If
they do not make that progress, it is impossible for them to speak in
any way of aesthetic facts. They must return, as regards such facts, to
that indifference and to that silence from which they had emerged when
they affirmed the existence of these facts and began to consider them in
their variety. The same may be said of all other unilateral doctrines.
They are all reduced to the alternative of advancing or of going back,
and in so far as they do not wish to do either, they live amid
contradictions and in anguish. But they do free themselves from these,
more or less slowly, and thus are compelled to advance, more or less
slowly. And here we discover why it is so difficult, and indeed
impossible, exactly to identify thinkers, philosophers, and writers with
one or the other of the doctrines which we have enunciated, because each
one of them rebels when he finds himself limited to one of those
categories, and it seems to him that he is shut up in prison. It is
precisely because those thinkers try to shut themselves up in a
unilateral doctrine, that they do not succeed, and that they take a
step, now in one direction, now in another, and are conscious of being
now on this side, now on the other, of the criticisms which are
addressed to them. But the critics fulfil their duty by putting them in
prison, thus throwing into relief the absurdity into which they are led
by their irresolution, or their resolution not to resolve.
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