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Date Posted: 13:32:34 11/20/07 Tue
Author: part 1
Subject: November 19, 2007

ICLC BRIEFING INTERNATIONAL VERSION

[A7-47-1/BFG001]:BFG:L: [07/11/18][06: ]AM BRIEFING
STAND:[1.1.00/ ][3.4.10/ ][0.1.00/ ] [21: ]ECO-FIN
SUBJT:[5.1.11/ ][4.1.11/ ][2.1.11/ ] [24: ]STR STUDIES
TOPIC:[060.000 :AM BRIEFING ]
SUB-T:[061.000 :AM BRIEFING, ENGLISH ]
TITLE:[BRIEFING FOR MONDAY NOV 19 2007 ] 1 of Pages

SYNOPSIS:

TO: ALL POINTS BY: HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE/DENNIS SMALL/DAVID CHERRY
RE: MORNING BRIEFING FOR MONDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2007.

+---------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| |
| MORNING BRIEFING |
| |
| Monday, November 19, 2007 |
| |
| |
+---------------------------------------------------------------+


HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE ADDRESSES ARGENTINA CADRE SCHOOL:
REPUBLIC OR EMPIRE; CREATIVITY OR COUNTERCULTURE

{On Saturday, Nov. 17, Helga Zepp LaRouche spoke to the
two-day cadre school organized by the LYM of Argentina. In
addition to the 18 youth participating in Argentina, Mexico City
and Colombia were on the phone hook-up as well. The following is
the text of her opening remarks; the ensuing discussion which
went on for some 90 minutes, will be forthcoming.}

HELGA ZEPP-LAROUCHE: Okay, well first of all, I'm very happy to
speak with you, because I really regret that I have never been in
Argentina. Because when Lyn visited President Alfonsín in 1984,
he did not take me with him--and I have not forgiven him for
that. So, basically, because Argentina is really a country which
I admire from a distance, and I find very fascinating, because
what I read about it, is that at the beginning of the 20th
century, Argentina was the third most developed country in the
whole world! So therefore, you do have a very great tradition to
revive, and I think with the Kirchner government you are in a
very advantageous position, because already now, Argentina is
playing a leading role for all of Latin America. And we in
Europe observed with great interest, when President Kirchner was
speaking of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the need for a New Deal,
and from that standpoint, what the Argentine government has been
doing, compares very, very favorably to the poor condition of the
European governments, which, even if there might be a useful
individual in them, here or there, they have completely submitted
to the supranational superstructure of the European Union, which
{is}, unfortunately, a kind of imperial, or would-be imperial
entity, and that is nowhere better to be seen than by the crazy
attacks of this European Union on the national sovereignty of its
members. And also the European Union East expansion is not
really taken as anything different than the NATO Eastern
expansion, at least by the Russians and some other people in
Asia.
So therefore, you really are in a relatively favorable
situation, and therefore, I think if you think about what role
and what is the historic task of the LYM in Argentina--and
naturally I don't forget Mexicans, who I hear are also listening
--but especially the LYM in Argentina, given this special
situation with the government.
Now, I think the two most important foci of your work is
essentially the same as what Lyn has been saying should be the
focus for us, internationally and inside the United States:
Namely, the fact that we have the really breathtaking,
acceleration of the collapse of the global financial system. And
there, again, I'm very happy about what will happen in the
beginning of December in Argentina, in Buenos Aires, namely, the
creation of the Bank of the South. Which is not the same, but it
goes in the same direction as what Lyn is trying to do with the
creation of the firewall, by fighting to get the Homeowners and
Bank Protection Act 2007 implemented in the United States; in the
same way, the Bank of the South, which is designed to be a
mechanism for infrastructure and other development, is exactly
one of these kinds of things of the common good.
So therefore, I want to encourage you, that all of you,
especially the newer contacts and members who are at this cadre
school, that one of the most urgent things you should do, is to
indeed study physical economy, study what did Franklin D.
Roosevelt do to overcome the Depression in the '30s, and also
study the famous Lautenbach Plan which was a similar plan like
the New Deal, which was presented in 1931 by an economist in
Germany before a secret meeting of the Friedrich List Society,
which essentially was based on the same principles as the New
Deal: Namely, that in the condition of a combined world
depression and world currency crisis, the mechanisms of the
market do not function, and therefore only if you go for the
creation of state credit that you can really influence the
economic situation and overcome the economic crisis.
Now a similar plan, by the way, was also presented by the
German trade union movement in 1931, the so-called
Woytinsky-Tarnow-Baade Plan named after three economists from the
trade union movement, which we are right now, by the way, trying
to revive, to intervene in the really tremendously big strike
ferment in Germany, especially where the locomotive conductors
are on strike, threatening to quiet the whole country. And they
must take up something like this WTB Plan for state credit
creation, if Germany is supposed to come out of this crisis.
So therefore, all of these things are very hot. So focus on
making yourself experts in physical economy, in re-creation of
economic recovery.
And secondly, the second focus that Lyn had defined as being
the most important issue, is the fight against the imperial
counterculture with which the enemy is trying to create mental
slavery. The Baby-Boomer generation, that is the ever-more
stupid "entertainment industry," the idiotic Hollywood movies,
the stupid TV game shows. And obviously, that is already bad
enough. But I think that the present assault on the young people
of the world, with virtual reality of the video games, MySpace,
Facebook, and so forth, if you take that together with the much
more degenerated pop music in all its varieties--from black heavy
metal, satanic rock music, of Gothic, to all these sub-versions
of hip hop, rap, metal and similar varieties, and there are many,
many new subspecies, where each fan community believes that their
specific variety is the most creative; but if you look at it as a
totality, you see that there is no creativity in it at all! And
if you take the virtual reality of the internet, the video games,
the Second Life in virtual reality, and the much more degenerated
pop music as a totality, I think that the present youth
counterculture is even much, much worse than that of the
Baby-Boomer, and it's also--in a certain sense, it's easier to
recognize because it is so atrocious.
Now, for those people who are new to our movement, I should
tell you that Lyn created the entire organization against this.
Now, that is really an unbelievable thing, because, in his recent
paper with the title, "Extreme Events," Lyn makes a very, very
interesting point: Namely he says, that the methodology of the
financial oligarchy is the same for the kind of utopian military
crazy ideas as they are expressed in the so-called Revolution in
Military Affairs--that is the idea that you only have air war,
that you have superweapons from basically from the Air Force and
that you don't have a traditional military any more; that is what
the Iraq War was based on; that's what the Cheney plan for the
Iran War would be based on, if we can not stop it--but that
methodology is the same used for video games, and it is also the
same mass schizophrenia as it is expressed by Treasury Secretary
Paulson in reaction to the financial collapse, by simply playing
the super-casino of ever more money creation to the hilt.
Now, I thought this was a very useful observation, because
it does refer to a specific mechanistic way of thinking.
Now, Lyn discovered his economic method of physical economy,
between 1948 and '52. And he did that very consciously against
Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, and their so-called
"information theory" and systems analysis. Because he recognized
that their efforts to describe the real, physical economy, with
mathematical-statistical models could not function. Because Lyn,
at that time was already very much engaged in studies of Leibniz,
in the Classical composition of Beethoven, and therefore, he
recognized immediately, that what Wiener and von Neumann left out
of the equation completely, was the effect of the creative
discovery of the impact of science and technology on the
productivity of the economy. And that these injections of
scientific and technological discoveries in the economy is
creating non-linear effect, which you can not describe with these
systems analysis and statistical methods, and therefore that was
the beginning of what would become the Riemann-LaRouche model of
physical economy.
Now, Lyn probably didn't know it fully at that point, but he
was already then in full opposition to what we call today the
"imperial faction" of the Anglo-American or Anglo-Dutch model.
For example, when, unfortunately Franklin D. Roosevelt had died
at the wrong moment in 1945, and when he was replaced by Truman,
Truman proved himself to be an early representative of this
utopian military faction, by doing the absolute war crime, and
dropping the two existing nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, despite the fact there was no military reason for this
at all, because the Japanese had already capitulated, and were in
negotiations for ending the war. But Truman did that in order to
establish the principle of H.G. Wells, which H.G. Wells already
had talked about at the beginning of the 20th century, long
before nuclear weapons even existed, that one day, there would be
weapons so terrible, that people would give up their sovereignty
voluntarily just to escape the consequences of the use of these
weapons.
Now, shortly thereafter, Bertrand Russell, in 1946 came out
and called for a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviet
Union, in the same tradition of the Hiroshima bombing by Truman.
And that faction then expressed itself most clearly in a terrible
book by Samuel Huntington, which he wrote in 1957, called {The
Soldier and the State}. I did this to myself in reading this
book on a trip to Paris once on the train, so I had many hours to
read it, because it's a real {hem} [ph], as we call these
books--it's 800 pages--but I wanted to find out what the mindset
is of the enemy.
So, in this book {The Soldier and the State}, Huntington
describes that there are two traditions in the military: One
goes back to Lazard Carnot, to the idea of the Prussian reformers
of Scharnhorst, that is, the idea that an army is there to defend
the national sovereignty, that soldiers should have an
exceptional role in society and be integrated into society; that
they should have the famous {Auftragstaktik}, which means that
they should be able to carry out the plan of the general staff,
even if they are separated because they're army unit is
separated, because they have understood the war plan as a whole.
They should follow something which in German is called the "inner
leadership of the army," which refers to the fact that there must
be a high moral standard of the army, that they should follow
their conscience, and principles, and that there is a higher
lawfulness than the order given by the military leadership. So
if the military leadership gives a nonsensical or criminal order,
the officers and the soldiers are not obliged to obey it. And
this patriotic conception of the army, Huntington compares then
to the legionnaire idea, as in the Roman Empire, where hired
legions would just carry out whatever they were told. And he
says, this second model, the imperial army, that is much, much
better.
So, that then intersected a debate in the military within
this utopian faction, which recognized the fact that during World
War II there were 15% of all soldiers participating in the Second
World War who were ready to shoot other human beings, even if it
was the enemy. Because firing on other human beings goes against
a basic impulse of human beings, that they don't want to kill
representatives of their own species.
So, then this section of the military started to develop
video games, with the idea to increase the kill-ratio of the
soldiers. Well, first of all, normal human beings when they
shoot at another person, they get very excited, they have an
adrenaline output which lasts about 15 minutes, and then finally
after that period they calm down and their nerves get calm. What
this training did, was to say: Okay, we need to get people over
that, we can not have them 15 minutes after each shot, so we have
to put up so-called paper targets which are moving very quickly.
And also we have to counter another impulse, which is that
somebody shoots at an enemy, the normal self-protection impulse
is that you shoot at the same enemy until that person remains
lying down and doesn't move any more, and then you can move onto
the next. So in order to overcome that, they trained people to
shoot very quickly on changing targets, moving targets, and do
that eventually without any emotional reaction.
Now, that military training, which was made into a video, is
already very bad in the military, and as I said, that is the
utopian military faction, which for example, Eisenhower warned
against when he left office at the end of his term, by saying
that there was a "military-industrial complex" in the United
States, which would be very dangerous and should be watched very,
very closely.
So, it's already bad if that occurs in the military, but it
is at least occurring within the context of a military
discipline--there is an officer, there are trained experts, and
so forth. So it occurs within a certain order.
But, if you do the same thing to children, to youth, if you
sell these videos in a commercial way, it has an absolutely
devastating effect, because young children and youth--you can see
it, with children who are younger than yourselves, they are
emotionally not very well balanced; they get scared quickly, they
get hysterical quickly, they have all kinds of emotional things,
which is usual and normal for children. But if you apply this
same thing, which was used to increase the kill-ratio in real
life for an imperial army, and for commercial reasons, you
emanate that among millions and millions of youth and children
throughout the world, you get exactly the kind of phenomena which
is now happening: You have youths who are playing violent
videogames for hours and hours; they are emotionally totally
crippled, and actually, if they do it long enough they actually
become autistic.
Now, I should tell you why I became interested in the first
place in this issue, because I never did play these videogames,
because I have better things to do--I have very important
creative work to do, and I could not really waste my time with
that. The reason why I got interested was that one time, Lyn and
I had guests, a family, a couple and their two children, and
while I was making coffee in the kitchen, the 6 year old boy came
with me in the kitchen, and asked me what I knew about Pokemon.
And I said, "I don't know what Pokemon is" and he said, "Ah, you
are stupid, you travel too much," because before at the coffee
table we had talked about our traveling to India and to China,
and he had somehow picked it up--he said, "Aw! You are traveling
too much! You are stupid, you don't know what Pokemon is!" And
he was totally aggressive for a 6 year old--I was quite shocked.
I said, "No, I don't think I'm stupid," but he said, "Oh, all the
children of the world know Pokemon, and you don't." And I said,
"Well, I don't think all children of the world know Pokemon,
because for example, in China and India there are many children
who are so poor, that they don't have electricity, and therefore,
they have no Pokemon." And he said, "Aw, no, that's not true.
Because China is very close to Japan, and in Japan, everybody
knows Pokemon, so also in China, people know Pokemon."
So, I was so shocked about this behavior, that I made the
effort to go to a so-called "tournament" in a mall in the United
States, where there was a gigantic display of Pokemon, hundreds
of play stations. So, I put myself in line together with many
parents and their children, waiting in line to be able play, and
I asked some 3-4 year old, tiny boys in front of me, why did they
like Pokemon? And they said, "We like fighting! Fighting!
Fighting!" I said, "Yeah, but that's really funny--isn't it much
nicer to love somebody and to be nice to people?" They said,
"NO! No! Fighting! Fighting!"
So, I was really shocked and decided to look into this more.
So, basically, I realized very soon that the effect of Pokemon,
videogames, and similar things is really leading to a tremendous
ugliness of the soul. And when Lyn talks about "zombies in
cyberspace," including people who have a complete virtual
identity in MySpace and similar things, I can really see this
very clearly. And I think it's important to understand that the
same sort of virtual reality is what dominates the financial
system at large, which is really nothing else but gambling in a
big casino, with hedge funds, private equity funds, conduits,
investment vehicles, and all these crazy things.
Now, Lyn made another point in his new paper, which was
really an "Aha experience," and which surprised me, but after I
thought it through, it made complete sense. I mean, we have all
these incidents about pupils and students in schools in the
recent school, who committed these amok shootouts, like this guy
in Finland, then the killing of a girl in Perugia, Italy, and
another 14 year old with whom this Finnish boy was in contact,
who only did not commit a similar act in his school in
Pennsylvania, because somebody tipped off the teachers, and they
found a tremendous amount of weapons in his room, so the whole
thing could be stopped. So the point Lyn was making, is that the
same mental disease is guiding the suicide bombers in Southwest
Asia, and those pupils who are running amok in schools--and the
people who are gambling in the hedge funds, and people who are
doing the Revolution in Military Affairs: That what is common to
all of these different things is an alienation from reality. All
of these people are living in a synthetic, nonexistent world, and
if you take it together, and you think how many hundreds of
millions of people are involved in that kind of world--actually
one can say "billions"--you can really talk about a mass
decadence of civilization.
Now, I think it is very important that the LYM in Argentina,
and that's the best thing you can do to support the absolute
historical role of the Argentine government at this point: The
best thing you can do, apart from studying and teaching physical
economy, is to fight for the Classical method of thinking and
Classical culture. And in a certain sense, you should have an
easy time in Argentina doing it, because Argentina historically
really belongs to the European culture and has many ties to
different European countries, and therefore, it should be very
easy for you to reconnect to the Italian Renaissance and the
German Classical period in particular.
Now, let me talk a little bit about the German Classical
thinking, because I think that here you can find the best
antidote to the ugly emotions which are associated with violent
videogames and this whole virtual world. Let me talk about one
poet, who was very crucial in laying the foundation for the
Classical period: Namely Lessing, who together with Moses
Mendelssohn, did a heroic job. Because this was essentially
after the Thirty Years' War and then the Seven Years' War had
been over, but the countries of Europe were still pretty much
devastated. Leibniz had died, and there was a huge
counteroperation by the English Enlightenment and the French
Enlightenment against the influence of Leibniz. So when these
two poets, Lessing and Mendelssohn, started to fight against the
English Enlightenment and what was dominant at that point at the
European courts, which was the French culture--things like
Voltaire and similar degenerates--then it was extremely
important. Because if you look at the image of man, which, the
English Enlightenment at that time had, they had the same image
of man as the imperial faction today, namely, in particular,
Locke, Hobbes, similar people, who basically said, "man is evil
by definition, he's not capable of ideas; the only knowledge man
can have is sense-certainty, and if you have enough
sense-certainty, then after a while, you can make some
conclusions and you can call that 'ideas,' but there are no ideas
in terms of universal principles. Ideas are only the abstract,
the deduction of sense-certainty. And since every man is evil,
naturally the emotions are evil also; every man is the wolf of
the other. And therefore, to prevent total chaos, all have to
agree to Leviathan, to an oligarchical dictatorship to suppress
the evilness of man, and everybody has to agree to a social
contract. They have to capitulate to be slaves in a
dictatorship, because that's the only way that society can be
run."
Now, that was a pretty evil conception. And Lessing who was
very influenced by Leibniz on the one side, and by Shakespeare,
developed this idea of an "Aesthetical Education of Man"
especially against the English and French Enlightenment. And
this idea, that man can be educated aesthetically, that is
something which has been almost forgotten today, but it was
developed as a scientific way to change and ennoble man in the
18th century. And Lessing, in particular, developed it very
consciously against Aristotle, who had this idea that man can
only be moved through fear and compassion. But fear is
necessary, because without fear, man can not have a {catharsis}
of his emotion.
So, against that Lessing said: No. The key is to develop
the individuality, the individual human man has to have a
harmonious and beautiful development, and therefore, everything
which strengthens the individual is good, and everything which
causes man to behave as a mass phenomenon, as a man in masses, is
destructive. Now, I was trying to imagine what, in the 18th
century, he could have meant by "mass." Maybe he meant a large
crowd gathering in the marketplace, or some other big gathering,
but if you compare the "mass" of the 18th century with what is
"masses" today! I think it was relatively mild.
If you're talking about masses today, you have masses of
audiences in soccer games, who are watching TV all over the world
simultaneously. Then you have hundreds of millions who are
watching the same soccer game. You have pop concerts, where tens
of thousands of people are doing the same thing, and having
orgiastic motions. You have millions of people who are playing
videogames. We have millions of youths who live their so-called
"Second Life" in virtual reality. For example, I once read a
statistic, that every single day, each of these prominent
computer games, like Doom, and CounterStrike, are watched by
500,000 people on average a day! Now, if you think how many
computer games exist, you come to a breathtaking number that
hundreds of millions of youth are doing {exactly} the same thing,
there is {no} creativity in that, because if 500 million people
or a billion people are doing the same thing, playing the same
idiotic game, that is indeed, the worst kind of "mass" I can
imagine.
Now, what did Lessing propose? He said: We have to have
the aesthetical education of man. Now, what is that, exactly?
What he meant is that it is the moral ennoblement of the soul,
the character, the education of the emotions, and the emotions
should be on the same level as the mind, as reason. So there
should not be a contradiction between reason and some irrational
emotions, but through the aesthetical education, you can make
sure that you can be on the same emotional level as your mind is
with reason.
As I said, this was against Aristotle, who had also this
completely different conception what to do with emotions. For
example: He had this idea of rhetoric. For example, a good,
rhetorically educated speaker could, according to Aristotle,
arouse passion in the audience and depending on how he would
speak, he could make the audience angry, or fearful, or sadistic,
or ridiculous, or whatever. And he said, depending on what kinds
of emotions I evoke in the audience, they will come to the
totally different conclusions in respect to the same factual
argument, because they will understand it differently if they're
angry; they will understand it differently if they are in a
sadistic mood, so therefore, I as the speaker, who's using
rhetoric, I can manipulate what the audience things.
Now, obviously, this is totally disgusting and an
oligarchical conception, but that is exactly what is happening in
the entertainment industry, where this method is really applied.
Now, Lessing had a completely different conception, and he
deliberately said that he was breaking with Aristotle, through
tragedy. He said: People should listen to great historical
tragedies, because they can train their emotions and their
reactions, like in play, so that in real life, where normally
events happen very quickly, and you don't have time to think
about what you should do, or rehearse your reaction, in the great
tragic play, you can train for real life, by training your
emotions. And he said, that basically, there is only one emotion
which is really interesting, and that is, compassion.
Now, he rejected Aristotle's idea that it was fright and
fear, and compassion, but he said that all of these things,
fright, admiration, are only steps on one ladder, where
compassion is in the middle. For example, if you don't have
enough compassion, you are fearful; if somebody is too heroic,
you don't have compassion, you admire such a person, but they're
all different degrees on the same spectrum of emotion, and
compassion is in the middle.
Now, Lessing basically said, that the aim of the great
tragedy is to teach compassion for all unhappy people of all
time. Now, the reason why I find that this idea of compassion,
of being able to suffer with your fellow human beings, to take
the suffering of mankind into your heart, is really the best
medicine against the indifference and the autism, which comes
with the videogame and virtual reality. Because, a videogame
player who goes through the Doom scenario or the CounterStrike
scenario--or I got an email the other day, where somebody sent me
a link to an even more horrible videogame, which was called
something like "Shooting in the Russian Army," where you could
see actual people being killed all the time, and they were just
with a knife, or a machine gun, and so forth. And I said,
"Somebody who is playing such a game, must be the most
dehumanized person!" So, obviously, the best medicine against
that is compassion. You do not kill people without feeling
anything about it! But you have compassion that you really want
to sacrifice your life, to prevent that somebody is done harm to.
Now, Lessing says, the most compassionate man is the best
man. And I really agree with that fully, because you have many
people today, when you point out to them that Africa is written
off by the international financial oligarchy, and the entire
continent is about to die, and then people say, "I don't go
there. I don't bother. Don't bother me. I don't want to know."
And all of this is really that people have completely lost the
virtue of compassion.
Now, there is a second thing about videogames which is I
think worth looking at, and that is that it's only autistic
indifference and hatred, but the second thing is really that
they're all so extremely ugly. The imagery is ugly, the whole
virtual world is normally--if you look at the cartoons, they're
all ugly to a degree which is really breathtaking.
Now, if you want to build a republic, then ugliness is
something you really have to get rid of, because the empire uses
ugliness because the Roman Empire already, through its bread and
circuses, and through its gladiator games, was a master at
evoking the lowest emotions in people. But if you want to build
a republic, then beauty is absolutely crucial. Now let me read
to you a quote from Friedrich Schiller, from the {Aesthetical
Letters}. Now, the {Aesthetical Letters} are very, very
important writings, which has great relevance for today, even if
Schiller wrote it when the French Revolution collapsed, because
of the Jacobin Terror, and Schiller who was one of the many
humanists in Europe at that point, who had hoped that the
American Revolution could be replicated, first in France with the
French Revolution and then in other countries, he was completely
dissatisfied and disappointed, and he said, "a great historical
moment has found a little people." And then he wrote these
{Aesthetical Letters} as the way to have an aesthetical education
of man, to make sure that the next great historical moment would
not find a small people.
So, in the Fourth Letter, he says: Every individual human
being carries, according to his potential and vocation, a pure
and ideal human being in him. And it is the big task of his
existence to bring himself into cohesion with its unchanging
unity all its changes and developments." Now, that is a powerful
idea, because he says, the aim of his life, the big task of his
existence, is to become this ideal man in helping to realize the
ideal state. Now, I think this is a very important idea, because
many people say, "Why are we here in the first place? What is
the purpose of life?" and here, Schiller gives you a very
definite answer. And then, he continues, by saying: In order to
develop the perfect state, and the perfect individual in it, you
have to have a harmonic development of the individual, you have
to have the ennoblement of the character, and for that, beautiful
art is the most important medium. So, he said, "Beauty is
irreplaceable for the perfection of man, and all culture proceeds
from a clear notion of what beauty is."
Now, Schiller, together with Goethe, and Koerner, and von
Humboldt, was working his entire life to develop aesthetical laws
which would have the same universal quality as universal
scientific principles. And in one other writing, called
{Kallias, or On the Beautiful}, he defines beauty as, quote,
"freedom in the appearance." By basically saying, that in order
to recognize the efficacy of natural laws, beauty has to exist
freely in cohesion with these laws. For example, Schiller
totally rejected Kant and his categorical imperative, by saying
it's too hard, and if you permanently have to suppress your
emotion to do your duty, this is really not acceptable for a man
who loves freedom so much, that if you watch the procedure with
which you have to be dutiful by suppressing your own emotion,
this is disgusting, and Kant has just written for the slaves, and
not for the beautiful souls.
So, Schiller then says, in another called, {On Grace and
Dignity}, he says: "The beautiful soul is called such if the
sense of morality is so certain about all the emotions of man,
that it can allow the passion to guide its will without worry,
because there is never a danger that there will be a
contradiction with its decisions. Therefore, a beautiful soul is
not the individual acts that are moral, but the whole character
is so. A beautiful soul has no other merit than that she is."
Now, this is really one of my most cherished ideas, which I
believe in and have held for sacred since I was a girl in school.
And this idea that man should become a beautiful soul, and that
you should develop your morality and your emotions such that you
can blindly follow them, because they will never give you advice
other than what you need to do, I think this is very important
concept.
So therefore, Schiller said: "The most urgent requirement of
the time, therefore, is the conscious education of one's own
sensitivity," and "sensitivity" here, the German word is
{Empfindungsvermoegen}. It's not what people nowadays call
"being sensitive" in the banal sense of the word, but what it
means for Schiller is the emotional capability to {totally}
absorb reality, compassionate--you know, make the whole world
your own, absorb it into your mind, and take the passion to take
the suffering of the world, make the suffering of all human
beings your own, and have {agape} towards mankind.
So, Schiller says, then, further: "Love, alone, is a free
emotion, because its pure foundation spring out of the place
where freedom itself is located, out of our divine nature. It is
not the petty and the low which compare itself with the high and
the great. It is not the senses, which dizzily look up to the
law of reason. It is the absolute greatness itself, which
imitates itself in love and beauty, and which finds itself
satisfied in morality. It is the Lawgiver Himself, the God in
us, Who plays with His own image in the world of the senses."

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