain a graceful naturalness that defines the beautiful.

modern: Kant's transcendental philosophy. Taken by the sublimity of humanity that sets condition for the very understanding of nature and possessses moral dignity by bing able to free itself from the grip of nature and tradition.

letter to Goethe, September 14,1979

"Two things have to be part of the poet and the artist: that he lifts himself above reality and that he remains within the sensuous realm. Where these two are joined, there is aesthetic art."

two fundamental laws of all tragic art

i. depiction of suffering nature

ii. depiction of moral independence in suffering

he also emphasizes the necessity for the protagonist to be portrayed as both sensuous and moral in order that their suffering may arouse our sympathy, the very purpose of tragedy.

idealism and realism

Schiller's representation of realism and idealism is as follows:

idealism: goals "reached for through culture"
realism: goals "achieved through nature"

idealism being preferable to realism because its 'infinite greatness' is ever approximated (as opposed to being already achieved/finished) and makes human progress possible if/when human beings cultivate themselves by moving from the naive to the sentimental stage. More simply, realism is (still) finite. idealism is infinite.

(the elimination of these dualities is where divinity appears, the ideal of human nature.)

naive and sentimental poetry

Two demands of a work of art:

first, the "necessary relationship to its object (objective truth)"
second, the "necessary relationship of this object...to the human abilities of feeling (subjective generality)."

depict the ideal, but do not imitate it. (through sentimental operation)

"The naive art of the ancients 'depicts the obejct with all its limitations, individualizing it,' while the sentimental art of the moderns consists in removing 'all limitations from its object, idealizing it.'"

thesis: "nature brings [man] to unity with himself, art separates and divides him, and through the idea he returns to unity." ...For Schiller, the poet's task is to transform a limited objective into an infinite one by means of a sentimental operation. (subjective and objective consciousness)

progress: Naive -> Sentimental -> Ideal.
only a synthesis of naive and sentimental poetry can "give human nature its complte expression" and thereby realize the whole range of human potential, that state of being "a peer of God" sought in Schiller's first dissertation.

on grace and dignity

three ways of life:
human beings can:

supress their physical nature in favor of rationality. (stifling monarchy, regimented tastes)

fully succumb to their sensuous nature. (political anarchy, tastlessness)

find a harmony between the demands of nature and reason. (unites law and freedom) - "The Aesthetic State"

i. the aesthetic education of man

Unity between man and nature and that a duality occurs as a dialectic between "person" and "condition."

The beautiful has the ability to reveal human potential (diminshed or supressed by the demands of business and profession). Aesthetic is the way to freedom - "The Aesthetic State" - the totality of human potential. It is an ideal, but stimulates human beings to the optimal realization of their potential- art acts as a mediator for this potential.

physical quality -> sensual condition
logical quality -> ou reason
moral quality -> our will
aesthetic quality -> (relates to sensual condition, reason and will - cultivates harmony)

Schiller opposes anything that threatens the realization of our potential: Repressive political institutions, one-sided cultural developments in which principles dominate feelings or emotions get the better of principles. Art plays a corrective role between physical and intellectual powers- nature and man.

art as free action

Schiller believes that a person "alone of all beings the privilege of breaking the chain of necessity by his will" that is to say, by free action or art (in the broadest sense of the term).

Seeing as how Schiller was writing in the late 1700s I would agree with his statement to a certain degree. However in the context of contemporary art and the current of socio-political climate, Art has the ability to act only through will in the sense that a person is acting detached from "the Great Beast" of society. Free will, being a gift from God, must be returned- and through which our inclination to create is incorporated into our religious impulse to act upon the gift granted to us from supernatural origin.

Without a developed understanding of God, so with it goes goes an underdeveloped understanding of reality. In this way, our act of creation often aligns itself with 'free will' in the sense that it breaks the chain of necessity within the context of the world (material)- changing our relationship to things. Although creation and art does have the ability to transform our relationship to space (finite), it is less thought of as an act that can transform our relationship to eternity (G0d- infinite).

There are two important differentiations however in terms of art: Art as an act of creation in lieu of our free will and and Art as a biproduct of our free will.

Point being that our act of creation is not necessarily creation as God created ex nihlo (our of nothing), but rather something out of something. Just as we are extensions of God's creation, so our creation is really just an extension of God's extension and by disregarding this relationship we create a greater distance between humanity and our understnading of God- Furthering our subjection to a objective reality.

reify: to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing.

schiller

now reading schiller's essays:

On the Art of Tragedy
On the Sublime
On the Pathetic
Concerning the Sublime
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
On Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Notes to follow...

The Great Beast

The Great Beast: On the origin of this myth cf. Plato, Republic, Book VI. To adore the 'Great Beast' is to think and act in conformity with the prejudices and reactions of the multitude to the detriment of all personal search for truth and goodness.

Rome is the Great Beast of atheism and materialism.
Israel is the Great Beast of religion.
The whole of Marxism, in so far as it is true, is contained in the page of Plato on the Great Beast.The state of

Conformity is an imitation of grace.

A Pharisee is someone who is virtuous out of obedience to the Great Beast.

devotion and obedience

Weil makes the argument that devotion is illusory while obedience is more closely related to that of necessity. Understandably this is a legitimate statement the way she develops it, however I feel she neglects her own theory of detachment and attachment. Both devotion and obedience have their ability to attach and detach, however they must work together in order to bear fruit. If we were to continue to act purely out of obedience to the law, we would limit the ability of the holy spirit to direct our actions and discernment would fall into objectification, idealism and ultimately reification or a removal from reality.

work

Man's greatness is always to recreate his life, to recreate what is given to him, to fashion that very thing which he undergoes. Through work he produces his own natural existence. Through science he recreates the universe by means of symbols. Through art he recreates the alliance between his body and his soul (cf. the speech of Eupalinos). It is to be noticed that each of these three things is something poor, empty and vain taken by tiself and not in relation to the two others. Union of the three: a working people's culture (that will not be just yet)...

The master is the slave of the slave in the sense that the slave makes the master master.

monotony is either a reflection of eternity or the sign of unvarying perpetuity. Time is either surpassed or sterilized.

It is not religion but revolution which is the opium of the people.

I was a little disappointed that out of all places to end, Weil's notes ended on enstranged labor. It certainly makes sense after her extensive notes on reification, human condition and social politics, but regardless, the necessity of God is merely a blurp in comparison to the rest of her notes. I'm still skeptical as to how 'heretical' her system of belief was. Her notes seem more edited than they do gnostic.

positive entropy? Part III

After the collapse of our civilization there must be one of two things: either the whole of it will perish like the ancient civilizations, or it will adapt itself to a decentralized world...it rests with us to prepare for the future.

You could not be born at a better period than the present, when we have lost everything.

Decentralization is the evil disguised as the good through 'humanism.' We are all lost and in need of sever recentralization. This whole most modern thing just isn't working for us.

Proust

Time flows and wears down and destroys that which is temporal. Accordingly there is more of eternity in the past than in the present. The value of history properly understood is analogous to that of remembrance in Proust. Thus the past presents us with something which is at the same time real and better than ourselves, something which can draw us upwards-a thing the future never does.

positive entropy? Part II

Atheistic materialism is necessarily revolutionary, for, if it is to be directed towards an absolute good here on earth, it has to place it in the future. In order that this impetus should have full effect there must therefore be a mediator between the perfection to come and the present. This mediator is the chief-Lenin, etc. He is infallible and perfectly pure. In passing through him evil becomes good.

We have either to see things in that way or to love God, or else to allow ourselves to be tossed to and fro by the little things-good and evil-ofeveryday life.

...The great mistake of the Marxists and of the whole of the nineteenth century was to think that by walking straight on one mounted upwards into the air.

O' what tragedy, O' our stupidity that we could perceive of perfection through means of mediocrity.

Darwin destroyed the illusion of internal progress (found in Lamark)
energy can only deteriorate.

eternity alone is invulnerable to time.

Two Goods

Good as the opposite of evil.

Absolute Good as without an opposite.

society is the cave that keeps good opposite to evil. For Weil, the way out of the cave is solitude.

emancipation

Capitalism has brought about the emancipation of collective humanity with respect to nature. But this collective humanity has taken itself on with respect to the individual the oppressive function formerly exercised by nature.

Through a long historic process of understanding the world, Nature, Man and God, we have inadvertently transformed the process of unification into a process of separation. It is difficult to tell exactly when and where the switch happened, but I would begin to make my argument upon the fall of man in the Garden. What was once our harmonious encampment with God's creation is now an unbridgeable distance that can only be reunited first through our recognition of this distance, second through our awareness of the origin for this distance and lastly through our acceptance of what Christ did to bridge this infinite distance. Only then may we relinquish our oppression through the appearance of oppressiveness, and only then may our struggle for 'emancipation' be a struggle for slavery to righteousness. We got it all backwards.

Submit yourselves for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether to a king as the one in authority, or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers and the praise of those who do right. For such is the will of God that by doing right you may silence the ignorance of foolish men. Act as free men, and do not use your freedom as a covering for evil, but use it as bondslaves of God. Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king. Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to those who are good and gentle, but also to those who are unreasonable. (1 Peter 2:13-18)