Accordingly, when the formal impulse holds sway and the pure object acts
in us, the being attains its highest expansion, all barriers disappear,
and from the unity of magnitude in which man was enclosed by a narrow
sensuousness, he rises to the unity of idea, which embraces and keeps
subject the entire sphere of phenomena. During this operation we are no
longer in time, but time is in us with its infinite succession. We are
no longer individuals but a species; the judgment of all spirits is
expressed by our own, and the choice of all hearts is represented by our
own act.
LETTER XIII.
On a first survey, nothing appears more opposed than these two
impulsions; one having for its object change, the other immutability, and
yet it is these two notions that exhaust the notion of humanity, and a
third fundamental impulsion, holding a medium between them, is quite
inconceivable. How then shall we re-establish the unity of human nature,
a unity that appears completely destroyed by this primitive and radical
opposition?
I admit these two tendencies are contradictory, but it should be noticed
that they are not so in the same objects. But things that do not meet
cannot come into collision. No doubt the sensuous impulsion desires
change; but it does not wish that it should extend to personality and its
field, nor that there should be a change of principles. The formal
impulsion seeks unity and permanence, but it does not wish the condition
to remain fixed with the person, that there should be identity of
feeling. Therefore these two impulsions are not divided by nature, and
if, nevertheless, they appear so, it is because they have become divided
by transgressing nature freely, by ignoring themselves, and by
confounding their spheres. The office of culture is to watch over them
and to secure to each one its proper limits; therefore culture has to
give equal justice to both, and to defend not only the rational impulsion
against the sensuous, but also the latter against the former. Hence she
has to act a twofold part: first, to protect sense against the attacks of
freedom; secondly, to secure personality against the power of sensations.
One of these ends is attained by the cultivation of the sensuous, the
other by that of reason.
Since the world is developed in time, or change, the perfection of the
faculty that places men in relation with the world will necessarily be
the greatest possible mutability and extensiveness. Since personality is
permanence in change, the perfection of this faculty, which must be
opposed to change, will be the greatest possible freedom of action
(autonomy) and intensity. The more the receptivity is developed under
manifold aspects, the more it is movable and offers surfaces to
phenomena, the larger is the part of the world seized upon by man, and
the more virtualities he develops in himself. Again, in proportion as
man gains strength and depth, and depth and reason gain in freedom, in
that proportion man takes in a larger share of the world, and throws out
forms outside himself. Therefore his culture will consist, first, in
placing his receptivity in contact with the world in the greatest number
of points possible, and in raising passivity, to the highest exponent on
the side of feeling; secondly, in procuring for the determining faculty
the greatest possible amount of independence, in relation to the
receptive power, and in raising activity to the highest degree on the
side of reason. By the union of these two qualities man will associate
the highest degree of self-spontaneity (autonomy) and of freedom with the
fullest plenitude of existence, and instead of abandoning himself to the
world so as to get lost in it, he will rather absorb it in himself, with
all the infinitude of its phenomena, and subject it to the unity of his
reason.
But man can invert this relation, and thus fail in attaining his
destination in two ways. He can hand over to the passive force the
intensity demanded by the active force; he can encroach by material
impulsion on the formal impulsion, and convert the receptive into the
determining power. He can attribute to the active force the
extensiveness belonging to the passive force, he can encroach by the
formal impulsion on the material impulsion, and substitute the
determining for the receptive power. In the former case, he will never
be an Ego, a personality; in the second case, he will never be a Non-Ego,
and hence in both cases he will be neither the one nor the other,
consequently he will be nothing.
In fact, if the sensuous impulsion becomes determining, if the senses
become lawgivers, and if the world stifles personality, he loses as
object what he gains in force. It may be said of man that when he is
only the contents of time, he is not and consequently he has no other
contents. His condition is destroyed at the same time as his
personality, because these are two correlative ideas, because change
presupposes permanence, and a limited reality implies an infinite
reality. If the formal impulsion becomes receptive, that is, if thought
anticipates sensation, and the person substitutes itself in the place of
the world, it loses as a subject and autonomous force what it gains as
object, because immutability implies change, and that to manifest itself
also absolute reality requires limits. As soon as man is only form, he
has no form, and the personality vanishes with the condition. In a word,
it is only inasmuch as he is spontaneous, autonomous, that there is
reality out of him, that he is also receptive; and it is only inasmuch as
he is receptive that there is reality in him, that he is a thinking
force.
Consequently these two impulsions require limits, and looked upon as
forces, they need tempering; the former that it may not encroach on the
field of legislation, the latter that it may not invade the ground of
feeling. But this tempering and moderating the sensuous impulsion ought
not to be the effect of physical impotence or of a blunting of
sensations, which is always a matter for contempt. It must be a free
act, an activity of the person, which by its moral intensity moderates
the sensuous intensity, and by the sway of impressions takes from them in
depth what it gives them in surface or breadth. The character must place
limits to temperament, for the senses have only the right to lose
elements if it be to the advantage of the mind. In its turn, the
tempering of the formal impulsion must not result from moral impotence,
from a relaxation of thought and will, which would degrade humanity. It
is necessary that the glorious source of this second tempering should be
the fulness of sensations; it is necessary that sensuousness itself
should defend its field with a victorious arm and resist the violence
that the invading activity of the mind would do to it. In a word, it is
necessary that the material impulsion should be contained in the limits
of propriety by personality, and the formal impulsion by receptivity or
nature.
LETTER XIV.
We have been brought to the idea of such a correlation between the two
impulsions that the action of the one establishes and limits at the same
time the action of the other, and that each of them, taken in isolation,
does arrive at its highest manifestation just because the other is
active.
No doubt this correlation of the two impulsions is simply a problem
advanced by reason, and which man will only be able to solve in the
perfection of his being. It is in the strictest signification of the
term: the idea of his humanity; accordingly, it is an infinite to which
he can approach nearer and nearer in the course of time, but without ever
reaching it. "He ought not to aim at form to the injury of reality, nor
to reality to the detriment of the form. He must rather seek the
absolute being by means of a determinate being, and the determinate being
by means of an infinite being. He must set the world before him because
he is a person, and he must be a person because he has the world before
him. He must feel because he has a consciousness of himself, and he must
have a consciousness of himself because he feels." It is only in
conformity with this idea that he is a man in the full sense of the word;
but he cannot be convinced of this so long as he gives himself up
exclusively to one of these two impulsions, or only satisfies them one
after the other. For as long as he only feels, his absolute personality
and existence remain a mystery to him, and as long as he only thinks, his
condition or existence in time escapes him. But if there were cases in
which he could have at once this twofold experience in which he would
have the consciousness of his freedom and the feeling of his existence
together, in which he would simultaneously feel as matter and know
himself as spirit, in such cases, and in such only, would he have a
complete intuition of his humanity, and the object that would procure him
this intuition would be a symbol of his accomplished destiny and
consequently serve to express the infinite to him--since this destination
can only be fulfilled in the fulness of time.
Presuming that cases of this kind could present themselves in experience,
they would awake in him a new impulsion, which, precisely because the
other two impulsions would co-operate in it, would be opposed to each of
them taken in isolation, and might, with good grounds, be taken for a new
impulsion. The sensuous impulsion requires that there should be change,
that time should have contents; the formal impulsion requires that time
should be suppressed, that there should be no change. Consequently, the
impulsion in which both of the others act in concert--allow me to call it
the instinct of play, till I explain the term--the instinct of play would
have as its object to suppress time in time, to conciliate the state of
transition or becoming with the absolute being, change with identity.
The sensuous instinct wishes to be determined, it wishes to receive an
object; the formal instinct wishes to determine itself, it wishes to
produce an object. Therefore the instinct of play will endeavor to
receive as it would itself have produced, and to produce as it aspires to
receive.
The sensuous impulsion excludes from its subject all autonomy and
freedom; the formal impulsion excludes all dependence and passivity. But
the exclusion of freedom is physical necessity; the exclusion of
passivity is moral necessity. Thus the two impulsions subdue the mind:
the former to the laws of nature, the latter to the laws of reason. It
results from this that the instinct of play, which unites the double
action of the two other instincts, will content the mind at once morally
and physically. Hence, as it suppresses all that is contingent, it will
also suppress all coercion, and will set man free physically and morally.
When we welcome with effusion some one who deserves our contempt, we feel
painfully that nature is constrained. When we have a hostile feeling
against a person who commands our esteem, we feel painfully the
constraint of reason. But if this person inspires us with interest, and
also wins our esteem, the constraint of feeling vanishes together with
the constraint of reason, and we begin to love him, that is to say, to
play, to take recreation, at once with our inclination and our esteem.
Moreover, as the sensuous impulsion controls us physically, and the
formal impulsion morally, the former makes our formal constitution
contingent, and the latter makes our material constitution contingent,
that is to say, there is contingence in the agreement of our happiness
with our perfection, and reciprocally. The instinct of play, in which
both act in concert, will render both our formal and our material
constitution contingent; accordingly, our perfection and our happiness in
like manner. And on the other hand, exactly because it makes both of
them contingent, and because the contingent disappears with necessity, it
will suppress this contingence in both, and will thus give form to matter
and reality to form. In proportion that it will lessen the dynamic
influence of feeling and passion, it will place them in harmony with
rational ideas, and by taking from the laws of reason their moral
constraint, it will reconcile them with the interest of the senses.
LETTER XV.
I approach continually nearer to the end to which I lead you, by a path
offering few attractions. Be pleased to follow me a few steps further,
and a large horizon will open up to you, and a delightful prospect will
reward you for the labor of the way.
The object of the sensuous instinct, expressed in a universal conception,
is named Life in the widest acceptation; a conception that expresses all
material existence and all that is immediately present in the senses.
The object of the formal instinct, expressed in a universal conception,
is called shape or form, as well in an exact as in an inexact
acceptation; a conception that embraces all formal qualities of things
and all relations of the same to the thinking powers. The object of the
play instinct, represented in a general statement, may therefore bear the
name of living form; a term that serves to describe all aesthetic
qualities of phenomena, and what people style, in the widest sense,
beauty.
Beauty is neither extended to the whole field of all living things nor
merely enclosed in this field. A marble block, though it is and remains
lifeless, can nevertheless become a living form by the architect and
sculptor; a man, though he lives and has a form, is far from being a
living form on that account. For this to be the case, it is necessary
that his form should be life, and that his life should be a form. As
long as we only think of his form, it is lifeless, a mere abstraction; as
long as we only feel his life, it is without form, a mere impression. It
is only when his form lives in our feeling, and his life in our
understanding, he is the living form, and this will everywhere be the
case where we judge him to be beautiful.
But the genesis of beauty is by no means declared because we know how to
point out the component parts, which in their combination produce beauty.
For to this end it would be necessary to comprehend that combination
itself, which continues to defy our exploration, as well as all mutual
operation between the finite and the infinite. The reason, on
transcendental grounds, makes the following demand: There shall be a
communion between the formal impulse and the material impulse--that is,
there shall be a play instinct--because it is only the unity of reality
with the form, of the accidental with the necessary, of the passive state
with freedom, that the conception of humanity is completed. Reason is
obliged to make this demand, because her nature impels her to
completeness and to the removal of all bounds; while every exclusive
activity of one or the other impulse leaves human nature incomplete and
places a limit in it. Accordingly, as soon as reason issues the mandate,
"a humanity shall exist," it proclaims at the same time the law, "there
shall be a beauty." Experience can answer us if there is a beauty, and
we shall know it as soon as she has taught us if a humanity can exist.
But neither reason nor experience can tell us how beauty can be and how a
humanity is possible.
We know that man is neither exclusively matter nor exclusively spirit.
Accordingly, beauty as the consummation of humanity, can neither be
exclusively mere life, as has been asserted by sharp-sighted observers,
who kept too close to the testimony of experience, and to which the taste
of the time would gladly degrade it; Nor can beauty be merely form, as
has been judged by speculative sophists, who departed too far from
experience, and by philosophic artists, who were led too much by the
necessity of art in explaining beauty; it is rather the common object of
both impulses, that is of the play instinct. The use of language
completely justifies this name, as it is wont to qualify with the word
play what is neither subjectively nor objectively accidental, and yet
does not impose necessity either externally or internally. As the mind
in the intuition of the beautiful finds itself in a happy medium between
law and necessity, it is, because it divides itself between both,
emancipated from the pressure of both. The formal impulse and the
material impulse are equally earnest in their demands, because one
relates in its cognition to things in their reality and the other to
their necessity; because in action the first is directed to the
preservation of life, the second to the preservation of dignity, and
therefore both to truth and perfection. But life becomes more
indifferent when dignity is mixed up with it, and duty no longer coerces
when inclination attracts. In like manner the mind takes in the reality
of things, material truth, more freely and tranquilly as soon as it
encounters formal truth, the law of necessity; nor does the mind find
itself strung by abstraction as soon as immediate intuition can accompany
it. In one word, when the mind comes into communion with ideas, all
reality loses its serious value because it becomes small; and as it comes
in contact with feeling, necessity parts also with its serious value
because it is easy.
But perhaps the objection has for some time occurred to you, Is not the
beautiful degraded by this, that it is made a mere play? and is it not
reduced to the level of frivolous objects which have for ages passed
under that name? Does it not contradict the conception of the reason and
the dignity of beauty, which is nevertheless regarded as an instrument of
culture, to confine it to the work of being a mere play? and does it not
contradict the empirical conception of play, which can coexist with the
exclusion of all taste, to confine it merely to beauty?
But what is meant by a mere play, when we know that in all conditions of
humanity that very thing is play, and only that is play which makes man
complete and develops simultaneously his twofold nature? What you style
limitation, according to your representation of the matter, according to
my views, which I have justified by proofs, I name enlargement.
Consequently I should have said exactly the reverse: man is serious only
with the agreeable, with the good, and with the perfect, but he plays
with beauty. In saying this we must not indeed think of the plays that
are in vogue in real life, and which commonly refer only to his material
state. But in real life we should also seek in vain for the beauty of
which we are here speaking. The actually present beauty is worthy of the
really, of the actually present play-impulse; but by the ideal of beauty,
which is set up by the reason, an ideal of the play-instinct is also
presented, which man ought to have before his eyes in all his plays.
Therefore, no error will ever be incurred if we seek the ideal of beauty
on the same road on which we satisfy our play-impulse. We can
immediately understand why the ideal form of a Venus, of a Juno, and of
an Apollo, is to be sought not at Rome, but in Greece, if we contrast the
Greek population, delighting in the bloodless athletic contests of
boxing, racing, and intellectual rivalry at Olympia, with the Roman
people gloating over the agony of a gladiator. Now the reason pronounces
that the beautiful must not only be life and form, but a living form,
that is, beauty, inasmuch as it dictates to man the twofold law of
absolute formality and absolute reality. Reason also utters the decision
that man shall only play with beauty, and he shall only play with beauty.
For, to speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning
of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.
This proposition, which at this moment perhaps appears paradoxical, will
receive a great and deep meaning if we have advanced far enough to apply
it to the twofold seriousness of duty and of destiny. I promise you that
the whole edifice of aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of
life will be supported by this principle. But this proposition is only
unexpected in science; long ago it lived and worked in art and in the
feeling of the Greeks, her most accomplished masters; only they removed
to Olympus what ought to have been preserved on earth. Influenced by the
truth of this principle, they effaced from the brow of their gods the
earnestness and labor which furrow the cheeks of mortals, and also the
hollow lust that smoothes the empty face. They set free the ever serene
from the chains of every purpose, of every duty, of every care, and they
made indolence and indifference the envied condition of the godlike race;
merely human appellations for the freest and highest mind. As well the
material pressure of natural laws as the spiritual pressure of moral laws
lost itself in its higher idea of necessity, which embraced at the same
time both worlds, and out of the union of these two necessities issued
true freedom. Inspired by this spirit the Greeks also effaced from the
features of their ideal, together with desire or inclination, all traces
of volition, or, better still, they made both unrecognizable, because
they knew how to wed them both in the closest alliance. It is neither
charm, nor is it dignity, which speaks from the glorious face of Juno
Ludovici; it is neither of these, for it is both at once. While the
female god challenges our veneration, the godlike woman at the same time
kindles our love. But while in ecstacy we give ourselves up to the
heavenly beauty, the heavenly self-repose awes us back. The whole form
rests and dwells in itself--a fully complete creation in itself--and as
if she were out of space, without advance or resistance; it shows no
force contending with force, no opening through which time could break
in. Irresistibly carried away and attracted by her womanly charm, kept
off at a distance by her godly dignity, we also find ourselves at length
in the state of the greatest repose, and the result is a wonderful
impression for which the understanding has no idea and language no name.
LETTER XVI.
From the antagonism of the two impulsions, and from the association of
two opposite principles, we have seen beauty to result, of which the
highest ideal must therefore be sought in the most perfect union and
equilibrium possible of the reality and of the form. But this
equilibrium remains always an idea that reality can never completely
reach. In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one of
these elements over the other, and the highest point to which experience
can reach will consist in an oscillation between two principles, when
sometimes reality and at others form will have the advantage. Ideal
beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible, because there can only
be one single equilibrium; on the contrary, experimental beauty will be
eternally double, because in the oscillation the equilibrium may be
destroyed in two ways--this side and that.
I have called attention in the foregoing letters to a fact that can also
be rigorously deduced from the considerations that have engaged our
attention to the present point; this fact is that an exciting and also a
moderating action may be expected from the beautiful. The tempering
action is directed to keep within proper limits the sensuous and the
formal impulsions; the exciting, to maintain both of them in their full
force. But these two modes of action of beauty ought to be completely
identified in the idea. The beautiful ought to temper while uniformly
exciting the two natures, and it ought also to excite while uniformly
moderating them. This result flows at once from the idea of a
correlation, in virtue of which the two terms mutually imply each other,
and are the reciprocal condition one of the other, a correlation of which
the purest product is beauty. But experience does not offer an example
of so perfect a correlation. In the field of experience it will always
happen more or less that excess on the one side will give rise to
deficiency on the other, and deficiency will give birth to excess. It
results from this that what in the beau-ideal is only distinct in the
idea is different in reality in empirical beauty. The beau-ideal, though
simple and indivisible, discloses, when viewed in two different aspects,
on the one hand, a property of gentleness and grace, and on the other, an
energetic property; in experience there is a gentle and graceful beauty
and there is an energetic beauty. It is so, and it will be always so, so
long as the absolute is enclosed in the limits of time, and the ideas of
reason have to be realized in humanity. For example, the intellectual
man has the ideal of virtue, of truth, and of happiness; but the active
man will only practise virtues, will only grasp truths, and enjoy happy
days. The business of physical and moral education is to bring back this
multiplicity to unity, to put morality in the place of manners, science
in the place of knowledge; the business of aesthetic education is to make
out of beauties the beautiful.
Energetic beauty can no more preserve a man from a certain residue of
savage violence and harshness than graceful beauty can secure him against
a certain degree of effeminacy and weakness. As it is the effect of the
energetic beauty to elevate the mind in a physical and moral point of
view and to augment its momentum, it only too often happens that the
resistance of the temperament and of the character diminishes the
aptitude to receive impressions, that the delicate part of humanity
suffers an oppression which ought only to affect its grosser part, and
that this coarse nature participates in an increase of force that ought
only to turn to the account of free personality. It is for this reason
that, at the periods when we find much strength and abundant sap in
humanity, true greatness of thought is seen associated with what is
gigantic and extravagant, and the sublimest feeling is found coupled with
the most horrible excess of passion. It is also the reason why, in the
periods distinguished for regularity and form, nature is as often
oppressed as it is governed, as often outraged as it is surpassed. And
as the action of gentle and graceful beauty is to relax the mind in the
moral sphere as well as the physical, it happens quite as easily that the
energy of feelings is extinguished with the violence of desires, and that
character shares in the loss of strength which ought only to affect the
passions. This is the reason why, in ages assumed to be refined, it is
not a rare thing to see gentleness degenerate into effeminacy, politeness
into platitude, correctness into empty sterility, liberal ways into
arbitrary caprice, ease into frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a
most miserable caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most
beautiful type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is therefore a
want to the man who suffers the constraint of manner and of forms, for he
is moved by grandeur and strength long before he becomes sensible to
harmony and grace. Energetic beauty is a necessity to the man who is
under the indulgent sway of taste, for in his state of refinement he is
only too much disposed to make light of the strength that he retained in
his state of rude savagism.
I think I have now answered and also cleared up the contradiction
commonly met in the judgments of men respecting the influence of the
beautiful, and the appreciation of aesthetic culture. This contradiction
is explained directly we remember that there are two sorts of
experimental beauty, and that on both hands an affirmation is extended to
the entire race, when it can only be proved of one of the species. This
contradiction disappears the moment we distinguish a twofold want in
humanity to which two kinds of beauty correspond. It is therefore
probable that both sides would make good their claims if they come to an
understanding respecting the kind of beauty and the form of humanity that
they have in view.
Consequently in the sequel of my researches I shall adopt the course that
nature herself follows with man considered from the point of view of
aesthetics, and setting out from the two kinds of beauty, I shall rise to
the idea of the genus. I shall examine the effects produced on man by
the gentle and graceful beauty when its springs of action are in full
play, and also those produced by energetic beauty when they are relaxed.
I shall do this to confound these two sorts of beauty in the unity of the
beau-ideal, in the same way that the two opposite forms and modes of
being of humanity are absorbed in the unity of the ideal man.
LETTER XVII.
While we were only engaged in deducing the universal idea of beauty from
the conception of human nature in general, we had only to consider in the
latter the limits established essentially in itself, and inseparable from
the notion of the finite. Without attending to the contingent
restrictions that human nature may undergo in the real world of
phenomena, we have drawn the conception of this nature directly from
reason, as a source of every necessity, and the ideal of beauty has been
given us at the same time with the ideal of humanity.
But now we are coming down from the region of ideas to the scene of
reality, to find man in a determinate state, and consequently in limits
which are not derived from the pure conception of humanity, but from
external circumstances and from an accidental use of his freedom. But,
although the limitation of the idea of humanity may be very manifold in
the individual, the contents of this idea suffice to teach us that we can
only depart from it by two opposite roads. For if the perfection of man
consist in the harmonious energy of his sensuous and spiritual forces, he
can only lack this perfection through the want of harmony and the want of
energy. Thus, then, before having received on this point the testimony
of experience, reason suffices to assure us that we shall find the real
and consequently limited man in a state of tension or relaxation,
according as the exclusive activity of isolated forces troubles the
harmony of his being, or as the unity of his nature is based on the
uniform relaxation of his physical and spiritual forces. These opposite
limits are, as we have now to prove, suppressed by the beautiful, which
re-establishes harmony in man when excited, and energy in man when
relaxed; and which, in this way, in conformity with the nature of the
beautiful, restores the state of limitation to an absolute state, and
makes of man a whole, complete in himself.
Thus the beautiful by no means belies in reality the idea which we have
made of it in speculation; only its action is much less free in it than
in the field of theory, where we were able to apply it to the pure
conception of humanity. In man, as experience shows him to us, the
beautiful finds a matter, already damaged and resisting, which robs him
in ideal perfection of what it communicates to him of its individual mode
of being. Accordingly in reality the beautiful will always appear a
peculiar and limited species, and not as the pure genus; in excited minds
in a state of tension it will lose its freedom and variety; in relaxed
minds, it will lose its vivifying force; but we, who have become familiar
with the true character of this contradictory phenomenon, cannot be led
astray by it. We shall not follow the great crowd of critics, in
determining their conception by separate experiences, and to make them
answerable for the deficiencies which man shows under their influence.
We know rather that it is man who transfers the imperfections of his
individuality over to them, who stands perpetually in the way of their
perfection by his subjective limitation, and lowers their absolute ideal
to two limited forms of phenomena.
It was advanced that soft beauty is for an unstrung mind, and the
energetic beauty for the tightly strung mind. But I apply the term
unstrung to a man when he is rather under the pressure of feelings than
under the pressure of conceptions. Every exclusive sway of one of his
two fundamental impulses is for man a state of compulsion and violence,
and freedom only exists in the co-operation of his two natures.
Accordingly, the man governed preponderately by feelings, or sensuously
unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter. The soft and graceful
beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must therefore show herself
under two aspects--in two distinct forms. First, as a form in repose,
she will tone down savage life, and pave the way from feeling to thought.
She will, secondly, as a living image, equip the abstract form with
sensuous power, and lead back the conception to intuition and law to
feeling. The former service she does to the man of nature, the second to
the man of art. But because she does not in both cases hold complete
sway over her matter, but depends on that which is furnished either by
formless nature or unnatural art, she will in both cases bear traces of
her origin, and lose herself in one place in material life and in another
in mere abstract form.
To be able to arrive at a conception how beauty can become a means to
remove this twofold relaxation, we must explore its source in the human
mind. Accordingly, make up your mind to dwell a little longer in the
region of speculation, in order then to leave it forever, and to advance
with securer footing on the ground of experience.
LETTER XVIII.
By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty the
spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of
sense.
From this statement it would appear to follow that between matter and
form, between passivity and activity, there must be a middle state, and
that beauty plants us in this state. It actually happens that the
greater part of mankind really form this conception of beauty as soon as
they begin to reflect on its operations, and all experience seems to
point to this conclusion. But, on the other hand, nothing is more
unwarrantable and contradictory than such a conception, because the
aversion of matter and form, the passive and the active, feeling and
thought, is eternal, and cannot be mediated in any way. How can we
remove this contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of
feeling and thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them.
The former is immediately certain through experience, the other through
the reason.
This is the point to which the whole question of beauty leads, and if we
succeed in settling this point in a satisfactory way, we have at length
found the clue that will conduct us through the whole labyrinth of
aesthetics.
But this requires two very different operations, which must necessarily
support each other in this inquiry. Beauty, it is said, weds two
conditions with one another which are opposite to each other, and can
never be one. We must start from this opposition; we must grasp and
recognize them in their entire purity and strictness, so that both
conditions are separated in the most definite manner; otherwise we mix,
but we do not unite them. Secondly, it is usual to say, beauty unites
those two opposed conditions, and therefore removes the opposition. But
because both conditions remain eternally opposed to one another, they
cannot be united in any other way than by being suppressed. Our second
business is therefore to make this connection perfect, to carry them out
with such purity and perfection that both conditions disappear entirely
in a third one, and no trace of separation remains in the whole;
otherwise we segregate, but do not unite. All the disputes that have
ever prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing
without a sufficiently strict distinction, or that it is not carried out
fully to a pure union. Those philosophers who blindly follow their
feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other conception of
beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in the totality of the
sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who take the understanding as
their exclusive guide, can never obtain a conception of beauty, because
they never see anything else in the whole than the parts; and spirit and
matter remain eternally separate, even in their most perfect unity. The
first fear to suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a working power,
if they must separate what is united in the feeling. The others fear to
suppress beauty logically, that is, as a conception, when they have to
hold together what in the understanding is separate. The former wish to
think of beauty as it works; the latter wish it to work as it is thought.
Both therefore must miss the truth; the former, because they try to
follow infinite nature with their limited thinking power; the others,
because they wish to limit unlimited nature according to their laws of
thought. The first fear to rob beauty of its freedom by a too strict
dissection, the others fear to destroy the distinctness of the conception
by a too violent union. But the former do not reflect that the freedom
in which they very properly place the essence of beauty is not
lawlessness, but harmony of laws; not caprice, but the highest internal
necessity. The others do not remember that distinctness, which they with
equal right demand from beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of
certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not
therefore limitation but infinitude. We shall avoid the quicksands on
which both have made shipwreck if we begin from the two elements in which
beauty divides itself before the understanding, but then afterwards rise
to a pure aesthetic unity by which it works on feeling, and in which both
those conditions completely disappear.
LETTER XIX.
Two principal and different states of passive and active capacity of
being determined [Bestimmbarkeit] can be distinguished in man; in like
manner two states of passive and active determination [Bestimmung]. The
explanation of this proposition leads us most readily to our end.
The condition of the state of man before destination or direction is
given him by the impression of the senses is an unlimited capacity of
being determined. The infinite of time and space is given to his
imagination for its free use; and, because nothing is settled in this
kingdom of the possible, and therefore nothing is excluded from it, this
state of absence of determination can be named an empty infiniteness,
which must not by any means be confounded with an infinite void.
Now it is necessary that his sensuous nature should be modified, and that
in the indefinite series of possible determinations one alone should
become real. One perception must spring up in it. That which, in the
previous state of determinableness, was only an empty potency becomes now
an active force, and receives contents; but, at the same time, as an
active force it receives a limit, after having been, as a simple power,
unlimited. Reality exists now, but the infinite has disappeared. To
describe a figure in space, we are obliged to limit infinite space; to
represent to ourselves a change in time, we are obliged to divide the
totality of time. Thus we only arrive at reality by limitation, at the
positive, at a real position, by negation or exclusion; to determination,
by the suppression of our free determinableness.
But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere sensuous
impression ever give birth to a perception, if there were not something
from which it was excluded, if by an absolute act of the mind the
negation were not referred to something positive, and if opposition did
not issue out of non-position. This act of the mind is styled judging or
thinking, and the result is named thought.
Before we determine a place in space, there is no space for us; but
without absolute space we could never determine a place. The same is the
case with time. Before we have an instant, there is no time to us: but
without infinite time--eternity--we should never have a representation of
the instant. Thus, therefore, we can only arrive at the whole by the
part, to the unlimited through limitation; but reciprocally we only
arrive at the part through the whole, at limitation through the
unlimited.
It follows from this, that when it is affirmed of beauty that it mediates
for man, the transition from feeling to thought, this must not be
understood to mean that beauty can fill up the gap that separates feeling
from thought, the passive from the active. This gap is infinite; and,
without the interposition of a new and independent faculty, it is
impossible for the general to issue from the individual, the necessary
from the contingent. Thought is the immediate act of this absolute
power, which, I admit, can only be manifested in connection with sensuous
impressions, but which in this manifestation depends so little on the
sensuous that it reveals itself specially in an opposition to it. The
spontaneity or autonomy with which it acts excludes every foreign
influence; and it is not in as far as it helps thought--which comprehends
a manifest contradiction but only in as far as it procures for the
intellectual faculties the freedom to manifest themselves in conformity
with their proper laws. It does it only because the beautiful can become
a means of leading man from matter to form, from feeling to laws, from a
limited existence to an absolute existence.
But this assumes that the freedom of the intellectual faculties can be
balked, which appears contradictory to the conception of an autonomous
power. For a power which only receives the matter of its activity from
without can only be hindered in its action by the privation of this
matter, and consequently by way of negation; it is therefore a
misconception of the nature of the mind to attribute to the sensuous
passions the power of oppressing positively the freedom of the mind.
Experience does indeed present numerous examples where the rational
forces appear compressed in proportion to the violence of the sensuous
forces. But instead of deducing this spiritual weakness from the energy
of passion, this passionate energy must rather be explained by the
weakness of the human mind. For the sense can only have a sway such as
this over man when the mind has spontaneously neglected to assert its
power.
Yet in trying by these explanations to move one objection, I appear to
have exposed myself to another, and I have only saved the autonomy of the
mind at the cost of its unity. For how can the mind derive at the same
time from itself the principles of inactivity and of activity, if it is
not itself divided, and if it is not in opposition with itself?
Here we must remember that we have before us, not the infinite mind, but
the finite. The finite mind is that which only becomes active through
the passive, only arrives at the absolute through limitation, and only
acts and fashions in as far as it receives matter. Accordingly, a mind
of this nature must associate with the impulse towards form or the
absolute, an impulse towards matter or limitation, conditions without
which it could not have the former impulse nor satisfy it. How can two
such opposite tendencies exist together in the same being? This is a
problem that can no doubt embarrass the metaphysician, but not the
transcendental philosopher. The latter does not presume to explain the
possibility of things, but he is satisfied with giving a solid basis to
the knowledge that makes us understand the possibility of experience.
And as experience would be equally impossible without this autonomy in
the mind, and without the absolute unity of the mind, it lays down these
two conceptions as two conditions of experience equally necessary without
troubling itself any more to reconcile them. Moreover, this immanence of
two fundamental impulses does not in any degree contradict the absolute
unity of the mind, as soon as the mind itself, its selfhood, is
distinguished from those two motors. No doubt, these two impulses exist
and act in it, but itself is neither matter nor form, nor the sensuous
nor reason, and this is a point that does not seem always to have
occurred to those who only look upon the mind as itself acting when its
acts are in harmony with reason, and who declare it passive when its acts
contradict reason.
Arrived at its development, each of these two fundamental impulsions
tends of necessity and by its nature to satisfy itself; but precisely
because each of them has a necessary tendency, and both nevertheless have
an opposite tendency, this twofold constraint mutually destroys itself,
and the will preserves an entire freedom between them both. It is
therefore the will that conducts itself like a power--as the basis of
reality--with respect to both these impulses; but neither of them can by
itself act as a power with respect to the other. A violent man, by his
positive tendency to justice, which never fails in him, is turned away
from injustice; nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a
strong character violate its principles. There is in man no other power
than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some privation of
self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man of his internal
freedom.
An external necessity determines our condition, our existence in time, by
means of the sensuous. The latter is quite involuntary, and directly it
is produced in us we are necessarily passive. In the same manner an
internal necessity awakens our personality in connection with sensations,
and by its antagonism with them; for consciousness cannot depend on the
will, which presupposes it. This primitive manifestation of personality
is no more a merit to us than its privation is a defect in us. Reason
can only be required in a being who is self-conscious, for reason is an
absolute consecutiveness and universality of consciousness; before this
is the case he is not a man, nor can any act of humanity be expected from
him. The metaphysician can no more explain the limitation imposed by
sensation on a free and autonomous mind than the natural philosopher can
understand the infinite, which is revealed in consciousness in connection
with these limits. Neither abstraction nor experience can bring us back
to the source whence issue our ideas of necessity and of universality:
this source is concealed in its origin in time from the observer, and its
super-sensuous origin from the researches of the metaphysician. But, to
sum up in a few words, consciousness is there, and, together with its
immutable unity, the law of all that is for man is established, as well
as of all that is to be by man, for his understanding and his activity.
The ideas of truth and of right present themselves inevitable,
incorruptible, immeasurable, even in the age of sensuousness; and without
our being able to say why or how, we see eternity in time, the necessary
following the contingent. It is thus that, without any share on the part
of the subject, the sensation and self-consciousness arise, and the
origin of both is beyond our volition, as it is out of the sphere of our
knowledge.
But as soon as these two faculties have passed into action, and man has
verified by his experience, through the medium of sensation, a
determinate existence, and through the medium of consciousness its
absolute existence, the two fundamental impulses exert their influence
directly their object is given. The sensuous impulse is awakened with
the experience of life--with the beginning of the individual; the
rational impulsion with the experience of law--with the beginning of his
personality; and it is only when these two inclinations have come into
existence that the human type is realized. Up to that time, everything
takes place in man according to the law of necessity; but now the hand of
nature lets him go, and it is for him to keep upright humanity, which
nature places as a germ in his heart. And thus we see that directly the
two opposite and fundamental impulses exercise their influence in him,
both lose their constraint, and the autonomy of two necessities gives
birth to freedom.
LETTER XX.
That freedom is an active and not a passive principle results from its
very conception; but that liberty itself should be an effect of nature
(taking this word in its widest sense), and not the work of man, and
therefore that it can be favored or thwarted by natural means, is the
necessary consequence of that which precedes. It begins only when man is
complete, and when these two fundamental impulsions have been developed.
It will then be wanting whilst he is incomplete, and while one of these
impulsions is excluded, and it will be re-established by all that gives
back to man his integrity.
Thus it is possible, both with regard to the entire species as to the
individual, to remark the moment when man is yet incomplete, and when one
of the two exclusions acts solely in him. We know that man commences by
life simply, to end by form; that he is more of an individual than a
person, and that he starts from the limited or finite to approach the
infinite. The sensuous impulsion comes into play therefore before the
rational impulsion, because sensation precedes consciousness; and in this
priority of sensuous impulsion we find the key of the history of the
whole of human liberty.
There is a moment, in fact, when the instinct of life, not yet opposed to
the instinct of form, acts as nature and as necessity; when the sensuous
is a power because man has not begun; for even in man there can be no
other power than his will. But when man shall have attained to the power
of thought, reason, on the contrary, will be a power, and moral or
logical necessity will take the place of physical necessity. Sensuous
power must then be annihilated before the law which must govern it can be
established. It is not enough that something shall begin which as yet
was not; previously something must end which had begun. Man cannot pass
immediately from sensuousness to thought. He must step backwards, for it
is only when one determination is suppressed that the contrary
determination can take place. Consequently, in order to exchange passive
against active liberty, a passive determination against an active, he
must be momentarily free from all determination, and must traverse a
state of pure determinability. He has then to return in some degree to
that state of pure negative indetermination in which he was before his
senses were affected by anything. But this state was absolutely empty of
all contents, and now the question is to reconcile an equal determination
and a determinability equally without limit, with the greatest possible
fulness, because from this situation something positive must immediately
follow. The determination which man received by sensation must be
preserved, because he should not lose the reality; but at the same time,
in so far as finite, it should be suppressed, because a determinability
without limit would take place. The problem consists then in
annihilating the determination of the mode of existence, and yet at the
same time in preserving it, which is only possible in one way: in
opposing to it another. The two sides of a balance are in equilibrium
when empty; they are also in equilibrium when their contents are of equal weight. |
|
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기