May 2 lecture blog

“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical – and, of course, not only technical – reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. For example, in photography, process reproduction can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet accessible to the lens, which is adjustable and chooses its angle at will. And photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes, such as enlargement or slow motion, can capture images which escape natural vision. Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room.

     I get that when you copied something, you didn't get the real thing.  Because for something to be seen or heard by a third party supplier of evidence, you could not get the nature of something.  But because time goes by and history fades with generations that die, recordings in the masses can be used technologically to the point out things we couldn't detect with our own eyes.  Hence there is progress.  Original pertains to the time it was recorded.  The present pertains  to how it was done and what it meant to us historically, socially, and technologically. It seems that original meant a sense authenticity, which was valued then. It give us a chance to look back.

April 25 Lecture.. Bridging Culture with politics

In war, when shells fly past our bodies at high speeds, we sense clearly that no level of intelligence, virtue, or fortitude is strong enough to deflect them, not even by a hair. To the extent this threat increases, doubt concerning the validity of our values forces itself upon us.

but it has also produced a long series of practical measures typical for the human spirit of the past century, such as–to name just a few–the abolition of torture and the slave trade, the discovery of electricity, vaccination against measles,

Born in full enjoyment of all these blessings now taken for granted, it seems to us as if in truth rather little has changed

Since Liberalism fades out and totalitarianism is the new progress.
War and evil is what affords us the pleasures.
This concept then means from these previous  passages that we must see things accordingly.

I see these group of statements to be hinting that we do not associate pleasure with pain.  Pain is felt at the moment by the indvidual fighting to build our power to choose our pleasures.. But to associate pain with pleasure is not possible. We create values in reflection of pleasure.  We do not associate pleasure with pain.
But we want be sure that we do not misunderstand what pleasure means.  There are sacrifices.  However, the sacrifices can have consequences.  We may be made to think that we can come to expect peace.  However, in order to maintain peace, there is pain.   Pain can be the harmful actions that we overlook to procure values and pleasures.  We have to watch our back at all times. We enjoy pleasure, but with a doubt that nothing is permanent.  We also experience pleasure it as a uniform society. But politics will deal with the pains to organize pleasures of life  through technology  We want freedom and pleasures, but we have to make sacrifices of evil actions to make it possible. If we share things, we may have to deal with a consequence of how we use or develop with our pleasures of life. Nothing is permanent. Progress is made through control, not by enjoying pleasure