Before I go on to show you by means of an elaborated dialectic – that of beauty itself – what I consider to be the central task of a lecture on aesthetics, I would like, at least in brief, to address an intervention from your circles that reached me at the end of the last session. I was guilty – and it is very easy to become guilty in one's efforts to explain specific aspects of a problem to you – of passing over self-evident and general things, things that are known about the topic, which naturally results in a skewed perspective. I am referring to Plato's view, and I was rightly told that I had presented – one could say – a radically dynamic or dialectical interpretation of the view of beauty in the Phaedrus, whereas the first tenet of the idea of beauty – and of all the ideas, or forms, in Platonic philosophy – is that it is eternally self-same and unchanging. In other words, that Plato's aesthetics too is a static ontological theory. This is true, of course. That is to say, Plato's theory of forms also extends to the Phaedrus, and one must insist on that all the more if, as I do, one wishes to contradict the prevailing philological view that the Phaedrus is from Plato's revisionist late period. I simply took this aspect for granted and wanted to show you instead that, in his, if you will, phenomenological effort to reproduce the experience of beauty as precisely as possible, Plato himself was actually pushed by the structure he had developed beyond that aspect of static ontology which, as we say, naturally remains the systematic foundation at least of classical Platonism. However, I would still like to say – although it does not really belong in a lecture on aesthetics, but as I have engaged with Plato, I do perhaps owe it to you to say a little about it – that one must not label philosophers too easily, and accordingly one should not believe that the whole of Plato can simply be subsumed under the category of a static ontology. For while it is true that this character of eternal self-sameness and immutability is ascribed to the forms, Platonic philosophy nonetheless, despite its doctrine of objective reason, the objective being-in-itself of the forms, was always dealing also with the problem of mediation, the problem of how these objective forms – the forms in themselves, Hegel would say1 – become something for-us, and how – to use a Platonic expression, albeit taken from a different context – we can participate in the forms.2 And because he views the nature of humans as a fragile and imprisoned one3 – today we would call it finite and problematic – that faces the infinite nature of the form's being-in-itself, there is already a dialectical relationship between these forms and our knowledge of them; in Plato, however, it is a dialectic that takes place largely on the side of the subject, not of objectivity. So it is no coincidence that, in keeping with the old division of educational disciplines, Plato refers to the theory of knowledge – which for him is synonymous with the theory of forming concepts – as dialectic.4 In his own view it constitutes a movement, one that is not even absolutely continuous but which, as I have just attempted to show in the Phaedrus, contains an element of a qualitative leap, a sudden transition: that same aspect which Plato describes with such categories as frenzy (ἐνϑουσιασμός)5 or divine madness (μανία).6 I do think, however, that because we can only know about the forms by means of our own knowledge – through those aspects of concept-formation that Plato highlights – Plato's ontology is not as indifferent, compared to this so-called Platonic dialectic, as one usually and trivially imagines; rather, because we cannot know about the being-in-itself of the forms, unlike their being-for-us, according to Plato, and as we ascend to them through the mechanisms of our own knowledge – by which he always means our own thinking – they are actually affected in their being-in-themselves by the process of appropriation, as Kierkegaard calls it.7 And that is what I really wanted to show you in the last session: how far the subjective aspect of the experience of beauty, as represented in that passage from the Phaedrus, does also, contre cœur – against the official static-ontological doctrinal content of platonic philosophy, so to speak – affect the objective concept of beauty itself.
I am telling you this today because I think it may not be entirely irrelevant to the questions with which we must now begin our main reflections. For now I will focus mainly on laying out the problematics of the concept of beauty for you, in so far as it is a problematics of subjective behaviour towards the beautiful, and I think that this will lead me to emphasize the objective aspect very strongly in relation to aesthetic subjectivism. This makes it all the more important – so that you do not shift towards the opposite extreme, namely a dogmatic objectivism – for you also to recall the subjective aspect necessarily connected to aesthetic objectivity which I highlighted in those passages from Plato, but with the addition that I have made today at your suggestion. So I would like to start by saying something about the concept of beauty itself, and about the relationship between beauty and art. Now this is a peculiar matter. On the one hand, if one were to be roused from one's sleep and asked what the nature of art is, based on the education one has fortunately or unfortunately received, one would be inclined to say: ‘My goodness, art – that is the area of beauty as a whole, and not just natural beauty, but rather that special area which developed from the magical one and which we have discussed in such detail.’ On the other hand, especially if one has one's own aesthetic experience of works of art – and we are now emphatically referring no longer to natural beauty but, indeed, to art, and in the second half of the lecture we will occupy ourselves exclusively with aesthetic questions concerning – if one knows what a work of art really is, if one feels that, then one will be very uneasy about the concept of beauty, and what will happen – I cannot recall if I ever told you the story – is the same thing that happened to me at the Hamburg lecture,8 when a man energetically objected that, in all my very complicated reflections, I had forgotten the simplest thing of all, namely beauty, the eternal beauty of works of art, to which I responded that this sort of criticism was chiefly voiced by operetta composers; it then turned out that the gentleman in question, though not an operetta composer, was in fact the retired leaseholder of an operetta theatre. In telling you this, I mean to sketch the sphere in which the current experience of the concept of beauty generally takes place. I dare say that, at first, unless we come directly from the countryside, we would all resist equating the experience of art with the experience of beauty. The idea of doing so would call to mind the toothpaste faces from advertising pillars, or even the grinning of advertising film stars, and we would tend to feel cheated of the main substance of the work – whatever it might be – when it confronts us directly with a claim to immediate, sensual beauty. I would like to point out that the experience to which I am referring is by no means as new as it seems to each subsequent generation; rather, it has come about countless times throughout history in an ever-changing fashion.
I would like to remind you above all that dialectical philosophy, even Hegel's school, highlighted very emphatically the concept of ugliness as a necessary aspect of beauty, and that one of the most talented and important of Hegel's students, whose work – unlike that of most others – continued to have an effect well into the nineteenth century, namely Rosenkranz, expressly wrote an Aesthetics of Ugliness.9 Yet I also wish to tell you that, if one is well aware of the limits of the concept of beauty in art, a certain historical differentiation is necessary. It is not as if so-called ugliness – whatever that might be – always simply constituted an aspect of art in the same way, as the meaning of this aspect itself significantly changed. I think it is also important, if you are to understand what we will subsequently develop concerning the critique of the ideal of beauty as something sensually pleasing, to understand this change in the relationship with ugliness as a historical one. Think of the importance of so-called ugliness in the great Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, for example Frans Hals's Malle Babbe, which, if I recall correctly, used to be exhibited at the National Gallery in Berlin.10 It is a depiction of an ugly, grinning and laughing old woman; but the depiction itself shows such a mastery of antithetics – it highlights this ugliness so humorously, one would say, it distances itself so strongly from this ugliness through its expression – that this ugliness is, in fact, indirectly taken up into a harmonistic ideal of beauty; naturally this is also evident in the picture's composition, in what one generally terms the formal elements of painting, which in this work – as in countless other Dutch depictions of so-called ugliness – integrates this aspect, takes it up into the form, and in this way precisely reinforces the victory of the beauty principle by showing that it can also incorporate the aspect of ugliness. If you look at contemporary depictions of ugliness, for example those found in virtually all of Samuel Beckett's work, which almost exclusively contains repulsive things – the most primitive bodily functions, physical defects, semi-putrefaction, dementia and the like11 – then you will, of course, no longer directly have this feeling that the shadow of ugliness here serves merely to underline the triumph of the self-possessed shaping mind all the more strongly. Nor do we find here any compositional approach that points beyond this ugliness and has a kind of affirmative meaning in relation to it; rather, the aesthetic element here lies in the power to endure those utmost experiences captured in the images of ugliness without glossing over them. I think it would be an undertaking that I can mention here, in order to prevent references to the significance of ugliness in art from being limited to an inferior generality, to trace the changes in the ideal of ugliness undergone by art;12 but, on the whole, aestheticians and cultural historians only like to chatter about the changes in the ideal of beauty. Instead of pursuing this aspect further, however, I would like to take on the critical question of beauty after all, and start by attempting to unfold its negative aspect for you.
Generally speaking, the concept of beauty we resist in art is indeed a subjectivist concept. This means it is synonymous with the sensually pleasing – be it the mere harmony of some formal properties that are meant to accommodate some primal need for harmony in us or the sensually pleasing in the sense of the attractive, the enticing, the enjoyable, or an image removed from erotic beauty in the widest sense. What I aim to undertake here, and what I shall now begin, is another attempt at immanent critique. This means I will not attempt – as I certainly could, and to which I shall return later – to show you positively in what sense the true substance and nature of works of art come only from their own objective constitution; rather, I will take the opposite approach and seek to show you how far the aspect of subjective enjoyment falls short of what, in our genuine aesthetic experience, we encounter as beautiful. In other words, I intend to take aesthetic subjectivism at its word. First of all, I will truly keep to the subjective experience of beauty or art and examine it a little more closely than is done in the usual forms of aesthetics, and I hope that, in so doing, I can also point out some things regarding the concept of beauty that would not otherwise be apparent. Allow me to remind you of what I attempted to show in my explanation of the difficult and by no means stable concept of disinterested pleasure: that works of art – the important works of art – do not lack aspects of sensual stimulation, but rather – as the sphere of art as such is a product of this interest in sensual stimulation, which never stands rigidly and abstractly opposite the sphere – that, at all its stages, time and again, it is always in a state of tension with this sphere. I would ask you to note this first of all, so that you do not lapse into the opposite extreme of – how should I put it? – cheaply spiritualistic aesthetic observation. But here you must also bear in mind that, in true works of art, these sensual stimuli appear only in a scattered form. When I say ‘scattered’, I am not referring to anything quantitative; I do not mean that they appear only sparsely here and there; there are surely great and important works that correspond in their entirety to the concept of the sensually stimulating, even if we have particular difficulties with such works of art today. What I mean to say is rather that, even where these aspects of sensual pleasure appear in the works, they are actually accidental; they do not constitute the nature of the work itself but are only scattered in comparison to that element which actually carries the work, namely its organization, its unity of meaning. In specific aesthetic experience, we will only really find those sensual stimuli adequate, we will only be able to identify with them as aesthetically experiencing individuals, if we see them in relation to the meaning they carry – but not if we view them as such in isolation, as valid in themselves.13 So if a work such as Alban Berg's Lulu14 constantly strives for a very particular form of sonic beauty and, one can certainly say, achieves it, this is connected to the fact that, in this work itself – if I can put it like this – the idea of sensual beauty and its allure, that entire dialectic between nature and control of nature, is at the heart of things, and that sensual beauty is here essentially the carrier of this idea and by no means a thing that stands in itself.15 I think it is relatively easy for me to make this plausible to you. I told you that the sensual elements of art as aspects of stimulation and pleasure become false and questionable the moment we isolate them. All this means, however, is that they then become culinary elements, values of taste. We then literally approach the work of art in the way we approach a good dish – or perhaps I should say a very fine wine. We consume the work as if it were physically real, so to speak, and thus violate the taboo which is the very law of art, namely – and here, too, I can refer to what we have already studied – that it constitutes a sphere which is removed from the sphere of mere empirical existence, which is not directly one with our own existence but separated from it like a sort of magical area.
What follows from this is something that I may not yet have told you in so simple a form, and which you are all the better equipped to understand at this point: that the nature of art as spiritual is, in fact, in direct union with that removal of the aesthetic realm from the empirical realm. Because we do treat works of art not as physical aspects of our existence but, rather, as aspects which are separated from us in a certain way, which are not directly part of our existence at all, and we can only experience them in a special way, namely through what has been called ‘aesthetic attitude’,16 this already removes them from the sphere of mere sensual immediacy. And this removal from empirical immediacy is itself necessarily an element of spiritualization, meaning one can say – and I think this is very important – that the spiritual aspect of art already lies in the immediate perception of a work of art as a work of art, and is not added afterwards through some spiritualistic act that only considers the so-called spiritual content of works of art post festum. By taking up the distance that accompanies my decision to view a work of art rather than eat an apple, I have already brought into play that entire process of spiritualization which reaches completion when I face a composition by Anton von Webern or a picture by Klee.17 By comparison, the culinary is always the atomistic, by which I mean that individual stimulus which becomes something physically real and sensually pleasing, and which is spiritualized precisely through its relation to the whole as defined by the formal law. And if I might adopt a schoolmasterly tone for a moment and provide you with a rule or a little aid to your own aesthetic experience, I would say this: it is really the decisive aspect in the experience of works of art that they understand the individual sensual element never as an individual sensual element but rather in relation to the whole, which makes it more than merely the isolated sensual manifestation as which it appears in the here and now. So if in the first movement of Beethoven's ‘Eroica’, for example, a certain very emphatic motivic element in semiquavers intervenes in the events,18 then primitive or culinary listening, atomistic listening, will grasp this theme in the same way as all the other individual themes; perhaps it will be remembered and, if one has heard it often enough, one might perhaps whistle it and recall it as a so-called musical ‘idea’. I have no wish to denigrate this. And I believe that, if one has not gone through this stage of sensual-atomistic behaviour towards works of art, if one perceives the work purely as an abstract whole, so to speak, without ever abandoning oneself to these individual sensual aspects, then one certainly does not know what a work of art is. But you will only understand the ‘Eroica’ at the precise moment when you do not hear this intervening motif as one idea alongside however many others but, rather, relate it to the totality; that means noticing that a kind of heteronomous force here intervenes in the movement's progression, that you really experience this specific theme as an intervention rather than a mere continuation – and hence that you are really capable of experiencing the difference between an exposition that progresses and develops and one that is antithetical, in which an element appears that seems not to have been planned and first obstructs the interplay of forces, but is finally reintegrated through the ongoing development of the whole. I think that, in so far as you are being trained in individual philologies or in musicology, you will be made aware of such individual phenomena – this is certainly the case in recent literary history – and then be given these as categories of stylistic critique and shown how individual aspects of the works of art relate to the respective whole. But what I wish to teach you here is actually something less harmless. I do not so much want to contribute to your education and show you, for example, that Beethoven's style does not consist simply in a stringing together of ideas but in the fact that these ideas are actually determined by one another and gain meaning through their functional context. Rather, I want to tell you what artistic experience is, namely that subjective aspect with which we engage in our critique of the sensually pleasing, and that you can only understand the work of art at all, only come close to it at all, if you perceive these relations between the individual element and the whole. This means that you will only truly understand a work of art if you perceive all its sensual details concretely and specifically, to be sure, but so much in relation to the other sensual aspects and to the whole that they accordingly become carriers of a structural meaning, and at that moment cease to be mere isolated sensual stimuli. The simple example of this is really that one cannot understand a music – if it is a highly organized music – as long as one perceives only individual beautiful passages in it, which may even become a virtual wall blocking one's access to an understanding of the work itself. If you add up an important musical work for yourself from such beautiful passages, what you are really making of this work is nothing but a potpourri of itself – or you are moving it in the direction of a smash hit. Incidentally, if I might add this, what you have here is perhaps a reasonable distinction between what one calls high or serious art and vulgar art of mass culture – or whatever you wish to call it.19 For one cannot simply tell these things apart according to their so-called standard, since the concept of standard is something extremely problematic in art. There are works of art that were once located at a very high standard but can no longer uphold this standard at all, while others were not at such a high standard objectively speaking but managed through the unfolding of some inner forces to leave so-called high-class art far behind. I need only remind you of Johann Peter Hebel20 in this context; then you will know what I mean. But the less one can rely on the dogmatic notion of standard in such distinctions, the more important it is to find such criteria within the matter itself, as I have attempted to do for you in one such case. But here I would say that this ability really to perceive the individual aspects as functional aspects of the whole is constitutive of aesthetic experience and that, on the other hand, a work of art exists only where there is indeed such a – yes, let me say it – dialectical relationship between the individual aspects and the whole. And when I speak of a dialectical relationship, what I mean is precisely that the whole comes together from such relations as the one I attempted to show you using the example of the ‘Eroica’, while, on the other hand, each individual element gains its meaning only from the whole.
This reciprocal production of the whole and its parts in a dynamic progression, then, is the meaning one can assign to the dialectical form of the work of art in itself. I would say that this aspect of breaking apart into so-called beautiful passages or individual sensual stimuli has, in fact, accompanied art time and again, that it could be seen as the constant temptation to which the works have always been subject, and that this aspect inheres in art as an element of danger just as, on the other hand, the element of abstract or idealistic unity can also threaten the work.21 Regarding this aspect of the individual sensual stimulus that threatens to breach the work of art, however, one can say that, because the works of art have only rarely developed as autonomous constructs in the world we inhabit and have almost always been to some degree elements of the market, the market has always asserted itself in a certain preponderance of these aspects. And the great artists have always submitted to this circumstance in some way. I think it would be a philistine and narrow view to reproach the artists for this, as it were from the vantage point of a poésie pure or a musique pure or peinture pure.22 Rather, it seems to me that the greatness of art in history until today – when these things are admittedly starting to become a little extreme and a little precarious – has really always consisted in the fact that art has yielded to this temptation yet nonetheless preserved the force of its spiritualization, the force of its integration, at the very point where it was lost.23 It is not at all in the nature of the work of art to be in control of itself and commanding its elements at every moment; it is surely an equal part of its nature that it becomes lost in its individual aspects and, in following the motto ‘throw away in order to gain’,24 namely surrendering to that danger, it demonstrates its strength all the more – the strength to find itself again. A work of art that does not succumb to temptation – one could almost say a work which, in modern terms, does not contain the potential of kitsch as something sublated – is probably not a work of art at all.25 Let me just add that the aspect of the sensual, culinary particular, which threatens to rupture the unity of the work, is clearly at its most legitimate where it immediately declares itself without masquerading as something higher. In certain revues or film revues, for example, where there is hardly any claim to present a context of meaning, and the work of art instead abandons itself unreservedly to these sensual aspects, a second spiritual context can compose itself precisely from these unleashed sensual elements, while elsewhere – let us say, in the music of Tchaikovsky or other great bad composers – where the work claims to be art, but one realizes it is actually only a matter of connecting themes that the ladies and gentlemen can take home with them, such aspects are infinitely less bearable than where they reveal themselves with a certain air, I would say an air of great shamelessness.
Here you must not forget that the work of art is truly an interplay between the individual impulse and the whole, and that even these heteronomous individual impulses, if you will, always contain an element of truth, namely that here, that same nature breaks through which is suppressed, and whose renewed honouring through its integration is what gives the work of art its own honour. But if I now return to our own aesthetic experience, it must be said that the whole constituted by the work of art – the context of meaning, that element which can be termed the carrier of the work's spiritual aspect – is initially its concealed side, that which is not immediate, and that therefore, at least for us in our situation today, the path of aesthetic experience is largely the path to the whole, and that one must not misuse the things I have told you about the retrieval of the sensual individual stimulus as an ideological justification to stop at that sphere, unless one wants to end up appreciating works of art in the manner of the provincial uncle who takes a trip to the metropolitan theatre. I would argue, then, that a work of art is experienced by someone who experiences the whole, for it is only the whole that lends meaning. And this experience tends to be an experience that leads away from the individual sensual phenomenon. Here you come across a strange paradox in the experience of art, just as the sphere of art in general – I have tried to elaborate for you as to why this is so – is the sphere of paradox par excellence. For the more adequate the sensual experience of works of art, the more perfectly you will perceive a work of art sensually and the more you will also distance yourself from the merely sensual element of the work of art. That is to say, if you truly listen to a complex symphonic movement in such a way that you genuinely relate all its sensual aspects to one another, that you hear and sensually perceive them in their unity and their mediatedness, if you thus hear what you hear not simply in the way it appears to you now but also in its relation to what has already passed in the work and to what still lies ahead of you in the work, and finally to the whole, then this is surely the highest degree of precise sensual experience that can be achieved. By the same token, however, you also distance yourself from sensual experience because this mode of perception takes you way from the mere ‘this thing here’, the mere moment in which you hear the individual element; because, in other words, adequate aesthetic experience is always one that simultaneously transcends the mere given, the momentary given of which it is composed. And from this necessarily follows the question of the nature of aesthetic experience itself and the question of whether, after what I have told you here, the correlate of the subjective concept of aesthetic beauty is tenable at all or, to formulate it very radically, whether it is actually possible for the enjoyment of art to be an adequate aesthetic experience.