If in the dynamic state of rights it is as force that one man ENCOUNTERS another, and imposes limits upon his activities; if in the ethical state of duties man sets himself over against man with all the majesty of the law, and puts a curb upon his desires: in those circles where conduct is governed by beauty, in the aesthetic state, none may appear to the other except as form, or confront him except as an object of free play. To bestow freedom by means of freedom is the fundamental law of this kingdom.
The dynamic state can merely make society possible, by letting one nature be curbed by another; the ethical state can merely make it (morally) necessary, by subjecting the individual will to the general; the aesthetic state alone can make it real, because it consummates the will of the whole through the nature of the individual. Though it may be his needs that drive man into society, and reason that implants within him the principles of social behavior, beauty alone can confer upon him a social character. Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual. All other forms of perception divide man, because they are founded exclusively eitehr upon the sensuous or upon the spiritual part of his being; only the aesthetic mode of perception makes of him a whole, because both his natures must be in harmony if he is to achieve it. All other forms of communication divide society, because they relate exclusively either to the priveate receptivity or to the private proficiency of its individual members, hence to that which distinguishes man from man; only the aesthetic mode of communication unites society, because it relates to that which is common to all. The pleasures of the senses weenjoy merely as individuals, without the genus that is immanent within us having any share in them at all; hence we cannot make the pleasures of sense universal, because we are unable to universalize our own individuality. The pleasures of knowledge we enjoy merely as genus, and by carefully removing from our judgment all trace of individuality; hence we cannot eliminate traces of individuality from the judgments of others as we can from our own. Beauty alone do we enjoy at once as individual and as genus, i.e., as representatives of the human genus. The Good of the senses can only make one man happy, since it is founded on appropriation, and this always involves exclustion; and it can only make this one man onesidedly happy, since his personality has no part in it. Absolute good can only bring happiness under conditions that we cannot presume to be universal; for truth is the price of abnegation alone, and only the pure in heart believe in the pure will. Beauty alone makes the whole world happy, and each and every being forgets its limitations while under its spell.
Schiller calls for aesthetic semblence.
But does such a state of aesthetic sembance really exist? And if so, where is it to be found? As a need, it exists in every finely attunedsoul; as a relized fact, we are likely to find it, like the pure church and hte pure republic, only in some few chosen circles, hwere conduct is governed, not by some soulless imitation of the manners and morals of others, but by the aesthetic nature we have made our own; where men make their way, with undismayed simplicity and tranquil innocence, through even the most involved and complex situations, free alike of the compulsion to infringe the freedom of others in order to assert their own, as of the necessity to shed their dignity in order to manifest grace.
Translated by Elizabeth M Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby
How fitting it is that Schiller ends on the note of Grace.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Sunday, August 16, 2009
understanding the origin of man
"But since in the enjoyment of beauty, or aesthetic unity, an actual union and interchange between matter and form, passivity and activity, momentarily takes place, the compatibility of our two natures, the practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite, hence the possibility of sublimest humanity, is thereby actually proven...
Since, as I have argued in the preceding letters, it is the aesthetic mode of the psyche that first gives rise to freedom, it is obvious that it cannot itslef derive from freedom and cannot, in consequence, be of moral origin. It must be a gife of nature; the favor of fortune alone can unloose the fetters of that first physical stage and lead the savage toward beauty."
NOTE: (it must begin with a deep understanding of man's origin, that is an understanding of God and God in man and nature)
Since, as I have argued in the preceding letters, it is the aesthetic mode of the psyche that first gives rise to freedom, it is obvious that it cannot itslef derive from freedom and cannot, in consequence, be of moral origin. It must be a gife of nature; the favor of fortune alone can unloose the fetters of that first physical stage and lead the savage toward beauty."
NOTE: (it must begin with a deep understanding of man's origin, that is an understanding of God and God in man and nature)
Friday, August 14, 2009
falsifying the absolute
"...for the intellect remains eternally confined within the realm of the conditioned, and goes on eternally asking questions without ever lighting upon any ultimate answer...Because the life of sense knows no purpose other than its own advantage...His concern is not with the holy, but merely with a powerful, being. The spirit in which he worships God is tehrefore fear, which degrades him, not reverence, which exalts him in his own estimation."
"the moral is still at the service of the physical: in either case the sole principle prevailing within him is a material one, and man is, at least in his ultimate tendency, a creature of sense-with this solde difference, that in the first case he is an animal void of reason, in the second an animal endowed with reason. What heis meant to be, however, is neither of these; he is meant to be a human being. Nature is not meant to rule him exclusively, nor reason to rule him conditionally. Both thesesystems of ruleare meant to coexist, in perfect independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord."
(Schiller, AEoM, Twenty-Fourth Letter)
we are naturally fallen (and it is much easier to work with gravity than to push against it). Although it is the push against gravity that is ultimately our victory which has already been won...we merely need to understand that victory and live under Grace, eternally. We set ourselves up for and place ourselves under the rule of our flesh willingly (or not) and spend so many passing minutes dwelling on the temporal. Let us not be driven by fear, but by reverence and joy. Transform your mind and conform it to God who has freely given us all things. We strive so much to be free without realizing that freedom is already set within us. Be still and tune into God's heavenly song over you.
"the moral is still at the service of the physical: in either case the sole principle prevailing within him is a material one, and man is, at least in his ultimate tendency, a creature of sense-with this solde difference, that in the first case he is an animal void of reason, in the second an animal endowed with reason. What heis meant to be, however, is neither of these; he is meant to be a human being. Nature is not meant to rule him exclusively, nor reason to rule him conditionally. Both thesesystems of ruleare meant to coexist, in perfect independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord."
(Schiller, AEoM, Twenty-Fourth Letter)
we are naturally fallen (and it is much easier to work with gravity than to push against it). Although it is the push against gravity that is ultimately our victory which has already been won...we merely need to understand that victory and live under Grace, eternally. We set ourselves up for and place ourselves under the rule of our flesh willingly (or not) and spend so many passing minutes dwelling on the temporal. Let us not be driven by fear, but by reverence and joy. Transform your mind and conform it to God who has freely given us all things. We strive so much to be free without realizing that freedom is already set within us. Be still and tune into God's heavenly song over you.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
the demand of the absolute
"...It is, as we know, through the demand for the absolute (as that which is grounded upon itself and necessary) that reason makes itself known in man. This demand, since it can never be wholly satisfied in any single condition of his physical life, forces him to leave the physical altogether, and ascend out of a limited reality into the trealm of ideas. But although the true purport of such a demand is to wrest him from the bondage of time, and lead him upwards from the sensuous world towards an ideal world, it can, through a misunderstanding (almost unavoidable in this early epoch of prevailing materiality), be directed toward physical life, and instead of making man independent plunge him into the most terrifying servitude."
(notes on the potentially facist individual, walter benjamin in correspondence with theodore adorno and the dangers of certitude.)
(notes on the potentially facist individual, walter benjamin in correspondence with theodore adorno and the dangers of certitude.)
man and desire
"What is man before beauty cajoles from him a delight in things for their own sake, or the serenity of form tempers the savagery of life? A monotonous round of ends, a constant vacillation of judgments; self-seeking, and yet without a self; lawless, yet without freedom; a slave, yet to no rule. At this stage the world is for him merely fate, not yet object; nothing exists for him except what furthers his own existence; that which neither gives to him, nor takes from him, is not there for him at all. Each phenomenon stands before him, isolated and cut off from all other things, even as he himself is isolated and unrelated in the great chain of being. All that exists, exists for him only at the behest of the moment; every change seems to him an entirely new creation, since with the lack of necessity within him there is none outside of him either, to connect the changing forms into a universe and, though individual phenomena pass away, to hold fast upon the stage of the world the unvarying law that informs them. In vain does nature let her rich variety pass before his senses; he sees in her splendid profusion nothing but his prey, in all her might and grandeur nothing but his foe. Either he hurls himself upon objects to devour them in an access of desire; or the objects press in upon him to destroy him, and he thrusts them away in horror. In either case his relation to the world of sense is that of immediate contact; and eternally anguished by its pressures, ceaselessly tortured by imperious needs, he finds rest nowhere but in exhaustion, and limits nowhere but in spent desire.
His violent passions and the Titans'
Vigorous marrow are his...
Certain heritage; yet round his brow
Zeus forged a brazen band.
Counsel and Patience, Wisdom, Moderation
He shrouded from his fearful sullen glance.
In him each passion grows to savage furty,
And all uncheck'd his fury rages round.
Iphigenia in Tauris
Unacquainted as yet with his own human dignity, he is far from respecting it in others; and, conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every creature that resembles him. He never sees others in himself, but only himself in others; and communal life, far from enlarging him into a representative of the species, only confines him ever more narrowly within his own individuality. In this state of sullen limitation he gropes his way through the darkness of his life until a kindly nature shifts the burden of matter from his beclouded senses, and he learns through reflection to distinguish himself from things, so that objects reveal themselves at last in the reflected light of consciousness."
(Schiller on the purely sensuous man, AEoM, Twenty-Fourth Letter)
he goes on to say that this state is more of an idea, that man has never been such an animal, but also man has never entirely escaped from this state either.
His violent passions and the Titans'
Vigorous marrow are his...
Certain heritage; yet round his brow
Zeus forged a brazen band.
Counsel and Patience, Wisdom, Moderation
He shrouded from his fearful sullen glance.
In him each passion grows to savage furty,
And all uncheck'd his fury rages round.
Iphigenia in Tauris
Unacquainted as yet with his own human dignity, he is far from respecting it in others; and, conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every creature that resembles him. He never sees others in himself, but only himself in others; and communal life, far from enlarging him into a representative of the species, only confines him ever more narrowly within his own individuality. In this state of sullen limitation he gropes his way through the darkness of his life until a kindly nature shifts the burden of matter from his beclouded senses, and he learns through reflection to distinguish himself from things, so that objects reveal themselves at last in the reflected light of consciousness."
(Schiller on the purely sensuous man, AEoM, Twenty-Fourth Letter)
he goes on to say that this state is more of an idea, that man has never been such an animal, but also man has never entirely escaped from this state either.
make man aesthetic
"The transition from a passive state of feeling to an active state of thinking and willing cannot, then, take place except via a middle state of aesthetic freedom. And although this state can of itself decide nothing as regards either our insights or our convictions, thus leaving both our intellectual and our moral worth as yet entirely problematic, it is nevertheless the necessary precondition of our attainging to any insight or conviction at all. In a word, there is no other way of making sensuous man rational except by first making him aesthetic."
(Aesthetic Education of Man, twenty-third letter, Schiller)
Aesthetic (also the beautiful) is the between space that exists from the passive state of feeling to the active state of thinking. It is what makes the sensuous man rational and the rational man sensuous.
"Beauty can produce no result, neither for understanding nor fo r the will; that it does not meddle in teh business of either thinking or deciding; that it merely imparts the power to do both, but has no say whatsoever in the actual use of that power." (lbid.)
logical form (concept) speaks to understanding
moral form (law) speaks to will
(Aesthetic Education of Man, twenty-third letter, Schiller)
Aesthetic (also the beautiful) is the between space that exists from the passive state of feeling to the active state of thinking. It is what makes the sensuous man rational and the rational man sensuous.
"Beauty can produce no result, neither for understanding nor fo r the will; that it does not meddle in teh business of either thinking or deciding; that it merely imparts the power to do both, but has no say whatsoever in the actual use of that power." (lbid.)
logical form (concept) speaks to understanding
moral form (law) speaks to will
Monday, August 10, 2009
A is for Agape
Agape is the doctrine that God eternally gives of himself to others.
For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work
is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
"To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil....To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."
Simone Weil
Love is absolute or no love at all. The beautiful (distance) keeps love in tension between the sensuous (empirical) and the moral (intellectual).
For one human being to love another:
that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks,
the ultimate, the last test and proof,
the work for which all other work
is but preparation.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I was walking down the street yesterday and I saw a beautiful flower emerging from under a thick brush, pinned against an iron gate. Immediately I wanted to pick it, perhaps to save it or maybe I just wanted to have it, but I plucked it out of the soft earth. I held it carefully almost taking on the persona of the flower; delicate yet strong. I made it home safe and placed the flower into a glass of water for it to drink. Naturally I had to find a place in my home where the flower could be seen and assure its compliments to the interior. The antique end table next to my vintage couch was the perfect pedestal. It looked more beautiful than it did pressed against the cold iron gate moments ago. I rescued it.
Soon to watch it die.
"To soil is to modify, it is to touch. The beautiful is that which we cannot wish to change. To assume power over is to soil. To possess is to soil....To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love."
Simone Weil
Love is absolute or no love at all. The beautiful (distance) keeps love in tension between the sensuous (empirical) and the moral (intellectual).
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