[Log4c-devel] Eased from all service and suffere
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From: Curzi C. <adr...@m-...> - 2010-09-29 22:58:22
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Indispensable. We are now to seek the real not in the ideal itself, but in that spiritual unity in which appearance is the incentive to truth, and natural imperfection the spring to goodness. This may be translated into the language which Plato uses in the "Symposium," when Diotima is revealing to Socrates the meaning of love. The new reality will be not the loved one, but love itself. "What then is Love? Is he mortal?" "No." "What then?" "As in the former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but is a mean between them." "What is he then, Diotima?" "He is a great spirit, and like all that is spiritual he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal."[359:3] Reality is no longer the God who mingles not with men, but that power which, as Diotima further says, "interprets and conveys to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and rewards of the gods." In speaking for such an idealism, Emerson says: "Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry. . . . The mid-world is best."[359:4] The new reality is this highway of the spirit, the very course and raceway of self-consciousness. It is traversed in the movement and self-correction of thought, in the interest in ideals, or in the submission of the will to the control of the moral law. [Sidenote: Fichteanism, or the Absolute Spirit as Moral Activity.] Sect. 177. It is the last of these phases of self-consciousness that Fichte, who was Kant's immediate successor, regards as of paramount importance. As Platonism began with the ideal of the good or the object of life, so the new idealism begins with the conviction of duty, or _the story of life_. Being is the living moral nature compelled to build itself a natural order wherein it may obey the moral law, and to divide itself into a community of moral selves through whi |