Second Section: The Sublime and the Charming
Chapter 30: Concept and Phenomenon of the Sublime
a) The domains of appearance of the sublime in life
The expositions of Chapter 26 have shown that the genera of beauty, and, along with them, the separation from them of the specifically aesthetic values, does not result in a clear series within any of the given standpoints; just as little a uniform principle of classification or even just an overview of them that would in some way inspire confidence. That is in keeping with the situation today in aesthetics, and must be accepted. We must nonetheless try to extract what can be grasped of it.
We saw already in that chapter how the sublime extracted itself from the series of value-predicates – as something exceptional, with greater weight than the others, and more singular. The sublime, alone among the others, stood uncontested, whether or not one subsumed it under the beautiful or, as Kant did, deemed it independent and equal. All later aesthetics took up the genus of the sublime – partly because of tradition, which extends back in time to the ancient concept of 
(“height,” “sublime”), whose nature was not yet purely aesthetical – and partly because every great and serious art approaches this genus, such that we always find ourselves referred involuntarily to the sublime.
For these reasons, people have also demonstrated that all other genera of the beautiful are found in other places in life, where one does not think of aesthetical enjoyment: the graceful, the sweet, the charming, the comical, the tragic, etc. One could not, therefore, claim that these have a value equal to the sublime. (364)
But in this way, the same objection could be made to the sublime: does it not occur in life quite without any trace of the aesthetical? When one thinks of the overwhelming powers of nature, such that we can crate no aesthetical distance to observe it, or of great human destinies to which we stand too close to view them aesthetically – in the face of death or in religious devotion – one may wish to believe that this objection is justified. In any case, we may assume here no clear separation from the other genera of aesthetic value.
In a different way, another kind of separation of the sublime from the other values occurs when one looks at the set purely in terms of content. The other genera of values – or at least the value-predicates – exhibit a broad similarity to each other and, specifically, they bring a kind of similarity to each other into their common opposition to the sublime. Of all of those genera, only the tragic is excluded. Further research will most likely place a few others alongside the tragic, perhaps from music: the largo, the grave, the maestoso, etc.
The graceful, the charming, the idyllic, the sweet or lovely, have quite obviously this similarity to each other, and this same opposition to the sublime in their very nature. And everything related to them must be counted among them also: the farce, the grotesque, the fantastic, and, yes, even the amusing. At a somewhat greater distance belong here also the genus of the comical, with all its species: the ridiculous, the funny, and the humorous. Out of this contrast the genus of the sublime becomes more precise; it is now unambiguously definable by means of its fundamental difference from these genera.
Here the real basis for this difference may lie in Kant’s having thought the sublime to be of such fundamental value and having placed it “next” to the beautiful itself. One cannot defend him for doing that, and the theory by mans of which Kant himself tried to justify the idea is, although quite profound in meaning, rather one-sided and, in many respects, artificial. But it is understandable if one sees that Kant had a tendency to force “the beautiful” a bit toward the group of “simpler” value-predicates: towards the graceful, the charming, etc. We will speak in a moment of his theory of the sublime.
But at this point we must ask: where in fact do we come in contact with the sublime? This “where” asks after the domains upon which we make its acquaintance, and those are not only aesthetical ones. To this question we may answer simply: upon almost all domains where we encounter something enormous or otherwise overwhelming in its elevation: in nature as in human life, in fantasy as in thought. That the two latter are not real domains does not change the fact that in them, too, the great and the enormous are contained. The sublime is indifferent to its ways of being. This indifference also makes it possible for aesthetic objects to be sublime. For aesthetic objects are, with regards to most of their components, unreal. (365)
First of all, the sublime occurs in many kinds of natural phenomena: the storm, the surf, and the waterfall, in sheets of snow in the high mountains, the desert, the quiet of the heath, in the starry skies. Those are old and well-known examples. Many things of a different sort can be for a scientist genuinely sublime: the inner structure of the atom or the subtle changes in the nucleus of a living cell – just as much as the statistical laws of the stars in the galaxy.
The significance in these matters may be that nothing here has yet to do with the aesthetically sublime. For of course the sublime also exists this side of the aesthetical. For the aesthetically sublime first comes to be upon the standpoint of beholding and enjoying by a subject; for it belongs to the essence of the aesthetic object that it exists as such only “for us,” assuming we bring with us the correct way of looking at it.
But the sublime approaches us in human life more forcefully and in a deeper sense; for these cases we usually do not have a sense for it. A person who calmly bears pain or great sorrow “is” in a notable way sublime – over pain and sorrow. Who sacrifices his life and health in some great undertaking “is” exalted over the goods of peace and comfort that he renounces for it. This “being” sublime has nothing to do with a “feeling” of the sublime; it exists absolutely in the person, regardless of other men’s knowledge of it or feelings about it.
This is in itself not a thing aesthetically sublime; one could call it with greater justice the morally sublime. But if this were a case of truly great deeds, of heroism and high capacity for responsibility, the sublimity would be evident because we would respond to it in our hearts with spontaneous admiration.
We come to the aesthetically sublime only when we achieve some distance, alongside of our admiration, from which to gaze upon it peacefully and to allow its greatness, far from all its excitement and immediacy, to affect us.
We must not forget that the purest manifestation of the sublime lies in the domain of myth, of religion, and, in general, of world-views; also in that of philosophical thought or theorizing. For a long time people have had these phenomena in mind when they attempted to characterize the sublime without bothering to consider whether they were in fact characterizing the aesthetically sublime.
Naturally, such things are not only aesthetical, especially in the case of myth, where poetic forms are nonetheless clearly those of art; but here, too, there is a boundary to be drawn. In the domain of religion, the artistic representations of the sublime are, however, in no way identical to the sublimity of the objects of the belief themselves, i.e., with the Divinity and its dominion over the world. Religious dogmas bear eloquent witness to that. The dogmas stand in direct opposition to the clarity and distinctness of aesthetic objects, and could never be the bearer of their values. (366)
b) The appearance of the sublime in the arts
The wide domain of the sublime outside of the arts and of the aesthetical in general demonstrates clearly that it is not, like the beautiful, a specifically aesthetical appearance. In that it is similar to the graceful and the charming or the comical, as well as to the other “genera of beauty” that we have noted, which initially are not specifically aesthetical appearances. From each one we must first separate individually the cases that are aesthetical. But in which domain do these lie?
Without doubt, they lie primarily among the beauty that is external to art; it appears as much in nature as in human life. For our purpose, we may lay claim to all of those cases that we just named with respect to the non-aesthetically sublime; for it was readily apparent that all these cases become transformed into the aesthetically sublime as soon as the subject that grasps them obtains the required distance and the tranquility of contemplation. This we may accept as a fundamental law throughout, and it is demonstrated innumerable times in life, when one and the same overpowering event at first appears as merely oppressive, but which then all at once appears thrilling.
When Schiller says, “Man now loses hope at length, Yielding to immortal strength,” he merely expresses defeat, and stands entirely on this side of the aesthetical; when he continues, “Idly and with wond’ring gaze, All the wreck he now surveys,”114 the attitude has turned about, and the aesthetically sublime gives itself simple expression in the same event, a conflagration.
This distance is usually not so easily obtained in the case of the morally sublime. A violent emotion in the face of the forces of nature may well be the more intense, but it does not penetrate to the same psychic depth. The morally sublime – perhaps a convincing act of generosity or magnanimity – forces one’s own selfhood to measure itself by it, and the admission of one’s own incapacity to do something like it is oppressive. A man must deal with it inwardly. But when, out of the consciousness of one’s own moral inferiority, distance upon it is taken, one’s admiration and reverence is then that much deeper.
The aesthetically sublime occurs in life ceaselessly in the wake of the sublime in nature and in the morally sublime; obviously this happens only to the degree that a person – and even an entire epoch – is aesthetically awake.
Let us supplement this with a few words about the religiously sublime. Since in its domain lie the most powerful forms of appearance – most powerful because they involve philosophical world-views – it is to be expected that here, again, will be found the most abundant occurrences of the aesthetically sublime as it appears in the wake of those forms.
That is so true that Hegel’s aesthetics – and no doubt that of the Romantics in general – identified the one with the other, or, at least, did not know how to keep them separate. People identified (367) the “divine” straightway with the “idea,” which comes to “manifest” itself there; that God was thought eminently sublime is reasonable, but to hold without further ado that this same sublimity, which is purely religious and philosophical, was an aesthetical one (as in myth and dogma) is a failure to distinguish matters properly.
At this point precisely the relation of the arts to religion should have been given a better analysis. No doubt the arts originated from religious life, yet they reached their highest flowering when religious life was already beginning to wane. They received their ideas from it, but they remained autonomous with respect to their power of sensible form, and transformed religious ideals into ideals of a conspicuously human type.
The arts no longer dared to approach the divine sublime itself. It was once forbidden to the fine arts (Do not make pictures!). Greek sculpture tried and achieved it – but only because their gods were very human; the same holds true for Christ in human form – in the great epochs that painted the “Son of Man.” Only music, perhaps, is thoroughly permeated by the divine sublime. It was able to do so, because it did not have to work with the objects of religion, but could suspend it in vagueness.
For that reason, in the minds of its imitators the musically sublime could most likely sunder itself easily from the philosophical world-views about which it once wove its tendrils, and today stands before us purely as the aesthetical sublime. Not even the connection to a text (in oratorios and cantatas) is an obstacle to it. The parallel in pure music by just these same masters (Bach, Handel, et al.) demonstrates that clearly. Historically and with respect to material and thematic content, the arts, when they create something sublime, take their point of departure from the philosophical contents of the religious life. That may not be challenged, even if the process of separating the arts from religion has proceeded considerably, and other thematic domains of the sublime have come into fashion.
In which arts do we find not only the “aesthetically sublime” but also the “artistically sublime”? And, furthermore: in which forms of art within the arts may it be found? Upon which strata of the object does it depend? The first question is easy to answer, and it will serve as an introduction and as a guide. The last, in contrast, is difficult, and leads us directly to the most fundamental question: what really is the sublime?
Initially, one might be of the opinion that the sublime could be found only in the representational arts, because only there do we have genuine themes. But that is the first error: that the sublime might be tied to objective themes from which they cannot be severed. In truth, the sublime is rather independent of them.
With the exception of ornamental art, the sublime exists in all the arts, but in a graduated series. Its impact in painting is relatively slight, although it does not lack sublime sujets and there is no scarcity of ideals (368) of an exalted humanity (of the Titanical). Painting may in exchange be too tightly connected to the sensible – the purely sensible is quite distant from the sublime. The “painterly” effects proper are those of seeing itself, not of something standing behind it.
Where painting genuinely reaches into the sublime, as in the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, something alien to painting enters – a combination of drawing and sculpture; and, perhaps, something that is humanly larger than life can be grasped authentically only in this way.
Of course in the art of the portrait there is an element of the profound-sublime, as we see in the late Rembrandt, where all of the magic of colors, rejoicing in the senses, gives way to what, standing in the background, touches the truly human.
The contrast of sculpture to painting in respect of the sublime now becomes clear. Hegel saw rightly that the former was the first to “form” the sublime in its figures of gods. Here in fact was created the ideal of human nature beyond experience and reality: it was inwardly beheld and, by means of creative imagination, given sensible shape as a model of perfection.
Literature is as much capable of expressing the sublime as it is of the other genera of beauty. It has the broadest scope in inner diversity. Even in lyric poetry the sublime is not absent; it comes powerfully to the fore in heroic epics, primarily in the characters, but also in their destinies; especially where their destinies becomes significant and tragic.
The situation is similar in tragedy. The characters that are marked by destiny fall under a grander law, and they experience its image in their own downfall. Whatever is great and uplifting in man reveals itself here in its purity. Then man grows beyond the measure of the merely human. But it is not true, as one may think, that “the tragic” as such is sublime (Little Eyolf).115
The sublime appears in its purest form precisely where it is least looked for: in the non-representational arts of music and architecture. Music presents it in the depths of our psychic dynamics, a place that representation cannot reach. Music can express the psychic-sublime because it allows it to “speak” directly and thereby produce a resonance in the hearer; it affects him emotionally and lets him sense it just as he otherwise senses only his own experience: as his own.
Architecture achieves as much the other way around; it displays a static sublime in quiet repose and greatness. So it has long been the case with monuments: in the Doric temple the sublime had already achieved a level – in a way that appears so simple – that has never again been reached: earnestness paired with an elevated and serene cheerfulness. In the great style of churches in the Middle Ages, a perfection of special and dynamic composition was once again achieved, and is best known in the Gothic. (369)
c) Kant’s theory of the sublime
After this survey of “where we find the sublime,” we can approach the question of what it is, or wherein it is distinguished from other kinds of beauty. This question does not yet incorporate the question of the value of the sublime, but that will become ripe for decision through the clarification of the first two. Kant developed the classic theory of the sublime, and we must begin with it.
Kant distinguished the mathematically sublime from the dynamically sublime. The first gives us what is great absolutely (the great beyond all comparison), and the second corresponds to the power of nature, viewed “as power that has no dominion over us.”116 This last point is true because otherwise the relation to the aesthetical vanishes, and only the “fearful” as such remains. Kant developed only the first point.
In both cases the perspective is quantitative: “That is sublime which even to be able to think of demonstrates a faculty of the mind [Gemüt] that surpasses every measure of the senses.”117 In the apprehension of something so beyond all measure, a “feeling of the inadequacy” must arise in us, namely “of [the] imagination for presenting the ideas of a whole […].”118 Kant has in mind, as the whole that pertains to this experience, something infinite that is in fact impossible to grasp with any clarity. The first kind of sublimity is therefore a condition of “non-purposiveness” of conception for judgment.
At this point in Kant’s analysis, the sublime could produce only a sense of displeasure, oppression. But then Kant introduces something else: the demand for totality that is made by human reason. Just the failure of imagination “indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense.”119 In that way, the mind wins back its pre-eminence and experiences a pleasure of a higher kind, one conditioned by displeasure of a lower kind.120 This pleasure is the feeling of the sublime. It signifies a lifting of the heart out of its depression. Apparently the most important thing here is the dialectic of the appropriate and inappropriate, of suitability and unsuitability, of pleasure and displeasure. Whereas in the “beautiful” (in Kant’s narrow sense) adequacy, suitability and pleasure arise in us directly, they are conditioned in the sublime by their opposites, and the core of the matter lies in the overcoming of this opposition. But what always happens is that, in its final effects, man remains the pre-eminent being; aesthetical pleasure is essentially the taking of pleasure in this pre-eminence.
This is most important where the faculty of judgment turns to the moral nature of man, his noumenal aspect. And that is seen in its purest form where we are concerned with events in our moral life – the kinds of material that is worked upon in the arts. In art, we are concerned with a still greater pre-eminence, for here freedom begins in man, with which his intelligible nature first truly appears. (370) One may apply to just this phenomenon the definition: “That is sublime which pleases immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses.”121
If one surveys these definitions of Kant, they leave one unsatisfied with respect to two of its aspects. First, they remain tied, even more than the definitions of the beautiful, to the subjective: one hears too much of the effects upon the mind and not enough about the structure of the object. But the dialectic of pleasure and displeasure remains useful, so far as those two elements may be understood as indicators of value.
But second, really too much in the object is made to lay complete claim to infinity. This somewhat frivolous play with infinity stems from the early Romantics’ tastes. But the subject does not require it; the first formulation, “the absolutely great,” is the better of the two, if one may understand this term as referring to an “absolutely great effective force,” without concerning oneself with how great or small it really is.
Thus, Kant’s account of the sublime says little, although he is clearly groping in the proper direction. Perhaps one may, in agreement with the direction of the two of his points that we just specified, record the following two elements as essential parts of the concept of the sublime:
- Two elements of feeling are in conflict with each other in the beholder, one functioning as a defense or as resistance, a feeling of impotence or fear, and the other as assent, of which the latter is founded upon the former. For this reason the value of the sublime is a value founded upon a disvalue – namely upon the former’s coping with the latter.
- A quite peculiar element of “greatness” appears upon the object. It is questionable whether anything at all quantitative plays a role here. It could be simply a question of something “superior to us.” That would be entirely sufficient and in better agreement with the more severe appearance of the sublime, for not all cases of it lie in the domain of extension, but rather in that of moral greatness – wherever it appears in the living human being or in artistic representations. It is also in better agreement with the peculiar forms of the sublime that appear in the non-representational arts (music and architecture).
Chapter 31: The Structure of the Aesthetical Sublime
a) The special forms of the sublime
The sublime, as Kant saw it, exists without doubt. There is only this question, whether this is true for all forms of the sublime – even if that is so only for the ones touched on above, e.g., for the sublime contained in music and in architecture. In those there are found what are perhaps the purest forms of it. But where do we find the basis for this limitation? (371)
One basis lies in the forms of thought peculiar to Kant, which in many domains works with pars pro toto [taking a part for a whole]. For example, “duty” was seen by him as the sole ground for taking a position within ethics; within the concept of the sublime, he gave preference of place to overwhelming power, oppressiveness, and fearsomeness.
Both of these had the eventual effect that Kant saw what was overwhelming more than what was sublime, or rather he held the first for the second. It could not be denied that this specific form of the sublime exists, and Kant’s examples, taken from nature and its ways, are entirely correct as characterizations of it. But they do not exhaust the type. They show a preference for that aspect of the problem from which Kant drew the relation of opposition between the pleasant and the unpleasant in the observer. As a result, the opposition appears artificially inflated by him.
If we further ask why Kant sought such emphasis, the answer must lie in his metaphysical convictions. To Kant, God is the absolutely sublime, before whom all creation is vanishingly small; this sublimity peers through all limited forms of sublimity in nature and in the life of the mind as infinity and unattainable being. This philosophical perspective led to a one-sidedness in his picture of the sublime.
Let us therefore look away from this one-sidedness! Much is left over when we do; especially if one puts to use the achievements of Kant discussed in the previous chapter, viz., the idea of the value founded upon a disvalue, and his refusal to understand the “absolutely great” quantitatively. We are able to grasp best the latter idea if we place the different forms of appearance of the sublime one next to the other, though, to be sure, in a more broad and open way than Kant did. To begin with, we must leave out of consideration the question of how the aesthetically sublime is to be demarcated from the sublime in life.
Thus, I present – without any claim to their systematic order or to the completeness of the list – the following species.
- The great and the grandiose – both without concern for measurable quantities, only “great of its kind,” in the way in which buildings may affect us with their grandeur, even when they are not large in size.
- That which is grave, imposing, overreaching, profound or whatever seems inscrutable; grave in the sense associated with solemn ceremonies.
- That which is complete within itself, fulfilled and perfect, before which one feels puny and needy (as often with the morally sublime); that which is mysteriously silent and still and may yet be sensed upon the surface of something dark and immeasurable.
- The pre-eminent (in strength or power) – what in nature is the overwhelming, in human life is the morally superior, imposing and inspiring (generous, splendid, magnanimous).
- The monstrous, the violent, and the fearsome – as something in life that overwhelms a man, and before which he (372) furls his sails, but also in artistic form as the lapidary, the monumental, or what in form constitutes the “flinty” and the “colossal” (Kant).
- That which is touching or deeply moving – both found primarily in human destiny, but prototypically in literature.
- Once again the tragic, distinct from both of the above – not only in tragedy, but also in other kinds of literary works, in music, and in real life this side of art.
These individual forms of the sublime form only a selection, and the series is not uniform; for example, the last two kinds are much more specific in their kind than the other five. Much about them still requires an explication; that is the case with the first three points, which deviate considerably from the Kantian conception.
Much of this can be made clearer by viewing it from the standpoint of the opposition itself. For every special form of the sublime has its opposite, which need not at all be negative (as, e.g., averse to all value, ugly); and often this counterpart is well known.
| To 1: | What is meant is the “inward greatness,” which in fact is not extensional in nature. That does not exclude the possibility that in special cases the term refers to something that is “big” in the sense of extension, such as the starry skies; yet the sublime is tied more to their undisturbed uniformity and inerrant reliability of their movements. The contrary refers to a being of small stature, petty, the ordinary man, the “nonentity.” For the “inwardly great” – the “well-formed” –, the case of what is “grand and spacious” in the form of a building offers singular evidence. A good example of this is Schinkel’s Old Guardhouse:122 it is a vanishingly small structure between two larger buildings that it overshadows by means of the impression of size that it exudes. The same can be said of some very small compositions in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – preludes and fugues – only a few last longer than seven minutes (using a moderate tempo), but given the inward greatness of their structure, they can be measured against the greatest compositional works and still emerge superior. |
| To 2: | We must not misunderstand the species. The serious or grave has nothing to do with what is sad or melancholy; also little to do with the tragic, which, to be sure, always remains, for its part, tied to them. Seriousness need not dispense with joyfulness; the synthesis of the two is clearly found in solemn celebration. And we should observe that everything inwardly lofty, as long as it is not oppressive, has something solemn and celebratory about it – something of what is separate from everyday life and “elevates itself above” it, so that “celebration” is an exceptional state in life. Precisely here might lie the primary sense of the “sublime.” It consists in this state of “elevation above.” What is solemn and celebratory is in fact given its purest form in great music. |
| To 3: | The perfect (complete within itself) is not normally included in the sublime, at least not any more; but it cannot be denied that everything that is perfect (373) makes an impression of superiority. When the mysterious and the puzzling are added to it and fill the observer with a sense the something greater may be contained in it, the impression becomes considerably more intense. |
The two forms of the sublime under 2 and 3 (within certain limits also 1) may well constitute the pure original type of the sublime, which stands entirely neutral in regard to emotional elements of other kinds – the tragic, the threatening, etc. This is in opposition to Kant, for whom the oppressive stood in the foreground, as his theory required.
For these two forms also the contrary element can be brought in as evidence. The contrast to the serious and the solemn is the banal and the quotidian, but in no way the simple and the superficial; to the complete and the perfect, the half-done and incomplete; to the concealed mystery, the vulgar and the vapid.
The next two points, 4 and 5, together make up to some extent Kant’s sense of the sublime. The opposition they have in common is to the familiar and usual, those things with which we know how to get along in life.
b) The tangible essential characteristics of the sublime
If we now cast a look back, we will see that the sense and essence of the sublime has become more precise. Indeed, we see only now how unclear is the traditional concept of the sublime. The series of its special forms brought the phenomenon not only to its correct dimensions, but also threw new light on its uniform nature. It is by no means required to conclude our discussion with a formal definition of the sublime, which we could read off against the Kantian. All ambitions of this kind must be set aside.
What then has been achieved in general for the philosophical specification of the aesthetical sublime? It appears to be negative in part, but it is eminently positive, though only mediately so. The opposition to Kant’s analysis concerns, moreover, only its specific emphases and its one-sidedness. The following affirmative elements remain.
- The detaching of the sublime from what is transcendental and absolute, from God and all other specifically philosophical presuppositions. Affirmative: the absorption of the sublime by terrestrial and the nearby, by the natural and the human (this in opposition to the Romantics).
- The detachment of the sublime from the realm of the quantitative: not because it cannot also be quantitative, but because in the great majority of the forms in which it appears, its superiority is of a different kind, indeed even its “greatness” is of a different kind.
- The detachment from the oppressive. Of course, there can be elements of affliction and distress in the sublime, of fearsomeness and the catastrophic, but that does not constitute its nature. The primary element in the sublime is the elevation produced by the beholding of what is superior.
- The elimination of its foundation in an element of disvalue (the “inappropriate,” the “unsuitable,” etc.); similarly of the corresponding displeasure in the value-response by the subject. Instead of its foundation in a disvalue, we arrive at its foundation in a value. This value need not lie in the subject. It usually lies precisely in the object, and indeed as its intrinsic value, provided that it is experienced as the absolutely great and superior.
- In the place of what does not correspond and what is not appropriate, there enters a clear correspondence, one that lies originally in human nature, between the superiority of the object and some psychic need of the human heart.
The last two points are genuinely affirmative; this affirmation becomes apparent in the nature of the sublime. Yet there are still some things needing clarification. Specifically, it is not the case, as one might think, that a pleasure that is conditioned by some pain, or a value that is founded upon a disvalue, simply cannot occur. Both occur frequently; the first is familiar even in psychology as the law of contrast among feelings. The second we know from ethics, where the distress of a fellow man (a disvalue) founds the moral value of brotherly love. For that reason there should (375) be nothing to object to in the Kantian analysis of the sublime in respect of this relation. The matter is simply that this analysis does not account for the phenomena: more correctly, it accounts only for a part of the problem, and not for the central part. For the sense of the sublime does not, as a rule, begin with the oppression of our self-esteem; rather, the latter is a special case.
The fundamental law that applies here may well be this: man feels from his very origins drawn to the great and superior; indeed he may go through life with an unspoken desire for something great and imposing, and keep open a watchful eye for it. When he finds it, his heart flies to it.
That, at least, is the case for normal men who are not poorly educated or full of anxiety; the latter is frequently the case, as we can see in men who possess a certain faint-heartedness before whatever is extraordinary – and even greater timidity before whatever is monstrous or overwhelming. To be dismayed or humbled by what is overpowering is usually secondary, although when one is up against certain kinds of external powers that is quite natural. For in such cases, the origin of the discernment for the sublime occurs on a second stage, one in which some distance has been established from whatever is threatening.
One of the most appealing moral characteristics that can belong to a man is that he is drawn to things that are great and superior to him. This pull upon his heart is not of an aesthetical nature, but it is easily transformed into aesthetical beholding and the pleasure of admiration. In any case, as a tendency toward value it lies (as an ethical response) at the foundation of the aesthetic value of the sublime, and that constitutes merely a special case of the more general law of foundation of aesthetic values (Cf. Chap. 28c). This admiration of what is great is basically, we might even say, of a more general kind. The moral case itself is something more specific. There is a kind of primitive magic exerted by the “great”; it possesses a “magnetic” capacity, which draws the human heart to itself. We may express it in this way: the man unspoiled by a poor education carries within him the tendency to reverence, and to live with an eye directed over and beyond him.
Perhaps this tendency is rooted in a still more fundamental tendency, the desire to bring meaning into one’s own life. For all that transcends us gives meaning through itself: man senses darkly the secret depths within him as one source of meaning. What the meaning of this transcendence consists in is a question only for later reflection, or even for philosophical consideration; in practical life, men do not ask such a question, and one’s developing aesthetical perceptiveness does not ask it at all. For aesthetic perception is tied directly to impression. But impressions arise, as always in the aesthetical relation, from the senses. And the senses are light years away from giving an account of such matters.
The changeover to the aesthetical sublime begins as soon as the first “flight of the heart” to what is “great” has achieved a state of distance and contemplation. The pleasure of seeing (376) lifts itself above the passion of devotion and the longing that feeds upon itself; and then, immediately the aesthetic value of the sublime arises as a more palpable value in the object, one beyond its importance as a value that bestows meaning.
What is of the essence here (as was already noted in point 4) is that instead of founding the sublime upon a disvalue, we have its foundation upon a value. With that, the purely positive relation between them is reestablished. Kant and his followers did not see the founding value, although it was there to see; the element of human pleasure in it shows itself unambiguously. The value of everything that appears on very large scale attains an added weight just because it is significant and powerful; the weight of this value is most intensely felt where it is a question of non-extensional psychic and moral greatness. The attraction of the human heart to what is magnificent is so basic that it will indirectly accept elements of disvalue of whatever strength. That is the reason why we meet with the latter frequently in the sublime, and why they are so frequently and emphatically represented in it.
That Kant made these elements of disvalue into the main condition of the sublime must have been due to the fact that in those examples of the sublime in which disvalues are represented the opposition of the sublime to the remaining genera of beauty, that is, to the charming, becomes very prominent. This difference was troublesome to Kant. He thought it made the sublime different from beauty in general, and he thereby brought confusion into aesthetics.
c) Intangible essential characteristics
In this way, the opposition to beauty may be dropped from the usual list of the characteristics of the sublime. That does not happen because the concept of the sublime has been noticeably broadened, but because the element of conflict in the essence of the sublime has been eliminated. With that the foundational arrangement is justified, whereby all special genera of aesthetic value are subordinated to the beautiful. With that, too, the concept of the latter is now fixed.
According to this analysis, the sublime is that form of beauty that responds to the human needs for “greatness,” for something “surpassingly great,” and with that the resistance of the faint-hearted and the all-too-human is easily overcome. This definition also dispenses with the other side: that of the integration of the more general specifications of the beautiful, which must hold true where we are dealing with a subordinate form of the beautiful.
To achieve the correct supplementation among the structural elements of beauty, it is sufficient to introduce the appearance-relation, for if that concept fails, as it does in ornamental art, then the sublime would also have nothing more to seek. Now provided that beauty consists in the appearing of a non-sensible background, i.e., the sensible real foreground to the object, and this existence is an “existence for us,” one can grasp the sublime (377) in the following way. It is that specific appearing of an unsensed background in a real sensed foreground of the object, which accommodates the needs of man for greatness, and, with the greatest ease, overcomes any resistance opposed to it.
One could leave the definition at that. But it is striking that this accommodation, of which we have spoken, depends structurally upon the appearing background itself. We can therefore simplify the expression, if we refer it from the start to the appearing background. Then it will read: the sublime is the appearance of what possesses overwhelming or surpassing greatness, which cannot be given through the senses, in the foreground of the object given to the senses, so far as this greatness of the appearing object accommodates the psychic needs for greatness and overcomes easily the petty human resistances arrayed against it.
The background is the surpassing thing itself that appears “in the foreground.” This appearing is especially strange in this context, because of the incommensurability between foreground and background. This is not so only in the arts; it is found just in that way in the sublimity of nature, where it is also peculiar in a similar way. For there, too, what is given through the senses is only a finite detail (a view of the sea, of the starry skies). But just that is the mystery of the thing: how can what is entirely Other appear to the senses? Yet the puzzle is no greater here than it is in the case of the beautiful.
Herewith we must drop all dialectics of the sublime, which once was so popular. It was referred to in passing by Hegel, was spun out broadly as a theory by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and continues in our own century – usually in such a way, to be sure, that one can see only dimly through to the antithesis. But the issue did not concern that antithesis alone. It was a question rather of creating a guide to the whole theory of art, whereby the arts and each of their more special forms, would be organized as a series. In this series, progress towards the next member could always be initiated by a [dialectical] turning-about of one of its elements. This genuinely Hegelian schema is cut at its roots when one finally abolishes the artificially exaggerated antithetic of the oppositions in the sublime. The consequences of this abolition affected immediately the entire structure of aesthetics. For all further [dialectical] transitions are built according to this schema.
Another question now becomes acute: how can, in fact, what is overwhelmingly great be represented in the arts? It must be represented in some form or other, for it is supposed to “appear.” The foreground is always tightly limited, just because it is given to the senses and is intended to affect us as an easily survey-able whole. How, then, can something overwhelmingly great appear in it?
Since the Romantic era this question has been subject to an intensified antithetic. Back then, writers intensified the opposition from the outset by speaking of the “infinite in the finite,” – an example of the bad disposition of the Romantics to elevate excessively everything that given, and to drive it into the Absolute. (378) One was forced by this tendency to return to earth before one could correctly understand the question.
What is in fact at stake here is simply the way the overwhelmingly great is placed within the narrowly limited realm of what can be surveyed by the senses. And that is strange enough. We have already pointed out that here we are faced with the far limits of imitation, and indeed on both sides. For no doubt nature contains things of surpassing greatness, but it cannot be imitated; and no doubt such a thing genuinely comes first to be as an idea, but it cannot be captured by any attempt to objectify it.
The answer is to be found in the more general nature of the beautiful. It is not at all a question of imitation or even of representation in the sense that something must be made real here. It is sufficient for the aesthetic object – even for the sublime one – to “appear.” In order to appear, however, the surpassingly great need not be “produced” or “completed.” It is enough that the idea we have of it stands perfectly clearly, peremptorily, and intuitively before our eyes. Otherwise, the question of making something appear presents here no more problems than elsewhere. The faculty of representation is similarly free, for the most part, in its creations.
Nevertheless, it is precisely the clarity of this appearing that is puzzling. For how can a thing that is out of the reach of the senses be brought to intuitive clarity? No doubt, in aesthetical beholding there is the “higher intuition,” and it is not bound to the limits of the senses. But the impression of greatness must be maintained, for the observer does not know how large is his own contribution to the aesthetic object – thus to the sublime.
But this is where the key to the puzzle lay all the time: the appearance-relation, which one attributed to the object, could have been created only by the participation of one’s own fantasy. The object in question, narrowly limited, can well enough be transformed into something overwhelmingly great by the work of the imagining mind.
Obviously, all representation of the sublime is incomplete and imperfect. But this incompleteness may be felt in the representation itself, and in that way the sublime is brought indirectly before us; thus, e.g., the morally sublime of a great deed or passion, and also the sublime in nature. In fact, the poet proceeds in that fashion: in offering to the senses concretely small phases of a life, he lets the sublime appear in the destiny of a person, and, in its appearance, it becomes aesthetically sublime.
The distance of the sublime from the senses constitutes the inward extent of its role as a mode of beauty. For beauty is appearance in sensible form. This opposition is never entirely overcome. It is not by chance that the art of painting, which rejoices the most in the senses and exercises itself entirely in the “magic of color,” is least capable of the sublime, so little, in fact, that it draws even the most sublime religious themes (379) into the magic of the senses. Still weightier is the affirmative testimony of music and architecture: what is amazing about them is that these two “non-representational” arts prove themselves most potent in the representation of the sublime. Not because these arts are less sensuous, but rather because they do not actually “represent”; what they express instead in their autonomous bestowals of form is made sensible only in a dark, indefinite way, and in that way, of course, the magic of appearance has been transported far beyond the level of the senses into the realm of the non-sensible.
Chapter 32: The Place of the Sublime in the Organizationof the Strata
a) The preponderance of the inner strata
The analysis of the structure of the aesthetically sublime has led to some intangible elements that are essential to it. For example, seen from the side of the phenomena these elements are no doubt tangible, but have not yet been brought to a point at which they can be understood. No violence will be done to divide further these extra- or super-phenomenal elements here. But now analysis may penetrate a bit further to some specific points that have appeared along the way.
Among these points, that most recently treated thrusts itself before our attention. It concerned the relation of the aesthetically sublime in the arts to the appearance-relation, which lies at the root of all beauty. This relation is, according to our recent discussion, a much more intimate one than one tends to think –indeed, more than theories of the sublime would be willing to grant. For it is more essential with these than with any other “materials” that in the case of “overwhelmingly large” the appearance be nothing more than “mere appearance.” In any other way, the “representation” – or even just the “expression” of the sublime – would be impossible.
This raises the question: upon which of the strata of a work of art does the sublime depend? Or, if not upon any one of them exclusively, to which is it tied primarily? It would no doubt be conceivable that distinctions among the strata remain in this case quite external. The sublime could, depending on the nature of its material, be tied to every stratum. And it could be rooted in the total relationships among all strata. Both possibilities are improbable, partly because the arts take part in sublimity in different ways, partly because the “overwhelming” as such asserts its distance from the senses. We must rather extend our question: how is the sublime related to the givenness to the senses? And how does it stand in relation to the “play of forms”? The latter dissolves the appearance-relation at its very border. The former, however, is opposed to “overwhelming size.”
Idealist aesthetics accused the sublime of being essentially without shape: otherwise said, formless. Such an accusation pretended to base itself upon Kant, who in this context spoke of the “unlimited” (F. Theodor Vischer). A further basis for this opinion seemed to lie in people’s belief that the (380) “universal” was essential to sublimity; the latter opinion relied upon the quantitative notions of real space and time. Such ideas as Hegel’s “bad infinity,” or the “tedium,” especially that found in nature, hovered before the minds of these Hegelians; so, as in a recurring example, the motionless open sea was tedious. As a counterweight to this, they (such men as Solger123) demanded of the sublime a form of motion, a “sudden bursting forth,” as Longinus124 required such 
for great rhetorical effects.
We see clearly in all of this a kind of tentative searching that finds no real point of contact. The “bursting forth” is obviously quite extrinsic to the sublime, and represents a disordered aiming at mere effect: how else could there otherwise be such phenomena as the “majestic” or “solemnity”? The “tediousness” is only a borderline phenomenon (about which will be spoken later). However, “universality” has been falsely imported here; individual literary characters contradict it completely. And the “formlessness” is a misunderstanding, but, as before, a quantitative one. Something that was really without form would be an aesthetical impossibility; such does not occur in the arts, and in nature it would not be beautiful, indeed not only not sublime but a nullity.
The truth of the last two elements is something quite different. What people have called the darkness of the sublime is a certain indeterminacy, a puzzling and mysterious quality that attaches itself to it, a depth or abyss concealed within that fills the viewer with a holy awe. Something alien, something standing at a great distance from us, remains in it. Therefore detail disappears: all that is trivial is excluded from sublime human figures (the trivial pertains to the standpoint of the “valet”125). Thus the poet reaches into the idealized times of long ago. Even the death of the individual seems to lift us into an ideal realm. Yet for all that the sublime is not universal; even less is it “formless.” Rather it remains tied even here to the individual figure, and is only tangible in it.
Thus we have not been able to answer our questions about the part played in the sublime by the strata of the work of art, and also with that its position regarding the sensible givens and the play of forms. Since the first question was by far the most important, we will begin here with the two other ones.
- The sensible givenness of the sublime is, as with all background matters, a conditional givenness: the overwhelmingly large does not itself enter the sphere of the sensibly given – that would be impossible – but only its appearance, and that is just as possible as it is possible for figures to appear.
- The play with forms has a lesser role in the sublime, because, in general, details play a lesser role in it; and where alone such play has no relation of appearance (as in ornamental art), nothing remains of the sublime either. The sublime stands in an indissoluble opposition to play. (381)
- Among the strata of the aesthetic object, it is without question the deeper ones – the inner strata – that emerge as the bearers of the sublime. Its appearance in the outer strata, which are close to the senses, is only partial. For that reason, “darkness” attaches itself to it, the indeterminate, the secretive, the concealed depths and abysses. That is obviously quite different from formlessness. Try sometime to give what is full of mystery a different expression! You will not find one. It can be given only in a veiled manner. This is precisely a bestowal of form, even if a conditioned one. What is “monstrous” naturally requires form of a different kind than other things. It can be revealed to the senses and to intuition only when it is largely hidden from them.
This can be demonstrated in a very specific way, as soon as one looks more closely upon the phenomena of the sublime in the arts with this idea in mind. Before all else, we see its perfect conformity with the trace of impenetrability that always attends the sublime: what is contained in the deeper strata of a work of art never allows itself to be adequately grasped except in the act of aesthetical beholding – and that means: through its appearance in the outer strata.
In drama, in epics, and in novels we never find the sublime, if it appears at all, in the outer strata. The writer can perhaps give it a bit of emphasis through his diction, can give it “weight,” can point to the veils that conceal it. – But in those ways he can never make it clearly intuitable. Nor can it be at all self-contained within the work. It also can lie neither in the stratum of movement and gesture, nor in that of situation and action. In all of this, it can only “appear” if it lies in the deeper strata: for even the plot is essentially the mode of appearance of something else.
This other something consists in the psychic form bestowed upon persons, i.e., in the qualities of their character; similarly, in the next-deeper stratum, in the destiny of human life. Only here can the phenomenon of the overwhelming largeness come to be in man: it appears as much in goodness as in evil, as much in freedom and in the force of will, or in the passions; in striving and success as much as in downfall; as much in the inner struggle of a man with his better nature; as in triumphant victory.
These are in no sense the ideational strata. But they are nonetheless the characteristic inner strata of literature. Here the element of content is entirely concrete and its form is intuitively present; thus, it has no trace of the universal. And its indefiniteness does not lie in itself, but only in its appearance in the outer strata.
It is not much different with sculpture. We have Hegel’s famous example of the sublime in the classic Greek sculptures of gods. How is it with the sublime in such cases? One seeks it in vain in the details of the figures’ stance, and, with even less success, in symbols and emblems. Only the whole of its attitude expresses it: when illuminated as a whole, (382) what produces its effect is the facial expression of a superior kind of tranquility, of severity, kindness, and wisdom.
Think, for example, upon the way the Olympic Apollo holds his head, or upon the head of Athena in her Corinthian helmet: here the level in which the appearing divine-sublime is rooted becomes clearly visible. It is the last stratum, that of the universal ideas: great human ideals rise to the level of the superhuman and are beheld as in a vision and fixed in stone. But this fixing in stone is entirely brought to life; it appears provided that it can be placed in the spatial form of stone. And what remains upon it is darkly sensed; it is a profundity that can still be felt.
And where in music is the sublime found? It is hard to find in the pure play with forms of the outer strata, however deep one’s understanding of the compositional structure of the musical piece may be. It can only be something other, a uniform whole – specifically a dynamic whole – that stands behind it; and that must belong to the domain of those inner strata in which the emotional turmoil of the psychic life unfolds.
Out of this originates the great power that we have concretely before our eyes in certain “first movements” of symphonies, quartets, or sonatas. That is no cheap sublimity, which one is free to ignore; rather, the situation is as follows: either we “understand” the music, and then we understand also what is sublime in its great style, or we do not understand it, and then what is essential in the music passes us by. This is so even more profoundly for the fugues of Bach: in their smallest segments we have the appearance of what is greatest and most profound. From there come the most sublime effects that no one could challenge, the “metaphysical” elements, as we often call them.
What is wonderful in music is just that it can produce in its outer strata an almost adequate expression of things other arts are not nearly capable of expressing. It is achieved through the absolute freedom of the play of forms in the tonal composition – even in the larger unities of entire musical works. On the other hand, it is achieved through the relinquishment of any real “representation”: for the element of content, as much as one recognizes it as psychic emotion, remains hovering in a characteristic indeterminateness, and only the dynamic character comes to expression. This indeterminateness corresponds closely to the “darkness” in which the sublime appears.
Finally we have the same preponderance of the intangible inner strata in architecture – namely everywhere that it becomes monumental, that is, where its aesthetical effect is that of the sublime. Palaces and churches, ancient temples, even towers and city and castle walls manifest this type of formal composition.
Some inner rooms seem “intimate,” and others are “uplifting”; we know the latter from Gothic cathedrals. The impression is that of overwhelming height and size. In the older Romanesque it is more a sense of massiveness (the Octagon of Aachen). But the “immensity,” (383) that is expressed within it belongs to the sphere of world-views and originates from the last palpable background of the work.
This condition is even more subtle in antique temples, where the expression of size lies more in the external form and is represented by means of the contrasting play of columns and entablature. Perhaps the secret of size lies in simplicity –even if it is in part only apparent. Beyond this suggestion, we can analyze no further the fact that the Doric column has a more sublime effect than the Ionic or even the Corinthian column, which latter are more pleasantly built and more slender. And the situation becomes even more inscrutable when we notice that even with its smaller mass, the Doric column seems considerably “larger” than the others … A pure example of the architecturally sublime.
b) The sublime in the tragic and its aporias
We have seen the preponderance of the inner strata in the aesthetically sublime object. We could perhaps demonstrate that preponderance still more convincingly, if we were to take account here of the sublime aspects of the tragic, for there is always sublimity where there is a genuine tragic effect. An inquiry of that kind would be too extensive at this time. In lieu of that, we may bring just a few thoughts into this circle of questions. The tragic, like the sublime is not, of course, merely an aesthetical phenomenon; in theoretical discussions of it many purely ethical issues have been drawn into it.
Among the few questions that may be raised about the tragic that really belong in this context, we may count only those that contain certain aporias of the sublime. They are questions such as these: how can there be sublimity in passion? How can what is morally evil be sublime? How can a mere human destiny be sublime? How can guilt and human weakness be sublime? How can the downfall of a good man be sublime? And how can the triumph of the senseless find any place at all in the sublime?
We see that these questions all revolve about the same point, and this point concerns precisely the essence of the tragic as such, that element within it through which it is distinguished from all other forms of sublimity. What this point is cannot be doubted; one must place it at the very top of the essential definition of the tragic.
The tragic in life is the downfall and ruin of what for man is of the highest value. To experience delight at such an event would be morally perverse. But the aesthetically tragic is not the downfall itself, but its appearance. The appearance of the downfall of what is humanly of the highest value may very well have aesthetic value and call forth a delight in beholding it – the shudder it causes us –without harming our moral feeling. This delight is, then a genuine feeling of the value of the sublime. (384)
Why does what is humanly great become especially evident and palpable, precisely in its downfall? One might perhaps opine that human greatness appears precisely in its limitations and its inconstancy. That is of course true, but what is strange is that the human heart ascribes these limitations to it as something positive. A psychological law lies at the root of this fact.
All goods seem to possess the greatest value just at the moment that they are stolen or taken from us: the pain of loss makes the sense we have of their value more intense. The negative value in the tragic appears in this form. One might also say: that is the positive meaning that the disvalue of destruction takes on. For the value and the aesthetical delight of the viewer is not tied to destruction, but rather to human greatness itself. But this human greatness is brought into the full light of our interest, of our sympathetic participation in it, and of our more intense feelings of value, only by the painful sympathy we feel for its destruction.
We may call this the aesthetical magic of the tragic. It is a kind of transfiguration of the human. It is like the rays of the sun turning everything visible to gold as it sets. In comparison, it is of secondary interest that in the structure of a drama the impending downfall gives occasion to the heroic in man to take upon a truly superior stance. Only the seriousness of what threatens him places a man before the highest challenge; such challenge first allows what is great in him to “appear.” And the aesthetic value depends precisely upon appearance.
With that, we have already solved one of the above-mentioned aporias of the tragic: it is not the downfall as such of the Good that is sublime, but the Good itself is transfigured in its downfall, and becomes sublime. And the more clearly the downfall reflects itself in the suffering and the defeat of those who struggle, so much more is the magic of the tragic amplified, for so much more is the audience driven to inward sympathy. To this extent Aristotle’s doctrine of 
and 
[fear and pity] is entirely correct; however, the affirmative element in it is developed too subjectively.
In a similar way, the other aporias are resolved. How can a mere destiny be sublime? The situation is the same as with the case of downfall. Not every destiny is sublime, and neither is every great misfortune, only the tragic ones – i.e., the destiny of some great kind, one that bestows upon that destiny the transfiguration of a downfall. The best example of this is the tragic denouement of a great love: one sees to what degree the destiny that separates the pair has an elevating effect upon us just by the ease and almost the necessity by which a happy end destroys all grandeur. One may in fact say: destiny as such is not at all sublime, just as little as a downfall; what is sublime is solely the human greatness that is amplified in it.
The same is true for the other form of the aporia: how can the triumph of what is senseless have a place in the sublime? It finds its place where (385) what is awesome in the appearance of human greatness is conditioned by its defeat. The defeat appears as the triumph of the senseless.
How can there be a sublimity of passion? And how can there be a sublimity of evil? These are two very different questions, for passion can also be a passion for goodness, for high endeavors. But in any effort to answer them, they belong closely together. There is a false resolution of these aporias. In the overcoming of passion, there may be sublimity, and there are poets who seek to find, in the self-overcoming of their heroes, the resolution of tragic conflict. But such resolutions are “rational,” and leave us cold. They are intended as a “moral.” Thus, they are poetically false.
The real resolution is a quite different one. The negative element in the sublime is by no means so general as Kant thought, but there are in fact certain genera of the sublime that really contain this element, e.g., the “fearsome” or the “threatening.” To these belong, as was observed, the tragic. But the negative element does not necessarily have to lie in the external threats that endanger men. It can also lie within them, and it can even be attached just to those characteristics that constitute the human greatness in him.
It is at first indifferent to the nature of sublimity “what” grows up in man to overwhelming greatness, if only there is a power in him that is capable of true greatness. Passion in itself is neutral: it can be destructive, but it can also be constructive; its greatness makes it significant. In Romeo and Othello it is love, in Macbeth it is ambition and the desire for power. An audience may accept these passions for a long while, can even feel them empathetically in their aberration, and sense their greatness as impressive.
This extends much further in the case of the sublimity of evil. We reject it, we step back from it in horror, but we yet still sense the greatness in it: Richard III sweeps us along in such a way that we admire as such his boldness, his vigor, and we find his efforts to be worthy of a “good” cause (a better one). In that way, his well-known wickedness grows with his downfall – but does evil itself thereby become sublime? That cannot be true.
To this we must answer: in fact that is not the case, evil in man is not sublime, although the downfall of the wicked man contains tragic sublimity in itself. Rather human greatness as such is sublime, even when it turns itself to evil, yes, even when the decision for evil is taken in principle. This is developed, via the highest sublimation, in the tragic figure of Mephistopheles, who, in the end, is the one betrayed. Then, corresponding to this figure, are those forms of passion that evil wears: anger, fury, desire for revenge, and the outrage that burns up accumulated resentment. The greatness in all that is like that of a natural force.
The final secret in the tragedy of evil is freedom. There is no freedom to do good alone, there is only freedom to do good and to do (386) evil. Thus, freedom appears in an evil will – whatever may motivate it – and just as purely in good will. However, freedom as such, understood as willing as such, is the fundamental attribute of man, the emblem of his power – and at the same time it is the general necessary condition in him of morality, the capacity to be good or evil.
As the final aporia, consider the question: how can guilt and human weakness be sublime? This is not the same question as the preceding, for guilt is not the evil in man, but it is rather primarily a document of freedom. It is well known how men disputed a hundred years ago whether the true tragic fate is guilt by one’s own doing, or whether it falls to a hero from outside oneself. Voices were not lacking to speak out for the latter, and, for support, they pointed to the ancient tragedy of destiny.
People believed that men were able to sympathize adequately only with the innocent, but that is quite untrue. A man in a conflict who is without guilt is hardly human. For, first, action in life, in some situation, gives him no time; thus, he acts out of passion. Second, real life situations are not such that a man can emerge guiltless from them; in the most momentous human situations, at least, that is not possible. One value stands opposed to another, and the will must decide which he will violate, and to which he will do justice.
That is the reason why even being completely guilty as such has something tragic about it. In the case of great guilt, however, one that is decisive for a man’s life and places a heavy burden upon him, this tragic element is amplified to the sublime, because the measure of guilt is greater than the capacity of the man to bar it, and it can cripple him inwardly (Don Cesar)126. … Then guilt develops into a destiny – in the form of an inward fate for which one has prepared the way. And the problem flows into that of destiny and downfall, which was already solved unambiguously.
c) Questions on the periphery of the sublime
We have introduced the tragic here not for itself alone, but only insofar as it represents a special case of the sublime. And that is only a part of tragedy. The other side of the tragic lies in the domain of the dramatic that makes up one specific sector of aesthetic value. For it is by no means by chance that tragic conflicts offer especially propitious conditions for meeting the requirement of highly animated and concentrated plots. That belongs to dramaturgy, which will no longer be treated here. What is more important for our general problematic is that tragedy also represents a marginal case of the sublime, which one apprehends upon the strong negative element in it.
The tragic is, in fact, not the sublime. When both appear in a character, such as in Siegfried in the Nibelungenlied, they still do not consist in the same characteristics: the sublime lies in the larger-than-life size of the unyielding power, of the immediacy, uprightness, cheerful security (387) and inner peace in the character; the tragic lies in the deceit to which he devotes himself, and the consequences that were his own doing. If the sublime appears only through these consequences, what is great and inspiring is still not attached to those consequences, and the tragic element remains in a certain opposition to sublimity. That is a trait that attaches to all that is aesthetically tragic. It is already given with the negativity of is preconditions alone.
In this sense, what is genuinely tragic also stands closely tied to the sublime, but opposite to it, and constitutes its counterweight. What is and remains most noticeable is that the feeling of value, too, reacts to these two elements in entirely opposed ways: it reacts to the errors and downfall with weeping and wailing, and to the greatness of what is thereby lost forever with enthusiasm and an inward sense of elevation.
Consider also that the tragic as an aesthetical collective phenomenon constitutes that form of the aesthetically sublime that concerns human and moral greatness. It is true that it is not the only form, but it is in fact the one that is most strongly marked by the sublime – if one does not consider the form of music, which is even more marked by sublimity, though it is indefinite. Literature, in contrast, manifests the tragic in completely objective individual definiteness. And if this form turns out to be in fact a phenomenon on the periphery of the sublime, certainly a peculiar weight would surely fall upon the phenomena on the periphery of the sublime. In the tragic, no doubt, this was never clearly seen. Only in well-tested theories, provided that they try to make room of the negative element, do we find something like a sense of this state of affairs.
A second form of the phenomenon on the periphery of the essence of the sublime is tediousness. It is a phenomenon that attracts less attention, and seems to have been rightly considered almost nowhere in aesthetics, although many thinkers have come close to it. At first sight it seems even unbelievable that there should be a direct transition from the sublime to the tedious – that the former should change over into the latter. And yet the possibility is not so strange.
Consider that the contrary of the tedious is the amusing, the distracting, and the gay. All that is lacking in sublimity, there is no concern for diversions, or, perhaps, they can be provided at times, as often happens in the musically sublime, but in the nature of the sublime itself it is not to be found, and there is a kind of sublimity in which monotony plays a major role. People have pointed to the example of the still waters of the high seas, where neither one’s own animation nor the contrast of land and sea introduces some diversity. One might add to that the example of the desert, perhaps also the flat northern tundra.
With these examples, one senses immediately the borderline space between the sublime that ravishes us and the monotonous-indifferent: it seems as if a mere step would suffice to leave the one and enter into the other. That is a serious danger for the aesthetically sublime. For in tedium it is (388) eliminated beyond hope, because it lacks what is gripping, mysterious, attractive, and inscrutable.
The attempt to understand, as did the Romantics, the overwhelmingly great in the sublime as a kind of infinity has been shown to be false. But that does not exclude the possibility that in certain cases it is really a matter of an infinity – at least in the imagination, or in what imagination takes to be infinite, i.e., everything very large, whether extensive or not. Examples such as the still ocean, the desert, the tundra, are of this kind. But then there is no doubt that infinities of that kind, the Hegelian “bad infinity,” are entirely tedious infinities.
419 One cannot avoid this curse of the infinite by reaching for the highest objects and calling immediately upon their sublimity as a hedge against tedium. Even God becomes tedious if one takes His infinite nature a bit too strictly, if, that is, one no longer looks upon Him, as the pious do, out of a deep living desire; thus in Dostoyevsky we are told of the blessed in heaven who sit to praise God for a thousand years, and then again for a thousand years, and so forth in infinitum.
Plato saw this danger to the sublime in the eternal seriousness of the tragic poetry of his time. He noted this danger, at the close of the Symposium, as a contrast to his famous insistence that the tragic poet also be a comical poet. Nothing but comedy can bring bright life and animation into monotonous seriousness. And that is quite natural: for so is human life. Shakespeare proved that Plato’s insistence is not utopist.
The most weighty among the phenomena on the periphery of the sublime is the comical, or, as it is usually described, the ridiculous. “It is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.” In this form, everyone knows the peripheral condition that is intended here. And, in life as in art, the scornfulness of uncreative men takes whatever is useful to it for “whate’er is bright to stain, and in the dust to lay the glorious low.”127 Such is the work of caricature, satire, and parody; such of travesty; such, as we see in life itself, is the work of the clever buffoon. They all bring laughter effortlessly to their side, and sublimity vanishes, is forgotten, is done for. One may think of Euripides in Hades in the work by Aristophanes (
…). Or in the impersonation scene in Henry IV: Falstaff’s joke on the king.
That is possible only where the sublime itself has already provided the toehold for it, i.e., where it lowers its guard. But how does that come to pass? It means that something is lacking in it. Why does the sublime find itself so easily lacking? Does it not have the highest pretentions? Or is the matter simply that people allow themselves to be led astray to the extent that they represent the sublime with insufficient powers? Perhaps even in their own lives they are able to realize it only in a foolish way? This latter point must be affirmed: say that someone wants to give himself an appearance of dignity that he does not possess. Immediately he makes himself ridiculous; (389) another man feigns power and confidence in his demeanor. Both fail on the first attempt.
And yet we find the sublime a thousandfold about us. Nature alone is full of it. Why is it not lacking in nature? Because it does not begin with pretentions as men do, and only that which is genuine and entirely fulfilled in it is alone what matters. Only man misses the sublime. Even in art works even in representation.
Why in fact is it only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous? Because the pretentions of the sublime are of a higher and more encompassing kind. It is easy to fall short of such pretentions; here the possibility of derailment is the greatest.
However, the nature of the comical consists precisely in such a derailment – a fall from things important and bitterly earnest into what is trivial and banal. That means that what is overwhelmingly great turns out to be some everyday human trifle, just when it was least expected. Thus when Diogenes says to Alexander, “Stand away from my sunlight,” the sublime, which then collapses into itself, is that of “Majesty.”
Perhaps no kind of human or tragic greatness exists that would not be liable to this derailment into the ridiculous, for anywhere the trivial can peer out of a chink in one’s armor. Or does there exist a sublimity that was created by men but that is beyond all such danger?
No doubt there does: in the non-representational arts, in music and in architecture. Here, too, there are weaknesses and errors in form, but they remain attached entirely to the foreground – more correctly, to the outer strata – and, in the worst cases, they appear as miscarriages and have no comical effect. The basis for this lies in the neutrality of the tones and the natural forms, as also in the indefiniteness of musical and architectonic expression, neither of which are expressions of themes or content, but merely deliver the psychic dynamics. These latter are, of course, not only stronger and more direct than in other arts, but are rather also more perfect, which is alone possible precisely in the heterogeneity of their material.
One further matter must be noted here. For poetry of a high and heroic style, this third phenomenon on the periphery of the sublime is a truly fearsome threat. In its most inward nature, such poetry is endangered by an involuntary transformation of the sublime into the ridiculous – and it cannot protect itself from that fate very easily – not even where it is completely genuine and fully realized –because ingenious or vulgar mockery can at any time, by a slight falsification of the tragic, create a point of attack for the comical. The example from Aristophanes is close to being of this kind.
Is there any remedy for it? Can one actively prepare a barrier to it? Yes, there is a means, an infallible one, but it presupposes a poetic skill of the highest kind. The tragic poet can himself discover the ridiculous that borders him on all sides and absorb it into the negative side of the tragic. In that way, he breaks the point of the spear – he turns it (390) about, so that it does not point in the direction of the sublime – and he lets the tragic element be amplified by burdening the tragic hero, already burdened with bad luck and pain, with scorn, which is the heavy curse of the ridiculous.
A proof of this taken from a high example is the fool’s scene in King Lear. The fool says to Lear, “for when thou gavest them [your daughters] the rod, and puttedst down thine own breeches” [Act I, Scene IV]. The “fools” in Shakespeare illustrate this point; and indeed Shakespeare, too, as a whole, in almost every tragic play. Thus one cannot make fun of him; he anticipated the ridiculous, which borders on the sublime, and uttered it more powerfully than the most malicious mockery could do. – Note here again also Plato’s law of the unity of the tragic and the comical.
Chapter 33: The Charming and Its Varieties
a) Phenomena in opposition to the sublime
It was shown above how within beauty in general the sublime stands in a clear position of opposition to an entire series of aesthetic values and families of values (Chap. 30a), that is, to the charming, the enticing, the idyllic, the delightful, the amiable or kind, the sweet, the droll, the grotesque, the fantastic and the amusing. The series can be differentiated more extensively. What is more important is that the series is not the only one, nor is it homogenous in itself.
We have seen that the sublime has a certain special place within the realm of beauty in general – because of its significance, but also because of its uniqueness. To this special place corresponds the fact that it has, in a multidimensional relation of opposition, contrasting values of very different types and of very different importance over against itself. Each opposite number forms an entire group. It is sufficient, however, to characterize each of them in terms of their best-known representatives. Accordingly, we will distinguish here four contrasting or oppositional dimensions in which the sublime forms the common extreme: as such, the sublime stands in opposition:
- To the quotidian, the usual, the neutral, to that which is in no way distinctive;
- To the facile, the small, the insignificant, to what lacks importance, to the delicate – to these one might perhaps also count the idyllic, but surely the sweet and the droll;
- To the charming and its various species: the enticing, the delightful, the amiable, the graceful; beyond them most likely also the amusing, the grotesque and the phantasmagoric;
- To the comical: this term used in its broadest sense, with its varieties: the witty, the ridiculous, and the humorous. (391)
We will consider the comical separately. It perhaps constitutes the most difficult of the regions of aesthetical problems, and for that reason we must hold off discussing it until simpler matters have been resolved. The first of the oppositions that we named, the “quotidian” and the usual or normal, does not require any analysis here, because it has no aesthetical character of its own, but is neutral regarding aesthetic values. Of direct interest in this context are only the two middle values in opposition to the sublime: the “facile” and the “charming,” both with their specific forms that are, moreover, closely related.
As for the first, the opposition is to the “weighty and the great” in the sublime. This aspect has been taken so seriously by some aestheticians that they have even counted the charming as belonging to this opposition to the sublime (Eduard von Hartmann). They thought that if the sublime is the overwhelmingly powerful and great, then the charming must be the “impotent,” that is, a thing that has somehow turned out to be weak and small, and if one must look upward to the former, one must look downward to the latter.
If one looks more deeply into this relationship, one finds that two different oppositional dimensions have been confused with each other, the second and the third: that opposition of the sublime to the facile, small, and delicate, and that to the charming and delightful. That the two are not identical ought to be obvious from the fact that the differences in size can hardly determine whether something is charming or enticing – not, at least, where it is primarily of significance, that is, in man, with respect to both body and soul (and in fact they exist only as the two together). The “delicate” is, to be sure, just as much in opposition to the sublime as is the charming, but this is a different opposition. That is the reason why it lies in another domain of value as the group of values that make up the charming.
The parallel to the comical might make one think of a relation between the sublime and the charming similar to that between the comical and the ridiculous that was discussed above. If this is so, it would then be a question of another marginal phenomenon of the sublime: there would have to be a direct transition of the sublime to the charming, a switching over, just as the phenomenon of the “one step” [from the sublime to the ridiculous]. There is no question of any of this as a matter of fact. There is no continuous transition at all from the sublime to the charming, not to speak of an insidious switching over of the one to the other. And the reason why this is not possible is that in this case a much more abrupt and pure relation of opposition exists.
That may be additionally confirmed by the fact that in this opposition there is hidden something negative and exclusionary – something that makes it approach a contradiction. The sublime excludes charm as such, and the attractiveness or amiability that ties us to a person excludes, for its part, the presence of sublimity. If one only tries to imagine this, one will see immediately the element of mutual exclusion. This touch of the contradictory makes transitions and transformations of the one to the other impossible. In that way, it does not allow any suspicion (392) of a border region existing between them. On the side of the charming no threat to the sublime arises, nothing forces itself upon its domain, and nothing at all penetrates into that domain. Remember also that the sublime at least permits an element of oppressiveness – and of what is negative in general. The charming radically excludes such things. They would annul it.
It is impossible to say what the charming consists in; it is even more impossible to say what the sublime consists in. In the latter, at least, we can point to the easily comprehended element of “greatness,” although it is not so simple to say what greatness consists in, when the quantitative element in it insubordinate. Some thinkers inferred from this opposition of the charming to the sublime that we must have a case here of “smallness,” but then one confuses the charming with the delicate and the sweet – as we have already noted. From this perspective, therefore, we are unable to obtain an essential characterization of the charming.
b) Orientation to the nature of the charming
One might simply give up the attempt at this point, since it is not the case that all beauty must be either a thing sublime or charming; rather there exist very many other instances of beauty: in the drama, the novel, in architecture and painting, in music and in life. … We also referred to this fact above. Nonetheless, something remained that now thrusts itself upon us as a problem, namely the peculiar opposition itself to the sublime.
This contrast has not yet been evaluated. And since the attempts to date must be considered failures, we must attack it from another direction. There are in fact three possibilities for such an attempt. The first consists in a direct description; the second in an inquiry into “where” the charming appears (in which arts, etc.); the third in the question, In which strata of the aesthetic object is the charming rooted?
For the first instance, let us consider description. The “charming” means that which “charms,” and indeed whose charms attract us. That is what is intended. What is it then, for example, that attractively charms us in a landscape? That would be easy to say, if one stood before a lovely landscape or a picture of one and could point to individual details; but it is hard to do when all one has are concepts to reckon with.
Is it that the landscape must appeal to the needs of men in order to be charming? Hardly, for then one finds oneself in a context of usefulness. But if I say that the landscape breathes peace and cheerfulness, then I am as far as I was before, and must ask anew what it is that produces the impression of peace and cheerfulness.
To that one may reply: a softly rolling terrain, traces of people in the form of their houses, farms, and pathways; a water-course or the (393) mirror-like lake, the enticing variations in woods, fields, and meadows; above it a summer sun with little billowing clouds scudding by.… No doubt, one hears something of the charm of the landscape in all of that. But is that universally valid for the charming? That cannot be so; this is only a special case, at best a type of charming landscape. Most likely, the element of variety is extremely general. The truth may be that the charming is individual, and different in every case. But there is nothing new about that; it is common to all things beautiful.
Is the case any different with a charming face? What charm attracts us here? The charm of expression, a slight smile; perhaps a wide-eyed glance, perhaps down-turned lids.… Clearly, it may take quite disparate forms, indeed even change to different features in one and the same face can affect us with its inner animation, as infinite variety, as riches. …
And even then, we have said very little. The genuine charm of a face or of a person lies in what shines out of the soul into the features of the face. Here we enter immediately the realm of ethical values; the aesthetically charming cannot be sealed off from that domain, for in fact certain ethical values enter into and condition – one could also use the term “found” (cf. Chap. 28c) the charming. There is nothing remarkable about that. They are also presupposed as foundations everywhere there is any question of the beauty of the human being or of the human condition.
But it is impossible to relate firmly any single moral value to the charming as its foundation, for there are always others to consider: on the one hand, shyness, modesty, innocence; on the other pride, a dignified self-assurance, rectitude, simplicity, unselfconsciousness.
And it need not be a matter of values alone. Disvalues can be foundational here, such as fear, dread, uncertainty, or the need for protection. A strong impulse can be generated by the expression of these negatives; indeed, precisely an aesthetical impulse in addition to the moral one. For the expression of them demands sympathetic interest and active help, and it affects us as a component of kindness.
It appears accordingly that in the domain of the humanly charming something more is to be obtained by means of the description of the relevant phenomena than those below the human realm. Perhaps that is because our attention here is directed by the phenomena themselves to the relation of appearance. With that, we already stand close to the second point of the inquiry: where the charming appears in the arts. We have asked similar questions with respect to the sublime, and from them resulted some distinctions among the arts.
With respect to the charming, there result also distinctions in the arts. For that reason, we must not allow any of the arts to be entirely excluded here. Even ornamental art can be charming, alluring, and attractive; similarly, architectural works can in certain cases have a charming effect, especially smaller ones that are harmoniously integrated within a landscape. Sculpture (394) is familiar with the charming in the stance and expression of its figures – from the grace of Aphrodite to the posture of the dancer (Kolbe128).
But the charming has much greater latitude in the domain of painting. The basis for this is profound. Charm exercises itself in the sphere of the sensible; whatever values may stand behind it as foundational, in itself it is entirely an affair of appearance. Painting, however, lays direct hold upon everything that is visible to the senses. It can hold every facial expression fast, even the most transient, and can allow everything that can be reflected in human features to appear in that expression. However, it is not so much the substance of the human being that makes up the charming, but the sensible play of the forms and colors themselves and the potency of appearance as such.
The content is developed much more effectively in literature. But even there the importance lies, in the end, upon the process of appearance. The endearing, the fine, good taste, come to appearance in the attitudes of persons; and this “appearance,” upon which alone aesthetic value depends, is apparently also one close to the senses. The grace of Susanne (in Figaro), the captivating ways of Philine129 appear in their stories, whether recounted or performed – not by gestures given visible clarity, as in painting, but by having the advantage of not being limited to a single instant. Since they are extended in time, they are capable of being followed along. In the case of human charm, that is a great advantage. In that way, the poetic arts can easily compete in their effects with painting by letting appear such subtle traits as that of the enticing, the fascinating, or the enchanting, although they do not attain the closeness to the senses of painting.
Finally, music: where there are nuances of the human soul that let themselves be captured without any definite content, music is in its true element. The greatest delicacy, flowering and swelling, warmth, clarity, brightness, buoyancy and purity – it knows how to bring everything to its adequate expression in its absolutely free play with form, which, in the nuance of the dynamic, knows no limits.
If one compares these results with the situation we encountered in the sublime, we get the following picture. Only music plays the exact same role for the sublime as for the charming, in that they both aim at the highest and most differentiated effects. In literature, the achievement is a bit unequal. It presents the sublime only in the limiting form of the tragic, while the charming is able to unfold completely in all its human forms. Sculpture clearly demonstrates a preference for the sublime, painting for the charming. Architecture is more capable of the sublime, and there it is able to rise to extraordinarily high values. In comparison, ornamental art, at least in one of its modes, is the master of the charming (the agreeable), but never of the sublime.
We see that when one places music on top, then descends downward past poetry and the fine arts to the level of architecture and ornament, one is moving along a line marking an increasing separation of the arts with respect to (395) their aptitude for the sublime and the charming. It has already been noted that this is connected to the relative distance of the arts from the senses – as that distance first appeared clearly in painting.
The next question is how we are to interpret this divergence. For that, we must enter the third of the groups of problems presented above, which concerns the part played by the strata in in the creation of the sublime and the charming in the work of art.
c) The predominance of the external strata
In which strata of the object do we find the charming? This question should be understood as strictly as in the case of the sublime: it is obviously not a question of isolating individual strata and in imagining that in them alone is the seat of the charming – that would be nonsense – but of identifying which levels have the largest part in the charming. That is a sensible question, and it can be answered.
We recall (Chap. 32a) how it stood with the sublime in this context: the inner strata were predominant in a decisive way. The overwhelmingly great is and remains a matter of the background and, in some cases, it possessed an intellectual character; and the negative element in it, which has been much discussed since Kant, consists in nothing more than that the senses fail before it.
Now the case with the charming and its varieties is somewhat different, and may be discovered at a place that aesthetics has long sought in vain, one that determines in a genuinely positive way the opposite of the charming: in charm, the predominant factor lies in the outer strata of the object. It depends on the superficial regions, to which it is tied – not the foreground alone, although the foreground takes part in it essentially.
Thus, in literature the attractive and amiable characteristics of the figures are neither tied to the stratum of destiny, nor even less to the stratum of the figure and his secrets; but hey are tied, only to a slight degree, to the situation and the plot, and much more obviously to the stratum of the movements and gestures of the persons and their external appearance and speech, which stands close behind the foreground. That stratum is co-realized in the stage play, because it addresses itself directly to the senses – more strictly, to sensible fantasy. One understands this immediately when one reflects on how great is the role of grace in fantasy. Then, too, values such as gentleness and sweetness, the enchanting and the attractive, are rooted here – close to the doorstep of the senses, and always extended into its domain.
That is, as it seems to me, the first and, up to now, the only affirmative determination of the charming to which aesthetics has attained. It was successful only through the distinctions among the strata in the structure of the aesthetic object, which were introduced here for the first time. Without it, we would lack any point of departure for an attack upon the problem of the charming. The proof of it can be gleaned from all areas of art in the exact same way as from literature. (396) Moreover, the proof is not limited to what has just been said: think of lyric poetry with its rich variety of sensible images, in which the special forms of the charming play a considerable role.
But the strongest witness for this idea is found in painting. It is in fact the art from which the sublime markedly withdraws – not because it lacks at all the necessary deep strata for it – those it indeed has, as we see in certain portraits –but rather because it absorbs too readily into itself the cheerful sensuousness of light and color. This characteristic partiality for the foreground is averse to the sublime. But it corresponds perfectly to the charming: for what is amiable or enchanting plays itself out on the level of the visible, and this dominates the art of painting like no other. The same is true for every kind of enchantment, of the blossoming, the fascinating: only the eyes are opened sufficiently for such seduction. In such full, concrete details, which are here in question, poetry cannot keep up with painting, although it has the advantage of process in time and can mark the changes in the features of its objects. Yet the smile of Mona Lisa can only be painted.
We should recall at this point the divergent tendencies in the arts with respect to the sublime and the charming: music is capable of both, but architecture and ornament are unfairly weighted, the first toward the former and at the second toward the latter. This divergence, apparently, has its basis in the way different strata dominate in different arts.
Music possesses a unique freedom. It can elevate the deepest material resident in the background to the level of immediate sensible feeling – of course not to a point at which it can be grasped conceptually, but that is not at stake here –and it can put in sound the lightest and most enticing melodies in an immediate series of ravishing tones. That is so essential to it that in “great music,” that is, in works of several movements, it has become custom to interpolate a certain alteration between the sublime and the charming. That is the meaning of the entry, in the middle movements, of scherzo, minuets, and the like, while the first and last movements, but especially the first, manifest preferentially throughout the character of the sublime.
Upon this freedom of music – primarily pure music – which itself remains rooted in indefiniteness regarding its object, rests its wonderful capacity to accompany everything, and to surround with the right mood whatever is peculiar to the ongoing human life. Thus it is able to bring into the opera and oratorio, with scarce effort, the spiritually sublime in a form that can be comprehended and experienced, as it brings grace and sweetness, mildness and bright warmth into light songs, dances, and operettas. Music can make dominant, according to its wishes, the inner or the outer groups of strata. For that reason, it is more of a universal art than the others.
We might have shown further that even sculpture, within limits, is capable of both extremes – no doubt with a certain preponderance of the sublime. It thus manifests the preferences opposed to (397) those of painting. Can one now say that the condition rests upon a preponderance of the inner strata? If we look at the classic example of the Greek sculptures of the gods, where sublimity predominates, we will be able to affirm that. For this is the stratum from which appearance emerges, the stratum of religious consciousness. It is of course true of sculpture that it can do otherwise – only not with the same sovereignty as music. It cannot capture so easily the ephemeral and the light-footed; yet where it does so, it can hold tight to it. It can also transfer its weight to the external strata.
In this regard, the place of architecture is also instructive. A building, as a rather large work, is always something imposing in itself, and, as such, it resists the charming. On the other hand, however, the tendency to become monumental – i.e., to move into the domain of the sublime – is found even in relatively small structures. The monumental can at least express itself in the detail, in portals, open stairs, courtyard passageways in patrician homes. In contrast, the charming appears more seldom, and when it does, it is only where it is derived from an imitation of folk-styles and integrated into a landscape or a townscape that is in itself idyllic. Nonetheless, the charming is possible in such buildings as the peasant cottage, the timbered house, etc.
The final confirmation of this law lies in ornamental art, from which we saw that, in its case, the sublime does not come into question. It does not have any deeper strata that could appear; it exhausts itself in a free play with form. And it is characteristic of such play that it may very well have “charm,” exert an attraction upon the senses, and even arouse directly an impulse to play with spatial form. Here we have the extreme, here the charming lies directly in the foreground. For a genuine background is not present.
Chapter 34: Peripheral Problems of the Charming
a) Compatibility of the sublime and the charming
A large collection of marginal problems accompanies the main problems of aesthetic values. Taken strictly, the situation is such that we are as yet not even certain about the main problems themselves. It may turn out one day that the analyses of the sublime and the charming are still insufficient, and that even its concepts and the relevant phenomena are not the central ones that must be attacked. Thus it might easily happen, as it often does with insufficiently developed areas of research, that from the marginal problems that no one had noticed the real, central questions may finally be developed. But such things cannot be anticipated. One may prepare for such an eventuality only by inquiring into these marginal problems for their own sakes. (398)
From among these problems, the first is directed at the issue of whether, and, if so, to what extent, opposed aesthetic values are compatible with each other, or more concretely stated, whether one and the same aesthetic object can be simultaneously sublime and charming.
There are two reasons why one would expect an affirmative answer. First, there are some arts that are masters of the sublime and of the charming, as we have seen – music and poetry especially – but the other great arts, too, although to a more modest degree. It is then difficult to understand why the arts should not be able to make both appear in one and the same work of art. And second: in life – as occasionally also in nature – the two are, after all, often united. The striving and struggling of a man can be genuinely sublime, all the more when he as a great resistance to overcome – nonetheless he may shine with the amiability of an old culture and the poised cheerfulness of a serene nature, no doubt to contrast with his earnestness, but not in conflict with it. But this alone says little. It is far more a question of how in principle this relation is given shape for the arts.
One may not shunt this problem onto another track. That happens, for example, when one assumes there is a relationship between “charm and dignity” – an assumption that is familiar to us since Schiller, but is of a different kind than the one we seek. For dignity is only related to sublimity, and has been falsely presented as one of its varieties. Dignity is too much an exclusively ethical phenomenon for it to be placed in service here; besides, theoreticians have understood it too much as “consciousness of one’s own sublimity,” where self-consciousness is in a dangerous passageway towards narcissism and the cult of the self.
At first sight, the sublime and the charming seem to exclude each other. Just because an object is sublime, it is not charming; just because it is charming, it is not sublime. To one belongs heaviness, to the other lightness, to one austerity and severity, to the other mildness and attractiveness.
But there are objects of a broader nature and a greater inner variety. Of this kind are man and likewise any segment of a human life, even more when the man in question manifests all kinds of complex interrelationships of any given kind. Figures of such a kind may well be sublime in one respect, and in another be charming. A man can possess amiability of the purest kind in his intercourse with others, and yet in his plans, his undertakings, and the energy with which he executes them he may be truly a man of grand format; that is not seldom the case in times of high culture, because there are great careers, political ones, perhaps, that are not possible to carry out without a degree of charm in one’s external demeanor. And a slice of life, such as a writer cuts out for us in a novel can, as a whole (399) be full of fascination and charm, and yet from its depths lets us perceive the sublime lines of a larger destiny, a personal one, perhaps, or even an historical one.
If one reflects more exactly upon what this situation entails, one will have to confess that it must always be so with some truths about life in the representational arts. For in life, everything is in fact jumbled together. We must not forget here that the art of representation begins with separating off, leaving out, and isolating objects, i.e., with a process of simplification. That consists in getting rid of this jumble and thereby allowing individual aspects of things and their interrelations to appear vividly before us.
As a consequence, the unification of the sublime and the charming in the arts should be a limited one. At least it places before the artist demands that are not easy to fulfill, and the same is true for the viewer who, in order to assimilate such works, would have to have seen a great deal of life and bring to the work a broad and developed heart.
But with that, the question of the unification of sublimity and charm is not yet solved in a fundamental way. We see now, however, what form the eventual solution must take, and upon what it must be based. Thus, we return to our basic thesis about beauty, i.e., that beauty rests upon a relation of stratification and of appearance.
We have already seen how the main distinction between the sublime and the charming lies in a distinction in depth of the series of strata of the object: the sublime, where it appears, is rooted in the inner strata of the object; the charming, in contrast, in the outer strata. Now upon this condition also rests the unification of the two with each other. If they had their soil and roots in the same stratum, then they would have to encroach upon each other in the form of appearance peculiar to that one stratum. In an object, one and the same thing cannot be both sublime and charming, or grandiose and amiable; rather they must be of an essentially different nature. Thus there can no doubt be a thing that in its depths is sublime and yet charming in the direction of its surface – but not the reverse. And, moreover, that is all the more possible the more an object has a large number of strata and the further away from each other are the strata that bear the sublime and the charming.
For these reasons, such unification in the case of a living person can take place with relatively little resistance, assuming that the individual meets the conditions for it, and the same is true in the case of a literary representation of a character or a corresponding human destiny. But just for that reason the unification faces significant difficulties in the case of objects with fewer strata, both in nature and in art, and the number of cases sinks to a minimum in sculpture; or sinks to an external juxtaposition of objects, as in a landscape. That such may still be effective as an intended contrast alters nothing of substance. (400)
With this solution we put an end to an old bone of contention. That such contention about this issue could last as long as it did lies in the fact that no one could find upon any of the prevailing foundations a starting-point for a fruitful solution. In the end, the lack of clarity that enveloped everything did not affect the unification of the sublime and the charming alone, but also the inner nature of both. And this nature cannot be penetrated without appropriately resolving the aesthetic object into its strata.
A confirmation of this that lies close at hand to the new conditions, as they were made accessible by the theory of strata, is found in the gradation of the responsive emotions felt by the appropriating subject. Here it is a question of aesthetical pleasure, that is, of enjoyment. This enjoyment can possess very different forms, and that is in a certain way dependent upon which domain of founding values (moral, vital, or goods values) are at its basis. The deeper founding values belong to the deeper strata of the object; the moral values, for example, clearly belong to the stratum of inwardness of character. For that reason they are also the ones that call forth a deeper sympathetic participation on the part of the viewer.
That, moreover, means that the aesthetic values that erect themselves above the object are also arranged in a graduated scale: those that are tied to its deeper strata are also the ones that are more deeply felt, that is, those on which a stronger participation of the ego takes place. That means in turn that they produce deeper aesthetical delight, and a more serious and richer enjoyment.
Thus the sublime is marked by a greater depth of enjoyment and of inner sympathy – corresponding to its own rootedness in the depths of the object. And, inversely, the charming is marked by a certain effect on the surface of the object and by an enjoyment that hovers lightly above it – corresponding to its own rootedness in the external strata of the object.
The unification of the sublime and the charming in one object is consequently possible precisely insofar as the two kinds of delight, which conflict with each other (as they must, when they are felt in one and the same object), are able to stay out of each other’s way because they belong to different psychic depths. As a clarification of this, consider that the heterogeneous feelings tied to the same object conflict with each other only as long as they concern the same level of psychic emotionality (one can, no doubt, respond emotionally to the same person both as exciting and as boring – for example when the person is thoughtful, but likes to repeat himself in a clumsy way …).
b) Problems marginal to the charming
The marginal phenomena of the charming make up a further group of problems. They are not as distinctive as those of the sublime, but they stand, as it were, parallel to them. Moreover, the dimensions of opposition in which they operate are quite of another kind. The parallelism (401) consists only in subtle transitions of the charming to something contrary to it, or also, and not seldom, in an abrupt changeover. Among these forms of changeover, of which there are perhaps many, we will discuss three here, because they throw light upon the nature of the charming itself.
When we reflect that charm, grace, and attractiveness of all kinds lie in a certain perfection of form – although we cannot specify it in any detail – it becomes clear that in these cases beauty always consists in harmonious proportionality, or, more succinctly put, in restraint as such. This is in straightforward opposition to the sublime, which is rooted in the overwhelmingly great, thus clearly in a kind of excess. Excess in the case of the sublime is not a lack of measure, but in the case of the charming it would be, i.e., the opposite to the measured and to noble harmony and proportionality. In this case and for that reason, excess is destructive; it breaks charm to pieces, and something formless comes to take the place of perfection of form.
From this standpoint, we can already see in which direction the first marginal phenomena of the charming lie: in exaggeration. When an artist desires to create with special nicety things that are attractive and enticing, and amplifies them to a degree such that they are no longer true-to-life – or do not seem essentially true – then the charming changes over into its opposite: it attracts no longer, because it is unconvincing, and it is unconvincing because it does not seem genuine. This “does-not-seem-genuine” is a lack of the true-to-life. What that means can be shown only by examples. Distortion to the point of exaggeration may easily arise from a genuine artistic urge to create the greatest impression by one’s drawing. We often find exaggeration where it is a question of the nuances of value that surround the charming.
Nothing is more familiar than the over-rendering of the youthful hero – with all his admirable hot-bloodedness, his capacity for enthusiasm and his unselfconscious chivalry. To measure out such essential elements correctly requires the highest artistic tact and, at the same time, a fineness of feeling that has been matured by long experience. Otherwise, what we will have is an ideal figure much like a fairy-tale prince who lacks genuine living truth. Great writers have not always known how to avoid this, the young Schiller, among others.
A parallel example is the model of the angelic maiden in the Romantic novels of a century ago (beautifully brought out in Dickens). These figures correspond to an emotional ideal; however, they affect us as untrue-to-life, and appear to us today a bit ridiculous or, even worse, they bore us. A third example is offered by certain Madonnas – not only in the painting of the late Middle Ages, but also just as much in the High Renaissance – which consist of hollow purity, humility, and piety, and as a result, those qualities begin to strike us as bloodless and somewhat lifeless. Much good will is surely needed to overlook those qualities – as the art historian does, who is concerned only with the phenomena typical of an age. (402)
It is not by chance that these examples come close to false aesthetical ideals. The phenomenon of the derailment both of the charming as it becomes untrue to life and of ideals that have gone awry, coincide in a broad way. This is a fundamental phenomenon manifesting itself in very different kinds of problems at the frontiers of aesthetics.
Another marginal phenomenon of the charming, which is related to the preceding ones, and which also concerns “representation,” is the generation of excess tension in immediate emotional effects without their being justified by the actual bestowal of form upon some material. Most of these special forms of the charming are capable of producing such emotional effects, and within their limits, they are entirely appropriate. Indeed, most of these forms are even known through such emotional effects; the “attractive,” the “touching,” the “enchanting,” the “amiable,” even the “charming” in general; for it means, after all, not what is charming in any way at all, but rather the attractive-charming.
However, these emotional effects have the peculiarity of making themselves autonomous, and then they overshoot the mark. The artist perhaps wishes to amplify them to some extent, but he may thereby spoil them. This occurs, at least, when a finely nuanced feeling for form and tact does not take care to maintain the proper limits. If not, what should be touching will be transformed into the sentimental, the soft, mild, and sweet into the cloying, the affectionate and gentle into the effeminate, and emotional strength and emotionality into mere sentimentality, that is, into a kind of swimming in feelings for their own sakes. And if the transgression of limits in one of these directions becomes quite noticeable, then there arises, instead of a work of art, the caricature of one, that is, kitsch.
Kitsch is nothing more than the inner derailment of an artistic will that lacks the means to bestow form effectively but that attempts to prevail violently by circumventing the requirements of form in order to achieve a certain effect that the artist has in mind. That is seen most readily where it is a question of a touching or otherwise powerful emotional effect. Kitsch is so dangerous and destructive in the arts because those who have no accurate sense of form and measure cannot see through it; it can therefore bedazzle whole groups of viewers and ruin them aesthetically.
Only the charming is threatened totally by kitsch and values related to it, not by the sublime. For when the sublime becomes vacuous, it falls victim to tedium or to comedy. The charming object is liable to dilettantism, to experimentation with insufficient skill. We might express this as follows: charm is more poorly shielded from the abuse of what is superficial and relatively easily learned in the arts. For such abuse can be done precisely with what is learnable.
Kitsch is encountered in the arts in quite varying places. The concept originated in painting, where the value-group surrounding the charming (403) dominates in any case. Here it makes itself felt as a lack of pure painterly skill: in the incapacity to understand the visible in an authentic way. The lack of skill in seeing is then replaced by flat and fabricated color contrasts – which have an effect that is unnatural, cloying, and flat. Kitsch may also flower in literature and music. In the former, by means of its treatment of materials (in the vulgar escape novel), in the latter, by means of a lack of disciplined execution in favor of individual effects tinged with emotion. Ornamental art is hopelessly exposed to it, because there we have a pure play with form without a background to appear in it. This freedom is dangerous; it tempts unskilled men to arbitrariness. Think, for example, of Art Nouveau.
A marginal problem of a quite different kind appears here in the third case. It lies in awareness or also in what is aimed at. It is to be distinguished radically from the two marginal phenomena we have just discussed: it does not concern the representation or the expression of the charming in art, but the charming in life, especially in man. It thus extends itself mediately to artistic representation, provided that the arts deal with man and human life; thus to literature, especially the drama and the novel, and along with that, to a lesser degree, to painting.
We may distinguish charm from the state of sublimity in man in that the former excludes consciousness of itself, for when it becomes fully conscious, it stands is at the point of changing into something quite different, whereas the sublime is compatible with a certain form of self-consciousness, and marks itself in the demeanor of a man as dignity. The latter is threatened only by conceit, arrogance, pretense, and the like, which, however, may easily be rendered innocuous by the curse of the ridiculous. Charm, in contrast, loses much of its force when it becomes self-conscious, and is often entirely destroyed by it. It cannot tolerate conscious reflection, and is dissipated by it. In its place there then arises the appearance of charm: affectedness.
This phenomenon is most familiar in the domain of the feminine-erotic charm, whose aesthetical aspect is questionable (when it is genuine). If, in this case, sweetness and amiability become aware of themselves, they turn to coquetry, that is, to an artificial and willed amiability. As long as the deception of the inexperienced man lasts, amiability has erotic fascination; at the moment it is seen through as “put on,” its power is extinguished. But let us not split hairs! Naturally a naive and amiable coquetry exists.
Affected charm stands in a roughly parallel position to affected dignity (“sub-limeness”). The difference is only that the latter seems comical, the former simply ugly; the latter belongs to farce, and can have a good effect there; the former has no place in any art. From this standpoint, one can better understand why charm and sublimity generally exclude each other. In order to unify the two, one must have an object of very broad dimensions and a versatile ingenuity. (404)
c) Other oppositions among aesthetic values
We cannot conclude our observations of the sublime and the charming without taking a further survey from our present standpoint. This survey will concern in part these themes themselves, and in part aesthetic values as a whole. But the state of the problems in aesthetics appears not to be propitious for such a survey. The material is not ripe for conclusions to be drawn, and we cannot expect anything except broad generalities to emerge from it. But one must attempt at least that much.
The opposed positions of the sublime and the charming require a further explication. We have already shown that this opposition neither exhausts the beautiful nor splits open the entire domain of beauty. But it is also not the case, as a few recent aestheticians have maintained, that beauty, which shows no preference for one or the other, must manifest a kind of indifference to the charming and the sublime. Such neutrality would presumably be quite vacuous.
To the contrary, the sublime and the charming form a polarity of two extremes, between which most of what bears the name of beauty can be easily arranged: everything in its nature stands closer to either the one or the other extreme. We can give many examples of that. No doubt, there are also cases of beauty in which quite different elements dominate – as, for example, beauty in the drama and in the stage setting of a play, that of liveliness in painting, motion in sculpture – for in these cases, any arrangement in such a graded series is external.
This seems disappointing. One asks oneself: is the entire opposition of sublimity and charm a purely external one? That can hardly be true, considering that the analysis demonstrated essential structural characteristics on both sides. But it may be that there exist still other value-polarities, and these too should be able to be made visible. Indeed, it might be that they form a more encompassing system along with the first opposition of sublimity and charm, a system of dimensions – for extended between any given pair of oppositions is a continuum – and it may well be that absolutely everything can be arranged in that system.
But, after some reflection, that too reveals itself as a false hope. Perhaps the problems regarding it are still not ripe for discovering a solution – as for so much other matters in aesthetics. And what “other value-polarities” – or simply structural polarities – are supposed to be in question?
Now one might think, for example, of the four oppositions in the sublime, among which the charming was only one, and which also formed a multidimensional system (Chap. 33a). But one can easily see that these three oppositions, viz., the facile, the quotidian, and the comical, stand in genuine opposition to the sublime; for if one removes this common opposed element, the entire relationship among them vanishes.
From the standpoint of the comical, one might right away think oneself to be grasping an independent dimension of opposition. For its opposite number is, taken strictly, (405) neither the tragic nor the sublime, but only the serious as such – said negatively: the non-comical. One could take this opposition as the more fundamental one and could of course arrange many others in its domain. Its only failing is that it is too contradictory. That implies that its opposite number is just negative, and as long as one cannot fill it in some way with affirmative content, the opposition remains vacuous, and useless for our orientation – that is, in a domain of values that consists exclusively of positive value, a domain, indeed, in which even disvalues have a definite positive content.
Thus here again we come upon the old calamity of aesthetic values. They cannot be grasped. One must be happy when one finds a point of attack anywhere at all.
With those observations, however, not all possibilities have been exhausted. In fact, one meets in aesthetics every now and then with attempts to introduce new value-oppositions. So, for example, the attempt was made regarding the opposition of “classic and romantic” (Hegel and his school); to be sure, the attempt was in vain, because this antithetic relates at bottom to a subordinate element, that is, not to a purely aesthetical element but one of a philosophical kind that here too belongs more to the material than to the aesthetical.
Another opposition, one emanating again from the material, might be taken more seriously: the opposition between material that involves conflict and material that is free of conflict. The justification of this is more deeply rooted, insofar as it brings with itself a large number of genuinely aesthetical consequences for form and composition. But it defines the region far too narrowly, for it can be related directly only to poetry, and, even there, only to the epic, the narrative, and the drama; it may still appear in an attenuated form, but only in certain branches of the fine arts. If one understands “conflict” more generally, so that we can also attribute to it the introduction of disharmony into music, then the concept of conflict becomes somewhat metaphorical and extraordinarily vacuous.
Finally, we may still think about placing at the foundation of all else the opposition that was developed (in Part One) between the beautiful as appearance and the direct and immediate beauty of form. This is, in any case, a very fundamental opposition. Beauty as “the appearance of one thing in another” is something fundamentally different from beauty as a “pure play with form.” But this opposition concerns more centrally the theory of the aesthetic object, its structure and its conditions, and less centrally the kind of values. Rather the one is closely tied to the other in the majority of aesthetic values (as the discussions in Chap. 17 and Chap. 18 have shown). Their relationship in music and in architecture was especially profound. The only exception was ornamental art. But that is an art of second rank; it possesses no great depth. (406)
Chapter 35: The Giving of Meaning in the Aesthetic Values
a) The world’s demand for meaning
One should not leave these questions of structure and value before having conducted a survey of the universal element in aesthetic value. This question can now be understood differently than was possible initially – more in the spirit of a philosophical world-view and with reference to the whole of human life. For these values play a unique role in that life. We could have postponed this survey until after the discussion of the comical. But the latter becomes easier, if we are able to presuppose the former.
The very least that our investigations into the sublime and the charming were able to tell us about aesthetic values concerns what is special about them. And this did not take us very far, because we are not able to pursue any further the differentiation of the values. At least the discussion tells us something about the nature of aesthetic value in general. The value was everywhere presupposed.
The truth, in fact, is that we can refer in the case of the more special aesthetic values only to our living sense of value. We can make an appeal to it, as it were, an appeal that may go awry just when we have concrete cases clearly before our eyes. That is true even for the sublime and the charming.
But, after one has reflected upon this limitation and realizes that it cannot be overcome, one may very well ask, in a new way, the question: what is the peculiar situation regarding aesthetic values as such? For it is not improbable that from an analysis of specific groups of values something will be yielded regarding the value that founds them.
Such an outcome has in fact occurred here. It lies in the character of both the sublime and the charming as givers of meaning.… In order to show that, however, we must reach out a bit further – into matters of philosophy and of metaphysics, but not into a specific speculative metaphysics, but rather into the domain of inexpungible metaphysical problems.
Among these problems, one of the oldest and most peremptory is that of the sense and meaning of the world and of human life. So long as there was a belief in a higher power, the question does not arise, because it has already been answered through faith. If faith collapses, then the problems, arising as though out of nothingness, are suddenly there. And then they may straightaway become life threatening. For who would want to live a life that has “no sense”?
The Platonic philosophy, after the dissolution of Sophism, answered the question with its “Forms.” The Forms constitute a realm of pure perfection, and everything in the world is oriented toward them, nature and man, with the single difference that nature adheres strictly to the commands of the Forms, while man, with his will, deviates from them. But the giving of meaning lies in the Forms. One may think in this way, at least, so long as one is not suspicious of the teleological metaphysics that one has silently assumed. (407)
In reality, two teleological principles active in the world are assumed by this theory, and the world itself is understood by analogy with man as guided by an understanding and purposive consciousness. For goals must be “posited” for some future, and means to their realization must be “chosen” antecedent to the goal. Both of these are possible only for a conscious mind, thus one similar to that of man. The ancient metaphysics of Forms miscarried on this hidden anthropomorphism, and with it failed not only the more vulgar (i.e., those that theologized) forms of the theory, but also the entire principle of optimism: the wish to found the meaning of the world upon teleology.
What then remains? A world devoid of sense? In such a world man cannot live, at least not in full awareness of its senselessness. One therefore looks about for something else that might bestow meaning upon things. But men always seek it in the same places from which they had been banished. They are tied, as it were, irresistibly to those realms. They silently assume two principles: 1. Meaning can lie only in the origins of things; none can enter the world subsequently. 2. Meaning can inhere only in the whole of the word and extend from there to its parts, for example to human life; but it cannot emerge from a part, or even less, to pass from a part over to the whole.
These two assumptions have determined the course of metaphysical thought for centuries. They resulted in a search for the source and bestowal of meaning exclusively in universal principles, never close to man, that is, in human life or in the activities or operations of men.
But here lies the other possibility, one far greater, of solving the problem of meaning. For the two silent assumptions have revealed themselves as prejudices. Our sense of meaning and value tells us that there are endless things in life, which, though limited and individual, are meaningful without recourse to principles or to a greater whole.
Thus every morally good act, every wise thought, every adequate response to a value, is meaningful and bestows additional meaning just out of itself alone. Out of itself alone: that means that it does not have meaning only for the sake of something else. Such is every act of benevolence, every participation in the spiritual and the inner life – every sympathetic understanding and every interpersonal involvement that breaks through icy loneliness precisely where a man wishes to be seen and appreciated – are meaningful just for themselves alone; yet they bestow a meaning upon other things, and a deep need of the human heart for the realization of meaning is thereby satisfied.
All of that is a realization of meaning arising from a part of the world that is empty of meaning in itself, a part, in fact, that is secondary and dependent. We see precisely here how there can be autonomy in what is dependent. This is a thesis that can be justified, even in all generality, by the categorial law within the doctrine of categories that asserts the “freedom of the higher construct.” (408)
If man with his powers, his sense of values, and his occasional capacity for realizing values, is capable of bestowing meaning and value, then precisely the senselessness of the world as a whole obtains a meaning for him. For then it falls to his lot to be the bestower of meaning in the world. He would not be able to give the gift of meaning to a world hostile to it – it would resist it – but surely he can to an entirely “meaningless” world, one that is in itself indifferent to meaning but is entirely open to being given it.
The situation is precisely the opposite of what the metaphysicians took it to be: for a being of the nature of man, a meaningless world is precisely the only meaningful world. A world that, without man, was already filled with meaning would render him superfluous even despite his gifts for bestowing meaning.
These gifts are, before all else, those that constitute his moral nature: the power of self-determination, of decision (freedom); the capacity to anticipate (providence) and to posit ends of action (predestination), as also his consciousness of values (cogitio boni et mali), or, perhaps more correctly, his feeling for values. Also belong on this list are the gifts of sympathy, understanding, and moral appraisal of those whom he meets.
But that is still not enough. For his aesthetical gifts are also exemplary of the bestowal of meaning, that is, the gift of seeing the world as something beautiful, and likewise many items within it. And not only that: the capacity to create goes hand in hand with the ability to see. In his creativity, man possesses the power to experiment with unknown forms beyond those created by nature – to posit them next to and above what is natural.
b) The bestowal of meaning by men and by art
Now all meaning in the world is connected to values; indeed, it consists essentially in its reference to value, to the realization of value, and to the discrimination of values. This is clearly seen just from the forms of the bestowal of moral value. But the matter is not such that, as one might think, only moral values come into consideration here; the other classes of values, too, play a role, the lower (e.g., vital values), but especially the higher ones, thus those that are at least equal to the moral ones: the values of knowledge and the aesthetic values. It can be shown that the latter are no doubt less preemptory and immediate as the moral ones, but are especially pure forces in the bestowal of meaning.
The bestowal of meaning that comes into human life via aesthetic values consists fundamentally in nothing other than in the convincing feeling of standing face to face before something of absolutely intrinsic value – before something for whose sake alone it would be worth living, regardless of how the conditions of one’s life stand otherwise. That is so, not least because it is a question of no practical interest in beauty, or of the desire to use it or to make it one’s own, but simply because of the joy taken in the object; or the pleasure we feel in living in a world in which such glorious things exist.
This element – that most pure bestowing of meaning – is stronger in aesthetic values than in moral ones. And that is beautifully expressed (409) in Kant’s thesis of “disinterested pleasure”; indeed it makes up perhaps its most genuine and deepest meaning. For here precisely nothing “practical” is in question, as always with moral values, whose demands, after all, concern human life.
In men who are artistically creative, this kind of bestowal of meaning is amplified considerably, as long as it is of a kind to bring forth consciously what is valuable – specifically absolute values that are intrinsic in nature. But these values do not depend on creativity alone. The viewer, too, carries the same bestowal of meaning to his part in life. To be able to “see” what is beautiful does much: without the viewer, there is no beauty, and, to be sure, he must be a viewer in a specific way. Thus are intertwined the three parts of the relationship in the aesthetic object. Accordingly, the man who beholds and grasps values is there also with the creator.
If we now reflect that there are an endless number of “beautiful” things in the world even this side of the arts and of human creativity, we see clearly the large role in bestowing meaning in this world that is played by the man who beholds aesthetically.
What is the highest value in life has something of the character of giving gifts. Nietzsche demonstrated that radiant virtue is like gold in that it is “uncommon and of no use and luminous and mild in its lustre”; “it always bestows itself.”130 These four characterizations apply properly to the aesthetic values. They too are “uncommon and of no use,” and they elevate everything that takes part in them to something uncommon and useless. The latter term means that it no longer serves any purpose. And the first asserts its rarity; for to beauty there belongs the pure gaze of the beholder, and he is more rare than one commonly thinks. Not all of those who wax enthusiastically about beauty really know how to “see” it. Not all delight is aesthetical delight, and it is frequently difficult to distinguish whether it is or is not. There are many sources of counterfeiting of aesthetical delight and replacing it with other forms of delight. Correspondingly, there are many pseudo-aesthetical stances, and we will speak of them in a moment.
It is the same with “luminousness” and with the “mild lustre” and perfectly so with the “bestowing of oneself.” Nothing is as much characteristic of aesthetic value as its having fallen to us as a gift from heaven – as happiness and grace may fall to us, and the love of men. Usually an element of surprise is also given with it; for whatever artistic ideas may arise in a man, they do not come when they are called, but ambush him when he least expects it.
For the truth of these things one may appeal only to the aesthetical experience of the artistically open-minded man. The philosopher can do nothing here either, except to appeal to the living aesthetical sense of values. There is no other witness to the miracle of the artwork than the human heart, which receives it with joy and thankfulness.
Seen objectively, however, this witness and this joy are already the effects of the aesthetic object, its radiance shining into human (410) life – in a life of compromises, of half-measures, and of distress. Just therein is reflected the bestowal of meaning, which emanates from beauty, from sublimity, and from amiability and fascination, such that this radiance penetrates the darkness of suffering and distress – it enters those places where other powers have lost their strength to succor us.
For what brings forth aesthetic values is no real change in things, but an inner psychic reorientation of a man: nothing is removed, yet a spiritual good is bestowed, things imponderable and immeasurable are given to us for our own. The power that expresses itself here is not real, but it is a power that grasps, validates, and justifies our real living heart, a power that extends as far as our philosophical picture of the world. Basically, all experience of beauty (the state of being aesthetically valuable) has philosophical significance just because it bestows meaning upon our lives. For without our seeing a meaning in our lives over the course of it, we could not live.
We should remember in this connection one basic phenomenon: the aesthetic object is lifted out of the daily bustle, out of the obligations in life that weigh upon us, out of all of permanent features of the everyday. Here the reverse manifests itself: the re-entry into our life of what had been lifted out of it – but not to assimilate itself to it, and thereby vanish, but rather to give to life what is for its needs of the greatest importance: meaningfulness. Perhaps one should put it more cautiously: it is the knowing or beholding of a meaning-content.
In all of this, aesthetic values are fundamentally different from moral values. The moral values are those that initially seem to place a burden upon us, give us tasks, call upon us to be responsible; they always have to “demand something, foster something, impose upon us,” and thus their gifts cut both ways, although in the final analysis they can lead men to the heights.
Aesthetic values are quite the opposite in this regard: they burden us with nothing, they demand and foster nothing – unless simply this, that man behold and take part in them, and in taking part receive from them pure joy and a lesson in how to feel. They give to men only a gift.… But however it may be with the giving of gifts: giving takes two, and there is something the recipient must supply: the taking. To be ready to receive, to be open: these things men must bring to the giving, so that they may execute adequately the act of beholding. We need not interpret that in the sense of the deepest understanding of art. It is sufficient that a man be prepared to bring to it peace of mind and reflectiveness. Much is achieved just with that.
c) Pseudo-aesthetical attitudes
These demands are not hard to meet, at least not within the limits of what was in general accessible to us initially. For men cannot force aesthetical understanding. But bit-by-bit, as a person goes through life, such understanding may bear a variety of fruit for him, often when he least expects it. He may contribute to the process (411) by keeping himself inwardly open. But here, too, there is a danger of missing the mark. It lies in the pseudo-aesthetical attitude.
The pseudo-aesthetical attitude seems to be unimportant; almost nothing of real relevance in life depends upon it – and yet by it a man destroys for himself great revelations in life – those that have metaphysical weight, as does the bestowal of meaning. No, we would not condemn a person morally because he lacks a genuine aesthetical attitude; but when his life lacks all light and luster, if it contains nothing of the uncommon and the useless from which all illumination proceeds, then we could attribute to him a share in this guilt.
For that reason, pseudo-aesthetical attitudes are so dangerous: they act as a dissolvent, precisely where the decisive bestowal of meaning is present – there where one’s own reflections can render even the nature of this giving of meaning comprehensible – as the gift and power of man. This gift is not meant only as the gift of creativity – thus of rare and favored men – but of any man who is led by a real inner yearning for beauty to the act of beholding.
What is the pseudo-aesthetic attitude? It is that attitude of anyone who does not enjoy the aesthetic object as such, but rather attributes some different character to it, and from that obtains greater enjoyment – and that is then of course a different kind of enjoyment. Of this type are the following kinds of attitude.
- Enthusiasm solely for the material; or, if not enthusiasm, at least an interest in it. That is the usual situation with the contemporary readers of novels: they want to be entertained or distracted from their everyday lives; they are indifferent to the artistic quality of the work, and they hardly notice it. And when such quality is lacking, they do not miss it. Very immature people “read” in that way. They “gorge” themselves, are ravenous, insatiable.…
- Remaining on the level of cheap, superficial effects, which are parts of works that are in fact far deeper. Here it is a case almost always of relatively shallow or vulgar emotional effects, such as the touching or sentimental. That is easy to find in poetry or music. In the latter case, there is still another kind of mistake: when music is misused for the sake of playing with fantasy images, or as a direct stimulus for them. Then music is in truth not appreciated and enjoyed, but rather one hears the ramblings of one’s own imagination. Something similar is true for every other manner of letting oneself be stimulated by art works, for example, by events in plays or novels that have us dream of being in similar circumstances.
- The inward concentration upon or enjoyment of one’s own feeling of pleasure in the place of taking pleasure in the object. This is called the auto-aesthetical attitude in psychology. This too is quite common, perhaps most familiar from Nietzsche’s description of how a “female Wagnerite submitted herself to Tristan.” This boils down to a kind of swimming in one’s own feelings; anything genuinely structural in the music – and even in the operatic plot –disappears. The case is similar – for auto-aesthetical natures – (412) in the other arts, too – painting, lyric poetry, etc. (in the sense of Geiger’s Zugänge zur Ästhetik [1928]).
There are other pseudo-aesthetical attitudes, e.g., one informed by a philosophy that in fact comes down to nothing more than a picture of the world that is often constructed quite primitively. This is quite frequently a picture derived from religious faith, which the viewer wishes to see appear in the background of a work of art. Occasionally the world-view simply has been whitewashed over with philosophy.
In aesthetics (and certainly also in many ways of understanding art), the Romantics’ popular metaphysical picture of the word, which once for many decades was thought very profound, was of this kind. It held that man rediscovers himself in nature and, more generally in all existing things. In those days even the poetic arts found this thought fascinating; many people went almost so far as to identify the thought with Romantic art. This is a great example of how disorienting such ideas can be; they can embrace whole epochs, turn into doctrine, and at last even come forth with the claim to be the measure of a higher kind of art!
Not few men live an aesthetical sham life because they continuously take a pseudo-aesthetical stance, whether by simply enjoying the material, whether by a cheap enjoyment of superficialities, whether by self-indulgence. The first type is still and all a natural one, although it is not aesthetical in nature; the second is a solvent, so to speak, a softener, but the third is a perversion of aesthetics and for that reason positively destructive.
There exist various other forms of pseudo-aesthetical attitudes, e.g., when one tries to make the arts useful in the service of some practical end – a political, religious, or even some material end. But that is really more a misunderstanding of art and of aesthetic values; it can no longer be called an aesthetical attitude, thus also not a pseudo-aesthetical one. Yet it causes the greatest damage to the arts if they do not resist it with all their power. For there are always some who let themselves be led by the nose. Yet then all bestowal of meaning that emanates from aesthetic values ceases.