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
Popular instruction is compatible with this freedom. By the term popular
speakers or popular writers I imply all those who do not direct their
remarks exclusively to the learned. Now, as these persons do not address
any carefully trained body of hearers or readers, but take them as they
find them, they must only assume the existence of the general conditions
of thought, only the universal impulses that call attention, but no
special _gift of thinking_, no acquaintance with distinct conceptions,
nor any interest in special subjects. These lecturers and authors must
not be too particular as to whether their audience or readers assign by
their imagination a proper meaning to their abstractions, or whether
they will furnish a proper subject-matter for the universal conceptions
to which the scientific discourse is limited. In order to pursue a
safer, easier course, these persons will present along with their ideas
the perceptions and separate cases to which they relate, and they leave
it to the understanding of the reader to form a proper conception
impromptu. Accordingly, the faculty of imagination is much more mixed up
with a popular discourse, but only to _reproduce_, to renew previously
received representations, and not to _produce_, to express its own
self-creating power. Those special cases or perceptions are much too
certainly calculated for the object on hand, and much too closely
applied to the use that is to be made of them, to allow the imagination
ever to forget that it only acts in the _service of the understanding_.
It is true that a discourse of this popular kind holds somewhat closer
to life and the world of sense, but it does not become lost in it. The
mode of presenting the subject is still _didactic_; for in order to be
beautiful it is still wanting in the two most distinguished features of
beauty, sensuousness of expression and freedom of movement.
The mode of presenting a theme may be called free when the
understanding, while determining the connection of ideas, does so with
so little prominence that the imagination appears to act quite
capriciously in the matter, and to follow only the accident of time. The
presentation of a subject becomes sensuous when it conceals the general
in the particular, and when the fancy gives the living image (the
_whole_ representation), where attention is merely concerned with the
conception (the part representation). Accordingly, sensuous presentation
is viewed in one aspect, _rich_, for in cases where only _one_ condition
is desired, a complete picture, an entirety of conditions, an individual
is offered. But viewed in another aspect it is _limited and poor_,
because it only confines to a single individual and a single case what
ought to be understood of a whole sphere. It therefore curtails the
understanding in the same proportion that it grants preponderance to the
imagination; for the completer a representation is in substance, the
smaller it is in compass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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