3) N. was here and said that he recognised only sensation, that
man himself, the “self” was only a sensation. Sensation receives
sensation. He reached this nonsense because of the scientific
method; the limiting of the field of research, the non-recognition
of anything else than sensation, is very good and profitable for the
practical ends of the science of experimental psychology, but it
is good-for-nothing as far as a living universal point of view is
concerned. And this error is often made by people; they transfer
to life the method which is suitable to science.
4) Nothing so confuses the conception of art as the acceptance of
authorities. Instead of determining by a clear concise conception
of art whether the works of Sophocles, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Raphael, Michael-Angelo, come up to the
conception of good art and exactly how they do so, they determine
by the existing works of the recognised great artists, art itself
and its laws. But, however, there are many works of noted artists
which are below every criticism and there are many false reputations,
accidentally won fame; Dante, Shakespeare.
5) I am reading the history of music:[161] out of sixteen chapters
on artificial music there is one short chapter on popular music. And
they know almost nothing about it. So that the history of music is
not the history of how real music was born and spread and developed;
the music of melodies--but the history of artificial music, i.e.,
how real melodious music was distorted.
6) Artificial, master-class music, the music of parasites, feeling
its own impotence, its own hollowness, takes recourse, in order to
replace real interest by artificiality, now to counterpoint, to the
fugue, now to opera, to illustration.
7) Church music is good, therefore, because it is understood by
the masses. The undeniably good is only that which is understood by
all. And therefore it is true, that the more understandable it is,
the better.
8) The various characters expressed by art touch us only because
in each one of us is the possibility of every possible character.
(Forgot)
9) The history of music, like all history, is written on the plan to
show how it has gradually reached that condition in which the thing
is found about which the history is now being written. The present
condition of music, or that about which the history is written, is
supposed to be the highest. But what if it is not only a lower thing,
but something entirely distorted, an accidental deviation towards
distortion.
10) Belief in authorities causes the errors of authorities to be
accepted as models.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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