The Beauty of the Cultures of the World: A Dialogue Among Civilizations

[Print version of this article]

The following are edited excerpts from the concluding panel of the Schiller Institute’s Dec. 7-8 conference, “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men, Become Brethren!” The panel took up the question of culture, and served as a rich and powerful conclusion to the two-day conference.

For space reasons, only selections from the panel can be included here. Several other presentations were also given, many which included music and other elements not suited for text. These can be viewed in full in the original video here.

Harley Schlanger: Welcome, everyone, to the fourth panel of the Schiller Institute conference, “In the Spirit of Schiller and Beethoven: All Men, Become Brethren!” I’m Harley Schlanger, and I’ll be the moderator of this panel, which is titled: “The Beauty of the Cultures of the World: A Dialogue among Civilizations.” We begin with comments from Lyndon LaRouche from Sept. 4, 1994: “What Makes Human Beings Unique.”

Lyndon LaRouche: People talk about a lot of things and they evade the issue. The issue is, the term imago Dei means nothing other, nothing different than, nothing substituted for, that power of creative discovery which is typified by fundamental scientific discoveries, by discoveries of a type which cannot be represented by any syllogism, which cannot be represented by any formal logic, ideas which no Aristotelian could possibly ever understand. No Aristotelian has a soul or knows God—if they’re consistent Aristotelians—because that method makes it impossible. And if you read the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, you see what that leads to: Every abomination imaginable is possible, if you do not have a conception of man as distinct from the beast, as in the image of God. And that which is in the image of God is the power to create, in a way which no formalist, no formal mathematician of the generally accepted classical type, could possibly ever begin to understand!

And therefore, do not try to reach cheap agreement with people on the image of God. “Well, I know what the image of God is, I’m in the image of God”—they don’t know what it is! And don’t accept it from them. They don’t know! You only know it, if you know what creativity is, as I’ve described it.

Now, if you know what creativity is, and understand that’s the nature of man, that’s the power of man to change man’s behavior, [and] is the source of man’s power over the universe. Many people try to influence politics or influence events in other ways, except by creativity—and they will always fail! Because there’s only one power, or change, which is efficient in this planet, and that is the power of creative discovery by the mind of a single individual, a power which is exemplified to any child by great Classical poetry, by great Classical music, by great Classical drama, by great Classical painting, and by the kind of discoveries of which I’ve been privileged to make a few in science. And it was because I understood that, because I had that experience which unfortunately is rare today, of having made, successfully, a fundamental scientific discovery in defiance, in successful defiance, of generally accepted classical mathematics, that I knew as an individual, given the opportunity, we could change history with what became known as the announcement of the SDI. Not the implementation of the SDI, but the announcement of it, which is what changed history.

The reason I bring this in here, in answer to these questions: If one understands that, one understands what I mean when I say, that we have the ability to intervene, now, in the course of events immediately before us, to do what has never been done in history before: to effect an immediate and direct transition from the collapse of a 500-year-old system, a global system, and without virtually missing a step, to make the transition to a complete new system: To build the bridge from Hell to Purgatory, as if in a single day—we can do it!

Schlanger: On May 15, 2024, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a bar in Kiev, gave a performance of “Rockin’ in the Free World” [plays video recording]. Be thankful I didn’t include his favorite, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” recorded with his band with the subtle name, “The Coalition of the Willing!” Discordant sounds, out of tune, coherent with his mission to Kiev to announce the delivery of still more U.S. taxpayers’ dollars to prolong a lost cause. His choice of music was as offensive as his words, bewailing the suffering of Ukraine’s citizens, while delivering the funds to extend that suffering indefinitely, in another of the collective West’s “endless wars.”

In a November 7th address to the Valdai Club in Sochi, Russian President Vladimir Putin sounded a very different theme, speaking of the intent to build peace based on collaboration for development, through the BRICS process:

It is my deep conviction that the only new international system possible is one embracing polyphony, where many tones and many musical themes are sounded together to form harmony. If you like, we are moving towards a world system that is going to be polyphonic rather than polycentric, one in which all voices are heard and, most importantly, absolutely must be heard. Those who are used to soloing and want to keep it that way will have to get used to the new ‘scores.’

In this panel, we will be taking up an overlooked feature of statecraft, namely the cultural component, and what it means to engage in a polyphonic dialogue which includes all nations. It is very easy to point to the corruption, the greed, and the murderous immorality of the imperial establishment as a cause for the “endless wars.” But why do the citizens tolerate it? We inhabit a culture shaped by ugliness, in which the pursuit of brutal vengeance which drives the indiscriminate slaughter of innocents in Gaza is considered a legitimate act of self-defense! What is in the mind of those perpetrating such actions, and those—like Blinken—who defend them, that they think so little about the potential of the children they have incinerated, and buried in rubble?

In this unfolding civilizational tragedy, contrast that arrogant view, typical of the delusions of the Gods of Olympus skewered by Greek tragedians, with the image of man embodied in the tenth principle of Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s “Ten Principles of a New Security and Development Architecture.” Helga wrote:

The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.

A new world economic order is emerging.... The European nations and the U.S. must not fight this effort, but by joining hands with the developing countries, cooperate to shape the next epoch of the development of the human species to become a renaissance of the highest and most noble expressions of creativity!

We will demonstrate, in this panel, that this conception of the inherent goodness of man requires what Lyndon LaRouche described as mastery, in musical composition and performance, of the Socratic method illustrated by Plato’s dialogues.

To open our panel, I am delighted to introduce Diane Sare, who wears many hats—President of The LaRouche Organization, Director of the Schiller Institute Chorus of Greater New York, and twice a candidate for U.S. Senate for New York, providing a voice for sanity for the nation. Diane will speak on the topic, “Why Is Culture So Important.”

Why Is Culture So Important

by Diane Sare

The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was a point of transition. The American use of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was another. Both were shocking and horrible. Each event was not an “event” but the result of a dynamic of decisions; decisions shaped by underlying assumptions about man and nature, colored by the desire to achieve an intended result. It is undeniable that the world was instantly changed in an irreversible way after those actions. These were each actions which could not be undone. However, the unfolding of what comes after is something which can still be changed, and I believe this is the subject of this panel.

Why is culture important? Because it is the water in which we swim, it is the invisible ether which we breathe, and far too many people merely “go with the flow” without considering the assumptions about man and nature which shape our actions and decisions—most of which are unconscious. This is why George Washington, in his Farewell Address, warned that in a Republic, such as the one he had fought to create, the United States of America, where the citizens would have liberty to chart their own destiny, the questions of religion and education would be crucial.

The rulers of the Roman Empire, and the Anglo-Dutch oligarchs also understood this very well, and they ran what you could call “cultural warfare” in which they strove to debase the image of man—to portray man as a beast to be ruled through force and violence and threats of violence, as we see the desperate owners of the bankrupt trans-Atlantic system trying to do. Like Thrasymachus, they have convinced themselves that might makes right, and that physical strength to impose mass suffering or terror equals power. They understand nothing about the universe, and therefore they always lose. As all true artists understand, it is man’s nature to be free, not in an arbitrary way, like a spoiled child, but in an educated way of humility, recognizing always that we don’t know, but if we seek to understand and to abide by the principles of creation—since our universe is one of growth, not decline—if we seek to perfect our understanding in that way, and conduct ourselves in harmony with universal principles with ever increasing and improving understanding, we will prosper, and the universe itself will become richer and better because of our existence.

Let’s listen to Lyndon LaRouche on this question [plays video]:

LaRouche: And therefore, we have to have ground rules for nation-states. Our basic point is nation-states, because nation-states involve the concept of culture.

Now, the power of creativity—which does not exist in monkeys, but should exist in people, even among some politicians—the power of creativity is unique to mankind. All processes on this planet and beyond, are creative. Inanimate nature is creative.

Look what happened: You had a Sun; The Sun is sitting out there, it’s all by itself. It’s spinning around rapidly, not knowing where to go, in this neck of our galaxy. You got that little Sun. And the Sun spun off some things. It created. It just spun out there, and it began creating the Periodic Table [of elements]; the complete Periodic Table, which keeps growing and developing all the time, through isotopes, some of which are generated by the aid of life, living processes. And so, suddenly, the Sun suddenly became a whole solar system. And all these kinds of developments occurred.

So, the Sun itself is creative; the universe is creative, inherently. Animal life is creative. But none of them can think; none of them have the ability for voluntary transformation of the universe. Only human beings have the mentality for the voluntary creation of new states of organization in the universe. And we need more people who are creative. We need to get rid of this uncreative nonsense, which was introduced in the postwar [World War II—ed.] period.

We have to develop populations; therefore, we have to realize that when you’re dealing with a language culture, which is a very complex thing—it involves not just the language, but a whole lot of other things. If you’re dealing with a language culture, you have a certain depth of a faculty called irony, which exists in every language culture. Which is generally expressed in the music and the poetry, the art and so forth of that culture. And therefore, when you touch that aspect, which is deeply imbedded in national culture, you are getting close to where the creative powers of the individual lie.

So, what our objective must be in a nation-state, is based on the idea of nation-state culture. You must bring into play the creative potential of a people through its culture. Therefore, you want them to represent themselves in terms of the fulfillment and enrichment of their own culture.

…because we’re going to have to create another thing. We’re going to go to Mars! Not this week, but we’ve got to get there. I won’t be there. I will be there in spirit, and you never know what I’ll be able to do as a spirit. I’ll do the best I can.

So, therefore, mankind has a destiny.

Sare: Mars? How can we talk about Mars? You may say, “Look I’m just worried about not being incinerated right now!” And you are correct to be worried about that. We have some really crazy people—like Tony Blinken, who is a rock musician, which is not irrelevant. What’s the mindset of someone who struts around saying, “I’m the hoochie coochie man”? He is a moron and a pervert—a question of culture, or is it a lack of culture?

But we can’t just think about momentary survival, or our own little short lives; and we have so many people dying right now! We have to consider that they have not died in vain; that we are going to take it as a matter of personal responsibility that the seven-day-old baby, buried under the rubble in Gaza, has not died in vain. Nor has the 57-year old Ukrainian man who was kidnapped and forced to the front lines in a futile war against Russia where he lived for four hours. Each of these people—like the American servicemen who died on this day in 1941, and the Japanese grandmothers who died in August of 1945—had a sovereign spirit, had independent thoughts, and were necessary in some way that they may not have understood. Their lives have been part of mankind, and it is for us to develop mankind to become a better species, where each child born can be confident that he or she will be allowed to contribute something to the immortality of the human species.

What’s involved in going to Mars? How do we get there? What will we breathe? What will we eat? What will our cities look like? Wouldn’t it be easier if we had a base on the Moon, where gravity is one-sixth that of Earth’s, from which to launch? We need a base on the Moon! Russia and China are already planning to build one! They are even planning to build a nuclear power plant on the moon to power it.

What are we doing in the United States? Well, we are spending enormous sums and deploying too many scientists to figure out if a man can become pregnant! We are abusing children! We have fools like Senator Lindsey Graham talking about how cheap and easy it is to use Ukrainians to kill Russians—and it’s good for our economy, he says. Now we have Americans killing Russians in Russia with long-range missiles, and Russians killing Americans who are deploying these things, in the position of “military specialists” in Ukraine. Does Lindsey Graham still think this is good?

We have in the Western world—you know, the “rules-based” democratic nations—a culture of violence. We call it a culture, but I would call it an anti-culture. It is a forced, well-funded and -propagandized effort to make us slaves and perpetrators of barbarism, and to bring about our own doom.

Think about this. Is it not natural to love a child? Why do we love children? Why do we delight when we watch a child make a discovery? Because a child represents the potential of perfection. It is nothing short of miraculous to watch the development of the mind of a child! And when we see a child singing beautifully, or playing the piano with natural expression, we are moved to tears.

How much effort has been expended to create a so-called “culture” or “anti-culture” which not only tolerates the deliberate murder and starvation of children, but which delights in making a child suffer? This is a society which is doomed. When you destroy children, you are destroying the future.

But this is also so hideously unnatural, that it sparks a revolt. We see it on the campuses; we see it in the streets. We see literally billions of people on the planet rejecting this paradigm and collaborating to create a new paradigm which recognizes the inherent dignity of each human being, and the sovereignty of each human being, and each nation as a protector of that principle.

But it is not enough merely to revolt, as we should have learned from the French Revolution. We need a common purpose, which is in keeping with the self-perfection and ongoing creation of our universe, which the recently launched Webb telescope confirms. We are alive in the midst of a growing, expanding, self-developing universe, and if we seek to unlock its secrets, we will grow and prosper. If we try to go against this incredibly vast harmonic development of our universe by making arbitrary rules and imposing unnatural so-called cultural norms which violate the innate free spirit of man, we will meet our doom.

The challenges ahead of us are so great, that we must shed the arrogance that our way is the only way of doing things. We must have the humility to recognize that a person who comes from a totally different perspective may bring something that we hadn’t considered before, which resolves the paradox confronting us and lifts us to a new level of understanding.

We should not be like the six blind men, relying solely on our sense of touch, trying to make sense of the various parts of the elephant. It may be that the man who doesn’t touch the elephant at all, but instead uses his nose, can solve the mystery.

So, let’s figure out how to get to Mars. Thank you.

On the 40th Anniversary of the Schiller Institute: Why We Must Create Beautiful Souls

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Looking back at the four decades of our work in the Schiller Institute—and I would invite people to go to our archives and look at the origins themselves—it is quite notable that we were indeed quite prophetic in defining the issues which would be the relevant ones today. We said that we absolutely have to replace the foreign policy of that time—which was basically unfriendly relations, subversion, coups, various kinds of negative forums—we have to replace that with statecraft; meaning, to advance the best in the other state in the hope that, vice versa, this would be the attitude towards us. So, it was very clear that the world was in urgent need of a more just, new world economic order, but that that would only function if it were combined with a renaissance of the best traditions of all cultures.

Now, that was a very ambitious idea, but I think if you look at the evolution that has occurred in the period since then, the idea that you need a renaissance of the best traditions has become a very prevalent idea. I participated in 2018 in Beijing in a dialogue of Asian civilizations. I was one of the very few non-Asians there, and I must say it was an absolutely astounding experience to see people from not only China, but India, Korea, Thailand, Afghanistan, various other places, who all would talk about the great traditions of their own civilizations which in part go back to 5,000 years ago. They would proudly emphasize what was the most advanced in this millennia-old tradition; and now they would use that to anchor the identity of their populations in this tradition to have a very positive idea about the future. This was referring to the old Vedic period in India, or the Bactria period of what is today Afghanistan, the Persian traditions, and so forth.

Now, why are Europe and the United States not part of this discussion? I think the nail was hit on the head by Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov a couple of years ago in his annual New Year’s address, when he said that the problem was that the West had moved away from its traditional values, those values which were handed down from generation to generation from the grandfathers to the parents. [Lavrov said] that we had adopted a post-Christian value set; and that that was the main problem why the communication between the Asian countries and Europe and the United States has practically broken down.

Why is it that people today in the West are so oblivious to the danger of nuclear war? In the beginning of the 1980s, when we had the intermediate-range-missile crisis, there were hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, because they were worried about World War III. And now, when we absolutely are closer [to nuclear war] than at any time in history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, very few people are even concerned about it. The majority of people entertain their pleasure, their vacation, their various hobbies; but they are not concerned about what could happen to all of civilization.

Now, does it have something to do with the video of U.S. Secretary of State Blinken [playing in a rock band in Kiev]? I would say absolutely yes, because, what has happened is that, as Lavrov said, we moved away from our traditions and into post-Christian values. Well, what was the best tradition we had in the United States? It was the American Revolution; it was the first war of independence against the British Empire—an anti-colonial war. Today, the British have taken over; you have an effort to maintain a unipolar world, which is no longer there, based on the Anglo-American special relationship, where the United States has accepted to be in unity with the British Empire and to use that as a model to try to be the hegemon in the world.

Germany once had a very advanced civilization or culture. The German Classical period, which includes everything in music from Bach to Handel to Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, even some of Hugo Wolf. What happened to that? Germany has taken a completely different road; there are only a few people who are still interested in Classical music, relatively speaking, as compared to the size of the population; it’s a tiny minority.

The Attack of the Romantics

This started almost 200 years ago with the attack of the Romantics on the Classical period. They attacked at the height of the Classical period, which in literature had reached a point between Goethe and Schiller, who revived the idea of the good, the truthful, and the beautiful. The Romantics tried to dismantle this, saying that the Classical form is no good; that you have to replace the beautiful with the interesting, and the interesting of today is boring tomorrow, so you have to replace it with more interesting things. And obviously the taste goes down, the culture becomes more degenerate, down to the present level where everything is allowed.

Heinrich Heine wrote a very important book which you should read if you want to deepen your insight into this period, which is called The Romantic School, in which he joined with Goethe in his view that the Romantics were insane because they had lost all touch with reality. If you look at the novels of somebody like E.T.A. Hoffmann, who literally went to the Charenton insane asylum in France at the time, to study cases for his novels. And you can tell by what came out as a literary product. What this did is, it opened the way, step-by-step, to a more degenerate culture. I’m not saying it started in the recent period; you have to really go back a long way. Heinrich Heine’s insight into the cause of the insanity, written in a very funny and polemical way, is extremely useful.

But how is this relevant for today? In Germany, despite the horrors of the 12 years of National Socialism, they had not been able to completely eradicate the tradition of Classical music, of Classical poetry. The Nazis even became quite afraid of, for example, Wilhelm Tell from Schiller, because they thought that this could be taken as a guideline to get rid of Hitler. But when the war ended in 1945 and all of Germany lay in a horrible rubble field, there was an incredible moment when people were searching their souls, saying, “What can we do so this never happens again?” There was for a short period of time a revival of a debate about natural law. You had [Heinrich] Schlusnus giving concerts basically in bombed-out factories. There was a short period when it would have been possible to reconnect Germany to its Classical tradition.

Then what happened was that the occupying powers—especially the Americans, and for sure the British—decided that the key thing was to separate the Germans from their culture as a matter of control, and force them, step by step, to adopt the Anglosphere’s cultural paradigm. In education that meant getting rid of Humboldt and replacing it with Dewey; replacing natural law with the case law of the American legal system. And in culture it meant making Classical music just one of many [options], and making sure no concert happens without modern music, 12-tone music, or atonal music. For this purpose, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was developed, which was a gigantic effort of cultural manipulation in the postwar period. They controlled every concert, every performance. Even excellent musicians who had nothing to do with that were part of it, because there was simply no other possibility to perform. At the height of this global operation, which also had operations in Africa and Asia, they controlled 120 cultural magazines. This was only interrupted a little bit in 1967 when the scandal blew up that the entire Congress for Cultural Freedom was a CIA operation; which obviously had a lot to do with Truman taking over after [President Franklin] Roosevelt had died.

I can only suggest you go into the libraries and look at the documents. You will be absolutely shocked also that that is not much a topic of discussion today, because a lot of modern art is the result of this operation. And obviously a lot of this art is extremely ugly, and Schiller had maintained that art has to be beautiful or it should not be called art. That was the first wave, the CCF.

Then came the next wave, which was the OECD [Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development] in 1963 or so, under the leadership of Dr. Alexander King, who also later played an evil role in the Club of Rome and the thesis of The Limits to Growth. They started to have an educational reform with the explicit aim to get rid of Humboldt, who said that the goal of education is the beauty of the character, and that there are certain subjects which are more suitable to building such a beautiful character than others. The command of high language, as expressed in the best poetic traditions, universal history, sciences, and so forth. They said, “Let’s throw out the entire baggage of 2,500 years of knowledge; Plato—all of this should go.” They did it; they eliminated all of these things from the education curriculum. Lyndon LaRouche said famously several times that he, knowing the Germans, would think that those people who had gone to school before the education reform and those who went to school afterwards were like two entirely different species. I think that he was absolutely right.

LaRouche, to my knowledge, was also the only individual who recognized in the 1960s, with absolute precision, the evil influence of the rock-drug-sex counterculture—the hippies, the flower power—as being potentially the most corrosive thing which would destroy the cognitive potential of society. Again, look at the video of Blinken, and judge for yourself if LaRouche was right.

Many people thought at the time, “Oh, the hippies, that’s something nice. San Francisco, that’s all beautiful.” But what it does to the mind we’re seeing today in the youth culture: the suicide rates, the drug addiction, the general collapse of the cognitive powers as compared to, let’s say, many pupils in Asia.

This is why I decided to call the Schiller Institute the Schiller Institute; because Schiller has given us in his Aesthetical Letters and his other aesthetical writings the method for how to improve people, how to ennoble the character. After all, Schiller came to that conclusion after he was very disappointed about the collapse of the French Revolution. In the beginning, he had hoped that it would be a repetition of the American Revolution on European soil. But when the Jacobin terror took over, he was completely upset and horrified. He wrote these Aesthetical Letters with the idea that a great moment—the French Revolution—had found a little people; that the objective chance for change was there but that the moral possibility in the people was lacking to be able to realize it. So, he set out to develop a method so that the next time a great opportunity of history would come around, that people would be better equipped.

What Schiller did in these letters was to elaborate where the source of improvement comes from, when governments are degenerated and the masses are barbaric. Where does it come from? He gave what for some is a surprising answer— that it comes through great Classical art; because it is when the ordinary person—the baker, the hairdresser, the engineer, just a normal average person who doesn’t think about the large issues of mankind every day—is confronted with a great composition, a great drama, great poetry, or some other great piece of art, it elevates the person because it speaks to their reason. But it is also speaking to the emotions. So, it educates the emotions to be on the level of reason, and therefore is suitable to develop people to a higher level of their capability. Schiller said every human being potentially has an ideal person within him, and it is the great task of his existence to bring that potential into conformity with his ideal man.

So, the answer is, everybody has the chance to become a beautiful soul. A beautiful soul, according to Schiller, is a person who has educated his or her emotions to the level of reason so that he or she can blindly follow these emotions without ever being led in a wrong direction; a person who does his or her duty with passion, and for whom reason and love are the same thing. The person for whom that condition is fulfilled is a genius. So, according to Schiller, every person has the potential to become a genius if you put a lot of effort into it.

This idea has been destroyed, and replaced with the idea of “anything goes,” where the crazier the proposal the better, and the greater the chance it will make it in the tabloids, or to be celebrated as an influencer of some sort. That is why today we in the West are really in a deep cultural crisis.

But when the Cold War ended, and Francis Fukuyama hubristically declared this was the “end of history,” meaning that Western democracies would export their Western democratic model to all countries of the world and the whole world would accept that, and this would be the end of history—now, as we have seen in the 30-plus years since, that didn’t work out so well. The attempt to export our present culture of woke-ism, LGBTQ, 99-genders, to Africa, to Hungary, to Russia, to China; these countries are saying: “No thanks. We have our own traditions which are much more in line with what we think should be our identity.”

I think what we have to do in the West, is we have to really look at the rest of the world and recognize that we have lost our way. This exaggerated individualism, this idea that everything is allowed, that there is no limit in the perversion that you can pursue, has been devastating for our own culture and our own minds. It would be so easy to rediscover what was great about European culture, of which the United States is an extension. We have to go back to the Italian Renaissance, the École Polytechnique, the Andalusian Renaissance, the German Classical period. We have to revive these wonderful ideas, and make them again the basis for creating something new. Then, if we pursue a dialogue between the best traditions of European culture with the best traditions of all of these other nations and civilizations, we can get a new renaissance. I think if we do our job right, it can be the most important and beautiful renaissance in the history of mankind. Because man is capable of reason and we should undertake this task with energy.

Poetry Must Supersede Information in the Affairs of Men

by William Ferguson

Friedrich Schiller, the Poet of Freedom, begins his essay, “On the Sublime”:

“No man must must,” … The will is the species character of man, and Reason itself is only the eternal rule of the same. All nature acts according to Reason; his prerogative is merely that he act according to Reason with consciousness and will. All other things must; man is the being, who wills.

Man’s freedom is violated when he is subject to the external compulsion of slave master or tyrant. But is Man free, if his internal impulses are in conflict with Reason?

Schiller upheld the ideal of a “beautiful soul,” “one in whom reason and feeling, duty and passion, coalesce, he who does his duty with joy.” As he states in his Letters on the Aesthetical Education of Man: “it is Beauty, through which one proceeds to Freedom.” Or, as he expressed poetically in “The Artists”: “Only through the morning gate of Beauty do you penetrate into the land of knowledge.”

Just as the rational powers of the student must be educated, Schiller demonstrates that it is the joyful duty of the artist to educate the emotions of the audience, so that they delight in the beautiful, the harmonious, the truthful, so that they leave the theater as better people, and that they eventually come to delight only in the beautiful, harmonious and truthful. It is the artist’s duty to playfully guide them in becoming beautiful souls.

Thus are citizens elevated to the capacity of self-government, the only government that is worthy of the dignity of Man. But aesthetical education and self-government require—as does poetry—a common language for the deliberation and development of a people; hence the necessity of national sovereignty. As Joan of Arc says of the English invader in Schiller’s The Virgin of Orleans:

The stranger prince, who quits a foreign shore,

Whose fathers’ graves are not dug in this land,

How can he love it? He was never young

Among our youth; his tongue is strange to us;

Our accents wake no echo in his heart;

How can he be our father and our king?

Schiller’s works depict the love of and struggle for freedom of all mankind: The defense of national sovereignty in France, led by the divinely inspired Joan; the revolt of the United Netherlands against Spanish imperial rule in Don Carlos; and Wilhelm Tell, his drama of the rebellion of the Swiss against Hapsburg tyranny, wherein the Rütli Oath scene can be considered as a German translation of the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America:

No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power,

When the oppressed can find no justice, when

The burden grows unbearable—he reaches

With hopeful courage up unto the heavens

And seizes hither his eternal rights,

Which hang above, inalienable

And indestructible as stars themselves

In 1984, the Schiller Institute issued “The Declaration of the Inalienable Rights of Man,” a universalized restatement by Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the American Declaration of Independence, applying its principles to all of humanity. What else is the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” if not the right to develop one’s mind and one’s heart to its fullest potential, the right to participate in what Schiller called “the most perfect of all works of art, the construction of a true political freedom”? The right to become a beautiful soul?

As we strive now in hope for a future beyond this current punctum saliens, where we witness, three thousand-fold, as Schiller’s Stauffacher warns, that “...war spares not the tender infant in its cradle,” and threatens soon to spare none of us, let us turn again to our dear departed Lyndon LaRouche.

In “Kepler’s Discovery: Mathematics is Not Science,” LaRouche refers to his assertion of 1978, that “Poetry Must Begin To Supersede Mathematics in Physics.” The second chapter, “Poetry as Science,” concludes with a subsection, “In Defence of Beautiful Souls.” The subsection begins:

There are two works from Classical English poetry: one, [John] Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, and the other, [Percy] Shelley’s In Defence of Poetry, which have affected me most strongly since my adolescence. The first, for its achievement of the quality of a perfectly ironical, Classical poem; the latter, especially its concluding long paragraph, peering into the mirror of my soul.

In all valid science and true Classical artistic composition and its performance, the quality of message which sets the product of human creativity apart from the beastly creature’s emphasis on simple literal pointing, is what is called Classical irony….

As LaRouche ends the article he first quotes Percy Shelley:

The person in whom this power [to lead society to great advances in the human condition] resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul. It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of their age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves....

Here LaRouche concludes:

Sometimes, I think of the period of association of Goethe with Schiller; but, then, I think, at other times, of another side.

Here, in poetry, we sense the dynamic principle of all those discoveries which empower the individual to generate ideas of principle which move societies, and, the planets, too. Science moves planets. Classical artistic genius moves the individuals, who move the society, who will move the planets, then the stars, and then, perhaps, the galaxies, too.

In honor of the revolutionary and ever optimistic Lyndon LaRouche, let us move our societies, and our planet, in Hope.

[He finishes by reading the poem “Hope” by Friedrich Schiller. Ferguson read the poem in its original German with English subtitles, but we provide here only the subtitles.]

Hope

All people discuss it and dream on end

Of better days that are coming,

After a golden and prosperous end

They are seen chasing and running

The world grows old and grows young in turn,

Yet doth man for betterment hope eterne.

‘Tis hope delivers him into life,

Round the frolicsome boy doth it flutter,

The youth is lured by its magic rife,

It won’t be interred with the elder;

Though he ends in the coffin his weary lope,

Yet upon that coffin he plants—his hope.

It is no empty, fawning deceit,

Begot in the brain of a jester,

Proclaimed aloud in the heart it is:

We are born for that which is better!

And what the innermost voice conveys,

The hoping spirit ne’er that betrays.

Concluding Discussion

The following are excerpts from the concluding discussion of the panel.

The Power to Transform Mankind

Sare: I was thinking about how do we elevate this discussion of war and peace; also, art has the power— Participating in something beautiful has a way of opening you. We become vulnerable; we dare to take a risk and not have up [around ourselves] this hard wall which Helga mentioned. I guess it was Teddy Roosevelt who gave us this “rugged individualism.” When you’re immersed in something beautiful, you can shed some of that ugliness and that wall that Paul was talking about, and perhaps be open to hear something in a way different than you had heard it before.

I think it’s really urgent; especially with some of the horrors that we’re seeing. It’s not right to go away; it’s not right to say the suffering in Gaza is so ugly that I just can’t even think about it. We have to think about it, but we have to somehow have the strength to take that horror into ourselves and then find a way to take an action which alleviates that suffering; which transforms mankind; which upholds the faith of the beauty of mankind and the inherent goodness of mankind, even in this question of ugliness.

…I also just want to add something which I think we have to take up, because people often say, “Do we have to think about this all the time? Isn’t there a time to ‘relax’?” Usually what people mean when they say relax is, “Isn’t there a time when I can be degenerate? Isn’t there a time when I can have a thought that’s more bestial? Do I really have to contemplate? Why do you have to analyze these things?” The point of this education of our emotions is that it shouldn’t be a burden to want to strive for perfection of the universe. That is actually a natural condition of humanity. But because we are encumbered with our physical, mortal existence, it does take some effort to put ourselves in that realm of identity. I think, in a sense, this is kind of a universal challenge facing all of us.

What Do You Mean by Art?

The panelists, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche in particular, were asked the following question.

Question: You mentioned art should be beautiful, or it shouldn’t be called art. Are you saying only art that depicts mankind’s high points of joy and accomplishment should be classified as art? What about art depicting urban blight and decay? Or art depicting genocide in Gaza? Wouldn’t they be considered art as well?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, beautiful doesn’t mean banal. For example, Lessing has written very interesting treatises about the treatment of the ugly in art; and Schiller has written about that as well. What they basically maintain is that the ugly, if it is necessary to address, has to go through a sort of sublime transformation.

For example, Lessing writes about the famous sculpture, the Laocoön. This was a Greek sculpture where a man is in a fight with dragons and snakes together with his two sons. Obviously, this is a fighting scene and there is pain, but if you look at the face of the man screaming in pain, it is not just a gaping mouth as wide as he can, but it’s a sort of thought-through pain which still expresses pain completely, but it’s not let loose. And I think this is very important.

There is a famous debate between Aristotle’s rhetoric school and the aesthetic education which developed over the millennia, one can say. The polemic, especially by Lessing, and then, later, Schiller, is that the artist cannot just go on the stage and scream, “Pain! I’m in pain!” There is a very nice little critique by Schiller called “On Bürger’s Poems.” Bürger was a very popular poet of the time who always would have these melodramatic emotional descriptions of his love life and various other things. And Schiller said this is just terrible; these are populist, ugly things. But the key point was that, in contrast to Aristotle—who had the school of rhetoric where you have to just learn how to say things eloquently, disregarding the content—the Platonic tradition of art demanded that an actor, for example, before they go on the stage, they have to intellectually master what is the implication of this emotion. Then, if they want to present it for some artistic effect, they have to bring the reflection of that intellectual process to the audience. So, it’s no longer the barbarian who screams and rips out his hair, but it has to have the Classical form to be art.

I think that is something which has been completely lost, and if you look at pop music for example, there is nothing of that. It is just plain sexual fantasies, working it all out in the open. The Classical idea is that you have to have some form, which also has an elevation. I think that that is extremely important. I would suggest that you read the letter exchange between Schiller and Körner—who is one of the best friends of Friedrich Schiller—where they discuss this question of beauty at length. Schiller comes to the conclusion that if the art is not uplifting, it is not art….

This is an important issue, because even the horrors in Gaza can be portrayed in a beautiful way. I’ll give you an example: There was a little video made by a group in Türkiye which we showed at one of our IPC meetings, which is an incredibly moving thing. Rather than showing the horrors of the dying children and men and women in Gaza, it has a scene where—in galleries around the world—people are looking at the way this genocide is being portrayed by artists in the year 2040. You have these powerful pictures of people who were killed, and then the children [viewing the pictures] ask their parents and grandparents, “Where were you? What did you do?” That makes it so much more powerful than if you just show the actual horror. The reality is not uplifting, but if you think about the historical process—since this is obviously a reference to what happened in Germany when a lot of children and young people were asking their parents and grandparents in the 1950s and ’60s, “Where were you when this horror happened?” This is obviously a poetical working-through of that conception which elevates it, and makes people aware of the fact that they are just one element in a long chain of generations of humanity, and there is no escape. You will be judged for your deeds—even if you get away from punishment today, history will judge you. And that is a metaphor which is much stronger than the actual portrayal of the horror.

Sare: I just wanted to add to this the question of the spiritual. Because one could say, “Wasn’t slavery horrible and brutal and filled with hideous, ugly violence?” And similarly, what could be more hideous than thinking of the crucifixion of Christ? If you think of the spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” it’s clear that art again lifts you to the universal—to what is immortal about humanity in overcoming this incredible adversity.

It just struck me of interest that it creates exactly the same question that she was just saying about the Turkish film, which you definitely would not get, or that tension which impels us to action, if you simply dwelt on making everyone experience the brutality of it.

Sigerson: I’d just like to say one more thing about this question that Helga was asked about in terms of beauty. I would recommend that you can also have beauty not just in poetry, but in a novel that’s written poetically. I would highly recommend the Italian novel, I Promessi Sposi, by Alessandro Manzoni; the translation in English is The Betrothed. It portrays a tremendous ugliness of character, but it ends in what you call redemption—or actually, atonement might be the best word. I think that it’s the novel that inspired Giuseppe Verdi to write his famous Requiem in Manzoni’s honor, because he was so highly cherished for this beautiful novel.

So, I think that, in general, when you’re listening to a piece of music or a piece of poetry, or somebody else doing it, you have to step back and ask yourself: What is the person’s, or the conductor’s, or orchestra’s, or whatever performer’s intention in doing this? Why are they doing this? What is their idea? Is there an idea, is there an intention behind what they’re saying? Is it to just entertain, to pass the time away? Or, is it an intention to do the kinds of things that Schiller discusses in his Aesthetic Letters—which is to uplift the audience? If your intention is not that, it’s not great art. I don’t care how pretty it is and how perfectly done it is—it’s not art. Art has to have that intention towards beauty and towards uplifting the audience and the person who is either performing it or listening to it.

To me, that’s the measure of anything; and that bridges all times and all spaces. There’s no particular era and so forth. But that defines what I would call a Classical mindset; or somebody might call it a Christian humanist mindset or a Confucian mindset. It’s that intention. And that can be with anything.