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‘these bald & naked reasonings are impotent over our habits, they cannot form them;
Action forms habits, theory informs them
Kleist’s famous and remarkable essay ‘On the Puppet Theatre’,
Ends come to justify means.
My perception itself is a thinking, and my thinking a perception.
he becomes aware of himself only within the world, and aware of the world only within himself.
those phenomena with which we have no affinity, and which we are not in some sense ready to see, are often not seen at all.
Consider the invisible ape experiment: when our attention is directed or preocupied, our awareness can narrow to the point of surprising exclusion.
Understanding, then, is not a discursive explanatory process, but a moment of connection, in which we see through our experience – an aperçu or insight.
Every act of looking turns into observation, every act of observation into reflection, every act of reflection into the making of associations; thus it is evident that we theorise every time we look carefully at the world.
‘The phenomenon must never be thought of as finished or complete’, Goethe wrote, ‘but rather as evolving, growing, and in many ways as something yet to be determined.’
‘Vernunft [reason] is concerned with what is becoming, Verstand [rationality] with what has already become … [Reason] rejoices in whatever evolves; [rationality] wants to hold everything still, so that it can utilise it’.
Rationality is reliant on abstraction to make things manipulable.
Claude Lorrain.
The same distance that connects sunders. The bitterness and the sweetness are aspects of the same experience, and come into being to the same extent at the same time on the same terms.
Same taste? Again, it seems as though he is describing meditative non-duality or something near to it.
At least a desire for it. Not sure if there is a clear suggestion that this state is an 'empowerment' of the right hemisphere.
That error arises from ‘either/or’ thinking (it must be pleasure or it must be pain), coupled with sequential analysis (if both are present, one must give rise to the other, presumably pain to pleasure).
‘every Person upon seeing a grand Object is affected with something which as it were extends his very Being, and expands it to a kind of Immensity.’
the sublime expands and extends, not dwarfs, the being of the beholder.
To the degree that one is united with something greater than oneself, one feels the expansion of soul that Baillie refers to; to the degree that one is aware of the separation, one feels one’s smallness.
Perhaps an explanantion of the sense of being everything and being (part of a) nothing during meditative states and some 'sacred' substances
Reverence is no abasement, they understood, but with as much truth an exaltation: a sense of belonging to something greater than oneself, which for the Romantics was the phenomenal world, and what one could see through it.
There is no doubt that, although I attempt to describe what … profundity consists in, as soon as I speak it becomes quite clear that, no matter how long I speak, new chasms open. No matter what I say I always have to leave three dots at the end … I am forced in my discussion, forced in description, to use language which is in principle, not only today but for ever, inadequate for its purpose … You have no formula that will by deduction lead you to all [the ‘vistas’ opened by profound sayings].50
The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung, The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green, My youth is gone, and yet I am but young, I saw the world, and yet I was not seen, My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done.
the depth of some divine despair
not the immediate to-day in which I move’.
Distance produces a something that is neither in the subject nor the object, but in what arises between them,
the difference between wanting and longing. The first is an impulsion, the second an attraction.
The first has a clear view of its target; the second intuits its ‘Other’.
Another way of looking at it is that in the process of completing, or attempting to complete, through imagination the fragmentary impression, one becomes in part the creator of what one perceives. Importantly, only in part: if the thing were either wholly given, so that we played no part at all, or wholly our invention, there would be no betweenness, nothing to be shared. As Wordsworth suggested, we ‘half create’ and half perceive the world we inhabit.
reciprocal, evolving process
The sythesis of the abstracted and concrete/sensual experience.
the sublime is more truly present when only partially visible than when explicit,
these are not distinct ‘reasons’ which just coincidentally happen together to mean that such half-perceived images are likely to recruit the right hemisphere: they are all inseparable aspects of one ‘world’, the coherent world of the right hemisphere, just as its opposites – clarity of information, detachment of the observer from the observed, and the triumph of the re-presented over the present – are not unconnected ‘facts’, but all aspects of the coherent world of the left hemisphere.
great sculpture is physically present, tangible truth.
the eye, no longer the isolated tool of the intellect, must bring the whole of the viewer’s body in contact with the whole of the body viewed,
Und belehr’ ich mich nicht, indem ich des lieblichen Busens Formen spähe, die Hand leite die Hüften hinab? Dann versteh’ ich den Marmor erst recht: ich denk’ und vergleiche, Sehe mit fühlendem Aug’, fühle mit sehender Hand.*
that ‘beautiful elliptical line’ which encircles the entire form, a line which, like Hogarth’s line of beauty, cannot be inscribed on a flat surface
Thus defying the logic of Euclids representational abstractions; his fundamental geometric axioms.
what had once been a source of wonder became part of the everyday.
This Life’s dim Windows of the Soul Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole And leads you to Believe a Lie When you see with, not thro’, the Eye.79 We need to see through the eye, through the image, past the surface: there is a fatal tendency for the eye to replace the depth of reality
A too great emphasis on the sound and feel of words as ‘things’ separate from their meaning, or alternatively on the meaning as something separate from the sound and feel of the words in which it exists, destroys poetry.
being on one’s guard for the substitution of representation for the whole,
The map and the territory?
the tendency immediately to reduce observation to conception, thus losing the power of the object in all its newness to help us break out of the otherwise unbreachable defences of our conceptual systems.
be careful not to reduce observation to a mere concept, to substitute words for this concept, and to proceed to treat these words as if they were objects’.
Consider the lawyer's struggle between the word and the spirit of the law
asymptotic
This line and goemetric metaphore for knowledge or understanding
distinction between fantasy, which presents something novel in the place of the too familiar thing, and imagination, which clears away everything between us and the not familiar enough thing so that we see it itself, new, as it is.
‘originality is antithetical to novelty’.
the maternal ‘comforting substrate’.
What a great descrprion of my experience of Pacha Mumma
It is only when our intentions are fixed on something else that we can see things as they really are.
This opposition persists despite the right hemisphere’s unification of opposites, for the same reason that a tolerant society cannot necessarily secure the co-operation of the intolerant who would undermine it, and may ultimately find itself in the paradoxical situation of having to be intolerant of them.
Protestant ethic, for ‘results’ as the reward for effort.
treasure house of detail, but … an indifferent whole’,
rationality cannot get by without imagination, but neither can imagination without rationality.
coniunctio oppositorum:
but these reformers, like those before them, had to acknowledge some sort of authority, even if it were the authority of reason
these ‘priests of nature’ did not honour nature herself so much as the human capacity to control nature,
