The Human & The Ideological

“They hate unpredictability. They hate anything which is in any way different. Since real art encourages you to be different, encourages you to recognize that you are different and special, and that’s in a way the essence of art. I mean, art is the perfect antidote to any sort of collectivism, so it is just the natural enemy [to totalitarianism], which is why I think the art that rose to the top in the GDR for me isn’t art at all. It is something that vaguely resembles art, but it is not at all the deep kind of experience that will help you explore your soul.” –   Writer – director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of The Lives of Other People

This is romantic, but it’s also  true.   We’ve all become a bit cynical about art’s ability to truly make us conscious, certainly we know it doesn’t  always make us good.     But the paradox is that it can both connect us to others  but yet also lead us to understand (and even assert) our separate selves.    We see this dual process in the growth of the Stasi official, played by Ulrich Mühe in   The Lives of Other People  (Das Leben der Anderen).   The dead hand of the government twists and destroys; it grinds down and isolates him not only from others but from an understanding of his own humanity.   The director describes  the tension between principle and feeling; in America we have long seen this as the tension between heart and head, ideology and humanity.   Whatever we call them, we understand the process.    

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Preparing for Class

With “Who’s Gona  Fill Their Shoes” in the background,  I come upon a passage apt  for discussions here of ambiguity:

 

A man’s power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss. The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature.

Emerson – Nature – “Language”