Lecture XXXV (Nr. 0456)
Facs
Transcript
[451] It is what Prof. [Herbert] a, in his book which I quoted already in the beginning of these lectures, [called] Eros and Civilization--the lack of 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 c of d eternal e, by the f which it gets, which is not only honest--determined by the purpose--but also an image of the
proportions according to which the 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 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 i 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 j, church buildings, church furniture and other things, and the whole realm of religious art. [The] lack of 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.