Imagine a book taking on the question of what beauty is. Imagine further that the question is pursued in all its generality: beauty in nature, beauty in the human frame, and beauty in all the various human creations that we call art: painting (portrait, history, landscape, still life, abstraction), literature (drama, poetry, the novel and short story), music (pure and program), architecture (monuments, houses of worship, palaces and homes), and ornamentation. Imagine then raising the question of the structure of human receptivity to beauty and creativity in art and nature, specifically how the subjective act of aesthetic beholding “reveals” strata in the ontic entity said to be beautiful in a process of give-and-take between the structured object and its beholder. Imagine the book then turning to the analysis of key aesthetic values: sublimity, grace, and the comic, considering and emending earlier analyses of them and discovering new questions about their value that lie upon their periphery. And, finally, imagine a writer who brings to this tripartite phenomenological schema of act, object, and the transaction between them a lifetime of research heavily weighted with ontology and a willingness to take on questions of the metaphysical horizons of aesthetics, yet only up to the point that current research allows – and you would have the present work, Aesthetics (Ästhetik), by Nicolai Hartmann.
The work leaves many striking questions in aesthetics still unsettled – Hartmann uses the word “mystery” many times, identifying only a few mysteries as genuine aporia of aesthetical reason and thus at least apparently unresolvable given the current state of aesthetics. Indeed, the discoveries made by Hartmann’s aesthetics enable the deconstruction and resolution of many aporia of aesthetics that past research had discovered and left intact. Only towards the end of the book and after palpable progress in aesthetical phenomenology and analysis, do new or formerly unclearly formulated mysteries and antinomies in aesthetics become clearer and more salient.
To be sure, Aesthetics was left unfinished at Hartmann’s death in 1950 at age 68, not in the sense that he intended to add to it – it concludes with his own postscript – but that he did not live to complete its revisions, a process that he carried out for his other published works. The book is nonetheless highly organized, and, while it contains on every page remarkable insights into how specific cases of art and nature “work” by their physical and formal qualities to carry us to a supersensible world, an overview of its achievements is relatively easy to present.
First, perception is the doorway to beauty: we see the sunset’s colors and the spatial masses of its clouds and sky, and feel its sublimity, its worth. In all perception there is an element of sense, which gives us the physical appearance of a thing, and of feeling as a response to values carried by things or situations, whether those values are aesthetical, ethical, or non-moral. The only cognitive source we have for knowledge of value of any kind is our feeling; we know the color green by seeing it and we know the disvalue of cowardice by feeling it. The two perceptual forms are interlinked (Chap. 1a); for example, we perceive the grace of an animal in its leap.
This notion of a noetic or intentional feeling of values as a source of knowledge of their material content is prominent in phenomenology; it is present in Edmund Husserl,1 and was raised to a principle of inquiry in ethics by Max Scheler.2 Now a person who lacks feeling for aesthetic or moral values cannot be taught them any more than a person without sight can be taught the colors of the rainbow. Yet most of us do possess such a capacity for feeling, and that capacity can be developed. When phenomenologists turn to aesthetics, they bring with them a developed capacity for revealing, re-performing, and exhibiting the structural features of these feelings and the aesthetic response they make possible, and of their aesthetic objects, in which together the “miracle” of beauty appears.
The beholding of and responding to a value in a relation of appearance, where an object appears out of some formal structure of tones, sounds and words to a person taking an aesthetic attitude towards what appears, tracks in some measure the Husserlian concept of noematic objects and noetic acts that constitute all states of consciousness. The noematic and noetic phenomena accessible to philosophical aesthetics of beauty are, accordingly, (1) the object, or thing of beauty – the grace of an animal, the charm of a village landscape, the sweetness of a piece of simple music (oddly, Hartmann does not discuss here dance as an art), the tragedy of Oedipus’ downfall – and (2) the receptive act of beholding in which such values are given, whose most general characteristic is the Kantian “disinterested enjoyment.” These two can again be divided: on the side of the object, one may study either (a) the structure and the ontology of the aesthetic object, or (b) the values it bears. On the side of the reception of the object, one may study either (a) the structure of the receptive (or appreciative) act, or (b) the fashioning involved in its production, i.e., the skill and genius of the artist (Intro., § 5). And, finally, (3) one may study the relationship between noema and noesis in aesthetic beholding.
Hartmann works with four concepts that he applies again and again to his task of pursuing these aims. They are (1) the beholding of an aesthetic value as a relationship between the act of beholding (noesis) and what appears (noema). The term Erscheinungsverhältnis is used to designate the relationship between the nature of an object thought to be beautiful and the appearing of the qualities carried by the object to a properly prepared mind; (2) the stratification (Schichtung) of the art work; (3) the transparency of a stratum such that one can see through it (Durchschauen) to the strata behind it; and (4) the bestowal of form (Formung) by an artist upon matter and his material (i.e., some physical substances and the themes or sujet of the work). These terms are utilized in the exhibition of the various genera and forms of the phenomenon of beauty, but they also (as with much phenomenology of value) have a practical side: they are intended to provide a stable platform for the evaluation of works of art, that is, the determination of the structural features that contribute to the making of some works of great art and of others less than great. It does not solve the problem of aesthetic value entirely, however, for although an artist creates his own “laws” under the constraint of these more general and abstract structures to which he is subject, the artwork he produces is a unique and individual value. In great works of art the mysterious genius of the artist creates, across the strata of his work, a synthesis of his material and the forms he chooses to express it. The beholder senses the lawful rightness of the work, even if he is unable to grasp its rightness fully.
The aesthetically prepared mind is not engaged in simple hearing or seeing and feeling, that is, in perception alone. Perception through the senses and through the visceral and mental centers of feeling (the “heart”) are, no doubt, the material conditions of appearance, just as some material things – flecks of paint on a canvas, tones and words – make up the sensibly perceived objects. Aesthetic beholding sees or hears through the sensibly given real elements in the foreground of the artwork to the elements in the background – the figures on canvas, the play with color, the free play with form in music, the elements of a narrative that words reveal, and so on. The real foreground elements are the grounds of the possibility of the background becoming visible in an act of beholding them. The appearance of beauty in art is hence tied to an existing object: to the work of an artist in which he or she has “objectivated” some meanings and values, or to the work of nature.3 Art has for Hartmann an ontological significance, for the being of what appears is neither real nor ideal; it exists merely as a being-for-us. For the ontology of the art object lies not in its reality as a thing but in its appearance to someone as an aesthetic value. This is not to say that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” for the beauty is in the object, not in a beholder who is thought to “project” it upon the object. Beauty is in the object, but it exists only for the mind able to behold it. Thus we have the peculiar ontological status of aesthetic values for Hartmann. Even the beauties in nature appear as beautiful only to a mind that is capable of penetrating the construction of their immediate physical foreground to the depth of values concealed in their background – not mysteriously concealed in them, but opening themselves easily to a mind that takes up an aesthetic standpoint upon them. Stars may be only points of light and be perceived as such, but to Kant’s beholding eyes, they possessed or expressed a noumenal quality; to most humans they have a sublime beauty.4
The achievement of this aesthetic “beholding” is what Hartmann calls Durchschauen – a seeing-through the real physical foreground given to the senses into an “unreal” background of objects and ideas that appear through and by means of the foreground. (393) A thing becomes beautiful when the real foreground becomes transparent. Both the perceptual seeing of a foreground and the aesthetic beholding of a background are stratified, a term that, for Hartmann, is essential in ontology, ethics, and aesthetics, though it functions differently in each. For aesthetics, Hartmann adopted three kinds of stratification. We first encountered this phenomenon in the act of beholding; sensible perception and feelings are two cognitions, the latter lying upon the former. In perception we grasp the matter of the artwork; in feeling we grasp cognitively the material content of the values carried “upon the back” of the colors, sounds, and tones we perceive. Second, intentional acts of feeling are also stratified, in that we experience higher and lower (deeper and more shallow) emotions, whose relative height is measured by their distance from each other with respect to matters of our greater or lesser concern and the depth to which they penetrate us and affect our hearts – deep emotions that intend the welfare of families or of humankind, say, in contrast to our more shallow emotions that intend the prettiness of a village or a simple ballad.
Third, values and disvalues themselves are stratified along the spectrum of their worth relative to each other. Max Scheler had identified five such strata that he considered phenomenologically evident: On the lowest level, the physical values of pleasure and pain; then the use-values of utility and disutility; then vital values, such as health and sickness, and nobility and vulgarity; then spiritual values, such as beauty and ugliness, truth and falsity, goodness and wickedness; then, finally, values of the sacred: holiness and the profane. Hartmann disputed some features of this ladder of values – he held, for example, that the class of objects that are sacred or profane is most likely empty and therefore the values lack instances – and he treated the virtues and vices differently than Scheler. He claimed that Scheler had not understood properly the nature of the vital values. However, he did not dispute Scheler’s idea of a stratified realm of “pure” values, i.e., values as material qualities divorced from individual instantiations of them. Indeed, Hartmann achieved a phenomenological description of several strata of aesthetic values in the concluding chapters of the present book. The sublime and the beautiful are the highest aesthetic values, while the charming, the graceful, and the comic are lower values. The difference in relative rank may be traced to the moral values that they carry, for the former suggest matters of highest concern – death, majesty, and the presence of powers we sense to be superior to our own – and the latter tend to appear on the more external strata of a work of art.
But Hartmann’s greatest achievement lies in his discovery and analysis of strata in the aesthetic work itself. A complex work of art possesses a series of organized strata, and on each stratum the artist gives form to its contents. This stratification takes different forms in different art media. As a product of human creativity, art is vaguely analogous to the creativity of blind nature, or to human technology; it is a meaningful organization of matter. But artistic creation is not primarily a realization of a physical object – though it requires, as we have seen, material objects to do its work. Art creates (as in a painting) something invisible and indeed unreal, and the de-actualization or Entwirklichung of the painting (e.g., by putting it in a frame) so that it cannot be confused with what is real, places its content in a stratified transparent realm where the invisible and the unreal may then appear to the mind. These invisible and unreal aesthetic values, which appear only in art, are different from moral values, which exist as ideal being. The latter place us before moral necessity. The men Aristotle and Homer may have possessed real moral qualities worthy of admiration for themselves and for what was achieved through them, but Rembrandt’s “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer” in the Metropolitan Museum of Art has merely aesthetic value. It suggests moral excellence, and makes that excellence beautiful (in part through the visible admiration of the younger man for the genius of the older), but the work does not bear it; we recognize those values through the deeper strata of the work. The strata found in a work of art vary with the kind of matter upon which the artists bestow form. They make aesthetic value objective by forming the “matter” of words, paint, or stone to give them aesthetic value and new meaning.5
Hartmann’s concept of form is quite nuanced; he denies, for example, that “form” and “matter” are opposed concepts, for every work of art must possess both. But the bestowal of form is not simply upon “matter,” that is, upon the substances out of which it is made (colors, stone, tones, words). The process of bestowing form takes place across the entire series of strata that constitutes the work. He writes,
What is here of primary importance is that the giving of form on a single stratum, seen as isolated and taken in itself, is not at all aesthetical form. The aesthetics of form has always misunderstood that. It thought to take to itself a definite kind of formal element, i.e., that of some one stratum, for example, the stratum in which literary material is treated, and to investigate just as such its intrinsic “laws.” That may be possible, but it fails to achieve its purpose, for in this way one does not arrive at aesthetical form at all. For that begins only with the succession of forms of different kinds. (257)
For the work of art consists of formed strata arranged so that the beholder may see through the formal arrangements in each stratum into the full meaning and value of the structured work. For example, in representational art, six strata receptive of form can be distinguished. Their analysis will be abbreviated for the sake of this presentation. We will assume a reference to a painting with human figures, although the same sort of analysis (one that might refer to fewer, additional, or different strata) would apply, mutatis mutandis to a literary work or a sculpture. Naturally, the painting does not possess these strata as physical components of it; the painting simply is as it appears. In a way, these strata are questions that the critical viewer of a painting or sculpture can ask of it: what does it let appear, and on what discernable intellectual levels can we place these appearances as part of our analysis of the painting? As such, the strata are very useful not in interpreting a work, but in engaging in an internal dialogue with the work as it is viewed, and in understanding how the painting works its magic upon us, how it provokes the disinterested pleasure that Kant thought to be the appropriate aesthetical response.
The first stratum is the foreground, the ontic stuff: say, visible specks of paint or carved marble, spoken or written words. Behind the colors and shapes, the second stratum is the three-dimensional spatiality embracing things that are visible in the “light within the picture”: the scene that the colors and shapes “represent.” In the third stratum, motion appears, made intuitively visible by the depiction of a phase of movement or by a pose. From behind this motion, on a deeper level, appears the living quality of the figures; this is the fourth stratum. Then, on the fifth stratum, we have the human psychic realm: the inner life of persons, their passions and their dispositions, as they appear through their apparent motion and the living quality in a phase of a situation. On the sixth stratum, in works of unusual depth, something of the individual Idea of the persons depicted may appear – what here and in the Ethics Hartmann calls the “intelligible idea” of a person. Thus we behold a human being “whole,” as it were. And finally, on the seventh stratum various kinds of universal ideas appear: the idea of childhood or old age, the destiny of a family or of humanity, and the like. These ideas may emerge from the theme of the work, as in religious scenes, but the artist also may camouflage them. Knowledge of the meaning of the scene, or of the “legend” behind it, gives depth to our response to it, but it plays an extra-aesthetical role (206).
The character of our appreciation depends on a distinctive feature of a stratified work of art, namely the transparency of the strata, i.e. the ability of a stratum to transmit the content of strata behind it and thus allow them to affect us appropriately, i.e. according to the creator’s intentions. This transparency depends entirely upon the skill of the artist, and it takes different form depending on the stratum. For example, the transparency of the state of old age that we see in the self-portrait of Rembrandt as an old man that is cited by Hartmann (183) opens the viewer to the next-deeper stratum, upon which we are given the intelligible Idea of a man who has fought his way through long conflicts with his métier and with life itself. The transparency of that figure opens to us in turn the final stratum: the idea of old age itself as an essential state of men and women who have fought their way to it, a state the viewer, too, will perhaps one day reach.
In a non-representational art such as music, the phenomenology of strata is simpler. Only three background or “inner” strata exist in music. The foreground is constituted by the sounds to which the listener responds with a kind of resonance. This begins in the beat of dance music, but it belongs to all music. The sound addresses and captures the listener. Second is the stratum in which the listener, by a deeper penetration into the composition, is gripped by it. This stratum causes psychic agitation; it reveals and proclaims. It raises what was hidden in the listener’s Self out of the depths. The third is the metaphysical stratum, in the sense that Schopenhauer gives to the appearance of the “universal Will.”
For great music has always the character of an encounter with dimly sensed but unknown forces of destiny. In contrast, specific human destinies can be communicated objectively by painting and drama, but pure music cannot give content to the forces of destiny it conveys to the listener. No doubt, when moved by a piece of music, we try to describe the values in the music that moved us, but only limited success is possible. We call these values, to use Hartmann’s examples, “sublime” or “majestic”; we speak of its “dark depths” or its “radiance.” We express our own response to the music as “ravishment, excitement,” or as “being put in a mellow mood.” Of course these characteristics are not utilized by the composer to represent any entity. But the indeterminateness and suggestiveness of music consists precisely in the inability of its background forms to be contained in any formal value-structure. Hartmann notes that aesthetics has not yet touched on how “the sounds and the sequences are able to make the most inward and inarticulate phenomena of the life of the soul appear” (216).
a) The listener and the critic. But this analysis makes visible a curious conflict that Hartmann attempts to overcome, as he does for many such conflicts. Music stands over against us as an object, yet the soul apprehends it reverentially and is absorbed by it; how can we be absorbed by it and yet maintain the aesthetic distance required to understand it? This might be called the antinomy of the listener and the critic. The antinomy is real, yet further study resolves it, Hartmann believes:
The internal strata of music have the means to grip the entire person and, in this state, he becomes one with it; the external strata have the means to focus his attention and even to form the object of his attention itself. The structural elements of the tonal composition are what hold [the hearer] firmly at a distance from and in a state of contemplation of what is objectively present. (218)
We cannot, while listening, stand in disinterested contemplation and ignore the external forms of the music. The lover of music, becoming one with it, is led ever more deeply into its beauty as he remains attentive to the formal composition. The critic simply remains coolly at the doorstep of the third stratum while he analyzes the structure of the external strata.
Music is a revelation, Hartmann says; its miracle is that it awakens inner moods perhaps unfamiliar to us, and gets us to “enter a great inward vital life, to give [ourselves] over to feelings that cannot be put under categories. And in this way the miracle of a community of listeners in the emotional experience of music takes place” (216). Think of the beginning of Bergman’s film The Magic Flute, where we observe people from all walks of life, ages, and nationalities, all floating off with the overture to the fantasy world brought to life by Mozart’s music.
b) Truth in art. Although art presents content that is present only to aesthetical beholding and hence unreal, it nonetheless bears a relation to truth. The capacity of the mind to penetrate the foreground and behold a non-existent background seems at first mysterious. Children, failing to understand the aesthetic relation, may think a represented world to be real. But Hartmann writes,
The perception of the invisible along with the visible loses much of its mystery when we realize how it plays a broad role even in relation to far simpler objects. […] Upon each thing, we are able to see more and more of what is invisible: we “see” the hardness or elasticity of things, or even their weight and the inertia that resists efforts to move them. And similarly […] we hear steps in an adjacent room, but “see” in the mind’s eye a human form in motion as it goes about some business or other; or we hear the quiet rustle of a wicker chair but we see inwardly how the person sitting upon it is rocking in some specific way. (50)
The dark presentiment-laden tie to an unknown object hidden behind an artistic construct is thus to a large extent already present in everyday perception; the augmentation by feeling and imagination and the revelation of the object in a work of art therefore is quite natural. We get lost in it for a while, but the ties that bind us to reality are never absent; hence, our sense of mystery can be enjoyed but then be overcome.
In representational art there is an apparent conflict regarding its truth. Art as representation comes under the category of mimesis, the use of nature, human or otherwise, as a model to be represented. This does not mean that the representation must be a mere copy of the thing represented; at the very least the thing represented is of a different kind of material than the representation. Nor does it mean that, as in Plato’s metaphysics, a physical object is a representation in the world of becoming of some eternal blueprint of its essence, or what Plato calls its Form, and the art work a representation of the formal qualities of the object. Hartmann sees these two forms of mimesis as correct only in part. The aesthetic object or objectified form falls under two categories of poetic truth: the true-to-life (Lebenswahrheit) and the essential truth (Wesenswahrheit) (Chap. 23d). The former has one pole in the outside world, which it represents; the latter lies in the artwork itself as “inward agreement, unity, completeness, and consistency in itself.” These need not be in harmony, for, he writes, “a writer can represent a character whose forms are lifted up to a mythical dimension, and yet thereby enter an essential sphere, perhaps even where it has the sense of a certain fanatical attachment to value, although what is true-to-life – human life as it is – is not attained by him in this way” (323).
Such peculiar conflicts between essential truths and the true-to-life are instructive, and suggest how these tensions, interactions, and relationships may affect the aesthetic value of a work of art. He notes that at one extreme a poet cannot sift off a few essential characteristics of human nature and, so to speak, allow them to come onstage and do a solo (325), for art has as one of its functions the revelation of features of real life that might otherwise be hidden. Some classical operas, especially those of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (generally classified opera seria) present highly idealized and romanticized kings and heroes that are hardly true to life; producers today tend to “humanize” them by allowing more realistic emotions and attitudes to be presented by means of new forms of stage setting, gesture, and costume. Of course, a poetic or operatic work that was simply true to life and contained no tendency toward some ideas is hardly thinkable; yet one that is “tendentious” towards its ideas would be in danger of becoming aesthetically derailed in both ways. He writes, “The moral tone, the idea, the philosophical presuppositions can themselves be erroneous, that is, be in conflict with our experience of life, and they can be represented incorrectly – too obviously, too insistently, or even too darkly, too veiled, misleadingly, unclearly –and can then be repellent or even disappear” (313).
In sum, the representational aim of such art must walk a line between its two functions: that of letting us see the world as it is more clearly and that of bringing the beholder to a deeper understanding of what is possible in life for a person. And where the true-to-life is congruent with its deeper ideal aesthetic values, this congruence becomes identical with beauty.
c) The unity of aesthetic value. A sense of a mystery in aesthetic experience may arise from the seeming disunity of the realm of moral and aesthetic value and from the incompleteness of our knowledge of it. Aesthetic discourse then breaks down and leaves us in a state of perplexity that is akin to mystery. Is no progress in aesthetical understanding possible? Does randomness prevail here? Is there, for example, a comprehensive typology of artistic values present on the relevant strata in different media? The effort to put the experience of beauty into some kind of large pattern and to establish the structure of the whole realm of aesthetic values has failed up to now. It is not surprising that the problem of unity appears aporetical and undecidable; the natural desire of reason for unity is unsatisfied. Yet as Hartmann argues in his Ethics,6 it is premature to assume that disunity is essentially impossible to resolve, that is, to assume that we can never discover an underlying unity. A value-conflict may appear to be irresolvable only because of the undeveloped state of the inquiry in which it appears. The disunity is a problem, not a limitation, of aesthetics. Thus, we may still hope that some local mysteries may be resolved in a higher synthesis that today may not be visible.
d) Architecture and its culture. Aesthetics may determine how a practical structure can express the spirit of a culture. Questions of three kinds may arise: (1) is there tension between the practical task and the forms through which it is achieved; (2) is there tension in the harmony or disharmony of parts and whole, which may involve a conflict between the spatial and the dynamic layout; (3) is there an opposition between the practical ends pursued and the spirit and style of life expressed by the structure. However, the question of how architectural structure expresses the life of its creators is not answerable by philosophical aesthetics only because these are questions of history and even of social and political criticism, which are external to aesthetics.
No doubt we wonder how certain architectural structures give voice, in the form of style, to the life of the people who erected it and who live or lived in and around it, and the means they used to express that style. As time passes, the voice of style in a piece of architecture becomes muted, though its formal structure still may impress us. For the style belongs to the culture that put itself in the hands of an architect who made use of the forms and materials then available to make objective the functioning social and political values of a community or leadership elite. “Only where this connection [between life and architecture] is found can the life and the nature of man appear in his buildings” (232), Hartmann writes. This connection can be forgotten. When that happens, we stand befuddled before many such creations, having lost historical contact with their creators. We wonder what they could have intended to communicate by some object, and what responses they were intended to provoke in their contemporaries. We wonder, for example, what is the meaning of the empty stares of the figures on Easter Island, or why the granary of Great Zimbabwe was given the odd spiral form it has. In such cases, the mystery is not one of aesthetics, but derives from the loss of the keys to aesthetic interpretation; we cannot reconstruct adequately the function of the object, the purposes of its creators and how these purposes emerged from the larger cultural structures that nurtured their sensibilities and their beliefs. Hartmann notes in passing that the contemporary apartment building fails to convey anything of the spiritual life of the residents; it is given form and structure only for the values of utility and parsimony; it lacks style. Thus, the actual life of the inhabitants cannot be discovered from an examination of their architecture; the spirit of that life is simply not present in them at all.
There may be mystery, too, in the incompleteness and frequent disunity of our responses to art, or to beauty more generally, but that mystery may lie in our unique nature as acculturated persons, and not in the object in question. Oddly, Hartmann does not describe this form of the problem of the give-and-take between the beholder and what he beholds, perhaps thinking it intractable. Much of our response to art, as to life as a whole, is personal, in the sense that objects resonate in each of us in an individual way. Let us assume that we are developed art critics and our sensibility has been nourished and refined by years of beholding, of listening, of reading, such that we may be able to analyze a given work adequately, to understand how it “works” throughout its various distinguishable elements. But we are not just critics; we may still be puzzled by our own response to the work, how we “feel” about the face in a portrait, how her humanity relates to our own, or even what she might “have been feeling while the artist painted her”; how she “affects” our emotions. It is hard to chart just how our mood responds to, say, Frank Gehry’s Pritzker Pavilion in Chicago’s Millennium Park, or to a specific performance of Rigoletto. Here the mystery – and it is real – does not lie in art or in beauty, but in ourselves, in the lack of transparency of the sources of our emotions.
a) Creativity. The deepest mysteries of art lie in the creativity of the artist and in the individuality of the artwork. One of Hartmann’s real merits is to have discovered, on the basis of this phenomenological procedure, mysteries that cannot be deconstructed, and limit the capacity of aesthetics to make progress in areas that are genuinely its own. Of the four avenues of aesthetical inquiry listed earlier, the fourth, that of creation in art, presents us with a special mystery. Hartmann writes,
Nothing is darker and more mysterious than the work of the creative artist. The very pronouncements of a genius about his work fail to cast any light upon the essence of the matter. Usually they prove only that he, too, knows nothing more than other men do about the miracle that was consummated in him and through him. The act of production seems to be of a kind that excludes any accompanying consciousness of itself. Therefore, we know only its external side and can draw conclusions about its inner nature only from its achievements. (9)
Even to the genius, the mystery is palpable.
The problem of form is fundamental to the phenomenon of genius. For “we cannot follow the various features of aesthetic form through all the strata” (238). Even single forms can be described only in the most banal generalities.
Why does just this particular form – purely in itself, without any further transparency [without opening upon deeper strata] – seem beautiful, why does the slightest alteration of it destroy the impression? Aesthetics cannot hope to provide an answer. It is just in this that the imponderable mystery of art consists; it belongs in a region whose laws even the artist does not comprehend, where laws can be adhered to only out of the pure feelings of a genius. (239)
How do the forms on a lower stratum feed into strata higher than their own? How can these formal structures, each peculiar to its own stratum, still give us a sense of the wholeness and unity of the work?
If the possibility existed of analyzing “structurally” the entire phenomenon of aesthetic form purely as such, we could take a direct route here, in such a way, for example, as biology describes and analyzes organic forms or as ontology does for formal structures of being. But this possibility is not given: it would as such be equivalent to the revelation of the mystery of artistic production. This revelation is prohibited to philosophical inquiry. (248)
The appearance-relation, in which an ideal content appears to a mind, governs the transformation of content to ever-higher degrees of ideality as we pass from stratum to stratum, that is, as the mind penetrates ever more deeply into the work. Genius consists precisely in the creator’s skill in bestowing form so as to allow the deeper ideal elements to appear through the less deep elements, until the foreground elements – which are entirely “matter” – are understood in terms of the ideal elements they allow to appear. We then “understand” the work as a lawfully structured individual order, but we cannot grasp how it achieved those ends.
b) Uniqueness. But there is a greater mystery that limits a philosophy that seeks to understand beauty and ugliness, though it does not impede the aesthetically beholding mind from responding to the work. After some reflections upon laws of great generality that govern aesthetics and can be formulated by a philosophical aesthetics, Hartmann notes,
The nature of beauty in its uniqueness, as the specific aesthetic value-content, does not lie in these general laws, but in the particular lawfulness of the unique object. This particular lawfulness is fundamentally unavailable to all philosophical analysis. It cannot be grasped by any epistemic technique. Its nature is to be hidden, and to be felt only as present and as coercive, but never capable of becoming an object of thought. (3)
Aesthetical criteria for the value of a work of art exist, and they may orient the critical patron of the arts, yet not require his assent in any given case. The laws of beauty that matter are individual ones. Thus the capacity of aesthetics to establish the relative quality of individual art works, as opposed to art criticism exercised by a particular art critic, who speaks out of his tradition and his peculiar sensibility, is limited. “Aesthetics thus cannot […] do the same for the aesthetical beholding as logic does for thought” (3).
The beauty of each work is unique just because the world it reveals is unreal; it requires a beholder, that is, some individual reader, hearer or onlooker for whom it exists as an artwork, whose peculiar qualities he can behold and, in so doing, “complete” it. Hartmann does not use the term “interpretation” of a work of art, a term that has become so important in contemporary discourse, especially in the light of hermeneutical and deconstructive practices of artists and their public. The term suggests that the work of art becomes other than what it is in the interpretive process and Hartmann will not sanction such an idea. By “completion” he refers to the double process in which a work is responded to: the process by which the “prepared” viewer or auditor or reader grasps the way in which the artist has achieved in him the “disinterested pleasure” that is the primary response to art as art, and the process by which the subjective and personal spirit, shaped by its own milieu and art history, responds in its own way to the work as embodying (objecti-vating) values. In both cases, the process is both personal and objective; the unique structure of the artwork and the aesthetic values it carries are there in the work, but exist only for the viewer, who leaves the work intact. Without that act of completion, there would be no aesthetic object. We would have only the physical object, like the paintings by van Gogh that, according to the story, were used to close holes in the walls of barns; they become something alien to their nature.
Accordingly, the key mystery of art is the unanalyzable, but still lawful, nature that is present in the work of art. As with a human being, we can speak of the integrity of a work of art, or of its lack thereof; of a person’s or an artwork’s success or failure in “becoming what he is or it is intended to become,” he or its ability to be understood in his or its uniqueness, or his or its withdrawal from our comprehension, he falling into madness and becoming an object of psychiatry, or it falling into the margins of life and becoming a recollection of art history. Analysis may capture the general features of men or of art works, but fail to touch their individuality and uniqueness, which simply “appears.” To understand the forms that make the artwork beautiful would be equivalent to understanding what Scheler called the “ordo amoris” of a person, the laws of the heart that make him who he is. Neither philosophers nor psychologists can aspire to do so; like the critic before the indeterminacy of music, they stand at the doorway of personality. Only loving devotion to a person or work can enter the intimate individuality of a person, into the unobjectifiable forms of his personhood as a value or into the individuality of a great work of art. Hartmann writes, “For what is personal is unique, and requires a loving gaze to make it visible” (52).
In his Ethics, Hartmann spoke of personal love as he speaks in the Aesthetics of “devotion” to a thing of beauty. To love another person is to joyously affirm precisely the peculiar individuality and uniqueness of that person, who may or may not reciprocate; to hate another is to reject him or her as broken, morally ugly, silent. Similarly, we rejoice in and affirm great works of art; they speak to us personally and, in so doing, affirm our own individuality. Others do not touch or speak to us, for they may lack individuality, lack spirit and life, or they may lack resonance with a personality like their own. And, as with persons, our response to art may run across a spectrum of rejection, interest, and loving affirmation. Art is spirit made objective, which, like the human spirit that created it, deifies reduction to categories. As with another person to whom we are open in friendship, the artwork must be beheld intuitively in order to feel close to it – indeed, as Scheler would say, the noetic acts that found its communications must be “re-executed” (nachvollzogen) in mente in order to grasp at all its unique nature. Great art, like genuine personal love, gives the highest meaning and highest joy possible for a human being. Ontologically, human love and human art are built up from matter, but for Hartmann their works illuminate life from the top down.
Especially strange and mysterious is Hartmann’s claim, given the parallel of the individuality of art to human individuality, that works of art on the highest level tend to converge. The senses render to us the myriad materials out of which a work of art is made, and these diverse objects condition what appears through them. One cannot create music out of stone, or human characters out of tones. But on the highest levels of art great works of all kinds reveal a similarity in their nature even in their middle strata. The universally human is revealed in these strata, and what is universally human is held in common by all. Even where, as in the representational arts, the intelligible essence of some individual appears, it does not oppose itself to the universally human, but affirms it in its opposition: King Lear gives both the essence of an individual as well as the universally human, to which he is both opposed in his individuality but which he nonetheless represents in his essence. So Hartmann expresses the law: “All art of slight or even of a more median value diverge immensely and are hardly comparable; but, in contrast, all truly great works of art converge and come close to an impalpable identity” (497). His examples of this purported phenomenon (“Thus the Parthenon and [J.S. Bach’s] Art of the Fugue, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (perhaps in the figures of youths or of the Prophets) and Shakespeare’s Henry IV (including the figure of Falstaff), Rembrandt’s self-portrait in old age (Amsterdam) and the Apollo on the pediment [of the temple of Zeus] at Olympia, Beethoven’s fifth or seventh symphony …” (497)) are less than convincing at first sight, but he insists that we can see this convergence when our eyes penetrate to the deepest and most inward parts of these great works.
The irreducible uniqueness of the work of art arises out of the creative freedom of the artist. There the mystery – or paradox – of art grows deeper. In morals, freedom stands under necessity – I must not kill, although I can. The artist’s freedom is limited by nothing, not even by some ideal – Hartmann cites Hölderlin: the artist has the “freedom to set forth wherever he will”7 (44) – except by the logic of his unique creation. For an effective artwork, like an integrated person has a logic, an ordo amoris. But how can a logical order be unanalyzable? Why can it be only “felt”? Hartmann does not question how this utter freedom of the artist coheres with the aesthetical necessity of law-like form that must limit his freedom, any more that Scheler was able to reconcile the creative freedom of the individual – the freedom to create oneself – with the inborn law-like order of the heart that he attributes to the human person and the category of individual fate that make coherent personhood possible. As with Scheler’s “models and leaders,” art inspires us not by “moralizing, pedantry, or admonition” (292), nor by its logic, but by the characters, figures, and tones it presents to us. They elevate and deepen us mysteriously. Perhaps their lucid presence in our lives makes it possible for us to “become what we are.”
The notion of the function of art, seemingly resolved by contemporary analyses of its social, political, and educational values, seems at first somewhat unclear for Hartmann. In the introduction to Aesthetics (§5), he discusses the problem as an aporetic in the foundation of art: art may have no function at all or, perhaps, the extra-aesthetical function of elevating the human spirit to a state beyond life and quotidian entanglements; thus, l’art pour l’art. Others will argue for engaged or political art (or its contrary, “decadent” art), whose function is the fostering (or dismantling) of solidarity and the achievement (or abandonment) of political goals. If this aporetic can be resolved, it will be possible only on the basis of an analysis of the noematic correlate of the aesthetic attitude, i.e., the art object and its ties to human life, says Hartmann (Cf. 12).
Hartmann eventually answers the question of the function of art in the following way. Art has a reciprocal tie to human life. It is tied, on the one hand, to the human world, which it expresses and represents in an aesthetic space outside of the ontic world. But in so doing, it elevates the beholder into a realm of its own. The beholder does not remain there, however; he returns to his quotidian life, but one now illuminated by what he has beheld. What is “bestowed” by aesthetic values upon man is a unique meaning and value of which we have need: the light in the darkness, the joy in the sorrow. These meanings and values are gratuitous, for unlike moral values they do not burden us with responsibility, and unlike vital value, they do not burden us with necessity. They are, as Hartmann quotes Nietzsche, like gold, “uncommon and of no use and luminous and mild in [their] lustre,” and they always bestow themselves (441).8
But these aesthetical meanings have no metaphysical tie to physical nature. Western civilization was mistaken, Hartmann believes, to assume a teleology either theological or metaphysical, to be operative in nature. For if the world had a “meaning” to which it was tending, man would perforce be required to serve that end. But the meaningfulness of life does not require recourse to a greater whole, to the world in its origins or its ends.
[E]very 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. (439)
Nietzsche’s dramatic proclamations that, with the loss of God and teleology, “we are lost wanderers in an endless nothingness,” and we “create art to shield us from the truth” imply that we have wandered away from a home that was once ours, and must lie to ourselves to protect us from the truth of our meaninglessness: “Alas to him who yet has no home.”9 But, Hartmann observes, “if man […] is capable of bestowing meaning and value, […] the senselessness of the world as a whole obtains a meaning for him” (439). What is great about humankind is bestowed upon us not by the Forms, or by a Logos or God, but by ourselves. This fact need not make us overly proud, but rather content with what we are able to see and do. Science, art, and philosophy are themselves affirmations of the meaningfulness of life, not justifications of pride in ourselves. Hartmann writes,
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. (440)
Although Hartmann speaks frequently of mysteries and secrets, of aporia and antinomies in art, most of them can be deconstructed by reducing them to other mysteries, or resolved by continued examination of the phenomenological facts of the case – with two exceptions, and these impede a thoroughly philosophical aesthetics. There is the mystery of artistic creativity and mystery of the absolute individuality of the artwork, or even the individuality of natural beauty. These mysteries are not a function of human thought. They are founded in the mysteries of human individuality and of human creativity. They may also be peculiar to the attitude of reverence owed to God or to the world as such. Scheler wrote,
Whenever we pass beyond the irreverent, that is, the typical scientific explanatory attitude, and attain the reverential attitude toward things, we see how something is added to things that they did not possess, how something in them becomes visible and palpable that they formerly lacked: just this ‘something’ is their mystery, their deep value.10
Hartmann, to my knowledge, never attempted a philosophical anthropology as a platform on which to pursue these mysteries, although, on occasion, he speculates on human nature and how art responds, via certain aesthetical categories, to that nature. Perhaps a generation or two hence the “typical scientific explanatory attitude” will discover the sources of the human mind in the physiology of the brain, such that the laws of individuality and creativity will be thoroughly understood, and all “mysteries” of art will be thoroughly understood. Whether ’tis is a consummation devoutly to be wished, we may leave to the reader’s reflections.
It may also be that modern painting, sculpture, music, and poetry – all those forms of the arts that underwent a fundamental change during Hartmann’s life – are no longer relevant to Hartmann’s aesthetics. The most recent writers mentioned by Hartmann were Knut Hamsun and Thomas Mann. Otherwise, the work of the early twentieth century seems to have passed him by. Many of its artists intend precisely to blur the strata of their works, or even to deny that such strata exist in them. The average viewer, hearer, or reader often comes to new work with the expectation, grown out of his familiarity with the achievements of works from the long past, that the work will “mean” something, that it have a formal structure on many levels, each of which is so constructed as to allow the appearance of some deeper meaning behind it. Yet much of contemporary art must be experienced differently, as a flat and inarticulable phenomenon: as colors and shapes on canvas, or musical tones that have no apparent relation to each other and with no sense of musical development, or poetry as images that tell no tale and possess no deeper coherence that might suggest a singular meaning intended by the author to which his images point. Incoherence, remoteness, randomness, and expressiveness sui generis seem to constitute the character of much of what characterizes art today. If this is so, Hartmann’s aesthetics would seem to have little point of contact or application for the generations that created art after him. Perhaps a different articulation of strata in painting or sculpture is needed, for example the analysis of strata such as materials (base, paint types), of the geometry of the construction of figures in space, of the size of a work – all ways in which materials may work upon the sensibility of a beholder. Then, too, the final stratum of the work of painting might be reworked to account for the mystical and surreal intentions of many artists in the twentieth century. Such related categories as the “absurd” that are treated by the drama and the novel would have to receive a novel treatment upon Hartmann’s platform for aesthetics. Perhaps a new account of aesthetic beholding is also required. Then, too, there is the interesting question of the extent to which, if at all, Hartmann’s procedure is applicable to traditions foreign to that of European art, to which Hartmann does not refer in this work.
But it may be that Hartmann’s aesthetics is precisely what modern art is running from. Some pundits have argued that such abstract and non-representational features of modern painting, atonality in music, and similar postmodern elements in avant-garde literature are liberating, for a work of art is allowed to be simply about itself. In such liberation, as in all liberation of an agent from the moral, political or even aesthetic rules and structures of his milieu, there are subtle dangers. Art would then escape all criteria for its quality, and divorce itself from its beholders, who are similarly liberated from an obligation to interact mentally and not just viscerally with the work, and who simply respond, as in social media, with a “like” or “dislike” – and that is the end of the matter! In the place of the transparency of the work or lack thereof and the appropriateness of viewers’ responses to it, we have today an art establishment that possesses obscure criteria for the acceptability and monetary value (often based simply upon an artist’s past successes and total sales of the works they display and vend). In all of this the concept of beauty and sublimity gets lost, and Hartmann’s threefold analytical schema becomes irrelevant. The old notion, “there is no accounting for taste!” which liberates the individual from the burden of accounting for his own taste, becomes today the rule. Consumers of art are now free to take a work or leave it – or, perhaps, to enter the art establishment as a taste-maker.
This assessment of the place of art today is dismal to excess, and no doubt unfair. Yet if Hartmann is generally unread today, that may be due to the fact that he speaks out of a tradition of art that has been successfully deconstructed, and new forms of art have liberated themselves from older traditions and created our not always brave new world.
I wish to give special thanks to Thomas Pemberton of the Institute of Education, University of London, for his suggestions for improving the manuscript and for the unpleasant but necessary work of proofreading.