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
If, on the contrary, subdued by its wants, man allows himself to be
governed without reserve by the instinct of nature, it is his interior
autonomy that vanishes, and with it all trace of this autonomy is
exteriorly effaced. The animal nature is alone visible upon his visage;
the eye is watery and languishing, the mouth rapaciously open, the voice
trembling and muffled, the breathing short and rapid, the limbs
trembling with nervous agitation: the whole body by its languor betrays
its moral degradation. Moral force has renounced all resistance, and
physical nature, with such a man, is placed in full liberty. But
precisely this complete abandonment of moral independence, which occurs
ordinarily at the moment of sensuous desire, and more still at the
moment of enjoyment, sets suddenly brute matter at liberty which until
then had been kept in equilibrium by the active and passive forces. The
inert forces of nature commence from thence to gain the upper hand over
the living forces of the organism; the form is oppressed by matter,
humanity by common nature. The eye, in which the soul shone forth,
becomes dull, or it protrudes from its socket with I know not what
glassy haggardness; the delicate pink of the cheeks thickens, and
spreads as a coarse pigment in uniform layers. The mouth is no longer
anything but a simple opening, because its form no longer depends upon
the action of forces, but on their non-resistance; the gasping voice and
breathing are no more than an effort to ease the laborious and oppressed
lungs, and which show a simple mechanical want, with nothing that
reveals a soul. In a word, in that state of liberty which physical
nature arrogates to itself from its chief, we must not think of beauty.
Under the empire of the moral agent, the liberty of form was only
restrained, here it is crushed by brutal matter, which gains as much
ground as is abstracted from the will. Man in this state not only
revolts the moral sense, which incessantly claims of the face an
expression of human dignity, but the _æsthetic_ sense, which is not
content with simple matter, and which finds in the form an unfettered
pleasure—the æsthetic sense will turn away with disgust from such a
spectacle, where _concupiscence_ could alone find its gratification.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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