I'm using this blog mainly to keep track of my own reading. I'm reading a couple of different things a day. I might read half a book, put it down and read a chapter of something completely different like a play script, move on to a chapter of something else and then return to the book. The trick is how to put all these things in conversation with each other?
Last few days however, I found myself drawn to the German Aesthetic tradition particularly during the period of 1790s when Kant wrote "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement". I started with Baumgarten who was the first to coin the word "Aesthetic" but referred primarily to the study of the sensuous. Then I went on to Schiller's "On the aesthetic education of man" - yes critics have said it is a problematic book because Schiller is not consistent with the technical terms he uses but it is enlightening how a lot of what he says resonates today. For example, the de-valuing of the arts at the expense of science, the privileging of rationality and reason at the expense of sense and feeling, the focus on time/finite at the expense of the infinite and that which is transcedental, beyond time. What I find most interesting is that unlike some contemporary scholars who call for a de-privileging within the space of this dichotomy, Schiller is calling for a third space: "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" (location 775). This third space is one that then becoems inclusive of multiple realities, of a kind of hybridity at ease with indeterminacy "beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not therefore limitation, but infinitude" (location 790).
Last few days however, I found myself drawn to the German Aesthetic tradition particularly during the period of 1790s when Kant wrote "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement". I started with Baumgarten who was the first to coin the word "Aesthetic" but referred primarily to the study of the sensuous. Then I went on to Schiller's "On the aesthetic education of man" - yes critics have said it is a problematic book because Schiller is not consistent with the technical terms he uses but it is enlightening how a lot of what he says resonates today. For example, the de-valuing of the arts at the expense of science, the privileging of rationality and reason at the expense of sense and feeling, the focus on time/finite at the expense of the infinite and that which is transcedental, beyond time. What I find most interesting is that unlike some contemporary scholars who call for a de-privileging within the space of this dichotomy, Schiller is calling for a third space: "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" (location 775). This third space is one that then becoems inclusive of multiple realities, of a kind of hybridity at ease with indeterminacy "beauty, does not consist in the exclusion of certain realities, but the absolute including of all; that is not therefore limitation, but infinitude" (location 790).
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