Vision 10
Presented on: Saturday, March 10, 2007
Presented by: Roger Weir
Let's come to Vision 10. What our phases are doing for us is to hold up a syncopation of a structure which is dynamic and also formed. The syncopation of the form and the dynamic happens so rapidly in our actual lives that over many thousands of years, human beings, like ourselves, have found ways to slow down and to amplify what is happening and what is going on and one of the time-honoured forms of this is yoga. The original yogas of India were brought to a great fruition about 5,000 years ago and at that time there was a crisis in ancient India civilisation. That crisis is mirrored in the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, Maha = great, barat is the ancient name for India. The great Indian war, which was fought about 3102BC in Northern India, the battle field, Kurukshetra is still remembered as it has been for 5,000 years.
In the Mahabharata there are 18 sections, 18 books, as it were, 18 chapters. The sixth of the 18 is the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna, Arjuna the greatest warrior of the day. Krishna who was a divine being who was there to help man through a crisis point to recalibrate what had been scrambled but was previously, for many thousands of years, a way of life. And that the way of life went back into what we call the Neolithic culture that succeeded to the Palaeolithic culture. The Neolithic coming in about 12,000 years ago, and before that the Palaeolithic goes back at least to 50,000 BC. In all of that great time period, the only change that came about was the introduction, in the Neolithic, of human beings learning to tame: to tame the plants, to tame the animals, to tame themselves. The way in which they now shifted from being hunter gatherers to being farmers, to being herdsmen, to finding ways to live together in densities and complexities that were never called for previously.
One of the most ancient units in the west of Britain, going back to Neolithic time, was that the deed to a stretch of land was on a hide. The hide was the amount of land that it took to support a single family during the course of their yearly life. It depended on the fruitfulness of the terrain ,of course, but in the west of England it took about 120 acres to support a family for a year. The Neolithic was an era where people became more and more able to support larger populations, where the land was centred around a village and everyone lived together in the same village, different from what it had been in Palaeolithic times, and now you found traces of this still surviving in Ancient China some 5,000 years ago. That there was a centre where there was a well and there were eight families that were gathered around this well, so that you had like a tic tac toe diagram and in the centre would be where the well was, where the village was. And all the other eight surrounding plots were the land where food was grown, where animals were raised, where life was sustained.
And so the archetype in the Neolithic was always that the land was no longer a landscape but is a human scape. That human scape, in order to find a way to recalibrate from the landscape to the human scape, used a celestial patterning: the movements of the sun and the moon, the movements of the planets among the stars, the constellations of the stars. And so the focus went from a landscape, that was largely mysterious because of something underneath it, because of caves, because of hidden springs, because of the way in which birth comes out of the earth. The Palaeolithic emphasis on an underneath became in the Neolithic an emphasis on the above. When civilisation came in as a recalibration, very, very strongly about 5,000 years ago, the difficulty was that there was something completely deep within human beings that had to be brought out: the underground of human beings, the hidden recesses, the underneath, had to be brought out.
When civilisation became extremely powerful it developed a written language and that written language was to allow for qualities of the inner to come forth and be typed, to be identified, to be put into a schismatic. When, about 300-400 years ago, the powers of thought, of symbolic thought, emphasised the ability to have science, to have mathematics, to have a deepening, not of the sense that it was the inner part of man that had to be brought out and typed, but now it was the celestial surrounding universe that could be typed. And so one found, in the 17th century, in the 1600s, there was a period of great confusion over how to do this, over what to do. By the end of the 1700s, it was apparent that the controlling problem for man was not something hidden within but was an inability to become acquainted with a transcendent without.
And so one of the triggers that emphasised this was in 1781, about this time of the year, March 13th, 1781: a man and his sister, who were astronomers, they had built a telescope, at that time was one of the largest in the world, it was seven feet. The man's name was William Herschel and his sister's name was Caroline. They discovered a new planet, they discovered Uranus in 1781. This is a little children's book cover on the discovery of Uranus. It was a shock that went throughout the entire world because all through our history there had never been a new planet. There had been comets or occasionally supernova, new stars. In fact the last supernova in our galaxy was in 1604 and the observer who was mathematically capable of understanding it at the time, named Kepler, wrote a fantastic book called the New Astronomy - which I brought last month - and came out in 1608 and completely changed the way in which human beings were able to see the heavens above are not encased in concrete, they change, there are new things. Whereas comets were always understood as being harbingers of terrible things that would happen, the new stars were harbingers that man must recalibrate himself to a larger and more complex transcendence.
The discovery of Uranus in 1781, oddly enough, was in a deep parallel with one of the most earth-shaking events ever recorded. In 1781 a very young Frenchman, who had become a general in the American revolutionary army, Lafayette, who had become the chief military person for the colony of Virginia, fighting against one of the most powerful English Generals, General Cornwallis, trapped his entire forces at Yorktown and all of the relief forces, more than 5,000 men on hundreds of ships, were unable to break the blockade. And at that time a letter was sent from Robert Livingston to Benjamin Franklin because Franklin, in Paris at the time, was the only internationally recognised American diplomat as well as American sage. The reason being that Franklin - before he was a diplomat and after he was a newspaper publisher and a writer of things like Poor Richard's Almanac - he's the one who, for the very first time, tamed electricity.
He's the one that found out that lightning is electricity and that you can save it, yuo can trap it, you can conserve it in special jars from Holland, Leiden, Holland, called Leiden jars and you could have a whole bank of these Laden jars and Franklin for the first time made up the word battery, positive and negative poles. And so Franklin was the discoverer of electricity and he was considered, throughout the world at the time, as being a new Prometheus. He's shown like Prometheus who stole fire to help man learn how to do new things, to refine himself. Franklin had stolen the fire from the universe to help man to things that were impossible beforehand. The impossibility was for man to be able to recalibrate himself so that he would not be driven into extinction by science and technology. Philadelphia, the 20th October, 1781, from Robert Livingston to Benjamin Franklin, in Paris,
Congress having lately thought it advisable to alter the arrangement of their great executive departments, to dissolve Boards and Committees under whose direction they formally were, I am to inform you they have done me the honour to appoint me their Secretary for Foreign Affairs: in which capacity they have made it my duty, as it will always be my inclination, to maintain an intimate and regular correspondence with you.
In all the world, Franklin represented not just the struggle for a new country but for a new kind of humanity that would be able to take the divine energy of the universe for the use of all mankind. Very, very powerful. All of this happened in the same year that Uranus was discovered and, if that weren't enough, a third event of earth-shaking importance happened in 1781 and that is that Immanuel Kant published one of the greatest classics in world thought, The Critique of Pure Reason. The new 1998 Cambridge University Press Collected Works of Kant has the 1781 and the second edition that came out in 1787, with The Critique of Pure Reason Kant showed for the first time that the limitations of human thought beforehand did not ever take into consideration the transcendent, transformative capacities of a creative spirit of man that could somehow influence the mind. It displays a considerable improvement over his predecessors' theories of cognition, earlier thinkers regarded perceptions of discrete events unrelated except by habit, or incapable of being connected by the mind, rejecting Cartesian - Descartes- metaphysics, Leibnitzian monadism and the negation of real cognition arrived at by Hume.
Through Locke, Kant formulated a theory, a theoria, a vision of cognition as a synthetic act operating through the mental combination of detached elements of experience. In his view, spatial and temporal relations are essential forms of our consciousness. Therefore our perceptions are ordered in the very process of perceiving, making understanding and the acquisition of knowledge possible, so that now transcendental consciousness of the mind became a creative act and perception not at all mechanical, not at all habitual, but able to not only be modified and changed, but to be put through a prism and the entire spectrum of possibility of thought was now available for human beings to consider. And because this prism of the entire spectrum of man's thought, of man's character, of man's capacities was, for the first time, shown in its completness.
The very first person who took advantage of this Critique of Pure Reason, of this revolutionary releasing of mankind from geography to be a new kind of experiment of human beings from everywhere in the world, being able to go literally where no one had ever gone before, and at the same time the heavens had opened up, not only with Uranus being discovered in 1781 but his sister - they did their experiments in Bath, England, where Jane Austen set a lot of her novels. In 1787 they found the first two large moons of Uranus and named them Titania and Oberon, from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Somehow the heavens had opened up completely in a revolutionary way, mankind had opened up and the ability for thought to consider itself in a conscious spectrum had opened up, all at the same time: the 1780s.
The first person to grab this with a great comprehensive genius was Schiller. What Schiller brought out was something that was truly revolutionary. The first time that it was recognised psychologically for what it was was in 1923 when Carl Jung published his book Psychological Types. In 1923 right at the time that the Rutherford-Bohr atom was being created and opened up, right at the time when modern art had just leapt into a completely new confidence of abilities that would soon open the art world, not just to Impressionism and Cubism but beyond any isms, beyond even abstract art, into an indefinite infinity of human creative capacity. Psychological Types by Carl Jung has about 100 pages on ... in chapter 2, Schiller's Ideas Upon the Type Problem and the subtitle is Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Jung writes, this is the 1944 edition that came out during the Second World War, Jung did some revisions to it, he wanted everyone to know: this is a serious threshold of recalibration that we are involved in, we cannot leave it, we cannot let it defeat us but the only way to go forward is to increase the ability for ourselves to be as consciously complex as we are habitually engrained,
So far as my somewhat limited range extends, Freidrich Schiller seems to have been the first to have made any considerable attempt at a conscious discrimination of typical attitudes, and to have developed a fairly complete presentation of their singularities.
And we are using On the Aesthetic Education of Man in the later edition, the first edition was 1795. The quotation at the beginning comes from Rousseau about the nature of man and it is Rousseau who adds an indelible quality of pre-transcendent qualities that are no longer metaphysical, are possibly mystical, but being Rousseau, he was not a mystic, he took it to mean that some basic new capability of man had been birthed in him. The event that led to this, Rousseau had rowed himself out on Lake Geneva and had stopped the oars and had just floated and drifted out there alone and slowly it dawned on him that his sensibility, his awareness had spread so that the entire calmness of the lake now was like an extended space of his equanimous mind and consciousness. That he was able to inhabit, not metaphysically and not necessarily mystically but inhabit as a conscious being, an individual who had expanded beyond his own mind, had expanded beyond his own limitations of body, beyond the limitations of the social world that had pigeon-holed everyone into categories since civilisation began, thousands of years ago.
And out of this came the famous Rousseauian confidence that every single person every single man, every single woman, has this capacity now evoked out of them, brought out of them like Franklin had brought electricity out of the lightning. This was bringing out of the lightning of intuition a new capacity to store and use the expanded space, and of course with Kant's transcendental Critique of Pure Reason, of Franklin and company's success with the founding of the United States, the American revolution, with the finding of new planet, and you have to realise that Uranus is twice as far from the sun as Saturn, so that the Solar System was doubled in size. In 1846 when Neptune was found, it was even farther out. So that we are looking at a threshold where the recalibration of man was on every one's tongue, on everyone's thought and filtered down even to the man on the street, even to the woman in her family life, that there was something that had changed irrevocably and that human beings now had to relearn, they had to re-educate themselves because they couldn't use the forms of the past. They couldn't use the dynamics that had been used u and were no longer applicable so new things had to be found.
Rousseau, himself, did a book on education in the form of a novel, Emile, she has to learn how to learn again, how to be who she is again because all the capacities are new, though largely unexplored. With someone like Franklin, and especially Jefferson following very closely on him, it was that now the forms of mankind were no longer to be governed by kings, by tribal ethics, by all of the strictures and constrictions of the past. And so completely new qualities had to be opened up and just like with the discovery of Uranus, that doubled the size of the Solar System, the Louisiana purchase in 1804 just when Schiller was reaching an apex in his creative work, just when Shelley was first beginning to realise that there was something peculiar in him.
Shelley, as a teenager, used a homemade chemistry kit to blow things up. He blew things up in the manor field house where he was raised, he blew things up in the university, in the schools, Eton, where he went, and was expelled all the time, from home, from schools. By the time he was an older adolescent, he realised the chemical experiments were also experiments in changing the political structures of the world and was very soon handing out revolutionary pamphlets. They hounded him in England, so he went to Ireland to hand out these revolutionary pamphlets and he became committed somehow that we have to change everything, no one knows what to do but we will find out by exploring each other and ourselves because it isn't just a transcendence of an individual, our transcendences have a mutuality to them. There are great currents of the cosmos that flow through all of us and if we can tap lightning, we can tap those cosmic currents that are flowing through all of us and find a way to bring the harmonics of energy into play, in our lives, in our communities together, in the explorations of reality, world without end.
This is why we're taking, at this particular juncture of our vision Schiller and Shelley because that period 200 years ago presages very much most of the issues that confront us again, only our threshold here in the late 20th early 2st century is about 1,000 times what it was 200 years ago. We face an incredible jump in capacity, in ability to understand and to appreciate that we must recalibrate ourselves completely again. We can acquaint ourselves with what has happened but we cannot acquaint ourselves with what has happened as a past. We have to acquaint ourselves with what has happened as a new past. We have to learn what it was in the sense of what we now understand are larger and larger contexts. In the early 1800s the whole nature of European thought was completely challenged by Napoleon taking not only an armed force and conquering Egypt but by taking a whole group, hundreds of savants, wise people. And so the discovery of Egypt suddenly opened up that the Greek and Roman origins of Europe are recent.
The Egyptians are thousands of years older and the great huge volumes that made up the Encyclopaedia, the original discovery of Egypt, the man in charge of that was one of the greatest mathematicians of the day, Fourier. I'll bring in an engraving of Fourier next week and you can see he has this huge decoration that has this radiant star on it, given to him by Napoleon for having instituted the rediscovery of Egypt in the world. And that somehow it isn't just for France, not just for the first council Napoleon but that the entire nature of man is going to change and that we're going to lead the way. Of course Napoleon got sidetracked in an ego problem and many people disagreed with his version and he was replaced.
What comes into play in a very odd way is that the nature of man is tuneable and that male and female together are the tuning forks. That mankind is not an abstract individual multiple copies of one kind but that there is an interchange which is polarised, largely in artificiality, in the way in which the world is set up in terms of cultures or political groups. But as soon as you go to the depths, the mysterious depths, out of which cultures arose and you go into the transcendent spaces out of which a polarity now changes its relationship and becomes a complementarity, the complementarities of male and female instead of having this kind of electromagnetic, just the electric force and might of electricity, now becomes to have a magnetic quality of extension into mysterious realms. More and more the concern, 'Is there such a thing as animal magnetism? Is there such a thing as a magnetic quality between people? Is it possible that these electromagnetic qualities transcend lifetimes so that people who have already lived will influence us still and people yet to come in some way can influence us?' And the universe becomes extremely complex.
In this, at the close of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which we talked about last week, was written exactly at the same time, right at the middle of Shelley writing Prometheus Bound. The subtitle of Frankenstein is The Modern Prometheus. Frankenstein says,
You who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and misfortunes. But in the detail in which he gave you of them, he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For whilst I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship and {I was} still spurned.
One of the most extraordinary films ever made was in 1931, James WHale made a film, a classic film, on Frankenstein. A couple of years later, in 1935 he followed it up with one of the all time great films, Bride of Frankenstein, where Elsa Lanchester played Mary Shelley writing the book and then played the bride of Frankenstein right at the end of the film. Leonard Maltin gives it four stars and calls it one of the most extraordinary films ever made. When Frankenstein addresses this electric, gorgeous, magnetic bride, her reply to him is [36.48 hissing sound]. Let's take a break.
Let's come back to what is almost exotic, radical to the point of being exotic. As our recalibration proceeds, the past no longer is dead but the past comes to life n a very special, scintillating way. When it was the dead past, it was a repository of documentation and chronology filed away: the dusty shelves of material that hardly anyone ever looks at. But our learning is extraordinary in that it uncovers, increasingly, through an expansion and a complexification so that the past is no longer a matter of just dead documentation. It's no longer a matter of chronological data, but becomes refreshed and new again and new aspects of it begin to assume the dominant tones. And they do this in such a way that we are able through the crisis of fire engines and other interruptions to constantly fold back into the activity that is going on because we are no longer just in an experience of just recording, just generating from our actions, from our rituals, from the habits, from the laws, from the codes, from the morays, from all the expectations.
Experience is churned up in this way but our transform of experience, through bringing a new kind of a complementarity into play, into creative play, sidesteps and obviates a flaw which was built into the way in which the mind structures thought. In Jung's theory of psychological types, in his discussion, 100 pages on Schiller, one of the peculiar things in Psychological Types: there are introverts, there are extroverts, there are feeling types, there are thinking types, there are sensation types, there are intuition types. You can be an extroverted intuitional, you can be an introverted feeling type. So the two kinds and the four varieties give you two times four, they give you an eightfold typology. One of the peculiar aspects that comes out f this, and Jung teases it out in chapter 7 of Psychological Types, teasing it out, not through philosophic thought, but by 1923 he had worked on thousands of people in a psychological, clinical way, largely in Zurich.
The feeling types, aesthetics, the problem of typical attitudes in aesthetics. Aesthetics has to deal not only with the aesthetic nature of things, but also, in perhaps even higher degree, with the psychological question of the aesthetic attitude.
Not for long could such a fundamental phenomenon as the opposition of introversion and extroversion escape the aesthetic standpoint since the form and manner in which art and beauty are sensed and regarded by different individuals differs so widely that one could not but be struck by this opposition.
Disregarding the many more or less sporadic and unique individual peculiarities of attitude, there exist two contrasting basic forms, which another psychologist and art critic, Waringer [42.57] has described as 'feeling into or empathy and abstraction'. His definition of feeling into is derived principally from another writer, Lipps, for Lipps feeling into is 'the objectification of my quality into an object distinct from myself, whether the quality objectified merits the term feeling or not. While I am in the act of apperceiving an object I experience as though in it, or issuing from it, something has been apperceived, and present in it, an impetus towards a definite amount of inter-behaviour.'
One of the peculiarities that began to emerge, though, in psychological testing, in psychological therapy, in the thinking through, in the experiencing through, in the recording of it, in the envisioning of it, was that for every major function, if you have an intuitive major function you can have a secondary function that really works with it. You can have an intuitive who has a secondary thinking function, or you can have someone who has a sensate function and maybe the secondary would be something like feeling and there are various combinations but one combination does not occur. There is no way that you can have a thinking dominant function with a feeling-toned secondary function. They are not miscible psychologically. Why? In our learning we have seen that the phases, that ritual as a phase is largely an action-based sensate existential regard of the objective world, of what we do, of what it does and how our doings interpenetrate, enmesh or do not to whatever extent. That feeling tone is largely a mythic experience quality that has images as well as feelings, as well as the capability for a spoken language.
The thinking is in the Symbols phase and is a formal structure, like the structure of existentials in the world; it is a form but feeling, experience, imagery, spoken language is not a form phase but a process phase and it is out of the process phase that the structure of thought is integrated. Its integration is in a way of weaving and knitting together so that what you get out of the flow of experience is a structure of thought which in its pure form was always logical, a logical structure, leading towards, increasingly as one paid attention to the structure of thought, would lead to an abstraction. An abstraction is definitely a polarity from empathy, of being able to empathise with one's own experience, for instance, or the experience of someone else, or the experience of images because now the images are brought together into the structure of symbols, of symbolic thought. The qualities of spoken language now can be put into an abstraction. One can have a written language, like characters of a hieroglyphic or like Chinese characters or an alphabet like Indo-European languages. There are qualities that are not miscible for those two structures because the integral of symbolic structure already digests the quality of feeling into the way in which thought will think about it.
It turns out to be an extraordinary problem. The more that one would perfect the strength of mentality, the more jeopardy one would have of no longer being free to just empathise or just to have the flow of feeling or just to have the flow of images, they would arrange themselves into those structures. Once an idea is very, very powerful, it integrates not only the way in which experience flows now but the way in which the basis of experience of what you do, the ritual comportments are stylised and structured so that they are referential to the power of thought and thought structures. And, more and more, the mentality becomes so super dominant it can have a secondary support from sensation, from the way things are done. It can have, even, a secondary type from intuition, from vision, but it does not allow for the participation of a free flow of feeling and of images to occur within itself as long as it is the dominant type, the dominant function. Here the classic insight is that music is a flow of feeling, a flow of a musical language, and yet it also has a structure to it, a definite symbolic structure that can be delivered into great complexity.
And so here, exactly at the time of Schiller and Shelley, you find a complete transformation of the understanding of music. From the previous qualities that were there in music since many, many thousands of years, the expression of the transcendent person, transcendent to the structure of their mind, now gives the dominant structure of intuition to aesthetic form rather than to symbolic form. So that art forms become the carrier of the emphasis rather than mental forms. Because vision, visionary consciousness allows for the feeling tones and the imagery of experience to come directly into parallel with it so that the works of art, the aesthetic works of art, bring experience, bring feelings, bring its empathy, bring its basic communication of languages into the aesthetic forms right away.
Schiller, more than anyone at the time, spotted a revolutionary difficulty. The structures of thought that most dominated mankind's interpersonal relationships, the communities, the villages, the cities, were political forms. Now the challenge was that political forms will always inevitably lead to a kind of abstraction where more and more people's empathy is ruled extraneous. People's feeling tones are more and more co-opted to fit into the way in which they are expected to behave and to feel and that it is a revolution to have a kind of a music that emphasises an expansive, infinite variety of your feeling capacity, of your empathetic capacity, of the images that are now available. For the first time, exactly at this time, you get someone like a Mozart, who writes a personal aesthetic musical form that transforms and brings into play all of the classic music forms but now they are recalibrated so that they are now expressing not an individual but the infinite array of personal possibilities of anyone and everyone, including the new communities.
The work of music that we use, in our music, in the learning, by Mozart is The Magic Flute, the opera The Magic Flute, which comes out exactly at this time. In The Magic Flute, Papageno, with his complement Papagena, has this magic flute that he has great empathy with birds and birdsongs and can play his magic flute as if it were lie new kinds of birdsongs that now are not birds just in nature but are birds in a supernatural expansion of visionary nature. Last year one of the - I think it was Yale University Press - put out a book of 250 Bird Songs with a little recorder in the back of it that when you press a button you get the number of the bird songs and you hear the birdsongs played for you so that you could hear 250 different birdsongs. Mozart's Magic Flute is a supernatural differential conscious birdsong that had never been heard before and it gives a pitched tone to a transformation of feeling and of experience that had never been freed in the world before.
Following on the heels of Mozart you have people, to just use the great example, Beethoven, who now takes the ability to have a lyric personal transcendent composition of feeling tones that are not stopped by structures in the mind but are directly carried by vision into the musical forms, into the aesthetic forms, into the art forms. And so you have someone like Schiller in the aesthetic education of man, we must recalibrate ourselves away from a political society to an aesthetic universe. In the fifth letter he says, he writes,
Is this the character of the present age, which contemporary events, present to us? Let me turn my attention at once to the object most in evidence on this enormous canvas. [The whole nature of the world is being recut.] True, the authority of received opinion has declined, arbitrary rule is unmasked and, though still armed with power, can no longer, even by devious means, maintain the appearance of dignity. Man has roused himself from his log indolence and self-deception and, by an impressive majority, is demanding restitution of his inalienable rights. But he is not just demanding this; over there and over here, he is rising up to seize by force what, in his opinion, has been wrongfully denied to him. The fabric of the natural state is tottering, its rotting foundations giving way, and there seems to be a physical possibility of setting law upon the throne, of honouring man at last as an end in himself, and making true freedom the basis of political associations. Vain hope! The moral possibility is lacking, and a movement so prodigal of opportunity finds a generation unprepared to receive it.'
Then it gets more complicated because Shelley, following on the heels of Schiller, very closely, puts his finger on the very knot that this was a situation that reoccurs for men and women when we expand our experience to include a historical consciousness because history is not just a dead file now, vision has revivified it. We have a future and a new past and in that expanding parenthesis of infinite variety and possibility, historical consciousness now is a kaleidoscopic consciousness. The history is prismatic of possibility and not at all delimiting of mental structures and strictures. So suddenly we get faced with an incredible realisation: for man to mature further than his mental structures will carry him, he must be free. Men and women do not just breathe freedom, they are real in freedom. It is not just a good idea, it is not a political idea, it is an aesthetic, prismatic actuality that now gets a confirmation, not from a referent going back but from a whole array going forward that the cosmos harkens to us in this way. That the freed spiritual person finds they are in a harmonic with the cosmos. It responds to them and they respond to it as kindred. They are in the same resonance of composition, they are tuned. And the cosmos accepts whatever songs we are singing as a part of the chorus of variety.
This becomes, in the late 1700s taking a cue from one of the most sophisticated little books of the high point of classical antiquity, we don't know who he was, the author's name is Longinus and his little book was a book on art at the time 2,000 years ago On the Sublime. Schiller before he wrote On the Aesthetic Education of Man did naive and sentimental poetry on the sublime because the sublime had been raised again by a very interesting figure, Edmund Burke, and his great volume which came out in the 1760s is called Burke's Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful . Here just a couple of sentences for it:
There are internal or reflex senses, those of novelty, sublimity, beauty, imitation, harmony. Taste, then, for this writer is not one simply power but an aggregate of many, which by the resemblance of their energies and the analogy of their subjects and causes readily associate and are combined for "correct" taste however all the internal sense must be exercised equally. From this premise he argues that no ancient with the possible exception of Quintilian had perfect taste. Longinus was unbalanced by excessive sensibility, Dionysian by refinement and Aristotle by judgment, proportion as well as complexity of response was essential.
But Burke points out that Longinus was exquisitely refined because he's not talking about a mental structure. He is talking about a conscious complex space that expands so that instead of just a structure of thought now, one begins to have many kinds of space that expand out into literally a living cosmos. When Schiller, on the sublime, comes into play he says,
The sublime object is of a dual sort. We refer to it either by our power of apprehension and we are defeated in an attempt to form and image of its concept; or refer to it as our vital power and view it as a power against which our own dwindles to nothing. But even if, in the first case or the second, it is the Occasion of a painful awareness of our limitations, still we do not run away from it, but we are drawn to it by an irresistible force.
There is a magnetic quality that comes from a very peculiar pair of activities that occur at the centre of thought. In our learning civilisation the interchange between the first and the second year have two pages that address this. The first page is called Acceptance, the second page is called Absorbing Experience. The final stage of an integral is accepting that the completeness is now what it is but leaves it open to be what it is in an is-ness that was not confined by the completion, so that absorbing experience now gives one the absorption of that acceptance and the immediate spontaneous occurrence of something new, had not been there before. The mystics would call it an oceanic allness. The musicians with the Pythagorean background would say now one hears the music of the spheres.
We know in the late 20th century, for instance, that all of the planets of our star system in the solar wind have a bow shock and each planet has its own note that it makes weere space capable of carrying the sound. NASA put out little whistles in the 1980s that were tuned so that one could hear the sound, for instance, of the earth in its orbit around the sun. And all the other planets have their own sounds, there is a music of the spheres. But just as planets in a starlight field have a bow shock, a whole star system has its bow shock in interstellar radiant space. We are in an area of the Milky Way that has a very high density of interstellar molecular gases and so our cluster of about 2-300 stars that are nearby us definitely share a special kind of a galactic sound as well. Galaxies themselves move in such a way that there is large intergalactic realms that also will deliver this.
It isn't just that there is a music of the spheres but, increasingly, the realisation is that the harmonic carries into infinity itself. And this was an enormous problem addressed by Schiller in one of his poems called the Eleusinian festival. The festivals at Eleusis were all about Demeter in search of her lost daughter Persephone who had been abducted and carried to the underworld by Hades to be his queen of the netherworld and Demeter the good mother searched and finally found a way to bring her back for half the year, she could be back in the world and then go back to Hades and come back again. The Eleusinian Festival is about the progress of society and Schiller begins at just the beginning of it, 'Wind in a garland, the ears of gold!' the ears of grain made into sculptural and then woven into a garland and this in a ceremony,
Wind in a garland the ears of gold! Let the cyan's azure enwoven be, O how gladly shall I behold the queen who comes in her majesty. Man with man in communal mixing, taming the wild ones where she went into the piece of the homestead, fixing lawless bosom and shifting tent darkly, hid in cave and cleft. Shy, those Troglodyte abodes, earth was found a waste and left where the wandering nomad strode, deadly with spear and shaft prowled the hunter through the land, woe the stranger waves may waft on an ever fatal strand.
In ancient times the ends of the world were not a boundary that ended but the ends of the world were wastelands that went on and mankind faded from the ability to live there, to be there. And the great wasteland of the far north, the Siberia of 3,000 years ago is the place in which Prometheus was grabbed by force and might, two burly henchmen of the God Zeus who did not like the fact that Prometheus was a friend of man. Prometheus whose foresight had helped Zeus to get to his throne and when he got there he didn't like having this kind of creative genius loose and so Aeschylus in the Prometheus Bound, written about almost 2,500 years ago,
Even to talk of it is full of pain, / And painful still to keep...{And painful to keep still} / My case is hopeless in every way. / From that first moment rancour entered heaven / And discord broke among the deities- / Some wanting Cronus ousted from his throne / And Zeus put in as king, / Some wanting the reverse: / To keep Zeus out from ever governing; / Then it was that I tried to give them good advice / But found them hopeless to convince- / Those Titans, children of Heaven and Earth / Who, disdaining in their rugged souls my consummate / Designs, assumed it was an easy thing / For force to take the mastery of Fate.
As soon as he did, Zeus became a tyrant. Aeschylus has Prometheus say, 'He was the only being free in the universe. Everyone else must toe his lines.' For this the most suspect personage was the Titan Prometheus because Zeus feared that if he became an advocate for man, as he started to be because he stole fire which is the most refining transformative element and had given this to man. 'What else will he devise for man?' And so he was exiled to the far north Siberian wastes, iron clasps by Haphaestus, directed by might and force to chain him. And this is exactly where Shelley, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ends up in the far North. She has him say,
Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief. My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man's death is needed to consummate the series of my being, an accomplishment that which must be done; but it requires my own. Do not think I shall be slow to perform the sacrifice. I shall quite your vessel on the iceraft that brought me thither, and shall seek the most northern extremity of the globe; I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create another such as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me, or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more the very remembrance of us will speedily vanish.
Only the body could be burnt. The consciousness of the superman was free in the aether and found fruitful forms in the industrial revolution that soon began to put the power of steam and factories and everywhere one found, what has come to be called in the early 21st century, the eventual Frankenfoods, that even the basis of the grain of nutrition of Demeter and Persephone now is subject to a manipulation that will leave nothing natural. Only the artificial will be able to live in an artificial world but it, of its very nature, will landslide into tyranny, into an imperium because this is exactly what an untransformed mental structure automatically does. It doesn't just mechanise the world, it mechanises the makers of worlds. More next week.