[451]

It is what Prof. [Herbert] Marcuse^a, in his book which I quoted already in the beginning of these lectures, [called] Eros and Civilization--the lack of eros^b in our relationship to work and the products of our work, to which he draws, very intensively, our attention. One can have eros towards work, and if one has this, a chair one makes can be a symbol^c of ultimately^d eternal meaning^e, by the form^f which it gets, which is not only honest--determined by the purpose--but also an image of the proportions according to which the universe^g itself is created. And if these proportions are used and not a reminiscence of Baroque trimmings, destroy[ing] the whole meaning of that--because there is no eros any more, one takes as trimming the eros of former periods. But this is worse! The eros of our time^h would be to do honestly what one is asked to do, namely to make a good chair or a good table. And if our time does it, I have observed that the eros returns. An honest piece of modern furniture, if it is done without trimming and without dependence on past forms, is a work in which meaning is embodied, which SPEAKS to us, and if we come to such a room, then we are spoken at immediately.

Now that is another side of the ideal of personalityⁱ which has RUINED our relationship to the technical transformation of reality. And as some of you know, I feel the worst of this is if this dishonest method is applied to religious art^j, church buildings, church furniture and other things, and the whole realm of religious art. [The] lack of eros^k [is] replaced by the forms created by the great eros of the past, which if we simply copy it, we make it into an object [about] which we CANNOT feel anything of what former centuries felt about what THEY did, about their eros relationship.