Facs

Tillich Lectures

Transcript

[12] application, namely historical knowledge, based on natural human curiosity to hear stories how it really has been--without ANY purpose. The people who gathered in public places in Greece to hear the ethical stories of Homer didn't want to use them for any special purpose, but they had a happy life when they listened to these internal, voices [forces?]. All of historical science is based on the same passion, to know how it really has been, to know the story of the past. Finally,a. This is the greatest of all curiosities and it is a curiosity which is so funda- mental for the human mind that in every primitive myth, the philosophical question is present, expressed in a poetic-intuitive way, united with conceptual elements. Only later do the conceptual elements become independent. But again I would say: c, by the love, to know what that being in which he finds himself, really is. He wants to know d, and a philosophy which does not have this eros any more, which is self-sufficient in dealing with the logical presupposi- tions of science alone, is not driven by the philosophical eros. It may be driven by special scientific eros--I don’t mind this, and I don’t deny it--but philosophy as philosophy wants to KNOW what the reality is in which we are living.b Now this is the third function--again dependent on e, on f-- the perceptive or g of human h. And as you can imagine, this will be a very central problem for our discussion of religion and culture. We have to deal with religion and science, with religion and historical research, with religion and depth psychology, with religion and philosophy. I come now to the fourth function of human culture, based on the encounter with reality, a function which arises as early as the production of tools, and somehow earlier as independent cognition, as the will to know--namely, the i of reality. This aesthetic intution [sic.] creates the artistic forms--first of all in language, or at the same time, usually, in sounds. The first we call poetry, the second music..., the third visual arts; or in movements (dance or theater). In all these functions, the intuition of reality expresses itself, and therefore in contrast to the transforming and to the perceiving functions of man's cultural life, I call this the expressive function of man’s cultural life: the aesthetic function

Register

aOntology
bPhilosophy_of_Philosophy
cEros
dUltimate_Reality
eLanguage
fUniversals
gCognitive_Function
hCulture
iAesthetic_Intuition

Entities

Keywords

TL-0015.pdf