1 Aesthetics and Metaphysics I
The Mimetic Schema
1 Plato
It is Plato who, famously, set the scene for the meaning and value of the work of art—a scene that was taken up, adapted, and modified throughout the history of philosophy and aesthetics, before it was finally and radically called into question by Nietzsche. Despite its many mutations and permutations, the Platonic schema remained firmly in place. From Plato to Hegel, art was thought of metaphysically, that is, from within the space that Platonic metaphysics opened up, the space that stretches between the sensible (αἰσθητόν) and the supersensible (νοητόν). To the things of sense apprehended perceptually, through the faculty of αἴσθησις, Plato opposes the things that can be apprehended intellectually, through the faculty of νόησις. From the start, and throughout, it was a question of identifying the place that art occupies within that space, the extent to which and the manner in which art bridges that space, orients one’s own sensibility towards the intelligible, that is, towards the world of ideas and concepts—a world, as Hegel claimed, in which truth finally exists in its true form—or, on the contrary, chains us to the (merely) sensible, to the world of appearances and sensations. Kant’s own mature views on art, to which I shall eventually turn, are informed by that very metaphysical distinction, which he refines and defines very specifically in his Inaugural Dissertation of 1770.1 From that early, pre-critical work, as well as from the Critique of Pure Reason, we learn that, for Kant, the sensible world is not reducible to the empirical world of sensations and impressions. The latter require space and time as the a priori conditions of their own givenness. On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World identifies those two principles of the sensible world, or, to be more precise, those principles of “sensuous cognition, not, as in intellectual knowledge, general concepts” (§15, corollary), but as pure intuitions. Kant argues that neither intuition may be abstracted from the senses; on the contrary, the senses presuppose space and time (§§14–15), which are therefore pure and not empirical data. It is their character as pure intuitions that distinguish them from qualities abstracted from objects of sense, but also from concepts, because objects of sense are conceived of as “situated in time, and not as contained under the concept of time.” As a collection of appearances corresponding to sensations, the sensible world is thus, Kant argues in the Critique of Pure Reason, “given to us” through our sensibility, which is a receptive faculty (A 19/ B 32) that nonetheless contains and requires the pure, a priori principles of space and time. It is only when combined with concepts of the understanding that the objects thus given can become objects of theoretical knowledge. As for the “intelligible objects,” Kant defines them as “those things thought through pure categories” without schemas of sensibility. As such, they cannot be objects of experience and therefore knowledge in the theoretical sense. This is how, departing from the Platonic view, Kant condemns the “illegitimate” use of theoretical reason and the “transcendent” conception of the intelligible world as an existent realm behind appearances, and subjected to cognition. In a way that will have decisive consequences for his conception of the beautiful in art, Kant claims that the only permissible intelligible world is the moral world, the main object of which is freedom (A 809/ B 837). The sensible and intelligible worlds thus coincide with the worlds of nature and freedom, which “can coexist together without any conflict, in the same actions, according to their intelligible or to their sensible cause” (A 541/B 569). For us, it will be a matter of understanding how this reconfiguration of the Platonic distinction calls for a revaluation of the place and role of art, yet one that is not radical to the point of calling the distinction itself into question.
Let me begin, then, by tracing that history—schematically, all too economically—before raising the question of how, if at all, art can be thought outside that schema, and why it ought to be.2
Plato’s seminal discussion and denunciation of art takes place in Book 10 of the Republic. Two highly significant features of that discussion need to be mentioned from the start. Firstly, Socrates envisages the work of art as a specific kind of image. Yet because the status of the image is itself, as we shall see, essentially ambiguous, it is necessary to establish the sort of image that the work of art is, and the relation to the original that characterises the work. Secondly, Plato’s discussion takes place in the context of a dialogue concerned with the construction in λόγος of the ideal city, which, as the image or allegory of the cave at the beginning of Book 7 suggests, requires that each soul liberate itself from its bondage to images, that is, from its inability to see them as images or shadows, and ascend towards the vision of the original, in what amounts to a philosophical elevation, or conversion, and a political liberation. It is remarkable that, wanting to warn us against the power of images, and mistaking images for the truth, Plato himself speaks in images and myths, thus performing the very operation against which he wishes to warn us. This type of strategy is repeated later on in the Republic when, after his famous denunciation of poetry, Socrates himself turns into a kind of poet and tells the story of Er’s visit to the underworld. Much is at stake in this discussion, then, and most specifically the place and rank of philosophy and art in relation to truth, and the place they ought to be given in the ideal city. The question of the place of art in relation to truth and in the polis is one that will remain central to the philosophical discourse on art and in fact define metaphysical aesthetics.
The work of artists—poets and painters—is a matter of what Plato calls “imitation” (μίμεσις). And it is precisely insofar as artists rely on such an imitative τέχνη that, Socrates tells us, they should be banned from the city. Why should there be no place for imitation in the ideal city? What is the power of images, such that they can threaten the very existence of the city? And how can Plato condemn, and indeed ban, the use of images produced by way of imitation, and at the same time speak through images and stories? This tension seems to point to an essential ambiguity of the image itself, which has the power to disclose the original, but also to conceal it, and deceive us into believing that it is the original. This ambiguity is actually reflected in a conceptual distinction that underpins the discussion of images that we find not only in the Republic, but also in the Sophist (236b, 264c). Some images, Socrates claims in the Sophist, look like the original. Such images have the ability to draw one’s vision to the original and provide an access—albeit limited and insufficient—to the thing as it is in truth. Those are the type of images that Plato himself uses, time and again, as an heuristic device to set us on the way to truth, and away from mere appearances, or semblances. In the Phaedo, for example, Socrates speaks of the need to examine “beings in their truth” (99e) by presenting an image (εἰκών) of them in logos, rather than by looking at them directly and risk having one’s soul blinded (99d–e). In that context, and to borrow Sallis’ words, “the logoi serve as images only in the sense of that in and through which the beings themselves, the originals, are made manifest.”3 As such, they should be clearly distinguished from another kind of image, which the sophist and the artist (or at least some artists) alike use. The image in question is not a likeness (εἰκών) that allows us to see the original, albeit only partially, but a phantom or semblance (φαντάσμα) that directs our gaze away from the original, and towards the appearance itself, as if the appearance were the original. But the appearances (φαινόμενα), after which poems and paintings are forged, are themselves only manifestations of things that are in truth, or real beings (ὄντα), and which Plato calls “ideas.” Phantasms are precisely such that they deny us the possibility of seeing them as images and relating them to the original of which they would be the copy. Far from pointing to “the being itself in its own nature” (αὐτὸ τὸ ἐν τῇν φύσει), they are only a simulacrum of being, and are no more real than the reflection of things in a mirror.4 It is perhaps not surprising that the image of art as, in the words of Hamlet, a “mirror held up to nature,” is a recurrent feature in the history of art and literature, from Leonardo to Shakespeare and Stendhal—even if, of course, from the point of view of those artists, imitative art, at least ideally, is seen as a reflection of truth itself, and not as its mere simulacrum.5 By making the case for art’s relation to truth in terms of its ability to represent nature as a whole, and human nature in particular, the image in question repeats the Platonic schema, whilst also calling into question the illusion and perversion of truth Plato associates with the pro-duction of artworks.
We should be careful, then, not to confuse the two types of images or image-making (εἰδωλοποιικὴ τέχνη), namely, likeness-making (εἰκαστικὴ τέχνη), such as that of the cabinetmaker, which “produces an image [εἰκών] or imitation by following the proportions of the original, of the paradigm, and by giving the right colour to each part,” and mere semblances, which require a technique that Plato characterises as phantastic (φανταστική τέχνη). Such are the images produced by imitation: they are only imitations of imitations (of a couch, for example, or a table), and thus thrice removed from the original, or the idea, in which the thing is given as such, or selfgiven. Once in the grip of such deceiving images, the souls are riveted to non-being, and oblivious of truth. But that is not all. Their danger and threat—to truth, and to the possibility of constructing a city that would be built on truth—consists in their ability to present themselves as if they were true, that is, as if beings were nothing other than (their) appearance or look, as if there was no truth beyond appearance. And that, Plato claims, is the ultimate deception and the source of all corruption. As Sallis puts it: “by making images (εἴδολα) that are far removed from the truth, both the painter and the imitative poet produce a bad regime (πολιτεία) in the souls of individuals.”6 Because mimetic art is “far removed from truth,” and “associates with the part in us that is remote from intelligence,” it is, Socrates concludes, “an inferior thing” that “belongs to the inferior elements of the soul” and engenders “inferior offspring.”7 As such, it has no place in the ideal city. It is important, then, to distinguish between two senses of the image and the sensible in Plato. Both are apprehended perceptually. But whereas, according to the first sense, which Plato wants to retain, the sensible is oriented towards the intelligible from the start, and thus has always already begun to slip into the other sense of sense as meaning or signification, according to the second sense, which Plato wishes to neutralise, the sensible resists such an orientation and signals its own diversity and purely phenomenal reality.
It would be a mistake, therefore, to reduce Platonism to the mere distinction between the world of essences and the world of appearances, or the intelligible and the sensible. There is another, more fundamental distinction, which characterises Platonism proper, inasmuch as it signals the motivation behind the distinction that defines the space of metaphysics. The distinction, internal to the world of appearances (φαινόμενα), is that between icons and phantasms, or images and simulacra. Between the two types of images, there is not so much a difference of degree as of kind. What characterises Platonism—at least that of the Sophist and the Republic—is that, although recognising the existence of such untamed differences, or such a multiplicity without tutelage, it sees it as a threat to thought, morality, politics, and art, and finds in it the seeds of anarchy. Platonism, and the specific problem it has with imitative art, is therefore a response to a political “event” in the broad sense of the term, which presupposed the advent of democracy as a society of equals, and of philosophy as a society of friends. Far from being a merely academic or even metaphysical matter, Platonism, and the place it attributes to art, is a response and a solution to a problem posed by a political order in which, in the words of a commentator, anyone can lay claim to anything, and can “carry the day by the force of rhetoric.”8 It’s that political transformation which, in the absence of the old hierarchy, generates the problem of Platonism; and it is to that potential anarchy and crisis of power that Plato responds by turning philosophy as metaphysics into the ultimate source of authority. Platonism is the systematic effort to nip this anarchy and rebellion in the bud, to hunt down, as Plato says, simulacra and rogue images of all kinds, by providing the philosophical tools that will allow one to discriminate between genuine and false images. It is, as Deleuze puts it, “a matter of distinguishing the splendid and wellgrounded Apollonian appearances from the other, insinuative, malign and maleficent appearances. . . .”9 Subsequently, Deleuze goes on to remark, “the world of representation will more or less forget its moral origin and presuppositions.”10 But that origin will continue to shape and orient it, and even determine its metaphysical concepts and hierarchies, as well as the place and value it ascribes to art. The liberation of art from its metaphysical framework would thus require that we not only wrest art from the space that stretches between the sensible and the intelligible, but also, as a matter of ethical and political priority, from the distinction between true and false images. It would require that, in place of such distinctions and hierarchies, we think of art as stemming from, and opening up, the hypersensible.
2 Aristotle
Although Aristotle envisages art, and especially poetry, as a form of mimesis, he seems to depart quite radically from Plato’s own conception. In fact, he seems to reject it entirely. In Chapter 4 of the Poetics, Aristotle emphasises the fact that imitation is “natural to man from childhood” and that he is in fact “the most imitative creature in the world.” Imitation, Aristotle goes on to say, is itself oriented towards learning: man “learns at first by imitation.”11 And because learning is the greatest pleasure achievable for men, imitation and, more generally, knowledge through representation, should not be rejected, but embraced. The reason why, Aristotle claims, we are able to delight in works that represent objects that, in the flesh as it were, seem to us ugly or inferior, such as “the lowest animals” or “dead bodies,” is because we learn something about those things. By emphasising this immediate and natural connection between learning, or the acquisition of knowledge, and mimesis, Aristotle calls into question the radical separation that Plato had established between those images produced through mimesis and the original of which they are the image, and which alone is true. Poetry, which is a valuable source of knowledge for Aristotle, is itself born of this natural inclination to imitate, and to learn through representation. For Aristotle, we actually learn through images and, as we shall see in a moment, not only through artistic images. As such, images cannot be reduced to mere phantoms or simulacra. They are—or can be-images of the truth. With Aristotle, then, a rehabilitation of mimetic art takes place, and a closer link between art and truth seems to be established. In fact, Aristotle values imitative art to such an extent that he thinks it teaches us more than history, for example, which speaks only of facts and singular events, whereas poetry is oriented towards universals:
The difference between a historian and a poet is this: one tells what happened and the other what might happen. Hence poetry is more philosophic and serious than history, because its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.12
Of course, the image of the poet is always singular: he always tells the story of a specific hero. And yet, somehow, he allows the universal to shine through the particular and is interested in the singular only to the extent that it can provide an access to the universal. The rehabilitation of images in Aristotle is also a rehabilitation of intuition as a legitimate mode of knowledge and access to truth.
Despite those differences, however, the Platonic schema remains firmly in place, for at least two reasons. Firstly, Aristotle clearly states that the delight we take in the representation, and thus the knowledge—albeit inadequate—of the object, requires the prior vision of the thing.13 In other words, and in a way that goes almost without saying, the kind of learning and pleasure derived from imitation requires the prior vision and experience of the being that is imitated. It requires a degree—minimal and provisional—of familiarity with, and knowledge of, the object that is represented. And yet, at the same time, imitation points beyond itself, and beyond the object it imitates. Its raison d’être, and the reason why we delight in its many productions, is to extract the universal from the particular, not through rational discourse and dianoetic knowledge, but through the production of images. But the universal is itself not actually given, but only intimated, in the particular. Only insofar as we already know, and have already “seen,” the universal, can we recognise it in the particular. In other words, no matter how pedagogic mimesis might be, no matter how much the beautiful words of the poet set us under way to truth, they are never truth as such. As Sallis puts it: “one can learn through the image only if it is recognised as an image of the thing itself.”14 It is this subordination of poetic mimesis to a prior and posterior vision of the truth that binds the Aristotelian account of mimesis to the metaphysical axiomatics of Plato.
There is, however, a deeper and more implicit affinity between Plato and Aristotle on the question of mimesis. For Aristotle, as for Plato, mimesis is not only, and not primarily, a concept that is specific to art. Art is essentially mimetic, but mimesis exceeds art. Mimesis is a metaphysical, and specifically onto-theological, concept. By subsuming art under such a concept, classical aesthetics locks art into a metaphysical framework, which itself requires to be deconstructed if the question of art is ever going to be wrested from mimesis. In the specific case of Aristotle, mimesis defines the relation between the physical, sublunary, world, and divine being. In fact, imitation of the divine, and its immobility, accounts for the motion of the physical world itself, and the Heavens in particular, whose elliptical trajectory is the very figure of eternity, the very image or the realisation within the sensible world of divine perfection. Divine being is always one, without beginning or end, absolutely itself, which means fully actualized, whereas sublunary or sensible beings, physical beings, are always striving after their unity, tending toward a state of perfection or rest in which they would be fully realized. From where do they get this goal (τέλος), which is the source of their movement? From where does nature derive its becoming? From the fact that, as matter (ὔλη), as power or potentiality (δύναμις) oriented towards a form (μορφή, εἶδος), it tends towards pure being, or truth, defined as self-presence and self-identity; from the fact that it is drawn irresistibly by a principle of perfection which is God’s mode of being or οὐσία, which is to say, pure immobility. It is precisely to the extent that sensible beings imitate the οὐσία of God in their own way that they themselves will be able to accede to the dignity of essence. Between the physical and the metaphysical, between sensible and supersensible beings, there exists a principle of imitation and desire or aspiration. In other words, there is between them a relation like that of the copy to the model, of the image to the original, which is to say, a relation of resemblance and identity, even if, by definition, there is still an unbridgeable gap or difference between them. This difference is the one that separates the act of potency, the full and already accomplished being that is proper to the Prime Mover, from the being that, in a perpetual condition of realisation, characterises sublunary beings. Οὐσία means beingness in the sense of full presence (παρουσία), fully realized potency. Being is above all a synonym for presence, or actuality. In the sublunary world, by way of contrast, the act is never pure; it is always mixed with potency, and this potency is what constitutes the movement of the world.
It is in that context that art is itself understood as mimetic. Art (τέχνη), Aristotle writes in the Physics, and in a way that encompasses useful as well as fine art, “imitates nature”15—not only in the Platonic sense, that is, in the sense that it produces likenesses of natural entities, but also in the sense that, like those entities, and like the meta-physical world, it is characterised by the primacy of form over matter, and by that of the final cause, which governs the process as a whole, including its coming-into-being (γένεσις). But art, Aristotle claims in the same sentence, also “extends and perfects nature,” as in medicine, or tragedy, by virtue of the same principle and the same primacy, namely, the end (τέλος) or that “towards which” (εἰς ὄ, τὸ οὖ ἔνεκα) it tends qua work or natural entity. Art, in other words, brings about or reveals the end of nature. Contrary to what Plato claimed, art has the ability to imitate not just imitations of the truth, that is, of things as they are in themselves, but Ideas themselves. Art is not condemned, at best, to naturalism. Its relation to truth, the divine intellect, and perfection is not simply secondary, or derivative.
There is little doubt that, unlike Plato, Aristotle affirms the irreducible materiality and contingency of the physical world, and of human affairs and activities, including artistic. And yet, the structure of imitation that governs them only confirms the Platonic insight according to which, at the heart of matter, and of all things natural and produced, there is a driving force and power that is itself supersensible, or meta-physical. The work of art, whether in Plato or Aristotle, consists in the sensuous presentation of an original and ultimately intelligible reality; it is thus situated in the space—the space of metaphysics itself—between the sensible and the intelligible, the particular and the universal, the image and the original. As a result, the role and place of the work becomes essentially ambiguous, insofar as it opens up and bridges the space of metaphysics, but only to an extent, and in a way that, ultimately, calls for its own end, its own overcoming, or Aufhebung in another, more intelligible or spiritual mode of presentation. Philosophy’s recognition of the power of art is also, and from the start, the recognition of the limits of art as production of images. This essential ambiguity of art, summarised in the concept of mimesis, remained in place throughout much of the history of art and idealist metaphysics, despite German idealism’s claim to have been done with such a concept.
Intermezzo 1: Mimesis, Allegory, and the Symbol
A The Renaissance and Mimesis
Before turning to the aesthetics of German idealism, however, I wish to indicate the manner in which this ambiguity and twofold conception of imitation was put to work in the visual arts themselves, and in the philosophy of art, between the Renaissance and Romanticism.
According to E. Panofsky, the Renaissance was the scene of an opposition between a naturalist conception of imitation, represented by the likes of Alberti, Leonardo, and Dürer, for which the ideal work of art was the faithful and direct reproduction of reality, and could thus be apprehend through perception, and a mannerist conception, influenced by Platonic and Neoplatonic idealism, for which art imitated not the actual appearance of a subject, but its ideal form and its perfect state, open to the eyes of the mind only.16 Thus, as Tolnay puts it, Michelangelo “did not intend to represent things as the human eye sees them but as they are in essence; not as they appear but as they are according to their Idea.”17 As such, art, in valuing style or maniera over nature, could be said to exceed nature and be truer than nature. This tension, which Panofsky presents in terms of an opposition between two opposed conceptions of art, and which Vincenzo Danti qualified in terms of the difference between mere depiction (ritratto) and true imitation (imitazione), seems to me to draw on two aspects of the Platonic schema of mimesis, without actually calling it into question. For it isn’t as if, even for the naturalist, imitations were purely a matter of perception and could turn to any object. By exercising his own intelligence, the artist was to always choose what’s most beautiful amongst the diversity of objects and avoid imperfection at all cost, especially regarding proportions:
It will please [the painter] not only to make all the parts true to his model but also to add beauty there . . . For this reason it is useful to take from every beautiful body each one of the praised parts and always strive by your diligence and study to understand and express much loveliness. This is very difficult, because complete beauties are never found in a single body, but are rare and dispersed in many bodies . . . For this reason always take from nature that which you wish to paint, and always choose the most beautiful . . .18
What is imitated, then, even in the imitation of the actual object, is its intrinsic beauty, which needs to be extracted from the object through an intellectual operation of comparison and synthesis between other, similar objects. Imitation is thus far from amounting to a purely immediate and sensible operation: it requires the mediation of an intellectual faculty. Painting, as Leonardo famously claimed, è cosa mentale. There is no question, however, that for the artists and theorists of the early Renaissance, beauty was internal to nature itself, and not, as in Greek or Christian Neoplatonism, the image of Ideas deposited in the human mind by divine intervention, and reflected in the physical world.19 The notion of Idea, then, and the conception of imitation to which it led, seemed to oscillate between an objective and a subjective interpretation: whereas, Panofsky argues, the early renaissance tended to view Ideas, especially that of the beautiful, as present in nature and merely reflected in the work, the mannerist attitude, most aptly conceptualised in Federico Zuccari’s l’Idea de’ pittori, scultori ed architteti (1607) saw the work, or the disegno esterno, as the manifestation of a disegno interno or an Idea present in the mind of the artist, but reflecting a transcendent or divine perfection: the “internal design,” was interpreted as a “divine spark” (scintilla della divinità) ignited in the soul of the artist.20 As such, with respect to its origin and true provenance, the Idea was nothing other than the design internal to the divine intellect who, by imitating it, created the world.21 That view, inspired by Ficino’s Neoplatonic and highly influential commentary of Plato’s Symposium,22 contrasted with the view of imitation of the classical Renaissance, which seems to resonate more with that of Aristotle: art perfects nature insofar as it is able to reveal its εἶδος, that is, the end (τέλος) or that “towards which” it tends qua natural entity. Beauty, subsequently, is only the realisation and full manifestation of a potentiality, the form in which a given object finds its completion.23
B Neoclassicism and Allegory
This Aristotelian line of thought and conception of imitation reappears in the 17th and 18th centuries, and precisely as a reaction against the Neoplatonic metaphysics of mannerism. Its most exemplarily form can be found in Bellori’s neoclassical and highly influential manifesto, The Idea of the Painter, the Sculptor and the Architect Drawn from Beauties both Natural and Superior to Nature, initially presented at the Academia di San Luca in Rome in 1664, and subsequently published as the Preface to The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672).24 Although I agree with Panofsky that Bellori’s manifesto contains strong Platonic and Neoplatonic elements, its fundamental thesis regarding the artist’s ability to imitate the Ideas created by the “First Worker,” and thus perfect nature, itself only an imitation of those Ideas, is, I believe, essentially Aristotelian. To be more specific, it amounts to a combination of the Aristotelian view of art, directed towards not things as they appear to be, but as they truly are, according to their essence, and a more Platonic view, according to which truth, although possibly intimated by the senses (aisthesis), is fully grasped by thought (noesis) only. Taking issue with Lodovico Castelvetro’s own criticism of Aristotle, and specifically with the view that “the virtue of painting is not in creating a beautiful and perfect image [far l’immagine belle a perfetta], but in resembling the natural [ma simile al naturale], either beautiful or deformed, for an excess of beauty lessens the likeness,”25 Bellori insists that the aim of art, and its value, consist in “making men more beautiful than they ordinarily are.” Choosing perfection over imperfection, he adds immediately in his defence of Aristotle’s view of poetry, “conforms with the Idea:” by contemplating the Idea or the form (la forma) of each thing, Painters are able to reveal their intrinsic beauty, “which is nothing else but what makes things as they are in their proper and perfect nature [nella loro propria e perfetta natura].”26 As such, the Idea may be called “the perfection of Nature, miracle of Art, foresight [providenza] of the intellect, model [esempio] of the mind, light of the imagination.” It is the “Sun” that “inspires” and the “Fire” that “gives life.”27
This conception of imitation runs through the 18th century and can be found, most exemplarily perhaps, in Reynolds’ Discourses on Art. Whilst denigrating a certain type of imitation, most obvious in Dutch still lives, landscapes and portraits, Reynolds ends up embracing a higher form of mimesis, oriented towards the universal and the moral, as evidenced in the Italian School. In one of his Letters to “The Idler,” dated 20 October 1759, he remarks on the “one maxim universally admitted and continually inculcated” amongst the painters and writers on painting, namely, “Imitate Nature.”28 But, he goes on to say, “I know none who have explained in what manner this rule is to be understood.”29 Too often, he complains, it is understood literally and naïvely, as an invitation to represent things naturally. If “the excellency of a Painter” were to consist “only in this kind of imitation,” he concludes, Painting would lose its rank as a liberal art. But that is not the proper way to understand imitation, and Nature, he claims in one of his Discourses, “is not to be too closely copied.”30 For by copying it too literally, one’s view of it remains bound to the contingent, the particular, and the imperfect. It cannot be a matter, therefore, of simply aping nature as it unfolds before us, with all its imperfections and deviations from the pure forms it expresses, but of imitating those forms themselves and abstracting from the various accidents to which they are prone. It is not “the eye,” but “the mind, which the painter of genius desires to address.”31 Beauty and perfection in art can only come from the abstraction of “an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature.”32 Such an ideal beauty can be achieved not by transposing oneself into the transcendent world of pure Ideas, but through a careful and long observation of nature herself: “The great ideal perfection and beauty are not be sought in the heavens, but upon the earth.”33 What Reynolds is offering, then, is a kind of empirical idealism, clearly formulated in the following passage:
All the objects which are exhibited to our view by nature, upon close examination will be found to have their blemishes and defects. The most beautiful forms have something about them like weakness, minuteness, or imperfection. But it is not every eye that perceives these blemishes. It must be an eye long used to the contemplation and comparison of these forms; and which by a long habit of observing what any set of objects of the same kind have in common, has acquired the power of discerning what each wants in particular. This long laborious comparison should be the first study of the painter, who aims at the great style. But this means, he acquires a just idea of beautiful forms; he corrects nature by herself, her imperfect state by her more perfect. His eye being able to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the Artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the great leading principle by which works of genius are conducted.34
Insofar as painting remains committed to a form of mimesis, then, it isn’t in the sense of a straightforward and literal imitation, but in the sense of the ability to extract the true, universal form or eidos contained in every individual thing or figure. Thus, to imitate means to correct, select, and combine features and elements, in order to retain the eternal and pure form they express. In that respect, art, according to Reynolds and Enlightenment aesthetics in general, continues to follow the Aristotelian view of poetic, and specifically tragic mimesis, according to which art remains true to nature by perfecting it, seeks the universal in the particular, or the necessary in the contingent. Although the lower imitator is like a collector of shells, the genuine imitator is like the philosopher:
He will permit the lower painter, like the florist or collector of shells, to exhibit the minute discriminations, which distinguish one object of the same species from another; while he, like the philosopher, will consider nature in the abstract, and represent in every one of his figures the character of its species.35
Imitation is based on a process of variation and abstraction from individual differences, through which the “central form” is eventually identified. Ultimately, the observation of nature, which seems to ground art in empiricism, is subordinated to something like an eidetic reduction that reveals the fixed and determinate forms that lie behind the various species of animals and plants: “Every species of the animal as well as the vegetable creation may be said to have a fixed or determinate form, towards which Nature is continually inclining, like various lines terminating in the centre.”36
Having, in his early years, begun by simply copying the objects before him, and then gradually learned to extract their idea, the painter achieves genuine greatness when, moving “beyond any thing in the mere exhibition even of the perfect form,” he is able to “animate” and “dignify” his figures with “intellectual grandeur,” “philosophick wisdom, or heroic virtue.”37 In other words, it isn’t until his art has become allegorical that it has reached its “true dignity” and becomes poetry’s equal. It is only when, as Aristotle said of tragic poetry, the painter is able to represent things not just as they are, but as they ought to be, that he exceeds the sphere of what we could call vulgar imitation, and enter that of noble mimesis. It is that sense of allegory that is captured in a number of Reynolds’ portraits, such as Mrs Siddons as The Tragic Muse from 1789 (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London). By espousing this view of painting, Reynolds was able to champion his art as equal to poetry, history (so long as it was edifying), and philosophy, and align his own work and thought with those of Neoclassicism. It’s indeed in the context of neoclassical art and art theory, concerned with the possibility of distinguishing, and indeed drawing up a hierarchy, between the various modes of artistic imitation that allegory came to be seen as the highest genre. The higher and nobler the subject of the painting, the more noble and worthy the artist as well as the viewer, as the following passage from André Félibien, written some one hundred years before Reynolds’ Discourses, testifies:
The Representation that is made of a Body by drawing Lines or combining Colours is considered as a mechanical Employment [un travail mécanique]. For this reason there are different Workmen in this Art, who apply themselves to different Subjects; it is certain that in Proportion as they employ themselves in the most difficult and noble Parts, they excell those which are low and common, and aggrandise themselves by a more noble Study. Thus he who paints fine Landskips, is above him who only paints Fruits, Flowers or Shells. He who paints living Animals is more to be regarded than he who represents dead and motionless Things; and as the Figure of a Man is the most perfect Work of God upon Earth, it is also certain that he who imitates God in painting human Figures, is by far more excellent than all others. Moreover though it be no small Matter to make the Picture of a Man appear as if it was alive, and to give the Appearance of Motion to that which has none; one who can only draw Portraits has not yet attained to this high Perfection of Art, and cannot pretend to the same Honour with abler Painters [les plus sçavans]. He must for that end advance from representing one single Figure to several together; he must paint History and Fable; he must represent great Actions like an Historian, or agreeable ones like the Poets. And soaring yet higher, he must by allegorical Compositions, know how to hide under the Vail of Fable the Virtues of great Men, and the most elevated Mysteries [les mysteres les plus relevez]. He is esteemed a great Painter who acquits himself well in Enterprizes of this Kind. ‘Tis in this that the Force, the Nobility and Grandeur of the Art consists. And it is this particularly that ought to ought early to be learned by young Students.38
C The Romantic Symbol
Consider, by contrast, the shift that takes place with the birth of Romanticism. It’s often argued that it’s by developing an original theory of the symbol, and under the influence of the concept of the genius and the subjectivisation of artistic “experience,” that Romanticism broke with neoclassical mimesis and its emphasis on allegory, premised on the irreducible distance separating the imitator and the imitated, the human mind and nature, the sign and its signification.39 The question, however, is one of knowing whether this break amounted to an overcoming of the mimetic paradigm as such, or whether it simply led to its reconfiguration. In fact, the shift in question took place in the name of true imitation, based on a renewed conception of nature and gathered in the idea of the symbol. On the surface, it could be seen to amount to nothing more than a return to the ideals of the classical Renaissance. This is how, in a lecture delivered at the Hampstead Assembly Rooms in June 1833, Constable pays tribute to the naturalism of Venetian renaissance, which he opposes to “the vacant school of idealism” of the late renaissance and Neoclassicism:
It was, however, at Venice, the heart of colour, and where the true art of imitation was first understood [my emphasis], that landscape assumed a rank and decision of character that spread future excellence through all the schools of Europe. Giorgione and Titian, both historical painters, were early disciplined in the schools of the brothers Bellini, where they were taught to imitate nature in what has been termed a servile manner [my emphasis]. But it appears to have been the true way of proceeding if we may judge form the result; for afterwards, when those great painters had attained the plenitude of their powers, they never lost their respect for nature, not for a moment wandered from the materials which were about them, and which they had been taught to copy so admirably, into the vacant school of idealism.40
In criticising the idealism that he associates with mannerism and all those “productions of men who lost sight of nature,” thus provoking the “decadence” of art, Constable was in fact advocating a return to a form of naturalism, now understood from the point of view of its symbolic structure.41
By contrast with allegory, which epitomised the idealism of Neoclassicism, the symbol was seen to reflect the correspondence, indeed the reflection, between parts and whole. “By a symbol,” said Coleridge, “I mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of speech, but an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it represents.”42 This is how the Romantics could maintain that being a part of what it represents makes the symbol identical to that whole. The symbol, and its progressive move into the very heart of the aesthetic order, was interpreted as the living unity of sense (or Sinn), that is, as the unity of the sensible appearance and supersensible meaning, or the union (symbolon) of two things that belong to one another, yet had been artificially separated. In the symbol, according to Goethe’s earlier, canonical formulation of the concept, the particular represents “the universal, not as a dream or shadow, but as a living and momentary revelation of the inscrutable [lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen].” Consequently, “the idea remains eternally and infinitely active and inaccessible in the image, and even if expressed in all languages would still remain inexpressible.”43 Many years later, in his 1903 essay on Blake, Yeats described the difference between the symbol and the allegory in the following terms, reminiscent of Goethe’s definition:
A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, and belongs to fancy and not imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.44
Yet, through its symbolic expression, nature didn’t appear in an absolute transparency, and the gaze of the artist isn’t that of God. On the contrary: what the Romantics sought to do was to present nature as we see it, in its appearance rather than its causal connections, and this means as it is always only partially revealed, mysterious, veiled. The symbol emerges within this tension between the visible and the invisible, or between visibility and blinding. For the artist, it isn’t a matter of lifting the veil of nature, but of showing it as that through which nature reveals itself, as an enigma. It is only through such a veil that we intimate the infinity of nature and that nature remains the object of our desire. As veiled, nature speaks to our imagination, rather than our senses or our understanding. Hence the emphasis on clouds in Constable, fog in Friedrich, or light in Turner. By casting a veil of light or fog on nature, the Romantics reveal it as the inexhaustible and the infinite, to which the imagination is drawn, and humanity is destined. Paintings are no longer attached to a single object, and thus finite. They are drawn to clouds, vapour, and light as the most immaterial objects that art can paint, short of becoming abstract. They are no longer representations of particular things, people, or events. They are no longer a matter of imitation, or allegory. They have become traces of a principle of non-limitation, symbols of the infinite unity of nature, which their material limits cannot contain. They are the expression—the “transparent envelope”45—of the divine and the eternal, as indicated in the following excerpt from a letter Constable wrote to Fisher on 20 September 1821, in which he speaks of his interest in the classical paintings that confront the problem of clouds:
. . . there is a noble N. Poussin at the Academy, a solemn, deep, still summer’s noon, with large umbrageous trees, and a man washing his feet at a fountain near them. Through the breaks in the trees are mountains, and the clouds collecting about them with the most enchanting effects possible. It cannot be too much to say that this landscape is full of religious and moral feeling.46
Rejecting the differences and strict hierarchy that Neoclassicism had introduced within nature, and between nature and history, Romanticism adopted an organic conception of nature, and saw the divine at work in every one of its corners, no matter how obscure and modest. As a result, there was no longer the possibility of distinguishing between higher and lower subjects or genres, and the emphasis shifted from history to nature. The classical notion of genre was abandoned and replaced with a conception of the landscape as the sublation, to use a Hegelian term, of all the genres. As Wat puts it, “the English countryside for Constable, the German countryside for Friedrich are two anti-Rome.”47 Our place within nature thus understood is precisely that of the spectator, as we see from Friedrich’s Woman Before Sunset: the woman is facing nature, rather than the artist and the viewer, yet not in an attitude of defiance and conquest, but of surrender, with her arms and hands open, as if bowing before its beauty and infinity. It is, in a way, the representation of the unrepresentable, the intuition of a beautiful totality accessible only to our imagination. And insofar as she stands on her own, facing the landscape, she works as a relay for a process of identification, fusion even, in which the character, the artist, the viewer and nature are one, expressed in one another.
The (primarily German) theory of the Romantic symbol has philosophical roots that can be traced back to the need to overcome the dualisms inherited from Kantianism, not, as Kant himself had done in the third Critique (and as I will try and show in the next chapter), indirectly, through aesthetic judgement and ideas, but directly, through a new conception of nature and a new conception of artistic mimesis. And so, although Gadamer may be right to locate the beginnings of emancipation of the symbol from allegory, which eventually led to the fusion of aesthetics with natural philosophy, in the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe, we may, following another commentator, wonder whether such a move wasn’t facilitated by certain earlier developments, and by the work of Herder in particular.48 Of particular relevance here is the fact that, in Halmi’s words, although agreeing with Kant that the beautiful could symbolise morality, “Herder rejected Kant’s explanation of how it did so: such symbolism was founded not on an analogy in the subject’s mind, but on the properties in objects themselves.”49 Herder argued for the existence of natural signs, and insisted that the significations rooted in the ontological content of phenomena—what he called Natursinne—“were to be distinguished from purely conventional associations.”50 This, he claims, is most visible in the artistic productions of the Greeks, whose allegories and personifications “are virtually natural symbols [fast Natursymbole].”51 In one respect, then, the symbol was natural “because its meaning consisted in the essence of the symbolizing object itself.” Yet in remained artificial in another respect, “because the symbolizing object was after all a work of art. Herder’s assumption that art originated in the imitation of nature permitted him to conceive art as a second nature, but not to fuse aesthetics with natural philosophy, as Goethe and Schelling would in effect do in their mutually reinforcing discussions of the symbol in nature.”52 The Romantic theory of the symbol was precisely this further attempt to move the indirect presentation of the supersensible, which Kant characterises as “symbolic,” and which he rooted in the free play of faculties of the subject, to a direct form of presentation, or a symbolism in nature. It is first of all by thinking nature differently—and this meant organically—that Romanticism was able to overcome neoclassical mimesis.
Initially, such a move required the construction of an ontological monism, the possibility of which was established, despite himself as it were, by Jacobi, when he published a report of the conversations he had had on Spinoza with Lessing seven months before the latter’s death.53 But it was also made possible by a certain form of vitalism, inherited from Leibniz, and reinterpreted in the late Enlightenment. The thought of Karl Philipp Moritz is, in that respect, crucial. In his 1788 essay on mimesis, Moritz argues for a conception of imitation based on the resemblance not between works of art and their natural model, but between artistic activity and natural organisms. What we normally recognise as “beauty,” he argues, is the spontaneous order that governs organisms as well as works of art, the autonomy and intrinsic principles that presides over their organisation and development:
Each beautiful whole [Ganze] from the hand of the visual artists is a copy in miniature [im Kleinen ein Abdruck] of the highest beauty in the vast whole of nature. . . . When nature itself has imprinted a sense of its creative power in someone’s entire being and the measure [Maaß] of the beautiful in his eyes and soul, then he is not content to view nature; he must imitate it, study it, eavesdrop on its secret workshop, and form and create with a fire in the belly [mit der lodernden Flamm’ im Busen bilden und schaffen], just as nature does.54
To imitate nature, therefore, is to reproduce the process of its creation. To imitate nature is to be creative. When freedom is no longer opposed to nature qua mechanical nature, but reunited with nature qua organism, the work of art can present this unity directly through its own organic unity of parts and whole, in which every part reflects the whole. “Every individual part of the work,” Friedrich writes, “must be stamped by the sense of the whole . . . ”55 Through that double move, it’s nature itself that came to be seen as symbolic, that is, as a universal substance and an organic totality made of parts, each working in conjunction with the others and producing a beautiful totality. If art was to imitate nature, it was no longer in the sense of the reality already given to the senses, but in the sense of an autonomous and spontaneous totality, teleologically regulated. Art imitates nature as symbol. As Todorov puts it: “Like the world, the work of art is a self-sufficient totality; precisely to the extent that it resembles the world, the work of art no longer needs to affirm its connection with the world.”56 From a conception of mimesis as representation, we move to a concept of mimesis as substitution. This, Halmi argues, is how the world was re-enchanted, that is, by “imagining the meaning of objects to inhere in their physical presence.57”
In the end, the Romantic conception of nature remains entirely consistent with the Kantian definition of the symbol, with the following, significant difference that infinity is no longer an idea of reason, but a feature of nature itself, schematised in the work. Isn’t nature here presented in place of the infinite and the divine, isn’t it the place holder or the substitute, rather than the representation, of transcendence, most visible and accessible in the most immaterial of its elements, the residual materiality of which points to something beyond matter? Isn’t, once again, art an intimation (and an imitation) of the immaterial, a sensible presentation of the supersensible? True, it’s no longer history and the noblest virtues, as is neoclassical art, nor the perfect eidos of, say, the human body, as in mannerism, that’s imitated: nature itself is pointing beyond itself, and is its own transcendence. It’s the place where the Idea of all Ideas, that of Infinity, can be experienced. In that respect, it would seem that the Romantic metaphysics of the symbol, and the new Naturphilosophie of the early 19th century, is a different answer to the same problem that Kant was raising, namely, that of the possible unity of the sensible and the supersensible, nature and freedom, or the sensuous and sense. Far from wanting to aggravate the difference between allegory and symbol, I want to suggest that they are driven by the same emphasis on meaningfulness, and indeed by the same orientation towards the sensible in terms of sense. By contrast, I would like to show how metaphor can be seen as the solution to an altogether different problem, which requires that we think not the unity of the sensible and the supersensible, or its possible mediation, but that we think outside the Platonic schema altogether. I wish to show how metaphor opens up, and at the same time draws on, the space of the hypersensible, which isn’t beyond the sensible, but folded within it, accessible to a kind of vision that is neither noetic nor merely perceptual. It is through metaphor, and through a radical rethinking of the aesthetic operation for which it stands, that art twists free of mimesis, as the examples of Hölderlin and Proust will make clear: it’s through a radicalisation of his early conception of metaphor as “transport” that Hölderlin escapes the problem (and the trap) of the imitation of the Ancients, but also Romanticism as an unsatisfactory response to Neoclassicism, and thus opens up an aesthetics that can be articulated as distinctively modern; and in his own way, Proust uses metaphor as an alternative to the organic or symbolic conception of the work of art, inherited from the 19th century. Contrary to what most (including Benjamin) argue, the decisive discontinuity is not between allegory and symbol, but between the latter two and metaphor.58 For despite its opposition to the mimesis of Neoclassicism, the romantic symbol is possibly the highest and ultimate expression of mimesis, in that it seeks the absolute unity of subject and object, or man and nature, as well as that of the various arts and genres in the Gesamtkunstwerk. Art is total because it encompasses nature in its totality. It is precisely that total conception of the artwork that Adorno will reject and, in what amounts to an ironic twist, oppose imitation to mimesis, understood this time as the forever incomplete and postponed, yet always promised unity for which the artwork stands. Metaphor as I understand it, however, enables us to relinquish even the idea of art as a promise of happiness, without falling back into a metaphysical ideal of absolute identity.