Second Section: The Structure of the Aesthetic Object

Chapter 4: Connection to the Analysis of the Act

a) Two kinds of looking and two strata of the object

The provisional analysis of the structure of the act was clearly occupied with preliminaries alone. It nonetheless became clear in that context that the analysis had to confine itself each step along the way to the elements contained in the object and its values. That is not surprising, since to every act-element there corresponds an object-element. This is a relationship, however, that can be evaluated in other ways, of course, when we know more about the object. The analysis of the act is (75) not yet closed. But it can win new perspectives only when the analysis of the object is undertaken.

Therefore let us enter the most central inquiry with the question of the structure of the aesthetic object.

This procedure is not in tension with the introduction to the preliminary analysis of the act. The act simply offers clues, and is, in the present state of the discussion, the better prepared side of the whole. Hence the elements of the problem are as such more clearly visible in it. But these problems are not solvable with reference to it alone. Many puzzles point to this fact – perhaps most of all the mysterious appearance of pleasure “in” certain elements of the act; this is again identical with the synthesis of looking and enjoying.

Therefore a new kind of inquiry must begin here. In order for this to happen, we must first learn in what regions we may begin our attack upon the object. The first hints to such regions come from the structure of elements in the act. 1. Two kinds of looking are arranged one upon the other: perception and the higher beholding of something imperceptible – where the beholding impels itself toward the imperceptible, 2. The perceptible is a real presence, while what is given in the higher looking or beholding is not real, or does not need to be real; it is additional to the seen, and, indeed, possesses an element of spontaneity.

These facts are a clear sign of the stratification in the aesthetic object itself. The mere division into two members tells us as yet nothing about how the strata are constituted, how we may distinguish one from the other, and how they are tied to one another.

The idea stated in this general form is very old. And just as old are the answers to the question about this “other” that stands behind perceptible objects. Plato taught that the other is “the Form,” and that this is what is grasped in the higher act of beholding. What is meant by this term is the universal as opposed to the real thing, and it has the nature of a primordial picture, which exists prior to all else in its purity and perfection (ideality). Accordingly, only the Form is genuinely “beautiful”; in the physical individual case it shines dimly forth. If one could free oneself entirely from perception, one would necessarily be able to grasp the beautiful as such, unmixed and pure.

The tendency of this doctrine suggests the exclusion of perception and its existing object. The case is similar in Plotinus and his much later disciple Marsilio Ficino38. The task of the observer is the same, to exclude perception and climb upward from the sensible to “intelligible beauty,” thus to elevate oneself inwardly to the “pure” vision of it, one not mediated by the senses.

This doctrine obviously conflicts with the sensible element in aesthetical cognitive acts. This element is, however, essential to it, and (76) ought to be understood in its own peculiar nature. The entire relation is interpreted [i.e., Platonically] here according to the relationship of knowledge to its object and viewed intellectually, as though it was a question in aesthetical beholding of insight, of the intuition of an essence and nothing else. To this corresponds the vague meaning of among the ancients; it is just as much the Good (Valuable, Perfect) and the beautiful, and is hence not congruent with the meaning of the aesthetic object. The intuition of ideas does least justice to the aesthetic object. In the genuine aesthetical relation it is precisely the sensibly given that appears as “beautiful.” The beauty of the Form, if it exists, is thus not at all beauty in the aesthetical sense.

German idealism first led the way out of this dead end. How Kant prepared the way has already been shown. Schelling and Hegel pursued this concept further. Now we say: it is not the Form itself that is beautiful, but the “sensible shining-forth [Scheinen] of the idea.”

This formulation is by Hegel, but the thought may be described as the common possession of the idealists. Even Schopenhauer maintained it quite consciously as an “improved” Platonism.

What is new about this “sensible shining-forth of the idea”? We may summarize it under three rubrics. 1. The Form is not the beautiful, but rather the “shining-forth” is; and if it is the shining-forth of the “Form,” then beauty is no longer the Form itself. 2. The shining-forth is sensible; with that, the object is recognized as an object of perception, and even an act of beholding does not separate it from perception. 3. Since the Form itself is not sensible, but appears in something that is, the object must have two parts; it must consist of sensible thing-like constructs as its foreground and the “Form” as the background. It is not especially surprising that the background has (or can have) a different ontological nature than the foreground, as long as one remembers its nature as an idea.

With this, a decisive transformation in the problem of the beautiful has been achieved. It is a question no longer of a high-flying metaphysics of the beautiful, but rather of a phenomenology of the beautiful, which makes fewer demands upon us, but is far more difficult to carry out. And immediately we discover the double aspect of the aesthetic object. Only now can we begin in earnest with the analysis of its essence. The quintessence of beauty is already visible: it lies in the relationship of appearance [Erscheinungsverhältnis].

However, we have thereby only made a start. Questions immediately arise: 1. What is the idea that appears here? 2. What does the appearing [das Erscheinen] consist in? Among these thinkers, “idea” was still understood as some general thing, and something like a principle (more or less in a Platonic way); the supposition behind it is again that nature and humanity are formed according to ideal primordial models (Schelling, Schopenhauer). But do (77) such things really exist? Even this thought, too, is just a remnant of ancient metaphysics that has been carried over to us unawares.

If we now assume that even beauty is no longer the perfection of such ideas, it still remains tied to the appearance of perfection; and, provided that is so, aesthetic value is left hanging upon the value-character of perfection – in poetry, for example, upon the nobility of the hero and the moral excellence of the great man. But that is precisely the error in this theory. What characterizes the essence of the beautiful is not that what appears is something perfect (a primordial model, an ideal type) but rather that it “appears,” specifically 1. That it appears in a “sensible” form, and 2. It appears as indifferent to reality and unreality. What the appearing entity must have as content is not yet clear; that is still in question.

Yet what the other question about what the “shining-forth” [Scheinen] consists in, we can say immediately that the expression is not a felicitous one. To appear always suggests deception and illusion, and just that may lead us astray here. For, as noted earlier, nothing is simulated here, neither perfection nor a primordial model, nor even the reality of what is unreal (in poetry, the reality of the characters and conflicts). Rather something is thrust into the realm of the sensibly visible that otherwise is only accessible to the higher form of beholding, in such wise that this beholding is tied tightly to perception. But this linking neither simulates reality where there is none, nor is anything presented thereby as to “what” this element, which is accessible only by the higher kind of beholding, must be.

Thus neither “idea” nor “shining-forth” is entirely accurate. Both must be replaced by concepts that are more accurate and fitting.

b) The necessary correction of Hegel’s “shining-forth of the idea”

A second correction of the definition of the aesthetic object must therefore be introduced. The first one, which Hegel made of the Platonic definition, is insufficient.

If one simply removes the “idea” from the “shining-forth of the idea,” one is soon forced to recognize that the correction is not adequate. The “idea” of the idealists had not just been pulled out of a hat: there are in fact ideas that play an important role in the arts. The most familiar example of this kind is taken from religious ideas, which historically encouraged most of what we possess of great art: the early images of the gods, the Madonnas of the Italians, the temples, churches, hymns and oratorios and, yes, even tragedy. The same must be valid for many moral ideals, such as we find in heroic poetry, in drama, in portraiture and even in music.

All that is and remains essential. But it is far from constituting on its own the content that shines forth in a work of art. Much more belongs to the work, specifically that which precisely does not have the character of an idea, (78) but which is individual, unique, and even typical, and which, because of that character, are far from being absorbed into to the universality of the ideational. Here belong the characters of poetic figures, which are not given to the senses, but rather are only mediated by the senses, and appear without any claim to reality; they belong to the appearances, but they are neither absorbed by general ideas nor by the typical. Scenes acted out on stage are entirely so; the conflicts, fates, actions, and passions appear primarily as those of individual persons, and are so understood. It is similar with the persons represented in portraiture, even with the figures and facial expressions in freely composed scenes, and even when they have not been taken from life.

That is all essential, and not only for the arts. But it belongs without exception to what shines forth; in the arts, even to what is unreal; it is given only to a higher form of beholding, and only provided that it is seen also, is everyday perception lifted to the aesthetical level. Further, only provided that it is also “seen along with” can the higher looking or beholding begin, by mediation, and then proceed to the universal, to ideas that are religious, moral, etc.

In the stratification of the object, Idealism overlooked an essential member; perhaps even several of them. As in the stratification of the receptive act a connecting member of the act of beholding must exist between perception and the intuition of an idea, so in the aesthetic object a connecting layer must exist between what is sensibly given in it and the content of ideas, which is to be strictly distinguished from perception. And this connecting stratum must, just as in the latter case, belong to the appearance, and nevertheless like the former, be concrete, intuitive and individual.

Seen in this manner, the correction undertaken of the “shining-forth of the idea” is given a quite significant weight. The formula of the Idealists was still much too simple; it yoked together the oppositions contained in the object, and failed to concern itself at all with the many things that made up the connecting links. The extremities do not make the whole. In contrast, the real fullness that in fact lies in the aesthetic object is, of course, exactly this whole. On the side of the object there must therefore also be more than one connecting member, and the riches of what is beheld may lie just in the colorful manifold that is filled out by this rich domain. A new pathway to analyze the structure of the aesthetic object now opens up to us, and it lets us see in advance that the real essence of its structure can be most quickly grasped in the relation of the strata to each other.

We cannot see in advance how far this discovery may lead us, whether, for example, it is possible at all to proceed along this route to arrive at the essence of the beautiful. We can see even less our way toward an exhaustive account of it. But since as of now the route has hardly been taken, it may nevertheless promise new discoveries. (79)

The other side of the “correction” is less central. It states that it is not really a question of a “shining-forth,” [Scheinen] but rather of an appearance [Erscheinen]. This shift in meaning lies in a resistance to the use of “shining-forth” because this term suggests an element of deception. But it is not that alone. Behind the Hegelian thought of “shining-forth” [Scheinen] there is hidden the remains of the old intellectualism: appearance implies an element opposed to truth. Truth exists only in the realm of knowledge, thus appearance exists only where there is a question of knowledge (as a limit, or as a failure of knowledge); or the opposite: only where it is claimed “that something of such-and-such quality exists” can there be appearance, deception, or a leading astray.

But here it is not a question of that kind. Whoever is unable to free himself, in reading a fairy-tale, a ballad, or any story whatever, from the question of whether “it really happened that way” does not grasp at all these literary works as such, he does not regard them aesthetically, but in a naively realistic or childlike way. Now just this realism hinders seeing, appreciation, and enjoyment, and misses entirely the elevation above the real world they offer. Such a person places a lead weight upon his capacity to be elevated; he does not give scope to the free, unattached state of beholding.

In contrast, “appearance” as such is quite indifferent to the real and the unreal. What appears at any point does so without the weight of reality, without any responsibility for the true and the false, without any claim to truth. That is why it is understood only as appearance. It is, of course, entirely an “object,” but only an intentional object, that is, such that it is entirely absorbed by its being as an object, and thus is not an object of knowledge, which transcends the intentional act.

The claim to truth that nonetheless is made by poetry, as by all representational arts, refers to something quite different. We will speak of that matter in another context.

c) The place of aesthetically autonomous pleasure

With this, a new light falls upon the relationship of appearing. We see now that the phenomenon does not rest upon the structure of the act alone, but more importantly upon a structural relationship in the object. But that is not the only fact that attracts the attention here. The interrelationships in the act also appear in a new light, one that falls precisely upon the most difficult of its aspects to comprehend: pleasure, delight, and enjoyment.

We saw that pleasure does not depend upon the thing that appears, not even upon what is sensibly given “in” which it appears, but rather on the phenomenon of appearing itself. We can supplement this observation by noting that pleasure also does not depend on the content of an idea, and for this reason it is not a value-response to values other than aesthetic values, but rather depends exclusively upon the way in which the appearing phenomenon (including its value-components) presents itself to consciousness. Now pleasure is the factor in the nexus of the aesthetical act that genuinely announces values, that is, it is through pleasure and through it alone – that is, in the form of pleasure – that being beautiful as such is given. (80)

That fact is also misunderstood by the aesthetics of Idealism, although Kant saw what the problem was about. As long as one holds to the idea of a “shining-forth of the idea” to the senses, one cannot fully assess the value and meaning of “disinterested pleasure.” It always seemed that there must be a more perfect cognition of beauty than one that is conditioned by the senses, i.e., “sensible shining-forth.” This is why Hegel ranked philosophical-conceptual thought higher than aesthetical vision. A certain odium remained attached to “appearing” – a deceitful form of knowing – and the form of seeing proper to aesthetics had to be elevated to a state of pure cognition. Thus it was assumed that what appears must be “cognized,” just as if it were an entity that in its appearance had not yet come into its own.

When Hegel came to understand the aesthetical relation to the object as intuition, he sensed that something must be disdained in this formulation. It would have to seem so, as long as one assumes in general the model of cognition that has always been a theoretical model. For that reason he valued concepts above beholding, and demoted pleasure to a lower level.

Now pleasure is a different kind in the aesthetical relation from pleasure in the theoretical one, and quite naturally it is different in the practical one. It is not only that in the former, pleasure is related to quite different values. It is also autonomous in a different sense. It first makes the object into an object of value. The value of practical success or of theoretical advance retains its validity even without taking pleasure in it; the value of a work of art exists only “for” a subject that beholds it and in the act of beholding enjoys it. Pleasure thus contributes to the constitution of the value that it points to and for whom it is intended. In this sense, aesthetical pleasure is autonomous. The observer endowed with spirit belongs to the appearance; for it is “to him” that something appears. Since however aesthetic value does not depend on what appears, but upon the event of appearance itself, the observer who takes in the appearance thereby takes part in aesthetic value. And since the same observer feels the aesthetical pleasure, its autonomy does not consist in the autonomy of the value given in it – as in other areas – but rather in its own participation in the creation of aesthetic value.

At this point we cannot yet grasp the relation entirely. We will come to grips with it later in the analysis of the object. But the phenomenon forces itself upon us already: aesthetical feeling of value is – what other value feelings never are –at the same time constitutive of values.

However, the phenomenon can be easily demonstrated. Aesthetic value cannot be anticipated; it does not exist before its appearance on the single object. It is also not objectively cognizable without an act of looking that is simultaneously taking pleasure in looking. It does not exist at all until it comes to be in the act of looking. For that reason it is so tightly tied to the singular case, and, strictly speaking, not only to it but even to the particular act of looking at it in one unique examination; on a second examination it may (81) be different, for each is a new execution of the synthesis that constitutes the phenomenon of appearing. Aesthetic value depends upon appearance as such.

Another indirect piece of evidence for this lies in the fact that language has almost no descriptive terms for these values. The images we use to describe them to each other are all inadequate, and do not reach what is unique in them. Aesthetical meaning is a latecomer to the human mind, and language was already in a finished state when it first appeared. Language is oriented towards the practical; for that reason also aesthetic values remained undiscovered and were long misunderstood, scrambled together with ethical and vital values – one thinks of our sense of human beauty, whose value-content has not been explicated – and they disappeared behind these latter values, while in autonomous pleasure the vital and moral values disappear behind aesthetic values (because they are mere conditions of pleasure).

From here it is possible to draw some conclusions about the character of aesthetic value. They may be expressed under the following rubrics.

1. They are not values of a self-existing entity, neither of real objects such as goods values, nor of something that is in the first instance merely ideal, such as moral values. For that reason no ought-to-be is attached to them. Rather they are the values of entities that exist “for us.” They are, to be sure, genuinely objective values, that is, values of the object as such; but the object itself does not exist in itself, but only for a subject that understands them aesthetically. If the object existed only as what is given through the senses, then that would not be true, but the aspect of the object that is sensibly given is only a part of the aesthetic object, and this part alone does not make it one. For what appears belongs to the aesthetic object and this entity does not have to be a real existent. The aesthetic object is the whole of these. This whole thus exists only “for us” provided only that we look at it rightly.

2. Thus, one may also say: aesthetic values are values of being-an-object as such; neither the values of acts (whether that of looking, or of pleasure) nor of an existing entity as such that is made an object for an onlooker by means of his acts, but only values of the object as object. For that reason they exist independent of reality and even of the realization of appearance.

3. This means that they are tied to the relation of appearance as such, but also just to it as a whole. The members of this relation are of course found separate from each other, but then they do not form an aesthetic object. For that reason, aesthetic values are conditioned by the subject, and, in fact, in another sense than other values (e.g., as goods values, which also exist “for” a being to whom they are useful). The meaning of “being for us” is in this case not a thing’s becoming useful, but an object-being that exists only “for us.”

4. Thus these values are not objectively general, as are the vital and moral values, but rather individual values that are specific to each object, and unique to it alone. (82) There are, after all, a limitless number of ways of appearance; the way is different for each “material” and for each substance; it is different in each “performance” of the same material in the same substance. There are of course universal features of all things aesthetically valuable; they correspond to the universal or typical features of the relation of appearance, but they make up only schematic and, as it were, “thin” genera of valuable objects. The genuine values lie in the unique specificity of the object, and all that is of a comparative nature in the realm of the beautiful remains tied to the mere surface.

The kinds and types of the arts, and even the styles that connect one to the other, pertain in the first instance to the structure of the objects and only secondarily to aesthetic value. Then, too, general value-characters are often common to very different kinds and styles of art. Genuine aesthetic values are hardly touched by such differentiations, and surely not understood.

Nonetheless the character of aesthetic values – the state of being beautiful and its differentiations – is tied to the structure of the object, indeed to the whole with its many strata. The road from a preliminary fragment of the analysis of the act leads, therefore, over to an analysis of the structure of the object; we best come to the analysis of value by that road and by it alone. The analysis of the structure of the object is central to the purposes of aesthetics, and the most important information both for the further problem of the act and for the problem of value – so far as we can approach it, given the current state of research – are found there in the first instance.

Chapter 5: The Law of Objectivation

a) The role of “matter”

The previous discussions have led us towards the problem of the being of the aesthetic object. It was revealed to be an error to attribute an independent being to it (a “being in itself”), one not dependent upon a subject. On the other hand, we saw that a part of it indeed exists independent of a subject. Thus we have the problem of establishing the kind of being that belongs to it. To solve this problem is an ontological undertaking. This undertaking precedes all further questions and must now be addressed.

The task belongs in its broader context within the general problem of ideal being. For just as the aesthetic object exists only “for” an intellectual being, there is also contained in it some kind of intellectual content, at least a definite way of looking or understanding. In a natural object that is not immediately apparent, but it is in a work of art. We will speak therefore at first exclusively of the artwork, for it is certainly evident in this case that we are dealing with an intellectual product that possesses within itself something of the productive mind that created it. (83)

Generically the work of art belongs to a specific form of ideal being, the “objectivated spirit.” It is objectivation, that is, the realization of an ideal content in objective existence. Objectivation does not refer only to the work of art, but to any other product that the human mind creates, from tools to invented apparatus to literary works. Everything that belongs to the spirit of earlier times, which thrusts itself historically before the quite different spirit of today and is understood by us as a witness to that earlier spirit, has the form of objectivation. Literary works play the greatest role here. But we need not be thinking of a work of art. Even a simple chronicle or a scientific report has the same fundamental form and ontological type of objectivation.

Now it is a fundamental law of ideal being that it cannot exist freely floating in the air, but can appear only resting upon some other kind of foundation. The personal spirit of individuals is carried upon the vital psyche, this again upon the life of an organic body, and this latter upon inorganic-physical being. A chain of conditions rule here “from below to above,” according to which the higher entity is borne by the lower; and since intellectual life is the highest stratum of being, it is carried by the entire series of the lower strata. What is true for personal spirit is also true for the historical objective spirit, which constitutes the common spiritual life of entire peoples and epochs; it too rests upon, is carried – by the mental life of the individual as by the life of human tribes, and therefore finally by the entire series of levels of being or (as the ontological phrase expresses) by the entire stratified structure of the real world. Ideal being can simply not exist without the levels of being that bear it up from below.

What is true for the two forms of living spirit (the personal-subjective and the historical-objective) is valid also for the objectivated spirit. Objectivation is the third fundamental form of spirit. It is, to be sure, not living spirit in itself, but simply spiritual content, a product of the human spirit, a spiritual creation. In this capacity it stands in a certain sense detached from “spiritual life,” and indeed from both personal and objective spirit and life; but at the same time it is lifted out of the spiritual life and is thus exempt from process of change to which that life is subject, and the objectivation can therefore have an existence of its own alongside of it.

The strange thing about spiritual creations is that they extend themselves temporally beyond their creators – the orator, the thinker, the writer, the poet, or the artist – indeed they not only outlive them but their epoch and its objective spirit as well. The change of generations and centuries passes them by, but they are not drawn into the fate of all that comes to be and passes away. They are capable, however, of such endurance only when they have been stamped upon an enduring real medium, a material possessing different (84) powers of resistance than transient human life. But in that case, the objective spirit is also a spirit that must be carried, that must rest upon an existent work that is itself not spirit, yet in the temporal measure of its enduring, it is superior to spiritual life.

Objectivation consists accordingly in the creation of an existing work that endures, and in which spiritual content can appear. In this way, the aesthetic object enters into, so far as human beings create it, a large set of phenomena; it forms a special class of objectified spirit. Thereby it falls entirely under the law of objectivation.

This law has a twofold form. It assets first: spiritual content can only endure if it is banished to real sensible matter, i.e., if it is tied to matter by its unique form, and is thus carried by it. And it asserts, second, that the spiritual content carried by informed matter always requires the responsiveness of a living spirit, a personal one as well as an objective one; for it depends upon a consciousness that beholds it – one may also say: upon a consciousness that comprehends or recognizes it, and to which, through the real medium it informs, it can appear.

In the aesthetic object, the material varies with the character of the art: stone, clay, or color upon a canvas, words, writing, or sound. But these all would be dumb, however they are formed, and could not be bearers of spiritual content –without the responsiveness of the living spirit. This consists of recognition ,i.e., in understanding. What is sealed in matter and deposited in it must be once more extracted, freed, made to flow, made living again; it must be taken up into the living spirit. That can be a complicated process, and many conditions must be fulfilled for it to become possible. The living spirit is not always capable of it, and, if it is, then only at a specific stage of its maturity. Many writings of earlier times were forgotten or banished for centuries without anyone resurrecting their spiritual content – until one day they are excavated, rediscovered, and awakened to new life. The objective spirit simply cannot exist without a real, spiritual life. For it does not possess a life of its own; it must have a different life, one that is lent to it. For the living spirit from which it is derived may have perished long ago; it has been released from that spirit and can no longer return to it.

For the work of art, naturally, this is especially true. The law of objectivation is also its law.

This state of “resting upon” of the objectified spirit is simply different from that of the living spirit. The latter manifests the strata of being that run through it from below to above: matter – organism – psychic life – spirit make up a single irreversible series of carrying and being carried. The chain of strata of being is not found in objectivation; in the works of literary and plastic art (12785) the spiritual content is immediately tied to the lowest stratum of the real, viz., the material. Of course it hangs upon a very definite construction, which itself is the achievement of the living spirit; but one cannot say that it alone bears a spiritual nature. The chain of strata is thus leapt over, for the middle strata are missing. So, at least, the relation appears at this point, and only by the mediation of the living spirit are the missing strata filled in.

The entire relationship in the objectifying spirit is thus threefold. In the work as such, the informed matter and the spiritual content are tied to each other by the act of informing – but not tied as such, but only for the living spirit, provided that it brings with itself the needed qualifications. The living spirit is the necessary “third member” through which alone the other two are tied together. Without this member, the spiritual content in the matter cannot be reawakened. This threefold relation cannot be reduced or simplified.

The complex ontology of objectivation flows from this immediately: it is only in part a real objectivation; that is, only the matter in its formation is real. The genuine spiritual content remains unreal; moreover, it is not realized by the living spirit, but rather comes to be for the living spirit only as appearance. We see clearly from this that we are dealing in the relation of appearance with something far more general and not with the work of art alone. It is not a question of the special ontology of the aesthetic object but of the ontology of the objectifying spirit. We will still have to show what the difference is between the relation of appearance in the work of art and that in the various other kinds of objectivation. 39

b) The spiritual content and the living spirit

This model of the tripartite relation is still incomplete. In reality, the living spirit appears (both as personal and objective spirit) in it in two ways. For the informing of material and the bestowal of spiritual content are in themselves the actions of a living spirit, and, in fact, they are precisely the original, creative acts. However, they are the acts of a different mind than the one that receives and recognizes them; a mind that may have perished long before his work manifested itself to the epigones.

We must therefore supplement our model and build the role of the creative spirit into it. Then the model becomes fourfold. The producing spirit informs the material; in that way it gives the spiritual content along with form, but also encloses it within, so that the receiving sprit can “disclose” it once again, that is, he has to win it back from the material. Clearly, the receiving spirit on its side must also engage itself spontaneously: it must, by understanding and beholding it, (86) allow what the producing spirit had made to rise up again; he must reproduce it. This engagement and this achievement first make it possible for the spiritual content to “appear” to him.

This fourfold relation is not an equal one. As the productive spirit does not know but must reckon blindly with the reproductive one, so the latter also is hidden from the former, for the creator is not contained in the objectified spirit; and where the epigone is not able to know of him in other ways (historically), he can imagine him only vaguely through his works. Of course the creator can represent himself in his works, but that is an addition of another kind, and one must already know of the producer as such in order to understand the representation of him. He cannot decide whether, as Greeks of later centuries believed, Homer presented himself in the figure of Demodokos, and it does not affect much our reading of the Odyssey if this should not be so.

In fact within certain limits every representation of a work is also a representation of its creator, even when it speaks only of its object; any sculptor giving form to some material always involuntarily objectifies within it some part of himself, if only as a way of seeing things. No doubt this is especially true for artistic representation. But this kind of self-representation accompanies all communication and is not peculiar to genuine objectivation (of a lasting kind) as such. For example, in life every person continually reveals himself in his speech, his gestures, and in his behavior. Whatever he may speak of, he involuntarily gives something of himself away.

The picture we have drawn seems in a way to have turned about upon itself. At first it appeared that the objectified spirit had been freed from the living spirit, drawn out from him, allowed to float freely. But now we see that it is continually tied to one and another living spirit, and, moreover, tied back upon the first one, i.e., the producing spirit, such that the creator is still recognizable in his object.

Neither of the two is important in principle for the objectified spirit, but they are essential precisely for the aesthetic object. This too – the work of art – exists only in relation to an appreciating subject that possesses the conditions requisite to grasp it rightly, and otherwise for no one, and least of all in itself. The productive spirit – the sculptor, the poet, and the composer – remains, always within certain limits, recognizable in it, even when one knows neither his name nor his life. And much stronger than our ability to know of him is our assimilation of him to ourselves: the beholder can be drawn by the power of the work into the way of seeing things as the artist did, it can take him by the hand and teach him new ways to see.

Here it is necessary to reach back in our discussion even further. Perception remains important above all for aesthetics, and with it the sensible object that has been given a form in which a spiritual content has been objectified and in which alone it appears. One might think that this construct must have been from the outset in some way akin to the spiritual content. But more careful observation (87) teaches us the opposite. For this, too, we must orient ourselves on the simple non-aesthetical forms of objectivation. The most familiar form of objectivation that we encounter in life is useful here: words and writing.

Language belongs to a certain level of the living objective spirit. So long as this spirit “lives,” that is, so long as it is in fact spoken, it is the “living speech” – in contrast to the dead languages, which are no longer spoken. The spoken word, as an element of language, plays a role on this level as a means of coming to an understanding with others; it is also the means of exchange in the spiritual marketplace. For that reason its life is short; it serves only the momentary situation and disappears as such behind the “circumstances” that are in question. It is forgotten.

Yet it is nonetheless a case of objectivation, and displays its two characteristic levels of being: the level of existing reality, i.e., the audible sound, and the spiritual content, the meaning, and the “sense.” Only both together constitute the “word”; one or the other alone is nothing on the plane of speech.

We see from this especially that the living spirit itself may constantly use objectivation, but without holding on to it or storing it away. The living spirit needs it always for its own temporary needs, the creation and maintenance of the common realm of spirit, in which its life consists and in which it moves.

But every word and every expression, along with its unique wording, can be kept and stored in the memory of the living. That happens often when the meaning of the utterance appears to have great weight, as has happened from olden times in the case of the story. The spiritual content is carried forth and it becomes a common treasure, just because it has been made objective in the written word. This process is enormously strengthened by writing, for it is of the essence of writing not to be transient, like the spoken world, but capable of being kept and maintained, because it is a permanent existing work. The extensive literature of stories passed down by the ancients is an eloquent testimony to that permanence. The truth-content of these anecdotes is not a matter of significance (and is, after all, no longer verifiable); the significance is rather simply in its preservation of the transient as such.

The philosophically remarkable thing about this relation is the profound heterogeneity of the strata of being in objectivation. For that also the most obvious examples are language and writing.

Sound and meaning are not only incomparable phenomena – they do not have a close common genus, and they also have a quite different ontological character. Then, too, they are to a great extent independent of each other within common constellations of words, as one observes upon the diversity of languages and even of dialects; and their constituents do not vary simply in concert with each other. Meanings are rather tied to phonemes entirely by convention (the occasional onomatopoeia are insignificant exceptions). (88) That fact makes possible both translation and multilingualism, even the variety of possible expressions in one and the same language. The real limits of translatability have a deeper basis; they lie in the disparities in the objective spirit itself, in its forms of intuition and habitual modes of thought in different peoples and epochs.

What is true of spoken language is even more so for the written word. The incommensurability of the form of the writing and its meaning, even the form of writing and the word is more immediately apparent here, even with respect to both their structure and their way of being. To a certain extent even the most naïve writer in his normal use of writing is conscious of these differences, and only habit conceals from him their great strangeness.

What is positive in this relation is apparently only the fixed nature of the order of the relation that exists between the audible sound and the meaning, or between the form of writing, the audible sound, and the meaning. On this relation depends the understanding of what is said and what is written, not upon any structural relationship or any other kind of similarity. The strangeness consists in the fact that an association of this kind functions most freely and most perfectly where it is merely external, conventional and “contingent,” and not influenced (one might almost say not distorted) by similarities or structural correspondences between them. For given the fixed nature of its elements, such an association will have to have the greatest flexibility in order to be amenable to the indefinitely varied senses it must carry; that can be achieved most quickly when it is a mere relationship among symbols and is not hindered – even in the slightest – by the ambition to “copy” what it conveys.

The most telling example of this at first strange-sounding fact is the great superiority of the alphabet (with its relatively few basic symbols) in analyzing the sounds of spoken language over pictographic writing. The reverse side of this superiority is that “recognition” (i.e., reading) is tied to the mastery of the fixed association of sound and symbol, just as the understanding of what is said is conditioned by the mastery of the current correlations of sound and meaning.

In this way we return to the law of objectivation, i.e., that all appearances of spiritual content depend on the reciprocal performance of acts of the living spirit, so far as the latter brings to them the conditions of understanding.

c) Being in itself and being for us in the objectivated spirit

As with words and writing, so it is also fundamentally the same in all other objectifications of spiritual content. However, the forms of objectifications themselves are very diverse – detours (89) over symbols and correlations are by no means required in all cases – and, accordingly, the independence of the entire objective construction is modulated in a variety of ways, and with that also its capacity for preservation throughout history, as well as its chances of reappearing in the living spirit of later ages. That all depends on specific conditions, and most importantly in the conditions set by the material, its capacity to be worked, and its durability. Yet after all these are met, there is the dependence on the unpredictable decree of fate as to the return or continuing absence of living spirits capable of grasping its meaning.

The material condition is generally satisfied by the written word, but in the spoken word, it is not. The essence of what is spoken is its impermanence. What is written “in black and white” is completely different in its capacity to persist through time. It continues to exist even when it is not being looked at; private letters that were written only for the passing moment may be preserved through peculiar circumstances and after millennia bear witness to a life that perished long ago. So was the case with remnants of papyri from Egypt’s desert sands.

Whether impermanent or permanent, the law of objectivation is met: our entire model of it has two levels, which in fact manifest the characteristic heterogeneity of the strata with respect to both its structure and its ontological form. For only the foreground, the material sensible form, is real; the background that appears in it, which forms the spiritual content, is unreal. The material exists in itself, along with its form; the background, in contrast, exists only “for” a living spirit ready to receive it, who contributes to it his own nature, and reproduces its content as he grasps it.

The foreground is always a sensibly apprehensible configuration. The background can to a certain extent be apprehended by the senses and therefore appear as it is drawn into an act of perception, as is the case with many works of art, e.g., in sculpture and painting there is a living bodily presence. The expression “spiritual content” must therefore be used with care. The background need not be ideal, neither as a thought nor as the ideal object of intuition. Its content also need not be taken from a higher stratum of being (psychic or spiritual being), nor be an imitation; it is sufficient that it be spiritually intuited originally, and that the way of beholding it is maintained in the manner of its appearing. The background is rather “spiritual content” only in the same sense as in reference to spoken words and writing: it is merely that something is expressed or described that is not contained as real in the object as a whole and also not deceptively presented as something real. For the ontological nature of the background, it is sufficient that it be called forth in the consciousness of the comprehending hearer or reader as a represented content.

The great difference between the different kinds and levels of objectivation is contained in its other elements. The differences are observed, for example, in the various degrees of its concreteness and detail, in the degree of abstractness and in the symbols merely external to it, with all of which the representational content presents itself to the receptive beholder. There are an incalculable number of subtle variations in these (90) features. In this respect, they are given great scope even in everyday speech, and entirely in the case of writing.

In contrast, in the work of art, the object that appears is always highly concrete; it possesses a wealth of content, and its ties to the real foreground are strong and deep. This is true even when the represented content, understood as spiritual in nature, is very general and ideal.

What is mysterious in the nature of objectivation is always and in all cases this: “how” can, then, the sensible thing-like construction that constitutes the foreground become in fact the carrier of a content that possesses an entirely different mode of being and that is there only “for” a receptive consciousness? For the relation between the two is so ordered that this content can be glimpsed in the sensible construct and can be at any time won back from it. It must therefore be in some way contained in it. For whatever else may be in the world, the well-known rule holds, that only a spiritual being can “have” spiritual content – however this act of having may be constituted.

The provisional solution to the mystery may be found in the consideration that in fact the spiritual content cannot come to be in the configured material without the agency of a living spirit. For the content is not the material in itself, but is there only “for us” who comprehend it. And it is only placed in the material by its creator “for” the spirit who comprehends it, but not stamped upon it independently of the nature of the material. Rather, the form really stamped upon it is itself only the material form, that is, the material of the sensible foreground.

If we substitute in this case the fourfold relation we developed above, the circle closes: in all cases of objectivation of whatever kind the appearing background stratum exists solely “for” a living spirit; it exists only by force of the reciprocal relation to it. That is the meaning of “being for us.” This way of being is a quite relative one that divides the foreground from the background, although the original creative spirit who formed the whole is a real being who can appear in the spiritual content of his creation; he appears along with it, but not as an existing presence.

d) Foreground and background

These two elements of the objectivated spirit have thus an entirely different ontology. As a consequence, the real existence of a unity of the two would immediately appear to us as an oddity. Moreover, they vary freely, for the most part, with respect to each other. The greatest range of variation, however, exists within the unity they form with respect to their connections to each other.

Some objectivations have a merely conventional interconnection of foreground and background. The spoken word and writing are of this kind. Even more important is that the same may be said of concepts. Even the concept is an arbitrary form, one that in fact always receives its own content not from itself but from a (91) definite relationship in high style, i.e., from an entire system of concepts. An isolated concept is nothing in itself; it is neither definable nor able to be given content by intuition. In short, concepts are not autonomous, any more than an isolated word is. In practice, neither word nor concept ever appears alone; they exist only within speech, that is, within a context of interrelated thoughts.

The product of a constructed concept is the specialized term; but that says in itself nothing about the spiritual content. One must know that content from some other source in order to use it correctly. One needs to fill out its content by intuition – for its nature is to be the means of a higher kind of beholding (either by looking-through or looking-with it) – that is, not any form of intuition at all, but rather with the right kind of intuitive act that is appropriate for the concept. The concept of “planet” is grasped only by one who grasps intuitively Kepler’s40 ellipses and the conditions of motion of the bodies in elliptical orbits. This intuition must be produced so that the concept can come to function in one’s own thought. That is what Hegel meant by the “exertion [Anstrengung] of concepts.”

But from what source may we obtain the intuition? It is easy to see that it can be obtained only from a larger context that can be readily scrutinized. Scientific thought is always contained in a system of concepts already at hand, which, even if not complete, exists within the limits of the current state of scientific knowledge. One cannot separate the individual concepts from such a system without losing its spiritual content. But such a system of concepts can, as objectified in scholarly written work, maintain itself across the centuries and be resurrected at a time when people no longer think with the same concepts and intuit matters in the same way.

The conceptual system of Aristotelian metaphysics, along with its individual concepts – Form, material, Eidos, dynamics, energy – which are no longer our own, may still be won back from the preserved documents, and that so precisely that one can distinguish consistencies from inconsistencies in it. But that is possible only on the basis of the entire work, not of the individual concepts, if one were to take one by itself. The individual concept has its meaning and content only from the whole.

The conclusion we may draw from this is simple. A concept, understood by itself, has its essence outside of itself. If one severs it from its context of interrelated concepts in which it is rooted, it collapses, loses is content, and can be distorted to the point of incomprehensibility. Such a collapse occurred to concepts developed in the ancient world innumerable times throughout history: for example, to the Aristotelian ones mentioned above. To be sure, one can win those isolated concepts back to comprehensibility, fill out their void; but one must then recreate their entire original context of ideas, and that can of course be done only on the basis of the historical sources (92) – by holding rigorously to the texts of Aristotelian metaphysics. And it is difficult to do so; it requires a long course of study.

The stability of the concept as an objectivation is otherwise not great. Concepts change over time – a claim quite in opposition to the teaching of the old logic, which attributed a super-temporal identity to them – for they have their own history, and their meaning changes for the living objective spirit. By this change we must not at all understand a decline. With every new growth in knowledge, new characteristics are rather added to the concept, and since this growth in knowledge may be extended across centuries in which our opinions concerning the same object may change fundamentally, the history of this concept may lead to the complete transformation of its content, even when it keeps its old verbal expression and still denotes the same object. In this case, in fact, the objectivation itself is altered, according to the understanding and the reach of the living spirit.

The amazing mutability of the concept – perhaps nothing in the world is as changeable as it – is not a weakness, but rather its unique capacity to follow the restless growth of knowledge. But this capacity is at the same time an eloquent testimony to the looseness of the tie that binds the term to the spiritual content in the concept.

It is very instructive to make these points clear by means of the example of the content. For only in the contrast we see here does the nature of the objectivation in the work of art appear in the correct light. The work of art has precisely a different kind of stability, an incomparably higher capacity to endure through time. The reason for this lies in the strong and independent tie in it between the foreground and the background. For here the tie is neither a conventional one nor one conditioned by externality (that is, by its extensive systematic relationships), but is rather a purely internal tie created by itself alone. For that reason, it addresses not our comprehension but our intuition and, within intuition, it has the form of a tight relationship between the sensible looking (perception) and the higher form of beholding.

With the bestowal of form upon a real object of some kind, a work of art gives the entire detail in which the spiritual content appears. For that reason, the content can always be recovered in the foreground detail without any need to reconstruct its far-reaching relationships. It is precisely the foreground, the material, and the sensibly real elements with which the work of art is richly adorned. Such adornment is not found in concepts, and for that very reason nothing in them can appear out of the concept itself, but it is instead dependent upon the relationships that lie above and beyond it. The work of art is dependent upon nothing of this kind; the fullness of the construction of the real object is sufficient to allow a spiritual content to appear to the beholder. That means that in the work of art the connection between the foreground and the background is a “close-fitting,” tight, and independent one. The knowledge that one brings to the work (93) does not open one to the spiritual content, rather the act of beholding it does; and if this is no longer a sensible looking-at, it remains tied tightly to perception. Without it, it cannot bring what appears in it before the eyes of the beholder.

We can express this in a formula: the work of art has its essence in itself; the concept has its essence external to itself. The concept, taken in itself, is not a closed whole; the next higher unity above it is not to be found in it. The work of art is a whole, and so tightly closed upon itself, that the beholder does not have to rely on any of its possible external relations for its contents to be fully available to him. The richness of the sensible form in its foreground is sufficient to awaken by itself all the necessary interconnections for the appearance of the background. Even more: the work of art is not only independent of interconnections that it might not itself contain, but also to the contrary it is lifted above the real relations of life, of knowledge, and of comprehending; it is wafted beyond them and rests only upon itself. That is why it has the power to lift the viewer up along with itself and transport him into the quite different world of appearance.

Therefore, the work of art is not liable to a “waning.” And as for the mutability in the living spirit, the work is subject to it only to a limited degree. It may happen that new content is revealed to the different – perhaps more mature – spirit in later times; but even this eventuality remains within the limits of what was once made objective in it. Upon what, however, depends the extraordinary power of the bond between the ontological strata of the work of art, by means of which it preserves its identity throughout history? That can be decided only by the analysis of the relations among the strata themselves.

Chapter 6: Foreground and Background in the Representational Arts

a) On ordering the problem and its investigation

Even in the act, which is itself a stratified beholding, we can perceive the twofold strata of the aesthetic object. Now that we have oriented ourselves in the opposed forms of objectivation, we are able to place all of these elements in a larger context of phenomena. Then the question of how the aesthetic object differentiates itself from other kinds of objectivation, which we just now discussed, takes on a greater weight. The reference to the greater strength of the inner bond, to its independence and its autonomy, is at this point insufficient. We must observe more closely the individual forms of the aesthetic object.

The following may be ventured in a preliminary manner to orient us within the domain of these phenomena. All aesthetic objects are stratified, to be sure, but not all of them are objectivations. Only the works of art that (94) are created by human beings are objectivations. In them primarily can we grasp the relation of the strata, their essential oppositions and their ties to each other. We must therefore exclude from this first attempt at the analysis of our material anything that is not a work of art, i.e., beauty in nature and in the human being. Later we will inquire into the extent to which what we find in the work of art may be transferred to those other domains of the beautiful.

Additionally, we may make another preliminary restriction. Among the arts, the most important ones for the aims of our inquiry are those in whose creations a spiritual content as a material structure stands out and presents itself to the mind. These are the arts that represent a “material,” a subject, a theme. This group is comprised under the “representational arts.” They are sculpture, painting, and the art of literature. Here we will inquire into the extent to which what we discover in them is found also in the objects of non-representational arts, especially music and architecture.

We may for the sake of our inquiry retain the well-known division of the arts in terms of the “material” in which they work: in stone or clay, in colors upon a canvas, in words, or in tones. It has already been shown why these divisions are not external ones. Not any content can be depicted in any material; or, expressed in a positive way, each material permits only certain kinds of content. Even if, in an extended sense, it is the same content, some kinds of material will touch some of its aspects rather than others. This is because each kind of material allows only a certain kind of construction, and in that kind only certain contents can be captured, that is, brought to “appearance.” The background of the work of art is of course not determined by the foreground; the foreground is much rather determined by the background; but still the “kind” of possible constructions of the foreground prescribes limits to the construction of the background. In that way, it exercises some influence on the selection of the material (its themes), and its influence on the construction of the material is total. The selection thus extends itself to what can in fact be represented.

The peculiar kind of aesthetic value that a creation can have is indirectly dependent upon the material of the foreground, for beauty lies in the form of appearance.

b) Stratification in the plastic arts

The entire problematic of the order of strata can be read off from Greek sculptural art at its most developed. In the upright figure of Apollo nothing is sensibly given except the external shape of the body in a momentary pose. The left arm is lifted, the right lowered. The head is turned to the side toward the lifted arm. The sculpted marble is still; it does not move or live, to say nothing of it carrying out some definite aim. And yet we see much more than this if we stand before it and behold it in the manner of an artist. We see movement, we see (95) life in this human body, and we see the action that, though it is already executed, still expresses itself in the pose. The “far-darter” has loosed his arrow. The extended left arm still holds the bow; the eye follows the fleeing shot. Thus something quite different from what the construction of the material alone can make visible is given with the object and represented by it: the entire action of the bowshot, the pulsing life of the figure, the dynamics of the action and its resolution, and, still more, the superior bearing of the god, its gravitas and its powerful freedom.

The plastic arts all have these features, regardless what phase of a given motion is represented. In the case of the discus thrower, the body is caught in the moment of greatest exertion, just at the last turn before the throw, and only the external form of this moment has been made permanent in the stone. But to the beholder, the entire process and its dynamics appear, including the toss of the disk in the palestra. This is true also for wrestling, for the dancing satyr, even for the David of Michelangelo, where what is shown is his calm and calculating bearing just before he slings the shot. The opposition of the strata is apparent: the stationary real construct and the movement of the appearance. The steed of Colleone stands motionless upon its pedestal and canters at the same time. We see the state of rest, and we see the motion; the one does not disturb the other, does not contradict it: to the contrary, the one makes the other visible.

How is that possible? How can what is moving and alive “appear” in what is motionless and lifeless? We are so used to this appearing, and it comes to pass so easily when we behold an object aesthetically, that we hardly waste thought on it. But the puzzle is merely covered over by that attitude, not resolved. For it remains the case that what is really before us is just the motionless stone; it remains also true that motion, life, and the meaningful execution of action persist in what is unreal. Nonetheless, it is also true that motion, life, and action are beheld in full concreteness; these are given in a manner appropriate to them, and do not at all have to be added by thought, deduced, or inferred. Moreover, the viewer never blurs the limits separating the real and the appearance, although he sees them as one, and yet clearly distinguishes and never confuses the two. It would never occur to the beholder to imagine that the clay moves or the stone is alive, or, even less, to address the person represented as a living fellow man.

The relation of the two heterogeneous strata in its entirety is not intended to cause deception but is rather an accompanying consciousness of appearance as such. And from the nature of works of plastic art we can now list, clearly and in a reasoned manner, the four elements of the relationship within the phenomenon of appearance. 1. The real material foreground in a purely spatial construction; 2. The unreal background, appearing with the same concreteness, but without the illusion of reality; 3. The tight bond of the latter to the former for the beholder; 4. The maintenance (96) of the opposition of the two forms of being in beholding –without loosening the tie that binds them and without any reduction of the concreteness in the non-real element.

We see most clearly in this the contributory role of the beholder in the construction of the aesthetic object. The background “appears,” of course, “in” the foreground, but only to a viewer adequate to the task of looking at objects aesthetically. The stationary material foreground is transparent only “for” him. This transparency of the spatial form is for him obviously what is genuine in the relation of appearance; it is that towards which the entire work of art is directed, for the sake of which the spatial composition in its lifeless stillness has been given to the material stone. But without this peering-through by the observer, it could not come to be. Without the contribution of the beholder there would also be no aesthetic object at all.

There is at the same time much else that comes to appearance in the plastic arts. Just think of the rider on his “galloping” steed who is poured bronze upon a pedestal; the motion of riding appears along with it. It cannot take place upon the pedestal, also not even in the appearance; more crudely expressed, the rider does not appear at all as if he was riding on the pedestal; no such nonsense appears. The rider gallops naturally over the free range, in a field; the field, however, is not present, so it must appear with the galloping rider. Thus there appears accordingly a different space in which Colleone rides, a similarly unreal space that is not congruent with the real space in which the sculpture stands. And the beholder, to whom it appears, does not confuse it with the space in which he is standing as he beholds the rider. Real and appearing space do not get in each other’s way, any more than the static form of the bronze and the movement of the rider do.

With wrestling the situation is similar, as also with the Olympic Apollo and the discus thrower. This similarity is shown with special clarity in the latter. The toss, and with it too the phases of the thrower’s motion, are nonsensical if we relate them to the space of the museum where the figure stands. The toss needs a large space, it requires the palestra, and indeed it belongs there. The palestra appears with it. What appears in the ontologically unreal stratum of the work of art is therefore not only motion and life, but also the specific space that belongs to it. Perhaps one may say: there appears also an entire segment of the world that is inseparable from the gymnastic life of ancient athletics.

And now we must look in the reverse direction and draw the conclusion: only provided that movement, life, ideal space, indeed an entire world in miniature with its hustle and bustle, appear in the silent stony form of matter can we call the plastic constructions in matter a work of art. We behold works of plastic art in terms of this appearing, we stand lost in them and enthralled by them, ourselves transported to this world that appears before us. And again only provided that we maintain in that transport a clear consciousness of the stone shape in the foreground as such, and experience with it the appearance as a pure appearance of what it also is, are we (97) experiencing aesthetically; and only then is the aesthetic object there for us as a whole. In its wholeness it has no other existence than this existence-for-us.

Consider the question we raised above: how is it possible that movement and life can appear in an immovable and lifeless form? If we cannot answer it as yet, we can now bring us a step forward towards its solution. Our sense of vision is in life adapted to the comprehension of moving bodies, of legs, arms, and figures in motion. We perceive life along with living things, although life as such is not visible. The plastic arts make use of these capacities by freezing a phase of motion in static spatial form and presenting it to our sense of vision. We, the beholders, recognize it in our own life, but we do not know it as a static state but as a phase of motion; we see along with it a bit of motion itself. If we look with our senses at a phase of motion, we immediately grasp inwardly the entire motion, or at least a bit of it: the dance, the toss, and the gallop. And as beholders we are drawn into this world of appearance, of animation, of life, of humanity.

So it is, at least, when form is imposed upon the stone; the phase of motion is seized and frozen plastically and true to life. For then the motion is recognizable as such to our beholding eyes. We then say of the sculpture: “It is convincing.” But what we really mean by that is the power of letting-appear. We just do not know that this is what we mean. For it announces itself to us only by the joy of beholding it.

And yet we sense the distance of the appearance of motion from the static form of matter. For that reason, we retain our awareness of the sensible material as such. The reverse of this awareness, however, is our knowledge of the unreality of the appearance and of the artistic achievement in the sculpture. This knowledge is just as unreflective as our joy and the act of beholding itself. That knowledge accompanies it directly.

If we now consider that the fundamental condition of beholding and appearance is that the frozen phase of motion be represented in a true-to-life manner, we can understand how, given an adequately prepared beholder, it is that all else – including the highest levels of appearance – depends upon the intelligible form bestowed upon the real material object. For that reason, everything artistically essential lies in this bestowal of form, including the technical details of its execution.

c) Drawing and painting

When I stand before a Dutch seascape and my eyes become lost in the distance just as if I were looking upon a real beach, it does not occur to me to believe that the wave-tossed sea is really there, and I need only to take a few steps to have it wash over my feet. The painting is not intended to cause such deception; it does not cause the illusion of reality, even when (98) it is very realistically done. What it in fact offers is something quite different: not what is represented, but the “picture” of what is represented.

Here too the two main strata may be distinguished: indeed, here they are more heterogeneous, more dissimilar to each other than they are in the plastic arts, and we are for that reason more easily able to distinguish them. Only the canvas and its spots of color belong entirely to the existing construct – in the case of drawing, the paper and the lines – but what is seen is the landscape, the scene, a person, a bit of life. All those latter elements belong to the background, and they are entirely unreal, and the observer, too, does not think them real.

The artist can directly create only the real element; everything else he creates only indirectly, by allowing it to appear through the forms of the foreground. But he can arrange lines and spots of color so that the entire fullness of the background comes into appearance within it – not seldom into what is in principle entirely unreachable by vision – human life and character.

The greater heterogeneity of the strata is already visible in painting (and in drawing) in the two-dimensionality of the surface of the canvas or paper, for it belongs essentially to the “picture,” while the appearing background has extension in three dimensions just as physical objects do. The first and greatest accomplishment is thus just the appearance of the third dimension into which we peer. The distinctive means of the artist to this end is the invocation of perspective – which in the everyday perception of objects is of course already there, although unnoticed because it almost entirely disappears in the act of reobjectiva-tion. 41 The effect of drawing begins by being made objective. There are other artistic means for the production of the appearance of three-dimensionality.

However, what is essential in all this is that these means do not disappear in the objective element of the appearing background, but instead remain visible and affect us as achievements of art, just as the two-dimensional surface of the painting should also not be lost from sight in artistic beholding, but seen along with the background. If it disappeared completely, the picture could no longer affect us as a picture. It is the same relation, shifted a bit, as we see in sculpture: in the latter, the frozen phase of motion in the worked stone is still seen along with the appearance of motion. There, as in painting, the real foreground as such also remains objective.

Another implication of these facts is that the “picture space” into which we peer is entirely and only an apparent space. For that reason, it separates itself unmistakably from the real space “in” which it appears – that is, from the space in which the picture hangs and where the observer stands before it, thus from the room with its walls or from the exhibition space at the museum. No one looking at the seascape imagines that the sea really stretches beyond the wall on which the picture is hanging, although the beholders (99) who sink into the deep space of the painting might suggest that. That is all so self-evident to us that talk of such illusion seems ridiculous. But the obvious in this case, as so often in life, is what is genuinely remarkable. For it is only possible because when we behold a painting the appearing space is never confused with the real space in which we find it, nor are the two spaces felt to be one, but rather as different.

That is even more remarkable as the space that appears is not quite independent of the real one. The “picture space” only appears properly when the actual position of the observer in relation to the picture surface is correct, that is, when he is at the right distance from it and is properly oriented to it – as a rule in a “central” position – otherwise the order of space in the picture will appear distorted. Even as distorted, it remains of course of a different order than the real space, but the distortion itself is dependent upon the latter.

In every case, however, the “other space” appears along with its objectified realization; it does not appear integrated into the real space but lifted up and released from it, without blending with it and without any actual transition. This is the same phenomenon we encounter in the plastic arts, out of whose figures too a different space appears. Here, however, the separation is more palpable and obvious. This obviousness is given by means of the appearance of the unreal space through a two-dimensional canvas surface, which is of a completely heterogeneous kind. For the canvas surface is consciously seen along with the apparent space; it is thus given objectively. In the sculpted figure, in contrast, the spatiality of the standing figure is of the same (three-dimensional) kind as the apparent space.

We may say that in a certain sense we peer through the canvas surface into the apparent space, into the landscape or an interior. This surface has for the act of seeing aesthetically the peculiar “transparency” of the thing-like foreground for the appearance of the third dimension, of the landscape, or of the arrangement of objects. But still this seeing-through, like transparency, must be taken only metaphorically in this case; for we peer through the picture not as we would peer through a hole, and what appears “shines out” not as it would through a ground glass screen. Both cases would suggest a blending of real space and apparent space. Rather, transparency is only a symbol for allowing something to appear; peering-through is to be understood entirely as non-spatial – in the sense of how one looks into the soul of a man through the expression of his face.

A second distinguishing element of the strata is light. The clarity with which we perceive represented objects rests essentially upon the opposition of light and shade, and even color-tones are given different shades by the conditions of light. For light and color are complementary. (100)

Now the “light in the picture” that falls upon the represented objects and makes them appear in different degrees of shade is not the same light as falls through the window or the ceiling of the real space that surrounds the picture. We may thus distinguish between the real space and the space that appears in the picture, and between the real light and the apparent light. The latter can be focused light (in the style of Rembrandt), or it can be sunlight, the light of torches, the diffused light of the setting sun and, accordingly, the things and figures represented there will be given shades of color, clear or vague lines, or simply suggested by flecks of color and shadow. Moreover, the light in the picture has its own source, one not identical with the source of real light. The source of the light in the picture does not have to be visible, for it makes itself clearly known in the play of light and shade upon the objects in the picture, and does not need to be similar to the real source of light that illuminates it.

Only in one respect is the appearing light dependent upon the real light: the latter is the condition of the appearance of the former. If no real light falls upon the picture, the light in the picture disappears; if it is too weak or poorly positioned (such that reflections appear on the canvas), the light in the picture will be distorted. Yet even in this state of dependency, the apparent light remains a different one from the real light. It maintains its independence in agreement with the laws of stratification.

We see in this a similar relation of dependency as that between the real and apparent spaces. Yet even the independence of the apparent from the real light is the same as that of the apparent space from the spatial position of the observer.

We could conduct the same analysis for the entire manifold of the appearing objects as we did for space and light. We will refrain, however, from that task here, on the one hand because evidently the same is as true for the appearance of things as for the appearance of the space and light in which they are placed; but also on the other hand because much more can appear in the picture than they, such that the unreal background may open itself up further. Of that we will speak in another context. For the present, we are concerned only with the relation between the strata of reality and appearance in general, and this relation is, in the work of the painter (or draftsman) fully and sufficiently comprehensible by the elements of light and of space. These are the decisive elements for visual experience.

We may add to this one thought: the setting-off of the background from its existing surroundings is of special importance in an easily intelligible work such as painting. For it is the same act of seeing that perceives the real and the appearing things, and indeed, with respect to its kind, in the same three-dimensional space (101), the same perspective, the same plastic effects rendered by light and shade, even the same brightness of color. Here is also the source of the inescapable element of “imitation” (mimesis) that is peculiar to all painting and that remains with it however much it grows beyond it.

In painting, this setting-off requires an accentuation external to it, a strengthening of the setting-off as such. This is achieved in giving special prominence to the limits of the picture, i.e., the visible and prominent frame. We do not have to think only of the gilded wooden frame; the white edges of the paper used in drawing will do as well. The effect of the frame is essential, however it is achieved; and it is a kind of test of the relation of appearance in the created work: it does not just set off the content of what appears in the picture, which is assimilated precisely to the visible real objective content, but it sets the appearance as such off from the real as such: we might also say that it sets off the appearance of reality from reality, what exists for us from what exists in itself.

For that reason, the presence of frames in painting is not extrinsic to it, but essential. It serves to create a sense of unreality; it works against the creation of illusions of a non-aesthetical sort. It allows the represented figure or scenes to set themselves sharply off from reality, as it allows the pictorial light to separate itself off from the real light. Without a sense of the unreality the picture is not an artistic work. If one willfully blurs the boundary that separates it from the real environing world – which is almost achievable by certain effects of lighting (think of the effects achieved by the wings in realist theater) – then it becomes nothing more than a feigned reality.

The frame is the simplest means to work against the fetishism of the object. Painting has other means to the same end. The best known is the process of selection. The painter does not put all the visible detail on the canvas randomly, he puts only what is appropriate to his representation and to the kind of looking that is demanded of the observer, that is, that which draws him into this definite way of beholding.

For all observation is selective. We may think of the way our field of vision is biologically determined. There the determining elements are the practical orientation of our interests, and, in the end, the practical values that guide our vision. Artistic vision makes its selections according to other principles; the value that conditions it is the appearance of what the artist sees in his mind’s eye and what the everyday person does not see, or sees only inadequately. This is true for the smallest detail of the drawing or the painting. The picture can limit itself to a few lines or to the most frugal specks of paint – it may in just this way direct our vision toward something definite that is supposed to appear, and direct it away from all else. To attempt such leading of vision, to follow its lead, is to understand the artist: specifically, to learn to see what he sees, and not only intuitively in beholding his work, but also autonomously in life itself. (102)

The result of the selection is the de-actualization of the object. It too allows the emergence of the distance between the appearance and the real. It thereby forces the relation of appearance into the consciousness of the observer.

d) The fundamental relation in the art of poetry

Poetry is similar to the fine arts in that it is also representational; it handles themes, and begins with the imitation of the real world. But it is not “constructive” in the narrow sense, because it does not build its themes directly into some material upon which they may then appear to the senses, but takes a detour over words and, through their mediation, addresses itself to the imagination of the reader or the hearer.

To this distance from the visible there corresponds another circle of themes, and in fact, considered as a whole, a much larger one. It includes all of human life. Things of the mind and spirit dominate it. The material in which this art works, however, is not only other than, but also of an entirely different kind from the material of the fine arts – and it possesses a different power. It is one not culled from nature but a material made by humankind: language, words, and writing. We have already spoken of how language and writing already have the character of objectivation and rest upon systems of symbols and classificatory principles. Now in poetry, words are the material of a higher kind of construction, and in physical forms of writing this form is preserved and receives permanence, the power of resistance, and durability. In that way, poetry, as a work, comes into greater proximity to objectivations of a non-artistic sort, to the great realm of creations of the spirit that can be collected under the title of written works. For no sharp boundary separates prose from poetry; we see this in the narrative art of the oldest writers in history, in the biblical narratives, or in the Norse sagas; in the same way we see it also in the poetic means used to represent the purely theoretical treasures of pre-Socratic philosophy.

Of course at the same time verse is only an adornment of speech, belonging entirely to the sensible foreground and to what is audible. But it is essential to the poetic construction; it keeps the ear of the hearer tied to the foreground and prevents him from entirely slipping past it and from sinking freely into the depths of the appearing background. Verse, as an external form of speech, can for that reason also become entirely dominant. We are especially sensible of that possibility in lyric poetry. Something astonishing occurs here: the process of bestowing form reaches over the sound of speech into what is expressed by it; it places itself, like the sparkle of highlights, upon the meaning of the words, emphasizing and intensifying them. Although it emerges from the visible and in fact belongs to it alone, it serves the internal and most intimate parts of what appears in the words, it takes part in the shaping of the background that is eventually represented, and this is an essential element in the representation. Thus the musical shaping of speech can in the best case complete, (103) indeed contribute – contribute in sensible concreteness – precisely what common words in their conventional connotations (which are always general) cannot offer.

How that comes about is a question that aesthetical analysis no doubt cannot answer in all its implications. But the phenomenon is unquestionable.

In its fundamental nature, the phenomenon of the opposition of the levels that appear in the art of poetry is a familiar one. No one would confuse the human spirit with the letters of the alphabet. Words can be heard and read, but the arrangement of words gives us the real shape of poetic creation. What the arrangement expresses is something quite different: the very embodiment of the human world – the fates and passions, the acting figures themselves, persons and characters. That is all background, that is, mere appearance.

A very naive reader (especially in childhood) will take what is told as “true events,” and perhaps become all excited about them. Such a reader is not adequate to the experience of poetry, he is not a kindred spirit, not in the sense of aesthetical vision; he enjoys the tension, the sensation of what is narrated, but not the poetry as such.

The material of speech receives in poetry a revaluation. The natural attitude takes what is said as true. For the meaning of speech is to tell what is or what was true. The natural attitude takes false speech as a misuse of this sense of truth, as a lie, or at least as a harmless fraud. In contrast, in poetry there appears a meaning of discourse that is beyond the gravity of true and false; it does not concern itself with this opposition, and, in any case, stands before us without the ethos of denying or bearing witness to the real world. This understanding of speech lets us allow things to appear for the sake of appearance alone, to “tell fables,” to genuinely “poetize.” The element in which words exist, their sound, is not affected by this – perhaps only in that its use is freer – but the meaning of speech is changed. It stands to everyday speech as dreams to waking.

Yet in this respect speech is like shaping space in sculpture, and like the magic of colors in painting: it does not feign reality, it does not lead us to an illusory world. Therefore the poet works also with certain techniques to create a sense of unreality. The use of “metrical” lines is only one of these techniques; there are many forms of stylized speech that limit what our sense of reality demands of speech.

The effect of these techniques is that words – which usually serve sober practical interests – become capable of a construction of another order. And by means of these it achieves great transparency, which enables the revelation of what in life otherwise cannot be said. Such a heightened transparency is made possible only by poetry’s indifference to the true and the false taken literally.

This remains essential even where poetry derives its material from reality. Its being put to use and its redesign are reserved to the poet. (104) We understand the unreality of the human lives, actions, and fates portrayed there, and we assume that; we grant to the creator of the material his poetic license to operate with it. In that way he first obtains the necessary latitude in which to move about.

The opposition of real and unreal in relation to the levels of material is thus intensified in poetry, as opposed to the originally practical use of speech. The opposition is not limited to the usual distinction between sound and meaning, which belongs to all speech, but reaches far beyond it. It releases, so to speak, language from its original function of bearing witness to reality.

The freedom of play in poetry depends upon this release, as well as the specifically artistic achievement of language. The setting-off of the appearing background from the context of reality returns again in poetry; it is more evident in the content of speech than in painting, even without the presence of a frame. Poetry allows a whole human world to appear before our inward vision; we can familiarize ourselves with this appearing world, we can, to a certain extent, live along with the characters that appear there. We see people acting and suffering, and we live along with them just in the same way as we do with others in real life.

Yet it is not our own and genuine real life in which we do these things, but another, an appearing one, a poetized and confabulated one. That does not make it any less meaningful, rather it is often enough superior to real life in the content of its meaning, and in the case of “great” poetry this superiority is what is essential to it. But the relation of appearance is not for that reason turned backward, towards our familiar relation to reality; reality is not simulated. That is true even when its themes are current, and drawn from problems of present-day human reality.

The form of existence of the background, with the entirety of its colorful scenes, is and remains in suspension, i.e., it is appearing existence. The figures called forth by the poet “are” never and nowhere than in the poetry. Therefore the slice of life that appears there stands isolated and set off from real life, confined, as is a painting, within a framework. But this framework cannot be understood to be real, but is contained by the ontological space of the language over against the figures. For it is not when we look away from and beyond words, but only through their presence to us, that we peer into the appearing life.

Correspondingly, this slice of life stands with fixed boundaries around it; it is closed within itself, a unity of life sui generis, with a comprehensible structure that is felt as a whole in an act of beholding; a segment that does not flow over into our environing life, but is clearly set off against it. Even here there is a different space in which it appears, and a different time; for poetry is essentially a temporal art. Figures, fates, actions and passions “play” within this apparent space and (105) apparent time. In reading, listening, or “watching” we are “transported” into the other spaces and times, and we do not confuse these with the real here and now in which we read and hear.

That is even the case when the material of poetry is taken from one’s own present times and from one’s own environment. Yet it is still the no-man’s land of appearance, the “world of the poet” in which the events “play out.” And, conversely, it is part of the power of poetry that it may allow the otherness of human life in historical times to appear in the concrete form of present-day life and experience. We see, as it were, through the frame of the written world directly into a life that is foreign and no longer really present to us.

e) The objective middle stratum of poetic works

In one respect the art of poetry is oriented quite differently from the plastic arts. The latter are turned directly toward the senses; and the stratum of being of the foreground, through which the background appears, is real and perceptible. In poetry that is not the case, at least not in an immediate way. It is not that poetry lacks a real stratum, but that it is an inadequate one. Only the spoken word or writing is given as real and sensible; and in fact appearance begins there. But still the figures, their character, actions and fates, do not appear directly in the words, but are mediated once again by something else, one must say: by a middle stratum.

With reference to this fact, we must correct one of the elements in the relation of appearance that we introduced at the outset. It does not cancel at all the fundamental relation, but it modifies it. What constitutes the particularity of the phenomenon of appearance in poetry?

We arrive most quickly at an answer by means of the following reflections. The poet rarely speaks in a direct manner about the psychic events that concern him, that is, about the inward life of the persons whom he presents. He prefers primarily to keep to the externalities, to that which in life offers itself to the senses, that is, to the gestures, speech, and movements of people, to their visible actions or reactions; he presents people as we would understand them in everyday life, i.e., from their expression, those that are voluntary and those that are involuntary. In this manner he creates figures capable of appearing to intuitive apprehension. But these external details are not what are essential to the human life as it appears in poetry; they are not congruent with the inward events, human activity and passivity, the intentions, the decisions, the successes and failures, not to speak of their congruence with attitudes, passions and fates. These are what really are at stake in poetry.

Why do poetic phrases not say these things directly? In everyday life we do this sufficiently when we speak to someone about a third person. Thereupon we see the simple answer: because in direct speech (106) about things of the psychic life words are abstract and clumsy, and they express only generalities. What one says becomes abstract and unintuitive. Only what is intuitive affects us immediately and convincingly. That is why poetry attempts to bring us to “see” the inward life of men upon their external expressions as we normally see the moods, attitudes, excitement, and passions of our fellows without them telling us about them. For every person reveals himself continuously in his visible action and inaction and also in his audible speech (whatever he may say). He does this involuntarily; he “gives himself away.” Poetry puts this to use: it lets its figures reveal themselves, it lets them give themselves away; it places them in changing situations and lets them reveal their character in their behavior. What poetry achieves are not the plastic qualities of this behavior of theirs, but their psychic interior qualities, their fears and hopes, their nervousness and suspicions, or whatever else it may be.

Poets do not speak of such things as psychologists do; they do not dissect the psychic life in a laboratory. Instead of sharply defined concepts, their concrete images emerge from the lives and scenes they place before us and the situations in which persons show themselves. Poets help themselves along with conceptual abstractions only rarely. Anyone who uses them continuously is no poet.

In this way a peculiar intermediate stratum arises in poetry that is unreal, just as the background itself is, and, taken strictly, it also belongs to the latter; but just as the sensible stratum this stratum is immediately visible, even though it does not address itself to the senses themselves but to the imagination. It makes possible the appearance of concrete images of the characters to the imagination. It constitutes thereby a kind of foreground that plays in the entire poem the role of what is present to the senses. And precisely such an intermediate element is needed for poetic representation.

This element is nothing less than a stratum of appearing perceptibility. It is an appearance, because its perceptibility is not real. In fact, it is first produced by the existing stratum of words, but not by the latter alone; it is produced spontaneously and reproductively by the imagination. To that extent it belongs to the appearing background. But it belongs to the foreground with respect to its function, and is also felt by the reader and hearer as still belonging to it, although that is not possible at all, given its mode of existence. Nevertheless, it is directly tied to language, and the tightness of the bond is determined by the strict arrangement of the sounds and meanings of the words. The bond becomes loosened only when the language is not familiar to the reader. Now since the language speaks immediately of the objective multiplicity of this intermediate stratum, the miracle occurs of an entire world of things, persons, and events arising in the imagination, a world that is as concrete as perceptible objects, without, however, being perceived. (107) This intuitable objective multiplicity is the realm of appearing perceptibility.

This intermediate stratum is essential to poetry, even when its concreteness –depending upon the artistic capacity of the poet – may come in many degrees and, at times perhaps, shrinks to a bare minimum. When it completely disappears, the poetry passes into prosaic exposition, and its speech becomes conceptual, dull and abstract. This does not exhaust the function of the stratum of appearing perceptibility. But now it consists for its part rather in allowing what is not perceivable to appear, that is, the psychic and intellectual life of persons with their entanglements, situations, conflicts, etc. – just the same as in painting the visible colors let this life appear on canvas.

That is an advantage that the representational arts have over the art of poetry. Poetry cannot address itself directly to perception – at least not with the colorful fullness of objects, in which they make the experience of life “experienceable,” but instead has to call upon a substitute stratum, where imagination takes the place of perception. For the real foreground in works of poetry, the visible script and the audible words themselves, is in comparison pale, schematic, and abstract.

This disadvantage of poetry is no doubt compensated for in part in that the imagination of the reader, which poetry calls to exercise itself autonomously, is in many respects richer than perception, and is free to move in a significantly larger arena. The displacement of the sensible foreground stratum in its concreteness to the unreality of mere appearance (thus really of the background) has also the advantage of greater freedom of movement and multiplicity. In poetry art moves a step further from imitation.

True, the element of abstraction in speech, which forms the only foreground proper, can never be eliminated. Words are and will remain concepts, after all; and concepts have unintuitable and inartistic effects, even though it may be true that what remains of their original nature contains some pictorial elements. This original element has just been forgotten, vanished, in a worn-out means of communication. But the unreal foreground (the intermediate stratum) is in need precisely of clarity and distinctness. The one who shapes poems knows how to work against this inadequacy by freeing the conventional meaning of words from their torpor; he makes them flow and come to life.

There are many means of achieving this effect, just as in life emphatic or very personal and sentimental speech uses them. Unique meanings of a special sort can be given to words by means of a unique blending of phrases; every word is supple in its meaning, regardless of the fixed arrangement required by their communicative function, and in the subtle nuances of words (108) the sense of each is altered according to the meaning of the entire verbal context. There is also the possibility of drawing out the pictorial character of the words from desuetude. Both means are well known and familiar. They constitute the peculiar transparency of poetic speech. But the special creative power of poetic expression is needed to raise them above mere playfulness and to make them expressive and suggestive.

f) Theater and the art of the actor

The disadvantage of poetry that we have just discussed is balanced out in the dramatic arts – but only so far as a second art and a second artist is placed between the poetry proper and the reader: the performing art and the actor. For then the intermediate stratum is transformed into reality; the reproductive imagination is removed and replaced by real perception. The “unreal foreground” is realized; the stratum of the object, in which poetic figures arrange themselves in space and time and speak and move expressively within it, becomes visible and audible, and can be the object of immediate experience. Readers become an audience.

This changes much. The first of these is the appearance of the art of interpretation itself, which stands between the mind that created the work and the audience that sees it. It is a second-order art – but not in a negative sense – that is quite close to the poetry, but is of a different kind. The poetry is dependent upon it, and must take notice of it, must reckon with it (with the capacity of the stage, the conditions of realization, the effects of scenery); it requires actors, directors, supporting mechanisms, a stage, an apron, a backstage – in all, a theater. Every dramatist knows what this dependency means, especially a beginner: he cannot put himself before the public directly; he must be called to it by the theater. Thus he first learns of the tightly wound world of another guild, represented by the so-called producers.

The second element to change is the work of poetry itself, which takes on a new form of appearance. The external mechanics of the stage creates a peculiar framework, causing an effect related to that of the frame in painting. Literature as a “performance” requires a more radical disconnection from the real contexts of life, just because it makes poetic figures visible and their speech audible. The “boards” themselves produce such a disconnect; they “are” not the world, they only “mean” the world. The apron is an unbridgeable border; it is never crossed in the play.

For these reasons one may say that the relation of the strata in poetry is not complicated by the production but rather simplified. Now for the first time the work of poetry – in its merging with the work of staging it – (109) stands exactly parallel to the work of fine art: it is no longer dependent upon the imagination of the observer (as reader), but addresses itself directly to the senses of sight and hearing; the appearing perceptibility is replaced by real perception.

With this a third element appears: the work of poetry is dependent in its content upon the art of the performer. For the realization of the intermediate stratum is not the work of the poet, but that of the actor. To him, the performer, is given the entire composition of the sensibly perceivable details. He has a free hand with these countless imponderable specifics. He becomes the co-creator of the work, even almost a co-poet; he is also a creative artist in his own way and within his own limits.

The poet cannot determine every perceptible detail of the action in the way, for example, a painter can present every last detail of a visible scene (within the limits he has set for himself) – his material, that is, words, is too intractable for that. The poet needs a sympathetic performer to take what he has put into speech, but only halfway, and realize it fully by bringing it to life. The performer can do that only by adding the details that the poetry lacks, and, indeed, according to his own best lights and his own spontaneous empathy with the spirit of the work (with the “role”), but only if he also “plays,” acts, and makes the material manifest through the commitment to it of his own entire personality. His personality becomes an instrument, his action the medium – through which appears the new acted-out character whose shape was beheld and intended by the poet.

This means that the actor is a “performer” of the work, and that further implies that his achievement is a genuine creative work. We see this most clearly in the case of a failed production: for not everyone who masters his trade is an artist. We might say then that the role was “unconvincingly” played, and we would mean that the actor did not properly represent the character as the poet understood him. Just because the actor has genuine freedom to shape the role as he will, he can play it poorly. The great actor is the one who has sympathy with the piece, who is able to shape the imponderable details of the role through an unfailing sense of its spirit.

Furthermore, it is just the great acting talent in whom the freedom of creative writing becomes visible. A play is different in every performance. In this way even the identity of the work, so immutable in the other arts, is lost to poetry to a certain extent. Its identity is divided up into the string of its performances. What is remarkable about this fact, however, is just that this identity does not disappear at all, but maintains itself untouched behind the diversity of its performances and is unmistakable by every lover of the “piece.” (110)

The enormous differences in the kinds of objectivation correspond to the conditions of performing theatrical works. The poet and the performer objectivize the same events, conflicts, passions, fates, and the same characters. But the poet gives his works only partial concreteness; even in the epic and in the novel the poet is dependent upon the imagination of the reader for supplementation. To that end he puts his creations in an enduring material, for nothing is more enduring than writing (which can be copied and reproduced without understanding it); he creates, as it were, “for eternity.” The actor creates by “performing” what was merely written and confided to the imagination, that is, realizes what is realizable in it. Thereby he finishes to the very end what he took over from a thing only half-created; he gives it full concreteness and sensible clarity and distinctness. But he creates in a transient material, in audible speech and visible movements, gestures, and facial expressions. That is the most transient of all things transient: in a word, he creates only for the moment.

The fate of any performance is the incapacity for permanence. In the cinema, of course, a certain permanence of what is otherwise transient is achieved. We should not undervalue this fact just because the cinema is a recent invention or because it loses much of the vital quality of the stage. But it shows that transiency is not a product of the material alone; taste and a performance’s power of insight may vary also, and the theatrical sense of an epoch is similarly changeable, for we seek new ways of interpretation, even though the poetic work itself endures unchanged. The individual performance gives way to ever-new ones just because it gives shape to every last detail.

Thus the art of the performer is and remains the art of a moment and “posterity gives no laurels to the actor.” Along with the interpretation the actor offers, the work of the poet remains untouched in its “half”-concreteness and offers always the possibility of new readings. The poet, for that reason, is the lone survivor in the minds of posterity. The permanence of his name, as always in art, is tied to the permanence of the created object, thus in the end to the objectivation.

g) Actualization and de-actualization

To all of this one may object: in the performance of the actor, it is rather the entire plot of the poetic work that is brought to life, that is, translated into real events. If that is so, there is no longer any room for an unreal background that appears within the real. Then the law of objectivation, and with it the relation of appearance and the existential condition of the “beautiful” – thus of the entire aesthetic object – is lost.

This objection can be met. It rests on a complete misunderstanding. First of all, even in the case of a perfect realization of the action on the stage there is still much room for an ideal background. Second, however, only a fraction (111) and never the whole of what is acted out in the play is presented as real, and thus drawn into the foreground.

A plot is not externally visible action; its essence lies behind it, in the realm of the invisible. The plot proper, the “drama” as such, remains unreal in its performance. What are real are only the spoken word, the facial expressions and miscellaneous movements of the characters, the gestures, and the dialogue, in sum, what is visible and audible on stage. What is “on stage” itself, understood as a part of the plot, remains unreal. As always, the plot belongs to the appearance, and what is visible and audible is only that within which and through which it appears. It is consummated on the level of the psychic events, situations and decisions, loves and hates, successes and failures, of the destinies of its characters and of the ways in which they are lived out.

That is obviously happening on a different level. All of these events are thoroughly unreal and are not at all intended to be real. The performer does not love or hate, he does not suffer, and the destiny he portrays is not his own: all that only “appears,” it is “played,” acted out. And therefore the performed work is called a “show” and the artist as the performer a “showman” [Schau-Spieler].

In the same sense the poetic figures met onstage – Wallenstein, Faust, Richard III – are not real but only portrayed, “played.” What is real is the living actor with his speech and gestures, but no one in the audience would mistake him with the kings, heroes, or intriguers that he portrays.

Precisely in the art of play-acting and dramaturgy what is decisive is neither the characters themselves, nor their destiny, nor the plot – thus all that is central to it – that is performed. And only for that reason is it possible for the audience to appreciate the art in the acting, indeed to notice it at all. If the members of the audience wished to take the events on stage for reality, the achievement of the actor would disappear entirely for them.

What is perhaps even more important: if the members of the audience were to take the events performed as reality, it would not be possible for them to sit quietly watching and serving as witnesses of clever intrigues or even of murder and manslaughter, or of the deep mental suffering of the characters. The stage would also make an entirely false presumption about its audience. The meaning of a tragedy would be falsely changed to one of moral brutishness, of a comedy to heartlessness. No theater imputes this to its audience. All theories that speak in this context of “illusion,” that is, of the simulation of real events, are entirely false, they have disoriented us aesthetically, and almost destroyed the meaning of dramatic effect. The infantile mind that actually falls victim to the illusion of the theater is not an aesthetical consciousness.

The truth is the reverse: the self-evident knowledge of the unreality of the events being acted out on stage that accompanies all looking and hearing (112) is the necessary condition of the aesthetical and contemplative attitude of viewing and enjoying them. One can observe the entire situation from the perspective of “play”: namely, what is real in everything shown on stage is only the play itself, and what is acted out in it is not taken for real, it is only “playing.” That gives what is performed the character of weightlessness. For the action itself is entirely in earnest, but the earnestness is acted. Only in that way is it possible for the sense of the play to be serious and meaningful, even sublime, without the play ceasing to be a play. The staged play is therefore totally different from children’s play. The latter is to a great extent entirely in the realm of illusion; the child does not keep his distance from what he is playing, he enters its realm entirely.

We find a clear confirmation of this relationship in the need of all stagecraft and performance for a limitation of realism. To achieve this, the ancients introduced songs that were developed at length, and processions between the “episodes.” They also had the chorus, which accompanied the play but had no dramatic effect, and the dialogue was in verse. They banned from the stage all violence and terror, allowing such things to transpire only “behind the scenes.” The dramatic arts have long retained much of these techniques, so also the use of verse, which is the most effective means of linguistic form.

A significant step further was taken by modern opera. Music is no mere accompaniment – for example, as “illustrating psychic states” – as many have assumed. Music is rather the most radical means of limiting realism. For music as such is essentially undramatic and nonobjective; it works against objective reality. Moreover, it introduces an element into poetry that is somewhat foreign to it, one that does not belong to it; for it is another form of art, and its synthesis with poetry opens a new chapter for aesthetics.

In general, every curbing of realism in theater – even by the stylizing of its external elements – is to be understood as the artistic fostering of the sense of unreality, in principle even when it works with questionable means. For it works consciously against the element of “imitation” (thus against mimesis proper). This can be taken too far, and can extend itself beyond the limits of dramaturgy. This appeared early, in the ancient comedy of manners, but most clearly in the modern world. These limits are breached in farces, as in the popular figures of Pagliaccio and Harlequin. The dramatic quality gives way to drolleries, to the farcical, and it disappears entirely in jest and fanciful nonsense.

It is important to recall in this context that in serious modern dramaturgy de-actualization [Entwirklichung] no longer involves the performers “playacting” as such. Realism maintains a free hand here – a clear sign that the appearance of psychic and inward states cannot do without a certain convincing faithfulness to nature. It may, however, also be a sign that the danger of a modern audience falling prey to illusion (113) is past, or at least not likely. The power of expression of the great character actor, which reaches far beyond what is merely typical in the character he portrays, demonstrates this most clearly. For every living human character has in it something unique and individual.

If we place these features of stagecraft alongside the stylized gestures of Chinese dramaturgy or even the restrained playacting in cothurnus and masks, as in the Attic stage, we may see the vast number of options available for portraying different degrees of reality and unreality.

As a whole and in general, in staged plays we find the same series of strata that govern the fundamental principles of all poetry and of all the performing arts. Only with respect to content is that order displaced. The “play” is the displacement of the “appearing perceptibility” toward reality and perception proper. The first segment of the background, which still lies close to the senses, moves thereby into the foreground. But only the first segment: everything else, the plot itself and the enacted characters, remain mere appearance. And when the play as such is understood also as appearance, the plot becomes clearly separated from the foreground and seen as unreal.

Chapter 7: Foreground and Background in the Non-Representational Arts

a) Free play with form

Perhaps one should say rather that there are no non-representational arts. Humankind represents something in all artistic construction – itself.

We must not understand that too narrowly. What appears in a work does not have to be the person or the artist himself; it may be the general type of person he is, and whatever special and intrinsic character that type has with respect to country, people, and epoch. It is always something of this kind. But this something is not what one means when one speaks of “representational art.” With that term, one refers to the specific theme, its sujet. The same artist can treat many different subjects without his own nature, which speaks along with them, changing at all.

Moreover, the personal nature of a writer is not explicitly represented but appears only with what is represented and often primarily only for the ones who stand far from it, his descendants. His nature is simply not made a theme. And if it becomes one, as in a self-portrait, it is again still just one theme among many possible ones. We cannot say that because of this one phenomenon all the arts are equally representational. For involuntary self-portrayal is ancillary; it comes along after the conscious treatment of the theme.

We can treat separately each of the following arts: architecture, music, and ornament. For in their cases the situation is quite special. To be sure, that is true in music only when we ignore songs with a text and so-called (114) program music. Why one can and must do that will be discussed later. At this point the reason suffices that text and title are, as a matter of fact, not music. Therefore we must not make light of extending representational considerations to music. There is also such a thing as “pure music” that has no extra-musical themes in it and does not need them. The lack of such themes is precisely what the three arts we named above have in common, however much they are otherwise different.

In any case, that is only the negative universal in them. The additional affirmative element is not so easy to determine. Even in specific forms of matter, one can glimpse it only where there is a pure though not always free play with form, and then only in a provisional way, with no guarantee of its correctness.

The matter in question is in one case heavy mass; in the other, tones. Naturally each of these allows quite different kinds of play with form. Form itself is determined only as to its kind by the matter, primarily by means of the dimensions in which the form is extended; the opposition between art that is constructed in space and that in time distinguishes the two dimensions of artistic creation, but this alone is insufficient to define their peculiar natures. Poetry, too, is a temporal art, while the fine arts are essentially spatial. Within the limits of what is possible for the matter used, the constructive activity itself is entirely autonomous.

For here begins what one is tempted to call “free play with form” as such. It is a pure play done for its own sake. For “representation” is tied to objects of a non-aesthetical sort and begins as imitation. It must be “true to its sujet,” but it can also be “false” to it. Yet the pure play with form knows nothing of being true or false – not in this sense, in any case – for no pattern, no model, no perceptible shape is given by it. It is based upon no previously given form. For that reason, the endowing of an object with form, as in these cases, is entirely an autonomous activity; it is a different and higher freedom than we encounter in the representational arts. It is pure production without an element of mimesis or reproduction, pure “creation out of nothing.”

This freedom is paid for in architecture and ornamental design by accepting a certain unfreedom of a different kind.

Architecture serves practical ends that in themselves have nothing to do with beauty. Even where the ends are of the highest and most ideal kind they possess always a nature that is external to aesthetics, as in the construction of temples and churches, and also of palaces and the like. As the former serve religious services, the latter serve political power and its aura. In a simple apartment building practical ends dominate most markedly. But strangely this does not, as a whole, interfere with the aesthetical element and its value; rather it bears them. It operates here as a kind of precondition, and where the formal beauty of the house is achieved, it absorbs the aesthetical element completely, without bargaining anything away from it. (115)

It is otherwise with ornamental art. In itself, it does not serve practical ends, but rather the objects upon which it appears; architecture, practical implements, the patterns of carpets. Thus it is a dependent art so far as it is incorporated in a formal whole that it cannot violate, even if these provide only a framework for it. Within that framework, however – for instance a surface that it must fill out – it is relatively free and may, moreover, approach the status of a fine art. When it does so, it accepts many elements derived from the circle of themes within the whole. But such does not belong to its nature, which is absorbed entirely in the play of lines, colors, or spatial motifs that are there only for themselves alone.

Only music is truly free, and then only pure music. For it, too, can, in a sense, serve ends. In pure music the principle of “play” becomes completely independent. Music as a play with tones, melodies, harmonies, timbre – exists in a kind of matter that divests itself, to a high degree, of all aims external to aesthetics. For that reason it is the most free of all the arts. Moreover, it is free in two directions: it is just as free of themes or sujets external to aesthetics as it is free of aims external to it.it.

For that reason the question of creativity is a peculiar one for music. A level of productivity, unknown in other arts, is reached here. Composition is based upon invention – on an inward discovery and creation – to the extent that even a musical “theme” is freely created; it is purely a product of musical fantasy.

Now the question of aesthetics, one that touches profoundly the nature of this art, is this: are we dealing at all in music with the same kind of beauty as in the representational arts? Or does a second kind of beauty appear here?

The latter is what we should expect. If beauty in the representational arts lies in the relation of appearance, thus neither in the real foreground nor in the unreal background, but only in the appearance of the latter in the former, then the situation changes at the point where the opposition of these strata does not exist. Where there is no sujet, none can appear. Is there still another type of beauty that consists in nothing more than a pure relation of form?

There are two reasons for that conclusion. The first lies in the character of pure play with form, although only in specific material; the second can be understood by analogy to beauty in nature and beauty in the human being, where obviously no theme (sujet) belongs to its nature. Those are the points of departure of two more serious arguments raised against the concept of beauty in the relation of appearance. Perhaps all beauty is of the same kind? Or is all beauty fundamentally of different kinds, and the assumptions of an aesthetic of pure form would be true in a new sense? (116)

b) Beauty in music

The circle of questions just touched upon clearly has music as its central concern. Music is the art that is “free on two sides.” We must therefore attempt here to grasp the fundamental problem.

We need not immediately ask whether beauty in music is beauty of an entirely different order. It is sufficient to ask first whether a relation of appearance exists in music and whether, if we can demonstrate that it does, it is capable of bearing the phenomenon of the musically beautiful. To this end we must set aside all program music, even the simple song, which is already a case of combining two arts (poetry and music); and we must not be led astray by the fact that the very beginnings of music are found in song. It is incorrect to judge a highly developed domain of the spirit and its great achievements simply upon its primitive origins. Those later achievements may have left their historical sources far behind them.

Further, we must not fail to take this question seriously just because music lays claim from the outset to psychic moods (pain, joy, courage, wantonness, longing, etc.) as background elements, which are undeniably expressed in it. That cannot be permitted precisely because moods constitute a further stratum of the whole. Besides, one would then pass quickly into the domain of program music. That transition must be postponed until we arrive at a later stage of our analysis.

In the meantime we can demonstrate that even in pure music – and, in fact, this side of all psychic content – a stratification and a relation of appearance is found. Obviously, it also is found in any and all other music, even in the composition and arrangement of works of poetry. But there it does not come into question, as it surely does in pure music.

We must assume that the audible tone constitutes for music the “material” that is given form by the composer. Then we must count the sequence and interrelation of tones as the ontic stratum and the foreground of music.42 One may ask therefore: is there in music something that lifts itself beyond the sensibly audible sounds, something that hovers above it, and can that something be grasped by a person capable of understanding music? Or, to state this in the image we used earlier: is there something here behind the sounds that stands out against them, but that constitutes in this way a background that appears through the sounds in just such a way as to remain the genuine and true musical content?

It can be shown that indeed this content exists. We need only to seek it where it can be found – not far beyond the domain of sounds, but rather close to that domain and still within its realm. (117)

For music itself – a “piece,” a composition, a “movement” – is not simply what is sensibly audible, for above and beyond that there is always the “musically audible” that requires a synthesis by the consciousness thatreceives it, one that is quite different from what can be produced in a purely acoustical perception. This musical synthesis is a greater whole, and creates the background, which is no longer sensible. What can be “heard” together in a purely sensible way is a narrowly restricted tonal structure: a sonata, a “movement,” or even a prelude is far from appearing in such structure. Of course we hear (purely acoustically) as a sensibly real unity a limited series of tones, similarly we hear a series of harmonies, but only so far as our capacity extends for acoustically retaining (the lingering “after-echo”) what has just been heard. Retention does not extend beyond a few seconds, less when the music continues and new sounds continuously wash over what has vanished in time.

Moreover, to hold together (sensibly and acoustically) the great mass of tones and harmonies of a “movement” is musically impossible, for it would cause an unbearable disharmony. Hearing is a sense conditioned by time, and music is an art conditioned by time. A “movement” is extended in time; it consists precisely in succession – a succession that is extended far more than the reach of retention.

Consequently, the movement is never present at any moment of its temporally extended performance. The movement needs time, it marches past our ears, it has duration; in each moment only a segment of it is present to its hearers. And yet to the hearer – at least to genuine “musical” hearing – it is not torn to pieces, but is apprehended as interconnected, as a whole. Despite its separation into its temporal stages, it is still apprehended as a coexistence of its parts – not as parts that are temporally simultaneous, but as belonging to each other, as a unity.

This unity is, to be sure, still temporal in nature, but not a simultaneity. Even a series as such can be a unity. However, here the unity is not produced in sensible hearing, but rather only in the execution of a synthetic act that must occur in musical hearing. Indeed, in the execution of this act musical hearing as such first comes to be – in contrast to sensible hearing. For it is not the instantaneous sound, but only the whole in the unity of its succession, that constitutes the musical organization of the movement’s tones. Only out of this whole do the details that were built into it – the elements that can be sensibly heard together –acquire a meaning.

Perhaps one might object that all this is entirely obvious, for there could be no music at all that did not allow the drawing together of temporally separated elements, allow, as it were, their being heard as one. This objection is just a confirmation of the thesis; what is musically obvious is precisely what is meant. The situation is here as it is everywhere: philosophy is first to note what is remarkable and meaningful – perhaps (118) puzzling – in what is obvious. For a thing is blindly accepted as long as it is thought to be just what is generally accepted and reflection on what it really is has not yet begun. Even aesthetics has, up to now, not consciously analyzed its fundamental condition, and therefore has never noticed what is problematic about it.

But what does this problem consist in? We must reach as far back as the categorial analysis of time. Time is in fact the drawing asunder of all real elements in the stages of temporal succession. A man, for example, is at no moment of his life present to himself as a whole, for what he was he no longer is, and what he will be he is not yet. Only in intuitive time (which is not equivalent to real time), i.e., subjectively, is it possible, within limits, to grasp intuitively one’s life as a whole, because in intuitive time consciousness has something that no thing or process has in real time: freedom to move. In life our apprehension of an activity is always tied to the momentary or narrow segment of it. But it is different in art.⁴³

Now music creates precisely a unity and closed wholeness in what, in the temporal series, is drawn asunder. This synthesis is produced in the process itself of musical hearing, a process that passes far beyond the narrow limits of hearing tones in unison. But it is not produced all at once, but rather successively in the process of sensible listening-to, and on the basis of a very definite inward unity and completeness of the musical work. For it is just this that constitutes an objectively structured interconnection of elements, a construct in which every detail refers forward and backward from itself, and these references are themselves also apprehended, of course unreflectively, but with complete clarity. For only so far as these references are apprehended do we sense the wholeness as such in the changing flow of sounds. And only so far as it is sensed, do we understand the work musically.

For in fact the musical unity of the work itself has the character of a synthesis; that is, it is a “composition” (compositio in a simple translation of “synthesis”). Such a unity is not heard by the senses. Therefore it is a genuine appearance and specifically one that appears through the sense of hearing. It therefore belongs properly to the background of the piece. Taken objectively, however, it is the synthetic unity in which the sound that has at one point died away and is no longer sensibly heard, is yet retained, and thus forms, as something still present, an essential component of the whole that is successively built up in the process of listening musically.

The hearer himself must execute the synthesis. As such, he is also active, imitatively, in the process of composition. (119)

c) The phenomenon of the background in music

Consequently, the fundamental peculiarity of the musical work of art consists in the fact that in its temporal unfolding the listener is able to hear from the inner interrelationships of its elements the compositional unity of such a structure, although that unity is not sensibly audible. For its unity is not present in any of the stages of its acoustical performance, but it is nonetheless what the composition is really about. A musical work requires the listener to anticipate and to recall, and, in every stage of his hearing of it, to have an expectation of what is coming, to anticipate the specific development that the music requires. That is true even when the actual development of the piece reveals itself as a different one than expected. For the resolution of the tension aroused by the music can be different from the one expected, and the exploitation of unexpected (innovative) musical possibilities is an essential element of surprise and enrichment. In music, such things are no different from poetry (e.g., an unanticipated development of the plot of a novel or drama).

It is well known that a composer can go too far in presenting an effective moment of surprise. His music can then seem to be striving after sensational effects. But excess does not destroy the basic phenomenon, for the playing with the disparity between anticipation and what really happens is constitutive of the unity of the composition and the musical structure of the whole, which, while overarching them, comes to appearance in the sounding-out and the dying-away of the momentary musical details.

The synthesis achieved by the hearer can be thought of as follows. As he apprehends what is momentarily audible, he is still inwardly aware of what he has just heard, even of what has long died away, and yet at the same time he is already present at what is to come. For in music each passage is directed beyond itself, both forwards and backwards. If one considers a passage isolated from the others, it loses its musical sense. This sense is tied to the whole. That is so true that in the contrary case, where the discerning listener, who by chance overhears a few bars of a piece, involuntarily supplements them and thereby apprehends a fragment of the whole – regardless of whether what he apprehends supplementa-rily truly characterizes the actual composition or not. What happens in his case is no otherwise than with a person trained in the plastic arts who beholds a fragment of a ruined sculpture.

The artistic miracle of a musical work lies in building within a temporal succession the unity of a collective structure; it fills itself out piece-by-piece, rounds out its parts and unites them as a single structure. By listening musically we experience the music’s lofty climb, its growth, its towering up and out of itself; and this entire construction, rising ever higher, is then completed and unified only just when the audible succession of sounds has come to a close, i.e., has died away. The final (120) bars of a logically constructed work of music will then be apprehended as the conclusion of the structure and its crowning moment.

In fact one hears more than what is sensibly heard; one hears a construction of tones of another magnitude that is impossible to hold together acoustically in one’s ears. This other construct is the music-work proper; it is the composition, the “movement,” the fugue, the sonata. And this other construct constitutes the “musical background.” Of course, we mean only the musical background, for much more belongs to the complete background of the music. Of that we will speak at another place.

Listening to music transcends sensible hearing. The entirety of the music that appears in a movement is not sensibly given as such. Acoustically it is unreal, that is, not even realized in the playing of the music, for it cannot be realized all at once. One hears it “throughout,” for the sensibly given series of sounds lets it appear, although its phases cannot be held together; those sounds have the peculiar transparency that lets something else, the structure that cannot be reduced to it, appear to an attentive listener.

What appears is thus an unreal background in the strict sense of the term. All characteristics of unreality are valid for this structure. Consequently, in music we have the same two strata of the object as in the representational arts: the same two levels and kinds of opposition in their nature, the same phenomenon of appearing in sensible material, the same transparency of the constructed foreground. In the same way too, an identical role is given to the apprehending subject, for only to an observer who meets the conditions of musical discernment can the unity of the work appear. The entire situation with its four members, such as is characteristic of the mode of being of the objectivated spirit, we find here once again.

Of course, only these basic features coincide. We ignore here completely all further stratification. In contrast, the special kind of tie between the strata is quite different in these [representational] arts, perhaps just because in music the foreground and first background are more similar, and are more like each other in kind. For that reason in music, too, people long misunderstood the dual nature it possesses.

But it is clear how in the composer’s work the foreground is determined by the background, how the unity of the internal shape of the composition determines the organization of what can be sensibly heard down to the smallest details. Here again the musical work of art is comparable to the works of poetry and painting.

If these points require further proof, we may turn to negative examples, that is, to failures in music. There is a kind of composition in which the details do not seem to the listener to come together, but instead fall asunder. The details may have a pleasant effect, they can root one to the spot, excite one, arouse anticipation; they may even point ahead to some whole. But when the whole is lacking, when the appearance of structure does (121) not develop out of the music, we experience it as lacking uniformity, as insipid and without character. No inward interconnectivity is felt; the piece lacks the unity of an inner form.

One may also say that such works lack genuine composition. For composition is “synthesis” of unity. The work affects us only externally, playfully; it makes the musically attentive hearer listen in vain; no unity appears to him. The contrast between “serious” and “light” music has nothing to do with this lack. Even superficial music, if it is done well – and that means that it is beautiful – does not lack unity and therefore it also does not lack the appearing background. Unity is in such cases of a different kind structurally, and it governs the rhythms and sounds of the foreground in a different way. But in its own way such music may well be musically beautiful.

d) Composition and musical execution

In a manner similar to theatrical performance, music demands an art of a second order, which alone allows the composed and written music to be audibly heard. The written composition needs such an art even more: after all, anyone can “read” a play, and, if a person has a little imagination, he can “see” the piece inwardly. To “read” a piece of music is quite different; it requires a specialist’s professional training and a great deal of practice. Ordinarily an amateur musician can “play” the music before he can “read” it without playing it. Despite occasional exceptions, it is much harder to hear the music “on sight” than it is to sight-read a piece.

However that may be, the musical public requires the audible reproduction, the presentation, or, in the case of great works, the “performance” – if it is to understand the music at all. In this way, the art of the performing musicians in reproducing it becomes an aesthetical necessity. Here, as with drama, it is an art of “execution” [Spiel], and many of the characteristics of the art of dramatic performance apply: of course, only mutatis mutandis, for the kind of execution is different.

In no wise is it at all a question of representation. For that reason, the person of the musician does not present itself as an “instrument” – as does the actor, who employs himself as the medium of the representation – the singer does not, either, although he employs the human voice as a natural instrument. We must exclude too the opera-singer, not because of the music but rather because of the dramatic stage he inhabits. In pure music, after all, no objects are represented – at least no objects external to music. Therefore, the question of realism and the circumscribing of reality vanish entirely. In song, no doubt, both are present, but only by the introduction of the text as an extra-musical element. (122)

These are all only negative, limiting elements, however. In contrast, what is positive and foundational is as follows. Even in music, an ontic stratum of the artwork, which remains unreal in the written composition, that is, it is not given to the senses but is left to the imagination, is transposed to reality by the secondary art of “execution,” and in that way it is driven into sense-perceptibility and into the foreground of the entire work.

The “reality” that comes in question here is exclusively the acoustical reality, the realm of the sensibly audible. This is true even where the “visible” energies in the movements of the musicians who execute the piece, or even those of the conductor, make an essential contribution to our understanding of the music. These visual cues, which assist us in listening musically, are a chapter in themselves. But they do not affect what is foundational, even when they reach into a level of deep psychic connections to the personalities of the musicians. Let us not forget that it is precisely the profoundly sensitive listener who will look away from these physical gestures so as not to be disturbed by them. To just such a person they may be too dramatic, obtrusive, or distracting.

To this we must add that the “realization” of the music by the musicians –including the amateurs who play it – is so obvious that in fact everyone calls the realization alone music, whereas the printed score in black and white is thought to be a mere expedient. We may not claim, therefore, that the reader becomes a listener (as in drama a reader becomes a member of the audience); the musical reader is the exception.

As a consequence, music proper arises objectively only with the secondary art of the musician. The organization that belongs to it is by nature not as large as that of the actor, it limits itself to the instruments, but it can, in the case of symphonic works, grow radically in size and contain a whole orchestra of artists for whom the musical accompaniment consists in their uniform collaboration –that is, in the achievement of the conductor.

No question of strengthening the effects of the frame arises here [as in drama]. Music as played and heard does not need to be set off from its ties to the environing reality; it is set off more than enough by its acoustic material, because this material, as a tonic series, appears nowhere other than in music. It is true, however, that a strict analogy to the fine arts appears only by means of actual performance: only through the audible performance is there a sensible foreground that is not dependent upon thought; the musical work first addresses the ears, and not the creative imagination of “readers” (who are rare). What is merely an object of thought is replaced by what can be perceived. (123)

In this way, the analogy to the actor’s art appears in its correct light; music is dependent upon the performance by the musician. For here, too, there is an intermediate stratum where the performance is realized. The realization is no longer the work of the composer but that of the musician who executes it. The musician has a free hand in the shaping of the endless details of the most imponderable sort, which cannot be written in the score, but upon which the shape of the whole depends. He is promoted to fellow-composer, and is in this sense not just a “reproducing artist” but rather quite creatively productive – no less than is an actor in a play.

The composer, for his part, requires a congenial performance. The musician has received from him a work that is shaped only in part (still in a relatively general way), and he completes the process. He fills it with life and soul, according to how he thinks it was intended to be. But he does not proceed through the medium of his own person, but through the instrument. For he is not, like the actor, “representing” characters, but is the interpreter of music.

Yet it is also true of music that it is altered in each performance. The reading by the musician is always added to the composition, and that reading can be very personal and unique. Within certain limits the integrity of the music may be lost in this way; it is broken asunder by the qualitative variety of the interpretations.

Nonetheless, the greatest disparity between written and performed music consists in the type of objectivation. The former owes its permanence to the durability of writing material – aere perennius –, it is given concretely only by a half, it is true, but at the same time it is given a structure for all time, offering itself ever again to new interpreters. The musician, in contrast, gives the music a realized concreteness and clarity, but only in the most transient material; he completes it, but only for the moment. The higher objectivation cannot be maintained; it fades away in time along with its unique performance. Of course, within certain limits, the music can be recorded by means of modern technology (recordings), but that technology does not reach to the finer details of the music, and it changes nothing regarding the multiplicity and diversity of the renditions. The individual performances, despite all recording, will always be replaced by ever-new interpretations.

The art of the performing musician remains essentially the art of a moment. For him, too, future generations weave no laurels. And, next to his achievement and towering above it, the written composition in its half-concretion stands immovable, at each instant available for possible new consummations, and its creator survives in the memory of posterity. –

One might venture the opinion at this point that, similar to the actor, the performing musician draws into reality the entire background of the music, including its high spiritual content, so that there would then be no further space for an “unreal” background that could appear in the real. (124) In that case, the fundamental law of objectivation would fail and with it the ontological conditions of beauty.

That would be a complete misunderstanding. In no sense is the whole work of music made real but rather only the first and nearest stratum of the background, that which is sensibly audible, the tones and harmonies. Just these play the role of the intermediate stratum. They alone are acoustically realizable. That is no small matter, but it is not the whole of music. All the rest remains unreal, as before the performance, and is produced only as the achievement of the minds of the hearers. This is true for the entire psychic content of the music, whatever else it may consist in. We have not yet spoken of this matter, but it is easy to anticipate that this psychic content must consist in the later series of strata that constitutes the depths of the background. As in the art of drama, the plot proper, with its loves and hates, remains unreal, so too the moods and feelings in a musical performance.

But that is not the end of it. Even the entirety of the composition remains unreal in the performance of the musicians. The synthesis involved in holding together what one hears as a unity cannot be achieved for a listener even by the most accomplished interpreter; he can surely bring him nearer to it, can lead him to it, but no power on earth can take from the listener the construction in successive order of the whole of the piece in the process of musical hearing. One cannot “hear” for another person, just as one cannot think, grasp, or understand for him. For, as we have shown, the unity and wholeness of a piece of music exists nowhere but in musical hearing. It is therefore clear that everything that we said above about the “appearance” of compositional unity refers precisely to the audible performance of the musician, and not at all simply to the written music.

In this regard it is also clear that only the middle stratum of what is “sensibly audible” is realized in the here and now of the unique performance. And that means that in the performance what is genuinely musical in the music remains appearance. Of course one may not take this being-as-appearance too lightly; appearance can be itself genuinely objective, it can be compelling, cogent, and shock us deeply; it can, to our amazement, pull along violently an audience of listeners and unite them in the unity of “one” artistic experience. But for that very reason it still remains appearance and does not become an objective reality. It is precisely and only in this way that the foundational conditions of the “aesthetic object” and of what is beautiful about it are fulfilled.

It is hardly necessary to add to this that also no element of illusion is found in performed music. As the musicians make no pretense to the reality of their feelings, so also not to the reality of anything other than the varying comings and goings of the tones – not to the whole, which requires synthesis, and not to the psychic element at all. The performance remains performance, and the earnestness of what appears in it and irresistibly sweeps us along remains appearance. The relation among the strata with its contraries of real and unreal is maintained. The relation works here through other (125) means than in the representational arts. Its apparent removal rests simply in the fact that pure music has no themes external to itself, that is, it is not representation. But what it really transmits to the listener through the foreground cannot be expressed at all in words and concepts.

e) On the appearing background in architecture

What the non-representational arts have in common was defined as a pure but not always free play in specific forms of matter. This play is carried on purely for its own sake, but it is limited by the material substance of which it is made (to certain dimensions, the possibilities within the substance, etc.).

Those arts are free only from a “sujet.” For that reason they may be quite lacking in freedom from some practical end. Music revealed itself to be free in both ways. In this, architecture forms the contrary opposition to music: it is subject to ends that are external to aesthetics, and to such an extent that if such an end were lacking, architecture would cease to be. An art of erecting buildings that did not give service of some kind to human life – regardless whether it serves everyday life or that of the state or of religion – would be wanton, empty, merely a backstage.

The chief question of aesthetics with regards to architecture is whether it possesses a relation of strata, or, more precisely, whether in architecture an appearing background exists behind the real presence of the visible foreground. And since nothing like a theme is present in it, the question is not easy to decide.

At first it appears as though the question must be answered in the negative. For among the fine arts architecture is surely the least free. It is bound in two ways: (1) by the nature of the practical ends it serves, and (2) by the weight and intractability of the physical material in which it works.

We may ask ourselves how a “free play” with form is even possible, since form, after all, has other tasks to perform and, even more, free play with form takes place in this instance in coarse matter. And how we are to suppose the appearance of an unreal element? To respond, we must first clarify two phenomena relating to architectural effects.

The first of these phenomena is found in an analogy with music. As in music, where a larger effect arises, one that is audible only to a musical ear, behind what is sensibly audible, so also in architecture. Behind what is directly visible a greater whole appears that can be given as such only in bringing its elements together in a higher kind of beholding. What is directly visible is always at any given moment only one side of the construction, a façade or even somewhat less than that. It is precisely the same when one stands inside, whether it is in a house or the spaces of a church. The whole of the organized structure cannot be seen from any given point – at least not by the senses. Yet the observer has an intuitive sense of the whole; and that sense develops quickly and surely as one wanders through the various interior rooms of the structure, or as one (126) changes one’s position while observing the uniform interior spaces or the external shape, so that the various perspectives, sides, and component elements are taken in one after the other.

This succession of views is no doubt random, and not a process of being led through some objectively given series, as in music, but it is nonetheless a temporal succession of individual pictures, each giving way to the next one, and which, optically, are quite different from each other. Aesthetical seeing, however, occurs when, standing out from these varying visual aspects, a whole with an objective structure appears, a physically unified composition that is as such not visibly given and cannot be seen from any given point, but rather first appears in the work of synthetic mental representation, and is to that extent “unreal.”

This is no doubt true only when one places great weight upon the idea of “the senses.” For the whole of the building is present before us as ontically real, but it is not sensibly visible in a single act of observation. The relation of appearance is displaced in this case, and approaches the phenomenon of appearance in natural beauty, where the elements of the entire vista are also genuinely together. Of this phenomenon we will speak later. For that reason we will leave at present the unsettled question of this ontological inconsistency.

Meanwhile, the inward artistic way of seeing is clearly distinguishable from sensible seeing. The object of this inner vision, as in music, is something larger, the composition proper. In viewing successively the parts as they become visible to us, the individual views become interlocked in a total picture. And as in music the individual tones cannot be heard acoustically as one, so in this case the individual views are not visible as one.

This phenomenon has not been taken seriously enough, probably because it seems so obvious. But in such cases, the main issue conceals itself in its very obviousness, that is, the genuine phenomenon of seeing architecturally. In it, the appearance-relation is hiding. –

In contrast, the second phenomenon is well known and often described, and yet it is difficult to describe it adequately. Apparently something more is expressed in the appearance of a building than the spatial and material form. We see this with special clarity in more ancient structures upon which an entire past civilization is visible. One need not know of the civilization from other sources; one senses it rising up before us even absent such knowledge – of course with varying grades of forcefulness. Very definite forms of human life are tied not only to churches, temples, palaces, to open stairs or battlements, but also to half-timbered homes or farmhouses in a local style. As a free-standing sculpture is encircled by an apparent space, so is a building placed within an apparent time and an appearing life-form, even within its cultural background: its forms of piety, its power and freedom, its ethos, its citizenry, peasantry, or lords. Something of all these “appears” in works of architecture, no doubt (127) in a very graduated manner, and most of them are present only darkly, as a living background, yet still satisfying and animating the architectural form. To the reflective observer, all that may become concretely present.

There is no exaggeration in these observations, and what they give us is not a mere picture. Something of this appearance-relation allows itself to be described matter-of-factly. A house stands to the domestic and personal family life of people as clothes do to the public person. We know that clothing constitutes the public and usually conscious self-presentation of a man; it expresses how he wishes to appear, and thus is the expression of his idea of himself (therefore fashion plays such a pronounced role in it). The lack of independence of individuals from the demands of style changes nothing. But a house is, in a certain sense, the garment of the individual’s most intimate life within the community (family, relatives, domestic life); for that reason it is an even stronger expression of his self-understanding – one might also say his self-consciousness – within his larger circle of friends and associates. And that is all the more true because a house is less ephemeral than clothing; it is built to endure even for generations, and receives for that reason something like the character of a monument.

In this way historical peoples and epochs “appear” in their architecture, and by no means only in the monumental ones; these are simply the ones that endure the longer. Many historical periods appear in buildings in the most marked fashion – also in their goals, desires and ideas. The latter we find impressing themselves upon us through their monuments.

This is important in yet another respect. The analogy with fashion in dress is obviously architectural style. However, there is hardly another art in which the element of style plays such a dominant role as in architecture. The reason for this may lie precisely in the element of practical use a building possesses; not everyone needs to write poetry or to paint, but all of us must have a roof over our heads and may therefore come to a point at which we must build one, and to do so without being an artist. Even the average building engineer is not yet an artist. He can build only “as one does,” that is, he falls back into the architectural style of his times. Thus it happens that men living in architecturally productive times become almost fixated on the current style; in that way, that particular style becomes characteristic and dominant, and we recognize it everywhere as the expression of its epoch.

An entire world of the appearing background is thereby given in architecture.

f) Practical purpose and free form

That much alone may suffice as a demonstration of what is in fact present in a work of architecture. But the problem lying within it is not thereby settled. Architecture is bound on two sides, that of the intractable material and that of practical purpose. Are these elements compatible with creative freedom in architecture? Here we encounter a clear antinomy of freedom and unfreedom. (128)

The solution must lie in a synthesis, one specifically engaging the two sides. The practical task of the building must be entirely integrated into the uniform composition and in such a way that it is visible along with its solution, i.e., it “appears.”

Considered in this way, the practical purpose is not a troublesome element, something that we would prefer to see eliminated, but rather an affirmative element that cannot be dispensed with. The practical purpose, along with all other specific architectural tasks that arise out of it, plays a similar role here as the extra-aesthetical “theme” (sujet) in the representational arts, although in fact it is not such a theme. Architectural purpose is distinguished from the theme in that it is not freely chosen, but is taken from the given needs of life; indeed they mark it out. Architecture is not a free art but an art that serves us, indeed a good half of it is pure technical science; only in great architectural undertakings does it rise above it. It is also the only one of the five fine arts whose works remain tied firmly to practical life, for its creations are not isolated and separated from that life. However, we are not prevented from seeing them as closed unities and as wholes.

This last point has its limits in the close propinquity of buildings along a street or in a townscape. But then they may be integrated into larger wholes.

Moreover, the practical purpose in architecture is distinguished from a “theme” in that it is not “represented” in a building; it is instead realized, is implemented by an actual construction. One may say only in a qualified manner that in its implementation it also represents itself.

Accordingly, the practical end is a positive condition and is content-bearing. The formal beauty of the architectural work absorbs that end in such a manner that it consists in and exists along with the technical elements of the work’s execution. The “elegance” of the solution of an architectural problem, even when it is quite prosaic, constitutes an essential element of architectural beauty. A building without a practical end would seem inorganic and unconvincing.

No doubt the conflict between the practical and the beautiful continues unabated even into the details of the design, and it may be impossible to force a truce upon them. But it is just here that a demand is placed upon the architect: he confronts the task of discovering a synthesis. And genius in composition, that is, in the art of architecture, may consist precisely in the degree of balance achieved by an eye that is both a builder and a creator of forms.

Something similar is true for the other side of the constraint upon architectural form, its connection to the substance of which it is made. This constraint is of some importance, for this is the coarsest and most unwieldy matter that we encounter in the arts, and its shaping is a real struggle. Sculpture, which must deal with similar material, is easily able to choose whatever suits its aims, and in some cases, produce it (129) synthetically – as with metal alloys, which obediently take on any form desired and hold it fast.

Not every form is possible in any material, but only certain forms in specific material; that is a fundamental universal ontological law. It is valid for all of nature, for every human construction, in all technology. It is valid also for the arts. But in architecture, it is like a decree of fate. A building must take material upon itself despite its weight and at the same time achieve stability of form, and the material must turn itself to account in structuring the interior spaces. That is only possible for certain types of construction. The greater portion of the work is technically determined by necessities of this kind; one might think of architectural technology as one great struggle with matter. And the solutions given to these problems, especially when they concern great size or generality, are so many victories of spirit over heavy matter. Schopenhauer saw this condition in his aesthetics; the result was a dynamic interpretation of architectonic form – a much more significant and profound interpretation than in modern art-historical theories, which understand all form exclusively from the perspective of construction in space.

This is especially remarkable where a structure is executed in the most durable of all materials, stone, which is also the heaviest and most inflexible matter. Overcoming weight in the roofing of the interior spaces is the main achievement of construction. This principle is already apparent in the form of Greek columns, which must support themselves as well as the architrave, the gables, and the roof. They direct thereby our mind upward to the phenomenon of juvenescence and make it visible. Weight itself appears to the senses in the form of space; it is of course actually present, but not visible as mere presence. It becomes visible only as form. Yet at the same time the overcoming of weight by the form of the structure also becomes visible. Well-known examples of this are formal structures such as the arch, the barrel-vault, the cupola, and the ribbed vault. The most evident example of this fundamental phenomenon may be the principle of the buttress, because its lines reveal most obviously its dynamics, its absorption of the side thrust of the building and the unbroken transmission of that force downward to the earth.

We find the greatest achievement of formal construction of heavy matter in the high-vaulted inner spaces of a church. Here weight appears clearly to the senses as the vault hovers and is held high above us in empty space. We are used to this sight nowadays, and our eyes pass carelessly beyond it. Originally, however, this floating over space was thought a miracle. The real element in it is the architectural construction – if you prefer, the technology – but the aesthetical element in this real relation is that the construction, and, in it, the victory of spirit over matter, “appears” in what is visible and becomes intuitively apparent.

With every new architectural invention there is a change in what appears and becomes evident in the visible – that is, there is a change in style. For the (130) style of a building in its formal structure is dependent upon the kinds of solution required by an architectural undertaking. Here is a further reason for the peculiar dominance of style in architecture. For here we do not have a free play with form, but rather an inner conditioning of form and the appearance of this conditioning in the formal elements.

The beauty of an architectural structure, as far as technical capacity makes it possible, comes to light when the overcoming of weight is actually made visible in the play of lines. This visibility is, however, no longer merely sensible, but is a beholding of a higher kind. One may therefore say the other way around: in technique and construction, provided that they condition the formal structure, it is a question of an appearing background. The content of this background is the intellectual achievement of the architectural composition.

g) The place of ornament

Ornament can no longer be counted among the great independent fine arts – as the name [Ornamentik] itself indicates. Nevertheless, for the sake of its kinship with the non-representational arts, it must be treated as an adjunct to them. On the one hand, it is freer than architecture, because it does not serve practical ends directly and it works usually without any great struggle with matter. On the other hand, it is not an independent art because it merely attaches itself to a building –or to some lesser human construct – and thus never possesses its own artistic effect.

Looked at positively, however, this lack of independence is its incorporation in a greater formal whole. In such a whole, the ornament has the function of decoration. If it is assimilated entirely to this function (as, for example, in richly decorated types of capital), then it also is drawn entirely into architecture, and becomes just a part of it. It is otherwise when an ornament lays separate claim to, and indeed possesses, an effect of its own by lifting itself out of the architectonic forms as something quite different, or even develops motifs of its own and thus again makes a new whole in itself.

This possibility of such a thing can also be aimed at by a building – just in order to allow the forms of the architecture to stand out against it. The ornament then has an effect similar to a frieze behind columns, which, as the latter, functions as an independent work. For the most part we will be speaking here of ornament in this last sense. It is not possible in any case to draw a sharp boundary between them.

Ornaments of pottery, vases, tools, and weapons play a relatively dependent role. But the origin of ornamentation may lie precisely in such cases. No doubt the oldest ornamental works we still possess (prehistoric ceramics) are of this kind; they are perhaps even older than the other arts. Precisely for that reason such dependent ornaments are not without high interest for aesthetics. Even in its origin, they are clearly a play with forms – even where they are forced into the service of a utilitarian object.

Nonetheless, each ornament can be regarded in itself, not otherwise than a picture or a sculpture. And that they permit this treatment (131) is essential to their art. Arabesques, for example, form a play with lines, which almost provoke such viewing. They are closed wholes and geometric schemata, and quite often possess symmetry and easily take on traits of a pictorial kind. One should not overrate their relative rank for this reason; still, within their modest limits they possess aesthetical independence.

The essential problem with ornament is whether even here there is an interconnected arrangement of different strata, and whether even here the beauty of ornament is dependent upon it. One must perforce question whether there exists in this case something other than the sensible real stratum in the foreground (the physical substance), in which the play of lines, the design, the fantasy of spatial forms, is each developed.

Now everything seems to indicate that we are at this point past the relations of strata and appearance. And that is true in a certain sense. In any case, we may find it difficult to trace the pleasure taken in an ornamental pattern to such a relation alone. Yet we must not dispense here, because of that difficulty, with what is a foundational relation for aesthetics. It is indeed contained in ornamental works, although it is concealed here. But it does not lie in the so-called motifs. The “turnip-pattern” on a Bukhara carpet is as such only a kind of occasion. Similarly, chain, vine, and animal patterns are exploited only as motifs. They are not represented objects, and hardly have any content that can produce an effect. One cannot glimpse anything appearing in them.

What is immediately surprising is the repetition of the motif, and also the spatial rhythms in the repetition. The same is true of other similarly formal elements: the arrangement, the symmetry, and variations of the motifs, and the coming together of the whole in a unified form that can take on pictorial character.

In this way, we are drawn to the other element in the essence of beauty, which lies in free play with forms. This element manifests itself, forces itself forward, and makes itself dominant. This process is similar to that in music, only with other materials and less rich. And again, something of the creative spirit appears here, though only indirectly, in its manner of seeing and its sensibility. Certainly at least something is there of its taste, its sense of form, its need of unity, its way of indulging in fantasy, and in its passing beyond the useful to create something of beauty.

No doubt, one can see clearly from this how the beautiful does not reduce itself to the relation of appearance in the ornamental arts. Play with form proves itself here to be an entirely autonomous element. And that means that there exists an autonomous enjoyment of form, one directed precisely on the free play with it. This too is manifestly a genuine aesthetical enjoyment, although one less profound than one that is tied to the relation of appearance.

We could trace this enjoyment back to the pleasure we get from play in general. But that alone tells us little. That would depend upon (132) the objectivity of form in play, and this objectivity cannot be understood in that way. It will rather become necessary to return to much more primitive foundational elements, ones that belong to visible form itself, such as contrast, harmony, intertwining, interlinking, or overlapping: in short, to certain structural elements that are sufficiently general to have a categorial character. In fact, with such catchphrases as these one approaches the most elementary categories that all existing things and the content of all consciousness have in common. It is here in particular that one encounters the relation of unity and plurality, whose variations in the strata of existing objects is in any case extremely rich and truly dominant.44

This much may be offered as a view upon these matters; we will keep the question open. However, if this view is later confirmed, the entire play with form will be integrated again within the relation of appearance. For the appearing background in ornament would then be nothing less than the realm of the fundamental categories themselves.