REPOST: The Art-Work of the Future - Part 2 Chapter 2
Derrick Everett
because of propagation problems with the previous posting. Some
participants in the group have reported that they did not receive
all of the parts. I apologize to anyone who receives them twice.
Part II - Chapter 2. The Three Varieties of Humanistic Art, in their
Original Union
The three chief artistic faculties of the complete man have once,
and of their own spontaneous impulse, evolved into a three-fold
expression of human art; and this was in the primal, earliest
manifested art-work, the lyric, and its later, more conscious and
loftiest completion, the drama.
Dance (Tanzkunst), Tone (Tonkunst), and Poetry (Dichtkunst) are the
names of the three primeval sisters whom we see at once entwine
their measures wherever the conditions necessary for art have
arisen. By their nature they are inseparable without disbanding the
stately minuet of art; for in this dance, which is the very cadence
of art itself, they are so wondrous closely interlaced with one
another, of fairest love and inclination, so mutually bound up in
each other's life, of body and of spirit: that each of the three
partners, unlinked from the united chain and so deprived of her own
life and motion, can only carry on an artificially inhaled and
borrowed life; not giving forth her sacred ordinances, as in their
trinity, but following the dictation of mechanical rules.
As we gaze on this entrancing measure of the truest and noblest
Muses of artistic man, we see the three first stepping forward, each
with her loving arm entwined around her sister's neck; then, now
this one and now that, as though to show the others her beauteous
form in full and individual symmetry, loosing herself from their
embrace, and merely brushing with her utmost finger-tips the others'
hands. Again the first, rapt by the spectacle of the twin beauty of
her interlocked sisters, bending herself before them; next the
second, transported by her unique charm, greeting the first with
tender homage; until at last, all three, tight-clasped, breast on
breast, and limb to limb, melt with the fervour of love-kisses into
one living shape of beauty. Such is the love and life, the wooing
and the winning of art; its separate components, ever themselves and
ever for each other, separating in richest contrast and re-uniting
in most blissful harmony.
This is free art. The sweet and forceful impulse in that dance of
sisters is the impulse of freedom; the loving kiss of their locked
embraces is the transport of a freedom won.
The solitary individual (Einsame) is unfree, because confined and
fettered in lovelessness; the social individual (Gemeinsame) is
free, because unfettered and unconfined through love.
In every creature that exists, the strongest impulse is to live;
this impulse is the irresistable force of the coincidence of those
conditions which first called it into being. Thus, of those things
or life-forces which, in that which has arisen through them, are
that which they will to be and, willing, can be; in this their point
of common union. Man appeases his life-need by taking from nature:
this is no theft but a receiving, an adoption, an absorption of that
which, as a condition of man's life, wills to be adopted into and
absorbed in him. For these conditions of man's life, themselves his
life-needs, are not removed by birth; rather do they endure and feed
themselves within him and by him so long as he lives; and the
dissolution of their bond is death.
The strongest of man's life-needs is the need of love. As the
conditions of natural human life are contained in the love-bond of
subordinated natural forces, which craved for their agreement, their
redemption, their adoption into the higher principle, man; so does
man find his agreement, his redemption, his appeasement, likewise in
something higher; and this higher thing is the human race, the
fellowship of man, for there is but one thing higher than man's
self, and that is mankind. But man can only gain the stilling of
his life-need through giving, through giving of himself to other men
and ultimately to all the world of human beings. The monstrous sin
of the absolute egoist is that he sees in fellow men nothing but
the natural conditioning of his own existence, and albeit in a quite
particular, barbaric, cultivated manner consumes them like the
fruits and beasts of nature; and thus will not give but only take.
Now as man is not free except through love, neither is anything that
proceeds, or is derived, from him. Freedom is the satisfaction of an
imperative need and the highest freedom is the satisfaction of the
highest need: and the highest human need is love.
No living thing can issue from the true and undistorted nature of
mankind or be derived from it, unless it fully answers to the
characteristic essence of that nature: but the most characteristic
token of this essence is the need of love.
Each separate faculty of man is bounded; but his united, agreed, and
complementary faculties -- and thus his faculties in mutual love of
one another -- combine to form the self-sufficient, unbounded, and
complete faculty of men. Thus too has every artistic faculty of man
its natural bounds, since man has not one sense alone but separate
senses; whilst every faculty springs from its special sense, and
therefore each single faculty must find its bounds in the confines
of its correlated sense. But the boundaries of the separate senses
are also where they meet, those points at which they melt into one
another and where each agrees with the others: and exactly so do the
faculties that are derived from them touch one another and agree.
Their confines, therefore, are removed by this agreement; but only
those that love each other can agree; 'to love' means: to
acknowledge the other and at like time to know oneself. Thus
knowledge gained through love is freedom; and the freedom of man's
faculties -- complete faculty (Allfähigkeit).
Therefore only the art that corresponds to this 'complete faculty'
of man is free; and not the isolated kind of art, which only issues
from a single human faculty. The arts of Dance, of Tone, of Poetry,
are each confined within their several bounds; in contact with these
bounds each feels herself constrained, unless, across their common
boundary, she reaches out her hand to her neighbouring art in
unrestrained acknowledgment of love. The very grasping of this hand
lifts her above the barrier; her full embrace, her full absorption
in her sister -- i.e. her own complete ascension beyond the imposed
barrier -- casts down the fence itself. And when every barrier has
thus fallen, then are there no more arts and no more boundaries, but
only art, the universal, undivided.
A sorry misconception of freedom is that of the being who would find
it in loneliness. The desire to break away from the community, to be
free and independent for the individual self alone, can only lead to
the direct antithesis of the state so arbitrarily striven after:
namely to an utmost lack of independence. Nothing in nature is
independent excepting that which has the conditionings of its
existence not merely in itself but also outside of itself: for the
inner are first possible by virtue of the outer. That which would
separate itself must, necessarily, first have that from which to
separate. He who would be nothing but himself, must first know what
he is; but this he only learns by distinguishing from what he is
not: were he able to cut himself off entirely from that which
differs from him, then he would be no differentiated entity, and
thus he could no longer distinguish himself from anything else. In
order to will to be what he is, the individual must learn to be
absolutely not what he is not; but the thing that is absolutely what
he is not, is that thing that lies apart from him; and only in the
fullest of communion with that which is apart from him, in a total
absorption into the community of those who differ from him, can he
ever be completely what he is by nature, what he must be, and as a
reasonable being, can but will to be. Thus only in communism does
egoism find its perfect satisfaction.
That egoism, however, which has brought such immeasurable woe into
the world and so lamentable a mutilation and insincerity into art,
is of another breed to the natural and rational egoism which finds
its perfect satisfaction in the community of all. In pious
indignation it wards off the name of" egoism" from it, and dubs
itself "brotherly-" and "Christian-" "art-" and "artist-love";
founds temples to God and art; builds hospitals, to make ailing
old-age young and sound, and schools to make youth old and ailing;
establishes "faculties," courts of justice, governments, states, and
so on; merely to prove that it is not egoism. This is just the most
irredeemable feature of it, and that which makes it utterly
pernicious both to itself and to the community. This is the
isolation of the single, in which each severed nullity shall rank as
something but the entire community as naught; in which each
individual struts as something special and "original", while the
whole can then be nothing in particular and for ever a mere
imitation. This is the independence of the individual, where every
individual lives upon the charges of his fellows, in order to be
"free by the grace of God", pretending to be what others are; and,
in short, inverts the teaching of Jesus Christ: "To take is more
blessed than to give."
This is the genuine egoism, in which each isolated kind of art would
give itself the airs of universal art; whilst, in truth, it only
thereby loses its own peculiar attributes. Let us pry a little
closer into what, under such conditions, has befallen those three
most sweet Hellenic sisters!
(Tr. W.A. Ellis, with some corrections and changes for readability)
--
Derrick Everett
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kate@musicnet
Derrick Everett wrote:
Thanks for that - very interesting indeed!