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 person (it is known what I mean by the expression) prescribes the
movements of the body, either through the will, when he desires to
realize in the world of sense an effect of which he has proposed the
idea, and in that case the movements are said to be voluntary or
intentional; or, on the other hand, they take place without its will
taking any part in it—in virtue of a fatal law of the organism—but on
the occasion of a sentiment, in the latter case, I say that the
movements are sympathetic. The sympathetic movement, though it may be
involuntary and provoked by a sentiment, ought not to be confounded with
those purely instinctive movements that proceed from physical
sensibility. Physical instinct is not a free agent, and that which it
executes is not an act of the person; I understand then here
exclusively, by sympathetic movements, those which accompany a
sentiment, a disposition of the moral order.
The question that now presents itself is this: Of these two kinds of
movement, having their principle in the person, which is capable of
grace?
That which we are rigorously forced to distinguish in philosophic
analysis is not always separated also in the real. Thus it is rare that
we meet intentional movements without sympathetic movements, because the
will determines the intentional movements only after being decided
itself by the moral sentiments which are the principle of the
sympathetic movements. When a person speaks, we see his looks, his
lineaments, his hands, often the whole person all together speaks to us;
and it is not rare that this mimic part of the discourse is the most
eloquent. Still more there are cases where an intentional movement can
be considered at the same time as sympathetic; and it is that which
happens when something involuntary mingles with the voluntary act which
determines this movement.
I will explain: the mode, the manner in which a voluntary movement is
executed, is not a thing so exactly determined by the intention which is
proposed by it that it cannot be executed in several different ways.
Well, then, that which the will or intention leaves undetermined can be
sympathetically determined by the state of moral sensibility in which
the person is found to be, and consequently can express this state. When
I extend the arm to seize an object, I execute, in truth, an intention,
and the movement I make is determined in general by the end that I have
in view; but in what way does my arm approach the object? how far do the
other parts of my body follow this impulsion? What will be the degree of
slowness or of the rapidity of the movement? What amount of force shall
I employ? This is a calculation of which my will, at the instant, takes
no account, and in consequence there is a something left to the
discretion of nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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