The life with Spiritual Being !

This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. It is something that appears to the soul and demands the soul’s creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being: if he commits it and speaks with his being the essential word to the form that appears, then the creative power is released and the work comes into being. The deed involves a sacrifice and a risk.

The sacrifice:

Infinite possibility is surrendered on the altar of the form; all that a moment ago floated playfully through one’s perspective has to be exterminated; none of it may penetrate into the work; the exclusiveness of such confrontation demands this.

The risk:

The essential word can only be spoken with one’s whole being; whoever commits himself may not hold back part of himself; and the work does not permit me to seek relaxation in the It-world; it is imperious: if I do not serve it properly, it breaks, or it breaks me. The form that confronts me I cannot experience nor describe; I can only actualise it. And yet I see it, radiant in the splendour of the confrontation, far more clearly than all clarity of the experienced world. It is present to me; tested for its objectivity, the form is not there at all; but what can equal its presence? It is an actual relation; it acts on me as I act on it.

The relation to the You is unmediated. Nothing conceptual intervenes between I and You, no prior knowledge and no imagination; and memory itself is changed as it plunges from particularity into wholeness. No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated, encounters occur. Before the immediacy of the relationship, everything that mediate becomes negligible. For the real boundary, albeit one that floats and fluctuates, runs not between experience and non-experience, not between the given and the not–given, nor between the world of being and the world of value, but across all the regions between You and It: between presence and object.

The present exists only insofar as presentness, encounter, and relation exist. Only as the You becomes present does presence come into being. The I of the basic word I-It has only a past and no present. He has nothing but objects; but objects consist in having been. Presence is not what passes but what confronts us, waiting and enduring. And the object is not duration but standing still, ceasing, breaking off, becoming rigid, standing out, the lack of relation, the lack of presence. What is essential is lived in the present, objects in the past.

The essential act that establishes directness is usually understood as a feeling. Feelings accompany the metaphysical and metapsychical fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different Feelings dwell in man, but man dwells in his love. Love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its object; it is between I and You. Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in the feeling-the equality of all lovers, to love man. Relation is reciprocity. My “You” acts on me as “I” act on it.