Aesthetics by Dietrich von Hildebrand

Author:Dietrich von Hildebrand [Hildebrand, Dietrich von]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781939773043
Publisher: Hildebrand Project

The poetic, the true antithesis to the prosaic

The specific antithesis to the prosaic in its two forms is the poetic, an extremely important aesthetic value which we shall discuss in detail in chapter 11 below. The poetic is a primordial element in art, not only in the artistic genre of poetry as a branch of literature, but in all the literary genres, in music, in the visual arts, and to a special degree in nature.

The poetic also plays a great role in our life. It characterizes many situations and personalities, and it is a profound source of joy. Some personalities have a specifically poetic charm. The poetic can occur on many levels of their being: in the gracefulness of their gestures, their smile, the way they walk, the way they express themselves, up to the highest irradiations of their being. Let us point out only that this is the specific antithesis to the prosaic, and that here the antithesis to the prosaic goes in a direction completely different from the case of the fantastic — to say nothing of the merely apparent, false antithesis of the sensational.

If the poetic is the specific antithesis to the prosaic — an antithesis like that between black and white — it follows that every beauty (apart from the most primitive formal beauty of regularity) contains an antithesis to the prosaic. Beauty is essentially unprosaic. We do not mean that beauty forms the specific antithesis to the prosaic (this is the poetic), if only because it is an incomparably more general value quality. In another respect, however, it is the much more important opposite of the prosaic, both as the opposite of lackluster neutrality and of the absence of qualitative values, and as the opposite of one particular disvalue. The valuable as such is always specifically unprosaic. This primordial antithesis is seen with particular force in metaphysical beauty, which is the fragrance and the splendor of the value in question.

We must understand that not only metaphysical beauty in the sense explained above, but also the beauty which appears immediately by means of visible and audible entities, contains this profound antithesis to all that is prosaic. This beauty too “sings” in all its various degrees of rank, although this element in beauty intensifies, the more sublime the beauty is.

The beauty of a rose, a hyacinth, a lily; the beauty of a landscape such as that of the area around Florence or the Apuan Mountains in Tuscany near Carrara or Sarzana; the beauty of Bernini’s colonnades and the dome of Saint Peter’s in Rome; the beauty of Michelangelo’s Medici tombs, Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert, Bach’s Air, or the adagio in Beethoven’s ninth symphony — all this is the enemy of the prosaic. This beauty is always the absolutely unprosaic.

Certainly, many of these objects also possess a specific poetry: flowers, the area around Florence, the Pastoral Concert. But neither the vista of the Apuan Mountains, nor the dome of Saint Peter’s, nor the Air, nor the adagio in the ninth symphony is specifically poetic.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.