(1964)
The history of Western literary theory can be summed up as a continuous debate on the classical dictum that poets are liars.1 Even Nietzsche was still under the influence of this assertion, when, claiming a metaphysical dignity for art, he had to invert it, contrasting the truthfulness of art to the falseness of nature.2 Halfway between the classical topos and the modern antithesis stands the scholastic concession to literature of a minimum veritatis [the least truth].
If we are to consider the pros and cons of the classical dictum, we must first decide what is meant by its antithesis—i.e., that poets “tell the truth.” There are, I believe, two sorts of truth involved: first, when it is claimed that literature refers to a given outside reality—whatever that reality may be; second, when literature is said to create a reality of its own. We must also bear in mind the purely logical possibility that both thesis and antithesis may be ignored, and art may be regarded as totally divorced from such considerations as truth and falseness or any criterion connected with “reality.” However, this logical scheme does not necessarily coincide with the historical possibilities.
At no time in the history of Western aesthetic theory has there been any serious departure from the tendency to legitimize the work of art in terms of its relation to reality, and so any critical assessment of the foundation of traditional aesthetics must begin with a clarification of what is meant by “reality.” This is difficult, for generally in our dealings with what we regard as real, we never get down to the predicative stage of defining exactly what it is that constitutes the reality. And yet the moment a doubt is cast on the reality of an action or a proposition, our attention is drawn to the specific conditions which have led us to regard it as real. The very fact that the “truth” of literature has always been contested has made literary theory a focus for the critical assessment of concepts of reality and for the unmasking of implicit preconceptions. Ultimately, we shall have to recognize what at a given time has been taken for granted as most obvious and trivial, i.e., not even worth stating—and hence never specifically formulated. Our immediate task, then, must be to define the various historical concepts of reality.
The first historical concept that I should like to discuss here is what we might call the “reality of instantaneous evidence.” This concept is not explicitly propounded but is presupposed when, for instance, Plato unhesitatingly proceeds from the assumption that at the first sight of ideas the human mind immediately and with total confidence realizes that it is confronted with the ultimate and unsurpassable reality and, at the same time, is aware that the sphere of the empirical and the sensual is not and could never be such a reality. However, it is by no means taken for granted that anyone could view the duality of the empirical world and the ideal world without risking a corresponding split in his own consciousness of reality—a risk we should certainly apprehend the moment we tried to imagine our minds transferred from the world around us to one that was completely different. The classical concept of reality that gave rise to Plato’s doctrine of ideas—though not identical to it—presumes that reality presented itself as such and of its own accord, and that at the moment of its presence it was there and totally incontrovertible.3 For these formal characteristics, the metaphor of light is particularly apt. This concept of reality also gave sustenance to a way of thinking that saw nothing problematic in biblical and other accounts of the appearance of God or of a god, who could present himself as such in a moment of direct revelation, leaving absolutely no room for the suspicion or the fear that he was illusory.4 “Instantaneous evidence” is a concept that involves the instant recognition of ultimate reality and can be identified precisely through this implication.
A second concept of reality, basic to the Middle Ages and after, may be called guaranteed reality. The length of time philosophy took to grasp and express the implications behind man’s understanding of an attitude to the world may be gauged from the fact that the history of modern philosophy had its starting point in the systematic formulation of this particular concept. For Descartes, there is no instantaneous evidence of the ultimate reality, either for the self comprehending itself in a quasi-syllogism (cogito, ergo sum [I think therefore I am]), or for God, whose existence is deduced from the concept of God. The given reality becomes certain only by virtue of a guarantee which has to be secured by thought in a complex metaphysical process, because only by means of this process can the suspicion of a world as gigantic hoax be eliminated. The idea of God as the guarantor of the reliability of human knowledge—the schema of the third instance—of the absolute witness, had been emerging throughout the history of the medieval concept of the human mind ever since Augustine. This schema precludes the possibility of any one characteristic that might pinpoint the total reality of a given object. The characteristic of clarity and distinctness which Descartes attributes to evidence can only be explained in terms of the metaphysical assumptions arising from his philosophical doubts; otherwise, as has rightly been observed, there would be no difference between this sort of clarity and that found in a state of paranoia. The schema of guaranteed reality, with a third instance mediating in the relationship between subject and object, has had a considerable impact on modern theory of art. It is still to be seen in the attempt to guarantee the truth of the artistic product by referring to the underlying experiences of the artist and the psychological integrity with which he has transformed these experiences.
A third concept of reality may be defined as the actualization of a context in itself.5 This concept differs from the others through its time component: reality as “evidence” makes itself felt in the present moment; guaranteed reality refers back to the instance that creates and mediates between the world and human reason—in other words, to what scholasticism called veritas ontologica [ontological truth] that has its place in the past. The third concept takes reality as the result of an actualization, a progressive certainty which can never reach a total, final consistency, as it always looks forward to a future that might contain elements which could shatter previous consistency and so render previous “realities” unreal. Even when a person’s life-space is complete, we can only say that his reality has been continuous, and that such and such constituted his illusions, delusions, and imaginings—in other words, “his” reality. It is typical of this particular concept that the possessive adjective is linked with the word reality. The transcendency of time either invalidates the self’s concept of “its” reality, or, at best, allows it the quasi-justification that it is nothing but a single perspectivistic topographical view. Reality as a self-constituting context is a boundary concept of the ideal totality of all selves—it is a confirmative value for the experience and interpretation of the world that take place in intersubjectivity. Obviously, this concept of reality has a sort of “epic” structure, relating to the totality of a world that can never be completed or grasped in its entirety—a world that can be only partially experienced and so can never exclude different contexts of experience which in themselves constitute different worlds.6
The last concept of reality that we shall discuss here is based on the experience of resistance. Here illusion is understood as the desires entertained by the self: unreality as the threat to and seduction of the self through the projection of its own wishes; the consequent antithesis is reality as that which cannot be mastered by the self, i.e., which resists it not merely as an experience of contact with an inert mass but also—most radically—in the logical form of the paradox. This would explain why paradox has become the favorite form of testimony in theology, which in the very frustrations and vexations of its logically inconsistent contents sees the proof of an ultimate reality that overwhelms the self and demands that it subjugate itself. Reality here is that which is totally unavailable, which cannot be relegated simply to the level of material for manipulation, but can only occasionally appear to be processed by one technique or another, then to reveal itself in the full potency of its overwhelming autonomy as a factum brutum [brute fact] of which it may afterwards be said, though not conceived, that it might have emanated from a free and constructive process of creative thinking. The significant feature of this concept is that which cannot be further analyzed—the basic constant, the “atomic fact”; it is typified by such claims as Heisenberg’s, that playing off two mutually exclusive images against each other can ultimately convey the correct impression of a particular reality—or George Thomson’s, that a “complicated section of mathematics is just as representative of reality as ‘mass,’ ‘energy,’ etc.” The beginnings of this concept are perhaps to be found where awareness of reality is supposed to involve an instinct, the practical workings of which need not necessarily exclude or remove theoretical doubts but make them irrelevant to our assertions concerning our existence or that of the self in general. D’Alembert suggests this in the introduction to the Encyclopédie. One might perhaps also cite Lessing’s letter to Mendelssohn—written more or less at the same time—in which he states, “with every violent desire or detestation, we are aware to a larger extent of our reality”7—an idea that separates awareness of reality from thought and removes this awareness of reality to the sphere of experiences unavailable to the mind with itself. Clearly, then, we must face the possibility that the modern era is one in which there is no longer any one homogeneous concept of reality, or that if one particular form of awareness predominates, it does so through confrontation with another fully developed or developing experience of reality.
This historical sequence of concepts of reality and the different ways of understanding works of art are dependent on each other. Without doubt, the theory of imitation8—the concept that is dominant in our aesthetic tradition—is based on the notion of instantaneous evidence. The theory of imitation depends upon two ontological premises:
It follows from these premises that an artist can only repeat nature, because there is no scope for him to transcend it. Furthermore, it is a fundamental feature of this exemplary given reality that not only can it be repeated, but indeed it should be repeated: it demands imitation of itself because if, in its exemplariness, it failed to instigate such images of itself, it would remain totally sterile. Thus, Platonic idealism demonstrates why there are such things as works of artifice and art, but also why nothing essential can be “achieved” by them. Herein lies the peculiar ambivalence of Platonism in the history of aesthetics: it has always been at one and the same time a justification and a devaluation of artistic activity. Plato himself verifies this in the tenth book of his Republic, where he attacks literature and the pictorial arts in general, arguing that in depicting given objects the artist is already creating something secondhand, insofar as whatever he is basing his work on is not itself the true and ultimate reality, but merely an imitation of it by nature or by a craftsman. The work of art, then, is an imitation of an imitation. The fact that the image of an image demands a completely different evaluation from that of the image of the original is also based on the concept of instantaneous evidence: in the unsurpassable evidence of the “original,” reality can be experienced as something reliable, and the image of this original is legitimized by the fact that it has to be, and not by what it has to be (a definition applicable only to the original). This is confirmed by Plato’s example of artistic representation of elementary household objects through the art of painting. There is no such thing in nature as a table or a bed; also, for Plato there can be no question of the craftsman’s having invented such objects for a particular practical purpose, for this would mean that the craftsman was the originator of the idea. According to Plato, for every meaningful human design there must already be “originals” in the world of ideas, and it is upon these that the craftsman bases his work. And so the copy of the original is accomplished by the man who manufactures the table or bed. The painter, however, who in turn reproduces such objects, bases his work on something that has already been produced—in other words, he creates a copy of what is already a copy.
But why does Plato not concede that the painter—just like the craftsman—may himself see the idea, when depicting such objects, thus fulfilling the requirements for producing a copy of the original? The tenth book of the Republic offers no answer to this question. But the problem is not unimportant if one wishes to understand the ambivalence of Platonism in aesthetic theory. It also plays a significant role in justifying the thesis that the Platonic residue within our aesthetic tradition is what denies the novel a legitimate place in the traditional system of aesthetics, making it a genre of the bad aesthetic conscience that has constantly had to be transcended or assimilated into other legitimate genres.
Platonic ideas fix a canon of what is both demanded of and permitted to the copier. They were, first of all, the basis of our abstract concepts, not yet themselves the primal images of forms, but norms for the accomplishments of reason, say, for establishing relations between objects, for comprehending geometrical proportions, and, finally, for evaluating actions. In all these spheres, ideas had the prescriptive character of rules; they were representative not of reality as it ought to be, but of the actual obligation. The fact that the original, preexistent experience of the ideas had to be visualized in the imagination led to their eidetic character’s becoming more and more clearly defined, so that they formed primal images of all the vague copies we see in the visible world around us. But these ideas were not only images of pure essences—they were primal images with the true exemplary character that demands and compels imitation. The terms “primal image” and “copy” are not just relational concepts arising out of the completed imitation but they themselves have an ideal quality, corresponding to the origin of the doctrine of ideas: i.e., the primal image is independent of the actual imitation and preceded it as a norm that could be substantiated only through the actuality and the faithfulness of the copy. This consequence of the doctrine of ideas, which had already come to the fore in the Republic through the singling out of goodness as an idea of ideas, is revealed in its full significance in the dialogue Timaeus: here the fact of the creation of the world is shown to need no further motivation than that of a mere glimpse of the ideas by a craftsman who is considered capable of performing this task, and who only requires affirmation of the truthfulness of his work, but not of any particular disposition of his will to take on and execute such a work. The visible world is, accordingly, a fulfillment of the compulsive implications of the primal images, which demand imitation as the correlative that completes their meaning. However, it is clear that in this system only the first, direct copy can be the legitimate fulfillment of the demands of the original, and this first copy therefore represents the end of the process of imitation; its imitative nature, though accepted itself as real predication, precludes the possibility of its becoming a binding model in its own right. The artist therefore only copies something which itself is already a copy and can be nothing but a copy, and he thereby raises it to the level of an original—a level which intrinsically it is not qualified to occupy. It is not every copy, or copies as such, that Plato derogates, but only those that did not directly imitate the original—i.e., the “unreal” copies, the indirect secondhand imitations that are based on what is already an imitation. One of the misunderstandings of Neoplatonism is that it gives a totally negative evaluation to all imitations, so that even the creating of the world itself, and not just that of the copies worked by the artist, becomes a dubious event. However, this Neoplatonic misconception of Plato’s criticism of imitation at the same time clarifies the curious fact that Platonic elements had a part in a development which led eventually to the liquidation of imitation as a basis for the artistic creativity.
We must not forget that the aesthetic theory of imitation is part of the Aristotelian tradition.9 With Aristotle, ideas became formal principles of nature itself, so that actuality and necessity merged in the world to such an extent that the artist’s function was to extract from the external world what ought to be and the way it ought to be. Artistic representation therefore became a direct copy, and was not, so to speak, a copy once removed. The dignity of imitation as the essence of artistic activity was thus established, not by revaluing mimesis itself, but simply by reducing the number of levels of reference: art now took over the position which in Plato had been occupied by nature itself or by the demiurge that created it, a position in which artistic activity had been essentially superfluous and even inconsistent with the system.
It is true that this is but a residue of Platonism in Aristotelism, explaining why a work of art may be possible, but endowing it with neither justification nor necessity. This is why the Aristotelian tradition in aesthetics, even though it sets out to define artistic activity as an imitation of nature, accounts for it and evaluates it almost exclusively in terms of man’s emotional needs and its effect on these needs. In Aristotelian aesthetics, the basic concept of man is more important than that of reality; it is a system conceived from the standpoint of the viewer or listener. Against such a background, the original, angry dictum that artists, and particularly poets, are liars is deprived of its negatively critical substance, insofar as the Aristotelian definition of art as imitation does not concern what ought to be done, but only what can be done.
The revival of Platonism during the Renaissance10 did not signify a reversal of the original derivation—Aristotelian concept arising from Platonian; the critique of the ideal of imitation was now based on a shift in metaphysical interest. In the late Middle Ages, man’s interest in himself and in his position in the world became the overriding consideration, and the answer to his questions lay first and foremost in man’s own works and achievements. Together with the dignity of man’s works, the dignity of art itself became the central theme of the Renaissance. An aesthetic system concerned principally with the observer’s reactions scarcely fitted in with such an approach. The comparability of man’s creations with those of God was implicit or even explicit in this newly developing concept of the artist; this meant returning directly to the question of art’s relationship to reality, and the extent to which this relationship was inevitable or contingent, necessary or dispensable. If this reinterpretation of the early symptoms of the modern view of art is correct, then the result of such an approach is not only a new definition of the difference between physical and aesthetic objects but also an inherent rivalry between the artist and the outside world as a whole—in other words, the artist offers not only a transformation, idealization, or variation of the world, but works that are, so to speak, of equal rank to it. Both in terms of the classical concept of instantaneous evidence and the medieval concept of reality guaranteed by God, this idea of the artist’s competing with given reality would have been senseless and groundless. Only a new concept, bestowing upon the intersubjective consistency of the given in space and time the sole right to recognition through a mind conscious of reality, could give substance, and even intelligibility, to the artist’s claim to totality as against the claim of the factual world.
The same concept of creation, now involving the possibility of totality in a single work—without this possibility’s being systematically made explicit—removed the very foundations of the Aristotelian concept of the artificial and the artistic. While nature appeared as the expression of an omnipotent, divine will, idealization as the task of the artist had become something not only dubious but demonic by the implication that nature was perhaps not what it ought to be; the artist had, as it were, to “catch up” with its possibilities and make up for its deficiencies in relation to what it ought to be. What, according to the Aristotelian definition, could it mean that art and technology completed what nature could not finish? For the medieval view of the world, nature had lost its specific, authentic evidence as reality. The fact, now constituted and guaranteed by an absolute will, was a great new element of ambiguity: it allowed the reassurance of not having to ask questions, and at the same time gave rise to the annoyance that anything factual is bound to arouse in man’s reason. The fact that no aesthetics came forth from the premises and postulates of Cartesian philosophy was clearly due to this philosophy’s being—in respect of its concept of reality—“medieval,” clinging to the guaranteed schema of reality. Cartesian aesthetics could not have been anything but, at best, a theory of medieval art. We should not be surprised or misled by this historical phenomenon; it is quite natural that the most deeply hidden implication of an era—namely, its concept of reality—should become explicit only when the awareness of that reality has already been broken.
If the question of the possibility of the novel is put as an ontological one, searching out the foundations of the concept of reality, this means that one is also inquiring into the origin of a new claim of art—its claim, not merely to represent objects of the world, or even to imitate the world, but to actualize a world. A world—nothing less—is the theme and postulate of the novel.11 It is odd that the premise underlying this approach was created by the renewal of Platonism, for, in this context, Platonism took on a historical function that was quite extraneous to it. Its inherent negative evaluation of imitation was, at the beginning of the modern age, more or less the “desired” effect, whose genuine premises certainly were not to be renewed: the difference between what is and what ought to be, as the scope of art, was a possibility that had in the meantime been excluded. Art was rather to concern itself with that sphere which had not been actualized by God or by nature, and so there was no longer any duality of existent reality and formative art. Instead, every work, measured against the new concept of reality, was the reality of the possible, whose unreality had to be the premise for the relevance of its actualization.
If our original thesis is correct—namely, that the history of aesthetics is one long debate on the classical dictum that poets are liars—this history must always be intimately related to concepts of the human capacity to “tell the truth.” It is the change in the concept of truth which opens up new possibilities for art to be “true.” The classical concept of truth, valid throughout most of the Middle Ages, maintained that in cognition, ontologically, there were present and effective the same constituent factors that made objects themselves what they were—in Aristotelian terms, their essential form. Between the object and the act of perception there exists a causal link of clearly imitative representation. Connected with the medieval concept of a transcendently guaranteed reality, there arose a new possibility of abandoning this direct causal link and, instead, viewing the sphere of cognition as a heterogeneous, individual world of mere signs for objects—a world whose internal order needed only to correspond precisely to the internal order of the elements of things for truth to be attained. The concept of nonimitative cognition, in which words and figures and their correlations can stand for objects and their correlations, has its metaphysical foundation in the premise of a third instance, which guarantees the strict coherence even of that which is totally heterogeneous. The Aristotelian claim that the soul is everything of the possible—a view that gave the most abstract definition to the age-old principle of cognition through similarity and affinity—takes on a new meaning: the cognitive mind, with its capacity for putting symbols in place of things and their correlations, is capable of every formulation of objective facts. The late Middle Ages had to abandon the concept of cognition through similarity and imitation mainly because it seemed to set the human spirit up too close to the divine. The new concept of cognition, however, radically separates the divine spirit, which sees all things directly and in their essence, from the human spirit, which can only represent them symbolically; the human spirit thus loses its receptive openness to things, and becomes instead a creative principle employing its own symbolic tools.12 The enhanced transcendency of the divine rule over things forcibly gives rise to the immanence of the new concept of human mastery over these things. The correspondence between cognition and its objects is no longer material but functional. The immanent consistency of the symbolic system of concepts remains the only—though adequate—approximation to the given reality. The concept of the image is released from its hitherto inescapable confinement between the original and the copy.13 Truth, in the strict sense of adaequatio, remains possible only for what man himself has created and of which he can therefore be completely aware without any symbolic mediation: this includes the structural laws governing his symbolic tools of cognition—laws that are formulated by logic—mathematics, history, language, and, last but not least, art. No longer is absolute truth to be seen somewhere in the relation between the representational work of art and nature; it now lies between the subjective mind perceiving the work and the product which is viewed as a possible piece of reality created by the artist. It is no longer through his relationship to nature, as a form of creation from which he is alienated, but through his cultural works, that man can match God’s direct contact with his own works both as creator and as observer. This hitherto unknown metaphysical dignity of the work of art has its foundation in what is, at one and the same time, a limiting and an intensifying transformation and dissolution of the concept of truth. The consequences of this new view of man’s spiritual achievements are far-reaching. Reality can no longer be considered an inherent quality of an object but is the embodiment of a consistently applied syntax of elements. Reality presents itself now as ever before as a sort of text which takes on its particular form by obeying certain rules of internal consistency. Reality is for modern times a context; even such an important phenomenon in the history of ideas as criticism of the theological interpretation of miracles as testifying to the divine, is totally compelled to maintain this concept of reality. Now, if aesthetic objects can have such a thing as a specific reality, they, too, are not only bound by the criterion of context as proof of their reality but are also constrained, as regards their scope and the wealth of elements they incorporate, to compete with the context of nature, i.e., to become secondary worlds: they no longer extract, by imitation, realities from the one reality, but imitate the fact of being real.
Ultimately, art claims as its subject matter the formal proof of reality and not the material content that presents itself with this proof. Without doubt, the nonpossible would represent the fulfillment of this claim—namely, the infinite context, which alone could be counted as the normal equivalent to the open-endedness of physical experience. This is the starting point from which modern literature—and the aesthetics appropriate to it—proceeded toward the novel as the most comprehensively “realistic” genre, representing a context which, though finite in itself, presumes and indicates infinity. The potential infinity of the novel represents its ideality, arising out of the concept of reality, as well as the aesthetic irritation inevitable in view of the fact that its task of representing an infinite context can be fulfilled only by aesthetically binding principles of form. Perhaps the clearest embodiment of the problems of the genre is to be seen in the humorous novel: already in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the subject is the possibility as well as the impossibility of the novel. The increasing incongruity between the real and the represented existence brings out the novel’s implication of infinity, and shows the dilemma created when a finite text tries to evoke an infinite context. As a finite and discontinuous work, the novel thwarts the reader’s expectations of the “et cetera,” and so focuses his attention on its true theme: that it is ultimately not concerned with proving its own validity as a work of art through a sequence of edited events, but with the conflict between the imaginary reality of a context and the reality of the existing world. Another such humorous novel that is not only in fact incomplete but also incompletable, and that has reality itself as its subject matter, is Jean Paul’s Der Komet [The Comet].14 Here the theme is the “experimental” presentation of the illusory world of the supposed crown prince Nikolaus Marggraf, interwoven with the real, or supposedly real, world of the German petty principality; as the two worlds act upon each other, the predicates of illusion and reality appear to be interchangeable. This very fact shows that what we tend to call “representation” in a novel is in fact “asemantic”—i.e., it represents nothing but itself; it removes the boundaries between being and meaning, matter and symbol, object and sign, destroying the correspondences that had been integral to our whole tradition of truth concepts. This destruction, nevertheless, involves continuing dependence on the tradition it negates, indirectly creating the uncreatable by removing the hitherto unchallenged function: the sign no longer purports to represent a “thing,” and so itself takes on the substantiality of a thing. This, of course, is an approach that ranges beyond the novel and its basic concept of reality, to an awareness of reality that is determined by resistance, and to a corresponding and confirmatory art form that is made up of means of expression that annihilate themselves, and use their own inconsistencies to demonstrate their own lack of meaning.15 Once more the novel takes itself as its own subject matter; by demonstrating the impossibility of the novel, a novel becomes possible. I should like to go into rather more detail concerning this problem of form. The idea of reality as context imposes on the novel the form of linear consistency within a given system of space and time. But, as I have pointed out, this concept of reality becomes valid only through an agreement among subjects that are capable of understanding one another—i.e., through intersubjectivity and its various possible perspectives. So far as I am aware, the novel first took on a perspective pattern with Balzac, whose cycle of novels creates the illusory reality of a whole human society through the recurrence of identical characters viewed from changing perspectives. As far as the question of reality is concerned, there is a big difference between the epic-linear and the perspective recurrence of characters—the spatial consciousness is different, and the world created is far subtler. Balzac’s perspective system enables a linear series of episodes to be translated into simultaneous events. But it demands more than mere consistency with elements already dealt with, for perspective consistency allows a transformation of those elements as the emphasis shifts, for instance, from one character to another, or from one aspect of character to another. The result is a highly complex process of reconciling individual aspects to one another and to the overall identity of the object to which they belong. This is basically quite different from the traditional introduction of individual characters drawn in preparation for their ultimate meeting at the climax of the plot. It is no longer merely the characters in the novel that move through the various events contained in the plot; the reader now moves around the body of imaginary reality, passing through all the different aspects from which it can be viewed. Balzac himself believed, and expressly indicated as one of his most daring intentions, that the recurrence of individual characters in his Comédie Humaine [The Human Comedy] would endow this fictitious cosmos with more life and movement,16 but in fact it is not the world of the novel that is set in motion so much as the reader himself as he experiences the various changes of perspective. The world of the novel itself takes on a greater degree of stability and substance, which seems both to the author and the reader more and more to defy total mastery, compelling them to ever greater efforts, by which the imaginative reality itself remains quite unaffected. The more the novel’s reality depends on the standpoint of the mediating self, the less it seems to depend on that self and his imagination, and in fact the more he seems to depend on it.
Clearly, then, the idea of reality as an intersubjective context can lead to an idea of it as the experience of the resistance of any given object. In the novel, this transition is marked as a breaking up of connections between aspects resulting from different perspectives. The beginnings of this process are to be seen in Jean Paul’s humorous novel Der Komet;17 and it came beyond all humorous implications to full fruition, for instance, in Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [The Man without Qualities]. In this immense fragment, even the (existing) conclusion does not begin to bring together the different threads of the plot or to lead them toward any common end; epic perspectivism is here virtually exploded, wrecked on the consequences of its own precision. In 1932, Musil wrote of his Mann ohne Eigenschaften: “This book has a passion for something which nowadays is to a certain extent out of place in the field of literature: namely, correctness and precision. What the story of this novel amounts to is the fact that the story which is to be told is not told.”18 The increasing specificity of the narrative leads to a demonstration of the impossibility of narrative itself. But this impossibility in turn is felt to indicate the unbreakable resistance of the imaginary reality to being described, and in this sense the aesthetic principle inherent in the concept of reality of immanent consistency leads at a certain point of transition to a different concept of reality altogether. Herein lies the reason why the constantly anticipated “liquidation” of the novel has never been achieved. It also explains why irony seems to have become the authentic mode of reflection as far as the aesthetic claims of the modern novel are concerned: the novel becomes ironic through the connections with reality that it is unable to dispense with and yet incapable of forming. Thomas Mann once spoke of the seeming accuracy of scientific discourse used as a stylistic means of irony: in his 1942 lecture on Josef und seine Brüder [Joseph and His Brothers], he calls this the application of the scientific to the totally unscientific—and this precisely is for him the purest expression of irony.
I should like to deal with just one more facet of the basic connection between the concept of reality and the feasibility of the novel. I have tried to show that the concept of reality as a phenomenal and immanent consistency lies at the root of the autonomous reality of the work of art. What I have not mentioned, but what actually brings together man’s created works in competition with the existing reality of nature, is the strange fact that, on the one hand, man asserts himself in the actualization of his creative potential, while, on the other, he must seek to conceal the dependence of his art on his own abilities and will; he must do this, because only then can his works take on the unquestionable autonomy and individuality that will make them indistinguishable from the products of nature. It may therefore be taken as a characteristic feature of modern art and literature that they have undergone a sort of dereification; the more familiar alienation is only a partial phenomenon within this trend. Human art presents itself neither as an imitation of nature nor as a “piece of nature,” but it is to have the same rank and dignity as natural objects; it is to be the work of man, but it is not to be characterized by the contingency of the individual will, or the actuality of the mere idea. In other words, it must be, at one and the same time, both novelty and fossil. We want to be able to disregard ourselves as the condition of the possibility of these works, because we do not want them to be a part of our conditional or our historical nature, of which we are proud despite the afflictions they cause us; we do not want our works to be objects dependent on subjects, but to be things in themselves. And these works for their part should not represent aspects but should offer us aspects of themselves. From the perspective structure systematically prepared and laid out in the novel, there can emerge a perspective potential that is stimulated by the work and yet at the same time is not fulfilled by it; we recognize this potential when we realize the essential openness of modern art to commentary and varied interpretation which is apparent from Romanticism onward. This hermeneutic ambiguity is integral to the “reality” of the work of art, insofar as it is this which proves its independence of our own subjectivity. This is why we tend artificially to historicize the work of art, in order to strip it of its dependence on ourselves and to “reify” it. Just as archaic sculpture exists in the landscape, such as the things tossed on to the green grass of Otterloo, there is also the novel distanced by language or by the artifice of a narrative framework—the type of novel of which we “know too much” for it to have its desired effect of alienation on us. In the same way that we can artificially historicize, we can also artificially naturalize, but no longer can we do this by representing or imitating nature; we must instead claim “naturalness” for our works, erecting things which resemble the products of eruptions or erosions, like the objet ambigu in Paul Valery’s Eupalinos. Corresponding to these in the novel is the artificially artless transcript of streams of consciousness and interior monologues—the “writing-the-minutes” type of novel [Protokollroman], which claims to create, and at the same time renounces, the creation of a whole world.
The concept of reality of the phenomena’s context presents a reality that can never be assured, is constantly in the process of being actualized, and continually requires some new kind of confirmation. This idea of reality, even when transformed into the reality of an aesthetic object, remains a sort of consistency which is, so to speak, open at both ends and dependent on continuous proofs and accomplishments, without ever achieving the finality of evidence that characterized the classical concept of reality. This is one reason for the uneasiness and dissatisfaction that have been a constant critical undercurrent throughout the history of the novel. One way out of this dissatisfaction is to resist the need for an endless actualization by deliberately breaking through set patterns of formal consistency—a breaking through which shows by the way it is handled that it does not spring from any failure or exhaustion of creative powers but, on the contrary, represents a conscious effort which can afford to disregard the quasi-objective principle of formal consistency. The idea that poets are liars can be completely invalidated only if they no longer set out to prove its antithesis—namely, that poets tell the truth—but concentrate on deliberately breaking the bonds of this antithesis and indeed all the rules of the reality game itself. Commitment to reality is rejected as an unwanted limitation on form, an aesthetic heteronomy wearing the mask of authenticity. Herein lie the roots of an aesthetic concept that can now present as “true” what all previous concepts of reality would have designated as unreal: paradox, the inconsistency of dreams, deliberate nonsense, centaurian hybrids, objects placed in the most unlikely positions, the reversal of natural entropy, in which refuse can be used to make objets d’art, newspaper cuttings be made into novels, or the noises of technology into a musical composition.
Modern art, however, has not freed itself from the compulsion to refute its dependence on the given realities of nature; its antiphysicism is not even directed against a constant nature whose dimensions are known or defined. The liberation of the imagination always being proclaimed, for instance by Breton, goes so far as to dissolve even the (now merely formal) connection between the concept of reality of immanent consistency and its commitment to the reality value of nature, and so it is again and again compelled to make desperate efforts to actualize itself despite its extreme improbability, in what remains, when all is said and done, a type of instantaneous evidence. The fact that the novel still adheres to the concept of reality of immanent consistency can be gauged from the problems that accrue to it from any heterogeneous concept of reality. It cannot actualize itself simply by contradicting whatever has hitherto been regarded as significant evidence of reality. The ideal of the perfetta deformità [perfect deformation] cannot be fulfilled by the novel. But it is characteristic of the novel that at this point it takes its own possibility as its subject matter, thus demonstrating its dependence on the concept of reality. I need only point to the technique of uncommunicative dialogue to explain what I mean: the failure of conversation, its hypertrophy in meaningless chatter, misunderstanding as a constituent product of language—all this remains essential to the novel, embedded in a world that is still presumed and produced with too much imagination for it ever to be said that pure absurdity can really become the subject matter. The novel has its own “realism,” which has evolved from its own particular laws, and this has nothing to do with the ideal of imitation but is linked precisely to the aesthetic illusion which is essential to the genre. Fixing (or causing) a world [Welthaftigkeit] as a formal, overriding structure is what constitutes the novel. When the absurd was proclaimed the program of art, its function was defined as “transcending the foundations,” and ultimately even architecture showed itself suited to this function of the absurd. But the novel had advanced much earlier and much more spontaneously to this transcending of the foundations—i.e., to the resolution of the conflict between reality and fiction—and, as I have shown, it had taken as its theme its own possibility, not as a fiction of reality, but as a fiction of the reality of realities. The novel’s preeminence in the actualization of basic modern ideas of aesthetics is comprehensible only if one realizes that it has not adopted absurdity, that new criterion of absolute poetry, because it has no need of such a stigma. The novel fulfills the aesthetic norm which, according to Boswell’s diary, was first formulated by Samuel Johnson during the famous conversation in the Literary Club about the excessive price of an antique marble dog: the extension of the sphere of the humanly possible (April 3, 1778),19 whereas even the broadest interpretation of the Aristotelian ideal of imitation—perhaps Johann Jakob Breitinger’s—is concerned with the sphere of the naturally possible.20
Translated by David H. Wilson21
Originally published as “Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Möglichkeit des Romans,” in Nachahmung und Illusion: Kolloquium Gießen, Juni 1963. Vorlagen und Verhandlungen (Poetik und Hermeneutik I), ed. Hans Robert Jauß (Munich: Eidos), 9–27; from Hans Blumenberg, Ästhetische und metaphorologische Schriften, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 47–73. English-language version published in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, ed. Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 29–48.
1. For the history of its influence, the origin of this dictum is scarcely relevant, but for a proper understanding of the matter, it is worth noting that at first there was no general devaluation but a critical reminder that the epic is obliged to be truthful—it should not bring up the unprofitable writings of earlier times, but ought to reveal noble deeds through the power of memory (esthlà anaphaínei) (Xenophanes, fr. B i, 19–23, Diels). The reproach of untruthfulness is therefore based on the premise that the epic should communicate truth. As Bruno Snell has shown in The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 90–112, the reproach takes on a general significance only through problems connected with dramatic illusion in the theater; here the technique of actualization, arising from the mythical significance of the lyric and tragic chorus, no longer coincides with the consciousness of reality underlying the epic. The transition from ecstatic identification in the cult of Dionysos to technical accomplishments of representation tears open the differences between reality and art, a split which, typically, is thought out to its ultimate theoretical consequences by the Greeks: even for Aeschylus, Agatharchos not only painted a decor in perspective but also left behind a treatise on it (Diels, 59 A, 39; 1:14 et seq.). There has also survived a piece by Gorgias (fr. B 23, Diels), with a moralizing justification of illusion in tragedy which is apparently excused by its effect on the spectator. And so in classical times, as in the eighteenth century with Diderot, the starting point for these reflections on poetic illusion was provided by the drama. But in both eras, this starting point was soon abandoned. For the tradition of this saying—that poets are liars—two points became significant: Plato’s critique of the truth content of art in general and the Stoic-Christian habit of allegorizing, which depended on defending a relic of truth in literature in order to be able to rescue it from dispersal or concealment.
2. Der Philosoph: Betrachtungen über den Kampf von Kunst und Erkenntnis (Entwürfe von 1872) (WW, Musarion-Ausg., vi, 31). Now the concept of nature is completely oriented toward scientific objectification and its command over the concept of truth, which fulfills itself in the destruction of anthropomorphic immanence. But the “taming of science” offers a questionable justification for “the need for illusion” (WW, vi, 12); ultimately, this kind of truth cannot escape from the tradition of imitation but is committed only to a world interpreted as an appearance that liberates the desire for cognition: “Art therefore treats appearance as appearance, and so does not seek to deceive at all, but is true” (WW, vi, 98). This interpretation of “art as a true appearance” remains bound to the metaphysical tradition of art theory, for it pins art down to the character of given reality, even if this is called incognizability. As regards the function intended for art in this reversal of history, it cannot be anything different: such efforts always assume the premises of that which they set out to repeat.
3. Although I should not maintain that the Platonic world of ideas is representative of the classical concept of reality, I do believe that it would be virtually unthinkable without the implication of that concept. It has been said often enough that the Greeks’ access to their world was not just through their eyes but also through their thoughts. This may need elaborating: the Greeks preferred seeing in repose and the seeing of given realities in repose—horan [to see] is leaving the eyes at rest on the outside appearance of something, on a shape or a picture, as I have learned from Bruno Snell’s lectures “Homerische Bedeutungslehre.” Aristotle referred to the momentariness of sight as an analogy to pleasure (Eth. Nic., x, 3; 1174 a, 13 et seq.): horasis [the act of seeing] is at all moments complete and has no need of additional integration in time, like hēdonē [enjoyment]. Reality for sight does not constitute itself within time; although of course objects accumulate, the course of experience does not endow them with anything that could increase their given character. In the here and now, seeing, without any reference to genesis [creation], is a whole (1174 b, 9–13). The direct consequence of this is the concept of any aisthēsis [perception] (x, 4; 1174 b, 14–17). The fact that sight takes place in a series of aspects, that it is a process which essentially takes in events, relations, and representations, causes no difficulties and has no bearing on the formation of concepts.
4. A late, ironic reflection of such instantaneous evidence is to be found in a novel whose theme is the interweaving of fiction and reality, their equivalence as far as human destiny is concerned, and the consequent irrelevance of their identity. This novel is Andre Gide’s Caves du Vatican. After the funeral of the poor crusader Amadeus, who had failed in his attempt to prove the alleged exchange of popes, there is a conversation in the coach between Count Julius Baraghoul and Anthimos, who is told by the count that the present pope in fact is not the real one. Anthimos, the one-time atheist, who has been as totally converted as he has been totally cured of lameness, thinks over this revelation and returns instantly to his atheism; who can reassure him now that Amadeus Fleunssoire, as he enters Paradise, will not have to recognize that his God is also not “the real one”? The count’s answer implies an unclouded faith, for in such a case there can be nothing but momentary evidence: for him, it is a bizarre idea that there could be a false presentation of God, a mix-up “as if one could imagine another God being there.” But, typically, this argument makes not the slightest impression on Anthimos. Undoubtedly, he no longer shares this concept of reality, stops the coach, gets out, and—limps again.
5. It has rightly been pointed out that this is the concept of reality of Husserl’s phenomenology. Perhaps I should have insisted on being more precise—it is the concept of reality presented [expliziert] by phenomenology. But I doubt whether this description of the constitution of reality could have been possible at any time; this is why it was important for me to determine what such a phenomenological thematization presupposes, and since when it could have been written and understood. Precisely in this context, it becomes clear that concepts of reality do not simply take over from one another, but that the exhaustion of their implications and the excessive strain on their capacity to answer questions inspire a search for a new basis. The fact that here I am confining myself to an enumeration of concept-types is due to the thematic interest in the vertical foundation structure. More recent discussion on the connection of the concepts of reality is contained in my “Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Reality” [in this volume].
6. The concept of reality of the “open” context legitimizes the aesthetic quality of the novitas [novelty], the element of surprise and unfamiliarity, whereas “guaranteed” reality does not allow anything new or unfamiliar to become real, ascribes to tradition and authority a world that is already mastered and rounded off as the sum total of all that is knowable, and so leads inevitably to the postulate of nihil novum dicere [to say nothing new] (e.g., Petrarch, Epist. fam., vi, 2; cf. x, 1). The change in the concept of reality removes the dubiousness from what is new, and so terra incognita [unknown soil], or the mundus novus [new world], becomes possible and effective as a stimulus to human activity; if one might phrase the process as a paradox, surprise is something to be expected. This is also relevant to the history of the “falseness” of poetry: aesthetic pleasure in falseness becomes legitimate so long as it can be regarded as newness as well (i.e., as something possible, a reality lying just beyond the horizon). Julius Caesar Scaliger, author of an oft-quoted poetics (1561), discusses in his even more interesting work De subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum (1557; I use the edition of 1582), Cardanum’s dictum: “Falsa delectant quia admirabilia” [fictions delight because they are marvellous] (Exerc. 307, 11; p. 936 et seq.). Scaliger protests against his commentary that it is only children and fools that could have such pleasure in the untrue, because they assume that there is plus veritatis [more truth] in it, so that ultimately it would actually be a (supposed) form of truth, which gives rise to pleasure. However, art can give far more satisfaction than nature to a naturally infinite, reasoning mind; those falsehoods in which even sapientes [the wise] find pleasure (e.g., the Homerica phasmata [Homeric inventions]) are revealed as the rich overflow by which art exceeds the (still) constant quantity of nature. “At quare delectant admirabilia? Quia movent. Cur movent? Quoniam nova. Nova sane sunt, quae nunquam fuere neque dum existunt.… Mentem nostram esse natura sua infinitam. Quamobrem et quod ad potentiam attinet aliena appetere, et quod spectat ad intellectionem, etiam e falsis ac monstrorum picturis capere voluptatem. Propterea quod exsuperant vulgares limites veritatis.… Mavultque pulchram imaginem, quam naturali similem designatae. Naturam enim in eo superat ars” [And why do marvellous fictions delight? Because they are moving. Why are they moving? Because they are new. Indeed, new things are things that have never been done and that do not yet exist.… Our mind is infinite in nature. That is why it can, in accordance with its ability, strive for strange things, and, insofar as knowledge is concerned, gain pleasure from the depiction of false and even monstrous things. And this is so because these things transcend the ordinary boundaries of truth.… (The wise man) prefers a beautiful picture to one that resembles a natural thing. For art surpasses nature in this respect].
7. Lessing, Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Aufbau, 1957), ix, 105 (letter of February 2, 1757).
8. The following description of the origin and historical role of the mimesis theory not only refers to but also partly corrects the corresponding section of my study “ ‘Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being” [in this volume]. Above all, I am no longer satisfied with establishing the ambivalence of the Platonic schema but would like to show that positive and negative evaluation, and emphasis on participation or deficiency, belong to different levels of reference, which might be labelled real and merely relational imitation. This will clarify what takes place in the Aristotelian theory of art, which cannot make this difference and is open only to the positive evaluation of mimesis, and also what Neoplatonism and Platonic Gnosis have “left out.”
9. We must also bear in mind that in this tradition the general metaphysical interpretation of art (technē) in the broadest sense was predominant, before what we would call Aristotelian aesthetics could take effect with the rediscovery of his Poetics. Medieval criticism resulted in Aristotelianism minus the Poetics (which only follows Arabic lines of tradition); the consequences of this are something that urgently require closer study.
10. It is difficult to define in detail what is really “Platonic” about this revival. In studying the history of concepts, we must not forget that the “Platonism” of the Renaissance after Petrarch originated from Cicero criticism and its capacity for comprehension was determined by this. As a result, a guideline such as the idea is unsuited to the discovery of Platonisms, as can be seen from Erwin Panofsky’s “Idea” (Studien der Bibl. Warburg, 1924; 2nd ed., 1960); by choosing species as the Latin equivalent, Cicero had removed all precision from the term (even though he also left it in Greek), out of which humanism made an all-round word. When Panofsky refers, for instance, to Melanchthon’s express equation of idea with notitia [knowledge; notion] for the “pulcherrima imago humani corporis” [most beautiful image of the human body] included in the in animo [in the mind] of Apelles, in order to demonstrate the immanence of Platonism, he is contradicted by Melanchthon’s own embarrassment, who, when compelled, at one stage, to reproduce an authentic Platonic idea, uses, for instance, imitatio, which is scarcely compatible with notitia, and so the statuarius [sculptor] has in himself a certa notitia [certain notion] of his work, which guides his hand: “donec efficiatur similitudo eius archetypi quem imitatur” [until it becomes a likeness of the archetype he imitates] (Corp. Ref., XIII, 305). If idea were really taken here “almost as a specifically aesthetic” concept, archetypus would not need to be smuggled in in this way, but idea is, of course, the nice academic term which in fact can be used for anything except something Platonic.
11. There is a certain affinity between Georg Lukács’s comment that “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God” (The Theory of the Novel [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971], 88), that is to say, the epic under the conditions of the modern view of the world—and the arguments developed here. The longed-for revival of the Greek epic, and the claim that it set the absolute standard, foundered against a view of reality that took the world for a world, the cosmos for a universe. The ultimate failure of Leibniz and Wolff to ensure the ratio sufficiens [sufficient reason] of the factual world opened the gates for a critique of the factual from the standpoint of the rational and the possible—a critique which was bound to work on the imagination and stimulate it into testing out the meaning of its own “worlds.” The uniqueness of the cosmos and the Greeks’ commitment to the epic as an interpretation of the world were just two aspects of the reality given by instantaneous evidence. The novel could not be a “secularization” of the epic after the world’s loss of religion; on the contrary, the contingency, the factualness of the indefinite article, the inrush of possibilia all go back to the theologizing of the world. The “worlds” which the aesthetically minded self is willing to belong to only provisionally, in the accessible finiteness of a context, are the quintessence of the novel’s thematization of reality and the irony essential to it.
12. For the similitudo divini intellectus in creando [the similarity of the human intellect to the divine lies in its creative activity], see my book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 530.
13. Already in the (disputed) Platonic 7th letter, eídōlon [image] and ónoma [word] are put on a level as regards their distance from truth (342 et seq.), but in a derogatory sense, as provisional measures for what is then an unsurpassable immediacy. The modern levelling out of the difference between image and concepts as suppositions which are free of any similarity relation to reality knows no greater approximation or immediate access to reality as such. It is, in fact, one of the features of the modern concept of reality that it excludes the “ontological comparative” (Walter Bröcker).
14. Jean Paul himself, in his introductory investiture of the reader with the story, points out this thematization by so projecting history and novel onto one another that to convey this given historical subject he wishes for himself the capacity of the novelist, so that with “one mighty stroke” he could complete the creation of his hero: “and I shall reach my goal if I can set out the historical truths of this story in such a way that they seem to the reader like successful fictions, with the result that, raised above the juridical law of fictio sequitur naturam (fiction, or appearance, follows nature), here conversely nature or history follows fiction—or, to put it in Latin, natura fictionem sequatur.”
15. Such a substantialization through annihilating the function of “means of meaning” has not been discovered in the immanent history of the novel; the reality that occurs in resistance is, from the viewpoint of the aesthetics of genre, basic to lyric poetry. Late nineteenth-century aesthetic experiences gained from poetry in its strictest and narrowest sense, have become prototypical—among other things, for the changing of novel aesthetics into the thematization of the “impossibility” of the novel. Perhaps I can best define this prototypical discovery of lyric poetry through the passage in Paul Valéry’s letter to J.-M. Carré, February 23, 1943 (Lettres à quelques-uns [Paris: Gallimard, 1952], 240), in which he tries to systematize the experience of shock caused fifty years back by Rimbaud’s Illuminations: “le système, conscient ou non, que supposent les passages les plus virulents de ces poèmes. Il me souvient d’avoir résumé ces observations—et, en somme, mes défenses—par ces termes: R. a inventé ou découvert la puissance de l’incohérence harmonique. Arrivé à ce point extrême, paroxystique de l’irritation volontaire de la fonction du langage, il ne pouvait que faire ce qu’il a fait—fuir” [the system, conscious or not, that underlay the most virulent passages of these poems. I remember having summed up these observations—and, in short, my defenses—in the following terms: R. has invented or discovered the power of harmonic incoherence. At this extreme, paroxysmal point of voluntary irritation of the function of language, he could only do what he did—flee]. The anticlimax of the “actualization,” the exhaustibility of the ontological basis of this concept of reality, are preconditions for the transposition of the principle to other genres and arts (e.g., the abandonment of tonality), but the novel (in a different way from the drama) has shown itself to be particularly resistant to the “paroxysmal” consequence of the principle, and so, as extremely flexible and productive as far as experiments are concerned.
16. “The result is what one might call a novelistic mobile, a whole formed by a certain number of parts which we can approach in almost any order we please.… Evidently, the recurrence of characters or their persistence from one novel to another has in Balzac a much greater importance than in what is called the roman fleuve.” Michel Butor, “Balzac and Reality,” in Inventory (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 104. “But Balzac’s definitive victory over his great predecessor (Walter Scott), his liberation from him, finds its expression in an extraordinary invention which will utterly transform the structure of his work … the recurrence of characters” (Butor, 103).
17. It is worth noting how the dialogues in Jean Paul’s Der Komet always “function” only through misunderstandings and never allow the fictional context to be exploded. But as the structure of intersubjective communication is shown to be strong enough to reify even unreality into quasi-reality, the concept of reality is not only thematized but also used as an aesthetic element—one might almost say it is instrumentalized. Inevitably, the aesthetic instrumentalization creates, indeed even presupposes, critical awareness: suspicion as regards the malleability of reality for specific purposes is here implied; this suspicion is also contained in the unexpected, socially critical virulence of the novel, in the ceaseless probing, for instance, of the deformability of elements of reality, up to the discovery of the breaking point as in the solipsistic dialogues of Kafka or Beckett. The triumph (as yet not properly understood) of finally having hit upon something stable, is what marks the phrasing of this development: the functional collapse of intersubjectivity releases a new concept of reality.
18. [Robert Musil, Tagebücher, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983), 1598.]
19. [Blumenberg paraphrases Boswell’s account, which has: “Everything that enlarges the sphere of human powers, that shows man he can do what he thought he could not do, is valuable.” James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions, 1999), 636.]
20. The notes added subsequently to this paper have been written, with grateful acknowledgments, as a result of suggestions, doubts, and objections raised during the discussion.
21. [Minor corrections by Hannes Bajohr.]