Charlotte M. Yonge - "The Prince and the Page"

Emile Zola - "The Three Cities Trilogy: Paris, Vol. 5"

Sam Vaknin - "Issues in Population and Bioethics"

Amelia E. Barr - "The Maid of Maiden Lane"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Literary and Philosophical Essays

V >> Various >> Literary and Philosophical Essays




For, to speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full
meaning of the word he is a man, and HE IS ONLY COMPLETELY A MAN
WHEN HE PLAYS. This proposition, which at this moment perhaps
appears paradoxical, will receive a great and deep meaning if we
have advanced far enough to apply it to the twofold seriousness of
duty and of destiny. I promise you that the whole edifice of
aesthetic art and the still more difficult art of life will be
supported by this principle. But this proposition is only unexpected
in science; long ago it lived and worked in art and in the feeling
of the Greeks, her most accomplished masters; only they removed to
Olympus what ought to have been preserved on earth. Influenced by
the truth of this principle, they effaced from the brow of their
gods the earnestness and labour which furrow the cheeks of mortals,
and also the hollow lust that smoothes the empty face. They set free
the ever serene from the chains of every purpose, of every duty, of
every care, and they made INDOLENCE and INDIFFERENCE the envied
condition of the godlike race; merely human appellations for the
freest and highest mind. As well the material pressure of natural
laws as the spiritual pressure of moral laws lost itself in its
higher idea of necessity, which embraced at the same time both
worlds, and out of the union of these two necessities issued true
freedom. Inspired by this spirit, the Greeks also effaced from the
features of their ideal, together with DESIRE or INCLINATION, all
traces of VOLITION, or, better still, they made both unrecognisable,
because they knew how to wed them both in the closest alliance. It
is neither charm nor is it dignity which speaks from the glorious
face of the Juno Ludovici; it is neither of these, for it is both at
once. While the female god challenges our veneration, the godlike
woman at the same time kindles our love. But while in ecstacy we
give ourselves up to the heavenly beauty, the heavenly self-repose
awes us back. The whole form rests and dwells in itself--a fully
complete creation in itself--and as if she were out of space,
without advance or resistance; it shows no force contending with
force, no opening through which time could break in. Irresistibly
carried away and attracted by her womanly charm, kept off at a
distance by her godly dignity, we also find ourselves at length in
the state of the greatest repose, an4 the result is a wonderful
impression, for which the understanding has no idea and language no
name.

LETTER XVI.

From the antagonism of the two impulsions, and from the association
of two opposite principles, we have seen beauty to result, of which
the highest ideal must therefore be sought in the most perfect union
and equilibrium possible of the reality and of the form. But this
equilibrium remains always an idea that reality can never completely
reach. In reality, there will always remain a preponderance of one
of these elements over the other, and the highest point to which
experience can reach will consist in an oscillation between two
principles, when sometimes reality and at others form will have the
advantage. Ideal beauty is therefore eternally one and indivisible,
because there can only be one single equilibrium; on the contrary,
experimental beauty will be eternally double, because in the
oscillation the equilibrium may be destroyed in two ways--this side
and that.

I have called attention in the foregoing letters to a fact that can
also be rigorously deduced from the considerations that have engaged
our attention to the present point; this fact is that an exciting
and also a moderating action may be expected from the beautiful. The
TEMPERING action is directed to keep within proper limits the
sensuous and the formal impulsions; the EXCITING, to maintain both
of them in their full force. But these two modes of action of beauty
ought to be completely identified in the idea. The beautiful ought
to temper while uniformly exciting the two natures, and it ought
also to excite while uniformly moderating them. This result flows at
once from the idea of a correlation, in virtue of which the two
terms mutually imply each other, and are the reciprocal condition
one of the other, a correlation of which the purest product is
beauty. But experience does not offer an example of so perfect a
correlation. In the field of experience it will always happen more
or less that excess on the one side will give rise to deficiency on
the other, and deficiency will give birth to excess. It results from
this that what in the beau-ideal is only distinct in the idea, is
different in reality in empirical beauty, The beau-ideal, though
simple and indivisible, discloses, when viewed in two different
aspects, on the one hand a property of gentleness and grace, and on
the other an energetic property; in experience there is a gentle and
graceful beauty, and there is an energetic beauty. It is so, and it
will be always so, so long as the absolute is enclosed in the limits
of time, and the ideas of reason have to be realised in humanity.
For example, the intellectual man has the idea of virtue, of truth,
and of happiness; but the active man will only practise VIRTUES,
will only grasp TRUTHS, and enjoy HAPPY DAYS. The business of
physical and moral education is to bring back this multiplicity to
unity, to put morality in the place of manners, science in the place
of knowledge; the business of aesthetic education is to make out of
beauties the beautiful.

Energetic beauty can no more preserve a man from a certain residue
of savage violence and harshness than graceful beauty can secure him
against a certain degree of effeminacy and weakness. As it is the
effect of the energetic beauty to elevate the mind in a physical and
moral point of view and to augment its momentum, it only too often
happens that the resistance of the temperament and of the character
diminishes the aptitude to receive impressions, that the delicate
part of humanity suffers an oppression which ought only to affect
its grosser part, and that this course nature participates in an
increase of force that ought only to tun? to the account of free
personality. It is for this reason that at the periods when we find
much strength and abundant sap in humanity, true greatness of
thought is seen associated with what is gigantic and extravagant,
and the sublimest feeling is found coupled with the most horrible
excess of passion. It is also the reason why, in the periods
distinguished for regularity and form, nature is as often oppressed
as it is governed, as often outraged as it isi surpassed. And as the
action of gentle and graceful beauty is to relax the mind in the
moral sphere as well as the physical, it happens quite as easily
that the energy of feelings is extinguished with the violence of
desires, and that character shares in the loss of strength which
ought only to affect the passions. This is the reason why, in ages
assumed to be refined, it is not a rare thing to see gentleness
degenerate into effeminacy, politeness into platitude, correctness
into empty sterility, liberal ways into arbitrary caprice, ease into
frivolity, calm into apathy, and, lastly, a most miserable
caricature treads on the heels of the noblest, the most beautiful
type of humanity. Gentle and graceful beauty is therefore a want to
the man who suffers the constraint of matter and of forms, for he is
moved by grandeur and strength long before he becomes sensible to
harmony and grace. Energetic beauty is a necessity to the man who is
under the indulgent sway of taste, for in his state of refinement he
is only too much disposed to make light of the strength that he
retained in his state of rude savagism.

I think I have now answered and also cleared up the contradiction
commonly met in the judgments of men respecting the influence of the
beautiful, and the appreciation of aesthetic culture. This
contradiction is explained directly we remember that there are two
sorts of experimental beauty, and that on both hands an affirmation
is extended to the entire race, when it can only be proved of one of
the species. This contradiction disappears the moment we distinguish
a twofold want in humanity to which two kinds of beauty correspond.
It is therefore probable that both sides would make good their
claims if they come to an understanding respecting the kind of
beauty and the form of humanity that they have in view.

Consequently in the sequel of my researches I shall adopt the course
that nature herself follows with man considered from the point of
view of sesthetics, and setting out from the two kinds of beauty, I
shall rise to the idea of the genus. I shall examine the effects
produced on man by the gentle and graceful beauty when its springs
of action are in full play, and also those produced by energetic
beauty when they are relaxed. I shall do this to confound these two
sorts of beauty in the unity of the beau-ideal, in the same way that
the two opposite forms and modes of being of humanity are absorbed
in the unity of the ideal man.

LETTER XVII.

While we were only engaged in deducing the universal idea of beauty
from the conception of human nature in general, we had only to
consider in the latter the limits established essentially in itself,
and inseparable from the notion of the finite. Without attending to
the contingent restrictions that human nature may undergo in the
real world of phenomena, we have drawn the conception of this nature
directly from reason, as a source of every necessity, and the ideal
of beauty has been given us at the same time with the ideal of
humanity.

But now we are coming down from the region of ideas to the scene of
reality, to find man in a DETERMINATE STATE, and consequently in
limits which are not derived from the pure conception of humanity,
but from external circumstances and from an accidental use of his
freedom. But although the limitation of the idea of humanity may be
very manifold in the individual, the contents of this idea suffice
to teach us that we can only depart from it by TWO opposite roads.
For if the perfection of man consist in the harmonious energy of his
sensuous and spiritual forces, he can only lack this perfection
through the want of harmony and the want of energy. Thus then,
before having received on this point the testimony of experience,
reason suffices to assure us that we shall find the real and
consequently limited man in a state of tension or relaxation,
according as the exclusive activity of isolated forces troubles the
harmony of his being, or as the unity of his nature is based on the
uniform relaxation of his physical and spiritual forces. These
opposite limits are, as we have now to prove, suppressed by the
beautiful, which re-establishes harmony in man when excited, and
energy in man when relaxed; and which, in this way, in conformity
with the nature of the beautiful, restores the state of limitation
to an absolute state, and makes of man a whole, complete in himself.

Thus the beautiful by no means belies in reality the idea which we
have made of it in speculation; only its action is much less free in
it than in the field of theory, where we were able to apply it to
the pure conception of humanity. In man, as experience shows him to
us, the beautiful finds a matter, already damaged and resisting,
which robs him in IDEAL perfection of what it communicates to him of
its individual mode of being. Accordingly in reality the beautiful
will always appear a peculiar and limited species, and not as the
pure genus; in excited minds in the state of tension, it will lose
its freedom and variety; in relaxed minds, it will lose its
vivifying force; but we, who have become familiar with the true
character of this contradictory phenomenon, cannot be led astray by
it. We shall not follow the great crowd of critics, in determining
their conception by separate experiences, and to make them
answerable for the deficiencies which man shows under their
influence. We know rather that it is man who transfers the
imperfections of his individuality over to them, who stands
perpetually in the way of their perfection by his subjective
limitation, and lowers their absolute ideal to two limited forms of
phenomena.

It was advanced that soft beauty is for an unstrung mind, and the
energetic beauty for the tightly strung mind. But I apply the term
unstrung to a man when he is rather under the pressure of feelings
than under the pressure of conceptions. Every exclusive sway of one
of his two fundamental impulses is for man a state of compulsion and
violence, and freedom only exists in the co-operation of his two
natures. Accordingly, the man governed preponderately by feelings,
or sensuously unstrung, is emancipated and set free by matter. The
soft and graceful beauty, to satisfy this twofold problem, must
therefore show herself under two aspects--in two distinct forms.
First as a form in repose, she will tone down savage life, and pave
the way from feeling to thought. She will, secondly, as a living
image equip the abstract form with sensuous power, and lead back the
conception to intuition and law to feeling. The former service she
does to the man of nature, the second to the man of art. But because
she does not in both cases hold complete sway over her matter, but
depends on that which is furnished either by formless nature or
unnatural art, she will in both cases bear traces of her origin, and
lose herself in one place in material life and in another in mere
abstract form.

To be able to arrive at a conception how beauty can become a means
to remove this twofold relaxation, we must explore its source in the
human mind. Accordingly, make up your mind to dwell a little longer
in the region of speculation, in order then to leave it for ever,
and to advance with securer footing on the ground of experience.

LETTER XVIII.

By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty
the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the
world of sense. From this statement it would appear to follow that
between matter and form, between passivity and activity, there must
be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this state. It
actually happens that the greater part of mankind really form this
conception of beauty as soon as they begin to reflect on its
operations, and all experience I seems to point to this conclusion.
But, on the other hand, nothing is more unwarrantable and
contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter
and form, the passive and the active, feeling and thought, is
eternal and I cannot be mediated in any way. How can we remove this
contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and
thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them. The
former is immediately certain through experience, the other through
the reason.

This is the point to which the whole question of beauty leads, and
if we succeed in settling this point in a satisfactory way, we have
at length found the clue that will conduct us through the whole
labyrinth of aesthetics.

But this requires two very different operations, which must
necessarily support each other in this inquiry. Beauty it is said,
weds two conditions with one another which are opposite to each
other, and can never be one. We must start from this opposition; we
must grasp and recognise them in their entire purity and strictness,
so that both conditions are separated in the most definite matter;
otherwise we mix, but we do not unite them. Secondly, it is usual to
say, beauty unites those two opposed conditions, and therefore
removes the opposition. But because both conditions remain eternally
opposed to one another, they cannot be united in any other way than
by being suppressed. Our second business is therefore to make this
connection perfect, to carry them out with such purity and
perfection that both conditions disappear entirely in a third one,
and no trace of separation remains in the whole; otherwise we
segregate, but do not unite. All the disputes that have ever
prevailed and still prevail in the philosophical world respecting
the conception of beauty have no other origin than their commencing
without a sufficiently strict distinction, or that it is not carried
out fully to a pure union. Those philosophers who blindly follow
their feeling in reflecting on this topic can obtain no other
conception of beauty, because they distinguish nothing separate in
the totality of the sensuous impression. Other philosophers, who
take the understanding as their exclusive guide, can never obtain a
conception of beauty, because they never see anything else in the
whole than the parts, and spirit and matter remain eternally
separate, even in their most perfect unity. The first fear to
suppress beauty dynamically, that is, as a 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 laws; 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 aesthetic 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 [Footnote: Bestimmbarkeit] can be distinguished in
man; in like manner two states of passive and active determination.
[Footnote: Bestimmung.] 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 impressions 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.

Now it is necessary that his sensuous nature should be modified, and
that in the indefinite series of possible determinations one alone
should become real. One perception must spring up in it. That which,
in the previous state of determinableness, was only an empty potency
becomes now an active force, and receives contents; but at the same
time, as an active force it receives a limit, after having been, as
a simple power, unlimited. Reality exists now, but the infinite has
disappeared. To describe a figure in space, we are obliged to limit
infinite space; to represent to ourselves a change in time, we are
obliged to divide the totality of time. Thus we only arrive at
reality by limitation, at the positive, at a real position, by
negation or exclusion; to determination, by the suppression of our
free determinableness.

But mere exclusion would never beget a reality, nor would a mere
sensuous impression ever give birth to a perception, if there were
not something from which it was excluded, if by an absolute act of
the mind the negation were not referred to something positive, and
if opposition did not issue out of non-position. This act of the
mind is styled judging or thinking, and the result is named thought.

Before we determine a place in space, there is no space for us; but
without absolute space we could never determine a place. The same is
the case with time. Before we have an instant, there is no time to
us; but without infinite time--eternity--we should never have a
representation of the instant. Thus, therefore, we can only arrive
at the whole by the part, to the unlimited through limitation; but
reciprocally we only arrive at the part through the whole, at
limitation through the unlimited.

It follows from this, that when it is affirmed of beauty that it
mediates for man, the transition from feeling to thought, this must
not be understood to mean that beauty can fill up the gap that
separates feeling from thought, the passive from the active. This
gap is infinite; and, without the interposition of a new and
independent faculty, it is impossible for the general to issue from
the individual, the necessary from the contingent. Thought is the
immediate act of this absolute power, which, I admit, can only be
manifested in connection with sensuous impressions, but which in
this manifestation depends so little on the sensuous that it reveals
itself specially in an opposition to it. The spontaneity or autonomy
with which it acts excludes every foreign influence; and it is not
in as far as it helps thought--which comprehends a manifest
contradiction--but only in as far as it procures for the
intellectual faculties the freedom to manifest themselves in
conformity with their proper laws. It does it only because the
beautiful can become a means of leading man from matter to form,
from feeling to laws, from a limited existence to an absolute
existence.

But this assumes that the freedom of the intellectual faculties can
be balked, which appears contradictory to the conception of an
autonomous power. For a power which only receives the matter of its
activity from without can only be hindered in its action by the
privation of this matter, and consequently by way of negation; it is
therefore a misconception of the nature of the mind, to attribute to
the sensuous passions the power of oppressing positively the freedom
of the mind. Experience does indeed present numerous examples where
the rational forces appear compressed in proportion to the violence
of the sensuous forces. But instead of deducing this spiritual
weakness from the energy of passion, this passionate energy must
rather be explained by the weakness of the human mind. For the sense
can only have a sway such as this over man when the mind has
spontaneously neglected to assert its power.

Yet in trying by these explanations to move one objection, I appear
to have exposed myself to another, and I have only saved the
autonomy of the mind at the cost of its unity. For how can the mind
derive at the same time from itself the principles of inactivity and
of activity, if it is not itself divided, and if it is not in
opposition with itself?

Here we must remember that we have before us, not the infinite mind,
but the finite. The finite mind is that which only becomes active
through the passive, only arrives at the absolute through
limitation, and only acts and fashions in as far as it receives
matter. Accordingly, a mind of this nature must associate with the
impulse towards form or the absolute, an impulse towards matter or
limitation, conditions without which it could not have the former
impulse nor satisfy it. How can two such opposite tendencies exist
together in the same being? This is a problem that can no doubt
embarrass the metaphysician, but not the transcendental philosopher.
The latter does not presume to explain the possibility of things,
but he is satisfied with giving a solid basis to the knowledge that
makes us understand the possibility of experience. And as experience
would be equally impossible without this autonomy in the mind, and
without the absolute unity of the mind, it lays down these two
conceptions as two conditions of experience equally necessary
without troubling itself any more to reconcile them. Moreover, this
immanence of two fundamental impulses does not in any degree
contradict the absolute unity of the mind, as soon as the mind
itself, its selfhood, is distinguished from these two motors. No
doubt, these two impulses exist and act in it, but itself is neither
matter nor form, nor the sensuous nor reason, and this is a point
that does not seem always to have occurred to those who only look
upon the mind as itself acting when its acts are in harmony with
reason, and who declare it passive when its acts contradict reason.

Arrived at its development, each of these two fundamental impulsions
tends of necessity and by its nature to satisfy itself; but
precisely because each of them has a necessary tendency, and both
nevertheless have an opposite tendency, this twofold constraint
mutually destroys itself, and the will preserves an entire freedom
between them both. It is therefore the will that conducts itself
like a power--as the basis of reality--with respect to both these
impulses; but neither of them can by itself act as a power with
respect to the other. A violent man, by his positive tendency to
justice, which never fails in him, is turned away from injustice;
nor can a temptation of pleasure, however strong, make a strong
character violate its principles. There is in man no other power
than his will; and death alone, which destroys man, or some
privation of self-consciousness, is the only thing that can rob man
of his internal freedom.