DIE SCHERE #8: Notes

[Rebing <Rebing@compuserve.com>]

By demonstrating that a certain statement can be as valid as its inversion
EJ manages to prove the point he has put forward in #7: both statements are
just dependent on perspective or on taste. They clash only on a lower level
of looking at the matter at hand. You are on that lower level as long as
you insist on art having a certain task or function. Against this limited
view EJ puts his own in form of a terse maxim which, more than being a play
on words, enlists the genius of a language which has very similar words for
"vision" ("Sicht") and intention ("Absicht"), both derived from one and the
same verb. 
The last pragraph starts with a phrase revealing and resuming EJ's own view
of art having "Autarkie" and "Souveränität". He adds, as a veiled climax,
that an even higher quality might be attributed to it, a quality which he
has hinted at more precisely in #1. 
In the last sentence of #8 the philosopher's conceptual statement is fused
into a superb image whose poetic rhythm with powerful effect drives home
the final truth about art EJ offers us here. 

Günter Rebing