The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  Nineteenth-century aesthetics was hardly to be happy with that low estimation of music, which was rather to be considered the highest form of art by some philosophers—for example, Schopenhauer. But as the case of Schopenhauer will also illustrate, the immediate response to Kant’s aesthetics was hardly to defend the importance of the emotional impact of art. On the contrary, as already suggested, at the outset of the century the response of the German Idealists to Kant was to accept his de-emphasis on the emotional impact of art but also to reject his theory of free play, thus returning to a strictly cognitivist account of aesthetic experience, although, as we shall now see, one that in one form or another gave a highly metaphysical account of the object of aesthetic cognition.

  25.2 SCHELLING: ART AS THE ORGANON OF PHILOSOPHY

  At the end of the nineteenth century, George Santayana (1863–1952) trenchantly wrote that “Such value as belongs to metaphysical derivations of the nature of the beautiful, comes to them not because they explain our primary feelings, which they cannot do, but because they express, and in fact constitute, some of our later appreciations.”9 What he meant was that aesthetic experience—the sense of beauty, in his terms—needs no metaphysical explanation, only a psychological explanation, although for those already in the grip of a metaphysical theory, this experience can be incorporated into their theoretical framework. He clearly had in mind the German aesthetic theories of the first part of the century, which gave accounts of aesthetic experience and of art within metaphysical frameworks already accepted on other grounds, and perhaps also had in mind the remarkable use of literary media to express philosophical theories, including those about art, in the hands of such early nineteenth-century German writers as Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and others among the so-called “early Romantics.”10 Here, however, our attention will be restricted to the chief philosophers of the period, beginning with Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).

  Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, published in 1800, can be taken, no doubt somewhat arbitrarily, as signaling the start of nineteenth-century philosophy and with it nineteenth-century aesthetics.11 Indeed, this work gives aesthetics an unusually prominent place in philosophy, declaring that “Art is at once the only true and eternal organon and document of philosophy” (STI, 231). The first thing that Schelling says in support of this assertion is that art is so important because it speaks to us “of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing,” but he then goes on to make the even stronger claim that “Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart.” That is, art does not somehow render accessible the unconscious, which is otherwise inaccessible, but rather expresses the unity of unconscious and conscious, the unintentional and the intentional, nature and mind, which is the essential truth about reality in Schelling’s metaphysics, in a way that no merely conceptual discourse, that is, philosophy, can. While ascribing to art the heavy burden of cognizing and communicating this most fundamental truth about reality, Schelling also extends Kant’s conception of genius to explain the production of art: “This unchanging identity, which can never attain to consciousness, and merely radiates back from the product, is for the producer precisely what destiny is for the agent, namely a dark unknown force which supplies the element of completeness or objectivity to the piecework of freedom, and…is denominated by means of the obscure concept of genius” (STI, 222). But while Kant’s account of genius emphasized creativity, invention, and thus play, Schelling transforms the product of genius into a pure cognition, “a complete recognition of the identity expressed in the product as an identity whose principle lies in the intelligence itself…a complete intuiting of itself.” And “With the completion of [this] product,” Schelling continues, “all urge to produce is halted, all contradictions are eliminated, all riddles are resolved…The intelligence will feel itself astonished and blessed by this union, will regard it, that is, in the light of a bounty freely granted by a higher nature” (STI, 221). In this regard anticipating and influencing Schopenhauer, Schelling argues that the metaphysical insight arrived at by the artistic genius produces a state of bliss best understood as complete relief from emotion. There is no trace of Kant’s conception of play in Schelling’s conception of artistic production, nor in the reception of it, and the full range of emotions that one might have thought could be expressed by art is reduced to the single state of tranquility at the resolution of metaphysical paradox. This is aesthetic cognitivism with a vengeance.

  Schelling’s discussion of art in the System of Transcendental Idealism occupied only its concluding pages. In the lectures on The Philosophy of Art that he gave at Jena in 1802–3 and repeated in Würzburg the following year, and which were thus well-known even though they were not published until mid-century, after his death, Schelling placed art and philosophy in tandem rather than subordinating the latter to the former, but still gave an essentially cognitivist account of art. His model was now that art presents the truth about the world, the ultimate identity of the conscious and the unconscious, more concretely, intuitively, or “really,” while philosophy presents it more abstractly, intellectually, or “ideally,” that is, art presents its information more through the senses and philosophy more through concepts; but at the same time he held that there are both “real” and “ideal” aspects within both art and philosophy, art never getting completely away from concepts and philosophy never completely away from sensuous imagery. And indeed he argued that the several media and genres of fine art differ in their degrees of reality and ideality: sculpture is a more “real” medium than painting, appealing to more of our senses than the latter, music is more “ideal” than visual art but less so than poetry or literature, yet even within poetry lyric poetry is more “real” or sensory in its appeal than other forms such as epic and drama. A detailed description and ranking of the arts in relation to these two poles indeed comprises the bulk of the lectures. But throughout all this detail, Schelling always emphasizes only the cognitive significance of art. He never mentions the sheer pleasure of playing with sensory form and matter, or with the relation between the senses and the intellect, nor does he mention the emotional impact of works of art. Rather he argues, for example, that “the primary demand that must be made of drawing” is “truth,” although not “only that particular kind of truth attainable through faithful imitation of nature” but a truth that lies “at a deeper level than even nature has suggested and than the mere surface features of figures show” (PA, 131), and that “the essential nature of poesy is the same as that of all art: it is the representation of the absolute or of the universe in the particular” (PA, 204).

  Coming only a few years after the System of Transcendental Idealism, Schelling’s lectures nevertheless prepared the way for the philosophy of mythology that occupied his later years by means of his argument that all the arts “intuit” ideas “objectively,” in the form of “real or objective living and existing ideas” of the “gods” of mythology (PA, 17).12 The distance from Kant’s philosophy of art to Schelling’s philosophy of mythology seems very great, but the way is prepared by Schelling’s distinctive reformulation of Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas. Radical reinterpretations of Kant’s conception of aesthetic ideas also lie at the basis of the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Hegel. Indeed, the path from Schelling’s aesthetics to Schopenhauer’s turns out to be very short, because in a third important work, his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom of 1809, Schelling replaces the claim of the original System of Transcendental Idealism that art offers reassuring insight into the ultimate resolution of all tensions between natu
re and mind with the thought that anarchy is always waiting to break through such reassurance. He writes that “After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order, and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again…This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things…that which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground” (EHF, 29). Putting Schelling’s earlier idea that art presents a reconciliation of mind and nature together with his later idea that this reconciliation is only apparent, or perhaps better temporary, and is always threatened by the underlying anarchy of reality leads pretty directly to Schopenhauer’s view that aesthetic experience is a form of cognition that offers momentary relief from the importunate demands of the individual will but not the enduring relief that can be afforded only by ethical asceticism—a doctrine that would later be rejected by Friedrich Nietzsche, initially a disciple of Schopenhauer but subsequently his fierce critic. If my brief allowed it, I would also argue that the twentieth-century aesthetic pessimism of Theodor W. Adorno is another descendent of Schelling’s evolution from the System of Transcendental Idealism to the Essence of Human Freedom, but here I will have to confine myself to the case of Schopenhauer, to which I turn next.

  25.3 SCHOPENHAUER: ART AS COGNITIVE THERAPY

  Arthur Schopenhauer was 13 years younger than Schelling and 18 years younger than Hegel. His works are usually read in his later editions, filled with invective against those philosophers (as well as Johann Gottlieb Fichte); so he is ordinarily discussed only after they have been. But he was in fact deeply influenced by Schelling, and his magnum opus and main work in aesthetics, The World as Will and Representation, appeared at the end of 1818, when Hegel was only beginning to lecture on the subject. So it makes sense to discuss his contribution to aesthetics between those of Schelling and Hegel. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics might indeed be seen as based upon Schelling’s claim in the Essence of Human Freedom that underlying surface order is anarchy, although Schopenhauer dresses up his account of the superficial appearance of order that we impose upon the mere appearance of the underlying anarchy with a Kantian theory of space, time, and the categories. In his earliest work, The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813), Schopenhauer had argued that we always impose upon our experience four forms of order—“sufficient reason”—namely, the geometrical order of space, the logical order of judgments, the causal order of a world in time, and the rational order of motivated action. In The World as Will and Representation (published at the end of 1818 but dated 1819, like a new car model), he added that the underlying reality on the appearance of which such forms are imposed is more like our own will than it is like anything else, and that since rationality is only a veneer over our own arational will, so the will that is the underlying reality of the world is also thoroughly arational. In Book II of the work, Schopenhauer argued specifically that the human will is never satisfied, for it is either frustrated in its attempts to achieve particular goals or else finds itself dissatisfied even if it does achieve them, if for no other reason than boredom. In Book III, his main treatment of aesthetics, Schopenhauer then argues that the aesthetic experience can offer at least momentary relief from the frustration of the will and that only the ethical attitudes of asceticism towards oneself and compassion towards others, grounded in the recognition that apparently different individuals are just different appearances of one and the same underlying reality, can offer more enduring relief from the pain of existence.13

  Like Kant, Schopenhauer begins his description of aesthetic experience with the experience of natural beauty, and says that if “we devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present…we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e., we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject…[as] pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition” (WWR, §34, 201). This is Schopenhauer’s version of Kant’s conception of the disinterestedness of aesthetic pleasure and judgment and signals his intention to follow Kant in excluding the experience of emotion from aesthetic experience. It might thus be expected to go along with a version of Kant’s at least initially non-cognitive interpretation of aesthetic experience as merely a free play of imagination and understanding rather than a determinate application of a concept to intuition. But Schopenhauer’s view is that the aesthetic state of mind arises directly from knowledge, although a very particular sort of knowledge, not the knowledge of an object in all its particularity, which would only throw us back into the morass of our own painful individuality, but rather knowledge of the essence of the type of object we are contemplating, severed from its causal and volitional context, the essence that Schopenhauer calls the “Platonic Idea.” In aesthetic experience “what we thus cognize is no longer the individual thing as such, but rather the Idea, this eternal form, the immediate objecthood of the will at this level: and this is precisely how someone gripped by this intuition is at the same time no longer an individual” (WWR, §34, 201). Schopenhauer’s theory might be seen as a development of Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas minus his theory of free play, but is perhaps better seen as the reconnection of the concept of disinterestedness with the theory of Plato’s Symposium and Aristotle’s Poetics that the experience of beauty, in nature as well as art, leads us to knowledge of universals rather than particulars. This will ultimately include knowledge of emotions—but not their experience through art.

  Schopenhauer’s entire aesthetics is then built upon the premise that aesthetic experience is always a cognition of some universal that delivers us from the pain of our ordinary, individual existence. In the experience of natural beauty, the relevant universal—the essence of fluidity when we gaze at a waterfall, or of light when we gaze at a rainbow (see WWR, §36, 208)—as it were leaps out at us, without any effort on our part, while in the case of the sublime we must overcome our fear of something powerful in nature that could destroy our own body in order to appreciate its essence (WWR, §39, 225–6). Beautiful works of art rather than of nature are produced by geniuses who have an exceptional capacity for the contemplation of the universal in the particular, “a degree of cognitive power…far in excess of the amount required for the service of the individual will” (WWR, §36, 209), as well as a gift for communicating that insight to the rest of us along with the relief that such contemplation affords. And where Schelling had differentiated the particular media and genres of art by their relative degrees of ideality and reality, Schopenhauer differentiates them by the level of “objecthood” or “objectification” of the will, insight into which they afford: architecture communicates to us the Platonic Ideas of such basic forces of nature as gravity, tensile and comprehensive strength, and light, achieving its beauty only by subordinating any hint of its functionality to purely aesthetic ends (WWR, §43, 242); “landscape gardening performs the same service for the higher levels of vegetable nature” (WWR, §44, 243); and so on up through tragedy, the “pinnacle of literature” and highest form of art but one, which represents for us “the terrible aspect of life,…the unspeakable pain, the misery of humanity, the triumph of wickedness” (WWR, §51, 279–80), but precisely by communicating to us knowledge of the essence of misery at least temporarily distracts us from our own, individual misery. And the highest form of art? That is music, which does not present any mere objectification or externalization of the will, that is, outward objects or conduct from which the nature of the will may be inferred, but rather, through melody, harmony, and rhythm, the very essence of the will as it is in itself, but which again liberates us from our own wills precisely by revealing the character of human will in general (from which the nature of the will as such may also be inferred). Music “does not express this or that individual and particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror
or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves…the essential in all these without anything superfluous” (WWR, §52, 289). Music too delivers knowledge of the essence of human emotions free from any experience of such emotions.