To facilitate your access to theoretical aesthetics, I promised to say a few words about some of the forms of resistance against this discipline whose existence I presuppose as widespread; here I proceed from the conviction, hardly unknown in the field of psychology, that very often such resistance is overcome when one reflects on it oneself – that is to say, through a certain form of self-reflection. After the resistance I addressed last time, namely that against a theoretical consideration of art as a form of nature reserve for irrationality, I would like to discuss a second kind. But perhaps I can first add that you should not, of course, take the theoretical consideration of art or with aesthetic questions directly as a sort of instruction for how to act towards works of art, or as an immediate help in understanding difficult works. If these lectures are at all successful, I hope they will contribute something to this by removing certain blinkers and shaking up certain conventions, but, at the same time, you should not simply take that as a formula for how to view works of art. Although the question of one's individual response to the work is ultimately determined by the objectivity of the matter itself, it is certainly something different from the treatment of this objectivity, which is also clarified by a fact that I will still be addressing today in a different context: that some of the greatest theoretical achievements in aesthetics come from people who were quite distant from an immediate experience of art. So theoretical reflection on art and the direct understanding or perception of art are not the same thing, and theoretical reflection can perhaps contribute something to this living relationship, but must not be misunderstood, as some of you are perhaps doing because you know that I have a very close connection to certain elements of modern art – as if one were receiving a kind of instruction manual for difficult modern music or difficult modern literature here – otherwise you will be disappointed.
The second prejudice faced by the theoretical consideration of art – that is, theoretical aesthetics – is what one could perhaps call the ‘individualistic’ one, and it finds its starkest expression in the belief that art is something which depends substantially on both the talent of the one who produces it and that of the one who approaches it with some form of understanding. And if art is linked to this aspect that is contingent, and evidently beyond theoretical definition – individual talent – it seems as if, in the face of this individuation, any attempt to pursue more general reflections on art is something arbitrary. In response, I would say that, first of all, the deliberations on objective questions in the works of art and aesthetics we are carrying out address the matter, not the relationship of individual persons to this matter.1 The tendencies of the observation found here are simply of an objective-aesthetic, not a psychological kind, otherwise I would be giving a lecture on the psychology of art, not a lecture on aesthetics. If I cannot rigidly separate the two categories, there are good reasons for this, and I dare say you will soon realize why that is the case. At any rate: the emphasis of what I am doing here – let me say it in advance – is, in contrast to the bulk of aesthetics, especially from the late nineteenth century, on observing the problems of aesthetic objects, not on reducing aesthetic objects to some way of viewing them. This is precisely what I feel the slackening of the theoretical aesthetic awareness I mentioned to you last time consists of: that, after Hegel and with the decline of Hegelian philosophy, theoretical speculation essentially no longer dares address the matter itself in this way, but has always attempted to reduce it to psychological forms of reaction. But as every work of art is in itself a strange union of objective and subjective elements – and this is the central topic for us to discuss – then that fact automatically rules out such a psychological reduction, and hence a reduction to mere talent.2
But that will probably be of little help to those of you who are coming here with this prejudice – and perhaps those who, for whatever reasons, do not consider yourselves specifically aesthetically talented. So perhaps you will allow me to say, at this point, at least a few words about a psychological problem, as it genuinely relates to the basic behaviour of humans towards art, and one can, after all, speak productively about the objective aesthetic questions only if there is some kind of living relationship between these individual humans and the concrete work of art. For it seems to me that the notion of talent is, in a sense, greatly overestimated in art. I do not mean to reason away this concept, and anyone who, as I do, has the opportunity to attend many music festivals – which today should instead be called modern music exhibitions – will become aware of differences in talent in an often very drastic manner. But what I mean to say is that one should not accept this notion of talent as something static, something immutable that has fallen from heaven, as it were, in the way that musicality is very often – and wrongly, in my view – viewed in analogy to mathematics as a form of definite natural talent. The talent for artistic matters is one part of the overall psychological constitution of humans, not some kind of specialist ability that has fallen to them. I think that, while one can have a good ear or a good eye, this alone is not at all decisive for one's artistic talent. In my life, I have known excellent, very important musicians who did not have an especially good ear, and I have known musicians with a legendary ear who could accurately sing sixth-tones, yet who struck me as essentially inartistic people. But genuine artistic talent is, in the end, a character of the person as a whole, one that is substantially defined by – if I may put it thus – a negative ability, namely the ability to emancipate oneself from the immediacy of existence, from entanglement in the immediate purposes and velleities3 of life and – as it was expressed during the time of German Idealism in a single word that one barely dares utter today, but which still has some merit – to elevate oneself, in the same sense in which Plato referred to enthusiasm as the central precondition for philosophy.4
The one mode of behaviour absolutely ruled out by the relationship with art is the concretist approach, this being what I would call a damaged confinement to that which is and which places practical demands on us, and which exerts such dominance and provokes such feelings of guilt that, in a sense, one forbids oneself to partake of the happiness that is found where one does something that cannot claim any such purpose in the business of the individual's and society's self-preservation. It is not, however, as if a mere reflection on this condition for artistic talent were sufficient to cure people who feel a lack thereof. But perhaps this is enough to make them investigate the factors that make artistic experience foreign to them in the first place, and thus – perhaps in a form of self-reflection – to lead them to the deeper cause of that lack. Generally speaking, it tends – if I could just say this much of a psychological nature – to lie in the fact that they are people who (usually in earliest childhood) somehow had the principle of reality – that is, the practical activity of self-preservation – drummed into them by some strong authority, usually the father, in such a way that they have a sort of fear of anything which goes beyond that; they forbid themselves to venture there. And this fear is then often compensated for and rationalized by a certain kind of false arrogance towards what they now call tomfoolery and nonsense, and supposedly means nothing to them – an arrogance that has more than a whiff of sour grapes about it. I have very often ascertained that people who were extremely unmusical – incapable of learning to read music, for example, or simply repeating a sung melody correctly – that these were people who had somehow had it truly driven out of them by a strict father in early childhood. On the other hand, I have often observed how certain changes in a person's mode of existence can suddenly change their receptiveness to art. I know cases of people who, after growing up in a very musical but simultaneously authoritarian milieu, initially considered themselves unmusical – or were considered thus by their surroundings – and who then suddenly discovered their musicality, one could say. And these things in general are not so rigid or static. So that is what I mean when I warn you not to overestimate the question of so-called talent with regard to art. This overestimation also contains an ideological element: it is precisely a society which insists so strongly on that reality principle which so easily drives out of people the ability to react to artistic matters; it is precisely that society which needs an ideology of the absolutely natural, the irrational, which is entirely independent from the will and consciousness, as a form of compensation wherever it does not directly pursue its aims. I am almost inclined to say: the fact that musicality is a grace of God that falls from heaven and in which the individual has no part of their own is just as much part of the household of bourgeois conventions 5 as the notion that Papa goes to his office at the right time every morning and that one does not incur debts. These are all ideas that come from the luxury edition of Schiller's Collected Writings,6 so to speak, and which – now that the education from which they once originated has long since fallen apart – still spook people and darken their minds, and which contribute to making it difficult or even impossible for people to relate to artistic matters in particular. I am pointing this out now not so much with reference to the psychological problem from which I began as to prepare you for something you will admittedly learn very soon in these lectures, namely that this very notion of art as purely sensual and thus independent from thoughts, effort and tension in general, which most of you are more or less likely to entertain – that this notion is untenable, and that the conception of a purely sensual art proves highly problematic in itself; it is an indispensable experience, incidentally, especially for understanding the authentically advanced contemporary tendencies in art.
You might [now] ask: after all that, who is supposed to occupy themselves with the theory of art if talent is not so important and if, on the other hand, what I conceded right at the start is true, namely that the weighty aesthetic tomes one finds in the libraries of philosophy departments contain an infinite amount of inartistic, even philistine, scribble that is especially likely to deter an artistically receptive person from dealing with so-called philosophical aesthetics? I think I must give you a slightly peculiar response here, namely this: here the truth evidently lies in the extremes that touch. I have the impression that there are two sources of aesthetic insight, as it were – or perhaps I should say two poles, where the spark sometimes leaps from the one to the other. One of these poles is the truly coherent theoretical idea, which often proves most fruitful precisely when it stays relatively far away from the specific aesthetic objects. This is the case in the great systems of aesthetics, especially in the Critique of the Power of Judgement and the Aesthetics of Hegel, but also in the aesthetic part of The World as Will and Representation. These three philosophers were surely not what one would term artistic people in a strict sense. They were surely not what one calls ‘refined’, but the power of their experience, their intellectual experience, was so profound that it also pulled other areas into itself, as it were, whose content was not yet so clear to them.7 In fact, the most staggering thing about Kantian philosophy – if one is truly able to read it as expression, not merely as epistemology – is how, with Kant in particular, the power of the idea itself always extends, almost independently of the contingent nature of his person and even his specific experience, to all sorts of things which, if you will, he did not actually ‘know’ in that sense – in other words, how far Kant's knowledge actually extended beyond his own knowledge. That, one could say, is virtually the proof of Kant's genius, and at times it seems to me that things are not so different with Hegel, whereas in the case of Schopenhauer, strangely enough, whose entire perspective on life was probably more that of someone who enjoys art, this power of specific insight into aesthetic problems does not strike me as being developed in the same way.
On the other hand – at the other pole – one finds the people who are themselves involved in specific artistic work, who have specific experience of the material and may perhaps reflect upon it to themselves. There are people in modernity for whom this process of reflection goes so far that it can no longer really be distinguished from the process of artistic production. As many of you will have guessed, I am thinking especially of Paul Valéry.8 So undoubtedly an engagement with art from within9 – which always means an engagement with art according to its technological categories, that is to say the categories of its immanent production – is an equally legitimate source of artistic insight, albeit with the obstacle that it is relatively rare for artists with these experiences also to have the conceptual tools to make them theoretically fruitful; yet, at the same time, this ability is not quite as rare as it might seem. So I would think that a fruitful relationship with theoretical aesthetics actually consists in the communication between these two approaches – those of the ‘highest height’, as Goethe put it,10 and the ‘closest nearness’.11
But I would warn you with the utmost urgency of what can be termed the sphere of ‘refinement’, the sphere of the aesthetic aficionado, the sphere of the so-called sensitive man who collects Chinese engravings and is terribly fond of chamber music as long as it is not too serious. The deterrent example of this kind of middle-level ‘refinement’, which seals itself off from genuine, primary aesthetic experiences precisely because it refers from the outset only to what has already been transmitted to him through his education, is the œuvre of Wilhelm Dilthey,12 at least where it relates to aesthetic matters. I do not intend to deal with it any further, only to encourage you in this context to have a look at Poetry and Experience, an enormously popular work among the teachers of the previous generation in particular, in which, among other things, he states in all seriousness that Hölderlin's language wraps itself in a purple cloak with deep folds, and more of the like.13 We will simply avoid these things entirely and actually keep to those extremes which, to make them touch, we will try to bend towards each other.
I wish to say only one more thing before I get directly into the matter: perhaps you have all at some point had an experience I will mention here, because it sums up the theme underlying these lectures rather well, namely the experience – I will put it in stark and correspondingly heightened terms, as is my custom – that, in a certain sense, one cannot understand works of art at all. What I mean is this: either one is inside a work of art and aligned with it in a living sense, in which case the question of understanding the work or of the meaning of the work does not really arise;14 or, on the other hand, through reflection or development – possibly even through something like disgust or an excess of artistic experience – one is now outside the sphere of influence of art and casts one's gaze on the work; and then – this is what I have experienced and still experience very often, and I would not be surprised if many of you had also encountered it at some point – then one suddenly asks oneself abruptly: so what's it all about, what is all this? The moment one is no longer inside it, where one is no longer aligned with it, art begins to withdraw in a certain sense, to close up,15 and assumes what I earlier called its riddle character and will explicate in far greater detail later on.
If there is a justification for the philosophy of art – and I do not, after all, mean to attempt a philosophy of art with you without at least providing a more serious justification than the claim that aesthetics should form a part of the so-called philosophical sciences – then the justification for the philosophy of art lies solely in the fact that it alone can [cope with the experience] when one has felt that rupture in oneself, when one steps out of the work and it suddenly becomes foreign and mute, and one asks oneself: what's it all about, what's the point of it, what does it say?16 This state, which surely forms a substantial part of every person's aesthetic experience, assuming they have not dulled their awareness of it through faith in education, this state of experience can probably be overcome only through a theoretical reflection on art. Now, I cannot explain that reflection to you immediately, in a word, like a shot from a pistol: ‘Yes, that is the meaning of art; that is art; now I can hold it in my hands once and for all; now I know what one of those works of art is.’ That would be presumptuous, and it would be fundamentally wrong to demand that theory provide such a thing. But through its totality, through the context in which it embeds its categories, it can do away with this foreignness and effect that reconciliation between the work of art and the one who experiences it which has become problematic at some point in any living relationship with art – and I would say especially in any authentic one.17 It is only the art aficionados who find art unproblematic on all levels, which is why they have no need to reflect on art. But if this riddle character of which I will speak at length is truly inherent in art, then – and I would like to place this thought emphatically at the start of these lectures – the works of art themselves require commentary and critique for the sake of their own development and their own life. And while commentary and critique of art are elements of its own life, they cannot be halted, they push forwards, they cannot be stopped on the way towards a theory of art, which is where they must end.18
To be quite thorough, I would like to point out that the term ‘aesthetics’ is not necessarily limited to art. It comes from the Greek αἰσϑάνομαι [aisthánomai], meaning ‘perceive’, and thus encompasses the entire realm of sensory experience; and Kant, as many of you know, and a number of German Enlightenment writers,19 applied it generally to all forms of scientific conditions of sensuality – that is to say, the conditions for sensory perception. In more recent times, too, this use of the word ‘aesthetics’ is not infrequent; but I doubt that you have come to these lectures expecting me to speak about what Kant calls ‘transcendental aesthetics’,20 which you will learn enough about in the epistemological courses and seminars. Rather, I will keep to the concept of aesthetics that is captured to some extent by phrases such as the ‘doctrine of beauty’ or the ‘doctrine of art’, though I should say in advance that none of these encapsulates all the things that aesthetics means. For the concept of aesthetics – like any philosophical reflection that views its object as living, not in a dogmatically hardened form – eludes such abstract definition; rather, aesthetics is then the content underlying the definitions that are brought together under this name. This correlation is really what constitutes the name, not some individual verbal definition21 that one need only give for a hand to be raised and say that there is also something else that is aesthetics, but which does not fall under this definition. Once you have eliminated that, then all that remains of the conventional definition of the word ‘aesthetics’ in the most general sense is that, in aesthetics, one deals with the sensually perceptible – as one substantial element, at least – and when I get to my critique of the absolute validity of the reduction of the aesthetic to the sensually perceptible, this critique is only meaningful, of course, if one first concedes that in art, or in the realm of the aesthetic in a more general sense, one is not dealing with knowledge in the literal sense,22 as used in the sciences, nor is it a practical behaviour, as I ruled out in my brief psychological excursus. For now, this sparse definition of the concept is all we hold in our hands.
If we continue looking at what the history of this discipline has produced in the way of important divisions, then the most extensive one we find is the difference between natural beauty and artistic beauty. The very strange thing here, which has perhaps not yet been recognized in its full scope, is that the relationship between these two disciplines has shifted in a peculiar fashion since the eighteenth century.23 Kant still treated natural beauty and artistic beauty as having the same level of dignity. And, in Kant, one can even make the astounding observation that some of the deepest aesthetic definitions – indeed, that precisely those of his aesthetic definitions that point the furthest beyond his own time, and of which I will expound a few – are arrived at not in the aesthetics of artistic beauty but, rather, in the realm of natural beauty. This means that the second part of the ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, going by his own words, refers purely to natural beauty and not to artistic beauty, and thus, for Kant, only nature, not art, can be sublime.24 This has now been reversed in a most peculiar fashion; and this reversal probably found its first conclusive manifestation in Hegel's philosophy.25 The reason for this is the progressive spiritualization of the awareness of art as such, which began with the overall European movement of Romanticism, in which art increasingly moved away from the aggregate of mere sensual enjoyment to become a carrier of spiritual meanings or, to put it in the words of that philosophy, was viewed as the expression of an idea. At the same time, the formal aspect, which is connected to the idea of mere sensual pleasure or appreciation, necessarily receded. It is no coincidence that the transition from an aesthetics dominated by the concept of natural beauty to a theory of artistic beauty coincided with a critique of formal aesthetics, of the formal rules of the enjoyable, in favour of a content-based aesthetics, although – as I will say in a moment – even in these philosophies, the notion of what constitutes content in art is generally presented only in a rather raw and inadequate form.26 And I would like to note right here that one of the themes we must examine is to reach a more thorough assessment of the contentual aspect, which stands in opposition to mere formal aesthetics, than is the case in the traditional systems.27
In order to give you a taste of this climate of turning away from natural beauty in aesthetics, I would like to read you a few passages by Hegel that I consider quite characteristic, and which I can perhaps follow with a few very brief thoughts. So, in the first, general part of his Aesthetics, Hegel writes: ‘Now as the physically objective Idea, life in nature is beautiful because truth, the Idea in its earliest natural form as life, is immediately present there in individual and adequate actuality.’28 Naturally this presupposes, as I already told you in the last session, that, for Hegel, everything is essentially idea, and that therefore – as the idea and beauty coincide for him – nature in its immediacy also has a piece, an aspect, of idea to it and, in so far as it has this, is beautiful. But Hegel immediately qualifies this. Here, following on from a discussion at the Hegel conference,29 allow me to say that it would constitute a complete misunderstanding of Hegel to view him as uncritical, as a thinker for whom everything is grey in grey, for whom the mill of thesis, antithesis and synthesis goes clickety-clack; rather, the true substance of this motion in Hegelian philosophy is precisely, to an eminent degree, critique. If you really look at Hegel seriously, you will find that these famous movements of the concept that one finds there are, in essence, always a critique of something untrue, limited, false, dead or decayed. Consider the following example: ‘Yet, because of this purely sensuous immediacy, the living beauty of nature is produced neither for [itself]’ – that is, without any knowledge of its beauty – ‘nor out of itself as beautiful and for the sake of a beautiful appearance.’30 That means it is not there for the sake of its beauty, but it is simply there, and the beauty it possesses is one that has not passed through this aspect of subjective spirit, nor thus through the aspect of spiritualization. – ‘The beauty of nature is only beautiful for another, i.e. for us, for the mind which apprehends beauty.’31 And for Hegel, whose aesthetics is substantially objective in its orientation, and who is thus concerned with defining the aspects of beauty in itself, not simply to the extent of their effects on the receptive consciousness, this definition of natural beauty in keeping with Kant's view, namely that beauty here is only beauty for the perceiving consciousness, is at once a very profound and invasive critique of this concept of natural beauty. Or he says: ‘The form of natural beauty, as an abstract form, is on the one hand determinate and therefore restricted; on the other hand it contains a unity and an abstract relation to itself. […] This sort of form is what is called regularity and symmetry, then conformity to law, and finally harmony.’32 So here, in Hegel, you find an expression of the idea I hinted at earlier, namely that the belief in natural beauty and the accentuation of natural beauty as opposed to artistic beauty is substantially connected with an emphasis on the merely formal – mathematical, if you will – conditions of art as opposed to their living spiritual content. The force of Hegel's statement is that he therefore considers natural beauty something subaltern, shall we say, and I am fully aware that Hegel's manner here, this arrogance of the spirit towards that which is not spirit, itself betrays an aspect of the narrowness of this philosophy; and I will draw the necessary conclusions from this and attempt to move a little beyond this narrowness. Or he says: ‘The beauty of regularity is a beauty of abstract understanding’33 – likewise consigning sensitivity to natural beauty, with a somewhat haughty gesture, to the rationalism of the eighteenth century, when Baumgarten famously attempted to augment the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff in the spirit of such an aesthetics – such an aesthetica formalis.34 The ‘essential deficiency’ of natural beauty – namely that it possesses no ‘ideal subjectivity’ – ‘leads us to the necessity of the Ideal, which is not to be found in nature, and in comparison with it the beauty of nature appears as subordinate.’35 So here you literally have the formulation of the subaltern that I just imputed. Or he says: ‘Thus it is from the immediate deficiencies of reality’ – and it is very characteristic of Hegel that he does not stand still in such a critique but, rather, uses the insufficiency, the inadequacy of natural beauty to derive something like the necessity of art from it36 –
that the necessity of the beauty of art is derived. The task of art must therefore be firmly established in art's having a calling to display the appearance of life, and especially of spiritual animation (in its freedom, externally too) and to make the external correspond with its Concept. Only so is the truth lifted out of its temporal setting, out of its straying away into a series of finites. At the same time, it has won an external appearance where the poverty of nature and prose no longer peeps through; it has won an existence worthy of the truth, an existence which for its part stands there in free independence since it has its vocation in itself, and does not find it inserted there by something else.37
So natural beauty, because of this element of chance, this aspect of not itself being pervaded by spirit through and through, is something – we would call it pre-aesthetic, he calls it ‘prosaic’ – for which the concept of beauty is essentially deficient, and this can be overcome only if the external itself, through art, is turned into the exterior of an interior. That is roughly what Hegel has in mind.
Now, I do not intend to revoke this development which Hegel's theory set off, nor do I wish to present you here with a theory of natural beauty – primarily for the simple reason that I myself have no such theory,38 and because I have my doubts about whether it is possible, or whether all theoretical definitions of natural beauty, if one occupies oneself with them, would not lead inevitably back to that homeliness which the nineteenth century had in mind. On the other hand, I cannot ignore the fact that the investigation of the problem of natural beauty has actually been suppressed in a peculiar fashion and, one could say, reserved for the holiday weeks, meaning that there is something unfinished here39 which theory has not properly addressed, and whose lack can in turn affect genuine theoretical aesthetics. The reason for that inadequate and questionable aspect presumably lies in a concept that stems from Kant and Schiller but was adopted by Hegel, namely the ‘dignity’ that is native only to humans, and which gives them a superior status in relation to everything else, which is accordingly reduced to mere material.40 But if – as I consider inevitable in the light of current experience – one no longer feels capable of going along with this absolute supremacy of humans, this philosophical anthropocentrism, then surely one must at least consider the problem of natural beauty in its connection to artistic beauty and, even if one does not believe an explicit theory of natural beauty is possible, not stop at Hegel's verdict on natural beauty as subordinate, but assess the relationship between nature and beauty, which is far more dialectical than Hegel would have it, and which will simultaneously provide the first categories for a definition of what art itself actually is.