Let us try to take up our threads, meanwhile somewhat tangled, where we left them hanging a week ago. I closed with an attempt to ground aesthetics in the so-called aesthetic experience or the consciousness of the aesthetic observer, and the final motif I introduced was that, in general, defining this so-called aesthetic experience, or defining what one experiences through works of art, is actually something entirely skewed and inadequate because it overlooks the decisive fact that there is really no such thing as determinate, unambiguous reactions, much less unambiguous intellectual judgements, as the conclusion of a work of art. This type of unambiguity, to which we are accustomed from knowledge in the form of judgements – something is or is not the case – is quite simply absent from the sphere of the work of art. Perhaps you recall that I pointed you to the phenomenon of Edouard Manet in order to make this a little clearer, and I tried – admittedly only in the form of propositions, for naturally I cannot develop this adequately in such a theoretically oriented lecture – to show you that, in this work, a critical, a socio-critical aspect, and also an aspect one could describe as the experience of destructiveness or evil, is interwoven in a most peculiar way with a delight at the charms associated with this, and that, even in the form it assumes in Manet, the work of art – as Hegel puts it – does not offer a ‘slogan’. One could almost arrive at the heretical notion that the work attempts, in this way, to heal some of what is inflicted on things by the discursive logic that proceeds in concepts and judgements.1 This means that the world is indeed as complex as the world feeling evoked by a significant work of art. While typical judgements that are for or against something – that say something is so or is not so, and go no further than criticism or a position – in a sense destroy the whole interwovenness of truth and untruth, the interwovenness of what is alive, the work of art, by not arbitrarily separating these aspects and proceeding towards decisions but, rather, by presenting them in their intertwined state, could be said to restore that truth which we lose precisely through the form of the mere judgement.2 But I think you would be underestimating the epistemic character of works of art or artistic experience if you thought that what I have called – using a phrase whose questionable nature I have already conceded to you, and whose questionable nature I would like to underline again in the strongest terms, and which only gives a small intimation about a very complex issue – if you were to think that what I called a ‘world feeling’ conveyed by a work were really something entirely vague and undefined. For the world feeling which we gain in artistic experience contains, precisely in that multifacetedness which I attempted to elaborate for you in a somewhat determinate fashion, all sorts of extremely concrete aspects. So you would be entirely mistaken if, for example, as people tend to do in vulgar existentialist interpretations of Kafka – yes, there is such a thing as vulgar existentialism! – you thought, if I too may express myself in vulgar terms, that this depicted the general lousiness of the world, as it were, and that these works, even Kafka's, were ultimately only about the general uncertainty surrounding the heroes of these novels and this general non liquet3 and non sequitur which the plots of these works of art repeatedly encounter. Rather, these works contain an infinite number of entirely determinate aspects – be it the sphere of law firms or the sphere of sadism, which plays so infinitely large a part in Kafka's œuvre, or be it a very specific connection to the question of guilt and the guilt context of myth. All of these aspects are evident in Kafka's work in the most unambiguous and emphatic form, and you will only understand it at all if you also note the unambiguity with which these individual motifs appear in his writing. But you must not treat that as the conclusion – and this strikes me as the fundamental error of vulgar existentialism when it addresses these matters – and say, ‘Such-and-such reveals itself here’; or, as some also say, ‘This or that corresponds to Kafka's world picture or “worldview”.’ For you, perhaps, the disgusting and repulsive nature of terms such as ‘worldview’ or ‘world picture’ already denounces the thing which such atrocious words usually stand for. And the synthesis of these aspects that Kafka brings about is indeed not one which tells us ‘That is so’; it does not result in a conclusion, a slogan, a judgement, but rather the judgementless and, if you will, ambiguous intertwining of these aspects that really permits the work of art to incorporate that very wealth of the existent which is otherwise cut off by the logic of judgement.
I have drawn your attention several times to the very profound connection between great speculative philosophy and the approach of art, and God knows I did not intend to suggest with this analogy that – as the vulgar historiography of philosophy claims – Schelling or Hegel erected ‘works of intellectual art’ [Gedankenkunstwerke], meaning self-sufficient products of thought in which there is no longer any real connection to the matter itself. That, of course, is the kind of nonsense that can only be formulated from a position of ossified scientism. One can say nonetheless, however, that there is a far more profound relationship between the character of Hegelian logic and the idea of art, in so far as this Hegelian logic essentially strives for a very similar interweaving of aspects without reducing them to a single slogan, some ready-made judgement or a conclusion or, as some so aptly put it, by ‘targeting’ an idea, but rather by seeking the idea precisely in the totality of these aspects. So, in this sense, the concept of the idea, which idealistic philosophy in particular associated with art in countless ways, is in fact highly unsuited to the true nature of art. The world feeling that I have mentioned to you is extremely internally articulated. Let me also add that it is itself historical. The world feeling created by Kafka's novels, for example – if I could just insist on this for a moment – is not, as Lukács has insinuated,4 a feeling of the so-called human condition, a feeling of our God-forsaken, thrown, fear-distorted existence itself; rather, it is a thoroughly modern feeling, a feeling that concerns and reproduces the current state of the world as an experience of its essence, not its façade. Related to this is Kafka's highly peculiar method of giving his novels a certain outdated, obsolete, squalid quality precisely in order to put into relief this historical experience which they strive to incorporate; in a sense it is the obverse, the negative that truly reveals the seeming positive of modern, streamlined high or late capitalist society. And what one could call the determinacy of the work of art as a whole, as opposed to the determinacy of the individual aspects which I have mentioned to you, is the fact that these individual aspects enter a particular kind of synthesis, yet not simply the kind that is familiar from simple cognitive acts – that is, in the synthesis of the judgement with predicate, subject and copula – but rather in a synthesis that connects these different layers and different aspects, placing them in a context by means of the formal law that is native to the work.5 But this formal law – let me say this too – is not external to the work. Croce showed this with the greatest emphasis, and in the most convincing fashion.6 So this synthesis does not involve the individual aspects of such a work of art being subsumed under a form which comes to these individual aspects as a finished, already moulded and binding form; this kind of subsumptive synthesis in art is an external synthesis, and a synthesis one can indeed only call inferior. Rather, the essence is that this synthesis itself results from the actual relationship between the individual aspects, while on the other hand these individual aspects are themselves determined by the whole in such a way that, essentially, for example in the first sentence of a good novel, perhaps not every subsequent word, but at least the tendency, the construction of the whole must already be more or less laid out. And naturally that applies all the more to poetry. I think it is also true of painting. That it applies to music – I think I have already tried to show you that. What one could perhaps define as the content of the work of art, if you will grant me the luxury of definition just this once, would perhaps be the way in which this synthesis – this process of the work's aspects in their relationship with one another, which is at once the result of the whole – the way in which this synthesis relates to reality. It would perhaps make sense to call this relationship – this quotient, I am almost inclined to say in positivist fashion – between the living formal law of a work and the reality to which it refers, however mediatedly, the content of the work of art; this would be something different not only from its material content but also from the so-called ideational content, or even the so-called message that, according to vulgar superstition, is conveyed by the work of art.7
That brings me to the end of the critique which I have attempted to offer you of any effort to ground the work of art in subjective experience; the function of the last things I mentioned within the construction of the whole is this: the basic error in the common view of a subjective grounding of the work of art in the recipient is that this experience is described too breathlessly, either as if it were concerned only with individual aspects such as sensual stimuli or as if the whole, the idea, were directly and tangibly given, whereas this whole is given only in a mediated form, namely through the aspects, the process and the configuration of aspects from which this whole then grows. Before I continue, however, I cannot refrain from reading you a passage from Hegel concerning this point we have discussed, in which Hegel addresses in the most succinct manner – and entirely convincingly both in his time and today, I would say – the question of one's reaction to the work of art – that is to say, the question of artistic experience: ‘If we ask further wherein artistic enthusiasm consists, it is nothing but being completely filled with the matter, being entirely present in the matter, and not resting until the matter has been stamped and polished into artistic shape.’8 This really takes us back to the starting point of this reflection, namely that, in order to describe something like artistic experience at all, to offer something like a phenomenology of artistic experience, one must always have a concept of the work of art itself and its objectivity, and that, without this, it is impossible to access the work itself via the merely psychological aspects of a description of the work. What Hegel says here is incredibly simple but stands at once – and, please, do not underestimate this – in stark opposition to all the habits which conventional bourgeois artistic education seeks to instil in us. And I would already be quite content if I succeeded with my specific analyses in making this statement by Hegel so evident to you that it genuinely takes on a certain binding meaning for your own aesthetic experience: that the subjective feelings which normally form the starting point for homespun vulgar aesthetics – and the more homespun the aesthetics, the more it likes, as we know, to invoke the authority of the subject – essentially always miss the mark with the only thing that matters, namely the connection to the work of art itself, and that whatever one can describe as ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’ is quite simply the fulfilled relationship with the matter itself, that in artistic matters there is really no other enthusiasm except enthusiasm at being entirely in the matter – that one dissolves in the matter, I would almost say. This is the notion that I conveyed to you using that older aphorism of mine in which I describe the man who knows something about art as a native who knows his way around a city, while only the amateur constantly says ‘How beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful!’9 True aesthetic enthusiasm, Platonic ἐνθουσιασμός in art, would probably consist precisely in this ‘How beautiful, how beautiful, how beautiful’ being fulfilled and dissolving in the intuitive observation of the matter itself.
You could now say that, with these reflections, which branched out in many directions and more or less explained a thesis but at once treated this thesis as a point of crystallization for all sorts of things that were said for their own sake – that I made things a little too easy for myself by restricting myself to a vague, indeterminate and random receiving subject, which surely cannot be used as grounds for any artistic judgement. For there is a different subjectivity that one can follow, and which is far more binding by comparison: the subjectivity of the creator, the subjectivity of the artist. I am not sure if many of you would share this view. I would almost assume that it has become a little obsolete today through the spirit of our time, for the cult of the artist and the cult of genius are connected to the belief in the unfettered individual that exists for itself, which was in turn based on very specific social preconditions in the world of late liberalism.10 In the current world, in which this genius of the Nietzschean type has been more or less replaced by the employee, the image of the artist in this emphatic and pathos-laden sense has paled somewhat, and people will consequently no longer refer to it so much. But I suspect that, in the individual humanities, where Dilthey is still an important name and in which the Dilthey school exercises a very significant influence, more of this reduction of art to the so-called personality of the creator has survived than one would generally assume. By this I mean the notion that, simply put, one understands works if one can reduce them to the experiences by the artist which manifest themselves in them. Let me say in advance that, if one views all of this from a historico-philosophical perspective, it is not entirely invalid. For next to late feudal and absolutist art, which had simply moved away from the living experiential content of the subject and assumed, one might say, a ritualistic objective, an alienatedly objective character, this appeal to the experience was something indescribably new. You need only compare some of Goethe's great youthful poetry, for example ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’,11 to his Leipzig Anacreontics, and you need only compare this tinge, this violin note one finds there, with this late rococo to see that what was known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the experience [Erlebnis]12 truly introduced here something utterly new and decisive into art – and something, I may perhaps add, that art cannot lose if it is to escape the threat that is probably as constant as that of randomness, namely a regression to Alexandrinism. But that is not what concerns us. For us, the central matter is the epistemological-aesthetic question of whether the work of art is to be understood through the subject of the artist – and even through a so-called understanding, analytic psychology that is directed at the artist; whether, that is, you will know more about Hölderlin or Novalis if you have actually read something like the Novalis or Hölderlin chapters from Dilthey's Poetry and Experience. I don't know if you have all read this book. As many of you want to become teachers, you have probably not been spared it. But, on the other hand, I would like you to consider, if you look at that today, for example where he writes that Hölderlin wraps language around his shoulders like a purple cloak,13 whether it really helped you a great deal in reaching a better understanding of Hölderlin. I am not saying that to mock the late Dilthey at all; I simply wish to point out something that concerns this entire approach, namely that, if one tries to understand a work of art with reference to its creator, one is on extremely shaky, problematic ground from the outset. This is first of all because it is very difficult to reach any conclusions about the psychology of people who are no longer alive. I can only describe the psychology employed by Dilthey and the human science school as run-of-the-mill psychology. That is, it is a psychology that works with concepts such as ‘objective type’ or ‘subjective type’ or similar categories without immersing itself in any specifics – and above all without touching on the driving force, the problematic, dark foundation.
In contrast, this has been attempted by psychoanalysis, whose school has likewise produced a number of seemingly aesthetic reflections, for example Freud's study on Leonardo da Vinci or Laforgue's study on Baudelaire.14 This psychology is certainly better, deeper and less conformist than the kind of psychology used by the Dilthey school. Yet, although I know that I am greatly indebted to psychoanalysis for its role in my own intellectual development, I feel compelled to say that, while this theory comes closer to the inner lives of artists, it is more capable of decoding works of art as documents of inner life, and it remains no less foreign to the essence of the works of art than the somewhat generalized, common-sense psychological observations usually made by Dilthey. In the work on Baudelaire, for example, you will find Baudelaire's psychology explained largely with reference to his conflict with his mother; in psychoanalytical fashion, he is then presented as a highly neurotic person who simply never overcame this conflict. This book – and I am not making this up – genuinely contains passages which more or less suggest that, if Baudelaire had only had a proper relationship with reality and lost these neurotic love–hate feelings towards his mother, he would have become a perfectly acceptable and normal individual. The question of what would then have become of The Flowers of Evil is not even raised in such psychology. The fact that the only thing that matters, namely the quality and dignity of the work of art itself, does not appear at all in such psychology – especially when it is striving quite earnestly to understand the psychology of the artist – speaks directly against the method. One could almost say that, the better the psychology study of an artist is, the less capable it is of providing access to the work itself, for there is something in the work itself that goes beyond psychology, something that is more than psychology. As long as works of art are no more than the fingerprints of psychological individuals, they remain pre-artistic; then they are documents, but not works of art, and in that sense, from a higher perspective, they are irrelevant to aesthetics. And then it must even be said that, thanks to the old fire of constructive philosophy, which continues to burn a little in Dilthey's school, albeit in a very tempered form, it does actually preserve more – of the works themselves, at least – than this psychological procedure.
The category of empathy – that is, the notion that one can understand a work of art by somehow identifying with the artist and putting oneself in their position – is something extremely problematic precisely because it is impossible for one person to empathize with another to such a degree that one can produce the work once again through them. The idea of empathy does have one element of truth, namely that to understand a work of art does indeed, in a certain sense, mean reproducing it – re-enacting for one's own part the process of production that lies within the matter itself, if you will – just as any good actor or any musician with interpretive skill, if they have the task of presenting a work, must, in a sense, personally bring forth this work again in its logicity, in the consistency and necessity and momentum of its elements. But the respective canon that applies to them comprises the texts of the works as given to the performer, not some mediated processes of psychological empathy with the creators who produced the art. Art cannot be grasped through empathy because what makes it art in the first place is that which exceeds what the subject has merely placed into it, that which also goes beyond the randomness of the individual artists.
What probably gives the work of art its binding character, that element which makes the work of art more than merely a random utterance, is the fact that a spirit has been objectified in it, that it is a genuinely objectified spirit, not the mere reflection of a subjective content that expresses itself within it; rather, if something speaks from the work, if the work truly speaks, this speaking quality is precisely that spirit which is objectified in it. One can say – and perhaps it is not immodest to point out that I can confirm this from some of my own artistic experience – that the work of art belongs to the creating subject infinitely less than the consensus would have it; for the more objectified and concretized bourgeois society is, the more it insists that works of art come flying purely to the subject. On the one hand, this expresses a sort of triumph of the concept of property – the work of art is the absolute property of its creator – but, on the other hand, this also maintains the work as the nature reserve of whose notion I have already tried to warn you in various ways. Perhaps one can say that the spirit which speaks from the work of art, once that spirit is truly objectified, is always both the spirit of society and the spirit of a critique of society, but that the dignity of the work depends on how far this sedimented society contained in the work goes beyond the contingency of the individual elements which merely communicate themselves through it.15
Let me say a word about the concept of artistic production, which was truly compromised – most of all through the trash novels of Stefan Zweig, Emil Ludwig16 and all their successors, some adept and some dim-witted – in the most ignominious way because the notion of the creative, which is at home only in theology, but with which humans feel they cannot dispense lest they lose all self-respect, has now been projected onto artists, and people thus imagine that artistic production is something like a creatio ex nihilo. This is indeed – I can only return to my old example – a notion that can at most be shared by operetta composers but will quite certainly never be confirmed by any artist or by observing a truly artistic production process. Essentially, producing always means going through something which, as soon as one places it outside oneself by – as people call it – creating it, already faces us as something with objective demands. And what has been referred to as creative agony, for example in the context of art theory and Flaubert's life story – the thing which makes the artistic process in general something so painful and tormenting for countless people – is not so much the birth pangs of the absolute creative process, which is a very superficial view, as the indescribable effort resulting from the fact that the creative process always requires following an objectivity that faces us as if it were already there – and as if it were placing very specific, unalterable demands on us even before it appears. So this means acting in accordance with a law that is not present for us as such, yet nonetheless possesses to the highest degree that character of coercion which, according to Kant, the law always has.17 Any self-aware artist knows the extent to which they obey. And the decision that must inescapably be made in every process of artistic production – at least today, when there is no longer a fixed canon that is dictated from without – is whether something is right or wrong. Does this thing here have to be so, or should it be different? This uninterrupted process taking place in today's artistic production is really nothing but a way of checking the work against such an imaginary objective element that is not there but which truly influences every moment of production like a magnetic field and demands that we do it in this way and no other, assuming we do not lose our patience and our strength and throw in the towel, or throw the fountain pen onto the piano. Richard Wagner already recorded a little of this in a line from Die Meistersinger, where Walther von Stolzing asks, ‘How do I begin according to the rule?’ Wagner's response: ‘You make it yourself, and then you follow it.’18 This contains the truth that a rule imposed from the outside is not binding. In the current situation of art, however, even Wagner's very profound thought of the self-imposed rule is too harmless. For nowadays, we can no longer even make a rule ourselves if we are to avoid creating a form of automatism, something arbitrary, through the imposed nature of that rule. Rather, we must obey a rule that we could not even make for ourselves – much less have objectively dictated to us – but which rather lies in the matter. We must listen to our own counterpoints, as it were, look at our own colours, observe our own words and follow our own words if we are to produce anything resembling valid or binding works of art at all, and the act of freedom, of drawing freely on what lies within us to create, is of infinitesimal significance by comparison. Please do not misunderstand: there are artists whose temperaments are such that the inhibiting mechanisms I have described – and which I certainly consider highly characteristic of the current objective situation – are absent. There are very many great artists with an incredibly easy hand. Picasso is probably the most extraordinary example, but Schoenberg too worked at amazing speed during his most productive period, though he subsequently rested in very long creative hiatuses and left countless works half-completed because he suddenly lost interest and was unable to finish them. These things are very, very complex today. But I would say that, even in an output such as Picasso's, these aspects can naturally be found objectively everywhere in the fact that he follows something which presents itself to him and wants its aspects to be one way and not another and that, next to this, the so-called free act of creation – ‘I want it like this, and that is exactly how it shall be’ – retreats entirely. Perhaps – let me just point this out – this is the place to recall a theory that is admittedly very one-sided and crudely ontological, if you will, that constitutes a crude autonomization and hypostatization of aesthetic forms, but which shows a profound knowledge of this aspect I am describing to you, namely the theory of the music aesthetician Halm,19 who is now almost forgotten. He said that forms such as the sonata or the fugue are indeed products of objective spirit which face the artist as entirely independent factors, and that, in a sense, Bach did not create or invent the fugue but was simply the composer who was adequate to the latent potential of an objective form such as the fugue. There is certainly some truth in this. If one compares Bach's fugues with all those that came before and after him, one truly has the feeling with him of an absolute authenticity of this form to a degree unmatched by anyone else. Yet, for that objectivity to come about, for that objective spirit to realize itself, one requires precisely the full force of the subject – which is admittedly not something that freely posits elements as it likes, but which lies in the way it dissolves in this latent, non-existent objectivity and, through this dissolution, turns the non-existent, concealed form into a visible one.20