Facs
Transcript
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 poetical stories of a didn't want to use them for any special purpose, but they had a happy life when they listened to these eternal voices.1 All of historical science is based on the same passion, to know how it really has been,2 to know the story of the past.
Finally, the knowledge of philosophy, which includes the question: “How is the structure of being-itself?"—not any special being, not even human being, but being-itself universally. This is the greatest of all curiosities and it is a curiosity which is so fundamental 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: every true philosopher is driven by the eros, by the love, to know what that being in which he finds himself, really is. He wants to know ultimate reality, and a philosophy which does not have this eros any more, which is self-sufficient in dealing with the logical presuppositions 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.
Now this is the third function—again dependent on language, on universals—the perceptive or cognitive function of human culture. 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.
2.6 Outline - Aesthetic intuition
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 aesthetic intuition of reality.
This aesthetic intuition 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