But it is precisely a recognition of the importance of play in aesthetic experience that lies behind Nietzsche’s subsequent repudiation of Wagner and celebration of Bizet’s Carmen, which Nietzsche first saw in 1881 and claimed to have seen 20 times by 1888! In contrast to the music of Wagner, which Nietzsche now describes as “brutal, artificial,…harmful,” which does not “liberate the spirit” but “wages war on us, us free spirits!”, Bizet’s music “approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is amiable, it does not sweat”; it “makes the spirit free,” “gives wings to thought” (CW, 234–5). Nietzsche’s revival of the concept of play had actually already transpired before his final repudiation of Wagner in 1888, his last year of sanity and productivity; in the Gay Science of 1882, he had written that “precisely because we are at bottom grave and serious human beings…nothing does us as much good as the fool’s cap: we need it against ourselves—we need all exuberant, floating, dancing, mocking, childish, and blissful art lest we lose that freedom over things that our idea demands of us” (GS, §107, 104). Nietzsche’s philosophy is one of liberation, from the slave morality of Judaeo-Christianity but also from the gloom of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and playful art can play a rôle in such liberation. Nietzsche hardly attempts an analysis of free play as an element in aesthetic experience, but he certainly recognizes its importance.
Nietzsche’s late work had no immediate reception, however, and hostility to the idea of free play as a central part of aesthetic experience remained in late nineteenth-century Germany, not only because of the earlier hostility of German Idealism to it but also because of hostility to Herbert Spencer’s interpretation of play as a merely biological mechanism for releasing excess energy.24 Rather, the dominant concept in late nineteenth-century German aesthetics was that of Einfühlung or empathy, and this emphasized the emotional impact of aesthetic experience rather than its character as a form of play.
25.7 EMPATHY: THE PROJECTION OF EMOTION INTO ART
The leading theorists of empathy were Robert Vischer, Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), and Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), who carried the movement well into the twentieth century; in the first part of the twentieth century, and under their influence, the concept was also promoted by the British expatriate Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856–1935).25 Our chronological as well as geographical constraints will confine our discussion here to the first two of these figures. Robert Vischer has already been introduced as the son and editor of the works of his father Friedrich Theodor Vischer. The younger Vischer attributed the concept of empathy to the elder, but made it prominent in his 1873 dissertation Über das optische Formgefühl (“On the Optical Feeling of Form”)26—a work thus published one year after Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, but with a very different tone. The core of Vischer’s idea was that we project our response to a natural object or a work of art—our physical and kinaesthetic response but also the accompanying emotions—on to the object, as if they were properties of the object. For example, when I experience a small object, “I very precisely concentrate my feeling. My feeling will be compressed and modest…When, on the contrary, I see a large or partially overproportioned form, I experience a feeling of mental grandeur and breadth, a freedom of the will…the compressed or upward striving, the bent or broken impression of an object fills us with a corresponding mental feeling of oppression, depression, or aspiration…” (OF, 104–5); and while in philosophical analysis we can clearly distinguish the emotion caused in us from the unfeeling object that causes it, in ordinary experience we do not, but project our emotions onto the object in a single, unitary experience of it in both ordinary sensory but also emotional terms. This is particularly true in the case of objects in motion or that suggest motion to us, for example “the flight of a bird apart from the bird itself” or the “undulations and curves in a road,” which my thoughts trace “sometimes with dreamy hesitation, sometimes at a bounding speed…The direction and tempo of this motion are related to the perceived form and thus emulate human impulses and passions,” a “responsive sensation” or Nachfühlung that is one of the forms of Einfühlung (OF, 106–7). One might think that Vischer is here describing a free play of the imagination in response to the perception of an object, but that is not the aspect of the experience that he acknowledges; his focus is on the emotional aspect of the experience and our projection of it back on to the object that triggers the experience. This emphasis on the emotional aspect of aesthetic experience represents a fundamental departure from the aesthetics of German Idealism, of course.
Vischer’s further works during his long career at Göttingen were disciplinary works in art history, for example monographs on Luca Signorelli and Peter Paul Rubens. The concept of empathy was instead developed into a full-blown aesthetic theory by Theodor Lipps. Lipps began his career with works in psychology; his first work in aesthetics proper was The Debate about Tragedy published in 1891. His chief works in aesthetics were a two-volume treatise simply called Aesthetics, the first volume on the foundations of aesthetics published in 1903 and the second volume on the visual arts (bildende Künste) in 1906, and then a shorter work, showing where his interest lay, entitled simply On Empathy (1913). Lipps added the terminology of “personification” or “humanization” (Vermenschlichung) to Vischer’s account: our projection of emotion onto aesthetic objects is a way of bringing them more fully into the human sphere. In our response to natural objects, we invariably humanize what we perceive: “We hear the trees moan and groan, the storm howl, the leaves whisper, the stream murmur” (Ä, I: 161–2), and “We consider animals as ensouled” (Ä, I: 160); and since Lipps regards aesthetics as a purely “descriptive and explanatory science” (Ä, I: 1), there is nothing to be said against such a tendency—it is not a mistake, it is just a psychological fact. But even more importantly, the experience of art is “in the final analysis always the experience of a human being. But this is the experience of myself. Thus I feel myself as a human being in the form that presents itself to me” (Ä, II: 49). We remain aware of the ontological distinction between the work of art and ourselves, presumably therefore also of the difference between the artist and ourselves, but at the same time “We demand that in every case a human being comes before us in the work of art,” one whose experience we can “co-experience” (Miterleben) (Ä, II: 53–4). This thought might help Lipps to avoid the charge often made against theories of artworks as the expression of emotions, namely that the artist does not need to have the emotion apparently expressed by the work; Lipps’s point is that we, the audience, have an emotional experience that we inevitably project onto the work and no doubt through the work back onto the artist as well. Again, this is not a mistake, just a psychological fact about how we experience art.
While emphasizing the emotional character of our experience of art, Lipps, like so many others in nineteenth-century German aesthetics, rejects the Kantian notion of free play. One of the rare exceptions to this tendency was the independent neo-Kantian Wilhelm Dilthey, with whom we will now conclude.
25.8 DILTHEY’S THREEFOLD SYNTHESIS
Scholars with many different interests owe debts to the Berlin philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911).27 Kant scholars know him as the force behind the Academy edition of all of Kant’s writings; Hegel scholars know him as the author of the first study of the young Hegel; Schleiermacher scholars as not only the author of a magisterial study of that figure but also responsible for the revival of the theory of hermeneutics; that in turn leads to the philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, but Dilthey was also a significant influence on Gadamer’s teacher Martin Heidegger; and so on. But here we are concerned with Dilthey’s aesthetics, and that means primarily with his work The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics of 1887. Dilthey’s central idea was the idea of “lived experience,” the anti-atomistic idea that our experiences are never isolated from one another but that every experience is inescapably imbricated in a nexus of further experience. Art, for which poetry is Dilthey’s stand-in, captur
es and communicates lived experience as fully as that can be done; thus “This to and fro of life at its fullest, of perception enlivened and saturated by feeling, and of the feeling of life shining forth in the clarity of image: that is the essential characteristic of the content of all poetry” (IP, 59). This already makes it clear that for Dilthey art fuses cognitive content and emotional impact, but Dilthey makes this explicit: “Lived experience can never be reduced to thoughts or ideas,” although of course thoughts and ideas are part of lived experience. And this in turn leads to an explicit rejection of Hegelian aesthetics: “Thus the interpretation of literary works as presently dominated by Hegelian aesthetics must be opposed” (IP, 137). That is, the assumption that the only thing that is important about art is its intellectual, indeed metaphysical content, and that art is not only in the same business as philosophy but is necessarily superseded by it, must be rejected. For example, a strictly metaphysical interpretation of the significance of Hamlet can offer only “a paltry description of the incommensurable facts [to] which Shakespeare has given a universally valid meaning in his drama…the lived experience of the poet and its unnerving symbols constitute a dramatic core that cannot be expressed in any proposition” (IP, 59). As long as art deals with lived experience, it cannot omit the emotional aspect of human life.
Dilthey formulates numerous rules for poetic success, and also emphasizes the need for truthfulness in art. So it might look as if a revival of Kant’s notion of free play is the furthest thing from this thought, thus that although he has insisted upon the presence of both cognitive content and emotional impact in art, he has made no room for the other aspect of aesthetic experience, the one that Kant united with cognitive content instead of emotional impact. But this appearance is misleading. For Dilthey argues that the creative transformation of reality is as essential to poetry as its truthfulness to the character of lived experience.
During his creative work, the poet lives in a dream world where…images receive the mark of reality. But they do not receive this through the obscure natural power of hallucinations, but rather through the freedom of a creative capacity in possession of itself…The typical and the ideal in poetry transcend experience so that it can be felt and understood more profoundly than in the most faithful copies of reality (IP, 101).
Indeed, Dilthey explicitly asserts that “Art is play,” the “entire effect of which…consists of a present and lasting satisfaction” rather than the satisfaction of “direct interests,” and that the element of invention and illusion in art is in fact necessary to make “imitation a lived experience of reality” and for the work to have sensory and emotional impact (IP, 130). For without the free play of the imagination, an imitation is in fact nothing but noise or ink marks on paper or pigment on a canvas: for a work of art to have content or meaning, on which its emotional impact in turn depends, already requires the use of the imagination. Dilthey thus concludes the narrative of nineteenth-century German aesthetics by demonstrating that free play is not just one possible aspect of aesthetic experience among others, but in fact the condition of the possibility of everything else that aesthetic experience and art can be for us. Aesthetic experience and art must begin with free play, although they need not end there.
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