From: Katherine Keating To: Katherine Keating Subject: After Words Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2011 08:21:27 +0000 Dear Friends, I wanted to share with you the forward to my father's new book 'After Words'. He truly is an inspiration and so is his writing. The book, which is a compilation of his speeches, was launched yesterday in Sydney. I will be sure to send you a copy, its a brilliant read. I trust this email finds you well. Kindest regards Katherine X Creativity is central to our endeavours I. 10:,u IM; The Australian October 22. 2011 12:00AM Paul Keating is aware that many people see him as a puzzle and contradiction. During the interview he explained he wrote this introduction to his book as a guide to help people see the unifying philosophy of his life, public and private. FRIEDRICH Schiller, the German philosopher, said: "If man is ever to solve the problems of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom." Romantic and idealistic as that view may seem to some, the thought is revelatory of the fact that the greater part of human aspiration has been informed by individual intuition and privately generated passions, more than it has through logic or scientific revelation. The moral basis of our public life, our social organisation, has come from within us - by aspiration and by light, not by some process of logical deduction. Immanuel Kant referred to our inner impulses as "the higher self', an unconscious search for truth, going deeply into ourselves to establish who we are and what we should be. Beauty is about the quest for perfection or an ideal, and that quest has to begin with aesthetic imagination - something informed by conscience, carved by duty. Kant called it "the inner command", the ethical construct one creates to guide one from within. But we need tools to mine good intentions: inspirations, ones which await the creative