'In Kant's typology, the third type, citizenship in a republic of ends, is not independently elaborated alongside of the other types; in it the imperative's images of practical reason are integrated and become specifically ethical.

According to the first type, one is to imagine oneself as a nature in the midst of nature, that is, as a set of sensory and motor powers regulated internally by universal and necessary laws. By itself, this rule would induce our thought to constrain our sensibility to represent sensible objects not as objectives of sensual appetite but as surface effects determined by the physiological properties of our sensory surfaces and the physicochemical properties of the forces that impinge upon them. It would induce us to view our complex of impulses, appetites, and practical volitions as regulated by psychophysiological laws of the same form as the empirical regularities that govern the physicochemical and electromagnetic events of external nature. The first type would exclude the second, the environment envisioned practically as a field of means for ends that could be introduced into it, and oneself envisioned as an instrumental system. It would leave us with the Stoic or technological ethics that uses thought to effect a cold intervention in one's own representational faculty.

The second type induces us to view our sensory and motor powers as means for our rational practical faculty, instead of as functions regulated by psychophysical laws of the same form as the empirical regularities of physiochemical nature. The second type extends throughout the universe and upon oneself the practical representation of the environment as a field of means, and fixes this representation as ontologically ultimate: the outlying universe as represented as creation, created to serve rational man. This representation extends the universe about us as a field of action, but it does so by excluding action contrived to ensure the happiness of our core vitality. The good for which it makes created natures—and our own sensory-motor powers and core vitality themselves—means is the rational faculty. But since the rational faculty arises by the force of the imperative, exists unconditionally, and maintains itself in existence, the universe of external natures and our own psychophysiological nature which we envision practically as means cannot be envisioned as means for the existence of this good. Then the action the rational will can have on its sensory and motor means transforms neither them nor their mundane objects. Action reduces to an intervention in one's own sensory nature such that one's spontaneous impulses not violate the dignity of one's rational faculty.

According to the third type, one is to imagine oneself as a microrepublic whose order is legislated by one's own faculty of reason, and where one's sensory-motor agencies function in relations of command and obedience. The third type does not simply supplement the others but inscribes the first upon the second, such that the objective representation of nature becomes a practical objective of one's own sensory-motor nature. The other appears in the practical field of our interaction as another figure of the imperative which binds me also and whose form exposes him in a surface of suffering which cleaves to me and arrests my sensuous impulses and appetites. I am commanded to view him with the sensible objects as regulated by the determinations of nature, as objective objects, but I see that they are not thereby divested of their sensuous impact; the pleasure-objects viewed objectively now show their harsh edges and lacerating momentum. This is what induces me to perceive them as structures of a practical field, a field of resistances and obstacles and the means to overcome them. Positive action becomes possible as an intervention that uses the objective structure of the universe to reduce the resistant layout of things so that they become for the other the means in the service of one's rational dignity they are in themselves by creation. Such action is to be effected by extending within oneself the relations of command and obedience that constitute our coexistence as rational agents in society. The instrumental field extended across the furthest expanses of the environment by the second type is inscribed on the vision of the world and of oneself induced by the first type, nature and one's own nature as a system arrayed about one according to universal and necessary laws. The image of the other and of oneself as an instrumental system is inscribed upon the image of the other and of oneself as a nature; the image of the other and of oneself as an unexchangeable good is inscribed upon the image of the other and of oneself as a totality integrated by laws; the image of command is inscribed upon the image of order and of force in the imperative at work in the other and in oneself. The image of oneself as a responsible citizen of the universe is inscribed upon the image of oneself as a nature surrounded by nature and the image of oneself as an end in a universal field of means.'

Snow.

'El día es el movimiento del Sol, la presencia sobre nosotros del astro que nos da luz y calor.'

Taking as

'How do we know that compassion is a virtue?'

'But the everyday reader vanishes as soon as they are mentioned.'

L’idée de pensée de derrière la tête

'There are two ways in which the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art. One is spatial; the other is temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves; the relationship in the aesthetic field are shown by the grid to be in a world apart and, with respect to natural objects, to be both prior and final. The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic.

In the temporal dimension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one. In that great chain of reactions by which modernism was born out of the efforts of the nineteenth century, one final shift resulted in breaking the chain. By "discovering" the grid, cubism, de Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich… landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present, and everything else was declared to b the past.

One has to travel a long way back into the history of art to find previous examples of grids. One has to go to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to treatises on perspective and to those exquisite studies by Uccello or Leonardo or Dürer, where the perspective lattice is inscribed on the depicted world as the armature of its organization. But perspective studies are not really instances of grids. Perspective was, after all, the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawal from it. Perspective was the demonstration of the way reality and its representation could be mapped onto one another, the way the painted image and its real-world referent did in fact relate to one another—the first being a form of knowledge about the second. Everything about the grid opposes that relationship, cuts it off from the very beginning. Unlike perspective, the grid does not map the space of a room or a landscape or a group of figures onto the surface of a painting. Indeed, if it maps anything, it maps the surface of the painting itself. It is a transfer in which nothing changes place. The physical qualities of the surface, we could say, are mapped onto the aesthetic dimensions of the same surface. And those two planes—the physical and the aesthetic—are demonstrated to be the same plane: coextensive, and, through the abscissas and ordinates of the grid, coordinate. Considered in this way, the bottom line of the grid is a naked and determined materialism.

But if it is materialism that the grid would make us talk about—and there seems to be no other logical way to discuss it—that is not the way that artists have ever discussed it. If we open any tract—Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World, for instance—we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.'

'… it can be said that the first use of serial imagery in recent painting is shared by two artists, Ad Reinhardt and Yves Klein. Klein's serial painting (begun about 1957) is marked by the systematic use of one canvas size and one grainy textured color. The similarity of color together with the low textural level of organically clustered paint grain, while it slowed down scan, was insufficient to defeat an inherent tendency towards inert uniformity. Reinhardt's use of serial imagery, on the other hand, though also basically entropic as an enterprise, is more important for a number of reasons. Reinhardt's serial usage predates that of Klein, and unlike the overtly systematic look of Albers' art, Reinhardt's serial forms imply the use of a structure whose order is inherent but concealed. In various paintings (as far back as 1955) Reinhardt employed as a structural principle a series of fundamentally positioned forms that repeated at the framing edge. At times he united four square canvases to form a larger square. This modular division of the overall format was further reiterated by the horizontal and vertical squares symmetrically placed within each segment. His early systematic use of symmetry served to purge his painting of an outdated rhetoric, which he campaigned against equally in his systematically reiterated writings.

Reinhardt clearly is a key figure in the evolution of serial imagery in the United States, as Klein was not. If, apart from the inherent entropic tendency of his painting, any deficiency could be isolated it would be his manner of paint application, which never sufficiently deactivated the internal time-flow of the structure. His method of facture, consisting of a layer-upon-layer application of flat paint over a preexistent image, left traces of a "local" time track. In his last works, however, the black overlay of paint fused more into a one-to-one relationship with his structure. As the paintings got blacker they became more and more neutral. The formal importance of Reinhardt's painting therefore resides in its quality of indetermination, its neutral emptiness. This indeterminate quality would not be remarkable in itself if it were not allied to an emphasis on symmetry and macro-structure: that which raises no claim to stand for the work in its own right, but which controls the development of the individual paintings within a series. What Reinhardt set into motion was the idea of a network of choices and limitations which were pre-formed but not logically apparent on the surface of the picture or within the whole series. Until now it has always been assumed that Reinhardt was only repeating one painting rather than painting a series. On the other hand Reinhardt's work also proved that once the hierarchical links are solved and ironed out it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve contrast, that is, to give each painting a positive identity without reasserting rank or becoming overbearingly redundant. Nevertheless, his painting was a forceful step in the serial direction and of great importance to a later generation.'