First Section: The Series of Strata in the Arts

Chapter 11: Opening up the Background

a) Modes of being and structures of content

The analysis of objects up to this point has been very sketchy. It has already shown the most important characteristic of the aesthetic object: the opposition of strata and, in the case of the arts, the ontological oppositions also. Further, it pointed out the way the strata are mutually interlinked and the significance of this fact for the relation of appearance. The results we have gleaned were shown to be valid within the domain of the arts – to a degree that found its limits only for a marginal phenomenon, that of ornamentation. They did not fail even in the case of natural beauty. Then too, the results afford, at least in principle, latitude for a different type of beauty, free play with form. Whether this is consistent or not with the beauty in appearance is as yet undecided.

These results are of course valuable, but much too general to do justice to the phenomenon of the aesthetic object in all its varieties. A second front of inquiry is therefore needed. It will have to confine itself to the arts for the most part, for in them the problem becomes more concentrated, as the background is not real. The arts no doubt can be unequivocally classified according to their “matter” [Materie], which in the case of the representational arts will yield indirectly essential distinctions with respect to their “material” [Stoff]. Since it is in these arts precisely a question of giving form to some artistic content in matter, the greatest importance lies upon the manner itself in which form is bestowed.

And at this point a further problem finds its source, one that we cannot approach with the mere distinction between two strata and their mode of being. Giving shape to some material is a question of “form.” But with reference to form one stands before the much disputed question of what in fact distinguishes form as such from form as an aesthetic value – a question that seems so simple from an artistic point of view but is so completely opaque when one attempts to grasp it intellectually.

Aesthetics must in some way take up the problem of form. It is no doubt already apparent that the entryway to it lies in the stratification of the object. (165) But the two-strata relation developed above is obviously insufficient. What are we lacking? Where is the theory biased?

The bias lies first and foremost in the fact that the analyses of these strata terminated in the ontological opposition of foreground and background and essentially remained there. This opposition is, ontologically considered, the most remarkable thing about the art object: the inseparable whole of reality and unreality is a uniform structure, ontically no doubt a piece of nonsense, but one made possible only by the decisive participation of the third element, the receiving subject, which, as it were, itself stands outside the stratification.

For the aesthetic object in general, this peculiarity cannot be decisive, if only because it does not hold true for the natural object and for human beauty. What is decisive is real in these cases, and therefore the difference in the modes of being does not apply. And yet we still catch sight here of the relation of appearance. We cannot, therefore, make the essence of the beautiful as such depend upon this opposition. If, on the other hand, this opposition is essential for works of art, even for what is genuinely remarkable about the arts, still, even for works of art, beauty as such cannot lie in the ontological opposition. The opposition of the strata –above all that of the sensibly given and of the appearance – cannot be assimilated to the ontological opposition.

But this remarkable feature is not the whole. The stratification reaches further – towards the interior, and certainly without further opposition on the ontological level. This means that the unreality of the background, once it has been reached (at the stratum that lies closest to the front) vanishes no longer from sight towards the “rear.” It continues on within the other inward levels of the object. We still must immediately provide evidence for this point.

To express the matter positively, what is decisive here is that next to the ontological opposition, a distinction of strata of a content-structural kind asserts itself. This distinction is just as important, but it does not limit itself to an opposition of two elements alone.

This other opposition cleaves the background into an entire series of strata. This implies that in the case of the work of art there appears in it not a simple background stratum, but rather a whole series of strata arranged one behind the other, all of which have the same unreality and are present only in the relation of appearance. They exist only for the beholding subject, and as content and as structure they stand out clearly from each other.

This opposition, in contrast, leaves the real foreground untouched. The foreground remains uniform. So it is at least in the primary arts; in the secondary arts – the “play” arts, in theatrical arts [Schauspielkunst] and in musical play [Spiel] – it is split up. But this splitting up is only an apparent one; in fact it is rather displaced than split up, that is, displaced toward the nearest stratum of the background: in the theater (166) the genuine play moves to the place of the written text, while in music to that of the audible sound.

In contrast, the appearing background arranges itself in a descending series of steps into the twilight depths of ideas, not immediately but mediated by other strata, which are just as unreal and just as essential for aesthetics. Here the main element is that this generality appears not abstractly and conceptually, but concretely and intuitively, not secondarily in reflection but immediately and at first sight, even if it is veiled in many ways.

We may summarize the entire situation regarding stratification in the following way: with respect to its ontological nature the art object exists essentially as two strata, but in respect to the collective structure of its content – and that means in respect to its inner form – it possesses many strata.

Both have great significance for the essence of the art object. The first is the ontic condition of its historical being, its continuing existence in some durable material, its capacity to be rediscovered and reawakened, its return to the living spirit even centuries later, and also its power to affect and modify that spirit. The second – the plurality of strata of the background with respect to its content – is the aesthetical condition of its profundity and richness, its fullness of meaning and significance, but also, and not least, the relative height of its aesthetic value, of its beauty. For along with the series of strata grows the concrete richness of the whole; the state of transparency continuously and evenly grows from stratum to stratum and with it the miracle of concretely intuitable appearance. On this the beauty of the object depends.

Those are the two fundamental functions of the work of art in man’s spiritual life, i.e., the great consistency in its existence and its aesthetical charm. It is important to make clear that both depend upon the stratification in the work of art, but not on the same stratification; further that there is without a doubt a starting-point where the second stratification (the aesthetical one) hangs upon the first (the ontic one), and that the second stratification would be an impossibility without the real foreground.

b) An example: The portrait

Before we continue our examination of the fundamental principles, we must attempt to exhibit the series of strata upon a concrete example.

The task is difficult, because it must appeal only to the beholder’s own aesthetical intuition and, where possible, avoid fixed concepts. Concepts are entirely insufficient here. Everyday language has no words for it, and science does not create any concepts for it, for the kinds of distinctions that function here are foreign to them both. These distinctions are given only to aesthetical beholding itself. (167)

We select our example from painting, specifically the portrait. We may consider one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in old age (these portraits are more tangible in their inner strata than many others). The series of strata may be sketched out in the following way.

1. The only thing given as real in the foreground are the specks of color on the canvas, which are arranged entirely two-dimensionally (the real light falling of the picture counts here indirectly, as does also the real space in which we take our proper position in face of it).

2. There then appears through the foreground the first stratum of the background: the three-dimensional spatiality, another unreal light with its (usually invisible) source, and also the physical shape of the represented figure with a portion of its environment.

3. We may take as the third stratum that of movement: the living bodily presence. This belongs – in the portrait it is limited naturally to the expression of the features – no longer to what the painter can make visible directly, and it is in that way and to that extent set off from the apparent spatiality, and yet is the foundation of all else.

4. For something else at once appears along with the third stratum: the man with his inwardness, the nature of the man; there appear traces of struggle, of success and failure of the man, of his fate in life; not the external fate, of course, although this too can stamp its traces upon a face, but more so the internal fate, that is, fate as it is determined by one’s own personhood. This stratum is extraordinarily rich, or at least it can be. It is what perhaps touches us so deeply in beholding it. It is essentially beyond what can be seen with the eye; it lacks spatiality, color, and physicality, in the same way that this stratum is also not visible upon a living person. The artist is able to make it appear only indirectly –as it appears in the real world only upon the external features of a face. Of course there the appearance of this stratum is made easier by the visible movement of the features.

5. But what is most amazing is that this stratum, which does not appear physically or through the senses at all, has yet the power to be transparent for something more. In a man as he is there may appear a man he is not at all, but rather as he should be in his very essence and nature. That is, his individual Idea can appear – in the way it appears in life – only to a loving glance.49 This achievement is one of the most remarkable capacities of art: the intuition and appearance of the moral core of personhood both in its uniqueness and its ideal nature at once (of, as it were, his intelligible character). This achievement is not within the capacity of the student of human nature, who never sees more than what is typical. Here the eye peers all the way through a man to what is unique and singular in him; it is precisely this that makes the portrait (168) a proper “likeness,” [das Ähnliche] that is, literally a premonition [das Ahnende]. Every person has fortunate moments in which his individual Idea appears. The artist grasps at such a moment and holds it fast. In this way he holds fast the Idea’s appearance.

6. And then there is yet another thing that can appear, something just as much part of the background; a thing unfathomable yet tied to the inward nature of a man: that which is universally human, that which anyone who beholds it recognizes as his own. It stands in strict opposition to the individual Idea, which cannot be a stand-in for anyone else and which must affect every other person as alien to himself. But here there shines forth something that concerns everyone, something that shows to everyone his own soul. In the arts one calls such things the Symbolic. And we cannot deny that it first gives genuine weight to individual persons, even the specific quality of their life and fate. Great works of art receive precisely from this final deep stratum their greatness and their permanent significance. That is quite understandable, because this is the universal, which addresses all men ever again in all epochs of history. We must simply make clear that there is no further expression for this something than the artistic expression: to let appear. There is no name for it: those that some have introduced – the Significant, the Idea (often only one’s own religious convictions were meant), or the Deep Meaning – tell us nothing about its content. It is given only in what can once again be concretely recognized in what appears, and there it is unmistakable.

c) Some discussion of this example. Implications

What we demonstrated by reference to this example of a particular art form, indeed of one of its branches, is valid for all the arts and works of art; and beyond them, for most forms of beauty in the human and in the natural realms. It is valid for all things that are beautiful through an appearance-relation. It has its limits only where the relationship of appearance ends.

But this does not mean that the series of strata are everywhere the same, or even just as rich in content. The series takes many different forms in the arts, and is in part variable even within any of the arts. In painting, the strata of the background that are found more deeply within the work are quite different in the case of landscape or still life. This means that the order of the strata, and even the number of the strata, vary with the material. But they vary additionally with the way of seeing and its corresponding way of fashioning of the material – thus with what we call style.

It would be more correct to say that variation in the series of strata is an essential and foundational element in the distinction between materials and styles. For materials are chosen with reference to this variation, but the kinds of fashioning are developed out of them. This will be apparent when one reflects that everything unique in the bestowal of form upon objects is determined from within, that is, from the deeper strata of the background, and that these are the strata whose appearance, in the end, is the purpose of everything that is more towards the foreground. That surely does not exclude (169) a certain reaction from occurring in the coexistent strata. But the fundamental relation that has been specified remains clear: from inner to outer.

An additional spotlight falls upon the entire principle of the order of the strata in art when one considers that this order possesses the character of a series, that is, in it the relation of appearance is a graduated one. It is no longer a relation of only two members, as it originally appeared to be, but is a relation with many members that continues from stratum to stratum.

In this step-like relation only the stratum closest to the front, that of the sensibly real, is not one of appearance and only the most inner stratum is no longer transparent, or one that allows deeper things to appear. All the others, which lie between them, are both: they themselves are appearances and also in turn allow things to appear. They are, after all, the middle strata, and connected to others on both sides. What is aesthetical in this relation manifests itself from the reverse side: each of these strata, as an appearance, is carried by one that is further forward than itself and is itself the carrier of an appearance of one in the deeper background. Thus the relation of appearance continues step-wise and structured from the real sensible foreground into the last, hardly palpable structures of the background.

It is clear from this analysis that the entire weight of the ladder-like structure in which phenomena come to appearance falls, in the end, upon the real sensible stratum of the foreground. This is the only level to which the artist can give shape in a direct manner; all fashioning of the later strata must be achieved indirectly, just by letting them appear through the first, and the process is led precisely by the bestowing of form. And since this bestowal of form is at the same time the leading of the observer, the process can itself be understood by the observer in this way: the entire direction of inner vision – of the representational faculty, of fantasy, of intuition – begins with what can be perceived of the real foreground. Through it there appears in the next-deeper stratum, which is already unreal, only what “can” appear on the basis of the visible forms; again through this appearance there appear out of the next stratum after it only what “can” appear on that basis, and so on through the series.

Accordingly, what we have already seen from the character of aesthetical beholding is again evident: it is a beholding that is tied to and carried by perception into the depths, which are removed far from all physical sensibility.

d) Dependency of appearance and dependency of composition

This sequence of dependency in the continuing series of the relation of appearance must, of course, correspond to something similar in the composition of the work of art. And this latter must also have a reverse direction: from inner to outer. For in the creative work of the artist the appearing stratum must always determine the transparent one, through whose fashioning it is to appear. (170)

In the activity of the creative agent, the aim is always the “bringing to appearance” of what is beheld. That means that from stratum to stratum the background determines what stands further in the foreground. That in which something should appear must always be directed at the appearance of what is beheld, that is, it must be correspondingly fashioned. How the artist does that is and remains the secret of his art; the “law” of this process is precisely what he can obey – perhaps can even make, but never specify. For he knows as little as the observer.

Now not all works of art have the deepest background strata, for example the two last ones that were specified above; but some of the “further” strata are always there. This implies, however, that the outer is always determined by the inner, even if, as surely happens at times, in a contributory way. This determination is passed on from stratum to stratum until it takes on itself perceptible form in the sensibly perceptible foreground.

Thus there flows a dependence of the structure counter to a dependence of the appearance. Both pass through the entire series of strata but in opposed directions, the latter from the inner towards the outer, the former from the outer to the inner, and just for that reason they are the opposite sides of one and the same relation. The opposition here is similar to the one we find in the domain of knowledge between the ratio essendi and the ratio cognoscendi; however here it is not a question of being and knowledge, but of appearance and beholding.

As clear as these main features may be, there is always something puzzling about how what is ideal or just merely universal in a human sense can extend itself into the sensible matter of the foreground and still offer itself there as appearance to the eyes of the beholder. We cannot limit ourselves here to simply ascribing everything to the secret of artistic genius; it is not a question of the peculiar way the artist fashions his work, but of the fundamental principle that what is in the background and fundamentally different from sensible vision can yet appear within the visible.

Let us stay with Rembrandt’s self-portrait in old age (perhaps the one in London).50 In the sunken face and its heavily hung features there is something in the gaze of the eyes that, once we seize upon it, will not let us go. We will have difficulty in saying what that something is, but it is there, it forces itself upon the beholder – and all at once we comprehend the suffering and overcoming in the man’s life, comprehend something of the inner fate of the genius, comprehend perhaps directly the individual law of this nature; immediately we grasp also the universally human, and the tragedy of him who wrestles with the highest things. What is entirely invisible becomes “visible” in the play of color and form upon the canvas.

We can vary our example as we wish; we get always the same results. Think of the smile of Leonardo’s Anna Metterza [The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne]. It is perhaps the most ephemeral thing that a man can grasp. It is held fast (171) upon the canvas with all else that transmits it – perhaps just a little trace in the corner of the lips, but yet a thing that is completely present. Even the faded colors could not efface it.

The power of letting-appear fetches the smile up and out of the deepest background and brings it to the sensible foreground, passing through the entire series of strata. Turned around, the appearance itself leads the observer from what is given by the canvas to the senses into the most inner depths of the essence of man. However not everything about this enigma is insolvable. Something of it can be resolved. What art brings about here occurs in life also – in the way in which men encounter and see each other. For they do not see each other only via the senses – they see also into the very soul of the other, but always through the sensible impression. And this seeing of the soul, this other form of beholding, is in fact the way men see each other in life; it is for the sake of that beholding that men look upon each other. Usually such seeing does not go very far into the depths – it does not easily pass to what is individual in a man – but in principle it is the same looking-through from the sensible into the psychic, which the painter also turns to his own use.

We find only two distinctions here. 1. The artist banishes what he sees into the realm of durable matter; he “objectivates” it so that it may at all times be beheld by an observer. 2. The artist beholds more than the profane eyes of a man in everyday life. The latter’s eyes pass over and past most of what is to be seen, most easily over what is deeper and more hidden, for he does not have time to engross himself in such matters. The eye of the artist begins precisely with what others overlook.

e) Filling out ontically the series of strata

For this reason, the opening up of the background, which first appeared to be uniform, into an entire series of strata is central to aesthetics. Without it, the miracle of artistic revelation would not be possible. How far we may follow this principle into the arts themselves and into beauty other than that of art remains to be established. First, however, the situation has a further aspect.

When we spoke here about the law of objectivation (in Chap. 5, esp. b), we came upon a fundamental peculiarity of all spirit. Spirit appears as free and unattached in none of the three and only three forms of spirit we know of, but only as spirit that is carried (“resting upon”). So it was in the case of living spirit, of personal spirit, and of objective-historical spirit. And, moreover, it is always the entire ontic series of strata that carries it, for even psychic being is carried by organic being, and this latter again by physical and material being. There are no exceptions to this principle in the domain of real spirit. How is it, however, in the domain of non-real and non-living spirit, i.e., that of objectivated spirit?

In the first stage of the analysis it appeared to be clear that spiritual content was carried by a physical and material stratum of being – by material that had been fashioned, i.e., that of the foreground – but not by the mediation (172) of the intermediate strata. Psychic and organic life seemed to be eliminated. But then it became incomprehensible how spiritual content can tie itself to material being directly.

This problem is by no means a difficulty that was resolved artificially. May not what is not possible in the real world not only occur as such in the appearance-relation, but also be convincing? It is wonderful enough how from stratum to stratum higher being can be supported by lower; this great heterogeneity in the natural relation of two neighboring levels is already considerable. If the intermediate stages were passed over, say perhaps two at once, the bestowal by spirit of form on matter would be completely incomprehensible. For the most heterogeneous entities that exist in the world rest close upon each other, so that in fact the highest has to appear directly in the lowest.

This aporia can nevertheless be very easily resolved. Any absent intermediate members must be able to manifest themselves in the relation of appearance. One could draw that conclusion simply from the role of the beholding observer, who is necessarily contained within the total tripartite relationship. Yet it is important to demonstrate the presence of the absent members even in the series of strata in the aesthetic object itself. And to do that, we now possess the key.

That key is just this: the law covering the splitting open of the background in the work of art asserts that the intermediate strata appear also – and appear, specifically, in the same order and the same dependency (as one being supported by the other) in which they would have to appear ontically if the object were entirely real. The relation of ontic dependence of the strata is also maintained in the series of the appearing members. The most inward features of a man, which always bear large traces of his spiritual life, are not, as it previously seemed, tied directly to matter and its fashioning, but rather first to psychic life, then to organic life, and this last one alone is tied to matter. Only in characters in art do love and hate, pain and joy appear; otherwise such things could not be made visible to the senses or even imaginable. And again, only on the level of love and hate do human individuality, character, personality, and even more, genuine conflict, fate, or other such relationships of meaning appear. Only in a preliminary examination, in which the manner of being was central, could we be mistaken about this return of the natural condition in the entire world of appearance of the work of art. In the context of the manner of being, there are only two strata. Only the inner differentiation of the appearing background throws light on the real nature of this relationship.

This solution of the aporia is important for another reason. For it is here that we can in addition reveal the actual basis of the differences in the kinds of objectivation, which is decisive for a more refined understanding of the position of works of art in our spiritual life. (173)

Let us remember that on the one hand, we have words, concepts, and writing expressive of thought; on the other hand, we have the work of the artist. Both are fragile and subject to decay with time; words suffer changes in meaning, concepts fall “out of use,” scientific documents are subject to misinterpretation and liable to reinterpretation. A special difficulty is posed by a single concept that has lost its original context, for it is difficult to return to its original foundation in intuition. Its fate is peculiar: it loses meaning and it withers away into abstraction. In contrast, the work of art holds tightly to its historical background; it lets that background appear through epochs and cultures wherever and whenever a beholding subject adequate to it appears.

We can account for this difference in kind only by what was said above: the work of art contains in itself its own concrete detail, while the concept has such detail outside of itself; the latter must be supplemented always and only by some larger intellectual context, that is, they must be filled out with intuition. This explanation is to the point, but it does not reach as far as the genuine problem. For one may yet ask: why do concepts (and everything built up from them) have their detailed context external to themselves?

To that the answer may be given: concepts have their detailed content outside of themselves because within the concept there is no effective guiding of intuition from the technical term itself (from the foreground, which is audible or visible in writing) to the intellectual meaning (the background) in which the intellectual property, the spiritual content, consists. Such guiding can occur only where the objectivation contains the entire series of strata from the sensibly given to the spiritual. This is absent from the concept: here the “thought” is tied directly to the concept, and there is no trace of the intermediate strata, which otherwise could appear. There is given no genuine appearance-relation. One cannot “intuit” the thought.

The situation is similar, mutatis mutandis, for entire pieces of writing that convey thought. However, in this case, the relationships among the concepts give us some starting-point for efforts to recover an intuitive understanding of them. The larger relationships help us to overcome somewhat the absence of direct appearance; here an indirect appearance takes over. But the means it offers are not intuitive. The isolated single concept, however, has the content that would be needed to satisfy it entirely external to itself.

Apart from the aesthetical effect, it is therefore the strength of the objectivation in the work of art that it can produce and conserve the entire series of strata in itself, and, correspondingly, it is the weakness of the concept and all conceptual expression that it does not produce the series of strata in itself. One may express this more concretely: what constitutes the strength of an artistic objectivation is the relation of appearance. Its essence consists in the letting-appear of spiritual content in sensible material. A concept, however, cannot make any of its content appear to intuition at all, at least not by itself alone. In it, then, the tie is an external and conventional one. It fulfills its function in (174) thinking only as long as the meaning given to the technical term is already known and can be executed intuitively. For if the concept is not filled out by intuition, it is dead.

The work of art is fundamentally different in this respect. The relation of appearance itself is carried out for the entire order of strata. That does not change the fact that in the How of appearance many kinds of mysteries still abound.

Chapter 12: The Order of Strata in Poetry

a) The self-testimony of the art of poetry to its middle strata

Painting, the one example we have given, is, to be sure, much too narrow to survey the relations among the strata and their consequences. Now that we have opened up the background, the first phase of our analysis (Chaps. 6 and 7) must obviously be taken up again and extended to the other arts.

Naturally, the way through the labyrinth of appearances must first be found. It must again lead through the entire list of the arts, but in so doing, it does not have to take the same route. Such a complicated relation as that of the “continuous appearance” can best be approached where the manifold of the strata is most clearly visible. To that end, the example of the portrait was chosen (in Chap. 11b). Now we must begin the second part of the analysis with those arts in which the strata can be most easily distinguished and where at the same time as many strata as possible can be found.

These conditions are best met where an art is not only representational but where the emphasis is placed on the side of thematic. That is most frequently the case in poetry. Poetry is the art that possesses the greatest range of material: everything that makes up human life, with its events, conflicts, activities and fates, belongs to its domain. For that reason it was once considered by the Idealist school as the highest of all the arts. But we must not forget that poetry is, from another perspective, the art that reaches least into the realm of the senses. For its matter is composed of words.

To this we must add something else that helps along our analysis. To pick out an individual stratum of appearance, to express its peculiarities in words, thus to describe it, is not easy; indeed it is always a risky enterprise. Concepts clash with intuition. This difficulty is well known, and aesthetics has always felt itself limited by it. For the ineffable, which is given, if at all, only in the relation of appearance, must be expressed in words, in a medium inappropriate for it.

It is obvious a priori that this can never be done. Such description does not even pretend to be successful in such an exacting endeavor; but it must nevertheless attempt to approach it, (175) that is, at least to set forth a few characteristics of the essence of the object that make it distinguishable from others. And here is the point at which the work of poetry meets the demands of such description.

For poetry speaks out in words that which philosophers cannot pronounce upon adequately. Up to a point, at least. Its matter is words, and what it cannot grasp by them – directly or indirectly – it can not grasp at all.

However poetry grasps very well the background of human life. It must therefore make articulate that in which it will allow that background to appear. But that means that it must give expressiveness to the intermediate strata. Then by means of their transparency the poet can allow human inwardness to appear. This fact can be turned to use by aesthetics.

Naturally the aesthetician does not find what he seeks simply expressed in concepts. The poet does not speak at all in concepts as such. Even when he uses concepts that are current, he transforms them in their meaning, emphasizes their pictorial origins, and, by means of context, places accents upon them that we would not otherwise recognize. However, that does not at all prevent the poet from giving voice to what people do not know how to say in their everyday language.

Poetry bears witness to itself in this way. It itself lays bare the principles of the construction of its product, the work of poetry. Its pictorial language is entirely sufficient for the aesthetician; indeed for its purposes it is superior to every other. For the aesthetician is not now primarily concerned with concepts as such, but only with a certain capacity to describe. And for that nothing can surpass the description in the language of the poet.

We must now try to choose examples so that one or another of the middle strata can best shine forth with a certain independence. Poetry has many such instances that serve this purpose. It addresses itself to the concrete imagination, it points always and initially to the external doings and activities of human character by means of words, which alone constitute the foreground – just in fact as things manifest themselves in life.

b) Poetic concreteness

Let us put together a few simple examples that will immediately allow two middle strata to become apparent. The first will be “There was a king in Thule.”51

Of what, really, do these few verses speak? We see the “old rake” at the hour of his death upon a cliff overlooking the sea, how he drains the golden goblet for the last time and then throws it into the sea, thus denying it to his heirs. Behind this another picture emerges, about which nothing is said, which simply shines through: the picture of a young love that could not be fulfilled – perhaps because of the ancient fate of princes, who could not choose the woman they loved – of a love, however, (176) that had followed him through his entire life, and now, at the point of death, it is the one holy thing in that life.

Or the verse from Sappho: “The moon has set and the Pleiades; it is midnight, and time goes by, and I lie alone.”52 A brief fragment, and yet everything is contained within it. We are told directly of the sleepless night in a lonely place and of the setting of the stars; we see the west-facing window and the night-blue sky through its opening. Of the yearning of the lover lying there nothing is said. That appears only in the picture of the lonely woman upon her couch. But poetry cannot help the person who does not hear that yearning from within it.

This is characteristic of all poetic art: it does not speak of what in fact is of most concern to it. For what concerns it, if spoken in everyday words, would seem crude; and moreover it would not have a living intuitive effect. How is art to render the essential? To that question one can only repeat: it renders it in the same way that fate, suffering, and life are given to us in real life, in the external behavior of people.

Art also needs, as the examples demonstrate in certain contexts, only a very small segment of the external behavior and the specific circumstances in which it moves. It is not a question of more or less, but of how material is chosen. All human behavior betrays something of the agent’s inward state, whether or not he wishes to reveal it. What is decisive is only that the chosen segment of his behavior betrays precisely that which is to be shown. This betrayal is identical to the relation of appearance.

If one asks why the poet takes this detour, we must answer: because only in this way can he really “let be seen” what he wishes to show – seen, of course, as understood in the sense of second-order seeing. If he were to speak directly of hate and love, jealousy, envy, fear and hope, he would sound like a psychologist, who calls everything by name, not as the poet does; and what emerges is not an intuitive picture, but a concept, which must be satisfied in some other way by intuition. It is well known that bad poets psychologize.

We do well to place next to the above examples some others taken from poetry of a more complex kind, that is, from the novel or from dramatic works. As different as these two forms of literature may be, they are still similar in that they both work with more complex materials, that is, they present a larger slice of human life with its conflicts, resolutions, and fates. They lead us into a whole sphere of humanity, and within and out of that sphere individual characters take shape. If the poet subjected his characters to a preliminary analysis, he would bore us. If he tried to tell their entire story, he would lose himself in an ocean without boundaries. He lets them appear in their acts, their speech and their reactions to things – but within a sharply limited selection of details. He lets them characterize themselves in a short sequence of scenes, lets them “betray” themselves, just as people do in real life. (177) And it often happens that we do not guess rightly or see through him at once, but at first see the character from only one side, similar to the one-sidedness of a picture offered of only a part of some action; and that is just the way it is in life also. Just in this way the entire picture of what is inward takes on life; it sparkles colorfully, it includes contradictions, and these are essential for the progressive revelation of the inward lives of the characters.

A wonderful example of this last idea is Prince Harry (in both parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV): how he presents himself in the scenes with Falstaff on the one hand, on the other in the scenes in which he is king. What strikes us directly is how unconcerned the poet is with the unity of these oppositions in one person. Clearly this affects the audience in a much more concrete and lively manner the less it is thematized as such on stage.

But even without this phenomenon of opposition, a single small episode, presented without the slightest explanation, can give us the most profound insights. Think of the malicious little scene about the aunt’s hat in Act I, Scene 2 of Ibsen’s53 Hedda Gabler.

The great writers follow exactly the same lead. Of course, many things are described quite simply; but what is essential in the work is not found there. Dickens⁵⁴, for example, allows almost all of his characters introduce themselves in scenes in which they bear the action. The description that precedes them is concerned mostly with externals. Hamsun⁵⁵ often lets his characters speak of matters of little consequence; what is important is not what they say, but what they do. In general, what is important is what is imponderable. It is not that the content of a speech is always unimportant; it is obvious that it is. But it is not the center of concern. That concern remains always what is unsaid and inexpressible.

The details that become transparent in this way are always more tangible when the poet allows his characters to speak directly. And there the strata in the poetic work are made directly apparent. Our analysis can begin here. In a sense we need only continue.

c) Distinguishing the strata in poetic works

With what strata of the poetic work are we concerned? Obviously not with the real foreground, with the words. But neither are we examining at the start the last and most deep strata of the background. Rather we are concerned at this point exclusively with certain middle strata. We must not attempt to describe these in detail and set them off from each other; only then can we appreciate properly the positive relationships between them. Now this relation is the relation of appearance.

1. The one further forward of the two strata considered here (and the two are nothing more than appearances) is clearly the one that in painting and sculpture corresponds to what is immediately and sensible visible; it is also the one that is pressed into the realm of the visible and the audible (indeed into that of reality); it is further the sphere of physical movement, (178) placement, facial expression, in a word everything externally perceptible upon a person (one may compare in this way the above examples).

2. The stratum behind it, which appears through it, is not at this point entirely inward, but rather primarily just that of the elements of plot, the external behavior, the actions and reactions, the successes and failures of the characters. Among these one may also count indirectly the intentions, conflicts, and resolutions, then again also the situations – as far as they cannot be assimilated to the external contacts among the characters but rather include the tensions among clashing purposes; yet the motives and dispositions are still excluded.

3. Even with that, the series of strata with which we are concerned is not concluded. Only now another stratum begins, which, however, already appeared in the previous ones. We may describe it as that of the bestowal of psychic form. For only by observing the way the characters act may we peer through them at the unique moral specificity and character of men, at what is already established in a man’s psychic life and is a prominent feature of his nature. From this standpoint, we distinguish the frivolous person from the sensible one, the egotist from the considerate man, the heedless person from the reverential, the coward from the bold. This stratum (it is already the third of the background series) first reveals to us the ethos of men, their merit and guilt, their accountability and their awareness of responsibility. For that reason, the depths of the conflicts, which lie always in the felt value-conflicts, first open up to us here; similarly, the moral side of the situation: that in which freedom and necessity are fatally intertwined – as the necessity of deciding freely.

One may think of the way in which Dostoevsky introduces his Dmitri Karamazov. We first learn some facts about his youth and career, which are reported as matters of fact. No one would feel on this basis genuine sympathy for him. The situation changes from the moment where, without premeditation, he lets the troubled Katerina Ivanova visit him, but then chivalrously lets her go off with his money, captured, as he was, by her great confidence. We are won over by her great faith in him. He thus wins with a single blow not only the heart of the girl but also the heart of the reader, and not all his later madness can efface that.

4. But then something quite different attaches itself here, once again a new stratum of objects. This stratum no longer concerns the inwardness of man, but rather the whole of his life. For even this whole cannot be given directly; it contains too much detail. The poet lets this whole appear only at certain points, in scenes or episodes; he shows it to us with the aid of its inward integrity, and for that the presuppositions are some characteristic conflicts and actions and the interlacing of responsibility and guilt.

This whole we may call destiny, whether it is that of the individual character or the mutually interconnected destiny of many persons. One must not, however, take “destiny” literally – as one determined for men (179) by a higher providence –rather it is usually the fate that one prepares for oneself, and is often a fate for which a man himself bears the guilt. The Nibelungenlied offers a lovely example of this. Siegfried prepares his own doom by allowing himself to deceive and break faith with Brunhilde, and then does not have sufficient resolution to destroy forever the trophies that betray him. As an example of a fate for which a man is guilty himself, the Nibelungenlied stands much higher than epics of otherwise the same rank.

The appearance of destiny is a large and significant event in epic and dramatic poetry. From a certain standpoint, it is the point from which all other matters, including the characters, receive their illumination. It is what we usually do not see in life, because we are too immersed in individual events. The job of poetry is to break open this narrowness of vision and point out the totality that appears within it. But poetry does not do that by speaking directly of such totality; it allows the inexorable consequences of decisions and actions to speak for themselves. In this way, the destiny of a man becomes concrete, picture-like, and intuitable.

d) The most inward stratum. Limits to what can be uttered

We have deliberately spoken up to now only of the middle strata of works of poetry. In them, we see clearly the step-by-step progress of the appearance-relation. But we must distinguish the last background strata from them.

What is there still, beyond character, guilt, or fate that could appear there? In the last chapter we demonstrated what there is by means of an example taken from painting, for the entire series of strata is similar (in cases where a person is represented): these are the strata of the individual Idea and of the universally human, both of which are of an ideal nature and superempirical, and yet they are different in nature.

1. As for the first of these strata, we have little to add here. Every man realizes that what lies within his nature is only partly realized in life. He can miss it entirely – through a bad schooling, a poor education, the imitation of alien personalities, and so forth; but some part of it still exists, and can be visible in him even through its many vicissitudes. When we realize that every man in every decision that he makes in life cuts himself off thereby from possibilities that originally were open to him though yet undefined (ontically they are of course only in part possibilities), we come to understand immediately at what an enormous distance a living person can find himself from the potential riches of his original – or we should say ideal – nature.

We normally do not notice that about a man. To do so, patience and a deepening observation of him are required. Everyday life does not leave us with leisure for such looking. But someone who loves a man personally often does; he is seeking the particular nature of the one he loves. Possibly he loves only because he sees the beloved (180) in the light of his idea of the beloved’s personality, in the ideality of that what he is precisely in distinction from all others. The peculiar thing is that the poet, too, is capable of such beholding. In that way he is like the lover.

The difference between them is only that the poet in his capacity is not limited to a single person, and that what he beholds of the ideality of a person can be shown to others, so that they may also be able to see it. The lover cannot do that. At bottom, the kind of vision the poet possesses is of another kind.

What kind of vision could that be? We might think it to be a form of the intuition of values [Wertschau], indeed genuine ethical value-intuition. This does not suggest an intermingling of ethics and aesthetics; moral values are in any case the presupposition of the understanding of those conditions, situations, and conflicts that make up the stuff of poetry (in the third and fourth of the middle strata). There is no good reason why we should take the values of individual personality as an exception to this. To the contrary, since these values are concrete and various, they have special weight among the materials for constructing a work of art. Recall also that concepts are not at all adequate in the case of these values; as instruments, they are much too coarse; our living feeling for values, when it turns to concepts, easily loses itself in what is indefinite and blurred.

What is needed here is sharp, sculptural beholding. That arouses the poetic eye. Recall once more the example mentioned above of Prince Harry. The figure of Hamlet is individualized even more adequately in its Idea; no human type is sufficient to encompass it, but the man Hamlet, characterized by his empirical life, is also unable to reach the idea of him. Another figure seen in its intelligible idea is Alexi Karamazov. As Dostoevsky depicts him, he is not that in all respects, but only just as far as in life itself the ideal essence of a man breaks through into reality.

Not all poetry enters into this realm. Playing with the idea of a personality is a dangerous game. It can turn into a mere construction, in which case the work fails. The elevation into the ideal may affect us unnaturally, as artistically invalid; it may lack the power to convince. The majority of poets hold themselves back from such attempts. But there are works in which the highest ends are achieved in just that way.

What is contained in the “constructed personality” is easy to describe. It is the ideal of the individual invented by the inexhaustible fantasy of man – and not by following the genuine intuitive personal idea, but rather following a set of general ideals. A pale figure that affects us little emerges in this way: the fairy-tale prince, the knight without fear or blemish, the angelic maiden, the wise old man. Those are of course extremes; they are outworn figures from folk-tales. The descent into the unpoetic is palpable in them. Only the genius masters tasks of this elevation. (181)

2. It is quite otherwise with what is ideal in nature, which has a universal character. This kind of entity forms a further stratum of objects everywhere the object concerns human things – not only persons themselves. Whether in this case it is always a question of the a deeper stratum is uncertain, but in one sense it is so in all cases, that is, here we deal with things that are more distant from what is concrete and intuitive.

In life also we frequently see in the destiny of an individual, in his struggle or his guilt, an image of our own life; we identify with the hero while reading a novel – whether we do so rightly or not – we thereby enter into his world, we win or lose with him. All that rests upon a certain kind of generalization, upon the inarticulate knowledge that “so it fares also with others.”

The poet cannot of course rest content with such obvious generalities. There are generalities lying far more deeply hidden, and which do not open themselves so easily to everyone. That, for example, “happiness” more easily comes to him who does not pursue it; that one’s own action “brands” the one who did it; that people’s loving sympathy is not measured by the advantages and abilities of one’s own person but by our sympathetic participation in their lives – those are things that one never stops learning. They do not engage a man when told of them by a person of experience. But they reach out to him when they become intuitively visible in the image of a human life.

The poet does not express these general truths in words – that is, he does not “pronounce” upon them – he lets them appear in his characters. Only in that form can they affect us concretely and convincingly. The poet moves, in a certain sense, between two perils with such generalities. If they fail to meet the mark entirely, or if they are hardly recognizable as such, the poetry seems “flat”; it lacks what concerns everyone and what is important to all. But if he puts them too far in the foreground, and makes them explicit themes, if he in fact pronounces upon them, they seem unpoetic; that means they will not affect us at all, however profound they may be.

The genuine poet allows these truths to appear only upon persons and events hidden behind the eloquent details presented in the middle strata. That means: he presents them just as life also at times reveals them (when a man knows how to choose his words), in the image of the single case, often in the form of a puzzle, so that the reader has something to puzzle out. Thus in mature years we read many works of poetry with a quite different understanding and even with different aesthetical enjoyment than we did in youth. (182)

e) Ideas in literature

General ideas conceivably play the largest role in literature. They belong most authentically to its “material,” and the specific, concrete materials are often chosen with reference to them. However, it is by no means the case that one should have to express them as a kind of principle; that happens rarely. The general or universal also need not have the form of a moral idea, as in the above examples; it can be of a much darker, irrational kind. It can, for example, take the form of a metaphysical disquietude, a living anxious fear, an inexplicable sense of uncertainty – something like the feeling of impotence before the countless and incalculable powers that affect one’s fate.

A great number of general ideas in poetry are of a religious kind. This is because much great poetry in earlier times, like the other arts too, grew upon the soil of religious sensibility. And here, too, it is true that the average poet directly utters these ideas of his, while the genius allows them to appear in the destiny and in the attitudes of is characters (he lets them have faith, doubt, go astray, find the way back, “wrestle with God” …), and that is quite different from expressing one’s convictions. Naturally, general world-views of all kinds function here. They may work themselves out even as far as the characters’ love life and create harm or blessedness there.

Such general ideas may extend to absolutely all areas of life, even to the political sphere. One can find many important examples where the idea of the freedom of a people forms the very backbone of a literary work. It makes no difference whose freedom is at stake or against whom one is fighting; what is alone important is that sympathy be awakened for the oppressed and hate be felt for the oppressor.

These political ideas are especially instructive, for we can see in them clearly that it is not primarily a question of playing them off against each other, clarifying them, or even just uttering them, but merely of making them accessible to feeling. And that happens not in the course of their analysis, but in the action: by means of the injustice, heedlessness, and scorn of the powerful; by means of the indignation, rage, impotence, and despair on the side of the weak.

No art utters so many ideas as literature. And, in contrast, what the man of intellect, or even the philosopher, has to say about them is quickly forgotten. But we still may ask: why in contrast do they disappear so completely? The poet is usually not a thinker; he is not the one to grasp ideas most adequately and deeply. How does it come about, then, that the poet utters them most adequately?

But that is just the whole thing: he does not utter them at all; he just lets them appear. It is hard for the philosopher to utter general ideas; he has to hit the bull’s eye, to show their parameters (define them). He must, especially, draw out of them the objectively universal as such, and make it (183) evident. The poet requires none of that. No one calls him to account. He needs only to point them out, but not point to the universal as such – each person can easily discover the universal element for himself – but point only to certain characteristic features of individual happenings, of personal feelings, passions, decisions, etc. That is sufficient to him.

It is clear that this frees the poet immeasurably from such burdens. After all, one can point to many things whose universal meaning one can darkly sense without naming them by name or even without being able to explain them. The poet not only does not have to do the latter, he must hold himself back from explanation. Explaining is not his business. The universal idea the poet has in mind should remain veiled, half in secrecy. Only out of the events may it speak. The poet does not have to “know,” in the strong sense, about it. Just this element of ignorance makes him capable of allowing it to speak out of the poetry, without him speaking of it.

But let us not now turn the spear around. We are not saying that the poet has it easy. In a certain sense, it is precisely the height of human capacity to integrate characters, events, destinies, passions and actions, so that the meaning of general ideas springs forth from them – and, even more, without obscuring their concrete individuality.

This capacity is not given to everyone who can create rhymes or fit together dramatic scenes. Scores of youths try their luck in the poetic arts, but produce pieces often with little beauty. Why is it that so many give it up later, even though they have learned to measure themselves against greater poetry, even though their own expectations have grown? There is only one possible answer: because most of them are wise enough to recognize that they lack ideas; they mark well that they have no insight into the depths of human life, and that at bottom the pleasing shapes they trace are hollow inside. Or: they have ideas, and they have beautiful language, but the former do not appear in the latter. The gift of looking-through upon what is significant, and the capacity to speak it in the language of life – that is, the language of acting and suffering, of hate and love – is and remains a rare gift.

f) Toward a survey of the strata

Overall, we have counted here seven strata of literature. Only literary works could contain such riches. But this is true only for works of the high style: the epic, the novel, and the drama. And even there it is not always the case that all the strata are developed in the same way.

In literature of a more modest kind, the case is often simpler. Lyric poetry does not develop a plot; no conflicts, etc. appear in it – none of that belongs to its (184) type. It leaps directly from the sphere of the external (perhaps from the surroundings, etc.) to the stratum of feeling and moods; it is able moreover to let us know something of the nature of fate (as in the fragment of Sappho) – perhaps even something universally human – but it has no need of such things.

Lyric poetry fills its function entirely simply with this lesser aspiration. No doubt, it fills it often in a more perfect way – perhaps just because its aspiration does not aim so high. This idea is connected with two things: 1. with the very tight framing of the poetic work – so to speak, its miniature size –, and 2. with the peculiar external organization of its language, which the lyric permits in these dimensions. In these ways a certain concentration arises, both of what can be said directly and of what cannot be said and can only appear.

In general, this compression of thought to the most extreme brevity seems a challenge to the reader or listener to evaluate the transparency of the little that is said. No harm is done to the work if, with this concentration, all the background elements remain fixed in a certain vagueness – or at least in a state of ambiguity. What is vague, what has been only tacitly suggested, contributes rather a positive element to the lyric poem. The verses speak, as it were, like a person overwhelmed by feeling to which he cannot give voice; he keeps to things of little importance while yet hoping that they will make his feelings comprehensible.

One may survey in this manner the genera of literature – in part their conventional names, as the distinctions between them are. That would take us too far afield. Another matter is more important. When we have grasped these strata rightly, we must not use them to engage in pedantry. We should not insist, in the case of every literary work, even the very greatest, that they all can be clearly distinguished and, as it were, their nature can be distilled.

These are only principles that are generally valid, not literary straitjackets in which everything can be dressed by force. No doubt, one may say about the drama and the novel (the good ones) that all the strata are always present – up to the penultimate (that of the individual idea). But the order of appearance is not for that reason always the same, especially not in the middle strata. “Destiny,” for example, can appear directly from the manner of the action (as is usual in Schiller56), or even just from the inwardness of psychic structure and the subjectivity of individual sensibility. Naturally, both need not be strictly separated; they cannot be so in any case, because in life the two are interlinked. Yet it makes an essential difference to the kind of literature whether the one or the other is dominant.

We are not considering the possible absence of a stratum, at least not for the middle strata. This is conceivable in the case of the two final strata, and even more of the sixth. The middle strata are tied so tightly together in life that it would seem (185) to do violence if a poet wanted to eliminate one of them entirely, just where he intended to represent active life. In simpler forms of literature the situation is otherwise, that is, where only mood, feeling, pain, or yearning are represented. For that reason, lyric poetry has much more freedom of movement –but of course, on the other hand it is tied to much more strict external elements of style. It is thus by no means, as some poetasters believe, the easier art. But that is simply more a question of the bestowal of form in the strata, and no longer one of the stratification itself.

What we may draw from the series of strata by way of a strict law is the non-exchangeability of the strata, or, perhaps more correctly, the laws of their place in the whole. The poet can allow a stratum that is clearly intuitable but which is still close to the foreground (for example, movement and gesture) to come off badly. That will seem unpoetic, but in certain cases, it may be necessary. But he cannot allow this movement and gestures of his characters to “appear” out of the plot (the genuine and inner one) or out of their psychic life. Where that appears to be the case, something else is at play: the inner person appears in the light of her actions, or her emotional reactions to events, and the fantasy of the reader, departing from these appearances, paints the corresponding facial expression (amazement, horror, etc.) upon the otherwise pale color of the characters.

By close examination, however, we may confirm this as nothing more than a device of the writer. For in reality it happens that the emotional responses become concrete only via a detour through allusions to psychic life. And if we ask why the writer takes such a detour, we may respond: because language is relatively lacking in direct pictorial expressions for bodily movement, just insofar as such movement is intended to be expressive, and gestures are relatively rich in expressions for changes in feeling. If the poet speaks of amazement or of fear, the reader sees directly the corresponding facial expression.… This seemed to be a reversal, but it shows itself to be more a question of verbal expression.

Chapter 13: The Series of Strata in the Fine Arts

a) The order of strata in sculpture

The richness of the strata in literature does not extend to the other arts. That is so, on the one hand, because of the limitations their material causes them; on the other because of the medium and its circle of tasks; and yet again because of the special artistic means that are available to them. It is and remains strange that the least concrete matter, as is used by literature, in the end leaves open the greatest possibilities. It is the only matter that is not sensible. One could therefore make the inference before all other complications (186) arise, that sensible matter affects us in a limiting way – not only in the choice of themes, but also in the emergence of the strata. We will not try to anticipate here a judgment on whether that is so. What is important for the time being is that this relationship announce itself at this point.

The fine arts are close neighbors of literature – just as “representational” arts, but also because the circle of their materials overlaps to an extent. That would not be the case if, for example, sculpture went no further than the representation of movement and bodily presence, and did not touch the psychic being of man. It touches psychic being in fact, and lets it appear in the object – although not, of course to the same degree as the poetic arts, but unmistakably concrete and visible to intuition, as only art can let a thing appear.

Yet the first great epoch of Greek sculpture – its “classical period” – manifests characteristically little of this. True, it brings us as far as the sublime posture of the gods, but not as far as their active physical life. The aims and will of the artists are directed towards different ends, their tasks are more simply defined. And perhaps just because of this, this epoch in the history of art achieved its peculiar perfection, which people later called “classic.” The law we enunciated above concerning perfection is adhered to here in the most clear and evident manner: the simpler work is more easily brought to perfection. That means, in this context, that the work of art with fewer strata achieves the greatest heights that are possible for it, given its level and the means at its disposal.

How can we express these matters in the language of the strata? To answer this question, let us return for a moment to the case of classical Greek sculpture: what strata are in fact present there? It seems that, despite all limitations, we can reckon with four distinct strata. 1. The sensible real stratum with its visible form gives us the foreground. 2. There follows the stratum of movement and rest, for bodily rest is in the broad sense an element of movement, for example, temporary repose. This stratum is already beyond the real. 3. Then behind the second appears the living quality proper of the represented human body, that which distinguishes it from a lifeless body, that is, the dynamic power over itself that is indirectly made visible. 4. And finally there appears – leaping, as it were, over all else – the power of divinity, the superior peace and sublimity of the gods, far above puny men. The same is true of representations of demigods, heroes, and nymphs.

Naturally, one may ask how such a leap is possible. The answer is quite simple; even the purely vital power, if it is sufficiently intensified, appears superhuman; that is expressed very primitively, but it can be shown to be so. Think, for example, of the speech of Zeus to the assembled gods at the beginning of the Eighth Book of the Iliad, where he challenges the gods to take a rope and drag him down from Olympus. And the gods – (187) they are amazed by his talk, but they accept it, and do not dare to contradict him.

That changes greatly later on. The warlike spirit, fear, anxiety, suffering, the sense of being marked by death mark themselves on their features; these become transparent; the psychic element appears behind them. From thence, it is a long way to the psychological forms of expression known to Michelangelo (the Bound Slave, the Pietà, the David). But only the depth of feeling and the power to act increases; at bottom it is the same here as formerly.

It is similar to marble busts, wherever a personal “resemblance” is genuinely striven after. To speak more accurately, they strove after an understanding of what is personal in a man. What appears here is not simply what is externally individual, but what is inward or psychic – occasionally in rich detail. Of course, one cannot have the second without the first, but what is noted is the element of the psychic-personal (for example, in the late Roman portraiture).

Old Egyptian portraiture calls for much reflection in this context – with its mixture of conventional forms and highly personal treatment of the features, which maintain the sense of individuality. A man as an individual is seen as having two faces, the universal and the personal, and nothing mitigates the opposition – for example, where the face is individualized, but the rest of the body is understood conventionally.

A step further and one reaches the sculpture of our times. Its greatest representatives – no doubt very few in number – have reached a new level. Here the psychic and inward is brought to expression in certain figures just for their own sakes, but not an individual element at all, but rather something universal –that is, a kind of middle level, not the universally human but rather the typical.

A good example of this is Rodin’s The Thinker, as with many of his other works. There is something strange about them: how can an artist represent a process like “thinking” in stone? That is, in something that is most foreign to it? And yet the impossible is made possible; one sees the effort of thought in the stance of the figure. Of course, we do not experience “what” he is thinking about; but that does not affect the matter itself. What is grasped is precisely just that which can at best be shown by way of a detour over the dynamics of the body. And that this becomes possible is the miracle of art. The detour, however, passes over the middle strata: one might say indeed over the psychophysical relation that makes psychic effort visible in the living body.

b) The exterior strata in painting

We have already spoken (above in Chap. 10) of strata in painting with reference to the portrait. The large number of strata was clear to see in this case. The parallel to literature, on the one hand, and to sculpture on the other, has also been pointed out. But painting is not (188) only portraiture, it includes a variety of other general types, as literature does, and we will have to inquire how much of what we have done here earlier will carry over to the other genera.

Sculpture and painting have two things in common: first, the matter they use is entirely physical, and second they have access to the very highest material (the kind of objects that can be represented) of which human beings are aware. The latter is apparent from the fact that there is just as much religious sculpture as painting. And this fact has had further implications throughout history, when we recall that great epochs of both art forms have grown in the soil of a highly developed religious life, and their most important themes are found in ideas of a religious kind. Thus the sculpture of the Egyptians and the Greeks; so also the painting of the Renaissance and to an extent that of the Dutch.

As far as sensible matter is concerned, we should observe from the aesthetical standpoint that these two arts, the “fine” arts, are the only ones that are “representational” in concrete matter, and thus bring themes, objects, and sujets, before the intuitive eye. Literature is also just as representational, although not in sensible matter; and music of course works as much in sensible matter, but music as such is not representational. That music can be representational, though in an indirect manner, is another matter.

Additionally, we note of course an extreme contrast between the materials used by the two arts. On the one hand, we have pure spatial form, which is indeed capable of being structured even to the finest details. On the other, we have spatial forms that can be reduced to a two-dimensional projection, but still offer all the gaiety of color; and where these are not found, as in drawing, there is still available the play with degrees of light and shadow. People have argued over which loss is the greater: the relinquishment of color by sculpture, or the relinquishment of full spatial form in three dimensions by painting.

Yet both arts have from this perspective their limitations. Sculpture is before all else limited to what is near, alive, and almost even to the human body. With respect to its diversity, that is no small area of competence, but it is incomparably narrower than that of painting, which also has access to the human body as an object. Its superiority lies indisputably in its capacity to deal with distant objects, and it even knows how to unite what is far and what is nearby in one “picture.” This union does not require compromise; distance in space is not suppressed or deceptively made to vanish, but treated precisely with emphasis, and quite objectively represented.…

One cannot hold back from drawing the implication that the direct imitation of spatial form is far more limited, with respect to the representation of spatial configurations, than a form of space that has separated itself from three-dimensional form and represents its objects by a detour through a picture surface of two dimensions. The latter is the spatiality of the “picture,” regardless of whether a drawing or a painting. In the mastery of space, painting is (189) superior to sculpture, and this is so just because it has detached itself from the sensible immediacy of spatial form. Seen from the outside this seems a paradox. Yet right here we find the key to the diversity of possible representation in art.

This fact is not without importance for the order of strata in painting. For in a spatial art form, the circle of themes is determined in it by spatial range and the uniformity of perspective. Both clearly extend much further in painting than in sculpture. Themes such as landscape, ocean and sky, cannot be treated by sculpture; indeed not only such matters, but also farmyards, the interior of living quarters or of churches, etc.

The discussion up to now has also taken drawing into its account, which, if we set color to the side, is close to sculpture. However, with color begins the great qualitative richness that in life, too, marks the distinction between seeing and other forms of perception. Painting makes use of this special “distinction.” For the manifold of qualities – with its inner lawfulness, oppositions, and constant blending into each other – is used by the artist as a language whose meanings are endlessly refined and which, if correctly applied, may express the most imponderable things.

This is not to say that individual colors have “meaning” – people have made up such games on occasion, but they fall far from the mark. Single oppositions, contrasts, the blending of colors, do not yet give meaning. That becomes possible only in the larger contexts, which always manifest structured themes, where the combinations of colors appear that are of concern to us here; they are unique, and serve the transparency that, perhaps by chance, allows living energy to appear.

It is important to be clear about this matter, for again certain kinds of themes in painting depend upon it – and, with that, the specificity of the relationships among the strata of a painting. There are in fact kinds of themes in painting that are determined primarily by the play of colors. This is well known in “still life”; we see it precisely in the work of its greatest representatives. It is true also for representations of interiors. But what is even more important: it is also generally valid for the landscape. As landscape is such a large branch of painting, the relationship we speak of shows its entire force.

We noted above in this context, that the eye of an artist in fact discovered the landscape, however not in painting but rather in seeing. Yet what is it, then, in the natural landscape that captivates such eyes? Of course, it may be several things. But there is one that must always be present: the bright colors, one after the other, just as they appear to us while looking, for example, past the trunks of trees into a clearing. They surprise and convince us, they are unsought-after and yet put in order as though by an invisible hand. And we should add: just as they not only contrast with each other and close up together to form the unity of an image, they are also different in light and shadow, and against the horizon are tinged with blue. (190)

For a person whose eyes have once been opened for these things – and for many others related to them – they do not easily let him go. For the entire world is what in fact has been opened to him. For that reason, the eyes of the painter return him so often to the landscape. It is as though one has discovered in it the adumbration of the principle of the picture – of course after separating it from deeper backgrounds, for a landscape does not need them. Perhaps also the transparency of color is greatest for these kinds of objects: this applies specifically to works of art that do not represent thing-like objects or structural unities, but give us only selections from the bright world about us that themselves may possess pictorial unity.

c) The inner strata in painting

Up to now, our discussion concerned only the external strata of painting: Those, specifically, that stand very close to the real foreground. We have here, corresponding to the distinctions made earlier, the appearance of space and objects, and the appearance of light. Here we must also include the level in which movement and animation appear, and it is perhaps fitting once again to distinguish these two, for “life” may appear in a picture in ways different from motion as such (the latter also appears, for example, in a wind-swept landscape).

But now we are already standing in the inner strata of painting. For without doubt the living quality that appears here belongs to a middle stratum that one must count among the inner ones. Perhaps the same is true even for the appearance of movement. For we must not forget that painting is similar to sculpture in that it can portray directly only what stands still; the speck of paint upon the canvas moves no more than carved marble, and from the radical stillness only the one narrow route of letting-appear leads to movement. Nevertheless, that route can open up considerable riches.

We must moreover consider that painting is the prototypical art of sensible vision (most likely the image of “aesthetics” was originally taken from it), and that the physical substance it uses permits that role, but also limits it more strictly than other arts are limited by the matter in which they are realized. The painter is quite right to remain in the sensible world, or at least not to depart from it too far. One can say that in the same sense and to the same degree about no other art form. For that reason, the artist is always drawn back from all supersensible visions to the sensible world and to color. It is almost as though he feels himself to have sinned when he distanced himself from the visible.

And yet painting does achieve the representation of what is psychic and inward in man. We spoke of that matter above in connection with portraiture. But this is by no means true of the portrait alone. For there exists an abundance of themes about the human condition that force themselves upon the artist, of scenes (191) that extend from everyday life to the miracle and mystery scenes of religion. The Dutch have demonstrated that every harmless occupation of men and women at home, or scenes of eating and drinking – and many other all-too-human matters – have their painterly side. This was a very strange discovery that no one before their times would have believed.

Even when it was not originally intended, some of the psychic life of men came to be represented, even if nothing more than taking joy in life. And – given the human condition – this something forces itself forward and becomes the main object. That occurs, for example, in historical scenes, but it happens also in the once much-loved mythical scenes. It occurs especially in religious scenes –whether these circle about the figures of Maria and the Christ, or about God the Father and the creation of the world, as in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

By close observation, we will find here again all strata that were familiar to us from literature, but only in a much-altered graduated series and indeed in a different manner of appearing. But it is by no means the case that the last and most background elements come off badly. The limitation in force here is rather of a different kind, namely one that is drawn beyond the limits of what is static and only momentarily visible, i.e., drawn beyond a limit that belongs to the foreground and is rooted in the physical matter of painting.

One may not object that the painter of scenes is simply excluded from the natural circle of themes in painting! For the role such painting has played in the development of art is too great. No doubt, this issue is tied to the “commissions” of an extra-artistic kind, especially in the case of religious scenes. But can one seriously just think away the abundance of biblical scenes that have fixed themselves among the themes of painting? The group-scenes of Raphael and Leonardo, the long lists of Madonnas and Crucifixions? Or just Rembrandt’s scenes from the Old Testament? They all belong within painting. And just as the technique of color, light, and the way of seeing develops in and through them, so also there develops the expression of inward human psychic life.

If we now summarize what painting aims at in the representation of the human world – we leave out pure landscape painting at first – and ask ourselves quite soberly what the series of strata in force here looks like, we may assemble the following points.

1. The level of the real elements, with its visible specks of paint, form the foreground.
2. Behind it, three-dimensional spatiality appears, things, and the light within the picture.
3. In this circle of things, there further appears motion – now made intuitively visible in a phase of movement or in a pose. (192)
4. The living quality of the figures appears in their state of motion, a quality strongly underscored by the “lifelike” color.
5. In the living quality of the motion appears further the human psychic realm, man’s inner life. There appear segments of the situation, the passions, the dispositions, and the plot.
6. In unusual cases, something of the idea of the individual appears (in portraits of unusual depth).
7. And finally, there appear various kinds of ideal universalities. Often this is consciously made part of the theme, as in religious scenes, but often it is also completely camouflaged. Knowledge of the meaning of the scene, of the “legend” behind it plays an independent role here. Oddly, such knowledge usually does not reveal much that assists us in viewing the object aesthetically.

If one compares the list of strata in painting with those of sculpture, what immediately strikes one is the richness of content in the former. With sculpture, one can distinguish clearly only four strata from each other. The reason for this difference is found, on the one hand, in the quite different relationships of the material in which they are realized (there was no need in sculpture for the detour through the two-dimensional planes; with that is eliminated also the first intermediate stratum); on the other hand, however, we find in sculpture a very limited appearance of the psychic and inward elements. Similarly, sculpture does not permit a separate stratum for the appearance of inanimate objects, for it is limited to what is living.

The result of a comparison with the strata in literature is quite different. We saw that literature also has to do with seven strata. But in part, they are not the same strata. Immediately behind the level of words began that of movement and gesture along with the words spoken by the characters – the dialogue. The intermediate place characteristic of painting that is given to the appearance of spatiality and the appearance of activity and gesture is therewith eliminated; more accurately put, they are not properly eliminated but are entirely taken up in the stratum of activity and gesture; and in this same stratum belongs the appearance of the quality of life. The strata two to five that were listed for painting thus constitute only one stratum in literature.

Why this is so can be answered without difficulty; Literature is simply concerned only with people and their conditions in life, their actions, and the like. Any other miscellany of the world outside is treated by it as a garment or as decoration. Thus it passes over the sensible structure and draws it to itself only according to the measure of its transparency for what is psychic. In contrast, painting has in this preliminary theater of the human scene its most powerful thematic material. For that reason, it tends to rest awhile with them, render them in detail, and allow the psychic elements appear indirectly by means of them. For painting is most strongly bound to the visible, and, in general, it is the art most tightly bound to the sensible world.

Thus it is when we compare the middle strata. When it is a question of the deepest inner strata, we find the poetic art significantly superior – simply because it is a temporal art: it is not tied to the unique (193) moment, and can follow up on events, situations, developments, actions and their consequences, and the unfolding of a destiny during an entire lifetime. For that reason in a literary background a series of strata are inserted, which painting either fails to render entirely or is able to let appear only by way of suggestion. These are the strata: first, the situation and the action within it; second, the bestowal of psychic form and character; third, destiny and the manner in which it is borne.

Here the boundaries of painting can be clearly stated. These boundaries do not mean, as was already said, that it cannot enter the last background element of the human situation. These come forward as entirely comprehensible universal ideas, occasionally even as the idea of an individual. But they are limited to the sidelights.

Painting – corresponding to its entirely sensible matter – is the art more tied to the objective strata of the foreground, but within those limits it is inexhaustibly variable; literature is more attached to the background strata, and is therefore less sensibly given and concrete, but in return it is the art that dwells at the depths of human life and exhausts its contents quite differently.

d) Painting and natural objects

In one respect, the order of strata in painting that has been presented here does not do justice to the greatest potentials of its nature. It took explicitly as its sole purpose establishment of its representation of humanity. That is justified insofar as here alone the deepest strata can be made objectively present, and here surely is where its greatest tasks lie. But the entirety of painting is not thereby exhausted, and it is still possible that certain general traces of its nature have been overlooked.

What is still left is all painting that consciously limits its concerns to natural objects. There remains thus the entire large domain of landscape painting. One may wish to include here the still life and the nude, and that has a certain justification. As to the first, it belongs here although one can still sense the hand of man on the object; as to the second, it may be included only if the painting renders only the natural physical figure.

How does it stand, then, with the painted “landscape”? Let us assume that in it the deeper strata are in fact lacking because they do not belong at all to the object: if so, what makes the painted landscape so impressive, so full of content, so near to man, so akin to mind? Historically the “pure landscape” – without any people in it – appears relatively late. It seems as if man, for whom a landscape should be something quite specific, would still have to be in it – as though the painting would hover in the air without him. This is, of course, a naïve error. But a nugget of truth is concealed in the error. That truth consists in the fact that the landscape, viewed aesthetically, (194) is there only for the beholder. And, indeed, only for a beholder that is viewing it in a certain way, namely by letting it register in him and letting himself enjoy it. Through this detour, man in his entire psychic nature enters again into the landscape, no longer as a component but rather as a condition of the object – and that in a very special manner.

These thoughts are not to be understood in all generality, as they are understood for all things that have being as an object, even for the theoretical ones, such that something can become an object only “for” a subject (the law of standing over-against [Gegenstehen or Objektion]); rather they have a very specific meaning: aesthetically, the landscape does not consist in formations of land, woods, and fields, but first in the definite pictorial standpoint that permits the viewing of all of those things from a specific point in space. But with the slightest shift in the latter, in the specific point in space, the “landscape” is changed; it changes similarly with changes in light, the position of the sun, the weather – not to mention seasonal changes. The painter thus captures a momentary, quite ephemeral effect.

This is not like the observation of an animal, a flower, a human face, where, no doubt, the details are altered according to one’s “standpoint” but are of the same fixed type as a whole: one returns to them after hours, days, or weeks, and finds there the identical “object.”

In “landscape” the situation is quite different. A cloud formation draws up, and the picture is changed. Or, for example, the artist does not find the point from which he previously painted, and everything in the picture shifts. Here is the reason why in landscape the person of the viewer – his chosen point in space and time – plays such an important constitutive role. Just the role by itself of perspective in landscape art would be sufficient to demonstrate that fact. For without one taking a point of view there is no perspective. This is true for other themes in painting: interiors, groups of persons, scenes. But with them, it is not as much the point of view that is the determining element.

Thus, it is not necessary at all to aim immediately at backgrounds expressive of feeling in order to find man, in his subjectivity, included in an “aesthetical landscape” – whether enjoyed in nature or in the painted landscape. What is always also represented in the work is not only “what is seen,” but also the beholder’s way of seeing; in fact, much more belongs there than we have named. What we said above (under b) belongs there, that is, the great qualitative riches of light and color, the effects of contrast and shading, the infinitely subtle language of transitions and mutuality of effect, for which effects of light and color no other descriptive means would be adequate.

Here are the roots of the circle of themes in painting that are determined by nothing else than the play of color. For that reason every discovery of some pure possibility in painting is epoch-making for new developments (195) in art itself; that was the case with the Dutch landscapes, with French impressionism, with modern en plein air painting.57 Before all else, painting is a “life in seeing,” an art that is rooted more deeply in the senses than the other arts, and where even with themes of the most elevated kind the sensible element remains prominent.

In this manner, for example, is a vista upon a broad plain with hills ranging in the distance, framed by what is near and close by, perhaps a large foreground with grasses and hanging branches, the tight pictorial propinquity of near and far, which are seen as spatially separated but in fact are all simply seen together. That and how one can render such things in line and color is not immediately obvious; we recall the discovery of aerial perspective, painting en plein air, aerial painting, and the spatial placing in painting of figures in front of and behind each other: all depend upon discoveries in ways of seeing. And thus it is with foliage painting, dewdrop painting, highlight painting, with the colorfulness of shadows and the disappearance of the colorless (black) from the field of view.

It would require an entire chapter on the technique of painting to do it justice. For technical means are not external to painting; they are largely tied to the ways we see. And when we just think for a moment how every new way of seeing is also a new kind of intellectual openness, even a new feature of the psyche in itself, we may realize the nature of the interconnection between man and landscape in the aesthetical sense. Only by means of this detour can we return to the question of the background in the painted landscape: namely to the question of the deeper background strata, which really pertain only to man as his own object.

People had correctly seen these things in the element of “mood,” and had seen beyond this phenomenon to more specific emotional content in landscape. But they had also included in aesthetical theory things that do not hold true. It neither is true that landscape itself possesses moods (cheerful, gloomy, chilly, cozy) nor is it true that we, the observers, simply project our moods into it (theory of sympathy). Rather the secret lies in the painter’s way of seeing, provided he finds the technical means to prescribe moods to the observer and thereby draw him into his way of seeing.

Mood of course belongs to the observer, not the one he arbitrarily brings with him, but the one that is objectively required by the art object: the mood that has been made objective in its sensible detail. In this sense one may, with good cause, assert the opposite: mood pertains to the landscape itself, it is its own; and the mood that appears upon it is its “own” provided that it is the landscape “seen thus,” as it is seen through the artist’s way of seeing.

This relation cannot be presented in any simpler fashion. But only its capacity for articulation (its definability) is what is complicated about it. It itself is the simple consequence of the ontological qualities of aesthetic objects as such, (196) provided, to be sure, that everything not actually sensible in them exists only relative to a subject that beholds it adequately. That is, of course, true of all works of art. Here it is especially palpable, because it does not refer to a mediated higher form of beholding alone, but to sensible vision itself. The artist intensifies this, far beyond the way we see things in everyday life, and upon this painterly addition to sensible beholding depends all else – including even the most subtle moods.

Something here must still be developed. Recall what was said here at the outset (Chap. 1c) about the emotional content of perception. As everything that is seen and heard forces us to go beyond itself, to apprehend something else that is not perceptible (our apprehension of men, of faces, etc.), so in natural and primitive consciousness perception drives us toward affective elements: the unknown, the uncanny, the terrifying, fearsome, or, this too, the familiar, trusted, salutary, even toward endearing kindness.

Our perceptions of nature especially are filled with such accents; we are touched by the warm sunshine, by the flickering air on a summer noonday, the tender azure of faraway horizons, the dark wood, and the cool of the evening. We are not indifferent when faced with what we see, we sense it as approaching us, as though “it demands something from us” – whether good or evil; everything affects us in a calming or arousing manner. Even in a consciousness made wise by age, where these affects have been inhibited, they do not disappear entirely; under certain circumstances they can become quite noticeable. To an artistic consciousness, these accents emerge by their own effort and give to what is seen the colors of moods tinged with color: the “cheerfulness” of a colorful meadow with its flowers, the “secretiveness” of the green forest half in darkness, the “uncanniness” of deep shadows or gorges, the “freshness” of the trees blowing in the wind.

The emergence of such primitively felt elements is almost identical with the withdrawal of an attitude centered upon practical objects. This withdrawal, however, is characteristic precisely of the aesthetical beholding of a landscape. Thus, the emotional side of seeing becomes alive at the same time as color and light. It is as if the emotional elements in everyday awareness had been artificially locked behind closed doors; yet as soon as this kind of awareness is separated from artistic beholding, the bolts spring open, and the whole colorful blaze of affectiv-ity comes forward and paints over all visible color.

This is no doubt only a point of departure for greater and deeper feelings and their contents, but this beginning shows nonetheless how the affective element is tied to what is seen – to a definite way of looking. For between such experiences and the deepest immersion of the self in the forms of nature is only a difference in degree. (197)

Chapter 14: Strata in Musical Composition

a) Levels of musical unity

The inquiries conducted in the First Part (Chap. 7) demonstrated that there is some difficulty in exhibiting the structure of strata in the non-representational arts. If that was already the case for the rough distinctions between the real foreground and the unreal background, how much more will that be true for the fine distinctions that begin with the splitting up of the background?

Or, perhaps, in the end no splitting up of the background takes place? The two arts with which this question is concerned are music and architecture. In both we find the situation regarding “appearance” complicated. In contrast, in ornamental art, where the situation is simpler, there is no longer a question, because the deeper background strata are lacking.

In music the situation allows everyone to assume without further ado that they have access in feeling to its background elements: it is after all apparent that the sounds and melodies are not there for their own sakes, but for the sake of some psychic content that does not just express itself in them, but pours itself out and “enjoys itself” to the full. Note that this latter phenomenon is an essential element, for much of our emotional life finds itself otherwise inhibited by life, and cannot enjoy and express itself to the fullest.

That is not simply the opinion of musically elevated persons who have been educated in musical performance or in music theory and criticism; it is also that of the musical dilettante who makes music a part of his life, hums a little tune as he walks or works, and lets himself be drawn into better music for the sake of relaxation.

Naturally, there is something understandable about this conception. The question is only what it is, what it consists in, what psychic contents are at issue here. Further, how can these contents be translated into music, if in fact they can, or how can they “appear” in the substance of sounds – and even whether we have then a genuine appearance. For in genuine appearance one must be able to recognize whatever it is that appears.

Thus far, we are still dealing in a very rough way with the aporetics of music. A more refined form, however, appears just behind it. This depends, on the one hand, upon the position of the first background stratum, about which we spoke above, which forms a tonal whole in a great style, but which cannot be heard all at once. This stratum – or are there several? – is not as yet a stratum with psychic content, but the leap to that psychic level must be taken from upon it.

On the other hand, a group of aporia appears as soon as we move from pure music to program music. Since the latter forms a significant part of the total mass of extant compositions, one cannot pass over them indifferently as with inferior music, but one must consider their problematic along with the others. (198)

As for the first of the two questions, one may quickly appreciate that program music itself takes on a certain analogy to painting. As painting, with its world of colors, gives scope to inexhaustible possibilities, so also does music, with its world of tones, sequences (melodies) and harmonies. The dimensions alone of musical structures remind us of colors: the height of a tone, its dynamics, the chord, the transition to another key (modulation) and rhythms (time-value, tempos, changes in tempo).

One is correct to expect at this point that in music as in painting a group of more “outer” background strata will appear that are all closer to the sensible material. That means that the stratum characterized above, i.e., of the musically audible whole, splits itself up further, and does so this side of the psychic elements that are present within it. This splitting up is difficult to follow, because the thematic handle we find in music is often lacking in the representational arts.

Nonetheless, it is possible to point out some features of the process. Clearly, it is a leap when one – as happened in Chap. 7b – passes directly from an audible heard sequence, as far as the mind can retain it, to the unity of a movement or an entire composition. Something with which to form tighter unities is set between these two, and a reference is thereby created upon which the greater whole can be built.

For example, there is the well-known law of four beats to a measure that underlies such forms of unity. No doubt there are others that could take its place, but in such cases there will always be smaller closed unities that are developed musically as such, and are used as elements in the construction of a piece. In classical music, they are often emphasized by a return to the tonic. Such unities come close to what can be retained by the mind, and they affect us like sensibly heard unities, although they are in fact no longer strictly capable of being heard together by the senses. The whole, which is spread out in time, begins to close up in them.

The return of the main theme belongs here also, along with variations upon it, in which it can be recognized but still experienced as different. Here is rooted the principle of variation, which can reach into the consciously designed “thema con variationi” – a fundamental form of musical structure that can dominate just as much in the “Lied” as in a sonata. The classic form of the “first movement” is built upon it: the repetition of an entire section and, after the insertion of the “development,” the variations, then two strophes and a coda. The addition of the “trio” in the scherzo serves similarly as a structural principle: these forms relate to almost all chamber music – quartets, trios, sonatas – and also to symphonies. We encounter them again in choral music.

Upon this is erected the “character of the movement proper,” the unity of the larger construct – for which those elements that were analyzed above are most genuinely valid: the retention of what has faded away; the music’s (199) foreshadowing what new things are to come; its pointing forward; the continual expectation and surprise, as also the holding together of the whole “at the last measures,” when the piece is finally done.

An enormous growth of this “structural whole” takes place again in so-called polyphonic music: individual phrases are written into each other in such a way that they produce the harmonies of the whole only in concert with each other. In this process, the harmony contains a kind of inner necessity that is clearly audible within it.

The “fugue” is the most extreme of all musical structures. It possesses a unity and wholeness of a higher order; in it the phenomena of rising up out of its own resources and of steady growth in size while in a condition of purity are present as nowhere else in music. That fact is most apparent when one compares to it the relatively loose unities that larger compositions (those in several movements) possess: the harmonic connections between the movements in a symphony or a sonata. And there are even looser intercorrelations, for example in the “opera,” where extra-musical themes determine the music to a great extent.

Therefore, if one wishes to do justice to this phenomenon of the step-like structure of musical unity, one will have to split open the stratum that inserts itself behind the sensibly audible into several strata. It is not important to determine how many of them there are, but in any case, one may, without risking much, distinguish three or four.

1. The stratum of closed musical phrases (the “law of four beats to a measure”).
2. The broader “themes” and variations.
3. Musical “movements” (here we find the strictest unities).
4. The harmonic interconnections between movements in the large “opus” (less strictly bound unities).

But it is not the number but rather the kind of ordered step-like structure that matters.

It is possible to make finer differentiations.

b) The inner strata of music

The other side of these aporetics lies in so-called program music. In order to evaluate them, we must orient ourselves toward the inner strata of music. For it is upon these, and not the strata of musical unity, that the possibility of giving music an extra-musical “content” depends.

There is no doubt that as one approaches from the music’s external strata and passes to the inner ones, one makes a leap, a [leap to another domain]. The external strata have to do with the design of purely musical forms, the “play with tones and harmonies.” There is no question there of feelings and moods. But with the inner strata begins something quite different, something that belongs to the [other genus]. This is a highly subjective (200) element belonging entirely to the psychic life of man. The former is the most objective element that one can imagine; it is purely a composed structure that is subject to analysis and is objective. What appears in the inner strata, the psychic element, is never entirely objective; it exists solidly within its subjectivity, is difficult to grasp, hard to name (at least not adequately). It is there only for the devoted listener, and apart from itself it is scarcely imaginable.

We could say: it exists only in the experience of it; but then listening to music is characterized as experience. Once this experience has passed, the music done, the hearer’s efforts to force what has been experienced into the present moment are in vain. For it can be grasped nowhere except in music, precisely in specific music with its specific ordered unities, although to the hearer they seem entirely heterogeneous and external.

We should not be surprised that, in any strict theory of music, all concern for “psychic content” is rejected as mere sentimentality. Accordingly, one becomes quite rigorous: music is a strict architectural construct; it has its own laws, which are purely structural in nature. It “can do quite nicely without feelings,” and the structural features of the gay color of its musical elements – timbres, transitions, modulations, etc. – are rich enough to allow a world made entirely of tones to emerge.

When people defend such theories, they are pleased to point out the most strictly architectural kind of composition, i.e., the fugue, and when they do so, it seems as if the purported autonomy of contrapuntal music is sufficient proof of the superfluity of all the feelings men “project” into music.

And yet the master of contrapuntal composition, J.S. Bach, is absolute proof of the opposite view. Take, for example, the first four pieces of The Art of the Fugue, or the ricercar of A Musical Offering, or any fugue at all from the Well-Tempered Clavier – as soon as one grasps the technique of listening to them properly, one will find in them, beyond the pleasure one takes in the structures, something quite different appearing: the elevation that devoted listening produces of itself. And, in fact, this is a genuine elevation of the mind, in which we sense ourselves lifted up to another world, one of purity and immensity.

This other element is experience in objective form. It belongs objectively to the music, as a thing existing in it and yet as something that thrills us most inwardly, in short, as something that appears genuinely in it, appears, more specifically, immediately in the hearing of the musical unity; it shines transparently through it.

All characterizations of this experience are weak and overly general. We have no expression for it. We say, for example, it is “solemn” or “sublime”; we speak of the “dark depths,” of the “radiant,” the “ravishing,” “exciting,” or “lofty” … But it is easy to see that these are all only images, and in fact weak ones. For here it is not a question of pale echoes, but of a powerful force (201) that takes genuine possession of our souls – a force that pulls us along and fills the souls of the listeners, and that nonetheless stands objectively over against them in the work of music as it maintains its aesthetic distance.

Such descriptions as those we offer are merely weak images of the mystery that takes place in the devoted hearing of a musical work of art. They are entirely insufficient for determining the objective strata themselves, on which the mystery depends: the inner strata of the musical work. One sees only that these are not simply present, but are what is of significance in the work – one might say what is metaphysical about it. How, of course, the sounds and the sequences are able to make the most inward phenomena of the life of the soul appear, those beyond all verbal expression, has not yet been touched upon in the slightest.

But let us leave this question for the moment. We see at least this much, that theories of musical form are insufficient in this psychic context; here we must in fact reckon with psychic conditions that are far deeper. Music is not a chess-game with tones. Without its background in the human soul, it would be.

Music is rather a genuine revelation, and indeed, of a kind that can be expressed in no other language. This last remark is crucial. We always feel ourselves in a predicament when asked what is revealed by music; that does not argue against such a revelation, but rather for it. One can say also: music is a proclamation, one that acts by awakening the soul of the listener – to come along, to dance along, to enter a great inward vital life, to give himself over to feelings that cannot be put under categories. And in this way, the miracle of a community of listeners in the emotional experience of music takes place. Indeed, they become as one, despite their individual psychic differences – a thing that otherwise in life is scarcely possible. This is the phenomenon of the concert-hall, one, to be sure, that occurs only when a musician of true genius is playing. No doubt, all the arts have the power to unite men; they reorient souls, dress their ranks, and attune them to one another. But none has this power in the same measure as music does.

Phenomena of this kind begin no doubt always with the act of listening, but they direct us unambiguously toward the object; for they presuppose the corresponding stratum of being in the composition that is related to the being of our souls; this shows how tightly woven are the analysis of act and object. In this respect, music stands alone among the arts. Of course every work of art requires of its audience an inward correlative movement or execution. Painting and sculpture require us to look towards what the artist “sees”; literature requires us to picture along with the writer the way he pictures things. Such an effort can grow to the point at which the reader is carried along. But in music, such things take on an essentially different nature: the process of being seized, of being drawn along, is in music a limine [at the outset] the main thing. Looked at subjectively, we can describe it as having one’s own psychic life taken up by the movement of the work and being drawn along in its mode of forward motion; it communicates this motion to the hearer, and, when he executes that motion himself, (202) it becomes his own. Thereby the relationship to the object is in fact ended and transformed into something else: the music penetrates, as it were, into the hearer, and, in his listening, becomes his.

This state of being drawn along is experienced as a kind of psychic abduction – to an order of things that is otherwise not found in one’s own life, but yet to an intelligible order, an ineffable perfection, harmony, and a floating rapture: the work, the achievement of the composer, disappears – for everything about a masterly performance seems easy – and the enjoyment of the state of devoted appreciation masters the soul, tension increases and decreases, and in that way we are rescued from a state of effort and the sense of being cramped.

This is not true only of the very great compositions, which quite often demand much effort and attention on the part of the hearer. It is true also of lighter and more flirtatious music – of dances and marches, of a jolly little song or a capriccio – but in these cases the heaven to which one is abducted has fewer pretentions. Yet the music can be just as pure, just as soaring. Only the depth of enjoyment is of a different kind, and so also the stratum of psychic life that is laid hold of by the music.

c) Composition and psychic life

Nevertheless, music is always objective. How is that possible? There lies here an antinomy that we must solve. For as the listening self is absorbed into the music, the sense of standing over against the music disappears. But then how does this over-against maintain itself? And how can the inner strata into which we feel ourselves carried and ravished, nonetheless remain the objects of our reflection, which always also preserves the required aesthetical distance?

There are two ways of enjoying music. The first consists in letting oneself be lulled or swept along by it: this increases in the case of certain pieces of great music to a point at which the hearer melts into the motion of the music, in effect swims in it. A good example of this is Nietzsche’s58 description of a “submitting to the mood of Tristan.” Such a listener misses the structural niceties of the composition. He makes it easy for himself. The other kind of listening holds the listener more tightly to the construction of the musical work; he penetrates into it and gives himself over to pleasure only after he has mastered the structured and perhaps complicated whole.

Aesthetical enjoyment proper is only of the latter kind. Only such listening penetrates the music – it runs through the entire series of strata and appreciates the composition. The first kind, in contrast, leaps over the structural elements of the outer strata, burrows immediately into the simpler emotional hues, and ends with enjoying his own feelings, the feelings of his excited states of mind. With that, the aesthetical relation is abrogated, or at least becomes much distorted. We might call this a musical pseudo-stance. In the case of popular music, it aims at luxuriating in sound. It never does justice to music, even to the greatest and most powerful, for the hearer seeks only to wallow in it (203) and hardly concerns himself with the compositional structure. Many say this directly: there are some specific passages in great works for which they run to the concert-hall – passages that are just barely accessible to them, yet they never genuinely grasp the deeper content.

We find in this phenomenon access to the question of how a composition maintains its objectivity. The “wallowers” are those that hear falsely: the object, the composition, disappears from their view; only their own feelings are left to them, and, to be sure, these feelings, as the work communicates them, are not pure but unclean, for they have been dragged down to the marshes of the hearer’s smallness.

The aesthetically correct standpoint is the reverse: it does not anticipate, led astray by certain “effects,” but goes along with the composer, step by step, lets the structure of the work arise in his inner hearing, and only through that structure does the psychic element appear – of course, also as something experienced, something that carries him along, but carries only in the definite direction which the tonal structure points out to him.

The antinomy is thus solved. The inner strata of music have the means to take possession of the whole man, and, in the act of enjoyment, let him become one with the music. But the external strata have the means to focus his attention and even to shape the object of his attention itself. The structural elements of the tonal composition are what hold him firmly at a distance and in a state of contemplation of what is objectively present. Indeed the object-like nature of the compositional structure is so powerful in great works that it also holds the inner strata continuously in a certain objective position.

This does not mean that the objectivity of music depends upon the “external” level, that is, it does not suggest that the music proper begins only on the psychic level …! That would be as if one were to say about a “landscape” that what is genuine in it is only the “mood,” the rest just “technique.” As with landscape, the sensible elements have their depths, and the mood only appears in them, so also here: the world of tones in music is never a mere externality that one may dispense with. It would be a mistake to leap over any of its strata, for in fact one would never gain access to the inner strata at all.

But let us return to the other question (on p. 216). How can sounds and sequences bring about the appearance of the inner strata, i.e., those that express the most inward and ineffable affairs of the human soul? Sounds and tones are, after all, quite different from human feelings. The question was put off when it first arose, but its significance must now be recognized at least as far as we can look into it. The answer to it may nonetheless be given in part.

First: the world of sounds and that of the soul are not as heterogeneous as they may appear to be at first sight. Both are non-spatial (not thing-like or immaterial), both exist as a flux, in transition, in motion, and both are developed in a play of conflicts (204): of excitation and relaxation, of tension and release. In fact, these are three ways in which psychic being differs essentially from the external world. And this much is clear: if there is to be material for art that can express this [psychic] being, it must be of the same kind: in its bestowal of form, no things or bodies may result; it may not consist of objects, but exist only in the execution – it must consist in nothing more than temporal flux, flowing, being moved and moving – and it must be able to flow along the dynamic lines of psychic events.

To achieve this purpose, the world of sounds and sound sequences has an unusual capacity: in that world, all is movement, all is excitement and resolution, surging and pulsing, tender dying away, quiet whispers or dark rumblings; wild roaring, storming, pursuit and escape, and also the taming of unchained power in musical form.

These images are not merely allegorical. They are no doubt very thin in content and are undifferentiated in comparison to the inexhaustible riches of all of what, moving and animated, is heard in music. But they point unambiguously in the direction in which these riches unfold. Here, in any case, we find the reason that music is capable of pronouncing the secrets of the soul without introducing objective themes – more precisely, letting them appear in sound. The arts of the visual sense cannot do this, or only indirectly, because they depend upon the seeing of objects and this seeing does not embrace the phenomenon of dynamics.

Second, in the tones of music an emotional content exits that is more powerful than in the elements of the visual sense. We spoke of the latter in connection with the external strata of painting. In the case of tones and sounds, however, this content achieves an extraordinary intensification.

Let us remember once again what was said above (Chaps. 1e and 2a) about perception. There is an emotional side to all perception, which is repressed by adults only upon the physical-practical (objective) standpoint. It appears again upon the aesthetical standpoint. But it is tied more firmly to the auditory sense than to the visual sense. The evidence for this is the richly differentiated character of the human voice, in which we, without being clearly conscious of it, “hear” with great subtlety the traits characteristic of the person who is speaking or his momentary state of mind – and we do this independently of the content of his speech. The tonal color of almost all heard sounds, both the natural and the artificial, takes us far beyond that – sounds that are piercing, dull, rumbling, howling and whistling, the soft rich tone, the chirping, warbling; sounds of jubilation and woe.

Music takes on these emotional elements and consciously intensifies them by means of the timbre of instruments, and perhaps most of all by melody and harmony. Here is the place from which these emotional elements (205) pass directly into the motions and dynamics that unfold as a musical structure (cf. this chapter, c). Its secret is just this, that even the “matter” alone of music bears in it itself the foundation of all expression of feeling – even the higher ones. The situation here is just like the intelligible foundation of the act of seeing color: the most elevated “represented” contents are also not separable from the sensible foundation. Here it is the same: only in a meaningful language of tones, which is based in the senses, but not outside of them in some other language, can the psychic content be grasped. Therefore, one can “show” that content to no one who is not capable of extracting that content in the hearing of it. One “speaks” about it in vain, for one never says what is genuine and real about it, yet one can sit down at the piano and “hammer it out” – in a moment, it is there as if by magic.

In these two elements is rooted the inner connection of musical composition (structure and formal unity) to the psychic life that appears in it. The connection is a puzzlement, but it is quite axiomatic for all genuine musical listening. Since, however, the psychic phenomena in music are related to the structural and compositional elements as a continuation of the series of strata, one wishes to know even more about them: how many inner strata are there, and which strata are they? Naturally, we must not become pedantic with respect to the strata. We can distinguish only a few things here, and only with respect to the depths of the psychic phenomena to which music gives expression.

Thus, we may distinguish three background strata in music.

1. That of the immediate resonance experienced in the listener. This begins in the beat of dance music, but it belongs to all music. Its effect is similar to being spoken to and led off, and it can increase so as to give us the sense that we are being carried away.
2. The stratum on which the listener, by this means, has a deeper penetration into the composition and is gripped inwardly by it. This is not the case for all music, but only for works of a certain depth and elevation. This stratum causes psychic agitation; it reveals and proclaims. It raises what was hidden out of the depths of the listener’s self. Almost all serious music works within the pathways of this stratum. It is extraordinarily differentiated and highly individualized.
3. The stratum of the Last Things, or what one may call the metaphysical stratum, in the sense that Schopenhauer gives to the appearance of the universal Will. It need not quite be that, but it has always the character of an encounter with dark, dimly sensed forces of destiny. This stratum is rarely exhibitable in fact.

Of these three inner strata of music, the third and final one – despite its rarity – is the easiest to prove: it is present, overwhelmingly large and convincing, in religious music, – in a kind of music that of course is not religious as a composition, but was made so by the occasions for its composition and the (206) themes of its program. But it achieves in fact the deepest revelations, for the metaphysical treasures in its ideas carry it. These revelations are not really dogmatic, but rather those of the human soul. Yet they have entirely the character of metaphysics.

Moreover, there exists also a great amount of “profane” music that manifests the same phenomenon of the third inner stratum: symphonies, quartets, sonatas –if not as a whole, then in individual movements – and we must not forget the “concerti” in Handel’s time and also the preludes and fugues of Bach. As for the latter, with respect to their metaphysical depths they stand completely alone.

The first and second inner strata belong to more serious music. Both are presuppositions of the third, for without getting into the beat of the music and without grasping the musical construction, the last and deepest inward strata could not appear. Before one can achieve the highest musical enjoyment, one must do the work of penetrating the construction. For compositions differ from each other depending on whether this grasping of the structure of a piece is present or not. For this constitutes a radical difference – both in the listener and in the composition itself.

In the listener: according to the depth to which he has penetrated the structure, the composition proper emerges for him; but tied to the strata of the composition is the appearance of the psychic elements. From the most superficial external strata, we are led only to the first inner stratum; from the deeper strata, where the structural elements lie, we are led to the second. This process is itself again graduated in a variety of ways … that is, within itself it can lead on to ever more profound depths.

In the composition: not all have a larger and organized structure; rather the ways divide here between superficial yet pleasing, and serious or great music, where the “greatness” is purely inward greatness, a condition that can be found in seemingly smaller works. Only where there is a sufficient higher unity and a structure throughout the tonal composition is it possible for the second inner stratum, that containing the deepest riches of the soul, to appear clearly and distinctly.

A kind of law functions between the external and internal strata in music. The appearance of the deeper inner stratum depends on the corresponding deeper external stratum. Or, put otherwise: the greater and more rich the tonal composition, so much more of psychic life can come to appearance within it.

There are countless musical dilettantes who do not realize this, or who do not wish to believe it, who think they can leap past the compositional side of a musical work. They are mistaken, and they cannot see the mistake because they do not have the capacity to compare what they experience when they merely swing along lightly with the music and what an intuitive understanding of the construct would allow them to experience. They know only the surrogate. That is the reason why early miseducation in music is so destructive. There are (207) some composers who make use of this public prejudice and create music that speaks to us in simple tunes and makes no large demands upon musical understanding. These works lead many to seek simple relaxation and amusement in music. For that they have a certain justification. But one seeks in vain in such music for greater psychic content. It affects us superficially, and, when it creates the illusion of greater content, it seems hollow, empty, sentimental, fragile, arbitrary, and amateurish.

d) The place of program music

We need now to accommodate program music. Why we cannot simply pass over it has already been mentioned: there is too much genuinely great music of this kind to deny its significance; and there are entire classes of music – the Lied, choral works, and the opera – which present themselves entirely as program music. One might reject the opera for artistic reasons, but can one reject the choral song, the quartet, can one reject the Lied?

There is something peculiar about music that lets itself be used as a “second art” – by a primary art, i.e., literature. Here “second art” means about as much as dependent, reworked art – in many cases even nothing more than an art that interprets, serves, and illustrates (the undercoat …).

The relation of music to literature is quite different from that of stage drama to literature. Music does not “represent” the content, it does not represent at all –for music cannot imitate literature – rather it lends to it its ability to “sound forth” pure tones bearing emotion, because literature as the mere art of words cannot do that. Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that a finished literary work is taken and then set to music. The composer at the very least chooses texts that can be set to music. There are also occasional cases where text and music are produced together, or the text is produced for some music whose character is already present in the mind of the composer.

But these are merely secondary questions. The main question is how music can take on such specific content that has been borrowed from human life and then present it. The content does not consist at all in pure emotions, but of persons, events, destinies, conflicts, etc.

One may go along when the composer “entitles” his work after things and human events, when he writes at the top, “Garden in the Rain,” or “Spring Murmurs,” “The Spirit of Morning,” “Lone Wanderer,” or when Beethoven gives titles to the movements of the Pastoral Symphony. But one may not expect that a hearer can guess the title from the music. For the theme named by the title cannot become the theme of the music itself. One must have stated it beforehand. Anyone who has not had it stated will most likely follow the piece with quite different expectations; the music can express only the tone of the feeling carried by sound, and the listener can extract only those tones accurately. The tone of the feeling expressed by the sounds, however, is something much (208) more general: one can extract from the “Spirit of Morning” perhaps “Magic of the High Mountains,” or from “Spring Murmur” “Love’s Rapture”; from “Lonely Wanderer” “Secret Sorrow,” and the like. Music as such can only say what can be said in tones. And that is never any given content-laden theme. But music can, given any content-laden theme, express the feelings appropriate to the theme – and no doubt with an adequacy greater than what can be achieved by literature.

The possibility of putting poetry to music rests upon this, especially in the case of the Lied. It approaches the peculiar character of lyric poetry, where feeling and mood are the primary content. These can be taken up by music and made to appear. True, music can also achieve this end in very different ways. It has complete freedom to decide which musical themes (motifs) it will light upon and how it will treat them. When Löwe59 and Schubert⁶⁰ set the same poem of Goethe to music, they chose the same thematic tone; of course, they emphasize thereby also different emotional tonalities of the poem, but they stay with the subject. Upon this fact rests the possibility of setting the same poem to music in different ways.

Within the limits of this freedom, program music is entirely justified. One may not only see in it a close affinity between the musical motif and the literary theme. Every further burdening of musical themes with meaning is arbitrary. In comparison, all musical “recitatives,” all dialogue set to music, are quite questionable, especially where these are strictly tied to specific objects, to persons, to situations, and the like, e.g., where it becomes dramatic.

It is easy to see from this how a questionable principle infests the “opera.” Much is amalgamated there in a way that creates difficulties for unifying poetry and music, especially the element of drama; but in a theatrical piece, the drama is precisely what is primary. Now music has a tendency to draw the events that it is intended to accompany into the lyrical, and that is not easily compatible with the plot and the dramatic dialogue.

The older opera, which was built upon Italian models, accommodated itself to this fact by reducing the dialogue to “recitative” set to a kind of “half-music” –rather arbitrary melody without dividing the measures and with only slight accompanying harmony – and was to that extent more generous with the time that it gave over to the development of lyricism, that is to arias, occasional duets, terzets, or choruses. The drama in this way was resolved into a series of musical “numbers” (that is, more or less independent “set pieces”), which then tended to appear frequently in concerts. In this manner, the “plot” was covered over by style to such an extent that it served merely as a kind of occasion for an order of things quite external to it. For that reason, this kind of opera was able to last. (209)

But dramatic sensibility demanded more, and therefore a new direction took hold at the end of the eighteenth century. Now people wanted to put the plot to music, or, perhaps better said: to dramatize music itself. Composers had already set assertion and response in melodic form where possible, such that the character of what is asserted is reflected in the music. Now they proceeded more realistically; the harmonic underbody of the melody was articulated by the orchestra with lively timbres, and the melodic part was structured emotionally in the manner of the Lied. We can follow this process to Mozart61; it is almost complete in Weber⁶². The final step in the process was given by the operas of Wagner⁶³.

In fact, dialogue here was as much musically dramatized as is possible for music. But despite all these subtle differentiations, it seems in the end monotonous and boring. For the stage apparently does not take easily to music’s waste of time: characters stand idly on the sidelines and do not know what to do with themselves while another sings. This is not due to a lack of “drama,” it is unavoidable, and is caused by the nature of the opera itself.

Another means used by “dramatic music” is the introduction of motives determined by their content (Wotan-leitmotif, Notung-motif, Siegfried-motif). We must note that this does not occur in Wagner externally (i.e., not put in writing, as for example, in the music program); the hearer is brought, in a way natural to music, through appropriate repetitions, to a set of specific associations. That is still entirely a musical possibility, and that is true although the content associated with the motifs is not at all expressible by music, and, besides, no listener could recognize it in the music as such.

The difficulty that such associations call up is of a different kind: drama requires, according to the specific features of the content, reminders offered by the motifs; music, however, has to form a structural unity, and cannot take up motifs randomly at all possible instants. This results in a drastic conflict of two requirements, one dramatic and one musical – and, indeed, within the composition itself. One cannot deny that Wagner’s genius solved this problem at least partly, for the most part by choosing at the outset an appropriate selection of “motifs.” Yet the compositional element suffers from it. It is possible that here the limits of program music have been violated.

One can furthermore ask whether all music that “accompanies” poetic themes simply brings something of this conflict upon itself. Can any text be so constituted that its cadence and rhythm respond to the genuine demands of music, that is, without doing violence to it?

With reference to many Lied-compositions, this must be affirmed (Hugo Wolff⁶⁴, Brahms⁶⁵ …). But it is not true as a rule, and indeed it could not be. Either music, with its own peculiar necessities (210) goes its own way without a concern for text and voice – as with the practice of coloraturas of the eighteenth century –or the text becomes a schoolmaster of the music, as in many operas. One may also recall how large choral parts in many voices were set to a dry scanty text in sacred music, e.g., Lotti⁶⁶ set the words “crucifixus et sepultus est.” In such cases, only the general dark emotional mood holds text and music together. Here too, there is a limit to program music, although, of course, a quite different one.

e) Strata in musical performances

We must say a word here about the art of the musician who executes the music. What was proposed in reference to it in Chap. 7c is insufficient once the splitting open of the background has taken place. It is a question of the second art next to that of the composer; the former brings the first background stratum, that of the tones themselves, into reality (audibility). In a way quite different from the performance of a play, it makes the composed music accessible. For the composed music as such is more or less inaccessible to the public. For that reason, there is a large role given to the performing musical amateur.

Obviously, the performer gives us only the external strata of music directly; in fact, only the first of them becomes entirely and sensibly real. But that does nothing to change the fact that in his playing, the whole of the series of musical strata “appears.” This does not distinguish the written music from the performance of it, and just as the actor is attempting precisely to make the inner strata appear, so naturally with the musician, if he is not entirely a superficial “technician.” So, at least, is the meaning and goal of all genuine musical performance.

This does not mean that the performer really brings out the inner strata and allows the psychic element to appear. His talent may fail him on the technical as well as on the psychic side; he may lack sufficient maturity. For the right effect, two conditions must come together: the technical mastery of the instrument and also one’s own musical voice, and his congenial appreciation of the composer.

Accordingly, one can distinguish two types of reproduction. At the far reaches of one side stands a trained musician. He has technical mastery, but he is lacking the inward spirit of the music, because he does not have the needed depth to experience it himself. Thus it usually happens that his choice of pieces for his performance is based on that fact: he chooses those concert-pieces that allow him to shine. At the far end of the other side stands the amateur. He has a musical sense and can hear the deeper psychic content in the piece, but he does not have the technical ability to let it be heard. Between these extremes, there are innumerable steps of all kinds. Only rarely do both types meet at the same level. In the first case, the music seems empty – it shines, but only superficially; in the second it is bungled (it seems inexact, unclear, and perhaps full of feeling that easily becomes sentimental …). (211) Both may approach kitsch, yet each may also have its own special qualities. In both cases, the law of the strata is offended. This law maintained that the appearance of the inner strata depends upon the fulfillment of the outer strata – specifically so that the deeper external stratum allows the deeper inner strata to appear.

However, the deeper external stratum – the one, for example, that consists in the unity of the movement – cannot be brought out without a certain adequacy in the lower-lying outer stratum. This is what the amateur does not understand. He attempts, by leaping over the middle strata, to render immediately what he feels, but the compromises he makes in executing the piece frustrate his efforts. For the whole can be constructed only one level after the other.

Here is also found the reason why a certain kind of musical amateur generally prefers program music: it reveals to him, in an extra-musical manner, what the music should be about, and that is what he needs, because he cannot easily find his way through the external strata and the mastery of the instrument that they require. He does not notice that much is eluding him. For program music, too, cannot simply leap over the structural elements. This attitude comes in degrees, up to the attitude that is at bottom unmusical but that wallows gladly in feeling –which in reality leads only to a very superficial enjoyment of music.

The odd thing, however, is that in this manner two kinds of music come to be. There is music that is damaged to a considerable degree, if not entirely destroyed, by the slightest amateurishness; similarly by a technically weak performance. Of this kind are Beethoven’s sonatas, and also works by lesser masters as Chopin, Grieg, and Debussy. And there is music that is hardly damageable at all, that even in weaker or superficial renditions can reveal something of its deeper content. Works by Handel and Bach and many of the older classics are of this kind.

Why is this so? The answer can again be given by means of the theory of strata: where the musical structure is more rigid, that is, where the external strata follow in a strict series, the inner strata appear even in an imperfect rendition. The higher wholes put themselves across by themselves in the process of listening alone, and out of them, the deeper inner strata appear. When such rigidity of structure is lacking, only the most meticulous performance of the content of the outer strata can let the psychic element appear.

Finally, we must not forget that the composer does not compose down to every detail; written music remains relatively general, and only the performing artist composes it in all detail. This is the same situation we have seen in the case of the dramatist and the actor.

The question is simply: in which strata of the musical work do we find a lack of definition? And in which, therefore, does the performing artist have to complete the composition? The answer: in principle, in all strata. But the emphasis should lie upon the external strata, not only because they bear all further appearance, but also because the inner (212) strata, despite their hiddenness, may yet be less “general” (undefined).

That may sound strange, but it rests upon the fact that psychic content –feelings, moods – reveals, if it becomes at all tangible, a well-known structure of its own. Well-known, namely, from one’s own or another’s psychic life. Yes, the soul possesses an accurate anticipatory function precisely where one’s own experience of life is wanting. And those things that are experienced, known well, or simply anticipated in their peculiar individual character, then step in as a totality.

This extends so far that the deep-souled composer can lead the inexperienced man into psychic depths that are entirely new to him, without running the risk of becoming liable to distort the music. It is the same with the interpreter: he can, as he plays back the composition, be carried away far beyond his own psychic sensibility. For that reason the playing of untrained but highly musical persons –for example, youthful ones – has a power to enter the music sympathetically in a way that fills with amazement more experienced and mature listeners. The purity of such sensibility, heavy with its own future, replaces the knowledge and the power of those whose souls have grown rich. The condition of this is merely the clean and respectful treatment of the structural elements in music’s outer strata.

Chapter 15: Strata in Architecture

a) The outer strata in buildings

We agreed in Chap. 7d that architecture is similar to music in that it is “free from a sujet,” but against this we noted that it is subject to some practical purpose. Further, a relation of strata exists in architecture also, although its double determination, by the practical end and by the weight and inflexibility of the crude matter in which it works, clearly conflicts with the situation in music. We saw that even here we could speak without hesitation of a play with form, and the resistance of matter in architecture forms precisely its essential dynamic element.

What comes in question is whether in architecture the background also opens itself up and produces a series of strata; also, whether it is possible to establish a difference between the outer and inner strata, as was found to be the case in painting, literature, and music. We can say immediately that both questions must be answered in the affirmative. To both arts, however, belongs a special inquiry.

Recall how matters stood previously, as we distinguished only between the real foreground and the unreal background. On one side, we could demonstrate the intuitive (no longer sensible) consciousness of a greater whole, of the composition of the work of architecture, which includes many rooms and partial views of it. Here we see in our imagination, as it works synthetically, (213) what the artist sees set off clearly from what is seen by the senses; that this whole is a physical reality changes nothing, for it cannot be surveyed by sight. On the other hand, in the viewing of an architectural work something more that this whole is expressed: it lets a kind of life appear along with itself, which has been placed within the building and to which it testifies. To be sure, certain psychic peculiarities of this life are reflected in the building – in the church, the temple, the palace, or the private residence. For men build their structures in a way that expresses how they understand themselves, their life, or their ideals (e.g., religious ones). In that way, the individual nature of peoples and times can appear in their buildings, and even in their ruins.

In both of these phenomena are clearly reflected not only the splitting up of the background in architecture, but also the opposition of the outer and inner strata, similar to the opposition we found in music. Let us stop for a moment at the outer strata. If one assumes that every architectural work fills some practical end, moves within spatial proportions, and at the same time must struggle with the resistance of unyielding matter, then we may distinguish these outer strata in it:

1. The practical layout (most clearly seen in the floor plan);
2. The spatial layout – the proportions, distribution of masses (intended to enhance the view and the impression it offers);
3. The dynamic layout – the overcoming of matter and the utilization of laws specific to it.

These three levels do not in all cases constitute a clear series. In a certain sense, the first is prior to the two next ones, but it may be that these develop beyond the first.

To 1: The practical layout. We have already shown how the practical end is far from being a merely negative or limiting element in architecture, but that it rather takes over the role that is played by the theme (sujet) in the representational arts. An architectural work that has no practical function is unimaginable, and would be in fact like a poem without a sujet. It must be given a task, and it is precisely in the solution of that task that art must manifest itself (for example: an apartment building with so and so many units, so and so kinds of fittings, and so forth).

Every layout that proceeds from some pre-given conception of form must fail here, because it will necessarily come into conflict with its task. Only a solution that begins entirely with practical matters and only then chooses, from the perspective of aesthetical form, among the possibilities that these practical matters allow, can be genuinely organic, and constructed from inside out.

For that reason, the layout that is intended to realize ends is the first in the order of strata – and also in the order of appearance. For an impractical work that fulfills its tasks imperfectly seems even with regard to (214) appearance unattractive – at least for the eye that grasps it intuitively. Insofar as that is so, the aesthetical shaping of the work begins here. It is therefore not entirely true, as was just said, that standards of aesthetical form are chosen only from the possibilities that the practical ends allow; rather, in the treatment of the ends, those standards are already at work. That is not nonsense, because the end plays in this case the role of the sujet, and must therefore be entirely taken into the organic composition of the architectural work.

To 2: The organization of space. This is the stratum that is treated most extensively in the history and theory of art. It is of course important, but it is not the only thing of concern. One must not imagine that there is no leeway for the shaping of space if one’s first concern is with practical ends. One who is inexperienced with blueprints does not see the abundant possibilities that still, as a rule, remain; and, especially, the inexperienced person has no clear picture of how, with small means – such as small changes in the dimensions that are insignificant for all practical purposes – relatively significant spatial effects can be achieved. For example, if one moves the roof down a small degree, the character of the house becomes different. It is similar if one alters the dimension of height, etc.

The art of the architectural genius consists to a great extent in his discovery of such relatively small means regarding the relations among sizes and in his cleverness in putting them to use, especially where powerful effects of spatial form depend upon them. That is true as much for the external architecture of the entire building, given the principles according to which it divides its elements, its structure, and its distribution of mass, as also for the internal forms of individual rooms.

Where it is a question of monumental structures, the effects of sheer size are added. These do not depend as much upon the actual size of the structure as upon the organization of space: there are enormous structures that do not seem big (skyscrapers), and there are some with very modest dimensions that affect us with their largeness (the Berlin Hauptwache and other works by Schinkel67).

To 3: The dynamic organization. Architecture is an art bound on two sides. The bond with the practical end is only one; the other is with matter. Now all arts are no doubt bound up with matter and limited by it, but the matter to which architecture is tied has a particular weight and stubbornness; it is crude, physical material – no doubt there are abundant choices among them (for the most part among wood and stone; also clay, only later iron girders arrived on the scene) – that will depend upon its purposes, but still it offers always only limited possibilities.

Not all spatial layouts can be carried out in every material. And, given some specific materials, they cannot be done in any way at all, but in ways specific to them. For that reason, the structure is from the very outset dependent upon the dynamic composition. The history of architecture is essentially a (215) history of building techniques: for example, the art, not just of piling up masses of stone so that they do not fall, but to fashion them as covering for the interior rooms (barrel vaults, ribbed vaults, domes).

The various building styles, one replacing the other throughout history, are essentially limited by the technical capacity of the builders. Here we see that in every dynamic layout in fact an aesthetical stratum functions in the building and not just a technical one. The important feature here is, specifically, that the beauty of form does not lie as much in the spatial proportions as it does in the dynamic meaning of the forms: it thus lies where the weight of the material and its overcoming by means of the construction is made present to the mind in its visible form.

Fine examples of such visibility are the flying buttresses of the Gothic, in which the outward force of the wall is absorbed by the ribbed arches leaning upon it at great height, and also the construction of the ribs themselves.… Schopenhauer used ancient columns as an example of this, where the upward tapering sensibly expresses double weight (that of themselves and the roof).

We have spoken of all these things earlier. What is significant here is only the splitting open of the background in its external strata. In fact, the dynamic layout is quite different from the spatial layout and entirely different from the practical design.

b) The inner strata of architecture

That there are inner strata at all in architecture is not as obvious as in other arts. This fact is connected to the lack of freedom with which the practical ends, which are very much external and inartistic, can be pursued. If we stand before an apartment building from the 1890’s, it is difficult to believe that it possesses inner strata. If we stand in a small western German town before a framework house (from about the seventeenth century), things seem a bit different. The case is similar with Westphalian or Upper Bavarian farmhouses. We become entirely convinced when we see old castles, palaces, estates, or even churches. Here there are obvious distinctions to be made: not every architectural work has the deeper background strata, those that speak of the life and psychic being of the people who built them. But the mere fact of age, that is, the temporal distance from the observer, will also make discerning of the background difficult.

What, then, will make up the background? We cannot force our way into this mystery. But we can see it in a negative sense. The contemporary apartment building with its many units is a product of an economic trend that demanded speed, cost-cutting, and, more than anything, effective use of allotted space. For the spatial design and dynamic layout, there remains, no doubt, some leeway, but there is no thought for these, no possibility for their development, no love. Never (216) is the practical layout developed with sufficient thoroughness and clarified by experience. Think of the dingy inner court, of the rooms that are too high and too narrow. Tradition is wanting, as too the connection with a life having a particular form and a particular style. The result is that the building lacks style; and that means as much as a lack of form; the design is purely external; it is expressive of nothing.

One sees from this that what matters is the connection of a building with human lives that develop themselves in definite ways. Only where this connection is found can the life and the nature of man appear in his buildings. One sees further that a close connection exists between the outer and inner strata of a building: for not only do we lack the inner strata where the connection with a form of life is wanting, but the outer strata also. And one may expect, accordingly, that this connection might be still closer – that is, that with the deeper outer strata deeper inner strata will also appear.

One may, accordingly, distinguish the following three inner strata of a building – but not, to be sure, in assuming that they are present in all buildings, but only that a certain order is present in them; at least the deeper strata never appear without the ones that are less deep.

1. The spirit or meaning in the solution of the practical task: one could also say the kind of solution, within which again all kinds of compositional variation is possible.
2. The total impression of the parts and the whole – resting upon the second and third outer strata, the spatial layout, and the dynamic layout; but in reality the former already determines the latter two.
3. The impression of the will to life and the style of life, which is usually unconscious and always in a certain opposition to the practical ends pursued (the impression, therefore, of something impractical, of an idea). It can intensify and reach up to the level of a world-view, and it relates always to the self-cultivation of human life according to man’s understanding of himself.

To 1: The spirit or meaning of the solution in the composition of the practical ends. One can attack a practical task from very different sides, and, correspondingly, can solve it differently. The choice depends on the standpoint that means the most to someone, and that standpoint is usually given by the character of life, especially that lived by a community. The frame houses of the waning Middle Ages drew their meaning from the need to save space within the tightly drawn town walls – the extension outward of the upper story, the low ceiling, the small windows; the meaning of the Westphalian farmhouse is drawn from their designers’ efforts to hold everything tightly together under one roof: living quarters, stalls, pantries, etc.; but one can also separate rooms having the same functions in one large courtyard with multiple structures – as it is done in other places, and both solutions offer the possibility (217) of further arrangements. In building a church, the aim of holiness is achieved in effect in different ways in the system of equally high multiple-naves and in the basilica. Both allow for different forms of execution. But the spirit and meaning is of a different kind both in the way the inferior space is conceived as also in the external shape.

Every kind of solution to the practical task of construction lets its own principle be known. And with every principle, a preference is given to one aspect of the problem over other tasks. Which side is given the preference depends upon the style of life or the taste that then predominated. And here – already in the first inner stratum of the building – the style of life is connected most tightly to the building style.

To 2: The total impression offered by the parts and the whole as resting upon the spatial layout and the dynamic layout. As it is impossible to achieve the practical end without at the same time pursuing a definite idea of the structure, so too is it impossible to realize a spatial and dynamic layout without giving the forms thereby created a certain expressiveness. There is of course no name for expressiveness of this sort, and it is therefore difficult to achieve any agreement as to what it is. But it is felt everywhere we face a true and well-executed construction; and the expressiveness is extraordinarily varied.

We tend to divide this phenomenon into certain formal types, which we name after peoples or epochs that created them, or from whom these types are known. Thus we speak of the Pompeian villa, a Byzantine church, a Tyrolean farmhouse, and a Chinese temple. And we mean by such designations the inner character of its architecture, which is exhausted neither by its purpose alone nor by its spatial form and its dynamic layout alone. But, beyond all that, it brings to expression something of the character and the common essential nature of the people who, in the long passage of generations, created these forms. For the peculiarity of such forms of construction, which express their human quality, is that they do not arise out of the fancies of individuals, but are formed gradually out of long tradition.

In such structures belongs also the experience of life. That is seen in their daily presence and their use, in their very familiarity and in the continuing need to make everyday reality bearable and engaging –, that is, just to shape forms that satisfy a higher psychic demand, forms that themselves reveal something of the psychic existence and inner attitudes of their creators. Perhaps the situation is such that just those forms that are bearable and engaging to a certain psychic type also reveal something about that psychic type. For in the end the peculiar nature of the human frame and its forms of life are characterized by nothing so much as by what speaks to him in its daily presence. (218)

To 3: The construction as bearing the character of a will to life and a life style. One can also call this inner stratum that of the idea in the structure. In all cases, it has distanced itself entirely from the sphere of the practical. But this stratum fulfills the purposes of the structure wherever these are also ideal – as in temples, churches, cultural centers, palaces and similar architecture.

Here we now find something of importance. The ideal purpose of a monument is not identical with the human idea that is marked upon it. This is clearly visible in the magnificence of temples and churches. These have been erected to honor some specific divinities, but they survive the centuries and, when the time comes that no one attaches a meaning to the name of the deity, they still stand before us in their ideality, that is, they will still be felt as the expression of a will and a greatness that extends above and beyond all human capacities. Extending beyond humankind and pointing toward an ideal is quite well understood apart from all knowledge of its dogmatic and cultural purposes. And indeed it is understood intuitively in the visible impression of the structure, or even its ruins. The situation is the same with religious music, painting, and sculpture: only the themes are dogmatic; the artistic creation is independent of them, and it speaks just as independently to the non-believer.

For these reasons, we may speak in this context of a stratum of the world-view in architecture – and, if we may, of a metaphysical stratum also. For in fact here is put in question the metaphysics of man: how every kind of monumental architecture articulates something about the self-image of man. We showed above how a simple apartment building relates to the tight social circle of families as clothing relates to personality: as an expression of that self-image and as a conscious effort to give shape to one’s life. In that way, a mere apartment building testifies to the essential character of man. Monuments, however, give testimony to what keeps his own ideal before his eyes, to what specifically he wants to be and of what his dreams are made.

And, if that is true, we may call this inner stratum in architecture that of the will to life. One must only understand that expression in its entire depth – not individualistically, but historically in the sense of a living human community with a common nature peculiar to it, common ideals and yearnings, in short, in the sense of a real-objective spirit. In this sense too, the phenomenon is quite well known: it is precisely that which draws us irresistibly to structures of great inward style, ones that have grown out of a genuine tradition. Only we usually do not know what it is that attracts us in this way.

c) Community, tradition, style

We have spoken often about how architectonic form does not grow out of the soil of individuality, but rather requires community and tradition. No doubt one may correctly say the same of other (219) arts, but those are much more free in their movement and allow the individual artist greater flexibility. Connected to this point is that the dominant role of style in architecture is especially strict in many epochs – in such a way that the architectural sensibility of men is entirely anchored in a specific formal character.

Why is this true of architectural sensibility? To this the first and most simple answer is: because a house is a practical object that offers itself to everyone in a striking way, a thing that sets the tone for its entire town. A house must fit into the whole of its environment, and, if it does not, its presence seems disturbing and vexing. In short, a house is a matter for everyone; it is privately owned, yet it still is an object of public concern.

Moreover, a house is an enduring entity; it is, once built, a form of capital, and therefore cannot so easily be done away with and replaced with another. The single individual does not, no doubt, grasp that readily, when he builds a house; he does not have to think about it as long as he is rooted entirely in the taste of his time and place. But it becomes a real question when he, as an individual, withdraws himself from that standard of taste.

Those are matters that distinguish architecture radically from other arts: no one is forced to look at a painting or a sculpture, or to read a poem or listen to a piece of music. One does not have to live with them; they belong in no universal contexts of life. They are, to the contrary, quite removed from them; and, if one wishes to see works of their type, one can normally just choose to do so. In any case, there is ordinarily no compulsion; works of art of these kinds are of no public concern.

For that reason, even in the communal life of the objective spirit to which they belong they are not a direct concern of a community. Rather, they first become of such general concern where their meaning has high spiritual significance. Precisely for that reason a house, even one of little significance and poorly constructed, is from the start the direct concern of the community. That is the reason why, in a highly creative architectural epoch, the sensibility of the community determines architectural form. This determination takes the form of the “ruling taste” or the “sense of style.” To the persons who built it, these need not be manifest. He simply walks the well-trodden track in architecture – in architecture as in the other realms of life. The track in this case is the sense of style into which he has grown and which, of all others, is alone familiar to him.

One may therefore ask further – for behind all forms of community there lies originally an element of history – why architectural form grows only in the soil of tradition? To say merely that this is the case in all the arts is insufficient. For the case is not the same. Tradition has a greater influence in architecture, and for (220) the creation of architectural form it is more essential – at least as long as one builds out of the common sense of style (that is, as long as the point just made is fulfilled). This sense of style grows only slowly over the course of generations.

One may express the matter in the following way: the spirit out of which form is developed is from the start a communal (objective) spirit; that means that it does not begin one day in the life of some specific generation, but arrives from faraway historical regions and out of small beginnings; thus it is transformed only very slowly. Speaking concretely: when a son builds a house, he wants one like his father’s, as he knew it throughout his childhood and found to be befitting his social standing. Stylistic traditions, and the traditional sense of style, are maintained because the latter is itself held tight by the former.

This means that the individual cannot extract himself voluntarily from this sensibility; he is trapped in it as in a communal spiritual form that thinks and acts for him. He knows it no other way. If he knew his situation in another way – from abroad or from the distant past – and wanted to imitate those forms, the effort would disorient him, lead him astray, and he would easily begin to misunderstand the foreign forms and come, disastrously, to confound them with his own.

The same is entirely true for the third inner stratum in architecture, that of the ideas, which beyond all else address man. Naturally, we limit ourselves here to building in which an idea plays a determining role – as with monuments. Within certain limits it is also true of private homes, so far as they allow something to appear of the self-image of the owner (within his close community). Ideas of this kind are in fact genuinely super-personal, or possessed in common. The best examples of this are religious ideas, which lie at the root of all temples and churches.

This is also true of religious ideas just because relatively important moral ideas stand behind them, when, for example, in paying reverence to divinity, one’s own reverence for the [the state] is manifest. That, too, is a community matter, and is felt to be so; and something of the same is placed within the structural features of the temple. We need not spend much time on these matters. If one has grasped the nature and function of ideas in the background of architecture, its foundation in the objective spirit becomes self-evident.

We still should note that what is genuinely stable in architecture is precisely the inner strata, and perhaps this is most evident in the last and deepest of them, that of the ideas. This does not mean that the outer strata do not possess an independent constancy of form. But what is most characteristic is that the external structure is still held fast from within, held fast, indeed, by that imponderable psychic satisfaction that connects itself tightly in human sensibility to visible material forms. Here tradition rules absolutely. (221)