One writes aesthetics neither for the creator nor for the patron of the arts, but exclusively for the thinker, for whom the doings and the attitudes of both have become a puzzle. The lover of art, sunk in contemplation, can only be troubled by such thought, the artist only put in a bad mood and annoyed by it; so at least, when thought tries to comprehend what the two of them are doing and what their object is. The aesthetician tears both of them from their visionary standpoint, although to both the sense of the puzzling is familiar enough, and belongs to their perspective. To both, this perspective is precisely what is obvious; they know of an inner necessity, and in that they do not lose their way. But they accept it precisely as a gift of heaven, and this acceptance is essential to their perspective.
The philosopher begins where both men turn over the miracle of what they are experiencing to the powers of the depths and the unconsciousness. He follows up the clues left by this puzzlement; he analyzes. In the analysis, however, he brackets the perspectives of devotion and vision. Aesthetics exists only for one taking a philosophical perspective.
Viewed the other way around, the perspectives of appreciation and vision overturn the philosophical. Or, at least, they encroach upon it. Aesthetics is a kind of knowledge, indeed one with a genuine tendency to become a science. And the object of this knowledge is that attitude of appreciation and that visionary attitude. Not these alone are its objects, to be sure; it is focused, just as much as they are, upon the beautiful, but also upon them. It follows from this that aesthetical appreciation is, at its foundations, different from that of philosophical knowledge, which takes such acts of appreciative devotion as its object. The aesthetical perspective is in general not that of the aesthetician. The former is and remains the aesthetical attitude of beholding and creating; the latter is that of the philosopher.
Neither the one nor the other is obvious. The natural exclusion by one of the other, if it were total, would make, in the end, the epistemic reflections of the aesthetician impossible. He must be capable of the aesthetical perspective, for he can learn it only by his own exercise of it. In any case, some notable thinkers had the opposite conviction. Schelling11 made aesthetical intuition the Organon of philosophy. The German Romantics dreamed of the unity of “philosophy and poetry”; thus Friedrich Schlegel12 and Novalis13. The latter conceived of the philosopher as (2)14 the “magician” who could, following only his desires, put the “universal organ” to work and conjure up a world to his tastes. This idea is taken unmistakably from the activity of the poet. And, on the other hand, it appeared to them that only the eye of the artist could penetrate the secrets of nature and of the life of the spirit. This seemed to be so because people believed they could recognize in all things and in the whole of the world as its background the same fundamental nature that becomes conscious in the ego. With this anthropomorphic formula for the world, the identity of what in themselves are quite different ways of looking at the world stands or falls. And when the formula was consciously suspended, which began as early as Hegel15, the enormity of the opposition between artistic and scientific thought, between appreciative beholding and the analytic work of the intellect, became apparent once again.
The separation of these acts as seen from the other side is just as little obvious. Since the beginning of aesthetics proper in the eighteenth century, the unspoken presupposition was tenaciously held that this philosophical discipline must have something essential to teach to the beholder of beauty and even to the productive artist. This idea must have seemed convincing as long as one saw a kind of knowledge in the aesthetical manner of looking, although it is a kind of knowledge different from rational knowledge. These were the days when people believed that logic, too, could teach the thinker how to think. And yet the relationships here are far more complex. Logic, at least, can show invalid reasoning the nature of its invalidity and indirectly contribute in a practical way to consistent thinking. For aesthetics, anything similar is secondary, and comes into consideration only in a very rough way. As logic determines only subsequent to thought what laws any consistent reasoning must adhere to, and only in this way may arrive at a system of logical consistency, so too – and to an even greater degree –for aesthetics, and even than only provided it is possible to speak at all of its ascertaining the laws of the beautiful.
Aesthetics presupposes things of beauty, likewise the mental acts that appreciate them, along with a peculiar way of beholding, a sense of beauty, and an inward devotedness; even more, it presupposes the much more amazing act of artistic creation, and both, let it be noted, without laying claim to distilling their lawfulness from them in the same way that logic distills laws from relations of ideas. Aesthetics thus cannot, for that reason alone, do the same for the aesthetical beholding as logic does for thought.
At this point, we must make a further distinction. The laws of logic are universal; they vary only slightly with their object-domains. The laws of beauty are highly specialized and are fundamentally different for each object. This means: they are individual laws. Beyond that, there are no doubt also general laws, those that refer in part to all aesthetical (3) objects, in part to entire classes of them. And, within certain limits, aesthetics can also attempt to deal with them. With what success is a quite different question and one must not become optimistic regarding its potential. But these general laws are just only preconditions, perhaps categorical in nature or otherwise somehow constitutive. The nature of beauty in its uniqueness, as the specific aesthetic value-content of an object, 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.
The creative artist also does not grasp it. He creates according to it, but does not reveal it and therefore cannot even speak of it. He also cannot speak of it because he also does not have objective knowledge of it. Even less has the beholder of beauty such knowledge. He is no doubt gripped by it, but only as by a mystery he cannot uncover; for his part, he does not grasp it. In certain circumstances he can learn the extent to which such lawfulness actually dominates the work, or how far the work has mixed with elements external to art and thus has failed as art. But even then the structural nature of the law defies his efforts to know it.
There is no genuine consciousness of the laws of beauty. It appears to lie in their nature to remain concealed from consciousness and only to form the secret of the background, while entirely hidden from sight.
That is no doubt the reason why aesthetics can say, as a matter of its principle, what beauty is and even what its kinds and levels are, along with their general preconditions, but cannot teach in the practical sense what is beautiful, or why the particular form of some construction is a beautiful one. Aesthetical reflection is in all cases post facto: It can take its ground after the acts of beholding aesthetically and simply indulging in the enjoyment of beauty has taken place. It need not come after them at all, but when it does, it can rarely add anything of substance to them. In that it can achieve even less than the systematic study of art, which can at least point to unnoticed aspects of an artwork, and in that way make it accessible to a consciousness that is only inadequately receptive. And aesthetics can give even less in the way of practical principles to guide the working artist. Within certain limits, it can teach us to recognize what is impossible for art as such to achieve, and protect it from losing its way. But to specify in a positive way what and how a thing should be given form is far from aesthetics’ sphere of competence.
All theories that have gone in that direction, and all unacknowledged hopes of this kind, however they may attach themselves innocently to the efforts of philosophy in aesthetics, have long demonstrated their vanity. (4) If one wishes to make a serious effort to examine the problem of beauty in life and in the arts, one must from the outset and for all time abstain from all such pretensions.
Before concluding this topic, a further point should be discussed. There is a more radical prejudice that concerns the relation of art and philosophy in general. According to this prejudice, artistic understanding is only a preliminary stage of the understanding that knows and comprehends. Hegelian philosophy, with its “absolute sprit” arranged in a step-like series, articulated such a standpoint. Only upon the level of the concept does the Idea come to its complete “being-for-itself,” i.e., its genuine knowledge of itself. If a person today would hardly give himself the trouble of defending this metaphysics of spirit, the idea that art is a form of understanding in which appearance to the senses is a demonstration of its inadequacy as knowledge is still widespread.
That in this way the peculiarly “aesthetical” element, that is, that which is given to the senses in artistic understanding, is fundamentally and entirely mistaken – while instead it is its clarity to the senses that demonstrates the superiority of in the arts over the concept – requires no further discussion. But the error that dooms this theory lies in the notion that aesthetical understanding (intuitive vision) is a kind of cognition, and thus of the same kind as epistemic cognition. In that way, its nature is entirely misunderstood. The older aesthetics had long enough dragged itself about with this error. In Alexander Baumgarten16, art is still entirely a matter of a kind of cognitio, and even Schopenhauer17 cannot loosen the grip of this pattern of accounting for knowledge upon his Platonizing aesthetics of ideas, even though he consciously denies its rationality.
Now of course certain elements of knowledge are contained in aesthetical beholding. Just perception through the senses, upon which the act is based, is productive of knowledge, because perception is initially a stage upon which objects are grasped. But these elements do not constitute the peculiar nature of such beholding; they remain subordinate to it. What constitutes its peculiar nature is not even touched by those perceptual elements. That peculiar nature can be uncovered only by a detailed analysis. For here elements of the cognitive act of an entirely different kind come into play than those of cognition, elements of assessment (the so-called judgment of taste), of the capturing and retaining of the mind by its object, the devotedness to the object, and the enjoyment and rapture it causes. Intuition itself obtains here another character than it has in the domain of theory. It is far from being merely sensible looking-at. And the higher levels of beholding are no longer cognitive understanding, but present an aspect of productive creativity, which the knowledge-relationship neither knows nor can know of. Art is not a continuation of knowledge; beholding enacted by the viewer is also not such a continuation.
For its part, aesthetics is also no continuation of art. It is not a stage above it, to which art (5) must or even could rise. Aesthetics is not such a thing, any more than literature is psychology or sculpture is anatomy. Its task is in a certain sense just the opposite. Aesthetics attempts to remove the veils from the mystery that is carefully preserved by the arts. It attempts to analyze the act of beholding that enjoys its object, which can continue as long as it is not disrupted and disturbed by thinking. It makes into an object what is not an object in this act and cannot become one, the act itself. For that reason also the art object is something different for aesthetics, i.e., an object of reflection and inquiry, which it cannot be for aesthetical beholding. Here is found the reason why the attitude of the aesthetician is not an aesthetical attitude, such that it naturally follows the latter; it subordinates itself to it, but does not place itself within it, and a fortiori does not place itself in a position inferior to or above it.
We may now ask: is “the beautiful” really the comprehensive object of aesthetics? Or, put another way: is beauty the universal value of all aesthetic objects – in the same way, approximately, as the good is properly the universal value of everything that is morally valuable? Both are usually assumed without saying so, but both have also been disputed. If one wishes to maintain them, then they must be justified.
Upon what does the objection to the central place of the beautiful in aesthetics rest? It rests upon three kinds of considerations, in fact, upon three different objections. The first one holds that what is considered artistically successful is certainly not always beautiful; the second notes that there are classes of aesthetically valuable things that cannot be absorbed into the beautiful; and the third argues that aesthetics deals also with things that are ugly.
Of these three, we can deal most easily with the third. No doubt aesthetics has to do with the ugly, among other things. To a certain extent, it indeed belongs with all kinds of beauty. For even to beauty, limits are present everywhere, and the contrast is just as essential here as in other spheres of value. Beyond that, there are degrees of beauty, an entire scale from the perfectly beautiful to what obviously lacks beauty, but that is not a problem in itself, for it is already contained in the problem of beauty. It lies in the nature of all values that they have a counterpart in a corresponding disvalue. What must be considered is never the valuable by itself, but a value and its corresponding disvalue. The discoveries made by the analysis of value have shown us that with the character of some value the character of the corresponding disvalue is also given, and vice versa. The method of Aristotle originally rested upon that: it determined the genera of the virtues on the basis of those of “badness.” And what is true in the field of ethics is valid to a great extent in aesthetics. The fundamental phenomenon, here just as there, is the entire scale, i.e., the dimension of values, in which value and disvalue are polar opposites. (6)
One problem no doubt remains as to whether, in all special dimensions of the beautiful, we find also the ugly. That is never disputed in the case of the products of men, though it has been for the products of nature. It might very well be that everything produced by nature has its beautiful aspects, even when we do not easily become conscious of them. One must keep this possibility open – in contrast with older theories, which left considerable latitude for natural deformities (e.g., Herder18 in his Caligone) [Vom Erhabenen und vom Ideal, 1800]. But this too would change little for the problem of ugliness. It rather means only that natural constructs contain nothing ugly. That would rest upon the peculiarity of nature, e.g., upon its lawfulness or its typical forms, but not upon the nature of beauty.
But it is otherwise with the objection mentioned first: what succeeds as art is not always the beautiful. In a painting of a markedly unpretty person we distinguish as obvious and with no effort on our part the artistic qualities of the work from the appearance of the person represented by it, and, indeed, especially when the representation is unmercifully realistic. We are familiar with the same distinction in the literary representations of ineffective or repellant characters, or upon the bust of an ancient boxer with a broken and disfigured nose. And then we say something such as this: the artistic achievement is significant, but the object is not beautiful.
An aesthetically mature person is caused no difficulties by this distinction. But one wonders on occasion: can one call the whole object “beautiful”? The represented object is surely not “made beautiful” by the representation, even one of genuine genius. And yet something of beauty is found in the work. That something of beauty lies on another level, and does not drop a veil over what is represented. It depends just upon the representation itself. It is the genuine artistically beautiful, the poetically beautiful, the beauty of drawings or paintings.
Apparently, two fundamentally different kinds of beauty and ugliness have been connected in series. And they each refer to different kinds of object. Representation in painting or literature itself has just in itself an “object,” i.e., that which it represents. That is not true for all art, not for ornamental art, architecture, and music, but it is true for sculpture, painting, and the art of poetry. The object in these cases is everywhere primarily the work of the artist, the work of representation as such, as also much of what extends beyond the process of bestowing form upon it. Only subsequently does the represented object appear from behind it – not, to be sure, in the sense of temporally subsequent, but in the sense of being mediated. And the success of the work we correctly designate as its being beautiful, its failure, in its triviality or its lack of clarity (the latter is often found, for example, in literature) as being ugly. For the value or disvalue of artistic achievement lies unambiguously here and not in the qualities of what is represented. (7)
Beauty in the first and the second senses apparently vary freely against each other within a large domain. The poorly painted object of beauty seems to us, in the end, as lacking beauty, the well-painted ugly object seems to us artistically beautiful. And even in the well-painted beautiful object the two kinds of the beautiful are and remain clearly distinguishable; in the badly painted ugly object the two kinds of ugliness are distinguishable. Whoever confuses the one with the other – not only upon reflection but also in the act of beholding itself – lacks a sense of art. The skillful representation has nothing to do with embellishments; to the contrary, where such things are mixed in, they detract from beauty and even worse: the work lacks artistic beauty; it fails as art, it becomes banal, becomes kitsch.
In this sense, it is quite appropriate to retain “the beautiful” as the universal and basic value of aesthetics, and subsume under it every work of art that is well done and effective. What this state of being well done consists in remains a question of another kind. It is almost congruent with the fundamental question of the whole of aesthetics: What, precisely, is beauty? –
Of the three objections, only the second is left. It asserted: the beautiful is only one of the genera of the aesthetically worthwhile. Next to it stands the sublime, generally recognized as such in its unique independent nature. Then a series of other value-qualities enter, although their independence is not similarly conceded: the graceful, the pleasing, the touching, the charming, the comical, the tragic, and many kinds more. If one enters the individual domains of art, one will find a richness of aesthetic value-qualities of a much more specialized kind, and it is easy to find a disvalue corresponding to each of them, even when language does not always know how to call them by name.
But just because the list is so long, and because they all can claim the right to consideration in aesthetics, there must certainly also be a general value-category that encompasses them, and it must have enough space for their multiplicity. One can no doubt dispute whether it is reasonable to characterize the value-category as beauty. For “beauty” is in the end a word from everyday speech, and, as such, ambiguous. If one ignores the word-use that is found in domains external to aesthetics, then what is in dispute here is apparently always a narrower concept of beauty, one with an additional meaning. The first stands in opposition to the sublime, charming, comical, etc.; the second encompasses them all without exception – as is the case no doubt only when one understands the named designations in their purely aesthetical sense, for they all possess a non-aesthetical meaning. Such a condition may be conceded, for it is also the presupposition of the opposition to beauty in the narrow sense.
When we look upon the issue in this way, the entire dispute about meanings turns into one about words. No one can prohibit another person from understanding the concept of beauty narrowly and oppose it to those more specific concepts, but it is also true that no one (8) can command another to take the term in its broad sense, and understand it as a concept superimposed upon all aesthetic values. One must only hold tight to the meaning one has chosen, use it consistently, and not again absent-mindedly confuse it with the other.
In the following section, we will lay the foundations of the broader meaning. We will also focus on the point at which special genera force their way into the foreground. The latter will then all appear as species of the beautiful. This has the practical advantage that the most familiar aesthetical concept will be advanced as the foundational concept, and the worries about an artificially constructed and superimposed concept become nugatory.
The direction of our inquiry can take several routes. But they are not all equally accessible, notably not in some of the specific places where the problem occurs. All methodological procedure must be oriented toward whatever aspects of a total problem are presently accessible. In aesthetics that is of special importance, because up to now it possesses only very few useful analyses of the phenomena and the entire complex of its questions, as measured against its difficulties, has been only slightly dissected aporetically. By this observation, no criticism of the achievements of worthy researchers is implied. The situation right now simply shows how much aesthetics is still tied to its beginnings and is groping forward with carefully measured steps. For we are not lacking in daring sketches and blueprints. But they are instructive only in their errors.
Since the beautiful is essentially directed toward a beholding subject, the specific orientation of whose acts is presupposed, we are presented from the outset with two courses that might be undertaken: one could take both the object and the act whose object it is as the themes of the analysis. These could again be divided. With respect to the object, one could examine its structure and way of being, or else the character of its aesthetic value. Similarly, one could direct the analysis of the act either towards the receptive act of the observer, or towards the productive act of the creator. To what degree one could separate the directions of these courses of inquiry from each other is a question in itself, and can, for the time being, be set to one side.
In any case, four kinds of analysis result. Of those, the first three, at least, are accessible routes for the procedure, while the fourth places at the very beginning insurmountable barriers in its way. Nothing is darker and more mysterious than the work of the creative artist. Even the pronouncements of a genius about his work fail to cast any light upon its nature. 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 (9) we know only its external side, and can draw conclusions about its inner nature only from its achievements.
Conclusions of such a kind are, however, uncertain and easily slip into fantasizing. Like all inferences about metaphysical objects, they have free play; one cannot verify them, one can just as little support as refute them. In the Romantic era, attempts were made to advance in this direction; they were undertaken by poets, and were in step with the enthusiasm for the romantic joy of creativity, but they assumed a speculative picture of the world that they could not pretend to demonstrate. Even today, credulous people are seduced by such theories, but they only tend to make more mature thinkers feel skeptical.
If one is critical, and ignores all metaphysics of art, one may still take one of three remaining courses. Of them, the analysis of values is in the most difficult position, because aesthetic values, understood concretely, are highly individualized. Any classification of them according to the genera and types they bear would touch only a few of their external aspects. The systematic study of art and literature has achieved a great deal in this area. Analyses of style have been carried out; tendencies and gradations have been made visible there. We have become conscious of kinship among similar types, and important tensions among them can be properly comprehended. Yet if we look more closely, we must conclude that such characterizations concern rather the structural elements of a work of art – and similarly beauty external to art – but much less the real value-components as such.
As language no longer has any name for the latter – unless we refer to the quite superficial ones given to certain genera – so also thought has no concepts for them. Where people coin concepts for them and give them names more or less randomly, they tend not to satisfy artistic sensibility rightly. Even the concepts that are common among us today, such as the sublime, the comical, the tragic, the graceful, etc., suffer from this lack. They are highly suggestive and indispensable as structural concepts, but as value-concepts, they are silent when questions are raised that are truly germane to aesthetics. This situation corresponds to those in other areas of value, for example, the ethical. Here too the analysis can directly describe only the content, but it cannot capture value-character itself; it appeals only to the emotional sense of value – it calls it in as a witness, as it were.
There is the additional consideration that this call for a witness in aesthetics comes primarily from the beautiful itself – from the created work of the artist or even from a natural object – but the call emanating from the descriptive analysis of its structure is quite weak. Nevertheless, one must travel this road ever again, though within certain limits; it must at least be kept open. For there is no other pathway to specialized research into values. All progress along that road still remains dependent upon, and tied very tightly to, the analysis of object and act, which are not essentially related to it. (10)
This also implies that almost the entire weight of what aesthetics can achieve is borne by the two remaining means of procedure: 1) By the analysis of the structure and ontic nature of the aesthetic object and 2) By the acts of observing, beholding, and enjoying.
We will work almost entirely with these two kinds of inquiry, even where problems of value enter the discussion. It would be wrong to wish to decide matters for only one of them, for they constantly intersect each other in the aporetics of beauty. Both are fragmentary and dependent upon each other in every detail. That may cause some irregularity in the course of the inquiry; given the state of research today, that is not to be avoided. And it is the lesser evil in contrast with the terrible one-sidedness to which one necessarily falls victim when one leaps to judgment prematurely.
In a certain sense, the primary task, at least at first, belongs to the analysis of the structure of the object, just because this work is still in a primitive state, and has not kept pace with the analysis of the act, which has advanced in many branches of research.
In the nineteenth century, aesthetics was, after all, subjectively oriented, for the most part; the neo-Kantian idealism and psychologism had a large influence upon it. That led not only to errors and one-sidedness, but also to progress in the analysis of the act. In the light of its neglect, it is appropriate to develop the analysis of the object. But it would be entirely mistaken to concern ourselves only with the latter. Only with the cooperation of both can we hope to pass beyond the stagnation to which we have been maneuvered by the one-sidedness of the past.
Moreover, the natural point of departure is from the object. The expression, “fine arts,” which we use without thinking, is fundamentally misleading. Art itself is in no way fine, but only the work of art is. Similarly, the viewing or the enjoyment of beautiful objects is just as little to be called beautiful, regardless of whether the enjoyment was produced by art or by some feature in nature. In viewing an object, beauty exists again only in the object, despite whatever sympathy the participation of the beholding consciousness brings to it.
But from the perspective of the act, too, the object is the natural place to attack the question. It is precisely the person who views and enjoys what he sees that is attending entirely to the object he is beholding, and he may even be so lost in his appreciation that he thoroughly forgets himself. This mental act is no doubt quite different from the epistemic attitude of an aesthetician, though it has nonetheless one thing in common with him: he attends to the object in the same way. Aesthetical analysis of course does not attend to the object alone, but shifts its attention to the act, also. But it finds itself (11) primarily attending to the object –simply because it comes upon the act of viewing while attending to it.
Now in this attendance lies a problem that has concerned aesthetics from its very origins. We know it as the problem of separating the object from its connection to other objects. Very closely related to this issue is the question of the isolation of the act of beholding from the contexts of life and thought of the person. Becoming lost in an object of beauty is the same as the forgetting one’s selfhood and all else in life that is present, real, important, or oppressive.
The object appears in majestic isolation away from the contexts of life; the man who submits to the impression it makes on him experiences in his own person the same isolation – from everydayness, care, life’s passing trivialities, and emptiness. For him, the environing world sinks beneath the horizon, and he, along with his object, seems to make up a world apart. This phenomenon is apparently essential for the genuine enjoyment of art, and in many cases –perhaps when listening to great music – it can become so overwhelmingly powerful that, when it is over, one feels an almost painful awakening from a moment of rapture.
This state of elevation above the everyday world is a form of genuine ekstasis. But since such states are experienced most strongly only by those whose nature is of a more profound sort, we have been led to the belief that it is in general the nature and task of art to create a world of rapture and elevation above life, a world that has its meaning and purpose in itself, and excludes all other interests. It would then seem possible that life serves art, but not that art serves life. For that would subordinate art to a purpose external to itself.
For us living today, such an intensification of the intrinsic value in art and in the artistic life seems rather remote. But it was not always so. Therefore, we should discuss it here. It played a great role in the “l’art pour l’art” movement, and it was not only raised to the level of theory but it also won considerable influence upon artistic sensibility and the creative process themselves.
A man of healthy sensibility sees clearly and irrefutably that an art that stands over against life with all its demands loses entirely the ground beneath its feet and is left hanging in the air. But given that this separation of life from art is erroneous, it is still not entirely transparent how art is tied to life and is empowered to resolve some problem in the spiritual situation of its contemporary world without losing its characteristic aesthetical autarchy. This aporia cannot be resolved at his point; it will be treated in other contexts. For only in an advanced stage of the analysis of the object will we find the materials needed for its resolution. Here we must merely point to the problem as such. For neither aestheticism nor an art tied to the cheap trends of the moment should have the final say. (12)
The central task is to unify the two demands correctly, that is, to unite them in a genuine synthesis. It will become apparent that there exists a much deeper tie between them; that only an art that has grown out of a lively cultural life can arrive at the creation of works that are lifted above and beyond all epochs. Similarly, only a spiritual life capable of motivating such works is in a position to bring its own current aspirations to their highest effectiveness. For spiritual creations draw their strength precisely from their ties to life, allowing them to reach the fullness of their unique nature and their genuine greatness, and it is only on the background of those ties to life that their own insular separation becomes visible; and, similarly, the opposite: only such creative works are capable of bestowing upon the life of individuals and communities an adequate consciousness of their own hidden power and depths.
Nothing in aesthetics is as familiar as the concept of form. All beauty we encounter, whether in nature or in the creations of artists, presents itself as having a certain kind of form. And, as observers, we feel immediately that the slightest change in the form would necessarily destroy the work’s beauty as such. The unity and wholeness of the work, its uniqueness and its self-containment depends entirely on form; and we know, without being able to prove it, that it is not a question here of the external appearance alone, is contours or borders, not even of what is visible or given to the senses, but of the inner unity and completeness of its structure, of its logical order and interconnectedness, of its being penetrated by lawfulness and necessity.
Thus, we speak of “beautiful form” as something quite familiar, and in no way problematic, but we mean very different kinds of things by it. We refer as much to the noble proportions of a sculpture as to the distribution of masses in a building, to the rhythm and succession of intervals of a melody, to the structure of an entire musical “movement” or to the artistic way scenes are arranged in a play; but no less do we refer to the play of lines about some terrain in which we stand, the heavy figure of an immense tree, the fine veins upon a leaf: and we always mean by these thing the structuring of the object from within, the form that points beyond itself, and which is essential to the whole. This has been called the “inner form” as opposed to the merely contingent external form of a thing, and in it hovers darkly the sense of the old Aristotelian “Eidos,” which, as an active inner force, constitutes at the same time the principle of form of the outward appearance.
But what, then is “inner form”? Precisely the connection to an historically obsolete metaphysics should cause us to reflect. It would be difficult for our contemporaries to be willing to assume an ideal realm of preexisting essentiae for the sake of solving the problem of form in aesthetics, and to make the puzzle of how a sense of form arises in the observer with great immediacy (13) could be dependent upon such a thing. Moreover, in that way, he would come in dangerous proximity to a theoretical understanding of the problem and, with that, to the corresponding ontic structure of things. For the Eidos was meant as the principle of such a structure.
And even without such metaphysics, any blurring of the borderline separating the concept of form from the mere ontological relation is a threat to the aesthetical concept of it. Naturally, this concept refers to an essential relation in the structure of the thing. But that is just as valid for it as for an object of knowledge: it is valid for the organism, for the cosmos, and for the physical organization upon which it exists, for man as a character and a type, for the state, whose structures as an existing human community are completely formed from its inner depths outward. “Inner form” says too little; its content is too general and too thin.
The specifically aesthetical problem of form has therefore hardly been touched upon as yet. And how could it be otherwise? “Beautiful form” is fundamentally nothing much more than another term for beauty, thus as a definition it is almost tautological. Only when we succeed in saying in what consists the special feature of “beauty” in beautiful form can this be otherwise. Many kinds of initiatives have been taken in response. Some saw the special feature as unity, or in the harmony of the parts or members, or in the mastery of a collective multiplicity; also, more subjectively, in the pleasing quality, the immediate clarity, or even in the animation or spiritualization of what offers itself to the senses. But these efforts render only very general definitions, and all are almost empty of content if no fundamental definition with a capacity to bear these phenomena effectively stands beneath them. Some of them are not true for all cases, while others are not true for the aesthetical concept of form proper, because they attach themselves far more to all organization of things, especially the higher types.
Still more difficulties are to be found. Could it be that which bears the content of a poem, of a portrait, or of some given mood in nature is excluded from being beautiful? Or is the opinion that all so-called “content” in this sense belongs together with form? That is conceivable. But then why do people speak of form alone, while it pertains to the concept of form itself that it characterizes an opposition to all content, which is first given structure by means of form?
It is possible that these inconsistencies rest upon inconsistencies in the concept of content. Let us therefore attempt to replace it with something more determinate. The analysis of the categories gives us a starting-point for this effort. For “matter” stands complimentary to form. By this term we do not mean ontologically just anything that fills space; matter in the broadest sense is everything that is indeterminate and undifferentiated in itself, so far as it is capable of receiving form – all the way down to the bare dimensions of space and time. These two also clearly play the role of matter in the aesthetic object, as we have both spatial and temporal arts.
But in our understanding of aesthetics there is still another, more narrow, sense of matter. We mean the realm of the sensible elements over which the process of organizing ranges, in the sense that stone or clay (14) is the matter of sculpture, color is the matter of painting, tones are the matter of music. Here matter has the significance not of something ultimate or indissoluble, even less of something substantial, but only and entirely the species of the sensible elements, which, in the shaping done by the artist, receive form of a unique kind.
Now this relation is without doubt foundational for all further analyses of beauty on the side of the object. Indeed, it belongs to the very first steps of the analysis. It is thus easy to see that the entire way of bestowing form encountered in the arts depends largely on the kind of material upon which form is bestowed. The universal and the categorial “law of matter” asserts itself here; it states that on all object-domains of any kind, matter and form are together determinants, for not every kind of form is possible for any kind of material, but only certain kinds of form for specific kinds of matter. Of course, this law does not put an end to the autonomy of form in any way, but only limits it. Here the roots of the well-known phenomena of the limits of what can be represented by the individual art forms, which appeared out of the eighteenth-century dispute about the figure of Laocoön. Sculpture cannot shape in marble all of what literature can easily represent in verbal material. These are genuine phenomena that limit and separate the domains of art, and the lawfulness of these phenomena, once discovered, cannot be in any way denied.
In its complete opposition to matter as a principle that indicates the scope of domains, the aesthetical concept of form obtains its first clear definition. And this can be easily maintained throughout all domains of the arts, for it so happens that every one of its domains has its specific matter. Indeed, one may say that the entire classification of the fine arts primarily depends upon the differences in matter. But to some extent, the principle of differentiation functioning here reaches even into the broad domain of beauty beyond that of the arts.
Nevertheless, this relation concerns only one side of the concept of form. This can be already seen in the fact that it is precisely the element of “content” in a work of art, i.e., what one inadequately designates by the term, which is not absorbed by such a concept of matter as this; indeed, it is hardly touched by it. Therefore, there must be another concept opposed to form if the concept of content is to have any clear meaning for us at all.
This second opposition is clearly present everywhere that there is a question of representation, where, in other words, the bestowal of form consists in making something visible to the senses that exists or could exist in the world this side of art. Thus, literature represents human conflicts, passions, and destinies, sculpture the forms of bodies, and painting almost everything that is visible. These domains of content are in themselves not artistic, only the bestowal of form by the arts makes them so. But they are the ones that give the “themes” for such bestowal, the “sujet,” hence in this sense the “material” that is brought into the presence of eyes and mind by the creative artist. (15)
“Material” in this sense is not found in all the arts, not, for example, in music (at least not in pure music), not in architecture, not in ornamental art. Its concept becomes questionable only in the domain of natural beauty. But it is certainly a constitutive element for the representational arts, including literature, and that fact, despite these examples, is sufficient to secure the concept a place in aesthetics. But then it must be valid at least for these specific arts that the category of form appears in them as a double state of opposition: on one side, to the matter “in” which form is bestowed, on the other, to the material “which” they give form. Clearly, there must exist here a specifiable relation between the bestowal of form in the first and the second senses.
The problem that now becomes apparent has broad implications. Solving it with a single blow would be hard to achieve. Are there in fact two kinds of bestowal of form in one and the same construct? Must not the bestowal of form upon matter and bestowal of form upon material be one and the same thing? And yet, is the first not only distinguishable from the second, but even essentially different from it? If, on the one hand, a writer bestows form upon characters and lived destines, while on the other he gives shape to the words by giving them expression, it is clear that the former can never be identical with the latter. In the created work, however, perhaps in a well-formed and executed play, both grow together to form a unity in such wise that they appear not only as inseparable, but are given as a single bestowal of form that expresses itself on two sides.
Is that an illusion, or does such simultaneous two-sided bestowal of form exist? The latter might mean that one and the same bestowal masters two kinds of unformed or potentially formable things. It might be that precisely in this two-sided relation the mystery of beauty as such can be understood – and if we cannot succeed entirely all at once, still perhaps we can solve an essential part of it.
Now it is obvious that in this case the category of form itself might not be adequate for such a task, and in its place would come categories of the structure of the object that allow us to understand the characteristic interweaving of two apparently heterogeneous relations, and their joining forces in the unity of a manifest multiplicity – or rather in the manifest unity of two multiplicities.
While the problem of the aesthetic object, even in the first analysis of its external features, has shown its considerable complexity and allows us to suspect the presence of background elements that can of course be felt by an observer but not be grasped by him, the second problem of the responsive act reveals itself to be no less complicated.
Just the fact alone that there is more than one name for it points to that complexity. For every name corresponds to an essential aspect of the act, but these essential aspects are no less heterogeneous than those of the object. (16) In the act there can be clearly distinguished, at a minimum, the elements of intuition, of enjoyment, and of assessment. Of these, that of enjoyment is the most peculiar, but it is also the one most distinct from acts of the same spiritual height and individuality.
This element has long been familiar. Plotinus19 was the first to recognize it, and Kant held fast to it almost exclusively in his Analytic of Beauty. He had the expression for it: delight and pleasure. He chose both terms consciously as the contradictories of the intellectual attitude. But both were strictly oriented towards the object and were so understood that they included reference to the element of reception. Indeed, they were intended also to contain the element of assessment. For what Kant calls the “judgment of taste” is nothing other than the expression of the pleasure that we feel before things of beauty, and not a second act that goes with it.
One can, accordingly, find in Kant’s aesthetics the unification of all three sides of aesthetical receptivity. But too little was done to differentiate them. Instead, a fourth element makes a powerful entrance in the background of the receptive attitude, that of autonomous engagement or of spontaneous achievement, which stands opposite to the devotional and self-forgetful attitude of enjoyment, and the receptive act seems thereby to approach the act of the productive artist. In Kant, this took the form of a reactive engagement, a “play of the powers of the mind,” of the “imagination,” and of the “understanding,” which proceeds according to its own inner laws and has the clear character of an inward re-creation of the original creation of the artist, but re-created solely in the act of beholding.
In the nineteenth century, these Kantian doctrines were often taken up and imitated in different ways; people found many things to alter and improve in them. They did not go far beyond them. The most significant work by them was the assimilation of the act of assessment to that of enjoyment, or, as Kant expressed it, of the “judgment” to the “delight.” A well-known and central doctrine of this analysis consisted in the demonstration that aesthetical satisfaction lays a claim to universal validity (for all subjects), but does not attempt to base this claim upon a “concept.” This generality “without concepts” is unique in Kantian philosophy; and for that reason it has always attracted the special attention of his followers. And in fact there is present here a fundamental and essential part of the strange interweaving of acts in the aesthetically attentive consciousness.
But what is insufficient in this doctrine is the aspect of intuitive beholding, which once stood higher than all others in the intuitive aesthetics of Plato and Plotinus. The act of beholding a thing is precisely the most important part of this interweaving of acts, or at least the element that bears it. Delight or enjoyment and the value judgment that lies within them have more the character of a reaction to the impression received in the act of beholding; they are responsive act-elements, and therefore are not the first in the entire warp and woof of acts. They can (17) appear only where what is given in the form of a picture is already there, for they are thus mediated by an act of reception. And it can hardly be doubted that this receptive act is of an intuitive kind.
To this corresponds even the well-established expression, “aesthetical.” The word means nothing but “of the senses”; what is intended along with it is that the external senses, eyes and ears, are the receptive tools of beauty. But with that, its opposition to intellectual comprehension is simply characterized once more. And yet the senses are not brought in simply as mediators of something already present, as in everyday perception, but rather as the stimulus for a process of a higher order that can only begin with it. The meaning of this relationship is evident as soon as we reflect that what is intended here is the element of genuine “intuition” within the activity of the senses. This is not the same thing as receptivity, but it is indissolubly tied to it only in perception. Yet perception retains the clarity of intuition even where it is built into a larger context of acts by which receptivity is entirely swamped – as happens almost always within the structure of knowledge.
It does not lose this character of intuition even in the quite different structure possessed by acts of aesthetical observation. It is just here that it comes dominant; a large class of elements characteristic of intuition, which are concealed in the knowledge-relation by the latter’s claims to ontological knowledge and purposely passed over, turn out to be essential here. Light and shadow are for knowledge only a means to recognize the shapes of things, and are hardly noticed; in the viewing of drawing and painting they take on objective independence and become the main focus. That is also valid for perspective, for colors, and for color contrasts. Similar things can be said about other areas of aesthetical receptivity and understanding. The writer also ties himself to what in life are unnoticed and imponderable features of human movement and gesture, and, if he is unable to offer them to our eyes, he lets them appear to our inner visions via a detour through words.
But even with that, we have not exhausted intuition; its role extends further. Seeing by the senses is only half of aesthetical seeing. Above the former, a viewing of a second order arises by the agency of the sense-impressions, but it is not absorbed by them, and, with respect to the act, is clearly independent of them. This other kind of viewing is not, as it may seem, a beholding of essence, not the Platonic grasping of some general principle, not intuition in the sense of some higher level of knowledge. Rather, it always attends entirely upon the individual object in its uniqueness and individuality, but it sees upon it what the senses cannot grasp directly. Upon a landscape it sees the elements of mood, upon a human being the element of his mental state, his suffering or passion; upon a scene playing out before it, it sees the element of conflict. Whether this is true of all aesthetical understanding, we may leave to one side. For art, in the narrow sense, and for the (18) clear-sighted viewing of the beauty in life and in nature, it may well be true as a whole. And we must orient ourselves toward those central domains of aesthetical phenomena.
It is important before all else that this beholding, or viewing of a second order, not be thought of simply as supplementary, a matter of an afterthought that could at times be absent. No doubt it may occasionally happen that what constitutes a work of art or an attractive human face may open itself to this beholding only gradually, but that is to a great extent true for first-order viewing also, and may not, therefore, be considered as a special character in contrast to the former. Rather, the characteristic we find is that the second order is firmly tied to the first order, beholding to viewing, and must always be there with it, at least at the start, if it is later to push itself forward and deepen. But in many cases, the relation is turned around, such that the focus moves from beholding back to viewing of the sensible details, as if those needed some special attention, a need that was first provoked by the weight and significance of the act of beholding.
Whatever the nature of this act of beholding, it is not to be discerned before the analysis of the object. That will therefore become the topic of a later inquiry. But we can draw some implications even at this point that will give an authoritative measure to all that follows: in the aesthetical receptive act two kinds of vision lie in sequence; and it is just the collaboration of both that constitute what is specific to the attitude appropriate to seeing artistically.
From this position, it is also easy to see that both kinds of looking-at form an indivisible whole, in that they interpenetrate each other in various ways, and condition each other mutually. It may, therefore, be expected that neither one nor the other will be the bearer of enjoyment (of “delight”) and of judgments of taste concerning the object, but always only both together in their interpenetration.
From this position, too, some light falls for the first time on the impact of spontaneity in the structure of the receptive acts. For here there is latitude for the inward productive attitude, whose presence we darkly sense in the receptive act that is executed by the observer, but we do not know how to specify in detail. Beholding, the second-order form of looking, is apparently creative, at least secondarily. What it beholds is not given to perception, but is only occasioned by it; moreover, it is spontaneously motivated. It consists for that reason simply as a representation for intuitive consciousness – concrete and variegated as is always what we experience – yet not experienced, but rather spontaneously produced (by the “imagination” as Kant says); it is a piece of sleight-of-hand by fantasy, yet firmly tied to the sensible impression.
There is an attempt at explicating this inward relation of the twofold looking-at in the Critique of the Power of Judgment. A “play of the powers of the mind,” Kant called it, and thereby grasped the characteristic unity (19) of the opposed powers of consciousness. But he characterized both “powers” that were in question as “imagination and understanding” and in that way reached too high along the vertical series of our “faculties.” He distanced himself too far from the senses. For clearly, one member of the double looking-at has a sensible nature. The other should not be characterized as much as an intellectual capacity, as the expression “understanding” suggests. If one assumes that grasping something is a function of the understanding, then the intuitive nature of the second member would be annulled. It would therefore be better to leave the understanding to one side, and understand the interplay as one of sensible and supersensible vision, where the latter is not a mysterious sinking into the sea, but means simply spontaneous, inward, and productive beholding that adds something new to what is immediately given to the senses. For this, Kant’s “imagination” is in fact the adequate expression.
However that may be, we can hold fast for the time being to the switching back and forth between the two kinds of viewing, for it is indeed foundational for the entire structure of the receptive act executed upon the aesthetical standpoint. Viewing through the senses is the first conditioning element, inward beholding the second; the latter is conditioned by the first, but then the two enter into a relation of reciprocal conditioning. Thus only with the onset of beholding is viewing through the senses lifted out and above everyday perception and receives from it a special aesthetical character. Further, both together make up the supporting act-elements called delight, pleasure, or enjoyment, as far as these three can appear only where the inward enlightenment of these senses occurs by means of a supersensible beholding. And again: provided this enlightenment and becoming enlightened in viewing are not themselves sensed as one of the elements of that act – whose relation is concealed from the beholding consciousness – but rather as a relation among elements or strata of the objet to which the act-elements are correlated, will the object viewed appear as beautiful.
The aesthetical judgment gives expression to this appearing-beautiful. Assessment as an element of the act is likewise supported by the interpretation of the twofold viewing. And that cannot be otherwise, where delight itself is also supported by precisely this interpenetration. For a judgment of taste is only the intellectual expression of that which delight makes directly present to our senses.
Not a few inquiries have been made under the heading of aesthetics that are in reality only philosophy of art. That is understandable, for it is in the arts where the fundamental questions of beauty and our grasp of it appear to have the greatest promise, and are for that reason usually more readily analyzable. One who is oriented to the arts also usually brings along a prejudice in favor of artistic beauty, of a kind, perhaps, such that from the outset it seems to him to be the higher form of beauty. Usually we find even today a certain (20) exaggeration of the value of art on the part of those who understand some things about it. And, then, of course, all beauty that comes from nature will be inadvertently assigned a lower rank.
Obviously, such opinions represent an extreme. No one would deny that value-elements of a unique kind appear in the arts that are lacking in all other forms of beauty. After all, it is the skill of the artist himself that constitutes the real meaning of the word “art”; we experience this element upon the artwork as the artist’s craftsmanship, and we admire it as a genuine value-quality. That does not, however, justify considering the absence of these qualities in beauty outside of art to be a deficiency in them.
Thus, we must first take our point of departure from beauty in general, regardless of when and where it appears. And to that end, natural and human beauty must take up a position of equality next to works of art.
It is no doubt common to speak in this context only of nature. But man, too, and much that is within the sphere of his life and behavior has an aesthetical aspect; man is, after all, not only a part of nature, but also the possessor of an entire spiritual world, which is superimposed upon the natural realm. And if it is true that aspects of character and morality in our actions and attitudes essentially make up human beauty, it does not follow at all that aesthetics turns into ethics, and the beautiful into the good. Human beauty can also be found in the play of the passions, even where they are uninhibited and can in no way be called good. Conflicts and struggle, suffering and defeat, produce dramatic tension and release, not only, to be sure, for the writer, who seeks them out as material in order to bestow artistic form upon them, but simply for anyone living a life who is able to bring the distance and peace required to see them in their natural drama. It is very probable that the onstage drama exists only because there is a drama in life, which can, just as such, affect us aesthetically. That is even truer of the comical in life, which likewise flourishes and has its effect upon us even without being reworked formally in literature. There are humorists without a pen, planted right in the middle of life, and not just where they manifest themselves in striking aphorisms; it depends upon an inner attitude, on a way of seeing and living, on the sense for the all-too-human. The unintended comedy in human life becomes visible by depending on a certain orientation of the observer, on his distance, his ability to stand above it, and on the pleasure he takes in it. The man taking part in or affected by the comedy of life will find it hard to meet these conditions.
The entire domain of possible aesthetic objects is thereby extended considerably. One may seriously ask whether, if that is so, there are any objects in the world at all that fail to have an aesthetical aspect. If we must assent to that, and all entities come under the rubrics of (21) “beautiful” and “ugly,” then it becomes necessary once again to separate out of this multitude those things that have a right to aesthetical evaluation in a more narrow and specific sense.
To achieve that, it is not sufficient to reserve only the narrower precinct for the work of art and to skim off everything else from it. Works of art may also turn out to have little value; they can be subject to critical attack by reference to what the artist was trying to achieve, and works of nature can have high aesthetic value and be quite convincing beyond all measure. But there is more. The question arises whether the ugly or the vapid are to be sought only in the realm of art, namely in artistic failures, and whether everything in nature is beautiful. And one can question further whether all of that is not true for the domain of humanity. Perhaps the incapacity to see beauty everywhere lies only in deficiency of the observer’s sense for different kinds of beauty. If Herder used the example of the “loathsome crocodile” as proof of ugliness among the forms of living things, the claim seems rather subjective to us today. The case of human faces and figures is similar: classical epochs of sculpture and painting created certain ideals of beauty that exerted a dominant influence on tastes for hundreds of years, and whatever did not meet those ideals was counted as ugly. But other tastes and epochs came along, and other ideal types became the norm. All norms of such kind have shown themselves to be historically conditioned, transient, and relative. With what right, therefore, do we living assume that just because the forms we meet with in life displease us they should therefore be thought ugly?
With questions of this kind, we straightaway reach a form of relativism in aesthetic values. And then it may appear that beauty is an inconstant and arbitrary norm that is conditioned by factors external to aesthetics, i.e., by social conditions, the dominant practical interests of a time, by what is useful for life, or also by the tendencies in our preferences that might have arisen out of our biological nature, which then attempts to give those tendencies expression in the form of certain ideals.
We must recognize the fact of fluctuation in history without reservation. One need not ignore phenomena of this kind to realize that with such fluctuations and other phenomena of that kind the essence of beauty is not affected; rather what is affected are the historical forms it takes. Thus we are left with the quite fundamental question of whether ugliness exists in the domain of nature, even if our sense of natural beauty varies considerably and appears in history relatively late.
This question too, will be treated in its proper place. Specifically, it will take the form of whether, in the diversity of our sense of nature, conditioned historically as it is, something that is held in common and basic to all such sensibility may be found that is objectively constitutive for a “sense of beauty” in general. Today we have certain means of access to such a phenomenon, but this access is such that intellectualistic and psychologistic aesthetics cannot find them. They lie (22) in the domain of recent developments in ontology and anthropology and point back to certain relationships among foundational categories. In general, on the side of content, the question of natural beauty borders on research in natural philosophy, which is today in a very painful state; similarly the problem of human beauty borders on the problem of anthropology. In this case as in the other, one must beware of blurred borders between disciplines, but one must also not allow the respect for disciplinary borders to go so far as to separate violently what is related.
To stay on the only feasible route, from which many dead ends split off, may in fact be a task of great difficulty. The old ontological ideas of perfection that the nineteenth century falsely assumed everywhere would scarcely help us here. But it is conceivable to dig out of it a useful nugget of an idea that could be salvaged by a new kind of analysis informed by phenomenology. The general place of departure for such an effort will appear as soon as it becomes clear that so-called “nature” does not consist in a system of laws, but in a hierarchy of structures whose fabric is derived from an inner unity and wholeness, regardless of whether they possess a merely dynamic or organic character.
The arrangements of such natural fabrics are variable, subject to disruption and destruction, and every disruption is something negative, something also perceptible in feeling as negative, as a palpable modus deficiens, both objectively upon the thing and subjectively in intuition. Here space is given for the appearance of ugliness in the realm of nature. Of course, the presupposition for this is the existence of an immediate sensible-intuitive consciousness, both of what is intact and complete, and of any disruption of these forms.
But of course, that would have to be established within certain limits, during the course of an appropriate analysis of the phenomena.
With that, the question of procedure once again appears in the foreground. Not that it is possible to sketch out a methodology in advance. Rather we must hold fast to the insight that the consciousness of method is always secondary in comparison to a live and working method that focuses only upon its object.20 But of course there are certain preliminary questions that can be settled upon on the basis of the historical experience of a variety of attempts and efforts. Given the current retrograde state of aesthetics, these questions have not been sufficiently treated beyond what the above fourfold analysis has achieved.
So young as aesthetics is, it already incorporates a series of very different tendencies that are not exhausted by the two contrasted analyses of act and object. (23) As early as in Baumgarten and Kant21, these two analyses were inextricably linked to each other. In Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, both are lowered almost down to the level of mere elements for the sake of some fundamental metaphysical conception. The center of concern was transferred to the arts, which then celebrated the momentous triumph of their superior status, and the beauty of nature this side of the arts sank to an affair of second rank.
That had its basis in the far more general metaphysics of idealism, and especially in the role assigned to the arts in the whole of the life of the spirit. If an “unconscious intelligence” or an “absolute reason” lies at the foundation of all existing things, then the works of nature are one-sided articulations of this reason; and yet if the life of the spirit is the self-consciousness of this same reason realizing itself in stages, then the arts, too, can be nothing but the stages of this self-consciousness: not the highest stage, to be sure, for the arts are tied to the senses, but for our limited human nature they are indispensable, and cannot be replaced by understanding. No doubt for Schelling the relation was turned around, because he assigned to intuition a higher rank than to conceptual understanding, and in the end elevated intuition to the universal instrument of all philosophy. Therewith the artist becomes not only a visionary but also the bearer of the destiny of spirit; the philosopher, for his part, becomes the model artist, as is appropriate for the ideal of romanticism. Hegel, in contrast, continued to maintain the superiority of the concept, and considered it a deficiency of art that it did not break through to the conceptual level. That makes sense only when one grants the idea upon which this idealism is based, that is, the existence of the Absolute at the foundation of all reality, which, in the creation of art, comes to consciousness in the form of a clear and intuitable image.
This metaphysics of beauty is relatively indifferent to the other aspect of the presupposition of idealism: that the Absolute must be a “rational” principle. That is proved by Schopenhauer’s aesthetics, which is built upon the same schema, but which places at the foundation of things a world-will bereft of reason and intelligence. Indeed, precisely at this point, the entire picture becomes transparent, because not only consciousness but intelligence, too, is the possession of man. In this theory, ancient Platonism enjoys a late rebirth: nature is a realm firmly stamped with Forms; an “idea” lies at the root of every species of organized thing, and individual cases take shape according to the idea peculiar to that species. The arts allow these ideas to appear in each individual work, and this appearance is a glimmer of beauty. Music reaches even deeper, for it does not imitate any object-like forms, but brings the original nature of things, the “world will” to direct expression. But in its entirety, this theory, too, assimilates the achievement of the arts to a consciousness of what already exists in itself entirely without the arts.
This last idea is unquestionably a remainder of the intellectualism that from ancient times infected thoughts about aesthetics; not, to be sure, an intellectualism in the narrow sense, which reduces everything to thought, concepts and (24) judgments, but surely an intellectualism in the broad sense that understands aesthetical beholding as a kind of cognition. Schelling’s promotion of intuition above the conceptualization does not affect this error at all. The basic thesis is entirely indifferent to the order of rank of the kinds and levels of cognition, for the knowledge-schema remains the same in all these formulations; it is tied firmly, as it were, to the aesthetical act, even when the theory itself tries, however hard, to protect itself from that bond by means of subordinate distinctions.
More important in this matter is a second element. Theories of beauty that correctly understand the act of beholding by analogy with knowledge are by nature primarily focused upon the content of the arts, and for this reason cannot do justice to the element of form, that is, to everything that is genuinely structural and sculptural in artistic creations. This criticism does not speak for a separation of “form and content”; that will in any case have sufficient justification when new inquiries demonstrate that the specifically artistic content consists precisely in the bestowal of form. But these metaphysical theories of art are far from such an insight. Rather, they take the element of content to be the pre-given “material,” just in the sense mentioned above of the theme or sujet. Of course then the material element is itself extended and enlarged; it is raised to the level of a metaphysical world-view.
But that does not change at all the fact that the matter of bestowing form in art – and, we may add to that, precisely by the total inward formal structure itself – comes short of the mark. At least it must be admitted that the significance of the autonomy and intrinsic value of form, as are characteristic of every artistic achievement, has not been understood. Any number of examples from the wide-reaching aesthetics of Hegel can be given for that; his interpretation of the idea of tragedy in the case of Sophocles’ Antigone is known worldwide, where the conflict is understood as a purely moral one between the written and the unwritten law.
Giving a central role to the “thematic” element is closely connected to the widespread notion that in all art the process of creation is a function of moral and religious life. This conception is not tied to specific epochs and theories; it is as much alive today as it was 150 years ago. We must not forget that historically the greatest art has usually grown upon the soil of a highly developed religious life; indeed, it was at first developed as a direct expression of it. The implications that have been drawn from this fact, however, are doubtful, and remind us dubiously of the Hegelian metaphysics of spirit. For then it appeared as though this relation is not only a principle constitutive of all art, but is also the inward principle of artistic productivity itself. But then, of course, the problem of aesthetical form is pushed to one side, and the autonomy of aesthetic values becomes problematic. (25)
Of all this, what alone can be salvaged is that artistic production tends to grow more readily where men are moved by great ideas, and the passion for ideas demands expression – one might rather say, demands objectivation. That is true for every highly developed spiritual life, once it is awakened. Religious life, more than all others, is dependent upon art as a means of expression, precisely because its content lies beyond what can be communicated directly. The arts have the magic wand that gives shape to what cannot be grasped; they achieve what mere words and formulas – for example, dogma – cannot; they bring close to the senses what is supersensible and incapable of being seen, and thereby bestow upon the hearts of men the kind of power that only what is felt as close and present can give. Religious life, once awakened, can do not otherwise than call for art, and so it does, and fills it with its deepest impulses, its passion, its ideas.
But art, once awakened, finds other things in the world that call out to it: moral and social life with its conflicts and its sense of destiny, the depths of the human heart with its needs, its struggles, with its inexhaustible variety, found in each unique individual; and then at last the realm of nature with its incomprehensible wonders. For the spiritual nature that is man, the spiritual life has by far the greatest actuality. Its circle of themes therefore stands in first place for men; their inner urge to realize them is the strongest.
But the bestowal of form itself in the arts, which satisfies that inner urge, is and remains for that reason something quite different, and can in no way be understood simply on the basis of what may condition its material. It also cannot be understood on these terms even if in fact the spiritual impulse to bestow form must be sought in the material alone.
It is understandable that the reaction against these metaphysical dealings with the content of art would eventually go to the opposite extreme. Some reflected upon the independence of artistic form, and tried then to understand beauty by means of purely formal principles. In this way, people aimed, in a quite consistent manner, at the structural elements of beautiful objects, especially in works of art. The method of research is, in itself, just as much objectivistic as the material procedure, but it saw the essence of the object not in something prior that is then represented, but in the special qualities of the representation itself. But in this way, of course, we came not one significant step closer to the essence of beauty.
Nonetheless, one must immediately note that this task presents itself as infinitely more difficult than one might have imagined at the outset. For only now men stood before the real puzzle of beauty, and the means of inquiry that one had to apply were quickly seen as insufficient for the task. They merely sketched out the problem, but could not penetrate very far into its depths. One might say that only here (26) does it become apparent how, in general, very little aesthetical form is an object of possible knowledge.
Today, when we look back on these recent failures, we are tempted to cry out: “How could it be otherwise! After all, is not form given only to intuition and not to conceptual understanding?” But that was not so obvious and certain, not to say self-evident, to those who got themselves ready for this new undertaking. And so it happened that, at first, elements external to aesthetics were called upon to fill in some way the gap in understanding that had now become apparent. Yet these thinkers could not get beyond the most general characterizations: harmony, rhythm, symmetry, the order of the parts of the whole, the unity in diversity, and many designations like these. Concepts of this type are enumerated in a nearly exhaustive manner and varied in order to track down the secret of beauty from the side of the object. One cannot fail to recognize something that is correct here, but only in the direction taken. But it is easy to see that the designations are much too general, and that in the end they brush only the surface of what in the qualities of form is specifically aesthetical in nature. Unity in diversity belongs to every work of nature, as well as the order of the parts, and in many other cases symmetry, also. Harmony and rhythm, in contrast, provided that they assert something different from the first two, are borrowed from the circle of phenomena of one of the arts, music (which is of course the prototype of all pure beauty of form); they are therefore tautologous in relation to that form of art without being exhaustive of it, but they are valid for the other arts only by analogy, and for that reason they are, of course, even less exhaustive.
The enormous variety of forms in the arts, and a similar variety in the beauties of nature, have not been touched upon as yet by any of the preceding. Yet the real problem of form begins just here. This problem starts with the question: why, then, are quite specific forms in the visible world (or what can be represented by means of organized speech) beautiful while others only slightly different from them are not? For ugliness is not simply that which is without form, but that which, although intended as determinate form, misses the mark, or fails. The main element is thus lacking, despite worthy attempts, and it is questionable whether the correct way to find them is on the road heretofore taken.
It is not more promising when one defines aesthetical form as expression. For the question immediately arises, “of what” it is supposed to be the expression. The answers given are like these: expression of life, expression of the soul, expression of the human, the spiritual, the significant, even expression of meaning, of purpose, or of value. Even these are possibilities that one cannot simply discard. Clearly, they hold true for many aspects of beauty in and out of the arts. But hardly for all things beautiful. In addition, we must reflect upon three issues. First, the phenomenon of expression is also to be met with outside of aesthetics, e.g., in everyday language, in gesture and facial expression. Second, not all expression is beautiful, even when it (27) is intended as such by the artist. And thirdly, with the question of what the expressed content may be, we are again turned away from the question of form to that of material. The problem of form itself, therefore, is not done justice in this way.
It is also not helpful to say that it is a question of form in unity with the substance, something like a question of the “appropriateness of the form to the content” (Wilhelm Wundt22), or the “form of the idea in a real manner of appearance.” 23 For one would rather be told what the “appropriateness” consists in, how it stands with the unification of the form with the content, or what in fact brings the “form of the idea” into appearance. Systematic theoretical work in the individual arts has been carried further in this direction: Hanslick24 in music, Adolf von Hildebrand25 in the fine arts. Certainly, from the perspective of the problem of style in the arts and in epochs of art much can be also learned concerning the nature of form and expression. Yet the advantage here is borrowed from the disadvantage of specialization, and one increases one’s distance ever more from what is foundational as one delves more concretely into specifics.
Thus here as everywhere in aesthetics we come up against the same methodological difficulties: the phenomenon is present only in the single individual case, but the universal principle cannot be grasped in the individual case, and, where the latter can be grasped, the phenomenon is torn asunder and destroyed. That is the reverse of the situation that was apparent right at the beginning: where vision is intact, there is no understanding, and where understanding begins, vision is disturbed. How may we pass beyond this negative dialectical relation? Only further inquiry can teach us.
What in fact is hidden in the principle of “expression” ought rather to be a relationship of appearance, and indeed one of a peculiar kind. But it requires the appearance neither of an “idea,” nor of life, nor of a meaning. Rather, what is specific to an object we think beautiful will have to be sought in the type of appearance itself. Then, however, we will have free latitude for a different type of concept of form, one specific to aesthetical phenomena. For the question here must touch in some way the form of appearance as such. And we may expect that entirely different rules of the game will be valid for it than for other phenomena in which form is bestowed.
Running parallel to the objective and formal interpretation of beauty, but partly in opposition to it and partly united with it by surprising turns of phrase, is the development of a conception that is psychological and subjective. This belongs to the general movement called psychologism, and shares with it the tendency to reduce everything to psychic processes. Given the difficulties that the analysis of form encounters, it is quite understandable that for a time the future of aesthetics seemed to be in its hands. (28)
Naturally, it is a question here only of the analysis of the act. But that is not yet the essence of the matter; without the analysis of the act, no progress in aesthetics is possible at all. The weight lies rather on the claim that the aesthetic object and its values can be explicated from the nature of the act. Theodor Lipps26, for example, understood the object as entirely dependent upon the observer, specifically in such a way that the object is completely penetrated by the activity of the subject; it becomes an aesthetic object only when a person, in his own inward activity, “empathizes” with it, and thereby experiences himself in it. Beauty is accordingly the quality that the object attains for the observer by means of this empathy. The enjoyment of beauty, however, is in the end a self-enjoyment of the ego, naturally an indirect enjoyment, and one brokered by the object into which the ego enters empathetically.
Alongside of this theory of empathy one can place a long list of additional conceptualizations, which are similar in their main principle that beauty does not consist in a condition in the object, neither in its form nor in its content, but rather in an attitude, activity, or state of the subject. Of course, these formulations seem more subjectivist than they are intended to be, because according to the psychologism that was dominant in those days, the idea that the object is carried by the act was taken as self-evident. But the enormous difficulty that was created in fact by this view cannot be lessened by its apparent obviousness. That difficulty lies in how it is possible to ascribe the execution of one’s intentional acts to the object as its value-quality and then enjoy that quality as its own. For what is beautiful in this entire situation is not the ego and its activities, but the object alone.
Theories of this kind tend always to become more complicated and artificial the more they reflect upon the phenomena that are actually given and then try to do justice to them. This is what happened to psychologistic aesthetics: it had to be reconstructed, improved, and reapplied, for without that, one could not progress in any meaningful way. That the theory had arrived at the dead end that its opponents predicted, became obvious to all – of course, without anyone being able to state the real reasons of this failure.
One thing will not be misunderstood today, thanks to a sufficiency of historical distance that we now enjoy: there exists as a matter of fact a certain kind of dependency of the aesthetic object upon the beholding subject, and this dependency, which even in the time of Kant was seen and disputed, was quite obscured by the theory of empathy, but at the same time it had been brought into the light and made an object of possible discussion. For this much became clear about it: beauty is not, like ontic characteristics, attributed to things independently of the manner of seeing and the perceptive powers of the subject, but is entirely determined by a very specific standpoint or inner attitude that is different for each form of art and even, to some extent, for every individual object. (29)
What one learned from this was something fundamental and permanent. It is connected only loosely to any specific psychological interpretation and does not at all stand or fall with the latter. It asserts that no beauty in itself exists, but only beauty “for someone,” and that the aesthetic object itself, whether in nature or in art, is such an object not in itself, but only “for us”; and that too only provided that we bring to it a definite inward receptive orientation, whether one understands that orientation as a kind of attitude or as a kind of active doing. We do not, for this reason, have to become immediately victims of subjectivism, whether of an idealistic or a psychologistic kind, for the subjectivity of beauty is not asserted by it, but rather a certain kind of mutual conditioning by the subject. That mutuality is consistent with the objective demands of an aesthetics of form, and indeed perhaps only with such a synthesis of those two will the emergence of a uniform picture become possible.
If we look from these questions back to Kant, we find the basic conception quite precisely but inchoately sketched in his Analytic of Beauty. It lies in the “play of the powers of the mind.” The object itself appears as beautiful or not provided this play takes place. One may ask oneself why this thought did not establish itself in aesthetics immediately. But there is an understandable reason for it: in Kant, the object of knowledge, i.e., the “things,” without any distinctions among them, are all conditioned by the co-activity of the subject. That is the nature of “transcendental idealism.” Thus according to the theory, these conditions make no distinction between the “empirically real object” and the beautiful object. And even if the contribution of the subject is essentially different in the two cases, the fundamental situation, it holds, is the same. The way of seeing typical of idealism itself was the reason the opposition in question became blurred, and the difference in the ontology of the aesthetic object was never done justice. Idealism – even one as carefully considered as transcendental idealism –is not the ground upon which one can work out in theory such ontological differences. We see precisely here that without careful distinctions of this kind (in the end differences in ontology) we cannot approach the problem of form in aesthetics.
The thought of an appropriate synthesis of subjectivist and objectivist readings was not lacking in doctrinal disputes. In a certain sense, it was found also in the aesthetics of “expression,” such as that represented by Benedetto Croce27: the act is not expression, but rather the object; its expression does not exist in itself, but “for” a subject that understands it. So it is also with beauty: it is not the beholding that is beautiful, also not the skill involved in its production, but the object alone – yet not taken as it is for itself, but only for a beholding subject who is in a special state of devotional appreciation.
There remains something for this analysis of the act to undertake, something that only it can achieve, and that indeed, notwithstanding the special task of the analysis of the object, towards which, moreover, the former analysis must rather be appropriately accommodating. That both (30) go their own way with a certain amount of independence, taking their point of departure from different sides of the total phenomenon, may be a priceless advantage. For in just this way all things that are compatible or even render mutual support to each other gain a justification that approaches the notion of a criterion of truth.
If we reflect upon this problematic in a relatively unprejudiced manner, that is, not from the position of one or the other theories that had worked within it, but rather by distancing ourselves from their intentions, we will not be able to conceal that, as a whole, the situation has seen some quite favorable developments. The question is now how they are to be assessed. And it must be observed that far too little has been done in this direction. The advances that have been recorded since the beginning of the century have gone off in one or another direction without recognizing either the task of synthesis or the advantage that it offers.
The most significant of these advances was initiated by phenomenology. In this manner of inquiry the methodological conditions of possible success were at least to be found. For nothing could assist us here except the tendency to approach the phenomena themselves as closely as possible, to grasp them more precisely than had been done up to then, to learn to see them in all their diversity, and only then to return once more to the more general questions. If phenomenology, during the first decades of our century when it came to blossom so astonishingly, had been able to press forward evenly from each side of the problem, a resounding success in aesthetics would not have been wanting. But the fields of work that immediately opened to it on all sides were too large, it seems, and the number of thinkers schooled under Husserl28 too small, to be able to master them all. People believed, moreover, that they had to build new foundations in all areas of philosophy, and aesthetics did not appear to them to be the most important. Thus here too, then, the problems that had arrived at a certain state of readiness for development were not evaluated.
The analysis was begun, of course, but only on the side of the subject and the act. Even there, it must be noted, it was trapped within a certain one-sidedness, since only the element of enjoyment [Genuss], thus what Kant called “satisfaction” [Wohlgefallen] became the subject of earnest new inquiry. Moritz Geiger29 was the one to conduct this analysis. What we owe to it is in fact something new and, in its own way, significant. But it still is too close to psychologistic aesthetics – as phenomenology arose, in general, out of psychology – to be able to attain to the fundamental problem of beauty. An analysis of the act alone could not reach beyond certain incidental phenomena that shone out from the object of enjoyment; it was unable to grasp the mode of being, the structure, and the value-aspects of the aesthetic object. Yet it lies in the nature of the case that this newly created method might have been applied in a fruitful way to the problem of beauty when the fundamental (31) quality of the act, i.e., aesthetical beholding in its dual nature, had been opened for description, and where at the same time the results of the latter could have been brought into contact with those of a parallel analysis of the object.
We see here once again what has been pointed out already in the preceding: the analysis of the act is a step ahead in its development; the analysis of the object is in a relatively backward state. There results the necessity of having to rescue the latter from its backwardness. The chances of doing that today are not unfavorable. The very failure of phenomenology to take up this program of analysis can both put us on the right road and can give us at the same time the means for progress. Then there is no good reason why the essences of acts should be more capable of analysis than the essences of objects. After all, it is precisely those essences of objects that are accessible to a consciousness upon the natural attitude (intentio recta), while the essences of acts must be made available by artificially reflecting upon the consciousness of an object (intentio obliqua).
It was the prejudice of phenomenology in its early development that the reverse was true: the act was immediately given. One shared in those days some philosophical presuppositions about immanence with psychologism and neo-Kantian idealism, from which most thinkers had emerged after having first purged them of their cruder errors. But a breakthrough, demanded in all areas of inquiry, into a nearby realm of the given, that of the object-phenomena, was still wanting. For that reason the cry sent out by Husserl, “Back to the things themselves!” bore no fruit, and thus the effort to press onward from the theoretical level, to that of existing things, from ethics to a real analysis of value, from aesthetics to the essence of the beautiful, was unsuccessful.
But that, too, has changed since then. The pathway into the open air stands free. It has long been accessible to the inquiry into real being; in ethics, it has led us to new analyses of material values. Only aesthetics has not yet set upon this roadway in earnest.
Just because a person turns to the senses, he thinks that the beautiful object is a thing like all other things: perceptible, cognizable, having the same reality as himself. Is that true? Why, then, is it not appreciated and enjoyed by all those who see it, but always only by the selected few for whom it is something other than a thing? This appreciation and enjoyment are obviously not achieved by perception. Two people pass through a burgeoning spring landscape; both are inwardly occupied with it. One estimates with a glance how much the field will bring in, what the value of the hewn wood may be. The other’s full heart leaps joyously at the spring greenery, the odor of the soil, and the wide blue sky. The sensible impressions are the same; the things that give rise to them likewise, but the object that they convey is nonetheless entirely (32) different. What distinguishes the landscape that one man has before his eyes from the landscape that the other sees?
To speak of two kinds of object says very little. The real land along with what is cultivated upon it is the same. Thus, the case depends solely upon the manner of looking at it; that is what has always been asserted. But with that, the aesthetic object becomes entirely a function of the act, and subjectivism is right: why then is it necessary at all to walk through the real landscape, why to perceive it? Apparently the man who is enjoying aesthetically cannot simply “look,” in imagination, upon a landscape whenever and wherever he will, but rather he is tied to its real presence and to perception.
But, as with all practically oriented consciousness, reflection occurs along with it and brings an objectively different domain of interconnections. So too with an aesthetically oriented consciousness, called up by the same objects, a different kind of looking and a different object of looking occur. Here one is thrown back upon the looking of the second kind, or beholding, of which we spoke above. And in it, we seem to have found, despite some uncertainty, the solution to the problem. This allows us once again to divert the problem of the object into the problem of the act.
The situation changes only when one notices that the joyful feeling had by the one who beholds and enjoys is not entirely private or individual; that rather he shares it with anyone of his spirit and sensibility, and, moreover, that even given the same psychic preconditions, there exists a certain objectivity, universal validity, and necessity here; in a similar way, it is not any landscape at all, but one of a definite type that lets itself be beheld and enjoyed in this specific way. Both the one and the other point unmistakably to an objective source of natural beauty, however much the subjective orientation and the way of seeing things may play a role in it.
What this source consists in will not yet be discussed here. It would not be to the point to apply again outworn categories to one or the other of them, for example, the form of what is perceived or its function as expression; that would bring us no further. Likewise, it would not be to the point to appeal, on the side of the subject, to empathy or to an interpretative function related to it. We will be better off by examining the phenomenon with regard to its mode of being and the structure of the object itself. That would allow us at least to say something before entering a more detailed analysis. We may then leave open for later discussion the extent to which it can be justified.
The man enjoying the spring landscape aesthetically has just as little concern for what is given as real through the senses as the one who is estimating its practical value. Both have something different before their eyes; for both of them, something that is not seen peers out from behind what is sensibly given, but that something is genuinely important to them; they both look-through upon this other thing and stay with it a bit, the one reflecting on his economic (33) calculations, the other in the state of psychic release we call devoted appreciation. In the case of the first, it is easy to see what this other thing is, but in the second case, it is harder to say. But it is there, and indeed objectively so – perhaps as the great rhythm of life in nature, which dominates powerfully both within and outside ourselves, although it is just as little visible as in the first case.
That is merely a preliminary result. Let us stick with it, for the moment, and try to observe how the whole of the aesthetical natural object is structured. Two forms of looking are arranged in series, each one after the other becoming active; the first is directed upon what is really present to the senses, the second upon this other thing, which exists only “for” us, the observers. But this other thing is not projected into the first randomly; rather it is clearly dependent upon the sensibly seen. It cannot appear to us in any given perceived object, but only in a particular one, and is thus conditioned by it. But at the same time, more than a simple conditioned state is at work here; what is looked upon is also largely determined, with respect to content, by means of the real object that is seen: “imagination” does not freely govern here, but is guided by perception. Therefore, what is inwardly beheld upon the object is also not a pure product of fantasy, but something called forth: called forth precisely by means of the sensible structure of what is seen.
Accordingly, the aesthetical natural object is structured in two strata, which apparently become active one after the other in series, like the two levels of vision. In this state, the relation of the two strata is so close that we sense directly the felt and enjoyed spirit of spring as belonging to the landscape itself, and attribute the existence of that spirit to the landscape. Thus, the aesthetic object appears to us as a unity, without gaps and seams, although we know very well that in reality the spirit of spring does not belong to the object, but to us.
This phenomenon of unity is nothing less than self-evident; it is neither exhausted nor explained at all by what has been said. It is a specifically aesthetical phenomenon, and constitutes the real essential nature of the aesthetic object. How it comes to be remains a great puzzle, namely the puzzle of natural beauty itself.
For within this phenomenon, matters are not at all what theories of empathy had thought them to be. There is no activity of the soul that we project into the object. No doubt, however, there is a familiarity with fields, meadows, and woods, which does not have to be built up by association, but which announces itself in us as a vital feeling, and which points to a connection between man and nature, out of which we all emerge, however much we may have lost our sense of it. The urge to turn towards the sun, the bursting forth and sprouting, is the same in man and in the flora beneath the sky. Man does not need to feel himself empathetically into it; he finds it within, and it awakes a mighty resonance within him. The (34) communion with all living things strikes him as a miracle – precisely him, the renegade who in his daily life has separated himself so far from the sources of being, while they, though indifferent to his forgetfulness, hold him upon the old Earth within their embrace.
With respect to this relationship of nature in us to nature outside of us, we must beware of making sentimental analogies and classifications that were once widespread in German romanticism, for the understanding of the phenomenon can only be confused by such exuberance. Those Romantic visions are, to be sure, closely related to the aesthetical beholding of nature, and may perhaps be taken into the complex of facts before us (the ones seen historically) as their limiting phenomena. But for that very reason, we may not simultaneously call upon them to explain the phenomena. For what is in fact essential here is not at all the extent to which the resonance that is felt and experienced can be explained anthropologically – or even metaphysically – but only that some second something experienced and intensely felt in second-order seeing (beholding) is given objectively just as much as the first (that which is directly perceived), and that the former appears with the latter interlocked in a fixed unity.
This indicates the schema according to which both the structure and the mode of being of any beautiful object may be understood. The beautiful thing is a double-faceted object, but united as one, as one single object. It is a real object, and is given to the senses that way, but it is not reducible to that givenness; rather it is equally a quite different, unreal kind of object that appears in the real one, or arises from behind it. What is beautiful is neither the first object nor the second alone; they exist only both in each other and with each other. More correctly expressed, it is the appearance of the one in the other.
Clearly, given such a structure, the mode of being of the aesthetic object cannot be a simple one. As it contains a twofold object, so it is also a twofold being, a real being and an unreal, merely apparent, being. And what is peculiar is that this duality of being, despite its complete heterogeneity, allows the object to appear undivided and unified. The relation between the two parts that constitute it must accordingly be quite intimate; one may say it is a functional kind. What the being-beautiful of the object most essentially depends upon is the specific role of the reality in it (that which is given through the senses) in allowing the quite alien unreal element to appear.
Here is found the reason why the mode of being of the whole must be a divided one, while in terms of structure, the object is unified and completely undivided in its effect. The unity lies in appearance. What allows something to appear must be real, and what appears must be unreal, for the latter consists only in this appearance of itself. That is the ambivalence in the mode of being of beauty: it is there and it is not there. Its existence hovers about it. (35)
In beholding and in enjoying, we feel this floating as the magic of beauty. If we understood the object itself as divided, the magic would vanish. Only provided that we encounter it as an undisturbed unity, and sense in it the opposition of existence and non-existence, are we able to experience the magic of the appearance-relation.
Now nineteenth-century aesthetics had much to say about appearance. But what was always meant by it is the appearance of an “idea” – whether one thought of this term metaphysically, as did Schopenhauer, or as a human thought, a work of fantasy, a dreamed-up ideal, etc. In all such cases, the relation was conceived much too narrowly. That is not so easily visible in the case of natural beauty, even less so with beauty in art. The poet lets figures appear that are entirely creations of his fancy, but they need not all be ideals (moral ones, for example); their appearance satisfies the claim to aesthetic value if it is a genuinely clear and evident (true to life) appearance. For that is by no means self-evident in the substance of speech, upon which the poet bestows form.
Now that is the first tangible idea in opposition to idealistic aesthetics. What is thought to appear need not have the quality of an idea, whether ethical or otherwise; it may be, perhaps, some segment or other drawn from life. It is a question only of the kind of appearance. That will be maintained even when what should result in practice is a certain selection from the material that is appropriate for representation. For it is a question here of “material,” as we defined it above.
The second idea, however, concerns appearance itself. Since the Romantic age, fortified by Hegelian aesthetics, writers have spoken of “illusion” [Schein] as the mode of being of beauty. But by this was meant that the object represented is in reality not present; it has no reality, but it approaches the beholder in such manner as if it were real. We see this in the concreteness of gay colors, in the richness of detail, even just in the submersion of what is beheld in what is perceived. For one who beholds aesthetically does not separate what is seen through the senses from what he beholds in spirit, but rather sees both as one, and thus believes that he perceives what is not perceptible along with what is. If one wishes to draw an inference from this, it must be that the essence of aesthetical beholding possesses an element of deception or illusion, but the essence of the object must possess an element of something deceptively presented as content.
Now of course there is a technique in dramaturgy and perhaps a technique in the narrative arts that work with illusion as a means, and in that way achieve a realistic effect. It is, however, a question whether that is a genuine artistic effect, or whether art then approaches mere trickery or sensationalism, and appeals thereby to quite different reactions from the audience than true art does. In general, the audience knows quite accurately that the action on stage is not real; it knows (36) the “separation” [of stage and audience], distinguishes clearly the actor from the character he portrays, and just for those reasons the audience can appreciate the actors’ work. If the audience believed that the triumph of the plotters, or the suffering and downfall of the hero was real, it would be morally impossible that the audience could peacefully sit there and allow itself to enjoy the proceedings. For that reason, there are limitations to realism in dramaturgy: the stylization of language by writing in verse, the stage setting framed like a picture, the apron, and much else. Analogous measures are found in the narrative and in the representational arts in general.
Just this simulation of reality is foreign to true art. All theories of illusion and deception that take this direction fail to understand an important characteristic of the nature of the artistic letting-appear. It is this: art does not simulate reality, but rather understands appearance just as appearance, it is not integrated as an element in the real course of life, but rather it is lifted out of life and stands before us, as it were, shielded from the weight of reality.
This state of being lifted out and shielded from reality reappears in all the arts that have taken something from reality, or, each in its own way, have represented something freely invented. This is most familiar in painting, where the frame creates isolation. It would not occur to any viewer to take the painted landscape as a real one, or a portrait as the person depicted. That precisely is essential to giving the appearance-relation its full effect. Its contrast with the reality that surrounds it is a conditioning factor here, even when it is quite true that the devoted onlooker forgets his immediate environment, for he is lifted out of it just as much as the object is. The forgetfulness of the environment and the consciousness of being lifted out of it do not, strangely enough, conflict with each other, although a remainder of the environing world is contained in the consciousness of the beholder. Here, too, the relationship is ambivalent; but even that is sufficient for our sense of being happily lifted up over ourselves, of falling away from everyday life and from our cares, of detachment and relaxation; we flee to this state of limbo when we wish to escape stress and psychic strain.
This error slips in only when we wish to interpret this act of running away as a flight into illusion. If it were really a question of illusion or deception, we would illusorily be exchanging one burden for another: we would be taking the appearance as real, and thereby experience a new state of restraint. For that reason, we hold the concept of appearance firmly in a state of neutrality with respect to the mode of being of what appears, and do not confuse it with illusion. For to illusion belongs the falsification of reality. But what is essential to art is precisely the opposition to being real, which we also sense as present in the object. (37)
A stratified structure and a highly peculiar suspended mode of being of the aesthetic object emerged from the above discussion. The latter depends upon the fundamentally different kind of existence of the two strata in it: reality in the foreground, which is given to the senses, appearance in the background; being in itself in the former, mere being for us in the latter. That is not disputed or even put in question, if one avoids attributing deception and illusion to the appearing background. Rather illusion would do injury to the character of pure appearance, because it would simulate reality. Its exclusion is thus precisely the condition under which the back-and-forth activation of the two modes of being can produce a stable and unified picture.
Accordingly, the two modes of being do not become mixed. They are too heterogeneous for that. And even in aesthetical beholding they do not quickly merge with each other, but remain distinguishable, although they are tied into each other and re-experienced as an indivisible unity. The whole is an entirely objective thing, and that means that it is a pure objective creation that contrasts with all of the elements in the act of beholding and enjoying, although it is co-conditioned, with regard to its more weighty constituents, i.e., to the subject and its act, and without their involvement would not come to be at all. It therefore again exists only “for” a subject who beholds it adequately. An objective element is just not the same as an existing thing that is independent of the subject. Objectivity itself, in this context, is a thing that is in part real, but in part also unreal. Only in this way is it possible that something that appears “in” some real thing could simultaneously distance itself from the sphere of the real and also not return to it, and still stand before us as a thing given in a concretely intuitable way, as otherwise only objects can be.
Such distance from real existence is de-actualization. With this phenomenon, a new fundamental characteristic of the beautiful object appears within our range of vision as a thing suspended between two heterogeneous modes of being. This element first becomes tangible in the activity of the artist, even if the puzzle of that activity is not thereby clarified. For at this point there intrudes the contrast to the practical activity of man and the burden of moral responsibility. All doing is a realizing. Purposes or aims, still unreal but posited by consciousness as an end, so far as we sense them as commanded or as ought-to-be, are made real by means of action; and the freedom with which we choose to act is the capacity to measure up to the ideal necessity of the Ought, where it still lacks real possibility. The realization of the unreal thus consists in making it possible. At first sight, it appears as if the activity of the artist was a realization, perhaps a realization of an idea, or of an ideal that hovers before his mind. But if one looks more closely, we find quite the opposite. His creativity is precisely not realization, and therefore also not a making-possible. What hovers before his mind is not translated into reality, but only represented. And that means: it is brought to appearance. (38)
The procedure of the creative artist is a distancing from the actual; it is de-actualization. He does not need to procure the conditions of possibility that are lacking, he does not need to put in motion the inert weight of the sphere of real things, but only to offer what is unreal as such to the beholding eye. He needs a real object only as a mediating element in which the former, the unreal, can appear; and only in the production of such real things can he be said to realize something. But what comes therein to appearance remains entirely unreal, and, indeed, so decisively and unmistakably unreal that even the appearing object in its sensible tangibility does not deceitfully lead us to think it real.
For that reason, the freedom of the artist is different from that of the man of action. The former is driven by no Ought, and no responsibility burdens him. In return, an unlimited realm of possibility stands open to him, one not tied to the conditions of the real. Artistic freedom is not only different from moral freedom; its domain is also much larger. It corresponds precisely to de-actualization as the mode of being of artistic activity, and it stands in the pure freedom of having nothing required of it.
Nothing in aesthetics has been as much disputed as imitation in the arts. In Plato we have the origin of the theory of “mimesis”; we find in Aristotle its classic formulation, and it is to be found even today in many other forms – yet most of them, though based upon the same schema, do not call themselves by that name.
At first, the term meant the imitation of things, of real persons and their hustle-bustle; later people thought of the Ideas after which, they believed, things were formed. In both cases, the artist has already set before what he is to give shape to, and only one question regarding this skill remained: to what extent is he able to measure up to the models. Such an interpretation limits considerably his creative work. That he might be able to show the world something new, something it does not yet possess, was not at all considered.
Little changes if one interprets the meaning of mimesis as representation. For from this concept, too, one still senses primarily and most strongly the element of imitation. Whoever listens closely to its subtext will no doubt find a different element in it: that is the one just discussed, the letting-appear – and, in fact, letting-appear in a substance of a quite different nature from what is represented: in words, in tones, in color, in stone. Now if, as was seen to be necessary, one does not transfer the essence of the beautiful object into what appears, but rather into appearance itself, then the independence of the creative achievement in the activity of the artist increases all at once to a considerable level, rises quickly and becomes the main feature of the created work. For it is easy to see that artistic representation is nothing but letting-appear itself. And then the genuine bearer of aesthetical (39) value is precisely the artistic achievement, and the specific “material” to which form is given by the work of the artist falls back to the second rank.
But this does not say enough. Are in fact the representational arts and their material referred back to some ready model, whether taken from nature or from the sphere of human life? Even in this respect, would the artist not also enjoy many kinds of freedom? Can he not reach beyond what is given and, in the very act of composing, lift his material above the domain of experience and in that way show the observer something that he does not find in life? Some idea of this kind was meant by the aesthetics of Plotinus, of Schelling, of Schopenhauer, when they spoke of the “ideas” that were brought to appearance. However, according to them, the ideas themselves were already present to and previously sketched out for the artist, so that the only productive tools left to him were a penetrating eye and the ability to draw from a model.
What happens if this presupposed metaphysics of ideas shows itself to be untenable? What if the pre-existent “primordial images” that allow themselves to be understood and brought to appearance are not really there at hand at all, and yet what if the artist has shaped projects beyond everything empirical and rises up to the level of ideas and symbols? If so, has the creative artist not also contributed to the creation of the appearing content, and been the first to lift it above and beyond what is given in life?
A simple reflection will teach us that this question must be answered affirmatively. If it is true that literature can also instruct us, that it can make palpable perspectives on values and meaning in human life, and even awaken in us the earnest desire to be worthy of them – and who could deny that? – then we may understand this truth in no other way than as a form of practical guidance. We do not need to interpret such things immediately as pedagogical efforts; on the contrary, precisely where there are no such efforts at all, influences of this kind arise most quickly. But then the writer must also be able to bring to appearance what lies beyond the given world.
The leadership of humanity by the arts is no longer a real aesthetical problem. But from that problem a light falls back upon the fundamental problems of aesthetics, at least where art has not been falsified by “pedagogical ends,” which alter the proper “mood” of a viewer. For this kind of leadership has one advantage before all others: it is immediately convincing, in a way that only the living of our lives can otherwise do, and just for the same reasons: literature does not speak to us as a teacher, but in clear and concrete figures, which are enlightening as such. They awaken our feeling for values and open our vision to the profundities in the conflicts in life, and do so in a manner of which we are not capable in life itself. The inward growth and maturity fostered by such literary effects are not delusions. Everyone not badly educated who approaches great art experiences these effects in himself. How can we distinguish radically genuine art, which is always without bias, from contrived work, or even from work (40) done at a moment’s notice on order? For these latter seem inartistic, and affect us accordingly; they achieve, in the end, rather the opposite of what they were after: the intended beholder turns away from them. Only what the artist has genuinely beheld and bestowed form upon in concrete figurations achieves the power to move men, a power that convinces, reveals, and shows us the way, because it unintentionally forces itself upward and out of the depths.
Here is rooted the high mission of literature and, in ordered grades, the other arts. Entire generations and epochs can be defined in terms of the creations of high art. From ancient times, men knew the secret of literature, which lies namely in its power to direct the human heart toward what is great, to elevate it, and to inspire by its very depths what a pedantic moral lecture can only soberly recommend or encourage.
Here lies also the main reason why the arts may not retire from real life, although they have their own kind of autonomy from life – at least, that is, if they do not wish to forget their own life. For it is from life, specifically from those things that move our hearts, that they draw their themes and their material, and their effects flow into that life ever again. They can be what they are in essence only in the context of an historical reality out of whose mother soil they arise, but not in order to become an aestheticizing shadow-life next to it, as the feeble epigones of creative epochs retrospectively imagine. From this soil arises the task that only the arts can handle, just because their creative activity is not intended to affect reality. It is well known how highly productive epochs have been aware of this task, and how they revered the artist as the bearer of great ideas – in such a way that they thought of the poet as a prophet (vates), and for hundreds of years called upon him as their witness.
But note: this task is no longer an aesthetical one. It is given to art, no doubt, for no other function in the life of the spirit can fulfill it, and it is for that reason also entirely a matter of artistic concern, but not on its aesthetical, but only on its cultural side. To separate these two would be equivalent to tearing art from its mutual relations with life, without which its diverse emotional ties to and inspiration by life could not come to pass. For so is man: only that which moves him inwardly, in living and struggling, in yearning and desiring, drives him to creative work. The whole of life, in which the artist stands, offers both fruitful soil and the land itself upon which he toils. What he produces, however, is far from being merely aesthetical in nature.
Two things also follow from these points that concern the purely aesthetical activity of the artist. The first is this: the influences of art external to aesthetics are a proof of its creative aspect, provided that they lie also in the content of great works of art; thus we have a proof of its extension beyond all imitation and of its autonomous intuitive beholding of what possesses the nature of ideas. For without such intuitive beholding, any extension beyond what is prefigured in life, beyond what we all know, is simply an impossibility. (41)
Why this creativity regarding content is so tightly interwoven with formal and sensible characteristics remains puzzling in many respects. That no other kind of creative work results in such an achievement still does not explain this fact. The achievement might be, after all, denied to men; that it is yet in principle possible for them and succeeds in lucky cases is one of the miracles of the creative spirit. Perhaps it is the bestowing of sensible form itself that, with respect to content, lifts the genius above and beyond the given. We may remain certain only of this: for great figures in the history of art there is always available a visionary sort of life, and the creative man is really torn out from and lifted above himself, laid hold of by his idea as by an inner destiny that he takes upon himself and lives out in his creative work.
What also follows from these reflections is a perspective upon genuine artistic freedom that lies in creativity itself. It rests, as we have shown, upon the fact that the artist has nothing to realize, that is, he does not make some real thing possible, but limits himself merely to letting something appear. On the level of appearance, however, he rules without limit. Here he does not come up against the hard resistance of reality; here unlimited possibilities open for what is not possible in reality. The only valid law is his own, which he promulgates and imposes as he gives form to his material. For that reason, what he intuitively beholds is not only autonomous but also self-governing – and there are no gods next to him.
This peculiar power of the creative artist is, in the highest sense, as in the phrase of Hölderlin30, his “freedom to set forth wherever he will.”31 (42)