Thursday, August 13, 2009

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

No comments:

Post a Comment