Let us make our position clear from the start, as summarised in the two epigraphs. The first, more problematic, written in a Europe on the brink of World War I, implies that body-mind-action should tend towards a human ideal of integrity (the ‘upright gait’ also mentioned by Ernst Bloch); the other (derived from a classic of theoretical thought, written at the end of that war) proposes that art is not above (or below) an ethical conscience and that beauty should not excuse barbarity or forms of thought that legitimise it.