Brodsky

Brodsky （https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1987/brodsky/lecture/）

跳出来看，整篇对tyranny of the intelligentsia的追捧啊。。aesthetics over history的部分，赞同，但是隐隐的自我歌颂调调，不得不让人警惕。

追求审美决定道德的人，是最隐蔽的犬儒，他们最孤独。

我大概能理解郭说的”审美爱国主义最高尚“的意思了。审美主义的自由，和卢梭说的道德状态的自由，“真正成为自己主人”（p25）的自由，好像是一致的——姑且去理解成一种美学的自由吧。

snippets：

'If art teaches anything (to the artist, in the first place), it is the privateness of the human condition.

A man of my occupation seldom claims a systematic mode of thinking; at worst, he claims to have a system – but even that, in his case, is borrowing from a milieu, from a social order, or from the pursuit of philosophy at a tender age. Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal – however permanent it may be – than the creative process itself, the process of composition.

To say the least, as long as the state permits itself to interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A political system, a form of social organization, as any system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense that aspires to impose itself upon the present (case law?) (and often on the future as well); and a man whose profession is language is the last one who can afford to forget this.

The philosophy of the state, its ethics – not to mention its aesthetics – are always “yesterday”.

On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man’s ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother of ethics; The categories of “good” and “bad” are, first and foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding the categories of “good” and “evil”. If in ethics not “all is permitted”, it is precisely because not “all is permitted” in aesthetics, because the number of colors in the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not a moral one. (very greek. but what about Hannibal? what about Quentin? Cravaggio?)

The more substantial an individual’s aesthetic experience is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the freer – though not necessarily the happier – he is.‘