Love is the moment of the two in unison

Play gives the soul its form—the body whose moments animate the sublimely true. Without this form, there might not be a soul; or at the very least, the soul would be lost upon us in life. It would crush against the world, passing before us as nothing more than a shocking spark, inexpressible. The matter of life and the matter of living recede from one another at one moment and collide again in the next. Living happens when the soul, essence, and truth of those colored coverings is discovered in ever-higher degrees of approximation to the spirit—its most powerful actualization is in love. Rather than in love, living is defined by love. The soul of love, falling everywhere like hapless leaves into water, sinks below the surface with the thousand husks of summer if one forgets its supporting body. Love is that eternal breath and illumination that cannot but be both wind and leaf—the object and its path. One cannot begin with the hollow and move subtly to its shaping parts, however silent and transparent they might be, and hope to glean an understanding. Love is the moment of the two in unison, the moment of unity in disjunction. And this love conferred upon disjunction includes many shades of longing, sorrow, and aching, each with its own formal elaboration of the infinite. It is that eternal stuff that enlivens the present and highlights the nearness of infinity. It does not care for understanding, only truth. But such nearness of this infinite soul also threatens life. The thing that feeds can over-fill; the heart and passion of life tempts the sundried embers toward a house fire like a dry, cold wind. It teases the empty onlooker into believing that there is a third position of knowledge. The onlooker is not a third position, but an imaginary stance that denies truth in exchange for practicality.

 

an understanding: la mythologie d’amour

1. If one wishes to say something secret to a few in a large, mixed company, and when is not sitting close to another, one must speak in a special language. This special language can be foreign either in its tone or in its images. The latter will be a metaphoric and cryptic language.

2. Many have thought that one should use a learned language to speak of delicate, abusable things, for example, that one should write in Latin about such matters. But the attempt should be made to see if one cannot speak in the customary language of the land, so that only those can understand who should understand. Every true mystery excludes the profane by itself. Whoever understands it is of his own accord, and with good reason, an initiate.

Novalis Faith and Love

The language of mythology does not need address itself to the question of language of languages, but reaches into the depths of the highest letter and shapes the pen on the page towards it. Novalis’ first fragment in his introduction to Faith and Love, like the other five fragments in the preface, point out that a new mythology, or a mode of linguistic creation in the popular tongue, will take on the appearance of the quotidian whilst procuring the philosophical and aesthetic space to create a new world. When Novalis says that the “latter will be a metaphoric and cryptic language,” it is clear that the following piece d’occasion is not at all the occasion of a mere coronation in Prussian monarchy, but a cryptic undermining of the corrupt underpinnings of social and moral power that had since polluted the aesthetic and “cultivated” spheres.

Novalis’ piece elevates the king and queen to the status of gods, (something that he explicitly states later in the text), that these figures should be hung in the home, especially the figure of the queen. I cannot help but be drawn to the imperatives and implications of Novalis’ explicit favor of the image of the ideal to be internalized over the adoration of the public power. This process of mythological elevation takes up its brush against the courtly pavement in many different places of the short text, with all of them sharing the common sentiment that the queen is a mode of relating to reality in order to transform it. The queen is the more important image of this transference, I think, precisely because of her  de-politicised location in the power sphere (whose rank perfectly corresponds with the aesthetic realm of society). She is already mythologized in her relation to the kingdom and to power, and this relation is usually mediated through moral purity and aesthetic grace. But the queen should not be misunderstood as the locus of moral mythology… that is the focal point of the painting but it is not the stroke-work that illuminates Prussia. The significance of this piece is really its exercise of the revolutionary within the sphere of the accepted discourse: the queen is a myth, and ideal and an image that is only understood* and elevated to that rank through the systematic work of image-making. That is to say that the queen and the king come to stand as a union between the universal and the particular via a cryptic type of cultural and aesthetic overwriting. This process of aesthetic and political mythologizing originates in the genesis of philosophical inquiry and elevation of the particular (monarch in this instance: Freidrich Wilhelm III) to the universal imperative of liberated and ideal humanity.

more on this and it’s relation to an everyday ethic later.

Aesthetics… chez Schiller

“By means of beauty sensuous man is led to form and throughout; by means of beauty and spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense,” (18^th letter).

Schiller posits that the aesthetic impulse of Play is an intermediary and corrective to the otherwise isolated and incommensurate intellectual and sensuous categories of being. This third category is also understood as the intermediary realm between nature and freedom (which are larger conceptions of rational and sensuous.)

The Play Impulse cancels those incommensurate faculties and sublimates them into functional categories that act in accordance with in a properly transcendental context, while preserving their respective truths and translating them into higher moral acculturation. Here, we should recall Kant’s conception of the transcendental subject, which, in order to “rise from the status of a man to a representative of the species,” the subject must effectively act as his own regulatory god. Schiller attempts to regulate and relocate the transcendental apparatus from the “other universal” to the Play Drive, which, Schiller argues, provides precisely the transcendental apparatus that allows the subject to always move toward the utopian.

To briefly define the Play impulse: third and mediatory realm that captures the real issues, impulses, and problems within both the rational and sensuous sphere, and sublimates their immediate contextual demands into the trans-historical discourse of aesthetics. This aesthetic realm does not dismiss or dissolve the real concerns of the natural and rational, but fosters a critical dialogue between those two impulses. Literally, the subject might play musical notes in a movement that free him from immediate rational and sensual demands insofar as he enters the trans-historical (utopian) realm, and therefore, achieves real freedom.

It should be noted that Schiller’s conception is ground-breaking to both aesthetics and Kantian philosophy because it follows Kant’s break with metaphysics, in that its utopian possibilities are contingent neither on historical tradition, experience, or purely sensuous desire. Rather, the utopian is constituted as the trans-historical possibility, whose real or immediate foundations can only be grasped through the sublimation of the other faculties to aesthetic production and critique. Here, we see the (proto) materialist drive in the attempt to locate the utopian outside of history, as the Absolute, itself.

Although Schiller himself shies away from specific engagements with aesthetic trends and imperatives (aside from his critique of the Greeks, whose aesthetic tradition he admires but does not deem the utopian model, since they relegated their own utopian principles to the realm of the gods), it is useful to include a concrete example. Schiller’s argument is palpable on the plane of literature, where real political problems and cultural imperatives are visible not only “in their context” but are also sublimated into the realm of the aesthetic, where these issues and problems retain their status without being washed away to form. That is to say, in the scope of novel, the otherwise disjunct spheres of culture and consciousness are made visible in order to position those issues and problems against the trans-historical, so that the utopian (Absolute) might be imagined.