Today I mean to conclude, at least provisionally, the fundamental reflections on the relationship between natural beauty and artistic beauty – or, as we can perhaps say more broadly now, the relationship between nature and art. Let me repeat once more that this relationship should be understood very much as a dialectical relationship, not a simple contrast; but neither, as the sentimental view would have it, is it in the sense of a direct relationship, as reproduced in the platitude that perfect art is perfect nature,1 and such like. I will attempt to present this dialectic – that is to say, this unity of opposites or this identity in non-identity – theoretically as vividly as possible. Art, at least in the way we have experienced the concept historically, initially stands in contrast to nature, in so far as it is taken out of the natural world and occupies an area that does not coincide directly with the real world; indeed, we consider it a failing in works of art if this line of demarcation from empirical reality is not drawn. For example, it was interpreted – by the cultural historian Friedländler, to name one author – and I would say with good reason, as a symptom of incipient barbarism in the days of the Roman Empire that the classical Attic tragedies were staged in some sort of Latinized versions, but that those heroes who were destined to die were played by slaves who were then genuinely killed on such occasions, as painfully as possible, resulting in a form of synthesis between gladiatorial games and tragedy.2 I think this is sufficient to show you what I mean by this demarcation line, and it belongs to an essentially similar, albeit initially less bloody, area, that today, within so-called popular art, there is an increasing tendency to blur this boundary and give the work of art a kind of justification, a raison d'être, by adding that it is based on true stories. On a side note, I think that this decline in the ability to observe a sphere without this sphere identifying itself directly in relation to empirical reality is also the reason for the unspeakable poverty of so-called biographical novels, which were originally associated with the names of Emil Ludwig,3 Herbert Eulenberg4 and Stefan Zweig,5 but have meanwhile become such a lucrative business that there seem to be few people who, after losing their posts as journalists at some point, would not try their hand at looking for a great man to use as the subject for such a hybrid product of art and reportage.
This fact that art is removed from the world is not the main thing, however; after all, it shares this trait with the sphere of games in the broadest sense. It is a feature of every game in existence that it is not initially part of immediate empirical reality, that it has no purpose in a certain sense, and that one does not directly pursue any advantages by playing it; when the latter does happen, it is only through some back door. You can tell from the sophistic distinctions between the amateur and the pro how strong is the awareness of this separation from empiricism; that is, even when the game, namely sport, has long become a source of income, one might hide this in order somehow to remain faithful to the idea of the game; and that a sportsman falls out of favour, to an extent, if he directly seeks to earn money with his activity. But, on the other hand, art does differ very substantially from the sphere of the game in a particular character that I would like, for now, to call its image character – though without examining this image character, this character of the imaginary, more closely than last time, when I told you a few things about the mimetic root of art. Here too, furthermore, the distinction between art and games that comes into play is not absolute, of course; there are countless games that also have mimetic character, for example children's games, where a child is a locomotive, a confectioner, an aeroplane or a Sputnik6 or whatever else; naturally they have this mimetic character too, but the mimetic character is not as fundamental as the character of a certain activity. Categories such as those of art and games, incidentally, can only be kept apart through their extremes; it goes without saying that there are an infinite number of transitional phenomena between art and games, and it is surely genetically true that one can trace the origins of art far back into games, perhaps even – if one is to believe the claims of Groos7 – back to certain behaviour in animals, to animal mimetism, animal imitation. But one can generally say, I think, that art sets itself apart from nature by constituting a special area characterized by two poles: on the one side the game aspect I just underlined, where the activities developed in art are not viewed as directly real but placed in parentheses, as it were, taking place in a separate realm; but on the other side the aspect of semblance – that is to say, the aspect that the work of art as a whole, to the extent that we understand it as art in the true sense, has an intention, that it means something, that something appears in it which is more than the mere appearance itself. And that, it seems to me, is the categorial element which distinguishes it from the game. One could certainly write a theory of art in which one organizes the elements of art around these two poles, and in which one establishes, for example in drama, how the two aspects of play [on the one hand] – for there is playing, people are playing and pretending to be others – and semblance [on the other hand] – for here a whole appears as if it were the sign of something standing behind it, something ideational – [face each other]. In this way, then, one can indeed treat the sphere of art as a tension field between these two aspects, play and semblance, which are both separate from empirical reality.8 One should perhaps add that this separation is a form of secularization. This means that the origins of art on the one side are surely those of the game which I have touched on; a different sphere – and I do not intend to indulge in speculations about which is most important, and whether there are others – would [relate] to the rhythms of work, for example, and everything associated with them. Such questions about the origin of art are always a little futile, and one immediately finds oneself in the sphere of ‘Yes, but …’.9 This much seems certain, however: the demarcated, separate sphere of art, whose violation we actually view as the negation of art as such, is initially nothing other than the secularized form of a sacred area sanctified by a taboo, an area that one cannot touch, as it were, without exposing oneself to some kind of unpleasant consequences. And the shudder in the face of the work of art, the concept of the sublime which you already encountered in the first sessions with reference to Kant, is unquestionably rooted precisely in the fact that something of this sacred nature of the untouchable, something of the presence of the mana,10 the great divine power in such a domain, has remained in art.
I said a few words to you earlier about art's roots in games, and one can certainly see this element as the root of what, in the language of philosophy, has been termed the element of the ‘idea’ in works of art. The idea, by which I mean that very feeling of life which leaps out at us from a work, is the sacred sphere that has passed through the subject, through reflection, through human freedom, in which this mana, this force that spreads among everything existent, is then concentrated.11 At the same time, however, this aspect I am describing to you, this aspect of the shudder, which is connected to the separate sphere of art that must not be touched, as it were, this element of recalcitrance in every work of art against communication with empirical reality – this aspect also contains something else. For this mana, this spirit that is meant to manifest itself in the work, always amounts also to a claim to totality. I think one can say that every work of art, even the most wretched, even one produced for the most pitiful profit, always seeks to be something like the whole, the absolute, the totality, the absolute fulfilment – objectively, by its own structure, even against its own will, even if its maker's consciousness would not dream of any such thing. And only this aspect, the fact that every work of art essentially promises us it is the absolute – under all the conditions of empirical thought, as it were, to which we find ourselves chained and of which we will speak later today, in an entirely different context, as an antipode of art that must be taken from us – and that we must, to a degree, be able to experience the unfettered, boundless whole: this aspect – and here too, you can see how much the same side of art I am emphasizing to you here is connected to the side of semblance – is what Schopenhauer, with particular reference to music, spoke of in art as ‘the world once again’.12 Every work of art is, in a certain sense, ‘the world once again’, namely the world cleansed of immediate purposes; in relation to the sacred sphere, however, it is at once a secularization, in that – as I once called it – the separate sphere of art, removed from the empirical realm, is freed from the lie it contains in the sacred sphere: the lie that there is any claim that this special, separate area, which is set apart in the world from the world, is actually real.13 In this sense, one can say that precisely the aspect of aesthetic semblance, which, compared to the immediacy of the game, entirely suspends reality itself, in turn honours reality especially because the mythical belief in the omnipotence of the idea – namely, that the idea is directly one with reality, that it even exerts a magical power over reality – that this aspect is negated from the outset in art.
And thus we come across a state of affairs that will still occupy us a great deal, and which strikes me as decisive if one is to avoid overly primitive notions of the conception of art. For if art, in a certain sense – to which we shall return shortly – looks after the interests of nature against the control over nature, then it does so not in some arbitrary way but specifically by always constituting some degree of enlightenment in itself. So this fact that – I would like to repeat this, for I believe it is central to understanding what one might call the nature of art – the special area, the aesthetic circle, as it were, no longer appears as a magical agency, but as something distinct from reality, does preserve, if you will, the memory of the old taboo and thus the memory of the stages of the relationship with nature that humans, in their history, left behind; but, at the same time, one no longer wears the countenance of the magic priest and behaves, within this separate sphere, as if one had any direct power over the world. In this manner, the semblance is freed from the lie of being real. And with this, the semblance also has what is initially an entirely immediate relationship with the truth that, as Hegel splendidly puts it, keeps on unfolding; for Hegel said that art is neither a pleasant nor a useful plaything but, rather, itself an unfolding of the truth,14 and I think you would do well to measure what I am putting forward to characterize the aesthetic against this statement by Hegel, which, in a certain sense, I have taken as my canon.
So now I have already touched on the opposite of what I demonstrated to you first of all, namely that art is separated from nature as ‘the world once again’ and stands in opposition to it. For it is precisely by opposing the entire workings of the empirical world – and this applies in an additional sense to the one in which I spoke to you just now of the relationship between art's semblance and the claim to magical truth – that it acts in the interest of nature in a certain sense. This should be understood in the sense that the social process as a whole – and allow me to remind you of some thoughts from the Dialectic of Enlightenment that you will find expounded particularly in the first part about the concept of enlightenment,15 and which I will therefore restrict myself to hinting at – takes place primarily under the banner of the progressive rational control of nature. The old mimetic behaviours are replaced by a progressive alienation from nature; and, because the knowledge of like by like – to use the classical metaphor16 – is increasingly replaced by the motif of knowing like by unlike,17 the control of nature becomes possible to an ever higher degree. And it is precisely this process that, in a very broad sense, one calls the process of enlightenment – or, if you prefer, the process of rationalization. Every conceivable thing falls victim to this process – starting from the actually and genuinely suppressed natural world mangled by humans, and extending to the infinite abilities of humans themselves, such as all the abilities that were once mimetic abilities and which we perceive in ourselves only in a scattered, fragmented state. One could say that art is an attempt to do justice to all that falls victim to this ongoing concept of control over nature, to give nature its due, albeit for now only a symbolic portion – namely the portion of memory, the memory of the suppressed, of that which becomes a victim, and also the memory of all those internal human powers which are destroyed by this process of progressive human rationalization.18 To that extent, there is even an element of truth to the philistine platitude that art addresses the emotions rather than the intellect. It is very easy to mock it, and if one considers how cleverly petty bourgeois art has exploited this aspect in particular, how much it has lent itself – out of people's craving for what the ongoing process of rationalization has expunged from them, one could say – to carrying out a rationalization of its own, namely supplying commerce and people with heart-warmers, then, God knows, one can approve of the hatred towards the conventional view that art serves the emotions; I certainly do. But there is also some truth in it, in the sense that art is the sphere in which those behaviours that were destroyed in us are kept and preserved. Now this is very closely connected to the aspect of art's removal from empirical reality. For in empirical reality – that is to say, the world in which we live as active, ‘practical’ people, pursue goals, use other people to achieve goals, and commit God knows what other atrocities – this world is indeed ruled by the reality principle, namely the principle that one behaves in such a way as to master this reality as comprehensively as possible. And the behaviour of art is fundamentally a negation of this reality principle – fundamentally in the sense that it constitutes a sphere whose ambition is essentially to be the semblance and the representation of a total area that is certainly independent from the reality principle, and hence an area one cannot ‘get something out of’ in the same practical sense as with most things in this world. And whenever people invoke the platitude of the liberating quality that inheres in art, I think this is not so much because of the so-called exhilaration which some crusty classics are meant to awaken in us with their virgins; it is far more probably because art promises through its mere existence to exempt us from the omnipotence of that same reality principle, the omnipotence of a mechanism of self-preservation at the expense of everything else that exists in the world.
This is, of course, closely connected to the fact that great art, as so many individual cases illustrate, could be said to stand with the victims; that history goes against the grain;19 that it is not history from the perspective of the victor, one could say, but rather the unconscious historiography of the ages, historiography from the perspective of the victim;20 and that what calls out from works of art is in fact always the voice of the victim,21 and that there is no art which cannot truly do this.22 So, because of its very principle, it is primarily on the side of whatever is suppressed, and it thematizes the suppressed time and again. I think that the element one generally terms ‘expression’ in art, which has a very difficult dialectic that I do not wish to hide from you, that this element is connected precisely to the fact that art is the voice of what is suppressed, for, essentially, expression always amounts to an expression of suffering.23 Compared to the significative-rational element, the mere sign, expression itself is a mimetic residuum from the outset, an aspect that is left over from an otherwise tamed nature, yet manifests itself vividly there in a remarkable fashion and can thus be included in the process of progressive differentiation. In that sense, one could say – if you will permit the dialectical exaggeration – that, on the one hand, art exits the realm of nature, and in that sense constitutes the absolute opposite of everything merely natural. If one watches a play and there is a smell of apples on stage, then this is essentially already the negation of the work of art itself, to put it crudely; and anyone who has first not experienced the antithetical position of art in relation to the natural world is a barbarian, just like people who go to see a play and then talk about it in the past tense as if it had been a real event, as they do not grasp this contrast. On the other hand, art is itself the manifestation of nature in a world where nature has alienated itself through a mighty and irreversible process. It is, one could say, the self-alienated manifestation of nature; but this also means that, in keeping with such alienation, art is more loyal to nature – not because it panders to it in any way or behaves as if it were nature but, on the contrary, because it dispenses with the semblance of the immediate, the merely natural, at least in the guise we find today.24
I do, however, want to protect the definitions I have given here from a very logical misunderstanding. This misunderstanding would be to take what I have just told you as a sort of phenomenology of the relationship between art and nature – as if it were like this once and for all – and that, if one follows the definitions I have given, one knows what art and nature are. I am sorry that I must once again behave in the way that evidently befits this idea, that I first attempt with some effort to expound the concepts clearly and distinguish between them, and then once more take away what I have gone to some lengths to give you and must tell you: that things are not so simple after all. What I mean is the following: this relationship between nature and art which I just outlined to you is not a static thing; there is not once and for all the sphere of nature on the one side and the sphere of art on the other. Rather, these two aspects are constantly in a state of mutual tension – and probably will be for as long as there is such a thing as art – and the relationship between these two aspects keeps changing at every stage of art history. There can even be stages – just to define things from one of the utmost extremes – where a particular form of aesthetic sensibility, directed against the sphere of cultured chit-chat and the affirmative-cultural,25 virtually demands of the work itself that, in order to remain a work of art at all, to remain faithful to its purpose in opposition to the world, it must revoke that very cultivatedness which defines its special area and then engage once more with elements from empirical reality after all – as has been the case time and again in the collages, in the montages, as the whole of surrealism has shown, and as you can still find today in the most recent works of the great painter Picasso, where the need for a perpetual metamorphosis of some elements or other taken directly from nature plays such a major and far-reaching part.26 So you should not take something like the idea that the aesthetic realm is removed from empirical reality as an absolute definition; rather, you must also take it as an aspect that is subject to historical dialectic and is precarious – precarious in the same way I told you in one of the previous sessions that so-called disinterested pleasure is a precarious thing,27 which means there can be no such thing as a work of art that is not rooted in sensual pleasure and does not refer back to this sensual pleasure, even if negatively so. But this means something very fundamental for art that one must establish with reference to the poles I mentioned to you earlier, and it means touching on an element that we must not neglect if we are to avoid reducing the polarity at which I have attempted to hint to what could be termed a form of ‘nature reserve of culture’ – in the way people imagine that, in a world that has grown as cold, alien, hard and evil as the world of today, it is fortunate that we can still read some sincere writers who will warm us and make us feel as comfortable as we supposedly did in earlier times, when it was probably not the case either. That is not what I meant, but practically the opposite, and I will try to show you very simply why: because art, as an attempt to create such a special sphere and to help the suppressed, that which is not rational, to find its voice, is involved in the overall process of enlightenment and in fact cannot exempt itself from this overall process. I told you earlier, at the start of the session, that the mere distinction of the special area of art from the special sacred area is already a piece of enlightenment, in the sense that this special area no longer claims to be true reality with an influence on the empirical domain but in a sense something powerless – one could almost say, as powerless as nature – and this already hints that this overall process of art's separation is pervaded by the process of enlightenment itself. In other words, art's attempt to object to the ever-advancing control of nature itself involves an element of that control, and as a very substantial, a truly central aspect.28 Essentially, what I am telling you here is the same as the specifically aesthetic experience of a fact that philosophy, especially Hegel, but all sorts of others too, has referred to time after time and with great emphasis, namely that the path humanity might find to a realm of freedom – that is, a realm in which oppression and violence, both towards humans and against nature, finally cease – that such a domain cannot be created through some retour à, through a return to something that supposedly existed once, as first formulated programmatically by Rousseau in his famous prize essay;29 rather, both art and social development are only defined by the idea of nature to the extent that humans learn to control nature just enough so that they no longer blindly obey it.30 So what I mean is that a work of art approaches the idea of giving a voice to suppressed nature only once it manages to free itself from the heteronomy of nature – that is, once it is no longer dependent on some materials that stand outside the artistic process as something unilluminated, blind and unpenetrated, and which exercise a power over humans that they perceive as heteronomous, as foreign, as other. In other words, then – and I would say that this is really the true dialectical key to the relationship between nature and art: the aspect that nature is salvaged in art is inseparable from the fact that art is increasingly able to control nature, yet, as long as it is blind and powerless in the face of whatever materials, it lacks the power to make nature as a whole speak within itself; then it falls victim to something blind and unilluminated, to a kind of mythology. And I would say that the tension between these two aspects, the idea that the progressive control of nature can at once help it to achieve freedom, this is the tension that truly distinguishes the artistic process and thus defines the meaning of the work of art in the first place.31
The concept that is responsible here, and which I must introduce at this point, which is as constitutive of all art as it was in Greek times, when one word applied equally to two things, is the concept of technique. No art that can seriously be termed art is without a technical element – that is, without the aspect of moulding its material sufficiently that, by the very fact of being removed from its natural form and melted down into an intention, into something human, it becomes the bearer of this intention, which in turn essentially belongs to nature. It is in this inescapable necessity of technical accrual that art's fundamental intertwinement with the process of enlightenment lies – precisely in the name of lending nature a voice, as I attempted to describe to you.32 Incidentally, it is probably a sociologically plausible consideration that art, whose special sphere remains a special sphere within the whole – that is, within the totality of society – cannot somehow remain static in itself but must rather – in so far as it has an interactive and antithetical relationship with this reality – take part in this reality.
I think that these reflections allow us to say a few words about the concept of progress in history. Supposedly there was once a so-called naïveté about progress in art, a ‘naïve faith in progress’ – though, for the most part, I always heard more squabbling about this faith in progress than expressions of this faith in progress itself. I can only say this: it would have been better for the general aesthetic awareness if there had been a greater faith in progress, namely faith in the development of technique and craft, especially here. And, on the other hand, we keep hearing: yes, it is simply a naïve enlightenment attitude to assume that art is making progress. And a number of very significant people, for example Hegel,33 then independently of him Carl Gustav Jochmann34 and also Karl Marx, have repeatedly said with great emphasis that there is actually no such thing as progress in art. This means that, for us, as Marx writes in one famous passage, Homer's poetry is just as canonic, and in Marx's view we are just as capable of ‘enjoying it’, as was the case when it was written, and it is impossible in the age of gunpowder to place anything alongside the Iliad that equals it.35 Nowadays such thoughts seem worn out, for example in arguments that are occasionally wielded against me when people claim that, when it comes to music, I simply have a faith in progress, but that there are powers of being that remain natural and untouched and have nothing to do with dialectic. I will refrain from discussing these things now. But I do think that we can say a few things here – I would indeed say, with good sense – on the basis of what we have clarified for ourselves. Namely this: there is such a thing as progress in art, but only in a very specific sense, namely the progressive control of nature. This process of progressive control of nature, progressive control of material, progressive technique, is irreversible in a very peculiar way,36 in a way that can be fully understood only if one has something resembling first-hand artistic experience. So, anyone who attempted to compose using Beethoven's methods or to paint with those of Monet would not produce works with the dignity of Beethoven or Monet but, rather, turn out tedious conservatory pieces or decorative hotel paintings,37 that seventeenth-rate impressionism which one finds so often in hotels and which would even make me choose a Defregger reproduction38 instead. But, on the other hand, the quality of a work of art, the truth content of a work of art, is by no means directly connected to this progressive control of material. There are works from earlier phases in which the control of the material was not developed to a remotely similar extent, but which nonetheless stand their own through a particular unity between their content, namely the truth they express, and the manner of their formation, though this does not mean that any person can turn back the clock of that progress in the control of the material, for it has a peculiar – I would almost say demonic – power which the individual will is powerless to defeat. In this sense, one should really speak of a progress in art, the control over its material and the absolute necessity for every artist to be capable of using the most advanced techniques of their time. On the other hand, one should not equate this progress in control of the material undialectically with the progress of art itself, where this aspect, in relation to what is controlled and what it actually expresses, is only one aspect and by no means the whole.39 This is the sensible meaning one should give the concept of progress in art, which would be both free of a kind of animal technocracy of art and, conversely, free of the obscurantism which believes that, to preserve nature, it must isolate itself from progress.