Infuriating!
Like the entwined roots of two trees what is the relationship between ideas and the world? Can you separate them out? What causes what!
…Menzel moved towards favouring authoritarianism. His admiration for Frederick the Great increased…
It was around this time that the sense of charm began to disappear from Menzel’s paintings. He became even more remote in his recordings of the world around him. That delight in the workings of the world that was one of the more innocent of the legacies of Romanticism gave way to a passionate and unyielding sense of naturalistic virtuosity.
Adolph von Menzel became an autocrat in style after his disillusionment with liberal politics; was his change of politics the cause of this change in style? Or is it the other way round: losing the liberality of his perceptions changed his politics…
If the great Enlightenment thinkers are right, and new ideas come from perceptions, from quick dives of the sensual mind into the everyday world, and those perceptions are governed by the passions, then the disappointment with the political failures of the 1848 revolution could be the cause, the emotional impetus. But of course, that world is already there, it is suffused with the ideas of the time and place; and your own body’s decay. You dive into a swimming pool only to find Hume’s Enquiries all over the tiled floor…
…Menzel moved towards favouring authoritarianism. His admiration for Frederick the Great increased…
It was around this time that the sense of charm began to disappear from Menzel’s paintings. He became even more remote in his recordings of the world around him. That delight in the workings of the world that was one of the more innocent of the legacies of Romanticism gave way to a passionate and unyielding sense of naturalistic virtuosity.
Adolph von Menzel became an autocrat in style after his disillusionment with liberal politics; was his change of politics the cause of this change in style? Or is it the other way round: losing the liberality of his perceptions changed his politics…
If the great Enlightenment thinkers are right, and new ideas come from perceptions, from quick dives of the sensual mind into the everyday world, and those perceptions are governed by the passions, then the disappointment with the political failures of the 1848 revolution could be the cause, the emotional impetus. But of course, that world is already there, it is suffused with the ideas of the time and place; and your own body’s decay. You dive into a swimming pool only to find Hume’s Enquiries all over the tiled floor…
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