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
working power, if they must separate what is united in the feeling. The
others fear to suppress beauty _logically_, that is, as a conception,
when they have to hold together what in the understanding is separate.
The former wish to think of beauty as it works; the latter wish it to
work as it is thought. Both therefore must miss the truth; the former,
because they try to follow infinite nature with their limited thinking
power; the others, because they wish to limit unlimited nature according
to their laws of thought. The first fear to rob beauty of its freedom by
a too strict dissection, the others fear to destroy the distinctness of
the conception by a too violent union. But the former do not reflect
that the freedom in which they very properly place the essence of beauty
is not lawlessness, but harmony of law’s; not caprice, but the highest
internal necessity. The others do not remember that distinctness, which
they with equal right demand from beauty, does not consist in the
_exclusion of certain realities_, but the _absolute including of all_;
that is not therefore limitation but infinitude. We shall avoid the
quicksands on which both have made shipwreck if we begin from the two
elements in which beauty divides itself before the understanding, but
then afterwards rise to a pure æsthetic unity by which it works on
feeling, and in which both those conditions completely disappear.
LETTER XIX.
Two principal and different states of passive and active capacity of
being determined[3] can be distinguished in man; in like manner two
states of passive and active determination.[4] The explanation of this
proposition leads us most readily to our end.
The condition of the state of man before destination or direction is
given him by the impression of the senses is an unlimited capacity of
being determined. The infinite of time and space is given to his
imagination for its free use; and, because nothing is settled in this
kingdom of the possible, and therefore nothing is excluded from it, this
state of absence of determination can be named an _empty infiniteness_,
which must not by any means be confounded with an infinite void.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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