Subject: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 10:40:48 -0400



Dear Chris,

How do you think about style? Kant in _Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point
of View_ says that there is two motions in becoming aware of representation.
One where the mind turns towards a representation, he calls it _attentio_
and the other turns away and that's _abstractio_. Abstraction abstract the
determination of an object from representation which gives it the generally
of a concept and so turns it away from sensibility to the understanding. In
terms of the practical philosophy, abstraction would be the disengagement of
the will from its pathological determination. The way abstraction works is
an act of free thought, an autonomy of the spirit. He says that abstraction
is a vigor of spirit that can only be acquired through practice.  This is in
I,3; in I,4 he goes to say that attention in this sense is a sort of
self-consciousness where we are inside our own thoughts closed off to the
world around us, a kind of absent mindedness. He writes that eventhough this
observation of oneself is necessary for human commerce and doing metaphysics
even; it is a detriment to human relationships because it is embarrasing to
watch and it's a kind affected stiffness in ones comportment. Without a
doubt this one of the diseases of us intellectuals. Its opposite is an ease
in manners, a disengaged air. Rather than a stiff artificiality there is in
a sense of ease a natural sincerity and frankness whose taste and tact is
pleasing because instead of being an imposition of ones own subjectivity and
their representations; is a speaking of the other, at least in a
coversational situation. Rather than a mechanical artificiality you have a
language that points to the frank straightforwadness of simplicity, the
absence of any dissimulation and so truth in this case is naive. Kant tells
us that this text are notes to courses he taught for thirty years. It's
about freedom from self-consciousness for the envious ideal of a sense of
ease characteristic of a "primative child", for instance. This is not a
mechanical reproduction of the imagination leading to fancyful artifice but
a productive imagination without a copy, without the precedence of a rule
such that the "innocence of a child" in Holderlin's Hyperion as a natural
expression brings out the unpresentable, is an icon without figuration that
does not fix our gaze but makes it flow... Edmund Burke's example for what
to me seem more like beauty than the sublime is that of a beautiful woman
"where she is is perhaps most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the
smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the
surface, which is never the smallest space of the same; the deceitful maze,
through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix,
or wither it is carried." In another part of his _Philosophical Inquiry into
the Sublime and Beautiful_ he writes on the beauty of an eye that is not
obscure and dull and dark like the sublime can be with its bursts and
spasms...  this eye is clear and shines like a diamond and continously moves
and shifts direction. What makes a good looking eye lovely is not a brisk,
sudden change of direction but a smooth one that checks out a beautiful
object with a slow and languid motion almost like Husserl describes the
seeing of a phenomena where there is always more and more to be described
but I better stop.

Gulio









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