I intend to introduce the consideration of the significant aesthetic concept, specifically the concept of splendor, by discussing one of the first and most important texts to contain something like a concept of splendor. The text in query is a section from Plato’s Phaedrus, about chapters 30 to 32, consistent with the well-known Stephanus pagination.1 Now, you can say to start with that it’s far alternatively peculiar to examine the concept of splendor by drawing on a passage of an incredibly mythological, dogmatic, and truly pre-essential person together with this one with the aid of Plato.
I have chosen this passage as it demonstrates that Plato becomes a truth seeker in any case, now not a mythologist; that is, all the decisive motifs that later appear in the philosophical theory of splendor are amassed in this explanation, rather akin to the manner that, in the introductions to positive first-rate symphonies, essential subject matters are present as though beneath glass and are then advanced within the path of the symphony itself. So I can hear the gift to you in status nascendi because it had been in an almost prehistoric form, the motifs that dominate the discussion of the concept of splendor.
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Phaedrus is one of the thinker’s most complicated and enigmatic works, so difficult that it is almost impossible to factor into a well-known theme of this communication. It starts offevolved by discussing a sophisticated speech about love wherein a starkly cosmopolitan declaration is made. The most effective proper lover is the only one who no longer loves himself.2 This thesis, that’s provided to Socrates through children, a young student of the Sophists—Phaedrus—is then corrected through Socrates, one might say, within the experience that he immanently criticizes it and outdoes it in a speech this is each extra internally rigorous and greater virtuosic.
However, this is abruptly accompanied by the aid of a magnificent rupture. As much as that point, the whole method is abandoned and offers a doctrine of love corresponding to the Socratic theory, which is normally based on the motif of re-remembering or anamnesis.4 And let me say it already: the Platonic theory of beauty states that the electricity of beauty comes from the truth that we understand the Form—in the items or humans we’ve got reason to call lovely.
5 It is this outstanding motif of ache and longing, which seizes human beings in the face of beauty, formulated for the first time and in the greatest style of this communication. This interpretation is followed by a 3rd part, which has a very ordinary Platonic shape that I would love to place within the class or return to.
This means that the soul, saturated with the reports accumulated via philosophy after turning closer to its maximum items, specifically the Forms, returns to the earth and brings the chic—to apply one of Kierkegaard’s terms6—into the pedestrian.7 Incidentally, This Platonic motif went directly to play a first-rate component in German classicism too; one must assume the simplest of Faust’s “I weep, I am for the earth again” to remember the fact.8
If you occupy yourselves in any respect with aesthetics, I could strongly inspire all of you to examine the Phaedrus in its entirety, for one ought to apprehend it as one of the best primary texts within Western metaphysics. One of its central “issues” is the connection between motive and madness9. [At the turning point of the dialogue] Socrates—possibly in slight jest, referring to nymphs—indicates himself seized using enthusiasm and leaves the rational realm.
10 There is an entirely systematic cause for this in Platonic philosophy. Platonic philosophy as a whole has a weird twofold man or woman, for it is rational or, to apply its terminology, dialectical, which means that it consists of the definition and improvement of ideas, both the abstraction and the type of concepts, yet isn’t always restricted to this but alternatively so as for the idea certainly to come to be what is without a doubt is, specifically the objectively valid concept its miles joined by that very thing of enthusiasm, or divine insanity, which Plato deems the element in which the best truth discloses itself, albeit handiest as an unexpected flash:11 until, having skilled it, we perform that return that is so fundamental to Platonic philosophy.
And it’s far from this defense of insanity towards rationality one could nearly say: against stupidity—it is from this justification of delirium, and absolutely an erotic frenzy, that Plato’s idea of beauty follows. He offers severe emotion within the face of splendor as one of these kinds of insanity wiser than the standard information of purpose. I had to tell you this so you might understand what I will now read to you and then interpret in a few elements. So, we read in chapter 30:
“Now we reach the factor to which the entire discussion of the fourth Form of madness becomes tending. This fourth sort of madness is the kind that happens when someone sees splendor right here on this planet and is reminded of actual beauty. His wings start to develop”—”wings start to grow” is a connection with the imperative parable that precedes this,12 however which I shall not speak now—
“and he desires to take wing on his new plumage. However, he can’t; like a fowl, he appears upwards, and because he ignores what’s down here, he’s accused of behaving like a madman. So the point is that this seems to be the most correct of all varieties of ownership, no longer only for the man who is possessed but also for anybody who is touched by it. The phrase “lover” refers to a lover of splendor possessed through this type of madness. As I have already said, the soul of every person is sure to have visible things as they are. Otherwise, it would not have entered this Form of residing creature. But now, not every soul is easily brought on with the aid of matters right here on this planet to keep in mind those real matters. This isn’t always smooth for a soul who caught only a quick glimpse of factors there, nor for those who, after falling to earth, have suffered the misfortune of being perverted and made immoral using the corporation they keep and have forgotten the sacred matters they noticed. Then.”
That nearly appears like Hölderlin. 13
“When the remaining few, whose recollections are right sufficient, see a likeness here which reminds them of factors there, they may be amazed and beside themselves, but they do not apprehend what’s occurring to them because of a positive unclarity of their perceptions. But the likenesses are right here on the planet (of factors valuable to souls, including justice and self-control).”
