"This insulation of kitsch from experience," Kimball writes, "helps to explain its peculiar abstract quality: Kitsch is always ready to sacrifice the particular for the general, the specific for the universal, the concrete for the abstract."...
"Instead of attempting to communicate individual beautiful, true, evil, human phenomena, kitsch strives to incarnate beauty, truth, evil, and humanity without loss. Art is more modest. It sees the universal in the particular, true, but it does not thereby dispense with the particular; its gaze remains focused on the particular because it realizes and accepts that, for man, the world speaks not abstractly or all at once but piecemeal, in fragments, through this tree, this landscape, this face, this web of relationships in which I find myself."
It's way easier to confess to the generic sin than the particular. The memory of a particular instance of (e.g.) rudeness still has the power to humiliate me in a way that no general admission that "I was rude to some people" can.
We don't live among Forms, but specific instances. Love is generic, yes, but it exists--is incarnated--in a particular smile, in setting out the needed item before the loved one needs it, the unseen works as well as the surprise cakes.
Likewise with the sins. Generic "Sin" afflicts us all, particular forms beset us differently, but what curses us most are the instances of it we put in our lives. Instances we don't like to think about; abstractions are easier.
Instances are life; abstractions are disembodied. Maybe angels have some kind of life of archetypes; not us.
2 comments:
I think Sins don't have forms, at least as I understand it.
So, the traditional Platonist / Neoplatonist way of talking about this is that the Forms are more real than the instances, because they are closer to the One and are the 'ideas in the mind of God' (as we might phrase it) of which the instances are just spinoffs.
Catholic theology treats sin in general as a privation from the Form that God intended. They should only exist here, where the perfect Form that is God's idea can't exist and imperfections creep in. So angels shouldn't encounter Forms of sins; in fact they shouldn't encounter sins at all in that realm, because they live among the Forms in their perfection. It is only if they come here that encountering sin should even be possible.
We tend to think of Forms as being equivalent to universals, which is what I think you're doing here, but universal quantification is only a logical concept. To say 'every instance of rudeness participates in Selfishness (or Pride, or however you want to characterize that)' could be true logically; but there shouldn't be a Form of (false) Pride in the mind of God. It's an error that creeps in at the spun-out level where we live.
"Form" in that classical sense isn't exactly what I'm thinking about with sin. I was thinking about what Paul might have meant by "sin coming to life" with the advent of Law. If we think of sin as privation, then instead of a type of sin having a positive Form, a type of sin is a "Shadow" of the Form. With different kinds of life, the rebelliousness of "Sin" would take different shapes characteristic of the type of life meant to be led. It's a bit tough to imagine existences for which the 10 commandments would need supplements, but possible.
WRT angels and sin; I don't know what the angelic environment is like, or even if there are different categories of angels that we lump together, only distinguishing the fallen and the unfallen.
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