Reading: Die Schere #1

[Guenter Rebing <Rebing@compuserve.com>]

Notes to Die Schere §1

 At thebeginning,, the playful utterances of homo ludens, of man as 
player, are seen as akin to his religious activities. Agreed: there are
overlapping areas, as in Bach's cantatas for example: an amalgam of deeply
felt religion and play obeying highly complex rules. 
However, EJ now turns this idea around: religions are also works of art.
Here another aspect of art is focused upon: art being the expression of its
epoch, die Signatur der Zeit. If you regard a religion, like art, as the
product of the time in which it was born it must be in the very long run
(of eons?) something similarly ephemeral as fashion is from season to
season and style from century to century.
But this is no downgrading of art or religion. Both aim at making visible
something which is sensed as being beyond time: perfection, the idea, the
divine.Within time, our mode of seeing incessantly changes and develops, so
the images fade and have to be replaced by fresh ones which are in their
turn only for a time adequate to the new way of seeing. But since all
images in art and religion are a means (and the only means) of making us
aware of what might be beyond time, images are needed forever. If they are
no longer supplied, man is threatened by "Verlust", a word which in this
context means more than "loss"; I think EJ here hints at the catastrophe he
describes elsewhere as nihilism and its consequences for the human mind. 

Günter Rebing