Making good progress with Schiller's "On the Aesthetic Education of Man" - the prose is quite hard to follow at times (requiring me to concentrate carefully, and often re-read paragraphs), but the 'letter' format is quite readable, and they are short enough that I can read one or two each morning before getting out of bed. I'm on the fourth letter, and was struck by this passage:
When therefore Reason introduces her moral unity into physical society, she must not injure the multiplicity of Nature. When Nature strives to maintain her multiplicity in the moral structure of society, there must be no rupture in its moral unity; the triumphant form rests equidistant from uniformity and confusion.
Schiller is again talking about 'reason' as the rational rules of society vs 'Nature' as the passionate, impulsive, individualism of society's members. So although he's talking about the aesthetics of society, as it were, it's still interesting to read it more generally roughly thus (warning, my interpretation!):
When logical rational impulses drive towards a unified coherent artwork, they must not injure the idiosyncratic, characteristic elements driven by the passionate irrational impulses. When passionate irrational impulses drive towards the incoherent and idiosyncratic, there must be no break in the overall coherence of the artwork; the triumphant form rests equidistant from uniformity and confusion.
I think the implication can therefore be taken, in other words, that the ideal is to balance between the boring but coherent, and the confusing but interesting. Just as Schiller is suggesting that society must balance the need for conformity and 'common rules' with the needs of individuals to be true to their own nature, so the artist needs to balance universality/accessibility with the need of their personal need to express their own character and quirks. The extreme of universality is the bland and formulaic, the extreme of personal expression is the obscure and self-indulgent.
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