(1957)
For almost two thousand years, it seemed as if the conclusive and final answer to the question, “What can the human being, using his power and skill, do in the world and with the world?” had been given by Aristotle when he proposed that “art” was the imitation of nature, thereby defining the concept with which the Greeks encompassed all the actual operative abilities of man within reality—the concept of technē. With this expression, the Greeks indicated more than what we today call technology [Technik]: It gave them an inclusive concept for man’s capacity to produce works and form shapes, a concept comprising the “artistic” and the “artificial” (which we so sharply distinguish between today). Only in this broader sense should we use this term we translate as “art.” “In general,” then, according to Aristotle, “human skill [technē] either completes what nature is incapable of completing or imitates nature.”1 This dual definition is closely tied to the double meaning of the concept of “nature” as a productive principle (natura naturans) and produced form (natura naturata). It is easy to see, however, that the overlapping component lies in the element of “imitation.” For the task of picking up where nature leaves off is carried out, after all, by closely following nature’s prescription, by starting from the entelechy of the given and carrying it out.2 This stepping-in of “art” for nature extends so far that Aristotle can say that the builder of a house only does exactly what nature would do, if it were able, so to speak, to “grow” houses.3 Nature and “art” are structurally identical: the immanent characteristics of one sphere can be transposed onto the other. This idea was then established as fact when tradition shortened the Aristotelian formulation to ars imitatur naturam, as Aristotle himself had already expressed it.4
What contemporary significance can this formulation have that would make its preconditions and historical transformations worth investigating? Has not modern man long been insisting that he is a “creative” being, starkly opposing nature to the manmade [Konstruktion]? In 1523, Parmigianino painted his self-portrait from a distorted convex mirror—thus not allowing the natural to preserve and increase itself in the artistic, but rather to refract and transform itself.5 Since then, the mark of the creative human being aware of his power has become ever more clearly evident in works of art. As a personal challenge and a testament to the genuine power of his being, art first became for modern man “the truly metaphysical task of this life.”6 A recognition of the bindingness of this task crystallized around the question, “What is nature’s authority over art?” Surveying the latitude for artistic freedom; the discovery of the infinity of the possible beyond the finitude of the factual; the easing of the relationship to nature through the historical self-objectification of the artistic process as art reproduces itself over and over within and through art7—these are fundamental processes that appear to have nothing more to do with the Aristotelian formula. It has often been said and demonstrated that the world in which we live is a world of deliberate, even vehement, outperformance, disempowerment, and distortion of nature, a world in which what is given is insufficient. Perhaps it was André Breton who first gave surrealism the ontological formulation that what is not is equally as “real” (intense) as what is—and this is the precise expression for possibility of the modern will to create [Kunstwillen] overall, for the terra incognita, whose untrammeled state entices imaginations. A work does not refer through suggestion or representation to some other, antecedent being; rather, it has an authentic share of being in the human world: “A new picture is a unique event, a birth, which enriches the universe as it is grasped by the human mind, by bringing a new form into it.”8 To see the new and to produce it is no longer merely a question of an instinctive “curiosity,” in the sense of the medieval curiositas; rather, it has become a metaphysical need: man tries to realize the image he has of himself. It is not because necessity is the mother of invention that “invention” is a significant act in the modern world; nor is it because our reality is so riddled with technological structures that they crop up as subject matter in the artworks of the period. Here, we perceive instead the formative power of a homogeneous impulse that prompts the articulation of a radical human self-understanding. Whence, however, the violence and force with which this self-understanding makes itself known?
Precisely this question we will not be able to answer adequately if we do not keep in mind what the modern concept of man had set itself against. The vehement passion with which the attribute of creativity was gained for the subject was marshaled in the face of the overwhelming importance of the axiom of the “imitation of nature.” This struggle has not yet come to an end, even as other, new formulations seem to be triumphing. But it is not merely a political commonplace that the enemy becomes a liability for the victor at the moment of defeat. The opposition, against which all powers were necessarily marshaled, disperses, and the forces once mobilized against it easily overshoot the position they once besieged.
I shall first try to describe more precisely the historical setting in which this contest took place. Although the “beginnings” of anything historical are always elusive, the terminus a quo I have selected already represents the striking early development of our problem. I am thinking of the Idiot in the Three Dialogues of Nicholas of Cusa of 1450. To characterize this figure in the dialogue, it is not enough to derive a sociological explanation based on the new consciousness of the layman in his conflict with the clergy in the fifteenth century, as it is here reflected. The Cusan confronts his Idiot equally with the Philosopher as a proponent of scholasticism and the Rhetorician as a representative figure of humanism.9 The Cusan “layman” is, to be sure, partially modeled on the opposition of the mystics and the devotio moderna [new piety] to the Scholastic and educational arrogance of the time. But the irony with which this illiteratus [unlettered] counters these intellectual luminaries, the, as it were, democratic style he employs in conversation, paying no mind to the dissimilarity of the premises, has a rather different basis—it suggests a new kind of man, who understands himself from the outside and justifies his worth by what he does and what he knows how to do—by his “achievement” [Leistung], we would say. The not at all historically obvious connection between achievement and self-consciousness is palpable in the Cusan Idiot, and precisely in the aspect that concerns us.
In the second chapter of the dialogue On Mind, the layman demonstrates to his interlocutors, the Philosopher and the Rhetorician, what his own trade, spoon-carving—which provides him with only a modest living and which society regards as lowly—means for his own self-conception and self-worth. This “art,” too, is indeed imitation—but not the imitation of nature. Rather, what is imitated is the ars infinita [infinite art] of God himself, specifically in the sense that this production is original, generated spontaneously, and creative, but not in the sense that this imitation created the world. “A spoon has no other exemplar except our mind’s idea of [the spoon].” The spoon, not exactly a work of high art, is nevertheless something absolutely new, an eidos not represented in nature, and the simple “layman” is the one who fashions it: “I do not imitate the visible form of any natural object.” The forms of the spoons, jugs, and plates that the layman manufactures are purely technical forms. And there is no leap necessary to get from the pleasure derived from this fact to accentuating it in the product itself—the essential feature of modern industrial design. Humanity no longer looks to nature, to the cosmos, to discern its place in the realm of being; rather, it looks to the world of things, created sola humana arte [by human art alone].10 Also important for our point is that the Idiot explicitly contrasts his own “achievement” to the accomplishments of the painter and the sculptor: after all, they get their exemplaria a rebus [models from the things]—non tamen ego—“but not I!” It is of immeasurable significance that here the entire pathos of creative, originary human beings breaking with the principle of imitation is expressed by a technician—not by an artist. This distinction is probably positively accentuated here for the first time, and therein lies the value of the testimony, when one looks ahead and sees how almost immediately creative testimonials center on pictorial art and poetry. Part of the development of art from the end of the Middle Ages on is precisely that it becomes the place where the artist begins to discuss himself and his creative spontaneity.
The history of technology is generally poor on such self-revelations by its practitioners. This cannot simply be a typological phenomenon, a case of the sober inventor. Neither is it due merely to the sociological fact that public awareness and esteem for the intellectual origins of technical innovations only began with the recognition of the artes mechanicae [mechanical arts] in the French Encyclopedia. It is above all a phenomenon of “being at a loss for words” [Sprachlosigkeit] in the practical arts. For the poet and the artist, there was already an arsenal of ready categories and metaphors in antiquity, from the anecdotal to the more basic, that, at least in their negation, sufficed to express how the creative process would like to reconceptualize itself. No language was at the disposal of the approaching technological world, and the people involved with it could hardly have created such a language. It is not until today—when the technological arena is held in high regard as something “useful to society”—that the very striking situation has arisen in which the people who determine the face of our world most powerfully know the least about, and know the least how to express, what it is they do. Autobiographies of great inventors—in contrast to the refined self-interpretations of modern artists—are often at a touching loss for words for the phenomenon that they would like to explain. Just one example: Orville Wright gave the invention of the airplane a typical stylization, explaining that six years before their first flight at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers had gotten hold of a book on ornithology. With the book, they made the breakthrough to understanding why the bird possessed an ability that man could not appropriate for himself by using a scale model of the physical mechanism.11 But that is exactly the topos that Leonardo da Vinci used four hundred years before.12 This of course made sense for Leonardo, and even for Lilienthal,13 since they actually attempted a homomorphic design. The hiatus lies between Lilienthal and Wright: the airplane was an actual invention in that it freed itself from the old dream of imitating the flight of birds and solved the problem using a new principle. The invention of the combustion engine (which itself represents an actual invention) is therefore not nearly as essential or unique as the use of the propeller. Rotating elements are of a pure technicity—that is, derivable neither from imitatio nor perfectio—since rotating organs must be foreign to nature. Is it somewhat too audacious to contend that the airplane is so contained in the immanence of the technical process that it would have come to that day at Kitty Hawk, even if never a bird had flown?
But the reference to what is already available, to the bird with its God-given ability to fly, does not have anything like the function of explaining the genesis of the idea. Its purpose is rather to express the more-or-less defined feeling of illegitimacy about what man demands for himself. The topos of imitation of nature is a cover for the incomprehensibility of human primordiality [Ursprünglichkeit], which is thought to be metaphysical violence. Such topoi serve a purpose in our world, as when naturalistic titles are placed beneath abstract paintings at modern art exhibitions. What cannot be formulated cannot be represented. Paradise was: knowing the name of everything and familiarizing oneself with it through that name. Where the logon didonai (in its double meaning, “to name” and “to give a reason for”) fails, we have a tendency to speak of the demonism of the thing—as in the common expression of the “demonism of technology” [Dämonie der Technik]. A problematic like modern technology is characterized by the fact that we feel it to be a “problem,” but are completely at a loss to formulate it as such. I shall trace back this embarrassment to the validity of the definition of art as the imitation of nature. I am attempting to show that this idea affected and controlled our metaphysical tradition and how it did so in such a way as to leave no room for the conception of authentic human creations. The creative self-consciousness that emerged at the border between the Middle Ages and the modern period found itself ontologically inarticulable. As painters began to search for a “theory,” they assimilated Aristotelian poetics: the creative “notion” [Einfall] was referred to with the metaphor of enthusiasmo [enthusiasm] and by using expressions of a secularized illuminatio [enlightenment]. The difficulty of articulation in the face of the overemphasis of the imitatio [imitation] tradition and the Renaissance gesture of rebellion are all of a piece. The appearance of something that had become ontologically unquestionable constituted a zone of legitimacy in which new ways of understanding could only succeed with force. One thinks as well of the “bursting onto the scene” of the “original genius” in the eighteenth century, who is systematically absorbed, so to speak, by idealism.
Only in historical retrospect do we understand what Cusanus’s experiment could have signified—his formulation of the idea of man as an original creator of being with the irony of his spoon-making Idiot in such a way that it comes out as the unavoidable consequence and legitimate explication of the theological conception of man’s being made in the image of God by God’s will—as (in the earlier Hermetic formulation) alter deus [second god]. Measured by its historical effectiveness, this attempt to see the modern period as an immanent product of the Middle Ages—an attempt in which the metaphysical legitimization of ascribing the attributes of the creator to man is only one component—did not succeed. We have to consider Nicholas of Cusa’s Idiot a historical indicator, not a historical force. For the sum of modern intellectual history constitutes the antagonism between construction and organism, art and nature, the will to form and the givenness of forms, between labor and continuance. Human creation sees its room for maneuver hemmed in by reality. Nietzsche formulates this fact most sharply, when he says in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Whoever should like to be a creator for good or ill, he must first be a destroyer and transgress values. Thus the greatest evil belongs to the greatest good: this is the way of creation.”14 Here nihilism is functionally assigned to the human claim to originary creation of being, but it is nonetheless unclear whether what is here expressed as an ontological law instead indicates a historical situation in which man finds his creative freedom hindered by a specific metaphysical tradition (precisely the metaphysical tradition whose specifics we are laying out). The antinaturalism of the nineteenth century is pregnant with this feeling of the narrowing of the possibility of authentic human production by an oppressive horizon of fixed conditions. The new pathos of labor directed itself against nature: Comte coined the term “antinature”; Marx and Engels spoke of “antiphysis.” Nature had not only lost its role as authoritative example, reduced to an object whose meaning was exhausted by its theoretical and practical mastery; it became, moreover, something like the opposing term to technical and artistic will. Its effect on the emotional susceptibility of humanity awakened mistrust: the self-sufficiency, the maturing, the returning-onto-itself of nature assumed the character of a temptation for the human will to create works to be unequivocal.15 Moreover, it has been the case in our century that natural resources, on the one hand, and the physical capacities of humanity, on the other, have been disturbingly unequal to the demands technology has placed on them. A curious inertia has revealed itself as a property of the organic. The conception of overcoming it was first developed in ruthless fashion with Ernst Jünger’s idea of the “organic construction” in The Worker.16
This, by way of examples, is an indication of the terminus ad quem [the point at which the process terminates] of the historical process, whose metaphysical terminus a quo [the point from which the process takes its departure] we would like to consider here. The metaphysical exclusivity of the concept of nature, as will be shown in more detail, eliminated the space for authentic human works, or, more precisely, did not provide for their occurrence. By the end of a violent countermovement, nature itself had its value disputed in the face of the absolute claim of technical and artistic works. And not coincidentally, from Idealism on, on any occasion when one believed one could ask about what “being” was, art took on exactly the same exemplary role in philosophy that nature had held in classical thought and the metaphysics it spawned.
Perhaps it has been made clear to the reader of our essay that one can say—without the presumption of a mental leap—that the modern pathos of the authentic human creation in art and technology springs from the protest against the metaphysical tradition of the identity of being and nature, and that the definition of human works as “imitation of nature” was the direct consequence of this identity. A fundamental investigation of the historical background will be necessary here.
It is worth beginning with a look at the tenth book of Plato’s Republic. As is well known, here Plato issues a polemic against poetry, and representative art in general, and he does so with an argument that does not so much protest against its negative consequences as against its origins, by focusing on its ontological foundational context. That art imitates nature is therefore not just an assertion, but in fact the decisive objection. To put this objection into sharp relief, Plato takes as paradigms two basic everyday objects (skeuē), couch and table. The craftsman (dēmiurgos) produces them, the painter (zōgraphos) only represents them. The craftsman, however, is not in addition the “inventor” of the couch or table, since no craftsman begets their Idea as such.17 The negative formulation of Plato’s sentence presupposes a particular definition of invention: it is the begetting of the Idea itself. But where does the craftsman get the Ideas for couch and table, if he did not beget them himself and did not find basic shapes of this kind in the given reality? The answer runs like this: Just as it contains the Ideas for the things already present at hand in the world, so the world of Ideas also contains the Ideas for couch and table.18 When the craftsman makes use-objects such as these, their Ideas are somehow pre-given to his mental gaze. The artist, however, gazes not upon the Ideas itself, but upon its already rendered copy. To reproach him for this, and to derive from the reproach a critique of the imitative arts, necessarily implies the premise that imitation is in some way negative. Plato, it is true, uses the expressions “to imitate” and “to participate in” indiscriminately and interchangeably—often for one and the same state of affairs. It is nonetheless important to recognize that methexis [partaking] has a positive connotation that emphasizes the relation of material things to the reality of the Idea, whereas mimēsis [imitation] emphasizes the negative aspect of the difference between Idea and thing, the defect of phenomenal being as over against Ideal being.19 Imitation means precisely: not to be the imitated itself.20 Art is therefore only a derivative of being; in the example of a painting of a fabricated object, it is already “third from what is.”21 The craftsman can at least be excused by the need that his work will fill, but how can the painter justify himself?
This negative aspect of the imitation of the Ideas will become so pronounced in the later history of Platonism that eventually even the first imitation, the foundation of the visible cosmos by the world Demiurge, cannot help but acquire a negative connotation. One should keep in mind this Neoplatonic one-sidedness if one is to understand why it was precisely the Platonism of the late Middle Ages that participated so vigorously in the overcoming of the mimetic formula for the work of art. The Aristotelian tradition—which made the “imitation of nature” formula its own, more than any other—never understood, could never even conceive of the idea, that imitation could be a stricture that would put the worth of human works into question.
For Plato himself, of course, priority should probably still be given to the positive aspect connected with the concept of methexis. It is easy to understand this when one keeps in mind the original hostility of the Socratic-Platonic doctrine of the Ideas to the Sophists. It is the Sophists who first conceive of an absolute positing, a thesis of what does not have its basis in the pre-given.22 But this concept still lacks almost everything that the concept of the “creative” ought to entail. The state, language, morality are, to be sure, seen here as derived from man, guided by human technē; likewise, “history” is first understood as a product of human making in Sophistic rhetoric. But this achievement does not attach to humanity as an honor; rather, its “technical” trait is an indication of human neediness, of a lack of natural endowments and discernible organizing structure. The Sophists also do not have a concept of the thinking subject to whom some sort of metaphysical “distinction” could be ascribed. “Positing” is indeed a contrasting concept to “nature,” but precisely because of this, positing turns out to be close to mere tychē [chance], which is how this contrast is usually expressed. What must have happened for the conception of the complete spontaneity of human activities first developed here to have procured its metaphysical dignity? The answer is easy to give in retrospect: “positing” first acquires metaphysical value because it is discussed as a theological concept, an attribute of the divine. Only the transplantation of a concept onto theological soil makes it flourish so as to be sufficiently attractive in the history of human self-understanding—from the homoiōsis theōi [mystical longing for likeness to God] to the defiant usurpation of divine attributes in what has been called the hubris of the Renaissance—to move the will. Thus, the fundamental question here is not at all about where the authenticity of human accomplishments was first conceived but rather about where it achieved the unique metaphysical status that would allow it to be at the center of an entire epoch’s thought. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, as the saying goes, but she is not able to give invention the luster that drives one to confirm incessantly that one is capable of it.
The Sophists’ concept of thesis justifies appearance [Schein], not being [Sein]: it has no reference to truth. Technē and alētheia are foreign to each other. To bring a foundation to this foundationless human activity, to provide a relation to being, a binding authority—that was the motive for the theory of Ideas and its correlative concept of mimesis. The craftsman who produces the couch and table makes something new only from the perspective of the phenomenal world, but not from the perspective of the world of Ideas, in which the Ideas of these objects are always already given. When Plato now says that these Ideas signify the couch and the table en tēi physei [in essence],23 then the implicit, specifically Platonic meaning of the imitation of nature formula becomes clear: To imitate nature means to copy the Idea. But what then? Can one ask about yet another source behind the Idea, or is it the absolute itself, without origin? Is the concept of a creative act foreign to Platonic metaphysics?
Traditional Platonism, in any case, will leave that impression, and it will become evident how this impression arises. In our passage, however, in the tenth book of the Republic, it is explicitly stated that it is the god who wanted to be the true begetter of the couch that actually is—not just any couch that any craftsmen can make—and he accomplished this by establishing the couch, in the singularity of its nature, as an Idea.24 Three times in short succession, Plato insists on this formulation, and he calls the god who creates being “Futurgos” [natural begetter]. It is here that creation is first conceived as the act of the originary formation of being and made a divine attribute. One would think that this conception of the creation idea in its radical form would have been recognized and acknowledged at the very latest when the biblical creation idea was being described in terms of ancient metaphysics and adapted to the tradition. But, as has been shown often enough, another element in the Platonic canon succeeded for this purpose: the myth of the Demiurge of the Timaeus. The Demiurge was seen to prefigure the biblical creator, God. But the Demiurge is not creative. He is—according to his function and not his metaphysical status—just as much a craftsman as the carpenter in book 10 of the Republic. The Demiurge of the Timaeus functions as the founder of the visible cosmos, not of being. He is supposed to clarify how, along with the cosmos of Ideas, there is its pendant, the phenomenal world. He is thus intended to bridge over a perplexity in Platonic philosophy, at which Aristotle then so persistently took offense. The Demiurge’s function is auxiliary, subordinate to the absolute being of the Ideas; the metaphysical accent lies not on this “creator” but on his blueprints. He only makes that which actually is (which one must imagine, as the Neoplatonists did, as being induced to announce itself) appear in a recognizable form; he translates it into the language of the senses. Whether or not the original model requires such an “expression” of its being is an unimportant question, at least as long as the Demiurge is not the god who must be justified as the source of good. This identification of the Demiurge with God had already been introduced in the first century BC, and it dominated Christian Platonism. Since the Futurgos of the Republic met with no interest and the Demiurge of the Timaeus was instead the influential model in the historical reception, the concept of “creation” had to be interpreted using the categories of the structural scheme of imitation. Although a conception of human spontaneous creation was still of little concern here, it was nonetheless predetermined to a considerable degree, when one considers how the concepts that make up the self-consciousness of the subject often incubate in theology. The adaptation of the Demiurge concept to the concept of God implied the decisive sanctioning of the principle of the “imitation of nature.”
But the Timaeus introduces an important modification to yet another aspect of the position introduced in the tenth book of the Republic. Aristotle informs us of the fact—astounding in light of previous explications—that according to the Academy, there were no Ideas for artificial objects, as for a house or a ring.25 How could Plato or his school have later abandoned the notion of Ideas for artificial objects? The reason is readily apparent in the Timaeus. The Demiurge copies pre-given, original designs into pre-given matter, but he does not do this as he pleases, not by making a choice. He is subject to the principle of optimal effect: the cosmos he produces is kallistos tōn gegonotōn [the best of things that have become] and his work is qualified by aristos tōn aitiōn [the best of causes].26 The realm of Ideas itself, in its double ontological and ethical function makes obvious that the Ideas are not simply guidelines for how this work can be fashioned but rather like obligatory norms for that it ought to be fashioned. In this way, Plato secures not only the unity of the real cosmos but also its complete compatibility with the Ideal model.27 But this means, consequently, that the Demiurge exhausts the potential of the Ideals; the real represents the Ideal exhaustively. Everything that is possible is already there, and there are no unrealized Ideas left over for the works of man. This considerable deviation from the tenth book of the Republic allows the question of the origin of human works to persist as a problem within Platonism. Aristotle reached the only possible conclusion: Everything “new” that is fashioned recalls what already is. The idea of the complete equivalence of possibility and reality does not allow for man’s originary, imaginative creation. That means that man’s efforts cannot ontologically “enrich” what is; or put another way, essentially nothing is created in the works of man. Human creation has no real intrinsic truth of its own. No wonder, then, that it had no significance for traditional metaphysics.28
The entire system, as Plato has already laid it out, is given in its traditionally accepted version by Aristotle. The eternity of the Ideas becomes the eternity of the real world itself, and the complete correspondence of Ideas to appearances becomes the uniqueness and completeness of the cosmos in relation to the concept of possibility. The exemplary aspect is weakened in this Aristotelian reformulation: Why nature ought to be imitated is easier to understand in Plato, since the real world appears as simply the best endowed creation; it would not make sense to conceive of a different one. The Stoics will pick up this thread again. But what is more explicitly expressed by Aristotle than by Plato is why a work can only be a copy of nature. Nature is the embodiment of all that is possible. Thought can be defined only as a faculty concerned with a totality that already is. The possible is only what is already a reality in terms of its Idea: the cosmos is the All of the actual as well as of the possible. Accordingly, the immanent law of motion (in the broadest sense that this term had for Aristotle, as change) is the eternal self-perpetuation of being. This basic structure encompasses entity and thought, nature and “art”; it is, finally, the inner structure of the absolute being of Aristotle’s metaphysics: the “Unmoved Mover” is the purely intellectual form of self-perpetuation through noēsis noēseōs, thought that thinks itself. This self-enclosed self-sufficiency of the absolute is as little externally creative as it is internally innovative. (How astonishing that Christian theology nonetheless took it as a model!) The self-perpetuation of the absolute in the cosmos works according to imitation: it explains the first, undistorted circular orbit of the spheres simply as the loving assimilation to the highest principle returning to itself. It is mirrored in the circulation of the meteorological waters;29 it is the fundamental law of all generative processes in which each entity always reproduces its own kind. Expressed as a general rule: What is derives solely from what is.30 Technē is ranked very low in the organization of this cosmic process: the produced does not, after all, perpetuate itself. Only indirectly—precisely through the unavoidable dependence on “imitation”—does the act of technē rejoin the basic cosmic structure and avoid being mere bia [force] or tychē [chance]. Likewise, “art” is “saved” for the cosmos, functionally incorporated into it, a testament to its uniqueness and completeness. The theologizing of the cosmos, which first the Stoics would develop fully, is basically determined here. Where the completeness of being is absolute, it cannot “enhance” being, not even through God. The will has no power to bring into being; it can only will what already is, can only—like the god himself—“keep things in motion.” Seen in the context of this completeness of his metaphysics, the homogeneity of the Aristotelian doctrine of knowledge becomes obvious.31
In the interpretation of Aristotelian mimesis, the significance of the dynamic conception of nature is referred to repeatedly—not as the total, given eidetic constant, but rather as the embodiment of the generative processes producing this constant at any given time: “the creative force, the productive principle of this universe.”32 Here we have the classical distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata. But I am not able to discern here a significant addition to Plato: even if one emphasizes the static character of the world of Ideas—ignoring the final formulation of the Platonic school—there is still an initializing dynamic concentrated in the Demiurge. Aristotle must bring all of this—Idea, matter, Demiurge—under the rubric of nature. This leads to the ambiguity that pervades the mimesis idea. “Imitation of nature” thus means not only the reproduction of an eidetic stock, but the mimicking of the productive process of nature: “Art in general imitates the method of nature.”33 I cannot see that any decisive meaning comes out of this distinction for our question, however, since for Aristotle all generative processes of nature are in fact regulated by an unchangeable eidetic constant. Nature duplicates itself eternally by reproducing itself. What, then, makes it possible to ascribe a “creative force” to it? Here, of course, the implications of the modern concept of nature, defined by evolution, are frequently brought to bear. This consistently leads to the overemphasis of epitelein [leading to the goal] in the Aristotelian definition of “art.” How can nature require any kind of completion? Here, lack, in any case, does not mean “vacancy” [Leerstelle], but rather the developmental goal that is factually not yet reached. When Aristotle says it is the task of artists to imitate natural objects as they ought to be,34 that does not mean by referring to any transcendental norm of one of these objects, but rather by “extrapolating” from the developmental process to its completion, from genesis to telos [goal]. The generative quality of the concept of nature is important for mimesis because it does not allow “art” to remain satisfied with a mere factual state of being and focuses it on the developmental goal, the entelechia [final shape] of the artwork. But the concept takes on importance only because once the Ideas are set aside, and despite their being set aside, some “ideal” is still necessary for man to understand what it is in the work—and especially the work of art—that defines him. Should nature ever forfeit its eidetic constancy, the Aristotelian doctrine of “art” would likewise lose its foundation. Where is nature to acquire an exemplar of what ought to be, if the concept of natura naturans means not the eternal perpetuation of finite ontogenesis but an infinite phylogenesis induced by selection and mutation? This allusion to what comes later is only intended to indicate that fundamental philosophical concepts cannot just experience a renaissance for no reason.
At the core of the Aristotelian concept of technē is the idea that man the maker cannot be assigned an essential function. What one would call “the human world” basically does not exist here. The human has his place in the physical teleology as maker and actor: he brings to completion what nature would have brought to completion; the “ought to be” is immanent in nature, not in him. Technē and physis are congruous constituent principles: one affects from the outside what the other affects from within.35 Production is tied to its counterpart, growth. The aesthetic or technical work therefore only has a referential meaning and contains no inherent truth. The possibility of experiencing something unique in a work of art is still unthinkable: the work is not yet a medium for human self-recognition and self-confirmation.
In the Hellenistic period, the pseudo-Aristotelian work, On the Cosmos provides a not insignificant variation on the mimesis concept with the addition of a Heraclitan theme.36 Mimesis does not depend primarily on the eternal eidetic constancy of nature, but rather on its formal structure (if one does not understand “formal” in the sense of Aristotelian-Scholastic forma). The cosmos is, according to Heraclitus, a network of contradictions that do not cancel each other out, just as a polis composed of rich and poor, weak and strong, bad and good, making up a unified whole. Nature realizes itself in contradictions, such as male and female, dry and wet, warm and cold. And it is in this way that art imitates nature, as, for instance, when painting depicts contrasting colors, music harmonizes low and high notes, or the art of writing combines vowels and consonants. To be sure, this formalization of mimesis wins some “latitude” for artistic authenticity, but it is not yet apparent how heterogeneous music or language (writing) is different from any natural process.
The Stoics broadened the metaphysical foundation of mimesis considerably by elevating the completeness and unity of the cosmos to predicates of theological dignity. Man’s position was nevertheless strengthened through the universalization of the theological principle that nature is organized to be at man’s disposal and that the works of men are an imitation and completion of this relation. Technē is close to receiving almost religious sanction when, for instance, Posidonius traces the dyer’s craft back to the sun, which gives plummage, flowers, and minerals their splendor, while also employing human “art” in its task.37 There is no longer a definitive boundary between the natural and the man-made, a single energia is at work: “Art” is nature by other means. The example of dyeing shows nicely how the boundary between nature as a work of God and “art” as a work of man will be restored by the Christian creation idea: in certain patristic authors a polemic can be found against the processing of textiles with the reasoning that God would have created colored sheep if he had wanted man to have colored clothing. Tertullian generalized this into a very typical polemic against ars: “There is nothing that God found pleasing, that he did not himself bring forth. Was he incapable of creating purple or steel blue sheep as well? Even though he was capable of doing so, he did not want to do so; what God does not want to make, man must also refrain from making.… What does not come from God, must come from his adversary.”38 Here, then, we have an anticipation of the “demonism of technology,” which places nature and “art” in a dichotomous schema. Of course this first required a new general conception of nature as an expression of the will of God and the still implicit presupposition of other entities as factual possibilities of being, willed as such.
But to demonstrate a fairly typical distinction I have jumped ahead. For Posidonius, imitation of nature represented only an external aspect of the homogeneity of the singular, total process working through both man and nature. “The theory of imitation becomes a theory of the relationship that allows for creation: the invention is an interpretation, a judgment, a deciphering of what is written in nature. Nature is not a model applied at man’s discretion, but rather directly, of its own accord, and man is to complete nature according to its essential, not its accidental, possibilities.”39 “Invention,” as the uncovering of nature’s blueprint, serves as instruction, so that for the first time the classical theory applies directly to the composition of the work, and philosophy appears as the root of material culture as well. Seneca’s polemic against Posidonius is aimed less at this fundamental conception as at the “elevation” to which technical skills, as the highest achievements of nature itself, are transported: the theoretical ideal forfeits its rank as the absolute—as is the case in Cicero. With precisely the same teleological principle, Seneca argues the exact opposite: nature, centered completely on man, provides sufficiently, making technical advancements and work superfluous, having the character of luxury.40 “Imitation of nature” is unnecessary, since nature provides for every need. There is no legitimate transition from nature to “art.” Here, “art” and hubris are already fundamentally one, a consequence of insufficient natural-divine providentia. The human being himself—his artificial needs, his weariness with the facilis actus vitae [easy act of life]—drives the development of the artes. “The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort. Follow nature and you will feel no need of craftsmen.… She equipped us for everything she required us to contend with.”41
What is instructive about this reversal is that completely opposite conclusions are derived from one and the same metaphysical principle. While Posidonius so exaggerates the mimesis idea beyond its internal premises that it nearly cancels itself out in the cyclical pattern of a self-reproducing nature, Seneca sees for the first time the authentically human in the feeling that the provisions of nature are insufficient—he sees the infinity of self-perpetuating needs, the desire for luxuries (with negative connotations, of course) as the source of the technical drive. Here, “imitation” has basically lost its meaning since the impetus for “art” is precisely seen as the rejection of the strictures and the contesting of the completeness of nature. Here, as is so often the case, a negative formulation has brought what is essential into focus.
The history of the corrosion and deracination of the mimesis idea, however, is not—as the example of Seneca’s polemic against Posidonius could lead one to presume—a process of the eruption of its inner contradictions. It is much more a process of the inauguration of new, external, specifically theological ideas. Of course, this is not to say that the biblical story of creation contributes novel premises here. Rather, it will become apparent how this process easily gets caught up in the existing interpretation of being. The two elements that were constitutive of the mimesis idea—the exemplary bindingness of nature and its essential completeness—seem at first to fit well with the concept of creation. Indeed, one must admit that the bindingness of pre-given nature was strengthened by the idea that it manifested the will of the creator, as the citation from Tertullian shows. It was not at all apparent at first that the justification of nature’s bindingness by an act of will would cast doubt on the idea that the actual world was necessarily the full realization of the possible. Accordingly, in the quotation we cited, Tertullian must formulate the expression of God’s will in the facticity of nature this way: Not only did God not create what He did not want, but also He did not want what He did not create. But what does this “unwanted and not created” consist of? A possible kind of being not yet represented in nature? This compelling deduction is not yet thinkable. It implies the facticity and incompleteness of nature—an opening for the possibility of the “artificial.” This example makes it possible to demonstrate the ontological consequences of adding will to the process of creation. The shoring up of the bindingness of nature by claiming that God decreed His will through it leads to the inevitable correlate of unwilled possibilities—the sort of thing to immediately arouse interest in an impious, curious mind, fond of splitting hairs, that is yet to come.
This interpretation rules out the usual explanation of the new Christian understanding of being in the context of the creation idea as a conception first explicated fully by Augustine. Rather, it was precisely this thinker who grasped the immanent consequences of the idea of creation in classical ontology. It is certainly correct that with his reduction of materia prima [first matter] to the absolute nihil [nothing] of the creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothingness] he had insured against dualism from all sides. But it is wrong to see this as the central problem. What is decisive here is that the divine spirit of creation is now identified with the Platonic mundus intelligibilis [intelligible world]. The Ideas and the power of the Demiurge are indeed now unified in one authority, but this does not change the fact that the mundus intelligibilis still represents a single unity—Plato’s zōon noēton [intelligible living being]—which can only be transposed into the mundus sensibilis [sensible world] as a whole. Here Augustine is under the spell of the pedantry with which Neoplatonism rehearsed the correspondence of the physical and noetic world.42 The divine act of will that determines the creation can only refer to the fixed totality of the singular cosmos of Ideas. Therefore, only the “that” of creation and not its “what” becomes a fact. In Augustine, the concept of omnipotence is not yet joined to the concept of infinity. Thus, he remains within the structure of the classical correspondence of being and nature. There is no alternative to the given actuality of the creation—not even for the creator. After the act of creation, nothing of essential originality can be brought into being. How a finite world and the infinite potential of God’s power, the real and the possible, could be related to one another was one of the hardest problems left to the Middle Ages to think through to its conclusions.
My thesis about the antiquity of Augustine’s ontology (as I presented it in Munich) is contradicted by Henry Deku’s shrewd history of the possibile logicum43—the history of the development of a realm of possibility, which encompasses the Ideal as well as the real cosmos—what we have here considered as the “latitude” for originary creation. Deku, who begins his history with Augustine, refers mainly to De spiritu et littera (On the Spirit and the Letter), where the concept of possibilitas appears most frequently. But here—as is typical of Augustine—this concept appears only in conjunction with the Pelagian controversy, in other words, within the framework of salvation theology. It is a matter of the possibility of man without sin, of a possibilitas non peccandi [the possibility to avoid sinning]—that is, of the possibility of a quality inherent in human behavior, a possibilitas naturalis [natural possibility], as opposed to salvation through grace alone.44 God is therefore not the reason for being, but the reason for salvation in this interpretation, just as the “ability” of humanity arises only in regard to its being worthy of salvation. The treatise is directed against the tribune Marcellinus, who was the target of an earlier work, De peccatorum meritis et remissione (On the Merits and Forgiveness of Sins). It reacts to an objection made against this earlier treatise that it was inconsistent to claim that humanity can rid itself of sin through good will and with the aid of grace if one must nonetheless admit, “There is nobody who has been, is, or will be of such perfect justice in this life.” Put differently, how can one assume as possible what does not really come to pass.45 Marcellinus, in any case, reasons very much within the horizon of ancient ontology: What is possible will only be proven by what is real—through the “actual coming into being” of the Ideas. The argumentation is as close as possible to Lucretius, who objected to creation, “how can the gods be creators of nature when they lack the exemplum which only an already actualized nature can provide—unless nature itself provided a model of the creation.”46 Marcellinus’s objection, which is unavailable to us, must be close to this position, if Augustine can say of it: it appeared absurd to you to say that anything was possible of which no example ever occurred.”47 It is then shown that the biblical revelation offered a new guide to what is “possible with God,” since God himself provides a testament of what is possible for him and the “word” takes the place of the “thing” as a proof in its own way: the story of the camel that can go through the eye of a needle, the faith that can move mountains—“although, nevertheless, it was never done, so far as we have ever read or heard.”48 However, these theological renditions of possibilities do not touch on the ontological basis of Augustinian metaphysics, since here the issue is God’s ability to restore His own work of creation, man, to the originary constitution of his being—in Platonic terms, the realization of the Idea. The horizon of the ideally preformed cosmos is not broadened by the question of human salvation, but rather reconstituted. When it is said that “omnia possibilia sunt Deo” [all things are possible with God],49 this omnia still does not in any way indicate the possibility of more than what is actually created; rather, the correspondence between mundus intelligibilis and mundus sensibilis became defective because of the original sin of man, and it is a question of correcting this defect. To hold on to man’s posse non peccare [being able not to sin] is therefore a logical necessity—without this possibility, nothing can reasonably be said about the posse peccare [being able to sin]. Man is defined precisely as a being who determines his own conformity to the Idea. But this freedom arose very much within the Ideal scheme.
There is no doubt that the idea of willing, introduced into cosmogony by the Hellenic period and made thoroughly virulent by Augustine, is a “disruptive concept” of the highest order for the continued validity of ancient ontology and that it exercised a “denecessitating influence on what had become reality.”50 Nevertheless, it was not Augustine whose understanding of being was so fundamentally distorted that he somehow actually broke through the visual horizon. I believe I can even give the reason for this: Manicheanism initiated and brought to the forefront the problem of the elimination of the materia prima and the tendency toward dualism inextricably bound up with it. One believes oneself to be in the thick of our theme when one finds Augustine distinguishing between creatum and creabile, the created and the to-be-created, only to discover with disappointment that the expression creabile refers to the material substrate that he wants to be sure is included in his tu fecisti [of your (i.e., God’s) making].51 Where the discussion concerns what is not yet, but could be, it is always about matter, the possibility of being as formal indeterminacy, which is associated with Aristotle.52 The emphasis on willing in the concept of creation has its limit in the anti-Gnostic position, which attempts to understand creation as a rational act: “Who would dare to say that God created everything in an irrational manner?”53 But here “rational” can only be interpreted in accordance with Plato’s notion of the Demiurge as the guiding corresponding thread between the noetic and the real world. In this way, the concepts of omnipotence and infinity are necessarily separated since infinitum [the infinite] in ancient understanding is incompatible with rationality; it is the hyletic apeiron [the boundles]. Infinity does not yet figure as an attribute of God. Only when God’s potentia is first understood as potentia infinita [infinite power], does it become logically necessary to stop defining potentia (and the Ideas it implies) on the basis of the possible and to do the inverse—to define the possible on the basis of potentia.54 It is only then that the limits of possibility are defined as its logical limits and the cosmos of Ideas is rendered irrelevant for the question of what omnia means as the extension of omnipotentia. As a consequence, the concept of rationality will be reduced to the concept of noncontradiction, while even in Augustine the concept of ratio is still not separable from the exemplary Idea and therefore implies a final, objective order. Only now for the first time can the decisive step for our inquiry into the ontological latitude of the creative be taken: The supposedly finite cosmos does not exhaust the infinite universe of possibilities of being—in other words, the possibilities of divine omnipotence—and cannot exhaust them. The cosmos is necessarily only a factual portion of this universe, and there remains a space of unrealized being—which of course will long be the unquestioned preserve of God and will not come up in connection with humanity’s inquiry into its own potential. But the discussion of the concept of omnipotence made this space ontologically implicit and comprehensible as part of the background of the reality of the world. This is primarily an eminently religious idea, not only insofar as the that of the world has lost its obviousness but also insofar as its what can now be understood as an act of a specific, divine decree. At the same time, however, it broadens the basis for a philosophical critique out of which an abundance of consciousness-shaping questions arise. The world as factum: this ontological presupposition makes it possible—practically serves as the inducement and temptation—to fashion something of human origin, to render the authentically “new” in the realm of the unrealized by using what has not yet actually been realized, advancing beyond the dependence on “imitation of nature” to a place untouched by nature.
Of course, there is no temptation here for the Middle Ages: All speculative boldness will focus on investigating to its farthest reaches the possibilities of God, not those of man. It will require yet a further, decisive motivation for humanity to be able to know and grasp the theologically discovered incongruity between being and nature as a possibility for its own originary creativity.
The contact between omnipotence and infinity, which produces the initial spark, apparently occurs around the eleventh century, when it becomes necessary to systematize the doctrine of divine omnipotence in response to the “dialecticians,” above all in response to the damage done by Berengar of Tours to the doctrine of transubstantiation. It is, above all, Petrus Damiani who takes the lead here with his De divina omnipotentia [Of Divine Omnipotence].55 I cite here only the typical rhetorical question, found in chapter twelve: “Quid est, quod Deus non valeat nova conditione creare?” [What is there that God would not be able to create under different circumstances?] The being of the world acquires a certain peculiar arbitrariness here, a revocability and hypothetical interchangeability that it first receives in the waning Middle Ages, when the period’s anxiety about facticity goes from logical to emotional—that is, is related by humanity to itself. I am not able to give a description of this transformation here. My intent is to present the growing incongruity between being and nature, and through it the growing relevance of the space of originary creativity. One ought not imagine this process as organic, nor attribute to it the honorable movement of historical necessity, which it appears to have a posteriori—especially coupled with the selective reading on which every study of this kind must rely. It is easy to see that the role the Scholastics played in this process of the reconceptualization of ontological premises hardly fits the description of “historical necessity.” But one should likewise not consider the classical revival brought on by the Aristotle reception as a violent reversion, as is already demonstrated by the insight gained from Augustine that the implications of ancient thought continued to have potency. It is all the more appealing to see precisely in the high Scholastic revival of ancient metaphysics the often unarticulated but nonetheless significant distortions that prove what could no longer be reversed.
Ontological premises that seemed valid to Augustine without needing to be explicitly formulated were now “ripe for questioning” in the Scholastic manner. A revealing quotation with reference to our citation from Augustine is the polemic of Albertus Magnus against the fons vitae of Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol) with its identification of the metaphysical principle of light and will: “it is not possible for will to be first principle.”56 The function of divine will is concerned with the existence [Existenz] of the world, with the order ut fiat [that it be done], not, however, with the forma operis [form of the work], the essential stock of being, which here also has the obviousness of the formal, predetermined totality.
Even Thomas Aquinas does not go beyond this conception. There is, however, a broader understanding of the principle of imitation of nature insofar as it is accompanied by the related idea of imitation of God that serves as second foundational context.57 This relation existed formally in Aristotle, according to whom the precise circular motion of the first sphere was the imitation of the Unmoved Mover. But this exhausts the potential of the relation. Aristotle must therefore explain the genesis of a house, for example, as the architect’s rendering of what nature would have allowed to result. In other words, the architect must imagine the artificial structure as a product of nature to then imitate this hypothetical representation. In this way, the universal validity of mimesis was guaranteed. Aquinas restricted the imitation of nature to only what nature indeed can make on its own58—a house, however, is a purely artificial object, it always results from artifice, “as every house is a work of art.”59 Here, of course, we do not have a discrepancy but a very great difference in emphasis. This is even more apparent in the commentary on the Physics, where he discusses the seminal passage cited at the beginning of this essay (II, 8; 199a 15–17).60 The Latin version available to Aquinas reads: “ars alia quidem perficit quae natura non potest operari,” to which his commentary reads: “He says that art makes certain things which nature cannot make.” This is formulated more radically than it could have been intended by Aristotle, who, after all, always takes for granted what is already on the way to becoming in nature when he discusses the human task of completion. Why the imitation of nature has so recognizably lost its invulnerability, why “art” can be taken out of the context of nature, Aquinas does not make explicit.
Not so his contemporary, Bonaventure, who does not participate in the attempt to interpret the creation idea with the metaphysics of the Prime Mover, since for him the mechanical character of this conception loses the sense of a divine will desiring to express itself through its works. “Expression” means, namely, that the limitless power of God does not, as it were, execute itself “automatically,” but rather inheres in the finite, which a finite being can conceive of and comprehend.61 A will to announce itself in the world emerges, which wants to make comprehensible not everything possible, but rather something specific (“multa non omnia”) [many, not all]. God brings out many but not all of the treasures in His chest of possibilities to prove Himself in His greatness to creation.62 The feeling expressed here, one could say, is that the difference between omnia and multa is a mere “remainder,” perhaps prudently and lovingly withheld from humanity—in any case, not a reason to feel short-changed in access to or possession of the store of being. But William of Ockham, who forced the Franciscan tradition through to its conclusions, will reverse Bonaventure’s formulation by putting the multa on the opposite side, on the side of the unwilled-unrealized: “There is much that God can create which he does not want to create.”63 One can almost sense how an agonizing, gnawing awareness of the arbitrariness of the factual must arise, the growing uncertainty about why this and no other world was called into being—a question that could only have the stark Quia voluit [because he wanted to] of Augustine hurled against it as a nonanswer. Its offensiveness to rationality made palpable the unbearableness of this facticity: all of a sudden, the accent shifted from the divine expression of will contained in the creation to the implicit and withheld in the uncreated. We can discern this process of accentuating the uncreated best in the careful attempts to deal with it, to absorb it—even to give it a positive valence.
The work of Nicholas of Cusa provides the most multifaceted response to the difficulty of this problem. In his early phase, Cusa anticipated Leibniz’s attempt to justify the noncreation of the uncreated by finding the actual world to be the highest form of reality, the self-exhaustion of the creative principle as deus creatus.64 But in this Christianized Neoplatonism inheres a contradiction between two elements of speculative theology: on the one hand, the maximal version of the concept of perfection of creator and work makes it necessary to say that nothing more perfect could have been made. On the other hand, the maximal version of divine omnipotence makes it necessary to say that no actual creation of the creator comprises the full extent of what He in His greatness and perfection could have achieved. This dilemma cannot be overcome. In De beryllo, almost two decades later, Cusa understands the creation with the model of legal statutes: he refers twice to the quotation in the digests, according to which the will of the ruler has the force of law.65 At the end of his intellectual career, in the text De ludo globi, Cusa attempts to harmonize his two previous positions, explaining the difference in terms of perspective: seen from God’s point of view, there is room for the play of possibility; from the point of view of the world, there is none.66 This is based on a metaphysics of the concept of possibility; in creating, God not only realized the possible or from among the possible, but also created possibility itself: “et fieri posse ipsum factum est.” Certainly, this is meant to wave off and ignore pressing, meddlesome questions. Nicholas of Cusa tries to do this through turning logic metaphysical, Martin Luther will do so by radicalizing the exclusive claim of theology. With a decisive turn against Ockham’s formula, he insists that “omnipotence” has no logically comprehensible meaning outside of its Scriptural meaning, and precisely does not indicate the power of God to realize much more than he had realized.67 God’s potentia absoluta [absolute power], the inconceivability of which worries the young Luther, as it does the late Middle Ages as a whole, is to be understood as limited by God himself to the potentia ordinata [ordered power] through the instrument of the Revelation. Asking about anything beyond God’s gracious self-restraint assumes the odium of rejecting this act of grace. Only by not asking about the infinite latitude of possibility does one escape the threatening uncertainty of that which it leaves open.
But the force of the questions once they have emerged cannot be contained. Where they lead, we can see already expressed almost to the fullest extent in Descartes. With Descartes, philosophy is a systematization of the possible; now what actually is, is understandable from the point of view of what is possible. Hence, the new meaning of hypothesis, which satisfies the intellectual desire to construct a possible nexus of being [Seinszusammenhang] and reacts with indifference to the question of the actual nexus. For the will to construction, it is irrelevant if nature is imitated by chance or if a solution not yet realized in nature results; the normative principle of economy is a principle of the human intellect designed for its benefit, not for the workings of nature. The principle of possible worlds is so endlessly fruitful that an agreement between their deduced, hypothetical construction and the actual world can only be a coincidence.68 It is already apparent with Descartes how the idea of freedom depends on the independence of rational formulae from the factually given: with the example of an “ingenious machine,” he demonstrates the force of the mind as so capable of originality that the inventor is able to conceive of the machine “without having seen anything like it anywhere.”69 Man “chooses” his world, just as God chose a world to create from the possible worlds. Leibniz will one last time attempt to limit these worlds with his notion of preestablished harmony and to balance the weight of endless possibilities with a metaphysical optimism. But when this boundless optimism collapses in the middle of the eighteenth century, the whole trouble of the matter comes to light: The reality of being can only be an arbitrary value in the realm of the possibility of being. What justification then remains for the possible to continue as possible? Nature is the factual result of mechanistic combinations: How can it be binding or serve as a model for the man-made through mimesis? The arbitrariness of natural formations stands in opposition to human creations—aesthetic and technical—with their necessity.
What remains of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” ontologically is not the “best world” but rather the infinity of possible worlds, a notion that becomes intellectually attractive precisely as the real world no longer plausibly represents the world chosen as best. Without being aware of the metaphysical background, Oskar Walzel traces the mid-eighteenth-century idea of the creative genius back to Leibniz.70 Walzel makes it especially clear how the comparison of God to the creative artist already contained within it the artist’s comparison of himself to God. In terms of logic, there will be nothing added here between the Renaissance and the Sturm und Drang. It is nonetheless decisively important that poetry comes to achieve a particular significance in this comparison. While the comparison of God to the master craftsman and the painter go back to antiquity, now the poet becomes the preeminent “creator,” and not coincidentally, but rather—as is now simply obvious—because of the destruction of the mimesis idea. In his Treatise on Painting, Leonardo da Vinci established the similarity of the painter to God: by imitating nature, the painter imitates its creator. And the rebellion of Mannerism against mimesis had de facto only managed an ostentatious deformation of nature. In the poetic tradition, the rebellion against imitatio was primarily against the stylistic restrictions of the classical canon; it was an insistence on the individuality of the expressive form against Aristotelian poetics and Ciceronianism.71 Yet Julius C. Scaliger in his Poetics of 1561 had already defined the difference between poetry and all other art forms: only the poet’s occupation was condere [to compose], while that of all other artists was narrare [to narrate], a retelling as opposed to the creation of the poet, who as an alter deus could found a natura altera [second nature].72 But this idea is still without ontological foundation: it receives a grounding first through Leibniz, who did not himself, however, draw any conclusions from the infinity of possible worlds,73 and could not because of his metaphysical optimism. It is the “Swiss” who first establish the connection between the imagination of the creative poet and the idea of “possible worlds,” which kindled a spark and determined the meaning of art as “metaphysical activity” for the next era. Johann Jakob Breitlinger’s two-volume Critische Dichtkunst [Critical Poetics] of 1740 is an “aesthetic” application of Leibniz’s doctrine of “possible worlds.”74 The poet finds himself in the position of God before the creation of the world, facing the entire infinitude of possible worlds, out of which he may choose; therefore, poetry is—and here comes the most astonishing formulation on our theme that one could wish for!—“an imitation of creation and nature not only in their reality but also in their possibility.” So powerful is the foundational formula of “imitation of nature,” so deeply rooted in the metaphysical tradition, that its sanction for the significance of human creations cannot be dispensed with, even when it is used to express—even to proclaim!—the exact opposite of its intended meaning! The endlessly possible now takes on the same role of regulative ideal as the Platonic Ideas, if it is possible for the discourse of imitation to take on yet another meaning. Johann Jakob Bodmer in his ca. 1740 Abhandlung von dem Wunderbaren in der Poesie [Treatise on the Wonderful in Poetry] speaks of poetry in almost the same language: “It is always preferable that the material to be imitated come from the possible rather than from the present world.”75 The example of Milton shows how the poet exceeds the boundaries of the given and is even able, via a “metaphysical exercise,” to demonstrate nothingness precisely because he throws out everything that makes the world the world by invoking “the creation before the creation.” Here comes the further, astonishing formulation that “through their art and by means of imitation” poets “produce things that are not.”
The nineteenth century decisively sharpens the factual character of nature. What lies before us as nature is the result of unregulated mechanical processes, of the condensation of swirling primordial matter, of the interplay between randomly scattered mutations and the brutal fact of the struggle for survival. The result can be anything—only it cannot be an aesthetic object. How can random chance produce such surprising evidence of the beautiful? The previously unthinkable becomes comprehensible: nature becomes ugly. As Franz Marc writes, “The trees, the flowers, and the earth showed every year more and more of their ugly and repulsive sides, until suddenly I became fully conscious of the ugliness and uncleanness of nature.”76 The ontological background is more precisely expressed by the French painter Raoul Dufy, when he replies to the criticism that he makes too short work of nature, “Nature, my good Sir, is a hypothesis.”77 In the aesthetic experience of nature, the proviso of an endless number of possible worlds has had sufficient impact so that, since Descartes, we cannot say with scientific certainty which of these possibilities are realized in nature, but rather only with which of these possibilities we can functionally cope. This nature has nothing more in common with the ancient concept of nature to which the mimesis idea referred: the unmakable model of all that is made. That all phenomena can be manufactured is instead the universal presupposition of experimental investigations of nature, and hypotheses are outlines of instructions for the manufacture of phenomena. Nature then becomes the embodiment of the possible results of technology. What remains of nature’s exemplary bindingness is revoked. For the technician, nature could become more and more of a substrate whose given constitution stands in the way of the realization of its constructive use, rather than promoting it. Only through the reduction of nature to its raw potential as matter and energy is a sphere of pure construction and synthesis possible. This results in a state of affairs that seems paradoxical at first glance: an era of the highest regard for science is at the same time an age of the decreasing significance of the object of scientific study.
Only now can the positive significance of the dissolution of the identity of being and nature be discerned. The devaluing of nature is thus not simply a nihilistic process, because it becomes possible to believe that “what is visible is but a fragment of the whole, there being many more latent realities,”78 and that this world “is not the only possible world.”79 Thus, art no longer points to another, exemplary being, but rather it is itself this exemplary being for the possibilities of humanity: the work of art no longer wants to mean something; rather, it wants to be something.
But is not this being, which selects one out of the numberless many possibilities that are left lying alongside nature, nonetheless equally limited in its facticity and arbitrary in its selection? All questions arising out of the overcoming of the bindingness of mimesis revolve around this. We are too much in the wake of the agonal process of overcoming mimesis to permit confidence in specific answers. We are dependent on hypotheses where we would like to flee from what is “merely a hypothesis.” There are many indications, however, that the phase of violent assertion of the constructed and the authentic, of “work” and “labor,” was only a transition. The overcoming of the imitation of nature [Nachahmung der Natur] could bring with it an “anticipation of nature” [Vorahmung der Natur]. Although humanity seems very much devoted to making certain of its originary power through the “metaphysical task” of art, a sense of the always-already-there comes through in creation, “as if it were a mere product of nature.”80 I am thinking of a life’s work as paradigmatic in its deliberate intentions as that of Paul Klee, which demonstrates how unanticipated structures crystallize in the latitude of creation, allowing what is ancient and eternal within the original foundation of nature to reemerge with renewed powers of persuasion. Thus, Klee’s titles are not to be interpreted as the usual difficulty of abstract painters to appeal to familiar associations; rather, they are the acts of a bewildered recognition, which almost announces that only one world validly realizes the possibilities of being and that the road to the infinity of the possible was only an escape route from the unfreedom of mimesis. Are the infinite worlds, which Leibniz bequeathed to aesthetics, only endless reflections of one foundational character of being? We do not know this, and we also do not know if we will ever know it; but further investigations into this question will be made innumerable times. Could it just be a circle that takes us back exactly where we started? The prospect of such a circle frightens many today, who fear that all these bold acts might have been in vain. But that is indeed mistaken. It makes a crucial difference whether we put up with reality as unchangeable or if we rediscover it as the core of what is evident in the latitude of the infinite possibilities and are able to consent freely to recognize it—if we are capable, finally, of “making the accidental essential.”81
Translated by Anna Wertz82
Originally published as “Nachahmung der Natur: Zur Vorgeschichte der Idee des schöpferischen Menschen,” Studium Generale 10, no. 5 (1957): 266–283; from Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 9–46. English-language version published in Qui Parle 12, no. 1 (2000): 17–54.
1. Aristotle, Physics 2.8.199a15–17. [The English translation used here is Physics, trans. Robin Waterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).]
2. See the formulation in Politics 4.17.1337a1–2: “The purpose of education, like that of art generally, is simply to copy nature by making her deficiencies good.” [The English translation used here is The Politics of Aristotle, trans. Ernest Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 331.]
3. Physics 2.8.199a12–15. Nature is, so to speak, “auto-technical,” comparable to the physician who heals himself (199b30–32). The inference that such auto-technicality is identical with deliberate intention would be rejected (199b26–28). Aristotle does not demonstrate for us any (at least hypothetically) requisite original situation in which nothing exists yet, or nothing very specific. Since all of his specificity is always already there, for Aristotle there is no moment when something must have been “thought up” and transferred from the imagination into reality. As a rule, thought thinks the existent only afterward.
4. Physics 2.2.194a21f. Meteorology 4.3.381b3–7.
5. See Exhibition Catalog No. 88, “The Triumph of European Mannerism” (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1955).
6. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Preface to Richard Wagner,” in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 31–32.
7. See Werner Hoffman, “ ‘Manier’ und ‘Stil’ in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts,” Studium Generale 8 (1955): 9. Kant had already transferred the aspect of imitation to the reproduction of one artwork by another. Nature, on the other hand, is the ultimately productive Ur-instance of art, through the medium of “genius,” in a sense, however, that implies not imitation but “production through freedom.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), § 46, 182. Genius “is to be entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, § 47, 187). Although genius must be understood as “nature in the subject” (Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, § 46, 186), an ultimately formal bindingness of nature is presupposed that no longer has any explanatory value. Only the historical process is still obviously imitative by “the product of a genius” becoming exemplary “for emulation by another genius, who is thereby awakened to the feeling of his own originality,” so that art “gives rise to a school”—“and for these people, beautiful art is to that extent imitation, to which nature gave the rule through a genius.” Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, § 49, 195–196.
8. Henri Matisse, as cited in Werner Haftmann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols., trans. Janet Seligman (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 1:78.
9. See the editor’s introduction to the Dialogues in Nikolaus von Kues, Die Kunst der Vermutung: Auswahl aus den Schriften, ed. Hans Blumenberg (Bremen: Schünemann, 1957), 231ff. [The English translation used here is “The Layman on Mind” in Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge and Wisdom, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1996).]
10. It is exceedingly characteristic of the “medieval” aspect of Cusa that yet another hidden reference to Aristotle’s dual definition of “art” is contained in the statement of the Idiot cited here: “ars mea est magis perfectoria quam imitatoria figurarum creatarum et in hoc infinitae arti similior” [So my artistry involves the perfecting rather than the imitating of created visible forms, and in this respect it is more similar to the Infinite Art]. It is implied that the two parts of the Aristotelian definition refer to a general difference (instead of a specific one) and that they are to be applied differently. Since the Idiot cannot take his art to be ars imitatoria [imitating art], he is left only with the option of referring to the ars perfectoria [perfecting art], since there is no possible third term left over for him—although the description of what he does, given just before, offers no specific evidence that he takes up something left uncompleted by nature and “completes” it, unless it be the material that he uses. Here it is evident how the history of the human spirit can be canalized through definition (read: through the claim to definitiveness).
11. Orville Wright, “How We Invented the Airplane,” Harper’s Magazine, June 6, 1953.
12. Leonardo da Vinci, Tagebücher und Aufzeichnungen [Diaries and Sketchbook], ed. and trans. Theodor Lücke (Zürich: Schweizer Druck- und Verlagshaus, 1952), 307. “You must do an anatomical study of the wing of a bird, along with the breast muscles that move the wing. And you must do the same with a human being, in order to determine what possibilities there are for man if he wants to keep himself up in the air by flapping wings.” Here, along with the ars imitatoria, the ars perfectoria comes directly into play—that is, the whole of Aristotle.
13. Otto Lilienthal, Birdflight as the Basis of Aviation, trans. A. W. Isenthal (London: Longmans, 1911).
14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I quote from the somewhat altered self-reference in Ecce Homo: Gesammelte Werke 21 (1928): 111 [Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 327].
15. No one could have depicted this more tangibly than Bertolt Brecht, who in one of his Anecdotes of Mr. Keuner entitled “Mr. K. and Nature” has one of his characters say: “Now and then I would like to see a few trees coming out of the house.” The subjunctive [Ich würde gern] is like a hidden man-trap in this quasi-idyll, which reveals itself now, where the “special degree of reality” of natural objects as opposed to the pure relativity of use-objects is celebrated, “something soothingly independent” about the trees, “outside myself.” The hope is finally uttered that perhaps there is something unuseable, nonmaterial about these trees. But this sharp-eyed phenomenology of an underground need for nature ends with a call to order. Its casual style—the following sentence is in parentheses and begins “Mr. K also said”—is merely a paideutic tactic. “We must also make use of nature sparingly. Spending your time amidst nature without any work, you may easily fall into a diseased condition; you are seized by something like a fever.” Brecht, Tales from the Calendar, trans. Yvonne Kapp (London: Lion, 1961), 110 [Translation slightly altered]. To abide in nature without work is a horror to the contemporary (and not just to those of Marxist observance, if they exist). The modern working garden shows this just as much as the various ways the allegedly nature-needy are accompanied by technical equipment that neutralizes the impression of nature.
16. [Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017).]
17. Plato, The Republic, 10.596b: “For presumably none of the craftsmen fabricates the Idea itself.” [The English translation used here is The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).]
18. Plato, The Republic, 10.596b: “There are presumably two, one of couch, one of table.”
19. Aristotle admits only a nominal difference: Metaphysics 1.6.987b10–13. For him, however, the ambiguous nature of the situation, which Plato was to have corrected, is no longer the case.
20. Explicitly in Democritus: “One must either be good, or imitate a good man.” [The English translation used here is Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 99.] Even his derivation of human achievements from those of animals (weaving, darning, building houses, singing; Democritus, fragment 154) clearly implies the superiority of a natural attribute over the poverty of an acquired one.
21. Plato, The Republic, 10.599a.
22. The inclusion of the Sophists refers back to a discussion of my thesis with Dieter Henrich.
23. Plato, The Republic, 10.597b–c.
24. Plato, The Republic, 10.597d.
25. Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 9; 991b 6ff. Formulated positively: Metaphysics XII, 3; 1070a 18–20.
26. Plato, Timaeus 29a. [The English translation used here is Francis M. Comford, Plato’s Cosmology (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 22–23.]
27. Plato, Timaeus 30c–d, 31. See also Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology, 40f.: “The intelligible Living Creature corresponds to it, whole to whole, part to part.”
28. Ancient Platonism soured on this hypothesis, as Willy Theiler has shown in Die Vorbereitung des Neuplatonismus (Berlin: Weidmann, 1930). On the exclusivity of the Ideas for physei onta [natural things], it was maintained (e.g., in Chalcidii Plato Timaeus, ed. Johann Wrobel [Leipzig: Minerva, 1876]): “ideae sunt exempla naturalium rerum” [Ideas are examples of the natural world]. One can be resourceful, with any kind of “Scholasticism,” and use nominal distinctions that lack conceptual cohesiveness, such as the distinction between idea and eidos, already touched on by Plato. Eidos is supposed to be the Idea inherent in the work.
29. Aristotle, Meteorology 1.9.346b16–347a5.
30. Aristotle, Metaphysics 11.21069b19; 11.3.1070a8. See Hans Blumenberg, “The Relationship between Nature and Technology as a Philosophical Problem” [in this volume].
31. Samuel H. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (London: Macmillan, 1927), 126, points out correctly that one cannot render Aristotle’s fantasia precisely as “imagination,” which would imply “an image-making power.” The more direct translation of “fantasy” also allows for a similar inference of an additional meaning, whose ontological possibility is precisely what concerns us here. One should not retroactively attribute this meaning to Aristotle. This makes all the less comprehensible to me Butcher’s mysterious remark: “The idea of a creative power in man which transforms the materials supplied by the empirical world is not unknown either to Plato or Aristotle, but it is not a separate faculty or denoted by a distinct name” (Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 127n1). It is characteristic of the history of the meaning of the term “fantasy” how late the first, original connotations flood in and no less that it was a representative of the so-called Second Sophistic Movement in the third century AD who gave a new definition to phantasia as “creative imagination.” A Greek-English Lexicon, ed. Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925) lists Philostratus, in his Apollonius Vita (Flavii Philostrati Opera, 2 vols., ed. Carl Ludwig Kayser [Leipzig: Teubner, 1870/71], VI, 19) where “fantasy” and “imitation” are expressly contrasted, and this in reference to what inheres additionally in the statue of gods by Phidias or Praxiteles, the addition of what is not seen, not pre-given: “Mimesis enacts what has appeared, while phantasia enacts what has not appeared.”
32. Butcher, Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, 116.
33. Butcher, 117.
34. Aristotle, Poetics 25.1460b11, 35.
35. Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.3.1070a7ff. “Now art is a principle of movement in something other than the thing moved, nature is a principle in the thing itself.” [The English translation used here in A New Aristotle Reader, ed. J. L. Ackrill (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 342.]
36. Pseudo-Aristotle, De mundo 5.396a33–b22. It is surely wrong to claim that the mimesis element in this connection is present already in Heraclitus, as Carl Michaelis does, s.v. “mimeomai,” Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1943) [available in English as Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. and trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964)], probably prompted by the complete rendition by Hermann Diels, Zwei Fragmente Heraklits (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1901), 22 B 10.
37. “And the arts of mortal men, imitating the working of the sun in the physical world … having been instructed in this by nature.” Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, vol.1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), 2.52.7.
38. Tertullian, De cultu feminarum I, 8.
39. Karl Reinhardt, Poseidonios (Munich: Beck, 1921), 400. In this connection, see Cicero’s expanded formulation of this relation with reference to the art of rhetoric in De ratione ad C. Herennium: “Art imitates nature because what the latter desires the former finds, and what the latter shows the former follows.”
40. Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium 90.16; “The things that are indispensable require no elaborate pains for their acquisition; it is only the luxuries that call for labour. Follow nature, and you will need no skilled craftsmen.” [The English translation used here is The Epistles of Seneca, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 4:405.]
41. Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium 90.18. [The English translation used here is Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell (New York: Penguin, 1969), 166.]
42. For example, The Enneads of Plotinus, where the duplication of the world is executed in such detail that the underlying logical structure of the realm of Ideas is given up in favor of the exactitude of a model of the physical world. The world then seems conceivable only in this one particular, binding form. Even the reversal of rank, described by Willy Theiler, between the Demiurge and the Ideas—which, with the aid of logical speculation, Philo subordinated to the organon of the creator god—did not alter the absolute exemplarity of the Ideas as an integral stock (Theiler, Die Vorbereitung des Neuplatonismus, 30).
43. Henry Deku, “Possibile Logicum,” Philosophisches Jahrbuch 64 (1956): 10.
44. Augustine, De natura et gratia 44.52.
45. The pervasiveness of the problem is most clearly formulated in Retractationes 2.7: “how … this could be the case when there is no precedent for it.” [The English translation used here is Revisions, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010).]
46. Lucretius, De rerum natura 5.181–186 [On the Nature of the Universe, trans. R. E. Latham and John Godwin (New York: Penguin, 1994)].
47. Augustine, De spiritu et littera 1.1 [Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, 2 vols., ed. Whitney J. Oates (New York: Random House, 1948), 461].
48. Augustine, De spiritu et littera 25.62.
49. Augustine, De spiritu et littera 5.7.
50. As formulated by Henry Deku in correspondence.
51. Augustine, Confessiones 12.19.28: “It is true that you have not only made whatever has been created and given shape, but also whatever has the capacity to be created and take shape, for all things come from you.” [The English translation used here is Confessions, trans. Carolyn J.-B. Hammond (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 301.] (Günter Gawlick alerted me to this quotation.)
52. Augustine, De vera religione 18.36: “Thus everything that is, insofar as it is, and everything that is not yet, insofar as it can be, has its being [or potential being] from God.” [The English translation used here is “True Religion,” in On Christian Belief, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2005), 52.] The context of this citation is also illuminating in connection with the previously discussed De spiritu et litera. The theological concept of salus [salvation] is here identified with that of bonum [good] and laid at the foundation of classical assumptions as integritas naturae [integrity of nature]—in Platonic terms, as an expression of Ideas.
53. Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus 83, q. 46.
54. For the derivation of possible from posse, I quote the versio latina of De natura hominis of Nemesius of Emesa: “tria igitur haec sunt ad invicem se habentia: potens, potestas, possibile, potens quidem essentia, potestas vero a qua habemus posse, possibile autem, quod secundum potestatem natum est fieri.” [“So those three things, as we said, depend on each other—being able, power and possibility: what is able is the substance, power is that from which we are able, the possible that which is of a nature to come about through power.” Nemesius, On the Nature of Man, trans. R. W. Sharples and P. J. Van Der Eijk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 182.]
55. The significance of this author for the history of the concept of possibility is demonstrated by August Faust, Der Möglichkeitsgedanke (Heidelberg: Winter, 1931), 1:72–75.
56. Albertus Magnus, De causis et processu universitatis 1 tr. 3 c. 4: “Primum enim et operi proximum, in quo primi est potentia agendi, est illud, quod dat formam operi, et non illud, quod iubet et praecipit opus fieri; lumen autem intellectus universaliter agentis est forma operis opus determinans ad rationem et formam, voluntas autem non est nisi praecipiens ut fiat” [The first and the most proximate (principle) for action—in which, first, lies the power to act—is that which gives form to the action, and not that which orders and commands that the action be done. The light of the generally acting intellect is the form of the action determining the action according to content and form—will, however, is commanding it to happen].
57. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1, q. 9a. 1 ad 2: “suam similitudinem diffundit [sc. divina sapientia] usque ad ultima rerum: nihil enim esse potest quod non procedat a divina sapientia per quamdam imitationem” [it (i.e., divine wisdom) diffuses its likeness even to the outermost of things; for nothing can exist that does not proceed from the divine wisdom by way of some kind of imitation].
58. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 1.75 ad 3: “In these things that can be done both by art and nature, art imitates nature.” [The English translation used here is Of God and His Creatures (London: Burnes & Oates, 1905), 191.]
59. [Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 2.75 ad 3.]
60. In octo libros Physicorum Aristotelis exposito 2, lect. 13 n. 4. [The English translation used here is Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, trans. Richard J. Blackwell, Richard J. Spath, and W. Edmund Thirlkel (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 119.] To show how a more authentic rendering of Aristotelian meaning can be achieved, I cite the translation of Johannes Argyropylos (ed. Immanuel Bekker [Berlin 1831], 3.109b): “atque ars omnino alia perficit, quae natura nequit perficere, alia imitando naturam facit” [And art makes entirely different things, which nature cannot make, and makes others by imitating nature].
61. Bonaventure, Breviloquim 2.1.1: “The entire fabric of the universe was brought into existence in time and out of nothingness, by one first Principle, single and supreme, whose power, though immeasurable, has disposed all things by measure and number and weight.” [The English translation used here is The Works of Bonaventure (Paterson, NJ: St. Anthony Guild Press, 1963), 2:69.] Deeply rooted ontologically in this factual specificity is the “incentive” to measure, to count, to venture, which opens the empirical route to knowledge.
62. Bonaventure, II. Sententiarum 1.2.1.1 concl.: “Propter ergo immensitatis manifestationem multa de suis theauris profert, non omnia, quia effectus non potest aequari virtuti ipsius primae causae.” The Aristotelian foundation for the vast heterogeneity of reality is typical. However, Bonaventure was more conscious of the difference between him and Aristotle than Aquinas was; in fact, he believed that he could praise Aristotle as a historical figure who understood the eternity of the world rightly, and in accordance with Bonaventure’s own principles.
63. William of Ockham, Quodlibeta Septem 6, q. 1: “Deus multa potest facere quae non vult facere” [God can do many things that he does not want to do]. Here the relationship of our problem to Ockham’s “nihilism” is apparent: The realism of the universalia proves itself to be incompatible with creatio ex nihilo in the strict sense of the term. The universale as somehow concretely reproduced and reproducible has only one meaning as long as the universe of possible existence is a finite whole (as the mundus intelligibilis), for which only existence is, as it were “supplied” (distinctio realis). The concept of the potentia absoluta, however, implies an infinite possible universe; it makes no sense to interpret individual entities as “duplications” of a universal. Creation signifies the ex nihilo of the essentia of every creature. In this way, Ockham argues, the notion that God contained his potentia through the creation of what is, is ruled out. The establishment of a universale only within the bounds of its reproduction of itself would make only imitation possible, and not creation: “creatio est simpliciter de nihilo; ita quod nihil essentiale vel intrinsecum rei simpliciter praecedat in esse real!” [Creation happens simply out of nothingness, and so this essential or intrinsic nothing of a thing simply proceeds into real existence]. The realism of the universe would mean that “per consequens omnia producta post primum productum non crearentur, quia non essent de nihilo” [consequently, all things produced after the first production are not created because they do not come into being out of nothingness] (Bonaventure, Sententiarum 1 dist. 2 q. 4 D). How much room the realm of possibility already allowed for is apparent in Ockham’s refutation of the claim of his predecessor, Duns Scotus, that God alone possesses creative powers. Ockham, Quodlibeta Septem 7.23. This is not yet the investiture of human beings with the attribute of creating, but it releases the potential of this idea from its exclusively theological conception and makes its transfer predictable.
64. Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia 2.2: “Quoniam ipsa forma infinita non est nisifinite recepta, ut omnis creatura sit quasi infinitas finita aut Deus creatus, ut sit eo modo, quo hoc melius esse possit; ac si dixisset creator: Fiat, et quia Deus fieri non potuit, qui est ipsa aeternitas, hoc factum est, quod fieri potuit Deo similus.”
65. “Quodprincipi placuit legis vigorem habet” (Corpus Iuris Civilis: lustiniani Digesta 1.4.1, ed. Theodore Mommsen [Berlin: Weidemann, 1877]), as cited in Nicholas of Cusa, De beryllo XXIX. This is explicitly aimed at the inability of classical metaphysics to explicate the act of creation: “Cur autem sic sit et non aliter constitutum, propterea non sciret nisi quod demum resolutus [I] diceret: Quod principi” [But why it was established to be such and not otherwise, [Aristotle] would not thereby know—except in the end he would say without hesitation(!): For what has pleased the Prince] (Nicholas of Cusa, De beryllo. See XVI). Ecclesiastes 7:17 is cited for biblical authority: “Omnium operum Dei nulla est ratio” (There is no reason for all the works of God). [The English translation used here is from On [Intellectual] Eyeglasses (De Beryllo) in Nicholas of Cusa, Metaphysical Speculations, trans. Jasper Hopkins (Minneapolis, MN: Arthur J. Banning Press, 1998), sec. 51.]
66. Nicholas of Cusa, De ludo globi I: “perfectiorem et rotundiorem mundum atque etiam imperfectiorem et minus rotundum potuit facere Deus, licet factus sit ita perfectus sicut esse potuit” [God could make a more perfect and rounder world, and even one that was more imperfect and less round, although the world that he did make would be as perfect in its own way as it could be].
67. Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will, trans. J. I. Packer and O. R. Johnston (Ada, MI: Baker, 1990), 217: “And by the omnipotence of God I mean, not the power by which He omits to do many things that He could do, but the active power by which He mightily works all in all. It is in this sense that Scripture calls Him omnipotent.”
68. “The Principles … are so vast and so fertile, that their consequences are far more numerous than the entire observed contents of the visible world.” Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, “Part Three: The Visible Universe,” sec. 4, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
69. Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, “Part One: The Principles of Human Knowledge,” sec. 17.
70. Oskar Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftsbury zu Goethe (Munich: Wortkunst, 1932).
71. See August Buck, Italienische Dichtungslehren (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1952).
72. The passage is cited at length in Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol, 45ff.
73. Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol, 51.
74. Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol, 39, and the passage following.
75. Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol, 43, for this and the following quotations.
76. This and other references from Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center, trans. Brian Battershaw (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1958), 159.
77. Cited in Maurice Raynal et al., Geschichte der modernen Malerei: Fauvismus und Expressionismus (Geneva: Skira, 1950), 69ff.
78. Paul Klee, cited in Werner Haftmann, The Mind and Work of Paul Klee, trans. anon. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1954), 90.
79. Paul Klee, Über die moderne Kunst (Bern: Benteli, 1945), 43. [The English translation used here is On Modern Art, trans. Raul Findlay (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 45.]
80. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, § 45, 185.
81. Klee, cited by Haftmann, Paul Klee, 71 [translation altered].
82. [Minor corrections and additional editorial footnotes by Hannes Bajohr.]