Our train of thought had developed in such a way that, in order to come closer to the problematics of the concept of beauty, we had attempted to follow on as directly as possible from grasping what aesthetic experience means; and here my prime intention was to show you first of all in what concrete ways the concept of beauty is problematic in the representation of art. I decided to show you this through an analysis of so-called aesthetic experience itself. When we are finished, however, I will carry out the opposite exercise with you: I will try to show you that, on the other hand, aesthetics cannot dispense with a concept of beauty, and then attempt to show how these two opposites can be unified. Now, our investigations will not merely have this methodological value; as must be the case in any dialectical procedure, I will try to ensure that the ideas necessary in order to make this central train of thought clear to you also convey something about aesthetic questions that is vaguely worthwhile and substantial in its own right.
At the end of the last session we came across the question of the so-called enjoyment of art and its problematics. Here one undoubtedly touches a form of consensus, a fixed clichéd notion with which probably few people would like to part, simply because they are so used to it. Now, certainly the phrase ‘enjoyment of art’ has itself become so old-fashioned and harmlessly good-natured that no one except persons of a very advanced age would use it so readily. But the seemingly more subjectively tinged and – how should one put it? – more experienced formulations, for example that a person wishes to be ‘given’ something by a work of art, and that they assess the work's entire value depending on what it offers them as a consumer, so to speak: these are no more than shamefaced paraphrases of that old-fashioned ‘enjoyment of art’. I would therefore rather take the bull by the horns and, for now, give less thought to the question of whether a work of art has anything to give people than to the question of the enjoyment of art. Here, however, it strikes me that – and I say this in the full awareness that it goes against widespread habits – genuine aesthetic experience, the experience of a work of art that does justice to this work itself and, on the other hand, is itself in fact aesthetically constituted, really has very little directly to do with enjoyment; that, when one approaches a work of art in a truly living way, one is doing something entirely different. In order to explain this to you, I would like to draw on the definition we formulated at the start and to which we keep being led back: that of the work of art as a special area, as a removed, secularly magical domain that may be connected to empirical reality through its elements and does, after all, refer to them in a highly mediated way, either critically or utopically, but, in so far as it is something aesthetic, in so far as we experience it as aesthetic, is not directly experienced as a piece of physical reality. It seems to me that the artistic experience we are examining at the moment essentially consists in being in this special area – and, if you recall, the definitions of this area should not be considered static, for the removal or positing of the aesthetic area itself rather takes place in a kind of endless process, starting anew at every moment. So I would say that aesthetic experience essentially consists in taking part in this co-enactment, in joining the process of the work of art by being inside it, by – to put it very simply – living in it.
The question of enjoyment – to say this right at the start – is simply discarded here because the kind of experience I am trying to define for you is, in a sense, a path leading precisely away from the subject, whereas every form of enjoyment is in fact something which, as they say, gives the subject something, something that, with regard to the subject, is chalked up as its own – to put it maliciously – ‘advantage’. The better someone actually understands art, however – by which I mean the more genuine their relationship to art – the less they will really enjoy art. Let me read you a few lines I wrote almost thirty years ago, and which reappear unchanged in my new book:1
What distinguishes the musician from the bad amateur is the lack of enthusiasm. The amateur enters the realm of music like a stranger wishing to spend their time there; they drift through the city and find everything beautiful that does not irk them. The native guiding them can only say ‘yes, yes’ to their words of praise, for the streets and corners are too familiar to require confirmation; perhaps the local even sees their differences in such detail that they can no longer appreciate their totality. But they abstain willingly therefrom, and their love is the even pace at which they check every alley corner and step through the right gate to glimpse the jutting gable of the house just across from them; sometimes they unlatch an unassuming door and enter a courtyard with the most perfect inner facade. If the stranger wishes to reward them with their delight, the local merely responds with the name of the courtyard.2
So that, to me, is the form of behaviour we are dealing with here. Incidentally, when people in certain movements, for example the youth music movement,3 said that doing is better than feeling, or when Hindemith once stated that making music is better than listening to music,4 there was some truth in it from this perspective. And, to be fair, I would like – especially after being very critical of this attitude of blind doing5 – to underline this element of truth, namely that the relationship with the work of art is not merely that of passive acceptance, which would be enjoyable in all its aspects, but that this question of enjoyment no longer even arises at first, in so far as artistic experience consists in a particular form of ‘doing’ or ‘making’, namely in co-enacting. Except that this making should be understood not as a technical busyness, as minstreldom, as somehow joining in, but rather as a spiritual, imaginary enactment, as an act of following the work of art, of the inward spiritual co-enactment of what the work of art, as a sensual manifestation, decides of its own accord. By contrast, the form of behaviour towards art that generally parades itself as the so-called naïve and immediate approach – based on enjoyment, in a word – actually strikes me as the opposite, namely an alienated form of behaviour borrowed from that of the consumer, the customer who experiences the world only in categories of commodities and – as commodities happen to be exchanged with their equivalents – asks with each such commodity whether it is worth its money,6 whether it returns as much as they have put into it of themselves. But – if we assume that a work of art is indeed an objective context of meaning, not a mere accumulation of sensual stimuli – the behaviour towards the work itself is naturally the opposite, and it was once rightly stated that it is less a matter of what the work ‘gives’ us than what we give to it. That is, whether, in a particular form of active passivity or effortful surrender to the matter, we give it what it actually expects of us. One could perhaps encapsulate that negatively in the rule of thumb that the enjoyer – namely, the person with the culinary attitude which, last time, I termed atomistic – not only fails to grasp the whole but in fact always perceives the wrong things in the work of art precisely because this attitude of enjoyment – which aesthetics still generally posits quite unreflectingly as the attitude towards art7 – ignores from the outset the very things that are present in the work.
Now, here you could admittedly enquire as to the purpose of this. You could ask: ‘If I do not enjoy a work of art, what is the point of the whole business?’ It must somehow have a meaning within the human world too, otherwise it is nothing but a fetish. If, as history certainly teaches us, works of art do contain fetishes, among other things, at least in their genealogy,8 then I think there are initially worse charges than that of fetishism. Just as one cannot imagine an act of artistic production that does not involve the work appearing to the artist as something absolute, truly as a manifestation of truth, however much they might know about the relativity of the aesthetic sphere, so too one can hardly imagine any artistic experience that views the work from the outset merely as a means to an end. Perhaps it would make more sense to say, rather paradoxically, that the work only comes to mean anything, to have a function and thus prove its raison d’être in the world, where it does not fulfil any immediate purpose but instead appears as a being-in-itself. Only through this being-in-itself, only through this constitution of its objective inner laws, can it hope to achieve that provision of joy which the guileless consciousness simply expects immediately from the work of art here and now, at every moment. Works of art have certainly preserved enough of their sacred origins that, as Benjamin once put it very aptly, they are not directly intended for an audience.9 No painting is there for the viewer, no symphony for the listener, nor even any drama for the audience, as they are first of all for their own sake; and only through this aspect, which must be described as a secularized theological one, so only with reference to the absolute, and not in some immediate relationship with humans, do [the works] exist, do they speak at all. As soon as one violates the distance that lies in them, as soon as one relates the works directly to what one wants from them, one already ‘de-artifies’ them and destroys the very thing one hopes to get from them. It also strikes me as one of the most characteristic inconsistencies in the current vulgar aesthetic consciousness that, while there is constant talk of ‘bonds’ and the supposed metaphysical meaning or, as people so wonderfully put it, the ‘statement’ of the work, there are at once incessant demands that the work should be there for people's sake; this exposes that demand for a ‘bond’ as precisely what one should suspect: an expression of administrative manipulation. But ultimately – you could say, the same way one lets sleeping dogs lie – one can also let the work of art lie. And if it indeed no longer has any connection to happiness, why should I be compelled to have any dealings with works of art? I spoke to you earlier of such a connection, using the example of Romeo and Juliet to show that, even in negativity, and especially in negativity, every work of art contains the idea of the complete fulfilment of utopia.
But now I would like to examine this question of the connection of the work of art to happiness, or to enjoyment, from a slightly different angle in keeping with what we are dealing with, namely actual aesthetic experience. Certainly there is something resembling happiness or enjoyment derived from works of art, and it would go against the simplest common sense if one simply denied that based on the metaphysical speculation I have carefully touched on, and indeed idolized the works quite primitively as absolutes. Works of art are not divine manifestations but the work of humans, and this gives them both their limits and their connection to human matters. What I wish to say, however, is that the happiness emanating from works of art, or I suppose even the enjoyment they provide, is not directly one with the aesthetic experience of them; this aesthetic experience itself does not directly provide enjoyment in its individual aspects, as imagined by the amateur and the bourgeois, who turn the work into a plate of pork rib and sauerkraut. Rather, the work of art offers happiness because it succeeds in drawing us into it in the way I have tried to show you; that it forces us to accompany it on the paths it traces within itself; and that, at the same time, it thus alienates us from the alienated world in which we live, and through this very alienation of the alienated in fact restores immediacy or undamaged life. If there is such a thing as happiness coming from the aesthetic, or aesthetic enjoyment, then this enjoyment therefore lies in that to which the work succeeds in subjecting us by absorbing it, by the fact that we enter it and follow it. But the work's aesthetic quality plays a substantial part in this achievement.10 Now you might think: ‘Well, what you are telling us – happiness through a work of art – is something rather abstract and general; so this means that the removal from the everyday sphere applies equally from the most inferior light novel to the greatest works of art, and what you are serving up here is really pretty stale, abstract and empty stuff.’ But I think it would be a little too hasty if you argued in this way. For it is precisely the work's ability to absorb the viewer or the listener so strongly, to draw them into itself so far and, as I put it, to alienate them from the alienated world, which strikes me as the idea of the work of art – this itself depends on the power and greatness of the work, on its autonomy, the extent to which it can embody within itself its own formal law down to the smallest details. In this sense, one could say – if I may return to the categories I laid out for you in the last session – that happiness through the work of art concerns the work as a whole, whose power ultimately decides how far it takes us out of mere existence, even if only temporarily, or whether it does not. To that extent, the description of being elevated through the work of art which is still found in earlier aesthetics,11 but scarcely exists today, is certainly as superior to the description of so-called enjoyment as it is to the question of what the work has to give us. I would like to mention, at least in passing, that you can indeed find here quite a fundamental connection to the problematics of art itself. For, ultimately, this power of the work of art to alienate us once again from the alienated world is itself an aspect of illusion; this real world from which we become alienated is not negated in its alienated character but, in a certain sense, left in precisely that state because we withdraw from it.12 And this is indeed where we find that conflict – if I may put it somewhat grandiloquently – between the moral, namely the aim to change the world, and the specifically aesthetic, namely the intolerability of the world as it is. If I correctly understand Tolstoy's novel The Kreutzer Sonata, which, despite certainly somewhat embarrassing ascetic tendencies of his, I consider an extremely important creation, then the idea essentially developed in this novel – and it is a theoretical novel concerned with the critique of art, and great art in particular, for he very consciously chooses a highly significant work of art, and what he says about this work, incidentally, testifies to an extraordinarily penetrating and subtle understanding – so what Tolstoy says in this novel about the work of art amounts to the statement that, the more significant a work of art, and the more adequate the artistic experience, the more the context of delusion is reinforced in a sense, and the more one leaves reality in the ghastly state one intended to flee through all this.13 I think that this antinomy must be named, at least, and that we are indeed dealing with a phenomenon of which – if one wishes to avoid burying oneself in a kind of naïve aestheticism, especially in the current period of restoration – one must say that there are periods in which art has exactly this value, that it pushes itself – and does so all the more, the more serious and perfect it is – as a substitute in front of other things that are ruled out in such a situation. And especially if one espouses what are termed avant-garde and very extreme positions in art, as I do, then one must also be aware, and tell those who trust one, that this radicalism also contains something very un-radical, one could almost say something resigned, and that there are situations in which precisely such radical art can become an alibi for an eschewal of an interventional practice.14 But I do not consider it my task to pursue this argument further here. I only wish to tell you – as nothing is isolated, as there is no sentence that, in the world we inhabit today, cannot be transformed into a lie through the function it assumes, no matter how true it might be – that even this idea I am touching on has become a lie in the entire eastern area, for example, where all art is being subordinated to so-called practice, which means being reshaped into a practical tool. And what this does to art, namely the obvious insufficiency and stupidity and primitivity of the art thus produced, at least shows that the problem I have described to you does not involve a simple duality in which, as it were, the moral human could simply triumph in Kierkegaardian fashion over the aesthetic one,15 but that what we have is rather an antinomy that probably cannot be resolved in the world we inhabit, and where all one can do is to take it into account.
But, to remain on the subject of aesthetic experience, I would argue that, even with what I have said to you – that the so-called liberating or elevating quality one attributes to art lies in the totality of the work and in its power to remove us from the immediacy of a bad and questionable existence – that even that does not truly describe the whole but is still something abstract. I think some of you will already have been bothered by this abstractness, and rightly so: bothered that the experience of the concretely aesthetic and that liberation which is only meant to follow indirectly through the whole do not face each other as directly, as simply as it would seem. If I may speak of my own experience for a moment, which is perhaps not as singular as one would think: I am inclined to take an extremely democratic view in these matters and always to presuppose that – if I can only succeed in getting hold of my own experience genuinely and very precisely – with this in particular, I am uttering something that does not belong only to me privately, but which is more or less human; I do not believe in the absolute right of individuation here. So if I may refer to my own experience once again, I have the impression that, in actual artistic experience, where it is genuine and the relationship with the work of art is intensified to the utmost degree – one could almost say, where one becomes entirely one with the life of the work in the pulse, the rhythm of one's own life, where one is taken up in it – that there are then moments of breakthrough. What I mean by breakthrough is that there are moments – they could be chance moments, but it could also be the highest and most intense moments of a work of art – in which that feeling of being lifted out, that feeling, if you will, of transcending mere existence, is intensely concentrated and actualizes itself, and in which it seems to us as if the absolutely mediated, namely that idea of being freed, is something immediate after all, where we think we can directly touch it. These moments are probably the highest and the most decisive which artistic experience can achieve; and it is certainly conceivable that the notion that works of art can be enjoyed is taken from them, for those moments truly have a form of delight to them that – I will not say outshines, but definitely matches the highest moments of happiness one experiences elsewhere; they have the same power as the highest real moments that we know. Yet, strangely enough, these very moments in which – how shall I put it? – the spirit of the work of art or its meaning actualizes itself and it seems as if we were experiencing it directly and almost physically in ourselves, these moments are far less ones of enjoyment than of being overwhelmed, of forgetting oneself, really the annihilation of the subject in a very similar sense to the way Schopenhauer – under the preconditions of his metaphysics, of course – describes these effects of the work of art in Book III of The World as Will and Representation. It is then as if, in that moment – one could call them moments of weeping – the subject were collapsing, inwardly shaken. [They are] really moments in which the subject annihilates itself and experiences happiness at this annihilation – and not happiness at being granted something as a subject. These moments are not enjoyment; the happiness lies in the fact that one has them.16
I would say that art, which is so often associated with hedonism and has always been viewed with suspicion, especially by the puritans of all religions and all so-called worldviews, for supposedly seeking pleasure, is – in the sense we have discussed – something anti-hedonistic. That is, the experience of art is not one that benefits the subject in the usual sense but, rather, one that leads away from the subject. From this perspective, artistic experience is indeed a form of temporary suspension, as Schopenhauer would have it, a temporary suspension of the pricipium individuationis in the idea,17 if I may say it in the old idealistic language, and by no means the path directly taken by sensual fulfilment – though I would note here that even the distinction between the so-called sensual and the so-called spiritual work of art is far more difficult, far more dialectical, than the cliché of northern-metaphysical and southern-sensual art, a cliché of which I can hopefully rid you along with a number of others in the course of these lectures.
I do not want to occupy myself with this tempting task now, however, but wish rather to follow on from what I explained to you about the concept of enjoyment by saying something about the concept of understanding works of art, in so far as understanding works also means establishing some relationship of appropriation or participation. For the theory of understanding, the work becomes something that belongs to oneself, something one makes one's property – which is also present in the notion of enjoyment – and I by no means desire to deny this aspect of artistic experience; I will discuss in what ways it is justified. But, first of all, I think – and perhaps this can also help you a little in your own relationship with works of art – the genuine relationship with works of art is not really one of understanding, because art categorically, by its very nature and constitution, if I may put it thus, initially contains an element of incomprehensibility; because art itself, as a piece of secularized magic, eludes any attempt to make it like ourselves and like the subject, which is what the concept of understanding essentially demands. If the definition I tried to give you earlier applies, namely that artistic experience is a co-enactment or being-inside, then this type of behaviour towards the work of art would indeed do away with the distance, the thing-ness, that is inherent in the concept of understanding. But the works themselves have an enigmatic aspect to which one can initially do justice only by refraining from asking ‘What does it all mean?’ and rather oneself entering the matter itself. So one could almost say for now: the less one ‘understands’ art, meaning the less one reduces it to some abstract, underlying general concepts which it supposedly conveys, and the more one instead surrenders to its happening, the better one will understand it, grasp its context of meaning, which means following the work of art without guessing what it means. When Hegel once responded to the accusations that his philosophy was so hard to understand, and that people often did not know what they were supposed to think of when reading about his concepts, by saying that one should not think of anything but the concept itself,18 he was describing an experience that specifically corresponds to the relationship with art. And, indeed, the experiences with which Hegel's philosophy is saturated have a great deal in common with the type of aesthetic experience I am seeking to define – though this should not lead one to aestheticize his philosophy, of course. Understanding a work of art does not mean understanding what is behind it, as it were, what the work means, but rather understanding the work of art as it is: understanding the logic that leads it from one chord to the next, from one colour to the next, from one line to the next. And only when this understanding of the matter itself is fully achieved, albeit without yet touching on the work's riddle character, only then does one come close to the work. On the other hand, the works of art – and this will perhaps show you in closing how essential a part of the work is that aspect of the riddle, the enigmatic element, which I have tried to describe to you – are completely helpless and exposed at the moment when someone who knows nothing about the artistic sphere, the philistine, asks: ‘So, what is that, what does it say, what is it all about?’ Attempting to convey to a person who is radically amusical, who suffers from amusia in the clinical sense, what a work of art is for, what it means, what it is – aside from what the work says immediately and of its own accord – is a completely hopeless undertaking. And in reality, as soon as one breaks free of its spell and faces it as one faces a piece of reality, all art has an element of perplexity and helplessness that spreads to those who regard it. But let me say one more thing: the experience of art must not stop at this level of experience but must, rather, insist, in a higher and far more mediated sense, on comprehending the work as something incomprehensible – if I may formulate it so paradoxically. And let me try at least to outline this exact mediation of the concept of aesthetic understanding to you at the beginning of the next session.