November 2010

Polarisation and That what is Inbetween

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I was planning to write a post about ‘the medium between law and necessity’, another phrase in the aesthetic letters. But looking at the subject, I realised it was something I have been writing about again and again on this blog. Not using the same words, but the essence of those posts was mainly the [...]

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The Instinct of Play

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The previous post was about two different instincts, the sensuous and the formal instinct. Two instincts that are opposed and that make us struggle to integrate in our human nature. This is again a post about The Letters on Aesthetic Education of Man from Friedrich Schiller, like a few of my previous posts. I am [...]

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Sensuous and Formal Instinct

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At the end of part two of the Letters on Aesthetics, Schiller talks about two opposite roads that depart us from our destination. He calls it false roads and says that only the beautiful can bring us back from this twofold departure. In the beginning of part three (letter 12) he talks about those two [...]

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Creativity beyond Praise and Criticism

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Still reading the letters on aesthetic education, I tried to understand the beginning of part two. In that part, Schiller paints a picture of how the individual is blinded by the age in which he lives, the society in which he is born. But also about the struggle of that society itself. That has this [...]

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Form becomes Independent of Meaning

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Being distracted by the art of language and the definition of art in my previous posts, I now continued reading Schiller’s Letters. At the end of part one, Schiller goes a long way to describe the influence of the culture on the individual. The individual who looses the contact with the whole. The inner union [...]

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The Developing Definition of Art

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Art is a difficult word to define. Wikipedia defines it as ‘a product or process of deliberately arranging symbolic elements in a way that influences and affects the senses, emotions and intellect’. It also says that the word art was traditionally used for skill or mastery, but later as an intention to stimulate thoughts and [...]

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