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
The architectonic beauty of man is then, in the way I have explained it,
the visible expression of a rational conception, but it is so only in
the same sense and the same title as are in general all the beautiful
creations of nature. As to the _degree_, I agree that it surpasses all
the other beauties; but with regard to _kind_, it is upon the same rank
as they are, because it also manifests that which alone is perceptible
of its subject, and it is only when we represent it to ourselves that it
receives a super-sensuous value.
If the ends of creation are marked in man with more of success and of
beauty than in the organic beings, it is to some extent a favor which
the intelligence, inasmuch as it dictated the laws of the human
structure, has shown to nature charged to execute those laws. The
intelligence, it is true, pursues its end in the technique of man with a
rigorous necessity, but happily its exigencies meet and accord with the
necessary laws of nature so well, that one executes the order of the
other whilst acting according to its own inclination.
But this can only be true respecting the architectonic beauty of man,
where the necessary laws of physical nature are sustained by another
necessity, that of the teleological principle which determines them. It
is here only that the beautiful could be calculated by relation to the
technique of the structure, which can no longer take place when the
necessity is on one side alone, and the super-sensuous cause which
determines the phenomenon takes a contingent character. Thus, it is
nature alone who takes upon herself the architectonic beauty of man,
because here, from the first design, she had been charged once for all
by the creating intelligence with the execution of all that man needs in
order to arrive at the ends for which he is destined, and she has in
consequence no change to fear in this organic work which she
accomplishes.
But man is moreover a _person_—that is to say, a being whose different
states can have their cause in himself, and absolutely their last cause;
a being who can be modified by reason that he draws from himself. The
manner in which he appears in the world of sense depends upon the manner
in which he feels and wills, and, consequently, upon certain states
which are freely determined by himself, and not fatally by nature.
If man were only a physical creature, nature, at the same time that she
establishes the general laws of his being, would determine also the
various cases of application. But here she divides her empire with free
arbitration; and, although its laws are fixed, it is the mind that
pronounces upon particular cases.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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