Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to begin this brief rhetorical prelude to the performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by the Hamburg State Philharmonic Orchestra on this 3rd of October in the year 2000 by saying that nobody could feel how strange this attempt is to combine speech and music as much as the present speaker. It seems to me we might even suspect the concert organizers of a lapse in good manners or an attack on the fundamental right of music to speak for itself in its own way. Since when has a major orchestra found it necessary to have its programme moderated by a verbal commentary? Since when have musical compositions had to accept sharing the stage with extra elements far removed from music? This kind of enterprise can only be justified by its connection with the date, the 3rd of October, the Day of National Unity in Germany. It is the day that marks the creation of the political union between the two German states that emerged from the dramatic events of the mid-twentieth century. It is, in fact, a public holiday that enshrines a political memory, and a day on which the majority of German citizens find remarkably little to celebrate, as we can see from the routine speeches of the class in this country that is obligated to celebrate anniversaries. It is a day on which the best thing people could probably do is to play Beethoven – as they are doing here and most likely elsewhere at this moment – the Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony, of course, a piece that imposes itself because it has been regarded for centuries as a concentrated expression of the culture of political celebration. This is why the chosen combination of speech and music here today is not just superficial, and more than a whim of the organizers. The Ninth Symphony, particularly its world-famous final chorus, represents an event of musical rhetoric; indeed, of musical politics in its own right. Because of this, it is not a serious breach, in respect of either the situation or the genre, if, before the performance begins, we say a few preliminary words of comment and reflection, words that concern not the musical but (if we can express it like this) the ideological score of the work.
It is enough to recall the reasons why, following its triumphal premiere in Vienna in the year 1824, the Ninth Symphony went on to become the most famous and most influential musical composition of the modern age. The reasons for its almost numinous and precarious success (precarious because it is so excessive) can be found not least in the fact that it has an inherently appealing character, certainly at the conscious points, the vocal points, which is designed to harmonize with ideas beyond music, to support enthusiastic consensus, to make an overwhelming impression through a political programme. It is worth noting that even the nineteenth century could hardly have dreamed that this wave of musical-political consensus would keep rolling on so powerfully. It is no coincidence that after the final chorus of the Ninth Symphony was selected as the European anthem at the beginning of the 1970s, the United Nations also chose the piece as its theme tune. In other words, even if it is true that you can’t speak with great music as such, the thematic excesses of Beethoven’s ‘political cantata’ definitely tend towards using speech as an additional element.
In what follows I would like to take the liberty of remembering the historical premises of the musical-semantic complex that gave rise to the Ninth Symphony and its Ode to Joy. The word ‘remembrance’ is particularly apt here because we need to start speaking again about largely forgotten relationships. If we want to imagine ourselves at the generating pole of Beethoven’s artistic achievement, it is necessary, to quote Hegel, to imagine a ‘state of the world’ [Weltzustand] when consensus was still called enthusiasm. At that time ordinary citizens were less concerned with sharing the same opinion than with being moved. Remembrance is necessary to be able to return in our imagination to the situation in which the progressive voices of society were obliged to present almost everything they had to say in an anticipatory fashion – unless they quickly found reasons to sidestep into idealized bygone periods. We must take a fresh look at a period in which a rising elite had developed the habit of thinking in sweeping terms. We have to think back to a phase of history in which individuals with their ability to dream for themselves became mediators of what they saw as dreams for humankind.
Prior to its victory, bourgeois culture spoke an enthusiastic dialect in the same way that today’s globalization consultants rehearse the dialect of visions and missions when talking to their clients. It would take too long to elucidate the meaning of enthusiasm in philosophical, psychological and systemic terms, but we can say that this honed notion of political Platonism has played a key role in the self-motivation of bourgeois societies that were keen to explore new shores. It contained the barely hidden categorical imperative of confidence at work. It helped to groom the middle social layer that was interested in power by enabling it to present itself directly as humankind in general. Enthusiasm from a bourgeois perspective is always a delirious fantasy of inclusiveness. It goes hand in hand with the prerogative of having had no experience of one’s own – not with oneself, not with the institutional spirit, and certainly not with the game rules of economic relations governed by money. It reflects the state of grace that hovers over those who have not yet attained power – the grace of good conscience in a situation that lacks complexity. This blessed, powerful state of inexperience is the natural tone of the young Friedrich Schiller – the tone in which in 1785, when he was barely 26 years old, he wrote the prime document for the future politics of enthusiasm, the Ode to Joy, in whose success curve we are trying to find a little niche for ourselves, on this particular day.
It is Hölderlin, however, who gives us the clearest and the most disturbingly beautiful testimony in the German tradition in his prepolitical reference to a vaguely imagined totality in the distant past. His epistolary novel Hyperion, written between 1792 and 1799, is set against the background of the Russian–Turkish war of 1770. It tells the story of the fateful involvement of the young Greek Hyperion in the initial stages of the freedom struggle of the Greeks against the Ottoman Empire. Even at that time the question of the spirit of Europe was already linked to what would later be called the Oriental question. There is no Western community of values without an eastern border. Hyperion’s explanation to his girlfriend Diotima as to why he felt compelled to volunteer alongside his friends as a soldier in this necessary war expresses the crucial statements of the early bourgeois politics of enthusiasm with an unsurpassed clarity. Hyperion’s appeal culminates in the proposition:
The new union of spirits cannot live in the air, the sacred theocracy of the Beautiful must dwell in a free state, and that state must have a place on earth, and that place we shall surely conquer.1
These rarely quoted lines are truly momentous for our times. They are the key to the Beautiful Politics, the ideas without which we human beings would scarcely be able to comprehend the dramas of the past two centuries – and yet those born later usually know nothing of the existence and use of these ideas. This politics has the right to be called beautiful to the extent that, to speak in Kantian terms, ‘it is acknowledged as the subject of a necessary aesthetic delight’ beyond its moral value; and the beautiful may be called political because it is driven by hunger for realization, or, to quote Marx, for praxis. In this case, the pattern of theory and practice that later became influential is prefigured in the relationship of script and staging or war plan and military campaign. Beauty awakens from a swoon and takes command in the real world. Later generations are usually unaware of this formation because the separation of the spheres of power, art and religion has largely become a self-evident fact and it is hard to think of any reasons to change that. In a society defined by differentiation between subsystems, nothing is more embarrassing and damaging than this meshing and coalescing of dimensions or arrangements when we have long been convinced that they coexist closely but neither can nor should ever achieve fusion. Yet what else was enthusiasm in its heroic, naïve phase but the general matrix of embarrassing situations that emerged from unpolitical politics, from people’s gushing embrace of the universe and the relentless equation of the bourgeoisie and humankind?
All the same, as long as we keep Hyperion’s argument in mind, we may suspect that Immanuel Kant had already lost sight of the main fact of the aesthetics of his time when he set out in his Critique of Judgment to confine the Beautiful solely to the borders of the arts. Kant said, ‘There is no science of the beautiful [das Schöne] but only critique; and there is no fine [schön] science but only fine art.’2 Kant’s objective of assigning beautiful things – and their producers, the geniuses – to a circumscribed field of play, a specialized region for art, made him miss the modus operandi of the age of enthusiasm, a large part of which coincided with his own lifetime. It blinded him to the highly conspicuous phenomenon that in his era, more than ever before or afterwards, not only beautiful art had existed but also beautiful physics, beautiful medicine, beautiful politics, indeed, even beautiful religion – however dubious and unsustainable those hybrid forms might have been. All this deregulated beauty is an outpouring of the politics of the beautiful soul that plunges into the general and oncoming stream, exhilarated by its capacity to expand and its desire to present postulates and by its universal inclusiveness that has yet to be tested by history. Enthusiasm appears as meta-competence in reaching out for real things; it wants to be the medium that is the message, and rightly so, because anybody who is enthusiastic is enthusiastic most of all about being enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is presented as the ability to infect reality with beauty.
At this point I shall mention that it required a hundred and fifty years of sobering down before the operative part of this programme was ready to be put on the agenda again – this time under the heading of Design.
To repeat my thesis, the fact that we can only fleetingly mention the existence of Beautiful Politics here implies that remembrance of an epoch which now seems far away – a time which would later be called German Idealism – was nothing more than an initial approach, a pretension or, as sceptics were already saying at the time, an excess, an upsurge of emotion that is demanding and therefore dangerous enough to try to become a reality. From a philosophical perspective, idealism was a logical and ethical ambition that did not shrink from any limits; in other words, the paradoxical enterprise of making freedom the central theme of a rigidly formed system. We should not forget what idealism was supposed to be in its most morally plausible and most socially futile dimension: the attempt of middle-class people to attain gentrification because they stubbornly believed that it was an indispensable qualification for legitimate claims to exercise of power. Idealism sought to make itself indispensable as a process of proof that bourgeois forces were also fit for and worthy of power as long as they could succeed in being part of a historically new type of aristocracy. The aristocracy should no longer be a state of the realm, but a propulsion system. We are talking about the aristocracy of enthusiasm for noble or, in other words, universal emancipatory goals relevant to humanity. Idealism emerged on this basis as the attempt to give pride of place to the world as a whole, a place with an ontologically ambitious name, that of the ‘subject’. The subject means the thing that is at the base – or, in modern terms, what basically does things, what achieves everything ‘at the base’ of every situation. This kind of thinking makes the highest appear like the broadest. What used to be at the top should now be something everybody is entitled to. What used to be the highest title has become the general style and an everyday form of address. It follows that the secret of the politics of enthusiasm is that it raises the whole of society to the level of the aristocracy – or, as Schiller said in the first version of the Ode to Joy, beggars would be brothers of princes. But if we’re talking about noblesse oblige, it applies even more to the subject. Nothing is more of a strain than being a principle oneself. Sometimes the subject, the everyday species, is presented as the productivity that posits the world [weltsetzend], that immediately encounters reality; and sometimes it is presented as free will without frontiers and finally as the capacity for universal brotherhood. The latter concept suggests the goodwill to create a single unified network of family, communication and life with everything that is human and to speak, or, rather, to sing, with a single voice, a voice of the species. This is a fine, if intolerant, dream of inclusion whose tracks we can follow through two centuries up to the washed-out late German idealism of recent Critical Theory.
Idealism as a form of enthusiasm for the species has an intrinsic impulse we could call the politics of choruses. Indeed, from this perspective, what are bourgeois societies but political music societies in which every member has a voice – a voice whose true definition is found in consonance, in agreement on existence in the long view, in the human species and its divinely ordained sections, the nations? Perhaps what Schiller set out to express in his Ode to Joy is only meaningful in the context of such melodious totalities. Only when nations become choirs of their own accord, choirs waiting for the musical notes – and political idealism is, perhaps, nothing but the decision not to doubt this –, can there be hope of enthusiasm, or ‘joy’ in Schiller’s terminology, triumphing against the divisive forces that are now (rather shallowly) called fashion, whereas we know, to the contrary, that they define valuable successful principles of modern society. In fact, nothing less than magic will be enough to bind what has divided society. It must have been a magic spell that stopped society’s subsystems on their way to dividing even further. Moreover, without magic, how can millions of people be guaranteed to keep calm when poets propose embracing? Without magic, how can we accept that the world is something we reach by a kiss? To repeat, however: what is idealism but this last indulgence in a pre-technological relationship to the universal? This kiss of the whole world! It would still be relevant – but not until communications technology was advanced enough to provide every household with remote kissing connections. But what are we supposed to think about an author who wants to suggest to his ‘brothers’, who are, presumably, enlightened readers, that there must be a loving Father living above the starry firmament? From where, we may ask, did the young idealist Schiller get this heavenly tent, the old firmament, which by his time had already been an obsolete cosmological notion for two hundred years? Where did he get the loving Father, when neither his own nor the sovereign could act as models? Hadn’t he just fled from the duke, from Mannheim to Dresden to his friend Körner?3 Joy alone made such things possible; it was the agent of higher cohesion and thicker mists; it obtained what no longer appeared accessible; the mail order company ‘Joy’ was known for its super-fast deliveries.
Ladies and gentlemen, the point of these remembrances is not to present Beautiful Politics for retrospective mockery. I am rather emphasizing its astonishing quality and economic potential, and focusing on its seduction, which is barely imaginable today. It is only possible now, from this great historical distance, to estimate how many autohypnotic routines were needed at the time to sing of joy as the medium of total unification in the way that young Schiller did. We can understand the high level of awareness he had in trying to create his own illusions – joy, after all, is the reflection of the concept of enthusiasm that has gone in search of an audience that does not entirely desire as it should. Astonished, perhaps even envious, we can guess the extent to which bourgeois people of the period were still secure in their ability to slide from reality into eulogy. How short were the paths from piano duet to humankind at that time, and how quickly humans rose from mongrels to become a special breed. Who, today, can still ignore the facts as mindfully as an educated German around 1800 was able to? Who, today, can still look solely at the good and beautiful, hoping that reality will follow the good example? We are too familiar with the end of the story of the culture of the bourgeoisie: it sank, it ruined its reputation with hubris, it was destroyed by the onset of reality in the twentieth century. But we cannot deny that its strongest part was this chamber music of illusion that was played from scores in all the better homes – also, if necessary, since the gentleman senator was busy at the office, with the help of accompanists at the piano, who gradually lost their initial shyness beside the lady of the house playing the violin.4
Ladies and gentlemen, let me say a few words about the catastrophe of Beautiful Politics. I can be brief because in this case we are tapping the potential of a common fund of freely accessible intuition. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were a test run for utopias, and after going through that it is clear to everybody concerned why the modern ‘free states’ or democratic systems, as we call them nowadays, were unable to provide fertile soil for the theocracy of beauty inspired by Hölderlin and graecomania. The only Beautiful City that passed the examination of history almost intact is the Kingdom of Sarastro, where revenge is unknown, at least as long as the aria ‘Within these sacred halls’ is playing. Only on the opera stage do princes embrace their opponents and even hug their assassins so tight that the dagger falls out of their hands. Of course, what should have made people think early on are the menacing lines, ‘Wen diese Lehren nicht erfreun/verdienet nicht, ein Mensch zu sein’ (‘Whomever these lessons do not please/Deserves not to be a human being’).5 Even on stage, the relation between enthusiastic inclusiveness and exterminating exclusiveness is illuminated for a brief moment – but who cares about the text in a transfigured world in which the bass is always right? All the same, didn’t the glamorous militant anthem of the French people contain a disturbing, racist refrain that threatened extinction with the words: ‘impure blood should soak the sacred fields of the fatherland’? Who would have been allowed to make a fuss about such scruples at this dawn of humanity? Who would have wanted to disrupt the triumphal music of the philosophies of unification and reconciliation? People only realized much later that every attempt to stage the real state according to the scripts of Beautiful Politics must inevitably end in atrocities of unprecedented scope. In fact, as soon as it developed militant features, Beautiful Politics, the practice of embracing the universe and of absolute totalizing inclusion, proved to be a very costly dream. Those awakening were forced to see their relationships clearly and to realize that every totalizing inclusion targeted to reality is paid for with equally real exclusions. And because this realization has now pervaded the everyday attunement of society, Beethoven’s music, at the very point where it succeeded impressively in the instrumentation and vocalization of enthusiasm for the human species, was incorporated into a historical movement that shifted its basic meaning, or, better still, its sources of vigour and panache.
To understand this more clearly it is worth remembering that from the beginning the aesthetic sphere seemed to be at least two-dimensional because it was responsible not only for the beautiful but also for the sublime, and this is what has been responsible for the transition to reality for hundreds of years. Just as impatient, impure theory constantly wanted to transform into practice, ambitious beautiful things were urgently trying to make the transition to the sublime – even if it should turn out to be terrible. This is why, from the very beginning, Beautiful Politics was always conceived as Sublime Politics. Indeed, the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible; yet we cannot be sure that it will casually disdain from destroying us. When the state mounted the platform in full regalia and demanded access to the citizen’s heart, it was acting as the Sublime State, that is, as the administrator of serious cases. Sublime may mean something that reminds humans of the possibility of their extermination – whether in the form of the concept of the infinitely large that appears as the mathematical sublime, or the observation of nature in its elementary dimensions that seem to tower over us limitlessly when we encounter the irresistible might of the dynamic sublime. But long before the encounter with these factors was worked out in aesthetic terms, the state of the early modern age had already established itself theatrically to its subjects and enemies as a potentially deadly force. It competed with nature as the source of impressive exterminations. It could not resist killing sufficiently often to support its claim to be the most serious instance. This is why, from the moment it became bourgeois, the sublime appeared philosophically as the aesthetic reflection of human freedom. It reflects our ability to take a position on our own downfall and the threat of it – provided that we retain the position of a spectator and remain secure from real threats. In this position the soul can hover between submission and resistance. Since the eighteenth century the bourgeois soul has practised the fall into omnipotent Nature in its artistic media. It never ceases imagining what it would be like to plane crash in the Alps or to be in distress in the Atlantic or to be touched by horror from the nether world at a country estate in the Scottish moors. In its nightmarish moments it rehearses death thoroughly, it watches heroes dissolving into the overpowering and sinking into the incredible, but as neither the Alps nor oceans nor haunted castles can satisfy the demand for occasions of downfall, there must be frequent recourse to the original source of the sublime, the Sublime State, where noble annihilation, both virtually and in real terms, still seems most likely to be guaranteed in its emergencies, the foreign policy wars. This touches on the sensitive point at which our late modern and postmodern embarrassment about the legacy of cultural enthusiasm begins. Today we can see more clearly how the sublime functioned as a bridge from the resistance of the subject to its voluntary self-extinction. In its founding period, bourgeois culture faced the enormous task of transferring the sublime from the absolutist to the democratic state. A bourgeoisie that reclaimed the aristocracy could not avoid this imperative. How could it dispose of itself without the aid of the aesthetic ideology that offered it the means to bring the beautiful into direct contact with the sublime?
A recently published book tells us that Beethoven was an expert at this operation.6 The task set by the period and the reward for its solution are described with the greatest clarity in the text for his Choral Fantasy opus 80: ‘When love and strength are united/The favour of the Gods rewards Man.’ Love must come into play as the ability to conclude the better social contract with beautiful souls; strength is needed to hold one’s own on the sublime front and to be bold in the face of downfall. This is the only way we can reach a more precise concept of enthusiasm: for joy to arise in the best bourgeois sense, the beautiful must be sublime and the sublime beautiful – and at the point where both elements are equally balanced, politics dissolves in emotion. Indeed, society seems destined to emanate its statehood, including its means of violence, like a spontaneous projection from itself. In the sublime civic state, volunteers precede conscription; tears surpass laws; the heart outbids the highest taxation rate. Perhaps there is simply no work in the history of the arts that holds the balance between the beautiful and the sublime at such a high level as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony does, particularly in its final chorus, when the celebration of friendship and voluntary downfall combine as a perfect example in the sublime total perspective. Such music irresistibly recruits us into the beautiful totality. It gives us an idea of what it would sound like if the small-scale politics of friendship could ever share common ground with the religious claim of the Sublime State.
The Ninth Symphony has been dubbed a Marseillaise of humankind and claimed for the Eternal Enlightenment; but it has also been identified as the emanation of the German soul and repatriated, at least in the sense of an imaginary copyright, as a lasting loan of the Germans to humanity. We acknowledge the validity of both claims because both express modes of the politics of enthusiasm and both remain loyal to the ideals of the nineteenth century, to the idealistic populism that wished the sublime to have its place in popular tradition just as much as the beautiful, which, by definition, could be guaranteed the necessary appreciation. Aesthetic ideology brought the upsurge into the sublime within everybody’s reach, just as universal conscription democratized the chance to perish for the sublime civic state, which was now called the fatherland. With reference to the Marseillaise, Hegel clearly stated the political power of popular-sublime music:
But enthusiasm proper has its ground in the specific idea, in the true spiritual interest which has filled the nation and which can be raised by music into a momentarily more lively feeling because the notes, the rhythm and the melody can carry the man away who gives himself up to them.
He regretfully added, however, that situations had arisen meanwhile in which music alone was no longer enough to create ‘such a courageous mood and a contempt of death’.7 Similarly, modern universal conscription has both generalized and pragmatically downgraded great gallantry.
The principle of the modern world – thought and the universal – has given courage a higher form because its display now seems to be more mechanical, the act not of this particular person but of a number of a whole [. . .].8
It is for this reason that the modern world has invented the gun, which not only changed the purely personal form of bravery into something more abstract but also embedded the decline of the individual in favour of the totality in an impersonal mass event.
The continuing development of society and its art system has demonstrated that the synthesis between high and low cannot be permanently maintained. In terms of cultural history, the major event of the twentieth century – if we want a really bold formula – is that the idealistic synthesis of the beautiful and the sublime was exploded. This is merely another way of saying that the cultural revolution of the twentieth century caused the members of the avant-garde to break with aesthetic agreement and led to the de-sublimation of the mass audience. This twofold revolution ended the flirtation of masses and nations with the sublime and separated it from the beautiful – though we should not underestimate the transitional function of kitsch, whether socialist or nationalist, which has carved out its role ad nauseam as a decadent form of the popular notion of the sublime. The political result is to expose the Sublime State as a kitschy state and compel it to present itself in future as objective or discrete. The aesthetic outcome is more complex. Nonetheless, looking back at the past century we can recognize a clear structural dominance: mass culture has expanded the paths of the beautiful into highways.
Kant would have trouble with his definitions all over again because everything is beautiful now except art, and everything is critical except art criticism. High culture has retreated into morose and costly sublimity. It lives on the fact that people can no longer accuse it of being generally understandable. The secret of its success consists in many people nowadays following the basic principle that makes the modernized sublime flourish: what nobody can find beautiful or understandable must be collected and exhibited. This is how the Sublime State still asserts its competence as the provider of museums.
Ladies and gentlemen, let me end by saying that the historical drift of the modern art system has led to conditions in which the dangers characteristic of the age of Beautiful Politics and of the Sublime State seem initially to have been eliminated. The fateful explosions of the politics of enthusiasm have been relegated to the past; what remains of them still works to create majorities in the relatively harmless shape of consensus technique and creditable art. It would be ungrateful to say that we cannot live with that. Conversely, it would be an exaggeration to claim that this state of affairs inspires satisfaction. The dominant mass culture has released a flow of innocent kitsch; this has not only democratized emotion and relocated beauty from art galleries to bathrooms and beaches, but it has also de-sublimated the sublime, made death banal and established a kind of expressionism of violence and tastelessness whose only historical counterpart is the bestial entertainments of the Roman arena. Nothing remains of the claim to nobility for all except the inviolable freedom to lower the level even further. Given these conditions, it is obvious that, precisely in democratic mass cultures, it would be worth trying out a new, carefully stabilized relationship between the beautiful and the sublime. There is no discussion at all about the third dimension of the aesthetic, irony, or the fourth, conceptualization.
In the process of clarifying these ideas, classical art must always play the role assigned to it. It is the only benchmark for understanding, first, what is no longer valid, and, second, what remains indispensable. The modern ear, which relates to elaborated experiences of dissonance, is happy with the occasional dip into the tonal world of enthusiastic flexibility that still shows the best that bourgeois culture was able to communicate about its inner states before its victory and decline. We are only too eager to borrow an hour of the enthusiasm of a vanished ‘state of the world’. Then, with enlightened nostalgia, we state that we are tempted to join a choir – let me remark here that more people in Germany today are members of choirs than of political parties. (This, incidentally, is only to give the Federal Statistical Office a mention on the Day of German Unity.)
Ladies and gentlemen, the last word goes to an author whose hundredth birthday was publicly commemorated in Germany a few weeks ago. Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the first person to describe the difficulties of listening to classical music after its time in a way that speaks directly to the contemporary mind. In Aphorism 153 in his book Human, All Too Human, he noted that ‘Art weighs down the thinker’s heart’:
We can understand how strong the metaphysical need is, and how even nature in the end makes it hard to leave it, from the way, even in a free spirit who has rid himself of everything metaphysical, the highest effects of art easily produce a reverberation of a long-silenced, or even broken, metaphysical string. At a certain place in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.
If he becomes aware of this condition, he may feel a deep stab in his heart and sigh for the man who will lead back to him the lost beloved, be she called religion or metaphysics. In such moments, his intellectual character is being tested.9