Eugene O'Neill - "Anna Christie"

John Lothrop Motley - "History of the United Netherlands, 1595 96"

Anthony Trollope - "The Man Who Kept His Money In A Box"

Geneve L.A. Shaffer - "The Log of the Empire State"

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




An external necessity determines our condition, our existence in
time, by means of the sensuous. The latter is quite involuntary,
and directly it is produced in us, we are necessarily passive. In
the same manner an internal necessity awakens our personality in
connection with sensations, and by its antagonism with them; for
consciousness cannot depend on the will, which presupposes it. This
primitive manifestation of personality is no more a merit to us
than its privation is a defect in us. Reason can only be required
in a being who is self-conscious, for reason is an absolute
consecutiveness and universality of consciousness; before this is
the case, he is not a man, nor can any act of humanity be expected
from him. The metaphysician can no more explain the limitation
imposed by sensation on a free and autonomous mind than the natural
philosopher can understand the infinite, which is revealed in
consciousness in connection with these limits. Neither abstraction
nor experience can bring us back to the source whence issue our
ideas of necessity and of universality; this source is concealed in
its origin in time from the observer, and its super-sensuous origin
from the researches of the metaphysician. But, to sum up in a few
words, consciousness is there, and, together with its immutable
unity, the law of all that is for man is established, as well as of
all that is to be by man, for his understanding and his activity.
The ideas of truth and of right present themselves inevitable,
incorruptible, immeasurable, even in the age of sensuousness; and
without our being able to say why or how, we see eternity in time,
the necessary following the contingent. It is thus that, without any
share on the part of the subject, the sensation and self-consciousness
arise, and the origin of both is beyond our volition, as it is out
of the sphere of our knowledge.

But as soon as these two faculties have passed into action, and man
has verified by experience, through the medium of sensation, a
determinate existence, and through the medium of consciousness, its
absolute existence, the two fundamental impulses exert their
influence directly their object is given. The sensuous impulse is
awakened with the experience of life--with the beginning of the
individual; the rational impulsion with the experience of law--with
the beginning of his personality; and it is only when these two
inclinations have come into existence that the human type is
realised. Up to that time, everything takes place in man according
to the law of necessity; but now the hand of nature lets him go, and
it is for him to keep upright humanity which nature places as a germ
in his heart. And thus we see that directly the two opposite and
fundamental impulses exercise their influence in him, both lose
their constraint, and the autonomy of two necessities gives birth to
freedom. LETTER XX.

That freedom Is an active and not a passive principle results from
its very conception; but that liberty itself should be an effect of
nature (taking this word in its widest sense), and not the work of
man, and therefore that it can be favoured or thwarted by natural
means, is the necessary consequence of that which precedes. It
begins only when man is complete, and when these two fundamental
impulsions have been developed. It will then be wanting whilst he is
incomplete, and while one of these impulsions is excluded, and it
will be re-established by all that gives back to man his integrity.

Thus it is possible, both with regard to the entire species as to
the individual, to remark the moment when man is yet incomplete, and
when one of the two exclusions acts solely in him. We know that man
commences by life simply, to end by form; that he is more of an
individual than a person, and that he starts from the limited or
finite to approach the infinite. The sensuous impulsion comes into
play therefore before the rational impulsion, because sensation
precedes consciousness; and in this priority of sensuous impulsion
we find the key of the history of the whole of human liberty.

There is a moment, in fact, when the instinct of life, not yet
opposed to the instinct of form, acts as nature and as necessity;
when the sensuous is a power because man has not begun; for even in
man there can be no other power than his will. But when man shall
have attained to the power of thought, reason, on the contrary, will
be a power, and moral or logical necessity will take the place of
physical necessity. Sensuous power must then be annihilated before
the law which must govern it can be established. It is not enough
that something shall begin which as yet was not; previously
something must end which had begun. Man cannot pass immediately from
sensuousness to thought. He must step backwards, for it is only when
one determination is suppressed that the contrary determination can
take place. Consequently, in order to exchange passive against
active liberty, a passive determination against an active, he must
be momentarily free from all determination, and must traverse a
state of pure determinability. He has then to return in some degree
to that state of pure negative indetermination in which he was
before his senses were affected by anything. But this state was
absolutely empty of all contents, and now the question is to
reconcile an equal determination and a determinability equally
without limit, with the greatest possible fulness, because from this
situation something positive must immediately follow. The
determination which man received by sensation must be preserved,
because he should not lose the reality; but at the same time, in so
far as finite, it should be suppressed, because a determinability
without limit would take place. The problem consists then in
annihilating the determination of the mode of existence, and yet at
the same time in preserving it, which is only possible in one way:
in opposing to it another. The two sides of a balance are in
equilibrium when empty; they are also in equilibrium when their
contents are of equal weight.

Thus, to pass from sensation to thought, the soul traverses a medium
position, in which sensibility and reason are at the same time
active, and thus they mutually destroy their determinant power, and
by their antagonism produce a negation. This medium situation in
which the soul is neither physically nor morally constrained, and
yet is in both ways active, merits essentially the name of a free
situation; and if we call the state of sensuous determination
physical, and the state of rational determination logical or moral,
that state of real and active determination should be called the
aesthetic.

LETTER XXI.

I have remarked in the beginning of the foregoing letter that there
is a twofold condition of determinableness and a twofold condition
of determination. And now I can clear up this proposition.

The mind can be determined--is determinate--only in as far as it is
not determined; it is, however, determinable also, in as far as it
is not exclusively determined; that is, if it is not confined in its
determination. The former is only a want of determination--it is
without limits, because it is without reality; but the latter, the
aesthetic determinableness, has no limits, because it unites all
reality.

The mind is determined, inasmuch as it is only limited; but it is
also determined because it limits itself of its own absolute
capacity. It is situated in the former position when it feels, in
the second when it thinks. Accordingly the aesthetic constitution is
in relation to determinableness what thought is in relation to
determination. The latter is a negative from internal and infinite
completeness, the former a limitation from internal infinite power.
Feeling and thought come into contact in one single point, the mind
is determined in both conditions, the man becomes something and
exists--either as individual or person--by exclusion; in other cases
these two faculties stand infinitely apart. Just in the same manner,
the aesthetic determinableness comes in contact with the mere want
of determination in a single point, by both excluding every distinct
determined existence, by thus being in all other points nothing and
all, and hence by being infinitely different. Therefore, if the
latter, in the absence of determination from deficiency, is
represented as an empty infiniteness, the aesthetic freedom of
determination, which forms the proper counterpart to the former, can
be considered, as a completed infiniteness; a representation which
exactly agrees with the teachings of the previous investigations.

Man is therefore nothing in the aesthetic state, if attention is
given to the single result, and not to the whole faculty, and if we
regard only the absence or want of every special determination. We
must therefore do justice to those who pronounce the beautiful, and
the disposition in which it places the mind, as entirely indifferent
and unprofitable, in relation to knowledge and feeling. They are
perfectly right; for it is certain that beauty gives no separate,
single result, either for the understanding or for the will; it does
not carry out a single intellectual or moral object; it discovers no
truth, does not help us to fulfil a single duty, and, in one word,
is equally unfit to found the character or to clear the head.
Accordingly, the personal worth of a man, or his dignity, as far as
this can only depend on himself, remains entirely undetermined by
aesthetic culture, and nothing further is attained than that, on the
part of nature, it is made profitable for him to make of himself
what he will; that the freedom to be what he ought to be is restored
perfectly to him.

But by this, something infinite is attained. But as soon as we
remember that freedom is taken from man by the one-sided compulsion
of nature in feeling, and by the exclusive legislation of the reason
in thinking, we must consider the capacity restored to him by the
aesthetical disposition, as the highest of all gifts, as the gift of
humanity. I admit that he possesses this capacity for humanity,
before every definite determination in which he may be placed. But
as a matter of fact, he loses it with every determined condition,
into which he may come, and if he is to pass over to an opposite
condition, humanity must be in every case restored to him by the
aesthetic life.

It is therefore not only a poetical license, but also
philosophically correct, when beauty is named our second creator.
Nor is this inconsistent with the fact that she only makes it
possible for us to attain and realise humanity, leaving this to our
free will. For in this she acts in common with our original creator,
nature, which has imparted to us nothing further than this capacity
for humanity, but leaves the use of it to our own determination of
will.

LETTER XXII.

Accordingly, if the aesthetic disposition of the mind must be looked
upon in one respect as nothing--that is, when we confine our view to
separate and determined operations--it must be looked upon in
another respect as a state of the highest reality, in as far as we
attend to the absence of all limits and the sum of powers which are
commonly active in it. Accordingly we cannot pronounce them, again,
to be wrong who describe the aesthetic state to be the most
productive in relation to knowledge and morality. They are perfectly
right, for a state of mind which comprises the whole of humanity in
itself must of necessity include in itself also--necessarily and
potentially--every separate expression of it. Again, a disposition
of mind that removes all limitation from the totality of human
nature must also remove it from every social expression of the same.
Exactly because its "aesthetic disposition" does not exclusively
shelter any separate function of humanity, it is favourable to all
without distinction, nor does it favour any particular functions,
precisely because it is the foundation of the possibility of all.
All other exercises give to the mind some special aptitude, but for
that very reason give it some definite limits; only the aesthetical
leads him to the unlimited. Every other condition, in which we can
live, refers us to a previous condition, and requires for its
solution a following condition; only the aesthetic is a complete
whole in itself, for it unites in itself all conditions of its
source and of its duration. Here alone we feel ourselves swept out
of time, and our humanity expresses itself with purity and integrity
as if it had not yet received any impression or interruption from
the operation of external powers.

That which flatters our senses in immediate sensation opens our weak
and volatile spirit to every impression, but makes us in the same
degree less apt for exertion. That which stretches our thinking
power and invites to abstract conceptions strengthens our mind for
every kind of resistance, but hardens it also in the same
proportion, and deprives us of susceptibility in the same ratio that
it helps us to greater mental activity. For this very reason, one as
well as the other brings us at length to exhaustion, because matter
cannot long do without the shaping, constructive force, and the
force cannot do without the constructible material. But on the other
hand, if we have resigned ourselves to the enjoyment of genuine
beauty, we are at such a moment of our passive and active powers in
the same degree master, and we shall turn with ease from grave to
gay, from rest to movement, from submission to resistance, to
abstract thinking and intuition.

This high indifference and freedom of mind, united with power and
elasticity, is the disposition in which a true work of art ought to
dismiss us, and there is no better test of true aesthetic
excellence. If after an enjoyment of this kind we find ourselves
specially impelled to a particular mode of feeling or action, and
unfit for other modes, this serves as an infallible proof that we
have not experienced any pure aesthetic effect, whether this is
owing to the object, to our own mode of feeling--as generally
happens--or to both together.

As in reality no purely aesthetical effect can be met with--for man
can never leave his dependence on material forces--the excellence of
a work of art can only consist in its greater approximation to its
ideal of aesthetic purity, and however high we may raise the freedom
of this effect, we shall always leave it with a particular
disposition and a particular bias. Any class of productions or
separate work in the world of art is noble and excellent in
proportion to the universality of the disposition and the unlimited
character of the bias thereby presented to our mind. This truth can
be applied to works in various branches of art, and also to
different works in the same branch. We leave a grand musical
performance with our feelings excited, the reading of a noble poem
with a quickened imagination, a beautiful statue or building with an
awakened understanding; but a man would not choose an opportune
moment who attempted to invite us to abstract thinking after a high
musical enjoyment, or to attend to a prosaic affair of common life
after a high poetical enjoyment, or to kindle our imagination and
astonish our feelings directly after inspecting a fine statue or
edifice. The reason of this is that music, BY ITS MATTER, even when
most spiritual, presents a greater affinity with the senses than is
permitted by aesthetic liberty; it is because even the most happy
poetry, having FOR TIS MEDIUM the arbitrary and contingent play of
the imagination, always shares in it more than the intimate
necessity of the really beautiful allows; it is because the best
sculpture touches on severe science BY WHAT IS DETERMINATE IN ITS
CONCEPTION. However, these particular affinities are lost in
proportion as the works of these three kinds of art rise to a
greater elevation, and it is a natural and necessary consequence of
their perfection, that, without confounding their objective limits,
the different arts come to resemble each other more and more, in the
action WHICH THEY EXERCISE ON THE MIND. At its highest degree of
ennobling, music ought to become a form, and act on us with the calm
power of an antique statue; in its most elevated perfection, the
plastic art ought to become music and move us by the immediate
action exercised on the mind by the senses; in its most complete
developmentment, poetry ought both to stir us powerfully like music
and like plastic art to surround us with a peaceful light. In each
art, the perfect style consists exactly in knowing how to remove
specific limits, while sacrificing at the same time the particular
advantages of the art, and to give it by a wise use of what belongs
to it specially a more general character.

Nor is it only the limits inherent in the specific character of each
kind of art that the artist ought to overstep in putting his hand to
the work; he must also triumph over those which are inherent in the
particular subject of which he treats. In a really beautiful work of
art, the substance ought to be inoperative, the form should do
everything; for by the form, the whole man is acted on; the
substance acts on nothing but isolated forces. Thus, however vast
and sublime it may be, the substance always exercises a restrictive
action on the mind, and true aesthetic liberty can only be expected
from the form. Consequently the true search of the master consists
in destroying matter by the form; and the triumph of art is great in
proportion as it overcomes matter and maintains its sway over those
who enjoy its work. It is great particularly in destroying matter
when most imposing, ambitious, and attractive, when therefore matter
has most power to produce the effect proper to it, or, again, when
it leads those who consider it more closely to enter directly into
relation with it. The mind of the spectator and of the hearer must
remain perfectly free and intact; it must issue pure and entire from
the magic circle of the artist, as from the hands of the Creator.
The most frivolous subject ought to be treated in such a way that we
preserve the faculty to exchange it immediately for the most serious
work. The arts which have passion for their object, as a tragedy for
example, do not present a difficulty here; for, in the first place
these arts are not entirely free, because they are in the service of
a particular end (the pathetic), and then no connoisseur will deny
that even in this class a work is perfect in proportion as amidst
the most violent storms of passion it respects the liberty of the
soul. There is a fine art of passion, but an impassioned fine art is
a contradiction in terms, for the infallible effect of the beautiful
is emancipation from the passions. The idea of an instructive fine
art (didactic art) or improving (moral) art is no less contradictory,
for nothing agrees less with the idea of the beautiful than to give
a determinate tendency to the mind.

However, from the fact that a work produces effects only by its
substance, it must not always be inferred that there is a want of
form in this work; this conclusion may quite as well testify to a
want of form in the observer. If his mind is too stretched or too
relaxed, if it is only accustomed to receive things either by the
senses or the intelligence, even in the most perfect combination, it
will only stop to look at the parts, and it will only see matter in
the most beautiful form. Only sensible of the coarse elements, he
must first destroy the aesthetic organisation of a work to find
enjoyment in it, and carefully disinter the details which genius has
caused to vanish, with infinite art, in the harmony of the whole.
The interest he takes in the work is either solely moral or
exclusively physical; the only thing wanting to it is to be exactly
what it ought to be--aesthetical. The readers of this class enjoy a
serious and pathetic poem as they do a sermon; a simple and playful
work, as an inebriating draught; and if on the one hand they have so
little taste as to demand edification from a tragedy or from an
epos, even such as the "Messias," on the other hand they will be
infallibly scandalised by a piece after the fashion of Anacreon and
Catullus.

LETTER XXIII.

I take up the thread of my researches, which I broke off only to
apply the principles I laid down to practical art and the
appreciation of its works.

The transition from the passivity of sensuousness to the activity of
thought and of will can be effected only by the intermediary state
of aesthetic liberty; and though in itself this state decides
nothing respecting our opinions and our sentiments, and therefore
leaves our intellectual and moral value entirely problematical, it
is, however, the necessary condition without which we should never
attain to an opinion or a sentiment. In a word, there is no other
way to make a reasonable being out of a sensuous man than by making
him first aesthetic.

But, you might object: Is this mediation absolutely indispensable?
Could not truth and duty, one or the other, in themselves and by
themselves, find access to the sensuous man? To this I reply: Not
only is it possible, but it is I absolutely necessary that they owe
solely to themselves their determining force, and nothing would be
more contradictory to our preceding affirmations than to appear to
defend the contrary opinion. It has been expressly proved that the
beautiful furnishes no result, either for the comprehension or for
the will; that it mingles with no operations, either of thought or
of resolution; and that it confers this double power without
determining anything with regard to the real exercise of this power.
Here all foreign help disappears, and the pure logical form, the
idea, would speak immediately to the intelligence, as the pure moral
form, the law, immediately to the will.

But that the pure form should be capable of it, and that there is in
general a pure form for sensuous man, is that, I maintain, which
should be rendered possible by the aesthetic disposition of the
soul. Truth is not a thing which can be received from without like
reality or the visible existence of objects. It is the thinking
force, in his own liberty and activity, which produces it, and it is
just this liberty proper to it, this liberty which we seek in vain
in sensuous man. The sensuous man is already determined physically,
and thenceforth he has no longer his free determinability; he must
necessarily first enter into possession of this lost determinability
before he can exchange the passive against an active determination.
Therefore, in order to recover it, he must either lose the passive
determination that he had, or he should enclose already in Himself
the active determination to which he should pass. If he confined
himself to lose passive determination, he would at the same time
lose with it the possibility of an active determination, because
thought needs a body, and form can only be realised through matter.
He must therefore contain already in himself the active
determination that he may be at once both actively and passively
determined, that is to say, he becomes necessarily aesthetic.

Consequently, by the aesthetic disposition of the soul the proper
activity of reason is already revealed in the sphere of
sensuousness, the power of sense is already broken within its own
boundaries, and the ennobling of physical man carried far enough,
for spiritual man has only to develop himself according to the laws
of liberty. The transition from an aesthetic state to a logical and
moral state (from the beautiful to truth and duty) is then
infinitely more easy than the transition from the physical state to
the aesthetic state (from life pure and blind to form). This
transition man can effectuate alone by his liberty, whilst he has
only to enter into possession of himself not to give it himself; but
to separate the elements of his nature, and not to enlarge it.
Having attained to the aesthetic disposition, man will give to his
judgments and to his actions a universal value as soon as he desires
it This passage from brute nature to beauty, in which an entirely
new faculty would awaken in him, nature would render easier, and his
will has no power over a disposition which, we know, itself gives
birth to the will. To bring the aesthetic man to profound views, to
elevated sentiments, he requires nothing more than important
occasions; to obtain the same thing from the sensuous man, his
nature must at first be changed. To make of the former a hero, a
sage, it is often only necessary to meet with a sublime situation,
which exercises upon the faculty of the will the more immediate
action; for the second, it must first be transplanted under another
sky.

One of the most important tasks of culture, then, is to submit man
to form, even in a purely physical life, and to render it aesthetic
as far as the domain of the beautiful can be extended, for it is
alone in the aesthetic state, and not in the physical state, that
the moral state can be developed. If in each particular case man
ought to possess the power to make his judgment and his will the
judgment of the entire species; if he ought to find in each limited
existence the transition to an infinite existence; if, lastly, he
ought from every dependent situation to take his flight to rise to
autonomy and to liberty, it must be observed that at no moment is he
only individual and solely obeys the law of nature. To be apt and
ready to raise himself from the narrow circle of the ends of nature,
to rational ends, in the sphere of the former he must already have
exercised himself in the second; he must already have realised his
physical destiny with a certain liberty that belongs only to
spiritual nature, that is to say, according to the laws of the
beautiful.