21st Century America(ns)

How to Define Yourself in a World of Definitions

1. Research
"I have a mind!" should be the first words out of your mouth. Second should be, "And how shall I use it?" with a healthy, dramatic pause for the audience, who mercifully gasp holes in the air. Go out there. Observe. Choose role-models. Throw them away. Choose others. Place yourself in unorthodox situations and work your way through with that courage you've been waiting to use. Throw some of that youthful instinct on the burner, toss some broccoli or orange slices in there with a pinch of enthusiasm, and take a whiff. What's it smell like? Terror? panic? death...? Not a chance. There should be a spiral of smoke circling from your concoction thats tinged with a fresh sprig of parsley-scented opportunity. Now take it and...

2. Bend the Rules
"Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness" as the saying goes. I prefer "demand adherence." if the irony is not immediately apparent, let me just add that i'm one of the most lily-livered idea-men out there; if only i could drop the social obligation and take a page out of the objectivist handbook I would be allll right. Innovation is the name of the game and if you don't have dreams of Greatness then hand the reins over to your non-existent ego, sit back in your carriage pulled by two surging steads named Nescience and Oblivion, and enjoy the ride.

3. Persona
"Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character" and character breaths life into the fabric of our modern reality. True character can be found in the work of Brauer or Frobenius, but our character comes from negation and a healthy suspicion of society. Re-creation, in the literal meaning of the word, and rediscovery, as psychoanalysts breath it, both lie beneath the warm, comforting covering of the self. The uncovering happens in step 1, harvesting comes in step 2, and profits flow here, when your exuberantly unique personality is established and nationally recognized. Craft every thought with a pre-thought and dominate yourself with deliberate ease. This is the Schillerian moment when the two impulses flow as one from without and within, ebbing and flowing with balance, ever intertwined, complementing each other. Cash it in: sell your self on the stock exchange and watch your stock grow.

4. The Part
Play the Part. Your Persona that you created in the previous steps steps into this all-star role with confidence and poise. Sharpened by experience, enlightened by Truth, protected by dignity and ego, experienced by protection, truthed by sharpen-ment, ego-ed by enlightenment, dignity protected by ego, truth sharpened to enlightenment through experience, and ..... and loved by all.

Truth and Art

"But how does the artist secure himself against the corruptions of his time, which everywhere encircle him? By disdaining its opinion. Let him look upwards to his own dignity and to Law, not downwards to fortune and to everyday needs. Free alike from the futile activity which would gladly set its mark upon the fleeting moment and from the impatient spirit of extravagance which applies the measure of the Absolute to the sorry production of Time, let him resign the sphere of the actual to the intellect, whose home it is; but let him strive, through the union of the possible with the necessary, to produce the Ideal.

Let him stamp it on illusion and truth, coin it in the play of his imagination and in the gravity of his actions, in every sensuous and spiritual form, and quietly launch it into infinite Time."


From the Ninth Letter of On the Aesthetic Education of Man

This excerpt is a good example of why I hold Schiller in great regard. His poetic and philosophical tendencies live simultaneously in his phrases. This harmony is exactly what he espouses in this classic work; that is, the reconciliation and unification of the sensuous and intellectual through Art, through Beauty.

Since it is so relevant to what I do, I'll be quoting from it in the next few posts.

why we need to train the sensibility

Again from Schiller:

"The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Content if they themselves escape the hard labour of thought, men gladly resign to others the guardianship of their ideas, and if it happens that higher needs are stirred in them, they embrace with eager faith the formulas which State and priesthood hold in readiness for such an occasion. If these unhappy people earn out sympathy, we should be rightly contemptuous of those others whom a better lot has freed from the yoke of necessity, but their own choice continues to stoop beneach it."

And now,

"These men prefer the twilight of obscure conceptions, where feeling is livelier and fancy fashions comfortable images at its own pleasure, to the beams of truth which dispel the fond delusion of their dreams. On the very deceptions which the hostile light of knowledge should dissipate, they have based the whole structure of their happiness, and are they to purchase so dearly a truth which begins by depriving them of everything they value? They would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom...."

"It is, therefore, not enough to say that all intellectual enlightenment deserves our respect only insofar as it reacts upon the character; to a certain extent it proceeds from the character, since the way to the head must lie through the heart. Training of the sensibility is then the more pressing need of our age, not merely because it will be a means of making the improved understanding effective for living, but for the very reason that it awakens this improvement."

On the Aesthetic Education of Man