Aesthetical and philosophical essays : $b introducing the dissertation on the "connection between the animal and spiritual man"Schiller, Friedrich
Philosophy
Aesthetical and philosophical essays : $b introducing the dissertation on the "connection between the animal and spiritual man"
Schiller, Friedrich
Aesthetics; Philosophy
We are, then, not obliged to say that the dignity of man and of his
condition heightens the beauty of his structure. The idea we have of his
dignity may influence, it is true, the judgment that we form on the
beauty of his structure; but then this judgment ceases to be purely
æsthetic. Doubtless, the technical constitution of the human form is an
expression of its destiny, and, as such, it ought to excite our
admiration; but this technical constitution is represented to the
understanding and not to sense; it is a conception and not a phenomenon.
The architectonic beauty, on the contrary, could never be an expression
of the destiny of man, because it addresses itself to quite a different
faculty from that to which it belongs to pronounce upon his destiny.
If, then, man is, amongst all the technical forces created by nature,
that to whom more especially we attribute beauty, this is exact and true
only under one condition, which is, that at once and upon the simple
appearance he justifies this superiority, without the necessity, in
order to appreciate it, that we bring to mind his humanity. For, to
recall this, we must pass through a conception; and then it would no
longer be the sense, but the understanding, that would become the judge
of beauty, which would imply contradiction. Man, therefore, cannot put
forward the dignity of his moral destiny, nor give prominence to his
superiority as intelligence, to increase the price of his beauty. Man,
here, is but a being thrown like others into space—a phenomenon amongst
other phenomena. In the world of sense no account is made of the rank he
holds in the world of ideas; and if he desires in that to hold the first
place, he can only owe it to that in him which belongs to the _physical
order_.
But his physical nature is determined, we know, by the idea of his
humanity; from which it follows that his architectonic beauty is so also
mediately. If, then he is distinguished by superior beauty from all
other creatures of the sensuous world, it is incontestable that he owes
this advantage to his destiny as man, because it is in it that the
reason is of the differences which in general separate him from the rest
of the sensuous world. But the beauty of the human form is not due to
its being the expression of this superior destiny, for if it were so,
this form would necessarily cease to be beautiful, from the moment it
began to express a less high destiny, and the contrary to this form
would be beautiful as soon as it could be admitted that it expresses
this higher destination. However, suppose that at the sight of a fine
human face we could completely forget that which it expresses, and put
in its place, without changing anything of its outside, the savage
instincts of the tiger, the judgment of the eyesight would remain
absolutely the same, and the tiger would be for it the _chef-d’œuvre_ of
the Creator.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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