R. Schleyer, M.A.

The author is an independent researcher investigating the platonic Idea as the fundamental, continuing ’utterance’ of the Absolute--its microphysical basis, its self-generation of a pseudo-history in geology and astronomy, its foundational support for living motion, conscious awareness, biopsychological functioning, and even intellectual achievement, as well as its necessary implication of a universal negative unity as the ideal origin of all gravitational and inertial phenomena.

For the most part, the studies here, which do reflect the basic division of intellectual life between Art and Science, earnestly seek to represent and progress toward the general thesis described in the accompanying abstract (’The Idea’).

A significant result (2017) has been to establish (pace Jacob Boehme) the precise correlation (unsettled in ancient and medieval idealism) between the “anima mundi” and the “spiritus mundi” as microphysical and cosmological entities of first importance in the Theory of Totality (see ’The Spirit of War,’ 2018). The fact that this study of True Cosmology has suddenly spilled open into a Pandora’s Box of aesthetic impacts has been a complete surprise to the author.

How can this be? Subatomic physics, hard-core paleontology, the ontology of human development, neuropsychology, psychophysiology, and the whole of ancient and modern idealism (through Hegel) suddenly have combined to reveal an unsuspected revolutionary insight assuredly tending to the destruction of a large part of the History and Practice of Art.

The triune Visage of Man, long celebrated by human genius in Art and by prophets of Religion as the “Image of God,” proves itself to be quite the opposite, and does in fact reflect the ugliness of a Psychophysical War deep within Man’s essential constitution that was contemporaneous with the very Birth of Mankind. 

We think it is notable that the pathological distortion of the human face according to our analysis affects only the finite profile and not the geometrically infinite idea of the frontal plan of the face (see ‘Prospectus of the Society for Faces’). Notably, also, it does not affect the faces of children, whose plan and Idea are a world apart, according to the master theorist of the face Max Picard (d. 1965).

Here enters an even deeper mystery, pointing to the possibility that the psyche must “refer” to the infinite (microphysically) for the geometrically regular frontal view and to the finite--the trifurcated embodiments it confronts, which is the psyche’s personal “cosmos” looking outward from its place in the zygote during embryogenesis--for the profile, perhaps explaining why only the profile is distorted (by interaction with the “spiritus mundi” according to the theory presented in the ’Spirit of War’).

The foregoing oddity is consistent with the associated theory, namely, that influence of the finite “spiritus mundi” stops at the infinite microphysical fundament, for the “spiritus mundi” is in fact defined as the finite (and Sinister) projection of the Eternal Life at the basis of the World. The conclusion that this necessarily relates to fundamental art theory is astounding.

The ‘Spirit of War’ proves that the undistorted and true beauty of the Face of Man as originally designed can only be surmised from the idealization of fossilized crania from “Cro-Magnon people” whose facial type, with a “smoothed-over” and idealized profile, is not found the present world!

Upon full comprehension, this discovery could overthrow the entirety of visual and sculptural aesthetics as received from Classical Greece and as revived in the Renaissance. Portraiture in particular will never be the same. The author, who has informally pursued photographic and graphite portraiture his whole life, is himself crestfallen!
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