Oh, oh, and what you wrote there is a perfect way to explain my adherence to the Ashtanga system. It's not ancient, but if we admit to our yogic ignorance and do yoga in connection with a perfected system, we're better off.
I do understand the separations (between art and philosophy and philosophy and writing) that you see as relevant, and I do think the "mother-tongue" issue is relevant. But then there's people like Thomas Mann. It's not apples and oranges in my opinion to consider both the philosophical and artistic greatness of "Doctor Faustus," within which the things we're discussing here are addressed.
The proximity of aestheticism and barbarism, of beauty and crime, is a second central element in Mann’s description of German culture which touches the fundamental role of art in society. Walter Benjamin has spoken of the fascist aestheticization of politics. Zeitblom says about one of Leverkühns major works, the Apocalypsis con figuris, that it had “a peculiar kinship with, was in spirit a parallel to, the things I had heard at Kridwiss’s table-round”, an inter-war circle in Munich that Mann describes flatly as “arch-fascist”. A few pages later, Zeitblom worries about “an aestheticism which my friend’s saying: ‘the antithesis of bourgeois culture is not barbarism, but community[9],’ abandoned to the most tormenting doubts. … Aestheticism and barbarism are (near) to each other: aestheticism as the herald of barbarism.
To me, everything is art. That may make me a barbarian. But I trust artists. I don't trust philosophers trying to be pure philosophers. It's a false conservatism in itself and doesn't, in my opinion, excuse a lack of artistry. That's why I like your writing. There's poetry in it. It's playful. It's artistic. Mann was the king of all that in my opinion. He was anything but vulgar in the way he addressed aestheticism in extremely varied ways. Even the German in the book is varied, since some chapters were written in such old, gothic style German, even native German speakers have trouble deciphering it. I love that. The writing transcends the mind level concerns of what is slipshod, or adorned. It happens on a whole other level and because it happens on a whole other level it can contain philosophical truths that mind-level writing can never express not matter how supposedly perfect it may appear to the mind.
the perfect writer rejects with disdain and with some impatience the demand of vulgar rhetoric that expressions must be varied since change is pleasant
That sounds like he's saying something about imperfect speech to me. And if you look at it the way we would look at music or painting, in my opinion, he's wrong on an aesthetic level as well. The variances in a particular great musical or painterly piece my be slight and reductive compared to other pieces, but without variance there is no relational beauty. A tightness wafts off of his writing as well. The tightness is vulgarly conservative to me.
Oh, oh, and what you wrote there is a perfect way to explain my adherence to the Ashtanga system. It's not ancient, but if we admit to our yogic ignorance and do yoga in connection with a perfected system, we're better off.
Oh, and that was a good one.
You know "why." Because then I get to enjoy your rebuttals.
I do understand the separations (between art and philosophy and philosophy and writing) that you see as relevant, and I do think the "mother-tongue" issue is relevant. But then there's people like Thomas Mann. It's not apples and oranges in my opinion to consider both the philosophical and artistic greatness of "Doctor Faustus," within which the things we're discussing here are addressed.
To me, everything is art. That may make me a barbarian. But I trust artists. I don't trust philosophers trying to be pure philosophers. It's a false conservatism in itself and doesn't, in my opinion, excuse a lack of artistry. That's why I like your writing. There's poetry in it. It's playful. It's artistic. Mann was the king of all that in my opinion. He was anything but vulgar in the way he addressed aestheticism in extremely varied ways. Even the German in the book is varied, since some chapters were written in such old, gothic style German, even native German speakers have trouble deciphering it. I love that. The writing transcends the mind level concerns of what is slipshod, or adorned. It happens on a whole other level and because it happens on a whole other level it can contain philosophical truths that mind-level writing can never express not matter how supposedly perfect it may appear to the mind.
That sounds like he's saying something about imperfect speech to me. And if you look at it the way we would look at music or painting, in my opinion, he's wrong on an aesthetic level as well. The variances in a particular great musical or painterly piece my be slight and reductive compared to other pieces, but without variance there is no relational beauty. A tightness wafts off of his writing as well. The tightness is vulgarly conservative to me.
I disagree with Strauss. "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."