All formalizations must be built upon an original sense of naïvety.
Alas, perhaps so many echoes ago, men would sing to only a single Melody, and cry to just a maiden’s lonesome words, so that their hands above their unplowed lands, could shudder in fear of Apollo’s song.
…
And if our lives could just proceed from the Lord’s Garden, perfect, naïve, and harmonious… But for our progress, our advancement (and some as Rousseau say, our sin) curse us with problems, and all philosophies since then, to solve them…
And thus all Romanticists and revisionists identify the problem of aesthetics and life as one. (bridge)
…
Two most intuitive forms of aesthetics:
The Greek: Nietzschean, today, Dylan. The Christian. …
Greek philosophy identifies binaries, but it accepts a continuum and flux between them, in which men exist. Thus men’s virtue of moderation and eudamonia (happiness) as goodness.
Christian philosophy identifies binaries, between which men must make a choice. Thus Dante, Kierkegaard.
If we view men as the medium between the world and his mind, then I say with courage: the men of China have suffered too much. Lord, have your World atone to us, and let our mind have some rest.
A pendulum… when Mill disparagingly wrote of the baser pleasures, he could not have seen the men here in China, their only pendulum their own life, between the dockyard and a bed, between the death-yard and the infinite hell.
If our education seeks solely to instill “noble pursuits” into the young man’s mind, then the latter is bound to die young. For one, he will be detached from his society, and two,
Young man! Your shoulder broader than the
Length of Time, your fist stronger than the Death
Lord’s Hold, and perhaps a hundred-years ago thy freedom Shy,
But now your hands reach the wide Germanic hills!