By locating the “birth of tragedy in the spirit of music,” the young, still Schopenhauerian Friedrich Nietzsche would try to assimilate the case of tragedy to Schopenhauer’s account of the supremely liberating power of music. But before we can come to Nietzsche, we must next discuss Hegel and his extensive influence on German aesthetics throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century.
25.4 HEGEL: THE SENSUOUS CONFIGURATION OF TRUTH AND THE END OF ART
Hegel’s aesthetics is known through a few paragraphs in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences, first published in 1817 and expanded in 1827 and 1830, but primarily through H. G. Hotho’s posthumous publication of the lectures he gave in Berlin between 1820 and 1829.14 Hegel dismisses the significance of natural beauty at the very outset, thus effecting the equation of aesthetics with the philosophy of art that has largely prevailed ever since, by arguing that only art is “beauty born of the spirit and born again” (A I, 2), that is, that beauty lies in the sensuous but intentional presentation of intellectual content, and that only humanly produced art, not natural beauty, satisfies this definition. Indeed, he argues not just that art must have some intellectual content, present some idea, but that it must present what he calls the Idea, the single idea that everything that is significant about reality is a product of thought, thought that we are most familiar with as human thought but that is ultimately divine thought, for no other thought could be responsible for everything that is significant in reality. But art also presents this thought sensuously, that is, in forms accessible to the human senses—above all the senses of sight and hearing (A I, 38)—and this ultimately limits art to being a merely preliminary presentation of a truth that is better comprehended by religion, but, since religion itself is typically dependent upon imagery and therefore art, by nothing less than pure philosophy. Thus the fact that for Hegel art is a form of cognition but always a sensuous form of cognition means that “The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need,” which is for intellectual understanding, for philosophy, and hence that art, even “considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us,” in a philosophical age, “a thing of the past” (A I, 10–11). The strictly cognitive character of art means that for Hegel it is not the organon of philosophy, as it was for Schelling, but a competitor of philosophy, and one guaranteed to lose out.
Hegel’s position, that art differs from religion in the degree to which it employs sensuous form for the presentation of intellectual content and from philosophy in that it employs sensuous form at all but that its significance nevertheless lies solely in its presentation of intellectual content, means that he rejects the view that the importance of art lies in its emotional impact as well as the view that it involves the free play of our mental powers. Hegel criticizes the view that the aim of art “is supposed to consist in awakening and vivifying our slumbering feelings, inclinations, and passions of every kind, in filling the human heart, in forcing the human being, educated or not, to go through the whole gamut of feelings which the human heart in its inmost and secret recesses can bear” on the ground that since human feelings are variable and sometimes even contradictory, if the aim of art is to awaken and vivify them then art itself will be contradictory and cancel itself out (A I, 47–8). He does not explicitly reject Kant’s theory of free play as a theory of aesthetic experience, but rejects it as part of a theory of genius that would cut art “altogether loose from attention to universally valid laws and from…conscious reflection,” a theory that would reduce art to the product of “inspiration” and “caprice” (A I, 26–7). In general, he criticizes Kant’s theory for being excessively “subjective” (A I, 57). He allows that “Kant sees the beauty of art after all as a correspondence in which the particular itself accords with the concept,” and is thus “so bound up with the universal that it is inwardly and absolutely adequate to it” (A I, 60)—but this lesson from Kant’s theory of aesthetic ideas can be drawn only once the element of free play that Kant included in his theory has been stripped from it.
The only option left, then, is that “the content of art is the Idea,” even though “its form is the configuration of sensuous material” (A I, 70). From this premise, Hegel then develops an elaborate historiography of art as well as a classification of the several arts of the kind previously pioneered by such predecessors as Schelling and Schopenhauer. Hegel’s historiography is inseparable from his end of art thesis: art begins with indeterminate, merely symbolic representations of vaguely conceived intimations of the spiritual character of reality, proceeds to fully determinate representations of humanly and therefore determinately conceived divinities in its classical period, but because of the restrictions of its unavoidably sensuous media is inevitably left behind when spirit’s self-understanding and our understanding of that becomes fully developed—art can only point, romantically, at such an understanding, but cannot itself achieve it. Thus, “art begins when the Idea, still in its indeterminacy or obscurity…is made the content of artistic shapes” that are themselves indeterminate in their significance (A I, 76). “The classical art-form clears up this double defect; it is the free and adequate embodiment of the Idea in the shape peculiarly appropriate to the Idea itself in its essential nature” (A I, 77); but in classical art “the spirit is at once determined as particular and human, not as purely absolute and eternal,” and once this has been realized then we must also realize that “absolute inwardness cannot freely and truly shape itself outwardly on condition of remaining moulded into a bodily existence as the one appropriate to it” (A I, 79), even though being molded into a bodily existence is essential to art. Once properly understood, the content of art is incompatible with any possible form for art. Art’s cognitive vocation is also its own fate.
Many philosophers and other writers on art in the wake of Hegel found his historical approach to art appealing but his cognitivism and its consequence ultimately unacceptable.15 But, as we will now see, it took much of the rest of the nineteenth century for aesthetics to find its way out of the impasse to which Hegel had brought it.
25.5 ESCAPING FROM HEGEL’S STRAIGHTJACKET: SCHLEIERMACHER, ROSENKRANZ, AND VISCHER
The theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) also lectured on aesthetics at Berlin several times during the years when Hegel was giving his lectures.16 Schleiermacher is best remembered for his contribution to hermeneutics, but in contrast to Hegel as well as the other idealists, he took a pluralistic rather than exclusively cognitivist approach to aesthetics; and he certainly did not think that art is a thing of the past, but rather emphasized its central rôle in every form of human society. For Schleiermacher, art gives form and clarity to human emotion by creating “prototypes” that come between raw emotions and finished works of art; in his words, “The art is thus here the identity of the inspiration [Begeisterung] by means of which the externalization derives from the inner emotion and the clarification [Besonnenheit] by means of which it derives from the prototype” (Ä, 11). This may be interpreted as claiming that art both arises from and produces an experience of emotion, but at the same time that it expresses and clarifies the character of such emotion, thus adding a cognitive dimension to the emotional impact of art.17 But Schleiermacher argues further that the “mood that arises from holding together the moments of affection” in the creation and reception of a work of art—which, like Schopenhauer before him and Dilthey afterwards, he holds to differ only in degree, not in kind (Ä, 3)—also “determines the free play of the fantasy” (Ä, 17). He does not explicate what he means by free play, but rather seems to presuppose that both the creation and experience of art are fundamentally exercises of the imagination, although with both emotional and cognitive elements as part of what the imagination plays with. In contrast to his contemporaries, Schleiermacher thus revives the Kantian conception of aesthetic experience as free play, but goes beyond Kant in interpreting this as play with emotions as well as with ideas.
Had Schleierm
acher’s lectures been widely received, the history of German aesthetics in the remainder of the nineteenth century might have been quite different. But it was Hegel’s lectures that were influential, not Schleiermacher’s, and it was thus a long struggle before the emotional and playful aspects of aesthetic experience were as widely acknowledged as its cognitive aspect. So, for example, Karl Rosenkranz (1805–79), one of the most influential of Hegelians although he was actually a successor to Kant’s chair in Königsberg, expanded the scope of Hegelian aesthetics to include an Aesthetics of the Ugly (1853), but he still took an essentially cognitivist approach to aesthetic experience.18 The heart of Rosenkranz’s argument was that “If nature and spirit are to be presented in their full depth, then the naturally ugly, the evil and the diabolical cannot be lacking…to depict the appearance of the idea in its totality, art cannot avoid offering an image of the ugly” (ÄH, 37–8). Rosenkranz adopts Hegel’s characterization of the content of art as the singular “Idea” and also Hegel’s view that spirit needs to express itself, but includes in the scope of the “Idea” not just the rational but the irrational and hence ugly as well, and infers that this needs to be expressed by art as well. Rosenkranz recognizes that art idealizes its objects, but argues that this does not restrict it to the depiction of beautiful objects, requiring us rather to represent the essence of ugliness although not what is merely contingent in it (ÄH, 41). However, although Rosenkranz diagnoses ugliness as a product of “unfreedom”—“True freedom is in all ways the mother of the beautiful, unfreedom that of the ugly” (ÄH, 56)—he does not employ the concept of free play, nor explain how there might be freedom in the artistic representation of ugliness as the product of unfreedom. In other words, he does not depart sufficiently from the Hegelian framework to include free play as an aspect of aesthetic experience.
The Hegelian approach was more effectively widened by Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–87), who in the course of his long career was professor of philosophy at Tübingen, director of the art museum at Stuttgart, and a novelist and essayist.19 He was also the father of Robert Vischer (1847–1933), who not only edited his father’s works but was an important theorist as well as art historian in his own right. The elder Vischer’s first main work in aesthetics was a monumental Aesthetics or the Science of the Beautiful, published from 1846 to 1857. The very title of the work already signals some departure from Hegel, since Hegel had so emphatically argued that aesthetics is concerned only with art, not with beauty more generally, and Vischer indeed gives considerable attention to natural beauty. His framework is nevertheless Hegelian: he says that “aesthetics supports itself on metaphysics,” specifically on the “absolute Idea,” which he characterizes as “the unity of all opposites, which come together in the highest opposition, that between subject and object, which sublates itself through the divided but then reunited activity of knowing and willing” and which “cannot as such come to appearance at any single point in time and space but realizes itself in all spaces and in the endless course of time through a continually self-renewing process of movement” (ÄWS, §10, I: 45). More so than Rosenkranz or Hegel himself, however, Vischer recognizes that contingency is part and parcel of the absolute (ÄWS, §41, I: 120). He then argues that the absolute Idea must present itself “in the form of immediacy or intuition,” and that its appearance to sensible intuition is beauty (ÄWS, §10, I: 48). Thus far Vischer’s departure from Hegel is only to allow that contingency must be presented along with necessity and that natural as well as artistic beauty can present this. But he departs from Hegel in rehabilitating the concept of play, arguing that Kant (and Schiller) had correctly characterized aesthetic experience while Hegel characterized its content: “The aesthetic disposition [Stimmung] in the subject is a reflection of the object also considered in itself as a pure mean of the opposed forms of its activity. This mean is determined by Kant as a free play and the pleasure that is connected with it as a pure satisfaction” (ÄWS, §75, I: 203). That is, the inexhaustible interplay between necessity and contingency that is the essence of the absolute Idea can only be represented and experienced through the free play of mental powers in the artist and audience. (Vischer criticizes Kant for restricting the powers at play in the experience of beauty to purely cognitive powers, and while it might be objected that Kant included pure practical reason among the powers at play in his account of the dynamical sublime, it should be remembered that for Kant this was primarily an experience triggered by nature, not by art.) Even in his early work, then, Vischer’s approach to aesthetics was more ecumenical than Hegel’s.
Especially in his later work, such as the lectures on The Beautiful and Art posthumously published by his son,20 Vischer also recognized the emotional aspect of aesthetic experience, observing how we project our emotional response back on to the work of art that triggers it and describe the work as if it itself had emotional properties. This is what Robert Vischer called “empathy” (Einfühlung, literally “feeling-in” or projection), and it would become the central idea of one of the most prominent movements in German (as well as British and American) aesthetics at the end of the nineteenth century. Before we turn to that, however, let us look at the thought of a figure who flourished between the early and later periods of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a figure virtually unknown in his own time but now the most prominent of all late nineteenth-century German philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche.
25.6 NIETZSCHE’S OWN REDISCOVERY OF FREE PLAY
Trained as a classical philologist, Nietzsche (1844–1900) undermined his career in that field but began his career as a philosopher with The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), in which he reinterpreted the meaning of Greek tragedy in Schopenhauerian terms and used that approach to tragedy as an apology for his fellow Schopenhauerian Richard Wagner.21 In his later work, Nietzsche would thoroughly repudiate both Schopenhauer and Wagner, and that is a reflection of his own rediscovery of the importance of play in aesthetic experience and life more generally.
The Birth of Tragedy famously contrasts the Apollonian and Dionysian “drives,” the former being the drive to seek discrete images or forms, which constitute beauty but are also mere “semblance,” the latter being the intoxicating urge to know the underlying oneness of all being, the “blissful ecstasy which arises from the innermost ground of man, indeed of nature itself,” in light of which the differences between individual existents, the principium individuationis, are meaningless (BT, §1, 14–19, quotation at 17). Nietzsche refers to Schopenhauer throughout his opening section, and it is clear that his Apollonian images stand for Schopenhauerian appearances and Dionysian oneness for the Schopenhauerian will in itself. Beyond that, the Apollonian and Dionysian might also allude to the “form drive” and “matter drive” that Friedrich Schiller distinguished in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind,22 and perhaps even more generally to the eighteenth-century contrast between the beautiful and the sublime. Nietzsche also begins by associating the Apollonian and Dionysian with specific artistic media, the former with the arts of the “image-maker or sculptor” and the latter with the “imageless art of music (BT, §1, 14). His argument is then that tragedy combines Apollonian and Dionysian arts and satisfies both Apollonian and Dionysian drives: it creates distinct characters whose fate, however, is to be sucked up into the oneness of being; but instead of finding their destruction merely horrifying, we are rather brought by tragedy to a “releasing and redemptive vision” (BT, §4, 26) in which we can joyfully become “one with the primordial unity” (BT, §5, 30). Nietzsche then argues that in modern times it is only the Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagnerian opera that revives the power of ancient Greek tragedy (BT, §16)—or rather, the tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles, since in Nietzsche’s view the tragedy of Euripides already represented a decline into mere rationalism under the malign influence of Socrates (BT, §§11–16).
Whatever the merits of Nietzsche’s historical explanation of the origin of tragedy, his more general view that a
rt that combines the power of several different media, especially the art of opera, may be more powerful than other art, was hardly novel—Kant had already suggested as much (CPJ, §52, 5: 325–6). In this regard Nietzsche was following in Kant’s footsteps in finding a combination of formal and cognitive elements in aesthetic experience. What was distinctive in Nietzsche’s conception of tragedy was his Schopenhauerian conception of its Dionysian content, although Nietzsche is also already departing from Schopenhauer in this early work in describing our attitude toward the oneness of being underlying the mere semblance of individuation as affirmative and joyful rather than negative and ascetic (BT, §§5–7).23 This also means that Nietzsche has gone beyond Kant in insisting upon an emotional aspect in our response to at least the highest form of art, the powerful combination of terror and joy rather than the rather anodyne mere pleasure that Kant had recognized as part of all aesthetic experience. But what Nietzsche does not clearly include in his account of aesthetic experience in The Birth of Tragedy is any element of sheer play or playfulness. He thus does not follow Vischer in including this Kantian element in his model of aesthetic experience.
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 94
