Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
The essays in this book investigate the complex and often contradictory
relationships between aesthetics and modernity from the late Enlightenment
in the s to the Frankfurt School in the s and engage with the classic
German tradition of socio-cultural and aesthetic theory that extends from
Aesthetics
Friedrich Schiller to Theodor W. Adorno. While contemporary discussions in
aesthetics are often dominated by abstract philosophical approaches, this book
embeds aesthetic theory in broader social and cultural contexts and considers
and Modernity
a wide range of artistic practices in literature, drama, music and visual arts.
Contributions include research on Schiller’s writings and his work in relation
to moral sentimentalism, Romantic aesthetics, Friedrich Schlegel, Beethoven,
Huizinga and Greenberg; philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Benjamin,
Heidegger and Adorno; and thematic approaches to Darwinism and Naturalism,
modern tragedy, postmodern realism and philosophical anthropology from
the eighteenth century to the present day. This book is based on papers given
at an international symposium held under the auspices of the University of
from Schiller
Nottingham at the Institute of German and Romance Studies, London, in
September . to the Frankfurt School
J C is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham, where he
specialises in German history of ideas, aesthetics and modern German theatre. His
publications include Art at the Limits of Perception: The Aesthetic Theory of Wolfgang
Welsch () and he is currently working on the German tradition of philosophical
anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
S G is Emeritus Professor of German Studies and Critical Theory at the
University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modernism and modernity
in cultural theory and on Bertolt Brecht. His most recent book is a translation and
edition of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny () and he is currently
working on two new editions of Brecht’s theoretical writings.
Aesthetics
Friedrich Schiller to Theodor W. Adorno. While contemporary discussions in
aesthetics are often dominated by abstract philosophical approaches, this book
embeds aesthetic theory in broader social and cultural contexts and considers
and Modernity
a wide range of artistic practices in literature, drama, music and visual arts.
Contributions include research on Schiller’s writings and his work in relation
to moral sentimentalism, Romantic aesthetics, Friedrich Schlegel, Beethoven,
Huizinga and Greenberg; philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Benjamin,
Heidegger and Adorno; and thematic approaches to Darwinism and Naturalism,
modern tragedy, postmodern realism and philosophical anthropology from
the eighteenth century to the present day. This book is based on papers given
at an international symposium held under the auspices of the University of
from Schiller
Nottingham at the Institute of German and Romance Studies, London, in
September . to the Frankfurt School
J C is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham, where he
specialises in German history of ideas, aesthetics and modern German theatre. His
publications include Art at the Limits of Perception: The Aesthetic Theory of Wolfgang
Welsch () and he is currently working on the German tradition of philosophical
anthropology from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.
S G is Emeritus Professor of German Studies and Critical Theory at the
University of Nottingham. He has published widely on modernism and modernity
in cultural theory and on Bertolt Brecht. His most recent book is a translation and
edition of Brecht’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny () and he is currently
working on two new editions of Brecht’s theoretical writings.
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Aesthetics and modernity from Schiller to the Frankfurt School / Jerome Carroll, Steve
Giles, and Maike Oergel (eds.).
p. cm.
Proceedings of a conference held in Sept. 2009 in London, England.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0217-3 (alk. paper)
1. Aesthetics, Modern--History--Congresses. 2. Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805--Congresses.
3. Arts--Congresses. 4. Philosophy, Modern--Congresses. 5. Institut für Sozialforschung
(Frankfurt am Main, Germany)--Congresses I. Carroll, Jerome, 1972- II. Giles, Steve. III.
Oergel, Maike, 1964-
BH151.A36 2012
111’.850903--dc23
2011036399
Printed in Germany
Contents
Jerome CARROLL
Introduction 1
Michael BELL
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence
of the Aesthetic 9
Gustav FRANK
The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity 25
Maike OERGEL
The Aesthetics of Historicity: Dialectical Dynamics in Schiller’s
and Friedrich Schlegel’s Concepts of the Art of Modernity 45
Robert LEVENTHAL
The Aesthetics of the Case-History:
Schiller’s Juridical-Psychological Contribution 69
James PARSONS
The Musical Poetics of Modernity:
The Choral Finale of Beethoven and Schiller’s Ninth 93
Norman KASPER
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental
Poetry and the Nineteenth-Century Aesthetic of the ‘Innocent Eye’ 115
vi
Marie-Christin WILM
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom as the Foundation
of Their Concepts of Play 139
Jerome CARROLL
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity
from Kant to Charles Taylor 183
Sebastian HÜSCH
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage:
Søren Kierkegaard’s Critique of Modernity 209
Nicholas SAUL
The Dark Side of Modernity: Wilhelm Bölsche, Darwinism,
Evolutionary Aesthetics and Spiritualism 233
Bram MERTENS
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism:
Walter Benjamin’s Epistemological Exercise Book 255
Steve GILES
Realism after Modernism: Representation and Modernity in
Brecht, Lukács and Adorno 275
Martin TRAVERS
‘Ek-Stasis’: Away from a Theory of the Lyrical Subject in Adorno
and Heidegger 297
vii
Eric S. NELSON
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno 319
Martin SWALES
Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic 343
Index 365
Jerome Carroll
Introduction
The anniversaries of Friedrich Schiller’s birth and death, in 2009 and 2005
respectively, have been a welcome occasion for renewed interest in his ideas
and their legacy. This recent work has assessed Schiller’s writings alongside
those of his contemporaries: his debt to or divergance from Kant’s writ-
ings about art and his relation to idealist thinking more generally. This
scholarship has also asked after the continued relevance of his ideas for a
contemporary readership. The importance of his legacy as a playwright,
poet and theorist of the role of art and the aesthetic in modern civilization
is undisputed, but it has been asked whether his dated style and the politi-
cal naivety inherent in the claim that beauty is the road to moral freedom
renders his ideas themselves outdated. Conversely, it has been suggested,
the subtle anthropology that accounts for man’s hybrid nature – our pas-
sions and principles – and his account of man’s relationship to alterity has
more enduring relevance.
These discussions are valid and valuable, but the concern of this col-
lection of essays, and the conference at which they were first presented, is
rather dif ferent. It is not primarily a volume about Friedrich Schiller, but
rather locates his work – and in the main his theoretical writings rather
than his literary work – at the start of a 200-year German tradition in intel-
lectual history, and specifically in socio-cultural theory. The over-arching
theme of these chapters, as the book’s title suggests, is the contribution to
theorizing modernity that is made by the German tradition of thinking
about the ‘aesthetic’ dimension. Schiller’s importance for this tradition
often goes unrecognized, particularly in the anglophone world. As such
it is hoped that this volume will bring this connection to greater promi-
nence, in particular for those who do not read German. The cornerstone
of the ideas may be German and aesthetic, but the resonance of the ideas
2 Jerome Carroll
as well as the supposedly sovereign ego. The material or sensory quality of
the artwork has more pointed ethical force in Eric S. Nelson’s reading of
Theodor Adorno’s poetics, in which Adorno’s focus on the non-human
is seen to be at odds with, for instance, Jürgen Habermas’ intersubjective
‘truth-claims’.
Alternatively, the aesthetic is read as being central to certain allegedly
distinguishing human capacities, such as meaning or freedom, with sig-
nificance that is equally ‘moral’. The epistemological value of the aesthetic
is what Martin Swales is driving at when he elevates art and the aesthetic
to the ‘central philosphical activity bar none’. In the wake of the demise
of religious belief, the aesthetic has become the activity that the human
longing for meaning attaches to. Central to his discussion of the value of
the aesthetic is the epistemological category of anagnorisis, or privileged
recognition, even in the grip of tragic suf fering. This epistemological signifi-
cance of the aesthetic dimension or experience is central to a number of the
essays. Sebastian Hüsch characterizes Kierkegaard’s conceptualization of the
aesthetic as a ‘category of existence’, which in spite of his criticisms of early
German Romanticism, derives from Friedrich Schlegel. Kierkegaard sees the
Romantic ‘poetization’ of reality as an – albeit seductive – abandoning or
betrayal of reality. Hüsch compares romantic irony, which de-realizes world
and self and leaves us free to (re)create the self, from Socratic irony. The
latter is defined as a capacity for ‘negativity’ that is essential to subjectivity,
and which crucially retains a binding external dimension. The former is
pure freedom. In this theoretical context Hüsch presents Gerhard Schulze’s
more recent diagnosis of the ‘aestheticization’ of everyday life, a phenom-
enology that sees the aesthetic as ‘essence of modernity’, and which Schulze
diagnoses as a source of the ‘erosion of the meaningfulness’ in modern
life. The contrast with the aesthetic as a source of meaning is apparent. In
similar terms, Bram Mertens reads Walter Benjamin’s Kunstkritik essay as
Benjamin’s attempt to lay out his embryonic thoughts on the ‘aesthetic’
nature of knowledge, experience and perception. Benjamin’s epistemology
shares the early German Romantics’ scepticism about Fichte’s immediate
intuition of the self, and echoes their respect for the object, characterizing
experience as a ‘coincidence of subject and object’, and seeking to describe
‘the integrated and continuous multiplicity of knowledge’.
4 Jerome Carroll
an indispensible component of the moral attitude and art’s moral force.
Rather than the choice between feeling and principle, sentiment is pre-
cisely the felt principle.
The aesthetic also becomes a project that of fers a kind of synthesis, a sort
of reconciliation between these aspects. So in Schiller’s own terms the suc-
cess of any project of aesthetic education is reckoned to depend on the ‘rec-
onciliation of the purely human, or sensuous, and moral spheres’. (Parsons)
One instance of this unification is the experience of joy, as Parsons reads
Schiller’s Ode to Joy, whose incorporation in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony
is taken to ref lect the composer’s similar aspiration to bring together the
mundane and infinite, evident for instance in through five octaves and a
change of key in his choral finale. In the same vein, Nelson reads a kind of
reconciliation with nature or the non-human as the aim of Adorno’s poetics,
albeit with the caveat that this experience of nature can be coercive, and is
in any case always ‘indirect’, mediated by the artwork or our faculties.
But a recurrent concern in many of the contributions is that any such
reconciliation is not a simple, subsuming synthesis of one aspect by the
other. Neither nature nor reason, Schiller tells us in the Aesthetic Letters,
is to rule a person exclusively, but the two ‘are meant to coexist, in perfect
independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord.’ Yet in Oergel’s
comparison it is Schlegel rather than Schiller who is alive to the radically
open-ended nature of the historical dialectic. Whereas Schiller responds to
the modern with a quest for lost completeness, Schlegel sees self-ref lexive
irony as allowing ‘dichotomous elements’ in human reality to be co-rep-
resented, though precisely ‘not synthesized’.
This notion of co-representation introduces a thread in the volume
that proposes the aesthetic as of fering a kind of ‘holist’ grasp of man and
his faculties, which seems to suggest a less heavy-handed approach to what
Swales calls ‘uncovering a logic of the imagination’. In Rob Leventhal’s
essay a similarly holist approach of ‘co-representation’ is central to the
juridical – and aesthetic – concept of ‘case’, whose history he traces as a
method of classifying individual anomalies from a variety of perspectives
and in a variety of circumstances and conditions, as an aspect of Schiller’s
‘rehabilitation of individuality’. In similar terms Jerome Carroll traces the
development of anthropology, a sibling discipline to aesthetics, from the
6 Jerome Carroll
late eighteenth century to the twentieth century, as a study of the whole
person that is seen as overcoming the straightforward approach to subjectiv-
ity and selfhood which separates the internal self from the external world.
A variant of this holism underlies Gustav Frank’s discussion of Schiller’s
novel The Ghost-Seer, which he reads as returning from a narrowly formal-
ist or self-ref lexive view of the value of aesthetics to a broader focus on the
entire field of perception. This holism also turns out to be central to Van
Schepen’s discussion of Clement Greenberg’s aesthetics. Greenberg’s tran-
sition from a more socially-oriented view to a strict formalist aesthetics is
read not as abandoning his progressive principles, but as an adoption of
a fundamental Schillerian (and of course ultimately Kantian) conception
of the aesthetic experience as an exercise in freedom. In the case of both
thinkers, the social force of this experience is indirect, and is seen to be
predicated on an aesthetic that ‘encompasses all of life and revolutionizes
individual experience’.
In many cases the aesthetic is seen to be of value because its verdicts
are not systematic, artworks do not amount to straightforward statements
about pre-existing reality. It is this non-discursive quality that Swales calls
‘another kind of speaking’, often presented on the stage not by any charac-
ter’s utterance, but by music or choric voice. If the aesthetic does ‘uncover a
logic of the imagination’, Oergel informs us that for Schlegel it is primarily
in the form of poetry that ‘hovers’ (schwebt) between the material and the
ideal. Nelson refers in similar terms to the moment of ‘encounter’ with
the object, which brings home ‘the entanglement of human life with its
world, and of reason with nature’. A slightly dif ferent role for the aesthetic
is emphasized in Steve Giles’ discussion of Brecht, Lukács and Adorno,
who are seen to share an indispensable realism. However art is still valued
by Brecht insofar as its representation cannot be limited to straightforward
mimesis. His turn to cognitive realism suggests an important parallel with
Lukács and Adorno, in the view that description and/or photographic
realism is insuf ficient to capture decisive forces of increasingly complex
modern reality. This is in spite of the fact that Brecht prefers epic thea-
tre whereas Lukács opts for the nineteenth century bourgeois novel, and
Adorno, unfairly in Giles’ view, sees Brecht’s views on realism as ‘straight-
jacketed’. Martin Travers’ discussion of Adorno and Heidegger’s aesthetics
Introduction 7
of the subject also begins with Lukács, whose stance that modernism’s
response to modernity had ‘surrendered to subjectivity’ Adorno rejects.
Travers presents the latter’s view that the subjectivity of the lyrical poem
just as much expresses the subject’s desire for self-negation. In particular
poetic language is seen to break the walls of individuality; largely in view
of the fact that language mediates the relationship between subject and
material world. The poet inhabits the space between the two. Here the non-
discursive quality of the aesthetic is again a source of its political force for
both Adorno and Heidegger, in that the relation between word and thing
is not subject to interpretation or explication. For both the encounter with
the text is most valuable where it seeks to hold meanings open, rather than
closing them down in a process of interpretation.
The course of modernity, even where it is ‘aestheticized’, may have
taken us some distance from Schiller’s conviction that ‘beauty alone can
confer on man a social character’. But in Schiller we find foregrounded
the importance of modern aesthetics for human freedom in a complex,
demanding and possibly amoral world. Schhiller’s bequest to modernity
is the notion that the deepest depravity, the most self less heroism, or the
most shattering scientific breakthrough can only be considered freely and
fully – without prejudice or vested interest – in the aesthetic mode, and
that only such an approximation of a full consideration equips the human
mind to judge, equips a complex subject to make some sense of an incom-
patible, complex reality. In this respect Schiller’s purpose of the aesthetic
is as political as it is philosophical, it insists on the political and social
nature and function of art. So human freedom need not be understood
as an aestheticist-formalist project, a reiteration of Kant’s disinterest, or
limited to what Martha Woodmansee calls a ‘consolatory freedom’. Rather
it might begin with the recognition that the epistemological and moral
value of the aesthetic is to be sought in what exceeds the bounds of con-
ceptual or discursive thinking. This aesthetic dimension of human experi-
ence is a shaky ground for determinate knowledge. And it also seems no
less susceptible to instrumentalization and reification than conceptual or
discursive formations. And it seems to put the ideal cart before the real
horses to suggest that all moral questions may be resolved in a reconciled
or harmonious aesthetic experience. But it does place at centre stage one
8 Jerome Carroll
1 See for example, Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature; Francis Halsall,
Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor, eds, Rediscoverung Aesthetics; Stuart Sims, Beyond
Aesthetics; and Patrick Swinden, Literature and the Philosophy of Intention.
10 Michael Bell
two retrospective, and distorting, lenses: the first is aestheticism, the sepa-
ratist notion developed in the nineteenth century; and the second is the
Arnoldian belief in the intrinsically ennobling ef fect of high art, a belief
which, as an inertially institutionalized assumption, probably underlies
the public funding of many likely readers of this article: hence the divided
legacy of Friedrich Schiller. For Germanists, Schiller remains an indis-
pensible classic, while for many modern critics of culture he has become a
byword of bourgeois liberal mystification. For me, his Aesthetic Education
of Mankind remains one of the most subtle and persuasive accounts we
have of the emotional engagement with literature, although not with the
emphasis that he himself gave. I believe his account of the aesthetic condi-
tion, including delight in semblance, represents a crucial turning point in
modern self-ref lection but he also argues within this a metaphysics of the
beautiful and the good, a kind of reconstructed Platonism, which, despite
its intrinsic and historical interest, is not of the same order of relevance and
plausibility for modern thought and feeling. His metaphysics of beauty
arose from a classical ideal, most notably embodied in Winckelmann and
Goethe, which was to be replaced by the darker, compensatory concep-
tion announced by Nietzsche. Yet, as is well-known, Schiller’s underlying
definition of the aesthetic condition was a crucial premise for Nietzsche
and through him for many of the greatest European writers of the early
twentieth century. The dif ficulty here, of course, is to unpick this account of
the aesthetic from the whole cloth, if not rather the mixed bag, of Schiller’s
idealist thinking and one crucial issue is whether, and if so how, the expe-
rience of great art is intrinsically ennobling. Although he undoubtedly
believed this as an empirical fact, and saw this value not just in the moral
content of art but in the aesthetic condition as such, it is not strictly entailed
by his account of the aesthetic; indeed, when his mind is fully on the aes-
thetic condition as such, he explicitly argues against it. I want to argue that
his apparent two-mindedness on this point is ultimately not a weakness
but the ref lection of a vital insight. Indeed, Schiller’s treatise may be seen
less as a single coherent argument than as a compendium of the necessary
questions and themes bound together by a powerful vortex of insights.
Moreover, he was also responding to dif ferent currents of contemporary
thought and the significance of his thinking on the aesthetic needs to be
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence of the Aesthetic 11
2 Corneille, 78.
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence of the Aesthetic 13
first place.3 But in Corneille we feel the force of one struggling to uphold
an artistic ideal for which the unity of place was aesthetically significant.
His incongruous literalism ref lects how neo-classical criticism seeks to
express a high aesthetic conception while lacking the category. And it is
notable that its modern commentators readily, and quite rightly, invoke
this term with no sense of anachronism.
Neo-classicism, then, reminds us that the eighteenth-century emer-
gence of the aesthetic occurred from within the extraordinarily tenacious
grip of literalistic rationalizations; so tenacious as to f ly in the face of an
intuitive practice that transcended them. Moreover, literalism with regard
to action and setting applied equally to the supposed moral ef fect. Villains
must be unsympathetic and heroes virtuous because they are assumed to
exert a one-for-one, isomorphic moral impact on the reader or audience.
Now although moral sentimentalism eventually contributed to a new
conception of literature and psychology of response, its initial ef fect was
to intensify this literalistic belief in emotional identification. Indeed, it so
raised the stakes in respect of the emotional response that it was sentimen-
talism, as I now wish to show, that finally enforced the recognition of its
own counter-principle: the category of the aesthetic.
Sentimentalism was a great Enlightenment myth: an upward evalu-
ation of the af fective domain to the extent of seeking to base the moral
life on feeling. In this respect, it sought to reverse the traditional religious
hierarchy whereby the lower appetital nature was under the dominion of
reason and the authority of God. Yet the challenge to religion was rather
implicit and long-term because sentimentalism was in the first instance
more ambiguous, as is shown by its widespread impact on both religious
and deistical constituencies. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of
Shaftesbury, in the essays collected under the title of Characteristics (1711),
inf luentially argued that social benevolence was a natural propensity of
man and therefore a supplement to moral and divine law. The insinuating
inf luence, and the ambiguity, at once fateful and fruitful, of sentimental-
3 Johnson, 501.
14 Michael Bell
ism was that, rather than invoke feeling as a challenge to moral reason, it
sought to identify them.
This is evident in the shifting semantics of the word ‘sentiment’ in the
mid eighteenth century. For Samuel Richardson, in the 1740s, it meant
predominantly ‘principle.’ If a man said, ‘These are my sentiments, Sir,’ he
meant these are the principles by which he lives. But by the time of Laurence
Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) the word had come to mean pre-
dominantly feeling. The important point, however, is that it always carried
some charge of both implications. The mid-century use of the word ‘senti-
ment’ implied that feeling had the objective value of moral principle while
moral principle had the immediate and spontaneous authority of feeling.
And as Jacques Derrida has pointed out at length in Of Grammatology,
largely using the case of Rousseau, the logic of supplementarity is danger-
ously circular. Any principle that accepts a supplement concedes a possible
need for it, thereby implicitly shedding something of its own authority,
and this was precisely the process that worked itself out in the history of
eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Feeling came to substitute for principle.
Mid-century sentiment modulated into late-century sensibility as ready
emotion was increasingly assumed to be a moral value in itself, whether in
fiction or in life, and Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Practical Reason
(1788), had good cause to insist, against the sentimental belief in the natural
goodness of the feelings, that no act can be confidently characterized as
moral unless it is performed out of duty and against inclination.
Not surprisingly, by the 1770s, even as it lurched into the full-blown
excesses of sensibility, a reaction had set in against sentimentalism. Laurence
Sterne, of course, was the author who most cunningly combined both
critique and exploitation of sentiment while Rousseau had tended to
veer between them. And in this respect, Sterne points most significantly
towards the future: for the important destiny of sentimentalism lay not
in the hands of its hostile and external critics but in those, predominantly
poets and novelists, who ef fected an internal critique while keeping faith
with its underlying belief in the holiness of the heart’s af fections.4 Once
4 I discuss this more fully in Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling.
Friedrich Schiller, Moral Sentimentalism and the Emergence of the Aesthetic 15
This lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and vigour,
is the mood in which a genuine work of art should release us, and there is no more
certain touchstone of true aesthetic excellence. If, after enjoyment of this kind, we
find ourselves disposed to prefer some one particular mode of feeling or action, but
unfitted or disinclined for another, this may serve as infallible proof that we have
not had a purely aesthetic experience – whether the fault lies in the object or in our
own response or, as is almost always the case, in both at once.8
Schiller af firms here the freedom and equanimity of the aesthetic even while
going on immediately to recognize its ideal impossibility: ‘the excellence of
a work of art can never consist in anything more than a high approximation
to that ideal of aesthetic purity’. But in emphasizing that the emergence of
the aesthetic is always partial, Schiller’s phrase ‘true aesthetic excellence’
fatefully confuses two questions: the nature and value of the aesthetic as
such and the value of particular artistic experiences or works. His phrasing
here makes the purity of the aesthetic response the index of artistic quality,
and by implication, of artistic magnitude, as if the aesthetic is a suf ficient
value in itself. This is why he has been assimilated to a later aestheticism.
But the larger logic of his treatise clearly insists on distinguishing these
aspects. The aesthetic in itself, he says, is quite empty. Its plenitude lies in
the range of values and potentialities it invokes in the mind and the feelings
so that its own value is not as an experience in its own right, but as a quality
of ref lection in the midst of experience. In other words, we may suppose
that the values and experiences engaged by the work have a bearing on its
artistic magnitude. Schiller’s slippage on this point, however, typifies how
his apparent inconsistency ref lects a penetrating and fertile insight for the
aesthetic always has a double relation of separateness and continuity to the
life around it, and that is what I take to be Schiller’s most important legacy
for modern literature and thought especially as mediated by Nietzsche.
Nietzsche articulated some decades in advance what a modernist gen-
eration around Europe would enact. In The Birth of Tragedy he deduced,
like Schiller, the evolutionary emergence of the aesthetic in Greek cul-
ture, where he also saw it created by the dynamic tension between polar
powers now named as Dionysos and Apollo. But whereas Schiller was
writing against the background of sentimentalism, Nietzsche was writing
in the century of ‘art for art’s sake.’ This requires a major shift in emphasis:
Schiller’s insistence on the separateness of the aesthetic gives way to a con-
cern for its liminal connection to living experience. T. S. Eliot was right to
say that the aestheticism to which the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’ gestures was
largely either incoherent or banal.9 Aestheticism, we might say, was a great
myth of the nineteenth century just as an ethics of sentiment had been for
the eighteenth. Most commonly it was a slogan of revolt against excessive
moralism and perceived bourgeois complacency as in Théophile Gautier’s
Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835). Nonetheless, Schopenhauer
underwrote metaphysically such a separatist conception of the aesthetic,
and Nietzsche’s career enacted a gradual, proto-modernist inversion of
Schopenhauer’s vision while remaining within his nihilistic premises. He
now celebrated the aesthetic viewpoint as enabling an af firmation of life as
purposiveness without ultimate purpose. Nietzsche stands, therefore, to the
high modernism of a James Joyce as Schopenhauer stands to nineteenth-
century aestheticism and Nietzsche honoured Schiller precisely for his
complex insight into the liminality of the aesthetic.
saw the high artistic culture, or Bildung, of his time as itself a source of
mischief. Early in his career, he coined the phrase Bildungsphilister, or
culture philistine, to denote a philistinism growing specifically out of
high culture. Nietzsche, therefore, concentrated on the values as such
and, whereas Matthew Arnold, with a residual sentimentalism, believed
in the ennobling value of high art, Nietzsche saw that art per se could not
enforce any such ef fect. Indeed, it is often the alibi of vulgar egotism and
greed: ‘To be cultivated means: to hide from oneself how wretched and
base one is, how rapacious in going for what one wants, how insatiable
in heaping it up, how shameless and selfish in enjoying it.13 Yet for him
too the aesthetic condition remained crucial. It might be supposed that
his late work Twilight of the Idols (1888) elides the distinction between
art and life values in the opposite direction from Schiller for it seems to
define the aesthetic through a simple, almost biological, invocation of life,
thereby erasing the complex ontological model of the aesthetic in Birth of
Tragedy (1872): ‘Nothing is beautiful, only man: on this piece of naivety
rests all aesthetics, it is the first truth of aesthetics. Let us immediately add
the second: nothing is ugly but degenerate man – with this the domain of
aesthetics is defined.’14 But the dif ference between the two works is that
whereas the Birth of Tragedy is centered on a philosophical definition of
the aesthetic, Twilight of the Idols is more concerned with passing judge-
ment on a quality of life through its culture. Failure to recognize this
distinction frequently bedevils discussion of the aesthetic. In the British
context, the literary critic F. R. Leavis once declared that a critic should
avoid the word ‘aesthetic’ as it almost always signals a loss of critical grip.15
His remark might seem to suggest hostility to the aesthetic on the part
of a naïvely moralist and literalistic critic. But the opposite is the case.
Leavis had a radical commitment to the specialness of the imaginative
experience involved in a literary engagement with language and, by the
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times, 3 vols (London: J Darby, 1711).
Corneille, P. Writings on the Theatre, ed. H. T. Barnwell (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965).
Gautier, T. Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), trans. H. Constantine (London: Penguin,
2005).
Johnson, S. Johnson: Prose and Poetry, ed. M. Wilson (London: Rupert Hart Davis,
1957).
Kant, I. Critik der reinen Vernunft (Riga, 1781).
—— Critik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin and Libau: Lagarde & Friedrich, 1790).
Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House,
1967).
—— Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London:
Penguin, 2003).
——Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
Rousseau, J.-J. Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloise. Lettres de deux amans habitans d’une petite
ville au pied des Alpes (Amsterdam: M. M. Rey, 1761).
—— Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre (1757), trans. A. Bloom (New York: Free
Press, 1960).
Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. E. M.
Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
—— On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, trans. H. Watanabe O’Kelly
(Manchester, Carcanet, 1981).
Sterne, L. A Sentimental Journey through Italy and France (London: Becket & Hondt,
1768).
Secondary Sources
—— Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (London: Palgrave, 2000).
Derrida, J. Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1976).
Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays (London: Faber 1951).
Halsall, F., Jansen, J. and O’Connor, T., eds. Rediscovering Aesthetics: Trans-disciplinary
Voices from Art History, Philosophy and Art Practice (Stanford University Press,
2009).
Leavis, F. R. Anna Karenina and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus,
1967).
—— The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus, 1952).
Sims, S. Beyond Aesthetics (London: Harvester, 1992).
Swinden, P. Literature and the Philosophy of Intention (London: Macmillan, 1999).
GUSTAV FRANK
Introduction
that the critical examination of all facts and traditions must be based on the
unbiased use of reason. In substantive terms, the Enlightenment project
involves a comprehensive ‘rehabilitation of sensory experience’, as indicated
by Wilhelm Dilthey and, in particular, Panayotis Kondylis.1 In contra-
distinction to theological orthodoxy, the Enlightenment thus attributes
increasing value to this world and to nature. Following on from the estab-
lishment of scientific curiosity in the Renaissance,2 the Enlightenment
vindicates the comprehensive investigation of nature.3 This turn to nature
requires a thorough understanding of both empirical sense perception
and the many and varied palpable techniques of representation in the
arts and sciences. In the first half of the eighteenth century aisthesis, to
use the Greek term, or sense perception breaks free from the stranglehold
of rationalism in which it had been constrained by continental philoso-
phy since Descartes.4 Descartes had interpreted the scientific revolution
of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo in intellectualist terms, and required
investigations of nature to engage in more geometrico in order to reveal the
rational laws of the world. The Enlightenment abolishes this constraint.
Now the res cogitans focuses not just on external nature and the rational
laws that govern the res extensa, but increasingly on the inner nature and
mental processes of human beings themselves. The emergent monism of
the Enlightenment starts to understand reason with increasing reference
to the senses, ultimately characterizing it as being in thrall to the sexual
drive and the interests of the powerful. In the course of this emancipation
of sense-experience, the prevailing power relationships are turned upside
down, if one compares seventeenth century rationalism with the Western
European mainstream of Enlightenment thinking from Mandeville, Hume
and La Metrie to d’Holbach and, ultimately, de Sade.
1 See Dilthey, ‘Das 18. Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt’, and Kondylis, Die
Aufklärung im Rahmen des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus.
2 See Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit.
3 Prior to the Baroque era, it is possible for this to be explicitly formulated once again
by one protagonist, Galilei: see Galilei, Lettera a Christina di Lorena – Briefe an
Christine von Lothringen.
4 See Meier, Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften.
The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity 27
This new idea, whereby knowledge of the sensory world involves sense
experience, becomes the fundamental argument for the scientific standing
of aisthesis, which only now begins to reveal the manifold phenomena of
the external world. The indiscriminate and comprehensive documentation
of nature, which characterizes early Enlightenment literature, is typical of
this initial optimistic stage, unspoilt by natural catastrophes. The knowl-
edge that emerges in this context is novel, and accumulates at breakneck
speed, so that by the middle of the century Diderot and d’Alembert find
it necessary to compile an encyclopaedia that can take stock of what has
been established so far.
Aesthetics develops out of scholastic philosophy on the basis of this
shift in values, which culminates in the celebration of nature. In doing so,
aesthetics remains however within the formulations of scholastic philoso-
phy, so that ‘its arguments are far too a priori and plucked from thin air,
and by the same token disappear into the thin air of general propositions’.5
Nevertheless, the fact that it is possible to congregate in academic symposia
to speak of aesthetics at all is due to the historical foundation of aesthetics
as a predominantly philosophical and above all independent discipline in
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica.
Baumgarten brings the valorization of sensory knowledge to the point
where it may provide a touchstone for truth. But his aesthetics is not just a
theory of sensory knowledge, as it also develops an – albeit metaphysically
grounded – theory of beauty and, moreover – because sensory knowledge
and its palpable representation are intrinsically connected – a veritable
theory of art. Baumgarten’s theory of beauty is, however, no more than a
regulatory idea. While it may appear to us mainly as a synonym for aesthet-
ics as such, Baumgarten adds his theory of beauty to his concept of sense
perception, or aisthesis, and thereby grounds his theory of art. The theory
of beauty has to ensure that as far as possible it excludes sensory ugliness,
not least as the latter is regarded as the sensory side of moral dubiousness.
5 ‘daß sie alles zu sehr a priori und wie aus der Luft hernimmt, und sich also auch in
der Luft allgemeiner Sätze verliert’, Herder, ‘Von Baumgartens Denkart in seinen
Schriften’, 191.
28 GUSTAV FRANK
6 ‘daß die Wahrheit und Güte nur in der Schönheit verschwistert sind’, Jamme and
Schneider, eds, Mythologie der Vernunft. Hegels ‘ältestes Systemprogramm’ des deut-
schen Idealismus, 12.
7 On the relevance of Diderot translations for Lessing’s illusionism, see Worvill,
‘Seeing’ Speech. Illusion and the Transformation of Dramatic Writing in Diderot and
Lessing.
The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity 29
both deceive, and the deceptions of both are pleasing.’8 The breakthrough
of illusionism thus presupposes the valorization of sensory nature, and
establishes this as the yardstick for any and every representation of nature
– hence the reservations concerning mathematics and mathematical, non-
sensory models – particularly in those art forms whose pre-eminent task
now involves sensory representations of the world of sense-experience.
The valorization of nature not only enhances the status of the arts,
but also releases the representation of nature from the obligation to illus-
trate rational categories and symbolize philosophical or indeed political
theses. All these factors prepare the ground for artistic autonomy. From
Lessing’s programmatic treatise onwards, poetic writing can be construed as
autonomous; by becoming an independent phenomenon, based only on the
interconnection between perception of nature and its specific techniques of
representation, it is at last able to fully liberate itself from the metaphysical
residues in the rational categories underpinning the philosophical aesthetics
of the likes of Baumgarten and Meier. Furthermore, with the onset of the
Storm and Stress movement around 1770, its represented worlds begin to
show how thoughts and concepts themselves are sensuously grounded in
individuals led by their own interests, so that by the late Enlightenment
its subject matter increasingly concerns the aporia of philosophy. In that
respect, autonomous literature presenting illusionist imitations of nature
and engaging critically with rationality should not be seen as a counter-
movement to the Enlightenment, but as bringing the Enlightenment’s
basic principles to fruition in terms of form and content.
Autonomous aesthetics in the Age of Goethe thus simply means that
art is now standing on its own two feet. Art has emancipated itself com-
pletely from the normative poetics of the early Enlightenment and the
aesthetic theory of art associated with Baumgarten or Meier, and no longer
constructs its represented worlds with reference to epistemology or moral
philosophy. On the contrary, art has reached the point where it can freely
choose its empirical subject matter and its artistic techniques. In other
8 ‘Beide […] stellen uns abwesende Dinge als gegenwärtig, den Schein als Wirklichkeit
vor; beide täuschen, und beider Täuschung gefällt.’ Lessing, Laokoon, 13.
30 GUSTAV FRANK
words, autonomy does not just mean self-referentiality, but art’s freedom to
choose its subject matter and how it treats it. The increasingly radical separa-
tion from the prescriptions of tradition, poetics and rhetoric – exemplified
in Sentimentalism, and even more in Storm and Stress – provides more
than suf ficient evidence for this, and has been described often enough. For
the first time in its history, literature too is able to construe its techniques
as its sole defining feature, tapping into the history of these techniques as
well as devoting itself to the expansion of its formal range. That is why it is
at this precise moment that Herder and Tieck become interested in all his-
torical forms without exception, and Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel
in all cultural forms without exception – including not just Shakespeare
and the Renaissance but also Calderon and Lope de Vega, and translations
not only from European languages but also from Sanskrit.
Art now has the inalienable right to use anything as its subject matter
– though it doesn’t have to – and above all can deal with subjects that phi-
losophers repudiate and even teach philosophers themselves a lesson too.
Autonomous aesthetics in the Age of Goethe also means that no authority
external to literature is competent to adjudicate on its concerns: literature
thus assimilates the entire artistic discourse that had previously accompa-
nied and encircled it. Even though this has of course been polemically dis-
puted by philosophical theorists – I once argued that Kant’s entire critical
philosophy, in its scholasticism, its linguistic mediation and its content, is
an attack on the cultural revolution of Storm and Stress9 − even if this is
9 See Frank, ‘Sturm und Drang: Towards a New Logic of Passion as Logic of German
Counter-cultures’. With Storm and Stress at the latest, it also becomes clear that the
process of gradually valorizing nature by studying it in more detail reveals aspects
of nature that can no longer be accepted by all those who were initially interested
in the process of Enlightenment. At each stage in the progressive development of
Enlightenment, certain groups lag behind as they can no longer identify with any
further exploration or radicalization of the image of nature and therefore from a cer-
tain point onwards reject any increase in Enlightenment. Furthermore, when Kant
provides us with a definition in his famous text ‘Answering the Question: What is
Enlightenment’ – which was, significantly, a response to an essay by the Berlin pastor
Johann Friedrich Zöllner entitled ‘Is it Advisable for Religion to Abjure from the
Sanctification of Marriage?’ – he is not calling for Enlightenment to be extended,
The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity 31
11 This process has been convincingly described in Staf ford’s Artful Science as a decline
of visual education, though she does not examine the ideological contexts of this
decline as outlined in my discussion.
12 My usage of the term ‘media aesthetics’ here is anachronistic, in the sense that a coher-
ent media theory was not developed until the 1940s, after which it was restricted to
those media that addressed the masses as a uniform entity and, above all, sought to
inf luence them. A contemporary conceptual framework, which might enable me to
develop a coherent perspective on those phenomena in Schiller’s story that interest
me, was not available in the 1780s. The most appropriate context for their discussion
would be an expanded version of aesthetics that theorizes sense perception and the
material representation of the sensory world, engaging with all dimensions of the
sensory world as well as displaying more interest in the material bearers of such repre-
sentations and devising theoretical models appropriate to them. However, aesthetics
did not develop in this direction, and at this point in time diverged instead into the
dual trajectory outlined earlier, so that for a considerable period of time it remained
blind to the materiality of sensory media and their impact on sense perception.
The Invisible Hand: Schiller’s Media Aesthetics of Modernity 33
highpoint in Schiller’s novel The Ghost-Seer. From the Papers of Count von
O. If Schiller subsequently issues a call for order in his theoretical writings
of the 1790s, which academic research has come to hold in much higher
regard, then that signifies not so much the triumph of classical aesthetics
as an admission of the failure of the Enlightenment project.
Schiller’s Ghost-Seer:
Histoire and Discours of a Late Enlightenment Novel
It’s only in the last two decades that Schiller’s Ghost-Seer has gradually
emerged from the obscurity13 to which it had been consigned by the author’s
own disparaging observations and his contemporaries’ discontent with a
supposedly fragmentary novel.14 I would first like to present an overview
of the story that the novel narrates, and then describe in more detail the
literary techniques by means of which the story is narrated. I shall conclude
by proposing a set of theses concerning the type of media aesthetic that the
narrated story outlines in conjunction with its narrative techniques.
The story presents the typical biographical narrative that we encoun-
ter again and again in the Age of Goethe. It tells us about an exemplary
human being – i.e. a young man – emerging from a state of immaturity that
is not self-inf licted, and does so in such a way that it can explore in detail
the conditions of heteronomy and autonomy, of successes and failures, on
this road to self-knowledge and self-determination.15 The hero of this story
is the Prince of *** – the text is replete with such asteronyms – while the
action takes place in the Republic of Venice and its environs and lasts the
13 See, for example, the analyses in Reiner, Schillers Prosa; Brittnacher, ‘Dunkelmänner
im Licht. Schillers Romanfragment Der Geisterseher’; and Riedel, ‘Die anthropolo-
gische Wende. Schillers Modernität’.
14 See Schiller, Historische Schriften und Erzählungen II, 998–1064 and 1020–1047.
15 For further discussion see Brandl, Emanzipation gegen Anthropomorphismus.
34 GUSTAV FRANK
best part of a year, starting with the carnival of – in all probability – the
year 1774. Supplementary details from the Prince’s biography enable us to
infer that he fought in the Seven Years War and the Battle of Hastenbeck in
1757, immediately after he had f led at the age of seventeen from his family
home, one of the ruling Houses of Baden.
His decision to escape from his sanctimonious family home and its
entourage of ‘enthusiastic’ and hypocritical educators is the first instance
in the text of a transition as defined in the narratology of Juri Lotman.16
But this first crucial stage in the development of self-knowledge and self-
determination is followed by nothing of note until 1774 – the uneventful
nature of his life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-five providing an
initial indication of the failure of this educational process, which appears
to have been replaced by military engagements and travel.
Only when he is in Venice is his life-story given a belated further impe-
tus. The second noteworthy event in his biography involves his encounter
with the Armenian, who seeks to gain inf luence on the Prince in a vari-
ety of disguises and with numerous accomplices whom the Prince fails
to identify. This event consists in the fact that the Prince manages by his
own ef forts to see through and tear asunder the web of intrigue that sur-
rounds him. Because of his background, those plotting against the Prince
had taken him to be a romancer. They wanted to exploit his overactive
imagination, oblivious to the promptings of reason, in order to bring him
under their power by using apparitions. The reason for the plot is that the
Prince is heir to the throne of his Protestant homeland, even though he
appears at first to be a late-born distant relative. His prospects of succeed-
ing to the throne improve as the ranks of the heirs start to thin out due to
the activities of the plotters. The aim of the plot is to secure the Prince’s
conversion to Catholicism, so that when he takes power the entire terri-
tory will switch its allegiance to the Catholic party in accordance with the
principle of cuius regio, eius religio.
The Prince is able to resist this first attack thanks to the autonomy of
his reason. He sees through the supposedly magical illusions of a ghost-
were hatched and who played which role in them – instead, he leaves that
to the reader’s own intelligence. And so the first book, which recounts the
Prince’s detective work that enables him to expose the plotters’ sleight of
hand and other deceptions, becomes a manual as it were for the reader’s
critical analysis in the second book. It is left to the reader alone to pass
judgement on such figures as the Prince’s new aide, Biondello, his new pro-
tegé, the Marquis of Civitella, and the Greek woman and their respective
actions. It is never made clear at any point in or by the text who is playing
which role in the play of intrigue, and above all we are never enlightened
as to what sort of instance or institution the ‘invisible hand’ might actu-
ally be in concrete terms, nor as to how it might be structured or might
function. Similarly, the secret society of which Bucentauro is merely a
superficial visible manifestation is cloaked in the obscurity of a vaguely
Enlightened Jesuitism together with a Freethinking hedonism and nihil-
ism. Some individuals are visible to us, as are some of their actions, but all
the underlying structures remain invisible. The end-result of this mode of
representation is a paranoid world-view, in which the empathetic reader,
beguiled by the semblance of representation, is made the victim of opaque
and impenetrable power-structures, just like the central figure.
Neither the first writer, Baron von F***, nor the second writer, Count
von O., has the last word in the published text. The superior narrative
voice in the text addresses the reader in but a few asides and footnotes,
and the identity of this voice is also hidden behind the abbreviation ‘S’.
While one cannot precisely infer from O.’s editing of the intellectually
challenged F***’s letters how much of their content he communicates to
the reader or on what basis he selected it, S’s explicit interventions into
the manuscript singularly fail to clarify how the Prince’s story was actu-
ally transmitted. Moreover, because we have read O.’s assertion that the
‘invisible hand’ intervened directly in his life, we are also inclined to sus-
pect that its agents are at work everywhere – another consequence of the
paranoid narrated world. Ultimately, it remains quite unclear whether this
entire narrative has been instigated by that same ‘invisible hand’ in order
to disconcert Enlightened circles in Germany or inf luence them in other
ways, by drawing them into an intricately interconnected intrigue of a
similar complexity to the one enveloping the Prince. It was precisely this
38 GUSTAV FRANK
ef fect of the text’s narrative techniques that provoked widespread unease
in contemporary readers. They all expected events and motives to be fully
clarified, and declared the novel to be a fragment because such clarification
was not forthcoming. But this assertion was motivated solely by ideologi-
cal unease, and has no basis either in the history of poetics, which did not
even recognize the novel as a genre because of its so recent emergence, or
in the tradition of novel-writing itself, which had not reached any sort of
closure and in fact had demonstrated its capacity to assimilate any and
every kind of discourse. Indeed, in the context of autonomous aesthetics
and the poetics of genius, it is precisely the novel that is the most liberated
of all genres thanks to its prose form.
19 For further discussion, see Kittler, Optische Medien; Mergenthaler, Sehen schreiben –
Schreiben sehen; and Schmitz-Emans, ‘Die Zauberlaterne als Darstellungsmedium.
Über Bildgenese und Weltkonstruktion in Schillers Geisterseher’.
42 GUSTAV FRANK
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Jamme, C., and Schneider, H., eds. Mythologie der Vernunft. Hegels ‘ältestes System
programm’ des deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1984).
Lessing, G. E. Laokoon: oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, in Lessing,
Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, Vol. 5.2, ed. W. Barner (Frankfurt/Main:
DKV, 1990).
Meier, G. F. Anfangsgründe aller schönen Wissenschaften. 3 Teile. Halle: Hemmerde,
1748–1750. ND (Hildesheim: Olms, 1976).
Schiller, F. The Ghost-Seer (London: Hesperus Press, 2003).
——Der Geisterseher, in Schiller, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, Vol. 7, ed. O. Dahn
(Frankfurt/Main: DKV, 2002), 588–725.
Smith, A. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Glasgow
Edition of the Works and Correspondences. Vol. 2a, ed. R. H. Campbell and
A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Found, 1982).
Secondary Sources
This chapter argues that both Schiller’s and Schlegel’s concepts of moder-
nity and modern art are characterised by dialectical dynamics and that this
is due to the increasing problem which the notion of historicity was pre-
senting towards the end of the eighteenth century. Schiller’s and Schlegel’s
ideas regarding the issues that beset modernity and might be alleviated
by an appropriate modern aesthetics, as developed in Aesthetic Education
(1793–1795)1 and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1795/1796),2 and On
the Study of Greek Poetry (1795–1797)3 and the Athenäum (1798–1800)4
respectively, have not been short of critical attention, both in conjunction
and separately. In conjunction they have been linked to the notion of a new
‘Querelle’,5 and separately they have been identified, in the course of 150
years of literary criticism, as the respective bases of classical and romantic
aesthetic theory. Their intellectual closeness to Idealist thought has equally
been widely discussed. But the notion of dialectics as a driving force of
1 Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen.
Henceforth ÄE.
2 Schiller, Über Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung. Henceforth NSD.
3 Schlegel, Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe
vol. 1, 217–367. Henceforth Studium.
4 Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe vol. 2 (1967), 165–372. Henceforth Athenäum.
Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe henceforth KFSA plus volume number.
5 See Jauss, ‘Schlegels und Schillers Replik auf die Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’,
see also Brinkmann, ‘Romantische Dichtungstheorie’, more recently Alt, Schiller:
Leben – Werk – Zeit, especially the chapter ‘Antike und Neuzeit’, 208–230.
46 Maike Oergel
their thinking has received little consideration. While the strict notion
that dialectics begins with Hegel no longer has much currency, research-
ers are hesitant to establish true dialectical structures for those who were
thinking in the orbit of German Idealism before Hegel (which includes
everybody associated with the Weimar or Jena circles in the last decade of
the eighteenth century). Kant is considered a key preparatory figure, but
no more,6 Schiller is granted only a notional sense of dialectical structures,7
while Schlegel’s dialectics are, if at all, considered in their relation to Fichte’s
Science of Knowledge, his groundbreaking Wissenschaftslehre, as evident in
the Wechselerweis debate.8 Fichte’s work itself is mainly analysed in terms
of its thinking on the structures of consciousness, rather than any form
of historical dialectics. If, however, dialectics is understood as a perpet-
ually dynamic process in which through contradiction an oppositional
6 This is mainly based on Kant’s suggestion in his Critique of Pure Reason for the need
of a ‘triadic system’ in paragraph 11 of the Table of Categories: ‘All a priori division
of concepts must be by dichotomy, it is significant that in each class the number of
categories is always the same, namely, three. Further, it may be observed that the third
category in each class always arises from the combination of the second category with
the first.’ (Critique of Pure Reason, 116)
7 When discussing Schiller’s Naive und Sentimentalische Dichtung, Fischer speaks of a
‘Vorform der Dialektik’ (‘Goethes Klassizismus’, 226), Hewitt sticks with a ‘symmetri-
cal and irreversible dichotomy, which finds a non-synthesising resolution through its
play in the Ideal’ (‘ReZoning’, 199), while Alt, when analysing how Schiller relates
naive and sentimental, identifies the manner in which antiquity is ‘appropriated’
as ‘ein dialektisches Verfahren, das jedoch nicht mit letzter Entschiedenheit zur
Anwendung gelangt’. (Schiller, vol. 2, 209–210). However, when discussing Schiller’s
Aesthetic Education, Alt cannot trace any dialectical basis at all: ‘Der vielbeschworene
Universalcharakter des Schönen entbehrt bei Schiller jener dialektischen Begründung,
wie sie später Hegel im Kontext seiner geschichtsphilosophisch gestützten Ästhetik
anzubahnen sucht.’ (Alt, 151). This remark illustrates well the approach to the emer-
gence of dialectics described above. Szondi discussed Schiller’s development of Kant’s
triadic system in some detail and probably went furthest down the road of granting
Schiller a post-Kantian dialectical understanding in his seminal ‘Das Naïve ist das
Sentimentalische’, 199–203.
8 See footnote 29 and Oergel, Culture and Identity, 78–93. Key ideas in this essay are
also discussed in this publication.
The Aesthetics of Historicity 47
For Schlegel these features are the mark of the modern condition. Schiller
begins his essay on Naïve und Sentimental Poetry with a similar description
of the inharmonious, internally disjointed state of modernity, and modern
art and thought. Both Schiller and Schlegel present critiques of modernity
that rely on increasingly established criteria for cultural assessment going
back to the middle of the eighteenth century, to the ideas of Rousseau, and
the young Herder. But Schiller straight away, in 1795, sets a determined
agenda for action to re-achieve completeness, happiness and harmony via
the long road of culture. For Schiller, an original natural state is no longer
worthy of the contemporary human mind, however desperate and stressful
the experience of the modern condition may be at the moment. Friedrich
Schlegel does not get on to formulating (such) solutions until the later
1790s, some time after Schiller had published his proposals, the potential
of which Schlegel quickly grasped, to his intellectual chagrin.
Both attest the instability of modernity. Modern conditions, intel-
lectual and social, are constantly changing. Modern intellectual existence
has, through cognitive and cultural activities, detached itself from a stable,
harmonious union with nature and set in motion a restless development,
which has variously been identified with ‘striving’ (cf. Faust, or the Romantic
individual in general) or the ‘historical process’. The restlessness of moder-
nity’s cognitive and cultural evolution makes any assumption of universal
values a delusion. Their critiques of modernity are also a critique of the
Enlightenment. Both are certain that the Enlightenment has not (yet)
achieved what it promised: true progress and perfectibility. For Schiller, it
has so far merely produced great confusion and widely diverging approaches
to culture.11 While Schlegel does not see the erosion of the (Enlightenment)
absolutes of constancy, correctness, and moral truth as something to be
mourned, he does not feel either that the wilful rebellious lawlessness of
Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) is the way forward, as both result
from the lack of a truly understood (or intuited) and experienced concept
of beauty.12
13 Dealing with the dif ferences between ancient and modern, which had been sharply
defined and heatedly discussed a century before Schiller and Schlegel take them up
in the 1790s, acts as a trigger for a realization of historicity. See Jauss, ‘Schlegels und
Schillers Replik’, and Oergel, Culture and Identity, 29–50.
14 For Schlegel, ancient culture as naïve art is the ‘höchster Gipfel der Idealität […] und
Schönheit’ (Schlegel, Studium, 46), ‘the highest peak of ideality and beauty’ (Study,
32). Schiller is never quite so emphatically superlative, no doubt because he was at
this point already convinced of the crucial merits of modernity: he never loses sight
of the potential and eventual (historical) superiority of the moderns.
15 At least not in any terms of content or detail. Herder had advocated an imitation of
cultural structure, because, as he saw it, the function and structural history of true
art was constant, but its content and appearance dif fered according to historical and
cultural developments. See Oergel, Culture and Identity. 19–29.
50 Maike Oergel
tions the superiority of linear progress, and which in extreme cases sees
‘progress’, and modernity itself, as a deterioration and degeneration. Yet
both Schiller and Schlegel become apologists for modernity. The aspect
that is initially responsible for the inferiority of modernity becomes its
saving grace: the capacity for reason and rationality, the predisposition
towards thinking, which had undermined and made impossible natural art
and a stable conception of beauty. Whereas Schiller’s outright apologia for
modernity is already inscribed in Naïve und Sentimental Poetry, Schlegel
mounts a more muted defence in his essay on the Study of Greek Poetry,
which he then re-enforces positively in his Athenäum contributions. How
did the apologia become possible?
For all their ancien tendencies, they were also modernes, who had
absorbed the notion of, if not historical progress, then of inevitable his-
torical change. If current or recent modernity was inferior to an original
natural achievement, it could still be a stepping stone towards an as yet
unknown or yet not understood improvement. So, too much thinking
could, and in their view eventually would, break on through to a new
level of modern completeness, but only if it took on board some seemingly
superseded yet original entities, which would create a modern naivety.
Thus in the final analysis both do tend towards progress, rather than just
historical change, thereby revealing their Enlightenment upbringing, and
credentials. Schiller suggests:
That nature which you envy in the irrational [non-rational, MO] is worthy of no
respect [yearning, MO][…]. It lies behind you […]. Abandoned by the ladder that
supported you, no other choice now lies open to you, but with free consciousness
and will to grasp the law. […] Let it no longer occur to you to want to exchange with
her [nature], but take her up within yourself and strive to wed her eternal [infinite,
MO] advantage with your external [infinite, MO] prerogative, and from both pro-
duce the divine.16
16 Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, 101–102, henceforth
NSP. ‘Jene Natur, die du dem Vernunftlosen beneidest, ist […] keiner Sehnsucht
wert. Sie liegt hinter dir […]. Verlassen von der Leiter, die dich trug, bleibt dir jetzt
keine andere Wahl mehr, als mit freyem Bewußtsein und Willen das Gesetz zu
ergreifen. […] Laß dir nicht mehr einfallen, mit ihr [der Natur] tauschen zu wollen,
The Aesthetics of Historicity 51
So long as man is pure […] nature, he functions as an undivided sensuous unity and
as a unifying whole. Sense [the senses, MO] and reason, passive and active facul-
ties, are not separated in their activities […]. Once man has passed into the state of
civilisation and art has laid her hand upon him, that sensuous unity within him is
withdrawn, and he can express himself now only as a moral unity, i.e. as striving after
unity. The correspondence between his feeling and his thought which in his first
condition actually took place, exists now only ideally; it is no longer within him,
but outside of him as an idea still to be realised. […] Through the idea he returns to
unity. (NSP, 111–112)17
Schlegel has the following to say on regaining through progress (on a higher
level) what had been lost through history:
Idealism in any form must transcend itself in one way or another, in order to be
able to return to itself and remain what it is. Therefore, there must and will arise
from the matrix of idealism a new and equally infinite realism. […] This new real-
ism, since it must be of idealistic origin and must hover as it were over an idealistic
ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the
ideal and the real.18
aber nimm sie in dich auf und strebe, ihren unendlichen Vorzug mit deinem eigenen
unendlichen Prärogativ zu vermählen und aus beydem das Göttliche zu erzeugen.’
(NSD, 428–429)
17 ‘Solange der Mensch noch reine […] Natur ist, wirkt er als ungetheilte sinnliche
Einheit und als ein harmonirendes Ganzes. Sinne und Vernunft, empfangendes und
selbstthätiges Vermögen, haben sich in ihrem Geschäfte noch nicht getrennt […]. Ist
der Mensch in den Stand der Kultur getreten, und hat die Kunst ihre Hand an ihn
gelegt, so ist jene sinnliche Harmonie in ihm aufgehoben, und er kann nur noch als
moralische Einheit, d.h. als nach Einheit strebend sich äußern. Die Übereinstimmung
zwischen seinem Empfinden und Denken, die in dem ersten Zustande wirklich
stattfand, existiert jetzt bloß idealisch; sie ist nicht mehr in ihm, sondern außer ihm;
als ein Gedanke, der erst realisirt werden soll.’ (NSD, 436–437) ‘[…] Durch das Ideal
kehrt er zu Einheit zurück.’ (NSD, 438)
18 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, 83–84. Henceforth Dialogue
on Poetry. In the Studium essay he had already similarly argued that ‘aesthetic theory
[was] now ready to produce objective results, beginnings of objective art and taste’.
(Schlegel, Studium, 356/7) Der Idealismus in jeder Form muß auf ein oder die andre
52 Maike Oergel
Art aus sich herausgehn, um in sich zurückkehren zu können, und zu bleiben, was
er ist. Deswegen muß und wird sich aus seinem Schoß ein neuer ebenso großer
Realismus erheben. […] Dieser neue Realismus [wird], weil er doch idealischen
Ursprungs sein, und gleichsam auf idealischem Grund und Boden schweben muß,
als Poesie erscheinen, die ja auf der Harmonie des Ideellen und Reellen beruhen soll.
(Schlegel, Athenäum, 314–315)
The Aesthetics of Historicity 53
As soon as we recall that it was precisely of this freedom that he was deprived by the
one-sided constraint of nature in the field of sensation and by the exclusive authority
of reason in the realm of thought, then we are bound to consider the power which
is restored to him in the aesthetic mode as the highest of all bounties, as the gift of
humanity itself. (AE, 147)20
For modern humanity beauty is the bridge between reason and the senses, as
it was the bridge between the senses and reason when reason first emerged.
For Schiller it is the theatre of dialectical operations. And dialectics is the
19 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 121 & 123, henceforth AE. ‘Sie [die
Schönheit] wird […] als lebendes Bild die abgezogene Form mit sinnlicher Kraft
ausrüsten, den Begrif f zu Anschauung und das Gesetz zum Gefühl zurückführen.
[…] Durch die Schönheit wird der geistige Mensch zur Materie zurück geführt und
der Sinnenwelt wieder gegeben.’ (ÄE, 365)
20 ‘Sobald wir uns erinnern, daß ihm [dem Menschen] durch die einseitige Nöthigung
der Natur beym Empfinden und durch die ausschließende Gesetzgebung der Vernunft
beym Denken gerade diese Freyheit entzogen wurde, so müssen wir das Vermögen,
welches ihm in der ästhetischen Stimmung zurückgegeben wird [i.e. to have both
together], als die höchste aller Schenkungen, als die Schenkung der Menschheit
selbst betrachten.’ (ÄE, 378)
54 Maike Oergel
engine of historical development. The end result of the process is divine
humanity. Crucially, beauty is always conceived as the link between the
intellectual and the sensual, between the moral and the physical.
We need, then, no longer feel at a loss for a way which might lead us from our depend-
ence upon sense [the senses, MO] towards moral freedom, since beauty af fords us an
instance of the latter being perfectly compatible with the former, an instance of man
not needing to f lee matter in order to manifest himself as spirit. (ÄE, 189)21
In Study of Greek Poetry Schlegel has the following to say about the dia-
lectical process:
The predominance of the individual leads of its own accord to the objective; the
interesting is the propaedeutic for the beautiful, and the ultimate goal of modern
poetry can be nothing else but the ne plus ultra of beauty, a maximum of objective
aesthetic perfection. (35)22
The dialectical process is evident, its catalyst is excess; and perfect beauty
expressed through poetry is to be the end-result. It is noteworthy that for
both Schiller and Schlegel, beauty has an immutable aspect, which one
could argue gives beauty a classical quality, but which, as will become
clear, is nevertheless thoroughly historicised in the manner of an adapt-
able structural essence.
The obvious question arising at this point is how much of a dif fer-
ence there is between the two end results, between Schiller’s humanity and
Schlegel’s beauty. For Schiller, beauty’s function, and its result, the aesthetic
21 ‘Wir dürfen also nicht mehr verlegen seyn, einen Übergang von der sinnlichen
Abhängigkeit zu der moralischen Freyheit zu finden, nachdem durch die Schönheit
der Fall gegeben ist, daß die letztere mit der erstern vollkommen zusammen beste-
hen könne, und daß der Mensch, um sich als Geist zu erweisen, der Materie nicht
zu entf liehen brauche.’ (ÄE, 397)
22 ‘Das Übermaß des Individuellen [which was the result of ref lexive philosophical
abstraction] führt also von selbst zum Objektiven, das Interessante [the product of
philosophical modernity] ist die Vorbereitung des Schönen, und das letzte Ziel der
modernen Poesie kann kein andres sein als das höchste Schöne, ein Maximum von
objektiver ästhetischer Vollkommenheit.’ (Schlegel, Studium, 253)
The Aesthetics of Historicity 55
experience, are linked to freedom, freedom from moral and physical coer-
cion. The aesthetic experience, devoid of any utilitarian function,23 is the
mode of endless possibility, it lifts the human being out of any historical or
natural or moral dependencies. It represents the counterpoint to historical
existence. It also exists outside historical reality, in the extra-historical realm
of ‘semblance’ (Schein). But its agent, beauty, and with it the actual nature
of the experience, is conditioned by history in the same way as any other
cultural entity. Beauty occurs in dif ferent guises in dif ferent historical eras,
i.e. it is historicized.24 But, in structural terms, beauty occupies at all times
the middle ground between sensual and intellectual, and can integrate any
split between them. It is thus always capable of dialectical synthesis.25
Although Schlegel shares Schiller’s view that true art – art representing
beauty and allowing an aesthetic experience – is free from intellectual and
physical coercion and utility,26 he ultimately focuses on a dif ferent aspect
of the redemptive qualities of modern art and produces his own ideas of
what this new art of modernity should be like. Rather than a grand his-
torical sweep, Schlegel is interested in the ‘Now’. Schiller spells out what is
possible, and by 1799/1800 Schlegel proposes how to do it, which could be
f lippantly summarised as: work on the creation of a progressive universal
poetry, through new mythology and romantic irony.
In Schlegel’s theory of poetic art there is little trace of the ‘pretend’–
aspect of Schiller’s aesthetics – of the tricky notion of the ‘Schein’. Schlegel
attempts to transport into historical reality what Schiller defines as only
possible in a space of playful extra-reality. Romantic poetry, as Schlegel
understands it, is not just a means to an end, but remains in itself the
end beyond which humanity cannot go conceptually. Art comprises the
most complete representation and understanding of life that the human
mind is capable of, which nevertheless always remains an approximation.
(I suppose it is possible to argue that this approximate quality constitutes
a form or semblance-like un-reality, and that thus Schlegel, too, cannot
quite bring into reality what is ultimately an elusive, and possibly illusory
hope.) Nevertheless, he confidently declares in the seminal 116th Athenäum
Fragment:
[Romantic poetry] […] too can soar, free from all real and ideal interests, on the wings
of poetic ref lection, midway between the work and the artist. It can even exponenti-
ate the ref lection and multiply it as in an endless series of mirrors. It is capable of the
highest and most universal education. (Dialogue on Poetry, 140–141)27
27 ‘[Romantische Poesie] kann auch […] am meisten zwischen dem Dargestellten und
dem Darstellenden, frei von allem realen und idealen Interesse auf den Flügeln der
poetischen Ref lexion in der Mitte schweben, diese Ref lexion immer wieder poten-
zieren und in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen. Sie ist der höchsten
und allseitigsten Bildung fähig’ (Schlegel, Athenäum, 182–183).
The Aesthetics of Historicity 57
How does this ‘perpetual becoming’ work? Schlegel works out his ideas in
connection with concepts developed in contemporary idealist-transcenden-
tal philosophy, especially by Fichte, whose work inspires his own as much
as it drives Schlegel to quarrel with some of Fichte’s key principles.29 As
28 ‘Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie. […] Andere Dichtarten
sind fertig, und können nun vollständig zergliedert werden. Die romantische Dichtart
ist noch im Werden; ja, das ist ihr eigentliches Wesen, daß sie ewig nur werden, nie
vollendet sein kann. Sie kann durch keine Theorie erschöpft werden, und nur eine
divinatorische Kritik dürfte es wagen, ihr Ideal charakterisieren zu wollen. Sie allein
ist unendlich, wie sie allein frei ist’ (Schlegel, Athenäum, 183).
29 It needs no reiteration here that Schlegel was deeply inf luenced by Fichte’s Wissen
schaftslehre of 1794/5. Both Schelling and Hegel sought in their own philosophical
endeavours to complete what they thought Fichte had left undone: a thorough ground-
ing of the Fichtean consciousness in the world. They sought to define a direct and
meaningful relationship between subject and object, a relationship that bridges the
two Kantian worlds, and yet allows the world of objects a distinct existence outside the
subject’s consciousness (which Fichte’s theory does not). Friedrich Schlegel set out to
accomplish exactly this, too. Schlegel thought that this grounding of ref lexion could
only occur through the integration of philosophy into poetry. He criticizes Fichte not
just for ignoring the world of objects, of nature, of history, and his own historicity
(see Behler, 190), but for what Schlegel sees as an inconsequential treatment of the
58 Maike Oergel
dialectical dynamic. His quarrel is with Fichte’s first principle, which he criticises for
not being dynamic in itself, which in turn makes the beginning of the dynamic proc-
ess problematic. He contrasts Fichte’s ‘Grundsatz’ with his own ‘Wechselerweis’ or
‘Wechselgrundsatz’, which he considers superior to Fichte’s unconditional founding
principle. See Naschert, ‘Friedrich Schlegel über den Wechselerweis und Ironie’. In
Schlegel’s view, Fichte devalues the world of objects; as non-ego they only function
as stimulant to the ego, which will gradually assimilate them. He wishes to make
them equal elements in a fruitful oppositional reciprocation. So he places dialectic
heterogeneity at the very beginning (of consciousness), which highlights again his
preoccupation with the dynamic process and his doubts about any static entities,
about stable solutions. He appears to acknowledge the relation between subject and
object in Kantian fashion as a split between two worlds, while asserting, in Fichtean
fashion, the existence of a meaningful interaction between the two, while yet again,
in post-Fichtean fashion, wishing to leave the right of the world (non-ego, nature)
to an independent existence intact. From Schlegel’s point of view, Fichte rather than
Kant should be seen as providing the final culmination of Cartesian subject-centred
rationalism, rather than its first thorough critique. Once the dynamic process is set in
motion, though, Schlegel has few problems with Fichte’s principles. In fact he employs
Fichtean processes to explain historical processurality: The way in which Fichte’s ego
gradually absorbs the non-ego is decidedly similar to the way in which Schlegel’s
evolving universal poetry gradually absorbs all historical phenomena of poetry. And,
it should be added as an ironic footnote, that Schlegel himself seems at one point to
suggest that human mental activity sprang from one unique and unitary origin. In
the ‘Rede über die Mythologie’, the most Idealist of the sections in the Athenäum, he
asserts that ‘weder dieser Witz [der alt-romantischen Poesie] noch eine Mythologie
können bestehn ohne ein erstes Urspüngliches und Unnachahmliches, was schlechthin
unauf löslich ist, was nach allen Umbildungen noch die alte Natur und Kraft durch-
schimmern läßt’ (KFSA II, 319). It should not be overlooked that there is always a
polemical element in Schlegel’s treatment of Fichte. Initially enthralled by the older
man’s theories, Schlegel found it a struggle to break free from Fichte’s mesmerising
inf luence. His relationship with Fichte was complicated by their personal acquaint-
ance in Jena, which was beset with tensions and in which Fichte always remained the
senior partner. Fichte is of course acknowledged as a ‘dif ficult’ person, opinionated
and blunt, who intimidated by exuding self-assurance.
The Aesthetics of Historicity 59
There is a poetry whose One and All is the relationship of the ideal and the real:
it should […] be called transcendental poetry. […]. But we should not care for a
transcendental philosophy unless it were critical, unless it portrayed the producer
along with the product, unless it embraced in its system of transcendental thoughts
a characterisation of transcendental thinking: in the same way, that poetry which
is not infrequently encountered in modern poets should combine those transcen-
dental materials and preliminary exercises for a poetic theory of the creative power
with the artistic ref lection and beautiful self-mirroring. […] Thus this poetry should
portray itself with each of its portrayals; everywhere and at the same time, it should
be poetry and the poetry of poetry. (Dialogue on Poetry, 145)30
Schlegel repeatedly argues for the fusion of philosophy and poetry.31 But
it is already clear from the new poetry’s ability to ‘hover’ (schweben)
‘between the real and the ideal’ that poetry occupies a meta-level in rela-
tion to philosophy. This makes poetry, rather than philosophy, the supreme
medium of human understanding. Philosophy is a theoretical preparation
that enables the poet to rise above his individual self and work, and take
up, at various times, a creative distance to his creation.32 This enhanced
30 ‘Es gibt eine Poesie, deren eins und alles das Verhältnis des Idealen und des Realen ist,
und die […] Transzendentalpoesie heißen müßte. […] So wie man aber wenig Wert
auf eine Transzendentalphilosophie legen würde, die nicht kritisch wäre, nicht auch
das Produzierende mit dem Produkt darstellte, und im System der transzendentalen
Gedanken zugleich eine Charakteristik des transzendentalen Denkens enthielte: so
sollte wohl auch jene Poesie die in modernen Dichtern nicht seltnen transzendentalen
Materialien und Vorübungen zu einer poetischen Theorie des Dichtungsvermögens
mit der künstlerischen Ref lexion und schönen Selbstbespiegelung […] vereinigen,
und in jeder ihrer Darstellungen sich selbst mit darstellen, und überall zugleich Poesie
und Poesie der Poesie sein.’ (Athenäum Fragment 238, Athenäum, 204)
31 See Athenäum Fragment 451 (Athenäum, 255) and of course also Athenäum Fragment
116 (Athenäum, 182): ‘die Poesie mit der Philosophie und Rhetorik in Berührung
setzen’, translated as ‘put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric’ (Dialogue
on Poetry, 140).
32 Ernst Behler argued that Schlegel joined philosophy and poetry (making good his
claim in Athenäum Fragment 451) by abolishing the ‘distinction between poetry
and philosophy’ because both Idealist philosophy and transcendental poetry par-
take of the (same) ref lective activity (Behler, 139). Guido Naschert, on the other
hand, has argued that it would be more apt to describe what Schlegel does as ‘eine
60 Maike Oergel
firm basis for your activity, a matrix, a sky, a living atmosphere.’34 It was this
circumstance that had made thinkers look beyond and before reason, and
led them to consider the notion of origins and their relation to the future.
The form of human conceptualising before the rise of reason had recently
(over the preceding half century) been identified as ‘myth’. Schlegel taps
into this intellectual background when he defines his other form of poetic
innovation: the intellectual mythology (Mythologie des Geistes), which
is equally capable of this integrating dynamics.
Mythology has one great advantage. What usually escapes our consciousness can
here be perceived and held fast through the senses and spirit, like the soul in the
body surrounding it, through which it shines into our eye and speaks to our ear.
[…] Mythology is such a work of art created by nature. In its texture the sublime is
really formed.35
34 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 81. ‘Ihr müßt es oft im Dichten gefühlt haben, daß es
Euch an einem festen Halt für Euer Wirken gebrach, an einem mütterlichen Boden,
einem [umwölbenden Sternen-]Himmel, einer lebendigen [erfrischenden Lebens-]
Luft [um frei aufzuatmen].’ Athenäum, 312. The brackets give the variant readings
according to Friedrich Schlegel. Sämtliche Werke, V, 1823, which are given as foot-
notes to this passage in KFSA II.
35 Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, 85–86. ‘Einen Vorzug hat die Mythologie. Was sonst
das Bewußtsein ewig f lieht, ist hier dennoch sinnlich-geistig zu schauen, und
festgehalten, wie die Seele in dem umgebenden Leibe, durch den sie in unser Auge
schimmert, zu unserm Ohre spricht. […] Die Mythologie ist ein solches Kunstwerk
der Natur. In ihrem Gewebe ist das Höchste wirklich gebildet’ (Schlegel, ‘Rede über
die Mythologie’, Athenäum, 318).
62 Maike Oergel
36 Always mindful of the complex relationships between the ancient and the modern,
Schlegel is happy to point out that neither irony nor mythology are specific to moder-
nity, that both in fact originate in antiquity. See Lyceumsfragment 42 (KFSA II, 152).
But, in reconditioned form, both have a crucial function to perform for modern
culture.
37 The rich irony of this term in this context will escape no-one conversant with both
German intellectual and political history.
38 ‘Bewußtsein der ewigen Agilität’, Ideen 69, KFSA II, 263.
39 ‘Gebildet ist ein Werk, wenn es überall scharf begrenzt, innerhalb der Grenzen aber
grenzenlos und unerschöpf lich ist, wenn es sich selbst ganz treu, überall gleich, und
doch über sich selbst erhaben ist.’ Schlegel, Athenäum Fragment 297, Athenäum,
215.
The Aesthetics of Historicity 63
and criticism, are (historically) limited. Schlegel’s thought of this period
is marked by two tendencies running counter to each other, his own dia-
lectic so to speak, which he is trying to grasp within one framework: the
optimistic ‘solutionist’ tendency is expressed in the imminence of the new
intellectual mythology, while the limiting tendency finds expression in his
insistence on the essential presence of irony. Schlegel’s Romantic irony
of fers the writer the means to capture and present, but not neutralise, the
antinomies of human existence. The ‘prospect of an endlessly developing
classicism’,40 which the ‘progressive universal poetry’ provides, pinpoints
this dual approach; it is meant to be a classicism, but one that is in the
continuous process of becoming.
Schlegel’s theory of criticism is a theory of human understanding, of
how the mind processes and expresses impressions, not just of works of
art, but of experiences in general, hence his ‘poetry of poetry’ corresponds
to the ‘philosophy of philosophy’. Ref lection has reached the level of self-
ref lection. Both philosophy and poetry are capable of the all-important
ironic ref lexivity.41 But his theory, like the others discussed here, exists on
the basis of history. His theory is informed by notions of ongoing proc-
esses, which shape its dialectical dynamics and open-endedness. The need
for a connection between theory and history, and the sequential nature of
this connection, is very clearly expressed in the part of Athenäum entitled
‘Dialogue on Poetry’.42 Schlegel’s historical limitation bears some similarity
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Robert Leventhal
4 F. Schiller, ‘Verbrecher aus verlorener Ehre’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. G. Fricke und
H. Göpfert (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1967). All references to Schiller are from
this edition using the abbreviation SW. All translations are my own. Schiller’s text
first appeared as ‘Verbrecher aus Infamie eine wahre Geschichte’, Thalia. 1785–91.
1786, Volume 2, 1. Stück, 20–58.
5 For a more complete assessment, see K. Dewhurst and N. Reeves, eds, Friedrich
Schiller. Medicine, Psychology, Literature.
6 On Abel, see ‘Abel, Jacob Friedrich (1751–1829)’, Killy Literaturlexikon. Autoren und
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The Aesthetics of the Case-History 71
The method of the human sciences is identical to that of the research of nature: First,
to collect individual instances, and from these to construct general laws and finally
to use these, partly to explain the individual instances and partly for the discovery
of new rules, through whose application new products can be produced […] Even
the spirit of the psychologist is the same as that of the researcher of nature. But
because the psychologist observes what has occurred in himself, and the study of
the human mind contains concepts which are not easily testable by means of more
nuanced and dif ficult experiments as in the case of the human body, the education
of the psychologist is even more dif ficult, but also more important.8
7 Schiller’s text edition and translation is Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle, als ein Beytrag zur
Geschichte der Menschheit. Nach dem franz. Werke des Pitaval (Leipzig: Crusius,
1792).
8 Abel, Einführung in die Seelenlehre, ‘Vorrede’, xxxi. ‘Die Methode der Menschenlehre
ist die bey Erforschung der Natur überhaupt gewöhnliche: Erst individuelle
Erscheinungen zu sammeln, dann aus denselben allgemeine Gesetze zu bilden und
endlich diese theils zu Erklärung der Erscheinungen, theils zu Erfindung neuer Regeln,
durch deren Anwendung aufs neue gewisse Produkte hervorgebracht werden sollen,
anzuwenden. […] Auch der Geist des Psychologen ist also überhaupt der Geist des
Naturforschers. Nur da der Psychologe das in ihm selbst Vorgegangene beobachtet,
und die Menschenlehre unbildliche, feinere, schwerere und durch künstliche Proben
nicht so leicht prüfbare Begrif fe als die Körperlehre enthält, so ist die Bildung des
psychologischen Geistes schwerer, aber auch viel wichtiger.’
72 Robert Leventhal
nitionis sensitivae), and only in a derivative sense a theory of art and the
beautiful. And while these gain the upper hand as its narrative continues,
its driving force was, as Andrew Bowie has stated, ‘to do justice to the
immediacy of the individual’s sensuous relationship to the world’ (Bowie,
Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 4). Aesthetics seeks not simply to rescue, but
to create the space for furthering the uniqueness of the individual in what
Schiller perceived as an era of the increasing reduction of humanity, instru-
mentality, fragmentation, violence, terror and leveling of dif ference. The
maintenance and expansion of such uniqueness, of Eigentümlichkeit, an
essential condition of actualizing the aesthetic state, requires for Schiller
recognition of the entwinement of the particular individual in f luctuat-
ing circumstances and conditions, both internal and external. This raises
the question of the status of the individual case in Schiller, in the multiple
sense of the particularity, the uniqueness of the individual, as an irreduc-
ible person, but also, the legal-juridical-psychological ‘case’ as a literary
genre and discourse-medium. It stood at the center of the late eighteenth
century’s and Schiller’s interests, from his early case-history regarding his
fellow-student Grammont’s depression at the Karlsschule to Der Verbrecher
aus verlorener Ehre: Eine wahre Geschichte, based on the true case-history
of the criminal Friedrich Schwan (1729–1760), and to his translation and
edition of Pitaval’s Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der Menschheit (1792).9
Recent works on Schiller have gone a long way towards dispelling
certain calcified preconceptions and fixed interpretations of Schiller’s
aesthetic theory; they have also shown another dimension of Schiller, a
stark realist aspect of his work, which derived from his early medical stud-
ies. Rüdiger Safranski’s 2004 book Friedrich Schiller oder die Erfindung
des Deutschen Idealismus goes to great lengths to emphasize and trace
the importance of Schiller’s medical studies for the development of his
9 Now available in a new edition: Schillers Pitaval: Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle als ein
Beitrag zur Geschichte der Menschheit, verfaßt, bearbeitet und herausgegeben von
Friedrich Schiller, ed. O. Tekolf with an Introduction by H. M. Enzensberger
(Frankfurt: Eichborn 2005).
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 73
10 ‘Aber die Begeisterung des Ausdrucks soll die Kraft zur analytischen Distanz nicht
mindern. Die Seele mag sich ausdrücken, doch soll sie nicht die Disziplin einer
“Erfahrungsseelenkunde” – eine Bezeichnung, die Abel von Karl Philipp Moritz
übernimmt – scheuen.’ (Safranski, 76)
11 ‘Schiller, der lernen muss, Leichen zu öf fnen, wird, was die Seele betrif ft, zum
sezierenden und experimentierenden Psychologen. Seine Arbeit an den Räubern,
mit der er 1777 beginnt, dient solcher Seelenkunde’ (Safranski, 76).
74 Robert Leventhal
political work’. For Beiser, Schiller’s text ‘stands in the modern republican
tradition of Machiavelli, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Ferguson’ (Beiser,
Schiller as Philosopher, 120). In contrast to older readings that claim that
Schiller’s text merely codifies Kantian autonomy aesthetics and buries
all individuality in the species-being ‘mankind’ and thus neglects what is
most personal and communicative about the aesthetic experience itself,
Beiser states:
It is of the first importance to note that Schiller thinks that it is the task of culture
to preserve the realm of individuality and variety as much as that of universality
and unity […] the importance of the realm of individuality – its intrinsic value and
status as an end in itself – is stressed in an essentially political context in Letter IV.
It is in this insistence upon the intrinsic value of individuality that Schiller begins to
take one of his more important steps beyond Kant, and anticipate the later romantic
ethic of Schlegel and Schleiermacher. (140)
13 ‘in ein Wesen, das nahezu hilf los der Triebe und Af fekte, des Unbewussten (der “dun-
klen Ideen,” “ideae obscurae”) und des Körpers (des Gehirns und des Nervensystems)
ausgeliefert ist’ (Riedel, 42).
14 ‘In all diesen “Heteronomien der Seele” geht es um etwas, was im Paradigma der
“rationalen Psychologie” nicht konsistent beschreibbar war, nämlich um Interaktionen
und Verschränkungen von Seele und Körper, von Psychologie und Physiologie’
(Riedel, 43).
76 Robert Leventhal
and disengaged from all worldly and mundane concerns and turns solely
on the representational powers of the subject in order to guarantee the
maximum free play of the imagination. For Schiller, there is a decidedly
moral and juridical interest which impinges on any understanding of the
case; the aesthetic ‘presentation’ of the case, and its reception, is therefore
not entirely ‘free’ or ‘autonomous’ in the strict sense: the reader is not only
to respond to the case cognitively, but viscerally, feeling the af f liction of
the other, and translating this into a deeper and fuller understanding of the
pitfalls of the human condition. Here resides the actual aesthetic import
of the case: its ‘reality’ or the force of the ‘real’ within it should ef fect a
fuller sense of who and what we are, of the discrepancy between the law
and justice, and the psycho-physiological determinants of human action
and behavior.
To establish the centrality of case from the aesthetic – and not merely psy-
chological, epistemological, or legal – point of view, we begin at the end,
with the Aesthetic Letters, and work backwards. We can, using the basis
provided by Beiser’s reading of the Aesthetic Letters, make the case that
the fourth letter is essentially an attempt to recapture the individuality
of the individual. It states that every individual person harbors the ideal
human being within them, the absolute unity of form and material; to
fully actualize this, Schiller says, is nothing less than the task (Aufgabe)
of human existence. This actualization of this mediation of material and
form is, if we follow the argument, the State (Staat). The state, if it is to
be legitimate and a truly just representant, must do justice to both the
objective/generic and the subjective character, the specificity of the indi-
vidual: ‘[…] it should also honor the subjective and specific character in the
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 77
15 ‘Er soll auch den subjektiven und spezifischen Charakter in den Individuen ehren’
(SW V 577).
16 ‘So wird sich auch bei der höchsten Universalisierung seines Betragens seine
Eigentümlichkeit retten’ (SW V 578).
78 Robert Leventhal
– but the unique pairing of Person and Zustand in the specific individual,
appears here as the sine qua non of justice and the foundation of the truly
representative, legitimate State.
Fast forward now to Letters 11 and 12 of the Aesthetic Letters, just
before the infamous formal splitting or stylized rupture of the Triebe, and
Schiller’s famous positing of the third term to reconcile form and matter,
freedom and necessity. Here, Schiller again underscores the requirement
of the individuality of case as a vital component of the true, actual, full
human being: distinguishing between the Person, which is what endures
(das Bleibende), and the conditions (Zustand) of the person, which shift
(das Wechselnde). Brought to the abstraction of Schiller’s formulation, we
arrive at the distinction between freedom, the absolute self-grounding of
the person as the persistent self, and temporality, as the condition of all
becoming:
Every condition, every particular entity emerges in time, and the human being, as
a phenomenon, must have a beginning, even though the pure intelligence in him
is eternal. Without time, that is, without becoming, the human being would never
become a particular person; his personality would exist as a disposition, but not as
an actual fact. Only in the series of his representations does the persistent ‘I’ itself
become a particular phenomenon and achieve appearance.17
Schiller’s ‘resolution’ of this opposition is that the persistent ‘I’ must actively
form the material, give structure to the world, actively maintaining and
positing the I precisely in the face of the ever-shifting demands of reality.
This, we might say, is the ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ response to the challenge
of existence; if one does not ascend to the level of actively forming time
and reality, one remains simply a part of the world, passive material to be
17 ‘Aller Zustand aber, alles bestimmte Dasein entsteht in der Zeit, und so muss also
der Mensch, als Phänomen, einen Anfang nehmen, obgleich die reine Intelligenz
in ihm ewig ist. Ohne die Zeit, das heißt, ohne es zu werden, würde er nie ein
bestimmtes Wesen sein; seine Persönlichkeit würde zwar in der Anlage, aber nicht
in der Tat existieren. Nur durch die Folge seiner Vorstellungen wird das beharrliche
Ich sich selbst zur Erscheinung’ (SW V 602).
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 79
determined: ‘As long as the human being simply senses, and desires, and
acts according to this desire, it is nothing more than a part of the world.’18
In the psychological case, the human being is not grasped in the sphere of
freedom, of actively forming the world, but as a piece of the world, and being
subject to the alternating circumstances of reality.
Schiller recognizes that the opposition of the Triebe also involves
accentuation or attenuation of cases: ‘If the first [instinct, RL] only provides
cases, the other provides laws.’19 Mediation of the individual case with the
law means that both will be preserved. Not by chance does Schiller men-
tion insanity and madness precisely at this point as the loss of the Person,
which he names in the text explicitly: ausser sich sein.
In Letter 14, case appears again, but now as important individual
instances that provide a sensible intuition of actualized humanity: ‘If there
were cases in which the human being could have this double experience,
in which it could simultaneously be aware of and sense its freedom and
its concrete, temporal existence, it would have in such cases, and unfortu-
nately only in such cases, a complete intuition of its own humanity.’20 Only
in the individual cases do we get the tangible intuition of the full sense of
humanity; only in individual cases do we experience the concrete sense of
the complete human being in its humanity. Here, the existence of indi-
vidual cases, not as mere particularity, but as actual temporal experiences of
mediation, are requisite as instances of precisely the envisioned aesthetic
state in which individuality and universality, inclination and law, material
and form are continually mediated with one another.
18 ‘Solange er bloß empfindet, bloß begehrt, und aus bloßer Begierde wirkt ist er noch
weiter nichts als Welt’ (SW V 603).
19 ‘Wenn der erste [Trieb, RL] nur Fälle macht, so gibt der andere Gesetze’ (SW V
605).
20 ‘Gäbe es aber Fälle, wo er (der Mensch) diese doppelte Erfahrung zugleich machte,
wo er sich zugleich seiner Freiheit bewusst würde und sein Dasein empfände, so hätte
er in diesen Fällen, und schlechterdings nur in diesen eine vollständige Anschauung
seiner Menschlichkeit’ (SW V 612).
80 Robert Leventhal
21 According to existing scholarship, the consensus is that Schiller heard the tale of
the Sonnenwirth from his teacher at the Karlsschule Jacob Friedrich Abel, who
himself edited a collection of case histories Sammlung und Erklärung merkwürdiger
Erscheinungen aus dem menschlichen Leben (1787), including the case Schiller used
for his story. Abel had first hand knowledge of the case since his father was actually
the magistrate who arrested and charged the perpetrator Christian Wolf. While
Schiller might have heard the story from Abel in the course of his studies, Minor’s
hypothesis that Schiller’s literary version was based on Abel’s was shown to be false;
rather, Abel seems to have borrowed from Schiller’s version in Thalia I, 2 (1786),
20–58, as one of his textual bases. See Koopman, 255. See also Jacob Friedrich Abel,
Eine Quellenedition, 620.
22 ‘Streut es den Samen nützlicher Kenntnisse aus, dient dazu, das Nachdenken des
Lesers auf würdige Zwecke zu richten’ (SW V 865).
23 ‘Man erblickt den Menschen hier in den verwickeltesten Lagen, welche die ganze
Erwartung spannen, und deren Auf lösung der Divinationsgabe des Lesers eine angene-
hme Beschäftigung gibt’ (SW V 865).
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 81
Add to this the fact that the more nuanced juridical procedure is far more capable of
bringing to light the hidden motivational causes of human action than is the case in
other instances, and if the historical narrative often leaves us dissatisfied concerning
the true motives and the final reasons of the acting players, the juridical trial often
reveals to us the innermost thoughts and the most obscure fabric of malice.25
Schiller also mentions knowledge of the law and jurisprudence gained
through the study of such cases: ‘This important victory for human knowl-
edge and the treatment of human beings is made even more powerful by
the increased insights into the law which are strewn throughout them,
and which gain clarity and interest through the individuality of the case
in which one sees them applied.’26 Finally, Schiller sees in the elucida-
tion of case the performance of the ‘republikanische Freiheit des Lesers,’
that is, the right of the reader herself to evaluate, judge and decide.27 It is
therefore not merely a matter of the interesting and valuable content, but
how the cases are presented: that is, the Behandlungsart. In the Vorrede to
Merkwürdige Rechtsfälle, Schiller insists that the authors have maintained
24 ‘Das geheime Spiel der Leidenschaft entfaltet sich vor unseren Augen’ (SW V
865).
25 ‘Dazu kommt, dass der umständlichere Rechtsgang die geheimen Bewegursachen
menschlicher Handlungen weit ins Klare zu bringen fähig ist, als es sonst geschieht,
und wenn die vollständigste Geschichtserzählung uns über die letzten Gründe einer
Begebenheit, über die wahren Motive der handelnden Spieler oft unbefriedigt lässt,
so enthüllt uns oft ein Kriminalprozess das Innerste der Gedanken und bringt das
versteckteste Gewebe der Bosheit an den Tag’ (SW V 866).
26 ‘Dieser wichtiger Gewinn für Menschenkenntniss und Menschenbehandlung […]
wird um ein Großes noch durch die vielen Rechstkenntnisse erhöht, die darinn
ausgestreut werden, und die durch die Individualität des Falles, auf den man sie
angewendet sieht, Klarheit und Interesse erhalten’ (SW V 866).
27 See Košenina, 392–393.
82 Robert Leventhal
‘the dubiousness of the decision, which often puts the judge on the spot,
and communicate this to the reader by mobilizing for each of the opposing
parties the same care and the same great art.’28 In other words, they have
not determined the outcome in advance; doubt, ambiguity, and multi-
perspicacity have been preserved; the reader herself is placed not merely
in the double role,29 but rather in multiple roles of sympathetic reader, wit-
ness, victim, the public, advocate, judge and jury, and even the perpetrator
himself. The full complexity and multi-dimensionality of the case is cru-
cial to this form of narrative and its aesthetic force to induce the public to
become more careful readers and more sensitive, sympathetic judges, and
this in a time, as has often been noted, when motive and circumstances
were irrelevant to the execution of the law.30 Schiller, in contradistinction,
is interested precisely in the etiology of pathology, on the conditions, or
the causes, of the idiosyncratic turn towards psychological dissolution,
criminality, and transgression.
Secondly, the introductory remarks of Verbrecher aus verlorender Ehre
focus in on the disclosure of the conditions and causes of the particular act;
not on the abstract value of the aesthetic experience of the occurrence or
the Handlung per se, but rather on the specific conditions, circumstances,
and inf luences of the soul. It is only in the annals of the Verirrungen of
human beings, how they, quite specifically, have deviated or become the
subjects of cases, that the real lessons of morality, psychology, and the
power of the state can be learned according to Schiller.
Five distinct features of Schiller’s aesthetics of case can thus be noted:
first, the Vorrang of the case over historical writing in Schiller’s view is
that history is written in order to sway the emotions (durch hinreissenden
Vortrag): ‘a gap remains between the historical subject and the reader …
31 ‘Es bleibt eine Lücke zwischen dem historischen Subjekt und dem Leser … die alle
Möglichkeit einer Vergleichung oder Analogie abschneidet’ (SW V 14).
32 ‘Die Beschaf fenheit und Stellung der Dinge, welche einen solchen umgaben.’ (SW
V 15)
33 Košenina’s otherwise fine analysis (see Košenina, ‘Tiefere Blicke’) stumbles here:
he cites the passage, but gets the second part wrong. The sentence reads: ‘Er [der
Menschenforscher, RL] sucht sie in der unveränderlichen Struktur der menschlichen
Seele und in den veränderlichen (my emphasis, RL) Bedingungen, welche sie von
aussen bestimmten’ (SA V, 15), not, as Kosênina cites, ‘unveränderlichen Bedingungen.’
See Košenina, 393.
34 ‘Weisheit und Torheit, Laster und Tugend in einer Wiege beisammen’ (SW V 15).
35 ‘Eine wahre Geschichte’ (SW V 14).
84 Robert Leventhal
Nature had failed with respect to his body. A small, non-descript figure, nappy
unpleasantly dark hair, a f lat-pressed nose and a swollen upper lip, which in addition
was distorted by the kick of a horse – this all gave him a contrary look that repulsed
all women and gave plenty of ammunition for the jokes of his comrades.40
The shift from an inalterable, fixed ‘Verderbnis der Seele’ – in some sense still
according to the traditional attribution of an original sin, a basic spiritual
f law or error engraved in the soul – to the externality of ‘chance’ appear-
ance, to awkward and misguided behaviours, and the attendant social
consequences of exclusion and rejection is significant: it makes the crimi-
nal a victim of a social world. In Abel’s case-history, based on eyewitness
interactions with the author and the reports of several reliable men (Abel
1995 334), the worsening of Schwan’s situation was a necessary outgrowth of
the fundamentally disturbed soul. In Schiller’s narrative, Wolf is ruthlessly
pursued by the apprentice of the Förster, Robert, who also happens to be
the suitor of the girl Wolf had fallen in love with. The decisive shift occurs
when the Sonnenwirth is incarcerated for the third time, sentenced to hard
labor in a fortress. The Sonnenwirth becomes a true criminal. Schiller marks
this transformation in the soul of the perpetrator with great intensity and
precision, and it is here that we receive the story from the standpoint of
the protagonist himself for the first time:
The mandate against poaching required a solemn and exemplary retribution, and
Wolf was sentenced, with the sign of the gallows burned into his back, to three
years hard labor at the fortress […] This time also passed, and he departed the for-
tress – but a very dif ferent person than as he had arrived. Here, a new era in his life
begins; one can listen to him, as he himself confessed to his spiritual council and
before the court: ‘I entered the fortress,’ he said, ‘as a wayward person and left it as
a criminal; I had had still something in the world that was of value to me, and now
my pride bent under the disgrace. When I was brought to the fortress, they locked
me in with twenty-three other prisoners, among whom there were two murderers,
the rest alleged thieves and vagrants. I was mocked and ridiculed […] the work was
hard and tyrannical, my body became sickly, I needed compassion, and if I were to
say it honestly, I needed sympathy, and this I had to purchase with the last remnant
of my conscience. And so I got used to the most depraved and abominable, and in
the last quarter-year I had surpassed my mentors.’41
41 ‘Das Mandat gegen die Wilddiebe bedurfte einer solennen und examplarischen
Genugtuung, und Wolf ward verurteilt, das Zeichen des Galgens auf den Rücken
gebrannt drei Jahre auf der Festung zu arbeiten […] Auch dies Periode verlief, und er
ging von der Festung – aber ganz anders, als er dahin gekommen war. Hier fängt eine
neue Epoche in seinem Leben an; man höre ihn selbst, wie er nachher gegen seinen
geistigen Beistand und vor Gericht bekannt hat. “Ich betrat die Festung”, sagte er,
“als ein Verirrter und verliess sie als ein Lotterbube. Ich hatte noch etwas in der Welt
gehabt, das mir teuer war, und mein Stolz krümmte sich unter der Schande. Wie ich
auf die Festung gebracht war, sperrte man mich zu dreiundzwanzig Gefangenen ein,
unter denen zwei Mörder und die übrigen alle berüchtigte Diebe und Vagabunden
waren. Man verhoehnte mich […] Die Arbeit war hart und tyrannisch, mein Körper
kränklich, ich brauchte Beistand, und wenn ich es aufrichtig sagen soll, ich brauchte
Bedaurung, und diese musste ich mit dem letzten Ueberrest meines Gewissens
erkaufen. So gewöhnte ich mich endlich an das Abscheulichste, und im letzten
vierteljahr hatte ich meine Lehrmeister übertrof fen”’ (SW V 18).
42 ‘Das Zeichen des Galgens auf den Rücken gebrannt’ (SW V 18).
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 87
Conclusion
43 ‘Bin ich denn irgendwo auf der Stirne gezeichnet? […] Die Verachtung dieses Knaben
schmerzte mich bitterer als dreijähriger Galiotendienst’ (SW V 19).
88 Robert Leventhal
44 ‘Schwarze Seele, sind von allem Anfang an einfach “da” – in ihrer ganze Dichte, in
ihrer ganzen Unhintergehbarkeit.’ (Neumeyer, 102)
The Aesthetics of the Case-History 89
45 ‘Den Unglücklichen, der doch in eben der Stunde, wo er die Tat beging, so wie in
der, wo er dafür büßet, […] für ein Geschöpf fremder Gattung an, dessen Blut anders
umläuft als das unsrige, dessen Wille anderen Regeln gehorcht als der unsrige’ (SW
V 14).
46 ‘Mensch war wie wir’ (SW V 14).
90 Robert Leventhal
Works Cited
For most listeners the Ninth is much more than Beethoven’s last symphony
or simply – assuming anything about the piece ever has been simple – an
imposing display of artistic prowess. As the tradition-smashing finale makes
clear, it is a work without precedence, bringing together for the first time
in the history of the orchestral symphony musical instruments and voices.
One might think this would be enough to guarantee the Ninth an enduring
place within modernity’s ever-enlarging gallery, a point Richard Wagner, in
1849, af firmed when he summarized its union of words and music as ‘the
human Evangel of the art of the Future’ beyond which ‘no forward step
is possible’.1 For all of its overt and covert baggage – and there is a great
deal of both – Wagner’s synopsis exposes a curious incongruity: a liberat-
ing rejection of the past and an ossifying benchmark by which to gauge
new additions to the pantheon of artistic greatness. This uneasy conf luence
is itself one of the many ways by which to understand that oftentimes
freighted concept of modernity. Thus, I do not endorse an either/or mode
of thinking in conjunction with Beethoven’s Ninth or its ties to moder-
nity, wherein this or the other term comprising a binary opposition has
greater value. The really interesting thing, and here I follow Schiller, is the
highly charged space, the Indif ferenzpunkt, he locates between divergent
domains. One example must suf fice for now. In his ‘Über das Erhabene’
(‘Concerning the Sublime’, published 1801), the poet-philosopher spells
out how the worldly here and now and boundless beyond intersect, a sub-
ject that deeply enthralled Beethoven and, I argue, one the latter maps
out in the finale of his choral symphony. Schiller makes clear the two
together, the sublime and its conceptual other, nature, are equals. ‘Only
if the sublime is married to the beautiful and our sensitivity to both has
been shaped in equal measure, are we complete citizens of nature, without
on that account being its slaves, and without squandering our citizenship
in the intelligible world.’2
Useful although the concept of an Indif ferenzpunkt is, music criticism
has evinced little use for it, either specifically or in a more general sense,
given that the field has tended to resist the Ninth’s most revolutionary
characteristic, the union of words and music. That neglect has extracted
a price, dulling appreciation as to why Beethoven chose Schiller’s ‘An die
Freude’ together with the ways in which the composer’s response to those
words shaped the movement’s formal design.3 Sustained and spirited,
the lack of interest accorded the movement’s purely textual element began
during the composer’s lifetime. One of Beethoven’s otherwise most sym-
pathetic early critics, Adolf Bernhard Marx, writing in 1826, unequivocally
denied the finale was ‘a composition of Schiller’s ode’, or, for that matter,
‘the musical expression of its content or even of its words’.4 Friedrich
Nietzsche agreed. Even though he viewed the Ninth to be ‘without equal’
and ‘beyond analysis’, he maintained that a ‘relation between poem and
music’ in the finale ‘makes no sense, for the worlds of tone and represen-
tation are an insulting externality’ at odds with the ‘absolute sovereignty’
of music. Rather, the music’s ‘sea of f lames’ inundates the words, and we
‘simply do not hear anything of Schiller’s poem’.5
Inasmuch as Schiller’s poem is a part of the Ninth, the words remain
an essential starting point, even if most scholars begin elsewhere. And there
can be little doubt, given the sheer dynamic volume to which Beethoven
often aspires in the choral finale, that we hear those words, especially the
section stretching from measure 326 (beats 3 and 4) to measure 330 when
the chorus fervently roars forth fortissimo three times with the words ‘vor
Gott’, before God. Of course, neither Marx nor Nietzsche deny Schiller’s
poem in so literal a way. What they question is that Beethoven fashioned
the finale in response to those words or that the poem held special af finity
for him. It is here we locate the way in which such resistance has dimin-
ished understanding of the Ninth, for Beethoven deeply valued Schiller’s
writings and held fast to the idea of setting ‘An die Freude’ to music for
more than thirty years.6
Paradoxically enough, the finale of the Ninth itself has contributed to
the state of af fairs I seek to redress; in Nietzsche’s formulation, the music’s
‘sea of f lames’ does have the power to overwhelm Schiller’s poem. If we
agree this is problematic and in the end surmountable, a way out suggests
itself: placing Schiller’s poem within the broader culture of its time. To be
sure, the poem enjoyed tremendous popularity during the 38 years before
the Ninth, sweeping the German lands and beyond, inspiring more than
forty musical settings before Beethoven’s, a process that confirms the work
shaped the cultural topography of the later eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries just as the era shaped it.7 Worth knowing, too, is that
Schiller’s poem was not the first to bear that title or some closely related
variant. Such cultural resonance, heretofore unacknowledged, possesses
enormous explanatory potential. Although time does not allow for a full
rehearsal of the literary tradition before Schiller’s poem, one of its central
tenets is that Freude unites opposing realms. As the Anspach poet and
jurist Johann Peter Uz avers in his 1749 poem ‘An die Freude’, Joy is the
6 The earliest evidence for Beethoven’s interest in Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ comes
not from the composer but rather a letter from his friend Bartholomäus Ludwig
Fischenich, Bonn professor of philosophy and jurisprudence, dated 26 January 1793.
The letter, to Schiller’s wife, appears in Thayer, Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, 120–121.
7 Schiller wrote ‘An die Freude’ in 1785 and first published it in his own literary journal
Thalia in 1786. He issued a revised version in his Gedichte von Friederich Schiller.
Zweyter Theil in 1803. For Schiller’s poem in full, along with an English translation,
see Parsons, ‘“Deine Zauber binden wieder”’, 50–53.
96 James Parsons
child of wisdom (‘Kind der Weisheit’).8 Johann Peter Cronegk echoes the
idea in his 1761 ‘Exhortation to Judicious Joy’ (‘Ermunterung zu weiser
Freude’) when he asserts that ‘wisdom’ is the ‘sister of Joy’.9 Friedrich von
Hagedorn, in his 1744 ‘An die Freude’, summons Joy as the ‘goddess of
noble hearts’ (‘Göttinn edler Herzen!’), the ‘cheerful sister of sweet love!
child of heaven! the strength of souls! the half of life!’ (‘Muntre Schwester
süßer Liebe! Himmelskind! Kraft der Seelen! Halbes Leben!’). Even more
importantly, ‘Gracious Joy, you enliven reason!’ (‘Du erheiterst, holde
Freude! Die Vernunft’).10 What emerges is that Joy – ‘our Being’s End and
Aim! / Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate’er thy name’, as Alexander
Pope af firmed in his 1734 An Essay on Man – is the reward granted the
person who reconciles the antithetical spheres of Enlightenment (Pope,
B). As Immanuel Kant observes in the 1787 second edition of his Critique
of Pure Reason, ‘the entire pursuit of reason is to bring about a union of
all the ends that are aimed at by our inclinations, into one ultimate end –
that of Glückseligkeit’.11 Kant’s word ‘union’, or Vereinigung, is noteworthy,
for the idea of fusion or harmony is a central concern of Enlightenment,
Schiller’s poem, and the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth.
Whereas poets of Hagedorn and Uz’s generation circumscribe Joy’s
purview, Schiller enlarges it. While Uz seeks Freude exclusively ‘in the
meadows and the f lowering field!’ (‘Auf Triften und Beblühmter Flur!’),
Schiller continually exceeds those limits with his references to ‘the panoply
of stars’, or Sternenzelt, a locale he cites or alludes to in his ‘An die Freude’
8 Uz, 5: 283–286. All English translations of Uz, Cronegk and von Hagendorn are my
own.
9 Cronegk, 206.
10 Hagedorn, 2: 41–42.
11 Kant, 3: 520. In light of Pope’s statement above, Kant’s ‘Glückseligkeit’ indicates
(most likely) that he is not drawing a distinction between such synonyms as joy,
happiness, or other related words. Seen in this light, the phrase ‘the pursuit of hap-
piness’, familiar from the American Declaration of Independence, emerges with
greater understanding. As David Hume wrote in 1742, ‘the attainment of happiness’
is ‘the great end of all human industry’, especially for ‘the man of virtue, … the true
philosopher, who governs his appetites, subdues his passions, and has learned, from
reason, to set a just value on every pursuit and enjoyment.’ Hume, 148.
The Musical Poetics of Modernity 97
eleven times, one that af firms his zeal in building on past conventions while
transcending them. My use of the word transcending does not imply that
Schiller favors one realm over the other. As an assessment of his writings
confirms, he repeatedly enlists the domains of nature and the sublime as
a metaphor for the Enlightenment synthesis of extremes, one he signals
at the start of his ‘An die Freude’ in the revelation that Joy’s magic pos-
sesses the ability to ‘join again that which custom rudely has divided.’
Beethoven aspires to a similar union of the mundane and infinite in his
choral finale.
Necessarily brief my overview of the importance Joy had for eight-
eenth-century thought has been, what is clear is that Schiller’s ‘An die
Freude’ relates to a larger literary tradition. Only when one reads the poem
against that backdrop is it possible to appreciate its boldness and unlock
its meaning. In an ef fort to shed light on both points it helps to know that
poets of Hagedorn and Uz’s generation sought Freude exclusively within
Arcadian nature. With his numerous evocations of the panoply of stars,
Schiller vastly expands the horizon of literature dealing with Joy, enlarg-
ing its conventions for new purposes, above all the all-embracing union of
nature’s beauty and the furthest reaches of infinity. As Schiller rhapsodizes
in his poem’s first choral antistrophe: ‘Be embraced you millions! This kiss
to the entire world! Brothers – above the starry vault must dwell a loving
father.’ (‘Seid umschlungen Millionen! / Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
/ Brüder – überm Sternenzelt / muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.’) Perhaps
not surprisingly, some fifteen years after writing the poem, Schiller found
its youthful intensity embarrassing, a repudiation later critics have found
hard to reconcile with the favor accorded the verse by contemporaneous
audiences, the result being that ‘An die Freude’ inhabits an indeterminate
no man’s land within present-day literary criticism. Writing to his close
friend Christian Gottfried Körner on 21 October 1800, whose modest
musical setting of ‘An die Freude’ precedes the poem with a special foldout
sheet bearing four staves of music in the 1786 Thalia, Schiller denounces
the poem in no uncertain terms. Notwithstanding its ‘fiery enthusiasm’,
he finds its standing as a ‘folk poem’ (‘ein Volksgedicht’) a measure of
98 James Parsons
can be made that what Schiller treats is the desire for humanity to become
like ‘the beauteous spark of the gods’ (‘schöner Götterfunken’) he lauds in
the poem’s first strophe. Schiller confirms this in the fifth strophe when
he proclaims that ‘from the fiery mirror of truth she smiles on the seeker’
(‘Aus der Wahrheit Feuerspiegel’ she – Joy – ‘lächelt sie den Forscher an’).
On the steep hill of virtue she guides the suf ferer’s path (‘Zu der Tugend
steilem Hügel leitet sie des Dulders Bahn’). The cultural reverberation of
these lines some six years later in Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), an opera
Beethoven deeply admired, opens up the possibility of understanding them
more completely. Through the scrim of good-natured entertainment, the
trappings of Freemasonry, the comic antics of a Papageno, Mozart’s opera
– just as does Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’, and, I contend, the choral finale –
treats the journey of self cultivation, that is Bildung.14 At the start of the
act II finale of Mozart’s opera the Three Youths sing,
soon, to announce the morning, the sun will arise on its golden path [gold’ner Bahn].
Soon superstition will disappear, soon the wise man will conquer. O gracious peace,
descend, return again to the hearts of men; then the earth will be a heavenly kingdom,
and mortals like the gods.15
when humankind contemplates its position in the world, that the infinite
is to be glimpsed.16
While it would be imprudent to put forward an overriding theme in
Schiller’s writings, there can be little doubt he places art at the crossroads.
As he writes in his 1802 essay ‘The Stage Considered as a Moral Institution’,
theatrical works – a concept I take to mean all art – provide ‘a school of
practical wisdom’, ‘an infallible key to the most secret passages of the human
soul.’ (Written in 1784 and first published in 1785 as ‘Was kann eine gute
stehende Schaubühne eigentlich wirken?’ [‘What Can a Good Standing
Theater Actually Accomplish?’], Schiller revised the essay in 1802 as ‘Die
Schaubühne als eine moralische Anstalt betrachtet.’) The fusion of opposites
– ‘all the ends that are aimed at by our inclinations’ – Kant identifies in his
Critique of Pure Reason also is important. As Schiller declares in his essay,
the stage encompasses a similar spectrum of inclinations: ‘the entire realm of
fantasy and history, past and future’ is ‘at its beck and call’. Accordingly, the
primary purpose of a stage work is to conduct us toward a ‘gentle harmony’,
one bridging not only the opposing concepts just mentioned but also our
‘animal state’ and ‘the higher ef forts of the mind’. Unifying such extremes
inspires a heightened awareness – Schiller’s word is Empfindung – a rea-
lignment of the senses or spiritual reawakening similar to the euphoria he
captures at the start of ‘An die Freude’: only drunk with fire, feuertrunken,
does one enter Joy’s sanctuary. Again from the 1802 essay, one learns that
in such revitalized Empfindung ‘we find ourselves once more’, a rediscov-
ery of the self through art Schiller labels ‘a triumph’. That victory is hard
won. Meeting its requirements, humankind ‘from all every walk of life,
having shed their shackles of af fectation and fashion, torn away from the
insistent pressure of fate, united by the all-embracing bond of brotherly
sympathy, resolved in one human race again, oblivious of themselves and
of the world, come closer to their divine origin’.17
16 Schiller, Aesthetic Education, Letter 14, 94–99; Letter 18, 122–127; and Letter 25,
184–189.
17 Schiller, ‘The Stage’, 28, 25, 24, 32.
102 James Parsons
What interests me in this last statement is not its idealism but the
contention that art permits humanity to glimpse not just the divine, but
also its origins in the divine, a pronouncement that finds a parallel in the
invocation with which Schiller starts his ‘An die Freude’: ‘Freude, schöner
Götterfunken, Tochter aus Elisium’. Intriguing, too, is the conditionality
Schiller locates in art’s reuniting powers. In the theater essay he mentions
that art is a guiding force allowing us to ‘find ourselves once more’. In
‘An die Freude’ he discloses that in entering Joy’s province one learns that
‘Deine Zauber binden wieder / Was die Mode streng getheilt’. The cou-
plet’s significance comes into focus only when one establishes its context.
A prerequisite for the latter is the knowledge that when Schiller revised
his ‘An die Freude’ for his 1803 Gedichte von Friederich Schiller he also
was at work on the essay On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy (‘Über
den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’). (Schiller published the essay
as the forward to his 1803 play The Bride of Messina or Brothers at War.
A Tragedy with Choruses (Die Braut von Messina oder die feindlichen Brüder.
Ein Trauerspiel mit Chören). Central to my argument is an awareness of
how atypical Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ is within the history of eighteenth-
century German poetry, featuring as it does after each eighth-line stro-
phe a four-line antistrophe the poet labels ‘Chorus’. Schiller thus seeks to
revive in his play and in his 1803 revision of his eighteenth-year old poem a
poetical practice closely linked with the ancient Greeks. This is no trif ling
bow to history. In both works he makes use of the chorus to inject a new
dimension, and not just the element of novelty since audiences of the time
certainly encountered choruses in opera. Whereas above I speculate on a
few of the reasons why Schiller subsequently found the tone and content
of his ‘An die Freude’ awkward, the interest he evinced in the idea of the
chorus at the time he revised the poem in 1803 in part explains why he saw
fit to include it in the 1803 volume. The chorus ‘purifies the tragic poem’,
creating a space for ref lection, an ‘organ of art’, that transforms ‘common
constricting reality’ into ‘das Poetische’, something ‘at once wholly ideal
and yet in the deepest sense real’. Schiller locates this reality at a ‘point of
indif ference’ – an Indif ferenzpunkt – a concept that, despite the English
The Musical Poetics of Modernity 103
18 ‘In der neuen Tragödie wird er zu einem Kunstorgan; er hilft die Poesie hervorbrin-
gen.’ Schiller, ‘Über den Gebrauch des Chors in der Tragödie’, 12: 205, 202, 198, 204.
Schiller goes on to long for a type of art ‘zugleich ganz ideell und doch im tiefsten
Sinne reell sein.’ ‘Was bloß die Sinne reizt, nur Stof f und rohes Element in einem
Dichterwerk und wird da, wo es vorherrscht, unausbleiblich das Poetische zerstören;
denn dieses liegt gerade in dem Indif ferenzpunkt des Ideellen und Sinnlichen.’
19 ‘Aber die Dichtkunst ist der elektrische Kondensator der Philosophie, jene verdichtet
erst das elektrische Spinngewebe und die Beatifikation der letztern zu Blitzen, die
erschüttern und heilen.’ ( Jean Paul, 4: 563. My own translation.)
20 Schiller, ‘The Stage’, 32.
104 James Parsons
23 Grey, Wagner’s Music Prose, 101–102, traces Wagner’s developing terminology for the
Ninth’s opening sonority, first as a ‘harsh outcry’, ‘cry of fear upon waking from a
frightful dream’, and Schreckensfanfare in three essays dating to 1846, 1870, and 1873
respectively.
24 ‘… diese unschuldvoll einfältige Volksweise.’ ‘In den dumpfen Bässen geht diese
Weise … und zutraulich still dahin, wie langverschüttete und übertäubte Jugend
erinnerungen.’ Marx, Leben 2: 285, 284.
106 James Parsons
heard that ‘tender voice’ with greatest clarity in the kind of song popular
in the German-speaking lands throughout most of the eighteenth century
and which Beethoven remarkably distills in the concluding movement of
his Ninth Symphony in the Freude tune. Such song typically basks in tune-
ful preeminence, uncluttered accompaniments, largely conjunct motion,
diatonic clarity, and strophic design.29 (Beethoven was no stranger to this
endeavor, having labored on its behalf in his 1816 Opus 98 song cycle An
die ferne Geliebte when he aspired, as the text declares, to song that springs
‘aus der vollen Brust / Ohne Kuns[st]gepräng erklungen’ [from a full heart,
sounding without the ostentation of art].) For Schiller the distinction
between what he calls ‘the most complicated’ and ‘unassuming simplicity’
is anything but frivolous. The realms are his means by which to engage in
a full-f ledged review of modern culture, one where: ‘nature must contrast
with art and put it to shame’.30
The intensity of expression Schiller reserves for that variety of nature
that ‘must contrast with art and put it to shame’ is tantamount to a cul-
tural wound, one that recalls Jean Paul’s desire for a form of poetry that
consolidates the ‘electrical spider’s web’ of philosophy into ‘lightning bolts
that agitate and heal’. In the sentence that follows Schiller’s longing for ‘our
mother’s tender voice’ in his naïve and sentimental poetry essay, he explains
the point more completely. ‘As long as we were mere children of nature we
were happy and complete,’ he writes. ‘We became free and lost both happi-
ness and completeness’.31 As I remarked at the start of this essay, regardless
of the binary opposition Schiller might consider, he does not set one up as
superior over the other. Anticipating the Indif ferenzpunkt of his 1803 essay,
Schiller, in Letter 25 of his Aesthetic Letters, af firms that neither nature
nor reason is to rule a person exclusively. The two ‘are meant to coexist, in
perfect independence of each other, and yet in perfect concord.’ Schiller’s
distinction takes me back to Wagner’s observation that the Ninth is ‘the
29 I provide a fuller account of the eighteenth-century German song in my essay ‘The
Eighteenth-Century Lied’.
30 Schiller, Friedrich Schiller Essays, 189, 180.
31 Schiller, Friedrich Schiller Essays, 192.
108 James Parsons
human Evangel of the art of the Future’ beyond which ‘no forward step is
possible’, a work of redemption that curiously cannot impart redemption.
Jürgen Habermas neatly sums up what Schiller (and Wagner?) seems to have
in mind when he states that modernity, whenever such has been at work,
pivots on a dynamic relationship with the past. The Enlightenment ‘ideal
of perfection’, Habermas writes, and the ‘infinite progress of knowledge’
inspired by modern science may have ‘produced a radicalized consciousness’
that ‘detached itself from all previous historical connection and understood
itself solely in abstract opposition to tradition and history as a whole’, yet
‘the modern still retains a secret connection to the classical’ past. Just as
the past contributes to our collective understanding of modernity, so,
too, does the future, and in an equally dynamic way. Such an avant-garde
‘explores hitherto unknown territory, exposes itself to the risk of sudden
and shocking encounters, conquers an as yet undetermined future … As
a self-negating movement, modernism is a “yearning for true presence”.’32
The same animating force informs Schiller’s aesthetic speculation, as it does
his view of nature’s relationship to the aesthetic. ‘Do not let it occur to you
any longer to want to change places with nature,’ he advises. ‘Instead, take
nature up into yourself and strike to wed its unlimited advantages to your
own endless prerogatives, and from the marriage of both strive to give birth
to something divine’.33 The quest for ‘something divine’ – ‘Freude, schöner
Götterfunken’, as Schiller records in his ‘An die Freude’ – absorbed him
for most of his life. As ref lected in his philosophical writings, the search
hinges on a reintegration of the aesthetic and the natural, ‘our mother’s
tender voice’. For Schiller, that attempt does not center simply on healing
culture’s wound. Bridging the gap between the beauty of nature and the
grandeur of the infinite, both domains Schiller traverses in his ‘An die
Freude’, is another way to trace the divine. As much of his writings bear
out, Schiller, sought nature in the sublime and the sublime in nature.
In this essay I hope I have advanced the thought that Schiller’s poem
relates to a larger cultural tradition. Once one locates that tradition, it
32 Habermas, 39–40.
33 Schiller, Friedrich Schiller Essays, 193.
The Musical Poetics of Modernity 109
34 Kerman, 194.
110 James Parsons
whole’.35 In looking only to the future, Wagner lost sight of the role the
past plays in modernity. The Joy melody, while being the laborious result
of Beethoven pursuing ‘both ends together’, also takes its cue from the self-
ef facing modesty of eighteenth-century German song, of which the many
settings of Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ form a noteworthy component.
Writing in 1812, the composer urged a young admirer to ‘not only
practice your art, but endeavor also to fathom its inner meaning; it deserves
this ef fort. For only art and science can raise men to the level of gods.’36
Beethoven’s words take us back to the trajectory Schiller plots in his ‘An die
Freude’, to where the humble worm moves by stages to the cherub who faces
God, or to cite the fifth choral antistrophe (lines 57–58), ‘die beßre Welt!’
the poet searches for ‘droben überm Sternenzelt’ (the better world, up there
above the starry vault). Reading Schiller’s ‘An die Freude’ in its entirety, one
is struck by its unyielding vertical resolve. The first strophe alone contains
four such examples: spark of the gods, heavenly one, [divine] sanctuary,
where your gentle wing abides (Götterfunken, Himmlische, Heiligthum, wo
dein sanfter Flügel weilt). Following the initial statement of the Freude tune
in the choral finale (mm. 92–115) by the cellos and double basses, Beethoven
matches Schiller’s heavenward ascent with a buildup of the overall con-
trapuntal texture, adding next the violas (m. 116), second violins (m. 139),
and first violins (m. 140), that is beginning in the lowest range of the string
instruments after which the others make their entrance in ascending fash-
ion. To be sure, the entire stretch of music from measures 92 to 202 builds
in intensity and, in the process, moves from relative simplicity to compara-
tive complexity. My point is that Beethoven’s compositional process here
stages, however symbolically, a progression that raises the listener to ‘the
level of gods’. At the same time, there also is the sense that this stretch of
music plays out Schiller’s previously mentioned ‘all embracing bond of …
sympathy’, the ‘triumph’ that ensues when humankind, ‘from all every walk
of life, having shed their shackles of af fectation and fashion, torn away from
the insistent pressure of fate, united by the all-embracing bond of broth-
erly sympathy, resolved in one human race again, oblivious of themselves
and of the world, come closer to their divine origin.’ In ignoring Schiller’s
‘An die Freude’ as a means to understand the finale, for too long my own
discipline of musicology has kept the Ninth’s ‘inner meaning’ at bay. Since
Schiller and Beethoven’s time humankind has lost a great deal of the con-
fidence it once had in the authority of art, science, or, for that matter, that
which might raise us to the level of gods. Perhaps we no longer care if the
composer’s last symphony concerns itself with the divine or the mundane.
Yet to understand it requires we engage with not only the ‘sea of f lames’
of Beethoven’s music but also Schiller’s poem. To call again on Habermas,
the Ninth unquestionably ‘explores hitherto unknown territory’, opening
vistas that bring with them ‘the risk of sudden and shocking encounters’.
Until culture and the scholars who presume to speak on its behalf accept
more fully the movement as the fusion of words and music it is, the choral
finale’s ‘true presence’, its modernity, will continue to elude us.
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NORMAN KASPER
Introduction
3 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 21. ‘Das freiwillige Dasein, das
Bestehen der Dinge durch sich selbst, die Existenz nach eignen und unabänderlichen
Gesetzen’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 707).
4 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 67. ‘Freiheit des Ideenvermögens’
(‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 778).
5 Schiller writes: ‘Das Gegenteil der naiven Empfindung ist nehmlich der ref lektierende
Verstand, und die sentimentalische Stimmung ist das Resultat des Bestrebens, auch
unter den Bedingungen der Ref lexion die naive Empfindung, dem Inhalt nach,
wieder herzustellen’ (Schiller, ‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 777). See
Szondi, ‘Das Naive ist das Sentimentalische’, 59–105, who extends this thought.
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 117
Schiller uses the term ‘pure innocence’8 in order to characterize the mindset
of children as opposed to the adult’s culture-bound attitude towards the
world. Children’s behaviour and feelings are based on ‘disposition’, ‘desti-
ny’9 and a necessity that also structures nature. As modern man is forced
to ref lect on his environment and his way of reality making in an endless
process, the child is equipped with natural access to her world. Therefore
it follows that because our childhood remains ‘the only unmutilated piece
of nature which we can still find in civilised humanity’ modern man’s feel-
ing for nature can be compared to that feeling ‘with which we lament the
vanished age of childhood and childlike innocence’.10 ‘[S]ensual truth’ and
‘living present’11 are attributes of the naïve. Both children and some ancient
poets are part of this world, having not yet become disenchanted by ref lec-
tion and the sentimental consequences of the idea. The development of art
follows the same rules as the development of mankind. There is a childlike
artlessness in ancient storytelling not ref lecting on narrative style, structure,
technique or perspective. Schiller names this kind of storytelling plastic, the
opposite of which is constituted by what he calls musical. Referring to the
elegiacal aspect of sentimental poetry as embodied by Klopstock, Schiller
describes the opposition of plastic and musical as follows: ‘According to
whether poetry imitates a certain object as the visual arts do or according
to whether it merely induces a certain state of mind as music does without
8 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 23. ‘reine[…] Unschuld’ (‘Über
naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 709).
9 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 23. ‘Anlage’, ‘Bestimmung’
(‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 710).
10 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 34. ‘Die einzige unverstüm-
melte Natur, die wir in der kultivierten Menschheit noch antref fen’, ‘womit wir das
entf lohene Alter der Kindheit und der kindischen Unschuld beklagen’ (‘Über naive
und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 726).
11 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘sinnliche Wahrheit’,
‘lebendige Gegenwart’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 735).
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 119
needing to have a particular object for it, it can be called graphic (three-
dimensional) or musical.’12 Schiller discusses the relationship between the
plastic and the musical in 1794 in almost the same manner as can be seen
in this passage. In his essay ‘On Matthisson’s Poems’13 he asks about the
possibility of incorporating landscape poetry and landscape painting in the
pulchritude-based discourse. Identifying Greek art with beauty, plasticity
and necessity in contrast to the pleasant colour ef fects of modern landscape
art, he continues the tradition of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes
that also structures On naïve and sentimental poetry and the colore-disegno
debate.14 Schiller likes ‘Claude Lorrain’s magical paintbrush’15 – but how
can his work and the work of Matthisson be thought of as callistic and not
just pleasant? The distinction between the beauty of form and the pleasure
of colour is accentuated in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. The old colour-
design debate is renewed in a transcendental reformulation. Whereas the
free beauty (‘pulchritudo vaga’) constitutes a free play in the interaction
12 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 100. ‘Je nachdem nehmlich die
Poesie entweder einen bestimmten Gegenstand nachahmt, wie die bildenden Künste
tun, oder je nachdem sie, wie die Tonkunst, bloß einen bestimmten Zustand des
Gemüts hervorbringt, ohne dazu eines bestimmten Gegenstandes nötig zu haben,
kann sie bildend (plastisch) oder musikalisch genannt werden.’ (‘Über naive und
sentimentalische Dichtung’, 756, emphasis in original.)
13 Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’.
14 See Jauß, ‘Schlegels and Schillers Replik auf die Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes’,
95–105. Jauß does not comment on the nexus between the Querelle and the colour-
design debate in French classicism (relating to this see Imdahl, Farbe, 35–73), but he
identifies the sentimental as the musical with non-objective tendencies in modern art
(‘Entgegenständlichung’, 102–103). As soon as colour is no longer subordinated to
design it unfolds a non-plastic, self-referential, musical aesthetics of reception. With
respect to the reformulation of the positions of the antique and the modern within
distinguishing between naïve and sentimental, a mixture of philosophical-speculative
(naïve – sentimental) and intellectual-historical empirical (anciens – modernes)
argumentation has been criticized: Hermand, ‘Schillers Abhandlung Über naïve
und sentimentalische Dichtung im Lichte der deutschen Popularphilosophie des 18.
Jahrhunderts’, 431–432.
15 Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1017 (‘Claude Lorrain’s Zauberpinsel’).
120 NORMAN KASPER
By prescribing to our imagination no other course but that which it would have had
to take in total freedom and according to its own laws. The poet’s purpose has to be
achieved through nature, thereby transforming external into internal necessity. It can
thereupon be seen […] that the highest degree of freedom is possible only through
the highest degree of determinacy.17
When one’s emotions are projected onto nature, these emotions ‘can be
represented with respect to their form’,18 like music. This is what landscape
poetry and landscape painting can learn: ‘[R]epresentation of the emotional
faculties’19 as some kind of formal expression without referring to the
world’s objects. As Schiller shows, especially in landscape painting the musi-
cal dimension is not based on the precision of mimetic forms – ‘because the
parts tend to vanish on the whole, and the ef fect is only achieved through
16 ‘In der Malerei, Bildhauerkunst, ja allen bildenden Künsten […] ist die Zeichnung
das Wesentliche, in welcher nicht, was in der Empfindung vergnügt, sondern bloß,
was durch seine Form gefällt, den Grund aller Anlagen für den Geschmack ausmacht.
Die Farben […] gehören zum Reiz; den Gegenstand an sich können sie zwar für die
Empfindung belebt, aber nicht anschauungswürdig und schön machen.’ Kant, Kritik
der Urteilskraft, 305, § 14., B 42.
17 ‘Dadurch, daß er [the poet] unserer Einbildungskraft keinen andern Gang vorschreibt,
als den sie in ihrer vollen Freiheit und nach ihren eigenen Gesetzen nehmen müßte,
daß er seinen Zweck durch Natur erreicht, und die äußere Notwendigkeit in eine
innere verwandelt. Es findet sich alsdann […] daß die höchste Freiheit gerade nur
durch die höchste Bestimmung möglich ist’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’,
1018–1019).
18 ‘ihrer Form nach […] der Darstellung fähig’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’,
1023).
19 ‘Darstellung des Empfindungsvermögens’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’,
1023).
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 121
masses’20 –, but on the formal necessity that leads the composition. Beneath
the projection of one’s emotions onto nature through reference to their
musical-picturesque dimension, nature can express and evoke ideas, ‘which
are necessary according to laws of symbolizing imagination’.21 Therefore,
reason tries to copy the structure of imagination’s free play: ‘Nature’s dead
letter becomes a living language of the mind’,22 as soon as the condition of
reason’s possibility, that is to say the structure of reason’s imagination-based
free play, ref lects itself in nature. Sensual experience and moral awareness
of the self are combined:
That lovely harmony of shapes, of tones and of light, which pleases man’s aesthetic
sense, will at the same time also satisfy his moral sense; the unbroken continuity
with which lines in space or tones in time merge into another is a natural symbol
of the disposition’s inner accordance with itself and of the ethical connectedness of
actions and feelings. And within the beautiful attitude evinced by a picturesque or
musical work of art, the representation of an even more beautiful, morally atuned
soul can be seen.23
20 ‘weil die Teile in dem Ganzen verschwinden, und der Ef fekt nur durch Massen
bewirkt wird’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1023).
21 ‘die nach Gesetzen der symbolisierenden Einbildungskraft notwendig [sind]’ (Schiller,
‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1025).
22 ‘der tote Buchstabe der Natur wird zu einer lebendigen Geistersprache’ (Schiller,
‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1025).
23 ‘Jene liebliche Harmonie der Gestalten, der Töne und des Lichts, die den ästhetischen
Sinn entzückt, befriedigt jetzt zugleich den moralischen; jene Stetigkeit, mit der sich
die Linien im Raum oder die Töne in der Zeit aneinander fügen, ist ein natürliches
Symbol der innern Übereinstimmung des Gemüts mit sich selbst und des sittlichen
Zusammenhangs der Handlungen und Gefühle, und in der schönen Haltung eines
pittoresken oder musikalischen Stücks malt sich die noch schönere einer sittlich
gestimmten Seele’ (Schiller, ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, 1025).
122 NORMAN KASPER
24 ‘daß wir in den Inhalt derselben wie in eine grundlose Tiefe blicken’ (Schiller, ‘Über
Matthissons Gedichte’, 1026).
25 The ‘ef fect’ of a landscape ‘is only achieved through masses’ (Schiller, ‘Über
Matthissons Gedichte’, 1023). Massing aims at a ‘true representation of the visible
appearance of things: for the eye, when at a suf ficient distance to comprehend the
whole of a human figure, a tree, or a building, within the field of vision, sees parts so
comparatively minute as the hair, the leaves, and the stones or bricks, in masses, and
not individually. Hence the mode of imitation was changed; and, as this massing
gave breadth to the lights and shadows, mellowed them into each other, and enabled
the artist to break and blend them together.’ Knight, 150–151.
26 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 126. ‘und das Sehen
für ihn einen eigenständigen Wert erlangt, so ist er auch schon ästhetisch frei und
der Spieltrieb hat sich entfaltet’ (‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in
einer Reihe von Briefen’, 662).
27 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 76. ‘Spieltrieb’,
‘Sachtrieb’, ‘Formtrieb’, ‘lebende Gestalt’ (emphasis in original), ‘Begrif f, der alles
materiale Sein, und alle unmittelbare Gegenwart in den Sinnen bedeutet’, ‘bloße
Impression’ (‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von
Briefen’, 609–610).
28 See Schiller, ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen’,
640, where he argues that ‘auch die geistreichste Musik durch ihre Materie noch immer
in einer größern Af finität zu den Sinnen steht, als die wahre ästhetische Freiheit
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 123
duldet’. In his review ‘Zu Gottfried Körners Aufsatz Über die Charakterdarstellung
in der Musik’, 1083, he writes accordingly: ‘Of fenbar beruht die Macht der Musik
auf ihrem körperlichen materiellen Teil. Aber weil in dem Reich der Schönheit
alle Macht, insofern sie blind ist, aufgehoben werden soll, so wird die Musik nur
ästhetisch durch Form’. ‘Form’ and ‘Macht’ can be compared to the relationship of
form impulse and sense impulse.
29 See Eberhard, Theorie der Schönen Künste und Wissenschaften, 147.
124 NORMAN KASPER
interpretation the naïve is not identified with the truth of the plastic but
with a kind of seeing that is concerned with the musical dimension of
the sentimental.
II
From the 1750s until the 1790s popular philosophers like Johann Georg
Sulzer and Moses Mendelssohn exposed the nature of art in its inf luence
on our sentiment. Intellectual valances became less decisive to the same
degree. Determining reorientations enables integration of the eye’s mode of
action into the sentiment-orientated discussion. Adopted from the English
sensualistic aesthetics, the variety, the melting and massing of colours, sfu-
mato and low dark-light contrasts are now no longer considered in terms
of their intellectual insuf ficiency. Colourfulness, as indicated by a cloudy
morning or an evening sky, is not measured against plastic-haptical quali-
ties but by its emotional ef fects. Next to the musical aesthetics of recep-
tion Schiller mentioned with reference to Klopstock, Claude Lorrain and
Friedrich von Matthisson, the term picturesque describes the sensualistic
dimension in a historical as well as in an anthropological-physiological way.
The well-known occurrence recounted by William Cheselden in 172830
can doubtless be considered as the prologue to the development of the
picturesque. Richard Payne Knight mentioned Cheselden and his patient
several times in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805).
30 The English surgeon William Cheselden is famous for performing one of the first eye
operations leading to recovery from blindness. In his interesting report he writes about
the convalescent, a thirteen-year old boy: ‘“We thought he soon knew what pictures
represented, which were shewed to him, but we found afterwards we were mistaken:
for about two months after he was couched he discovered at once, they represented
solid bodies; when to that time he considered them only as party-coloured planes,
or surfaces diversified with paint”’. Cited in Smith, A Compleat System of Opticks,
43–44.
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 125
A young man who starts to see without realizing and identifying the seen
– that is what interests the nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic
of the innocent eye and what Schiller points to in the form of a pictur-
esque painting and a musical poem as a force of attraction: ‘that we look
at their [aesthetic ideas] content as into a groundless depth’.31 The inno-
cence Schiller attested in children and naïve poets by stressing their ability
to apprehend a non-mediated sensual reality is replaced by an innocence
which no longer aims at the unity with oneself. In the changing of inno-
cence from a moral-intellectual to a more aesthetic, that is to say, aisthetic
value, two fundamental alterations can be recognized. In evolutionary
terms, we can detect a momentous change in the succession of styles. The
plastic character of art can no longer be considered as the idyllic beginning
of mankind as the origin of vision has to be distinguished from the origin
of the tactile sense. From this it follows that the innocent eye has nothing
to do with the idea on which the sentimental is based. Schiller character-
izes the naïve through the eye and its plastic products and the sentimental
through the inner sense or imagination. By way of contrast, the child-
like eye as the innocent eye is a picturesque not a sculpturesque one. The
resultant development can be outlined as follows: aiming for unity with
oneself and with nature, Schiller’s concept of innocence is a holistic one
that combines sensual, ontological and intellectual dimensions in terms
of ‘sensual truth’ and ‘living present’.32 In man’s idyllic historical origin as
well as in his developmental-psychological beginnings there was no need
for ref lecting on epistemological problems like the body-mind problem.
Compared with this, the sensualistic tradition of the innocent eye ref lects
on man in a physiological perspective. In isolating visibility from other
sensual functions and mental ref lection, a kind of gap separates man from
his seeing and the truth of the world.
31 ‘daß wir in den Inhalt derselben wie in eine grundlose Tiefe blicken’ (Schiller, ‘Über
Matthissons Gedichte’, 1026).
32 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘sinnliche Wahrheit’, ‘leb-
endige Gegenwart’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 735).
126 NORMAN KASPER
When John Ruskin footnoted his Elements of Drawing (1856) the
meaning of what he presented in the term ‘innocence of the eye’ was any-
thing but new. ‘The perception of solid forms is entirely a matter of expe-
rience’, he writes, and: ‘We see nothing but f lat colours […] The whole
technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called
the innocence of the eye, that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these
f lat stains of colours, merely as such, without consciousness of what they
signify, – as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight’.33 A
blind man suddenly gifted with sight – that is the story of the young man
treated by Cheselden (who lost the innocence of his eye step by step by
connecting optical and haptical information habitually). In English dis-
cussion of the picturesque, this topic has been accentuated dif ferently. As
Uvedale Price argues, on the one hand, in 1801, a ‘pure abstract enjoyment
of vision’34 seems to be possible in the future. In Richard Payne Knight’s
Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, pure visibility becomes, on the
other hand, a part of cultural criticism. Stressing the impact of education
and literacy on the development of children’s knowledge and cognition,
the sense of sight is to be considered as a form of sensual and pleasant self-
relation. ‘Children are delighted with every gay assemblage of colours: but
as the intellect and imagination acquire strength by culture and exercise,
they obtain so much inf luence over the sense, as to make it reject almost
every gratification, in which one of them does not participate.’35 Describing
seeing as an experience-based sort of learning Ruskin links his remarks to
that understanding of visibility. The eye loses its innocence, being restricted
by culture and exercise. Ruskin does not comment on the pleasures of
seeing (as Price and Knight do) referring to feeling, association or taste
but on seeing as an artistic necessity that the artist to-be has to bear in
mind. ‘Being suddenly endowed with sight’, he puts himself in the place
of someone who has to learn to see, who has no knowledge of the proper
33 Ruskin, 27.
34 Price, ‘Dialogue on the Distinct Characters of the Picturesque and the Beautiful’,
233.
35 Knight, 95–96.
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 127
colours of things. Therefore, he argues, the green of the grass can turn on
a sunny day into a ‘dusty-looking yellow’, and this is what you see without
knowing. Another example chosen by Ruskin is also based on the nature
of colour ef fects. A book is not a book: ‘it is to your eyes nothing but a
patch of white, variously gradated and spotted’; and a table is not a table
but ‘a patch of brown, variously darkened and veined’.36
The innocence Ruskin has pointed out has nothing to do with Schiller’s.
Aiming at the mode of perception, the objects by which the eye is af fected
are of little or no interest. This is what French impressionist art theory
and practice has learned from Ruskin. Once characterized as the naïve,
the plastic of the form is now listed as part of knowledge, culture and the
exercise that removes man from his childish state of nature. Innocence as
a metaphor changes its meaning: from ‘sensual truth’,37 which eliminates
subjective modes of representing and ref lecting in confirmation of oneself
and of the world’s objects, innocence shifts to signify the subjective mode
itself. In this sense, the innocent eye becomes a sentimental one in Schiller’s
classification, as picturesque theory shows. This eye focuses on the ‘state
of mind […] without needing to have a particular object for it’38 and – as a
consequence – without imitating or presenting nature. In other words, it is
about the musical as aimed at emotions, not about the plastic as referring to
the world’s things.39 The loss of plasticity is one of the characteristic features
36 Ruskin, 28.
37 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 40. ‘Sinnliche Wahrheit’ (‘Über
naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 735).
38 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 100. ‘bloß einen bestimmten
Zustand des Gemüts hervorbringt, ohne dazu eines bestimmten Gegenstandes nötig
zu haben’ (‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 756).
39 Although there is a shift in the code of the naïve and the sentimental the dichotomous
character of Schiller’s categories remains preserved. The plastic and the picturesque/
musical constitute in their transcendental-ontological foundation, as Wolfgang Binder
argues, ‘antithetische Seinsweisen’ governed by reality (plastic: naïve) or idea (musi-
cal/picturesque: sentimental). Binder, ‘Die Begrif fe “naiv” und “sentimentalisch” und
Schillers Drama’, 143. Wilfried Barner follows Binder but accentuates the antitheti-
cal character of the naïve and the sentimental in an anthropological-psychological
dimension. See Barner, ‘Anachronistische Klassizität’, 66.
128 NORMAN KASPER
III
49 Verworn writes: ‘Es ist aber ganz besonders interessant, daß wir in der Ontogenese
der Kinderkunst diesen cenogenetisch wirkenden Faktor, der den Ausfall der physio
plastischen Vorstufe bedingt, ganz genau kennen. Es ist die Erziehung oder – um
einen Begrif f zu gebrauchen, der in unserer Zeit allmählich anfängt, einen weniger
wohltuenden Klang anzunehmen – die “Bildung”. Schon in den ersten Lebensjahren
beginnt die künstliche Düngung der harmlosen Kinderseele mit Wissen, das nicht
auf Selbsterlerntem beruht. Das moderne Kind ist eine Treibhauspf lanze; der
132 NORMAN KASPER
paläolithische Jäger war ein Wildling, der sich in der Natur entwickelte. Darin
liegt der Unterschied der sich in ihrer Kunst äußert.’ Verworn, Ideoplastische Kunst,
72–73.
50 ‘Naive […] Physioplastik’. Verworn, Ideoplastische Kunst, 41, emphasis in original.
51 See Verworn, Naturwissenschaft und Weltanschauung, 26–28; Die Mechanik des
Geisteslebens, 10.
52 Schiller, On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, 67. ‘Freiheit des Ideenvermögens’
(‘Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung’, 778).
Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 133
mind problem as in Verworn but the first step to overcoming the division
on which he ref lects as a philosophical physician.53
IV
53 See Schiller, ‘Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen
mit seiner geistigen’; Riedel, Die Anthropologie des jungen Schiller, 100–142.
54 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 126. ‘Formtrieb’,
‘Sachtrieb’, ‘Spieltrieb’ (‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe
von Briefen’, 609).
55 See Poenicke, ‘Eine Geschichte der Angst?’, 78–79.
56 See Zelle, Die doppelte Ästhetik der Moderne, 179–184.
134 NORMAN KASPER
heuristical potential of the naïve and the sentimental can be seen. Schiller
distinguishes between an ‘absolute representation’ and ‘the representation
of an absolute’.57 The religious and metaphysical adoption of the non-
objective, sensual products of the innocent eye within nineteenth- and
twentieth-century aesthetic discourse can be read as a way of representing
the absolute without absolute representation. Combining the representa-
tion of the absolute with Schiller’s understanding of the sublime, as post-
structuralism has outlined, the sublime is updated in its overwhelming
aesthetics of ef fect.58 For example, Barnett Newman’s striving for imme-
diacy as described in his text The Sublime is Now! (1948) has to be seen in
relation to his assaults on colour’s plastic functionalizing as it is developed
in the same text and in the programmatic The Plasmic Image (1945).59
The overwhelming materiality of colour as an ef fect is here understood
as revelation that has to be protected from the form impulse and – con-
sequently – from ‘an art within a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek
ideal of beauty)’.60 It is obvious that the English picturesque theory as well
as Ruskin’s innocence of the eye can be considered as the prologue to an
immediate non-objective experience of the sublime. And it is also obvious
that such an understanding of colour ef fects marks an important dif ference
when contrasted with (picture) theories concentrating on concept and
knowledge. Leading on to a discourse-free zone, the innocent eye loses its
ethical relevance as outlined in Schiller’s understanding of the sublime and
the beautiful. The gesture of overwhelming is hollowed as soon as it is tied
to a convertible series of ef fects. Schiller’s Kantian division of free beauty
and sensual pleasure is transformed within an opposition that stresses on
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(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 117–124.
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1990), cited as NSW.
—— ‘The Plasmic Image’, NSW, 138–155.
—— ‘The Sublime is Now!’, NSW, 170–173.
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M. Andrews, ed., The Picturesque, Literary Sources and Documents, II, Debating
the Theory and Practice of the Picturesque (Mountfield: Helm Information),
231–264 (digest).
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(London: Allen, 1904).
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Main: DKV, 1992), cited as STS.
—— On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, trans. R. Snell (Bristol:
Thoemmes Press, 1994). ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer
Reihe von Briefen’, STS, 556–676.
—— On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, trans. H. Watanabe-O’Kelly
(Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1981). ‘Über naive und sentimentalische
Dichtung’, STS, 706–810.
—— ‘Über Matthissons Gedichte’, STS, 1016–1037; all cited translations by
N. Kasper.
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Schiller’s Concept of Innocence in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry 137
Secondary Sources
Homo Ludens
For, to mince matters no longer, man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the
word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.1
1 Schiller, AE 15, 107. ‘Denn, um es endlich auf einmal herauszusagen, der Mensch spielt
nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch,
wo er spielt’ (Schiller ÄE 15, 359). Quotes from Schiller’s Ästhetische Erziehung are
referenced with the abbreviations AE (English) and ÄE (German) and the respec-
tive letter and page numbers.
2 Whereas the term Homo sapiens was introduced by Linnaeus in 1760 as a species
designation for man (see Ritter 1178), the term Homo faber came into use only in
the 20th century, particularly through its application by Bergson and (critically) by
Scheler. Knowledgeable man, according to Bergson, arises from Homo faber’s ref lec-
tion on that which he has manufactured (see Ritter, Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 1174).
Scheler criticises the hierarchy inherent to this approach, which places knowledge of
authority and achievement above the educational and redemptive knowledge that
distinguishes man when one thinks of him as defined by reason and God (ibid.).
140 Marie-Christin Wilm
By some the origin and fundamentals of play have been described as a discharge of
superabundant vital energy, by others as the satisfaction of some ‘imitative instinct’,
or again simply a ‘need’ for relaxation. According to another theory play constitutes
a training of the young creature for the serious work that life will demand later.
According to another it serves as an exercise in restraint needful to the individual.
Some find the principle of play in an innate urge to exercise a certain faculty, or in
the desire to dominate or compete. Yet others regard it as an ‘abreaction’ – an outlet
for harmful impulses, as the necessary restorer of energy wasted by one-sided activ-
ity, as ‘wish-fulfilment’, as a fiction designed to keep up the feeling of personal value.
(Homo Ludens, 2)
3 Huizinga had previously investigated the fundamental meaning of play for human
culture in three lectures, which were published in Dutch, German and English
between 1933 and 1937 and which in nuce contain the core theses of the later book.
Due space constraints, the text can not be quoted in the original Dutch version.
4 For the reception of Huizinga’s play theory see Bührmann, ‘Das “Spiel der Natur
völker”’, 135–156.
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 141
I cannot here pursue the multitude of theories of play upon which this
quote touches,5 but let us take as exemplary Freud’s interpretation of play
as ‘conservation of ef fort’, which he develops in his 1908 lecture Creative
Writers and Daydreaming: through play children and writers alike try to
keep away ‘from the joyless demands of reality’; both children and writers
transfer the things burdening them in reality into a new order favourable
to them. Thus the opposite of play, according to Freud, is not seriousness
but reality.6 Huizinga’s justification of his critique becomes apparent here:
like all the others whose approaches he has outlined, Freud too assumes
that ‘play must serve something which is not play, that it must have some
kind of biological purpose.’ Instead of taking on the phenomenon of play
directly with the ‘quantitative methods of experimental science,’ Huizinga
aims his attention first at ‘its profoundly aesthetic quality’ (Homo Ludens,
2). In this I wish to follow his lead, and do so in regards to the three terms
‘beauty’, ‘play’, and ‘freedom’, as these lie at the centre not only of Huizinga’s
concept of play but also of Schiller’s.
This article will neither neglect nor overemphasize the fact that, notwith-
standing the all-too-familiar scholarly cliché that Huizinga’s concept of
play would be unthinkable without Schiller,7 the two authors’ concepts
of play are fundamentally divergent. It is true that Schiller and Huizinga
speak of dif ferent things when they say ‘play’; at the same time, however,
both thinkers work with a highly significant set of terms to describe that
5 A comprehensive survey on the meanings of the term and the conceptional variety
of conceptions of play is provided in Wetzel, ‘Spiel’, 577–618.
6 See for these (as opposed to other) Freudian interpretations of play, Wetzel, ‘Spiel’,
597–598.
7 See Zelle, Über die ästhetische Erziehung, 438.
142 Marie-Christin Wilm
which they call ‘play’ – and both use exactly the same three terms. I shall
demonstrate that in both Huizinga’s and Schiller’s approaches ‘play’ is
closely connected with the concepts of beauty and freedom. The following
will investigate both the comparable structure and the divergent deploy-
ment of this three-term constellation.
Although Huizinga is unwavering in his assumption that not only all human
beings but also animals engage in play, he directs his attention to the ‘func-
tion of culture proper’ that is expressed ‘not as it appears in the life of the
animal or the child, we begin where biology and psychology leave of f ’
(Homo Ludens, 2), as it is only in terms of culture that one can speak of
a concept of play that does not have to be conceived biologically or psy-
chologically. How does Huizinga approach the concept of play that he, as
previously mentioned, does not understand as an expression of culture but
through which he, rather conversely, seeks to demonstrate that ‘myth and
ritual,’ ‘law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom
and science … are rooted in the primeval soil of play’ (Homo Ludens, 13)?
Huizinga first establishes that play is an independent, autonomous
form, lying beyond the dichotomies of ‘wisdom and folly,’ ‘truth and false-
hood’ and ‘good and evil.’ Although play is thus a ‘non-material activity’
(Homo Ludens, 6), it fulfils neither an epistemic nor a logical nor a moral
function. Huizinga sees the proximity of play to the aesthetic, however, as
indisputable: ‘Many and close are the links that connect play with beauty’
(Homo Ludens, 7). He identifies these links as freedom, indif ference, and
governance by rules, as his enumeration of the formal ‘main characteristics
of play’ reveals: ‘First and foremost, then, all play is a voluntary activity’
(Homo Ludens, 7). Play is not imposed through physical necessity, nor
through moral obligation, but rather human play sets itself apart from
other natural processes through its character of freedom: ‘Here, then, we
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 143
have the first main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom’
(Homo Ludens, 16).
The assumption that play and man at play are free is at the same time
the sine qua non of Huizinga’s theory of play. Before man can become con-
scious of duties and cultural rituals, which can be potentially life-threatening
in nature, for example the feudalization process in the waning days of the
ancient Chinese seasonal festivities, he experiences, individually or col-
lectively, his own freedom in play.8
According to Huizinga, this freedom is grounded in the ‘inf lux of
mind’ that ‘breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos’ (Homo
Ludens, 12). In contrast to the ‘point of view of a world wholly determined
by the operation of blind forces’ (Homo Ludens, 3), from which scholars
interpreted human beings, the state, the economy and, of course, nature
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mind is capable,
according to Huizinga, of leading humanity out of its predictable deter-
minedness: ‘The very existence of play continually confirms the supra-
logical nature of the human situation […]. We play and know what we play,
so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.’9
In the third section I shall return to this stipulation by Huizinga. For now
it is to be noted that Huizinga’s concept of mind stands for an intangible
human power, which is independent of reason, and which ensures that
the human being at play neither acts upon nor is inf luenced by ‘physical
necessity’ or ‘moral duty’ (Homo Ludens, 3).
Tellingly, in Homo Ludens Huizinga does not ground his claim of the
freedom of man at play anthropologically. He positions his definition of
freedom in opposition to the then-current discourse of play, which in its
structurally rational interpretation of play focuses not on human freedom
but on determination. On the other hand, a glance at Huizinga’s oeuvre
reveals that his own postulate of freedom is grounded in his humanistic
idea of man, which surfaces within his theory of play.10 Huizinga himself
ref lects upon the problems concealed in, or rather revealed by, this part
of his theory of play when he demands that ‘obviously, freedom must
be understood here in the wider sense that leaves untouched the philo-
sophical problem of determinism.’11 Huizinga shifts the burden of proof:
human play is not made possible by a freedom that must first be proved,
but rather the reverse is true: the games existing worldwide both currently
and throughout history of fer evidence of human freedom.
This notion of man at play acting freely is closely connected to the
second characteristic of Huizinga’s concept of play: ‘play is not ‘ordinary’
or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere
of activity with a disposition all of its own’ (Homo Ludens, 8). The activity
of man at play is distinguished by standing ‘outside the immediate satis-
faction of wants and appetites, indeed it interrupts the appetitive process.’
According to Huizinga, one can thus speak of the ‘disinterestedness’ of play
(Homo Ludens, 9). Play as an end in itself corresponds to a voluntary human
activity that is played neither to further particular abilities or advantages
nor in reaction to feelings of longing or fear.
Huizinga identifies as the third characteristic of play ‘its secludedness,
its limitedness’ (Homo Ludens, 9) and the attendant repeatability and
rule-governedness. Playgrounds, whether arena, gaming table or cinema,
become ‘temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the
performance of an act apart’ (Homo Ludens, 10). The order of play thus
brings ‘a temporary, limited perfection’ into ‘an imperfect world and into
the confusion of life’ and this ‘profound af finity between play and order
is perhaps the reason why play … seems to lie to such a large extent in the
field of aesthetics’ (Homo Ludens, 10).
It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form,
which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of
play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the
ef fects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc.
Play casts a spell over us; it is ‘enchanting’, ‘captivating.’ (Homo Ludens, 10)
Play is here seen as analogous to beauty in two senses. First, there is a level,
as it were, of the aesthetics of production, at which play and beauty are
described as products of the creation of a limited and complete order,
set in opposition to the unlimited and incomplete nature of reality. It is
no coincidence that the above description of the ‘play-ground’ as its own
temporary world, ‘dedicated to the performance of an act apart’ (Homo
Ludens, 10), is reminiscent of the central definition of tragedy in Aristotle’s
Poetics. The Poetics presents tragedy as the emulation of a full and completed
act, whereby ‘full’ designates that which has a beginning, a middle and an
end.12 The decisive dif ference between Aristotle and Huizinga is, however,
that the latter views the creation of order not as mimesis of a real or meta-
physically existing order outside of art or play, but rather as a product that
is explicitly artificially created, and which constitutes an opposite to the
disorder of reality. The classic formula of the final verse in the prologue to
Schiller’s 1798 work Wallenstein also underscores the fundamental separa-
tion between life and art: ‘life is serious, art is light-hearted.’
At the same time, Schiller’s concept of light-heartedness expresses the
second central aspect of Huizinga’s analogy between beauty and play, as
Huizinga also appraises beauty and play as analogue phenomena in terms
of aesthetics of reception: both beauty and play bring tension and relaxa-
tion to human life in equal measure (‘tension’, ‘resolution’); both provide
variety (‘contrast’, ‘variation’) and equilibrium (‘poise’, ‘balance’). (Homo
12 Compare the beginning of the seventh chapter of Poetics as well as Arbogast Schmitt’s
insightful commentary in Flashar, Aristoteles, Werke in deutscher Übersetzung,
361–364.
146 Marie-Christin Wilm
13 See for example the chapter headings Play and Law (IV), Play and War (V), Play
and Knowing (VI), Play and Poetry (VII).
14 Schiller, AE, 2, 9: ‘weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freyheit
wandert.’
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 147
anthropological experience: where reason does not form concepts but rather
is in constant interplay with the imagination, man experiences himself not
in his physical needs or as a rational being but rather as a being that is free
and, in this freedom, unlimitedly determinable.15
The concept of freedom thus stands at the heart of Schiller’s theory of
play and is at the same time made more specific: the freedom of the aesthetic
state, which is addressed in regard to the play of the powers of the psyche,
is fundamentally dif ferent from the freedom that reason is able to lend to
man when he raises himself above his sorrows, his body and his feelings.
Reality, according to Schiller, demands not a model of reconciliation but
rather a model of self-discipline; the theory of the sublime corresponds
on the aesthetic side to this self-discipline.16
When, however, Schiller uses the concept of the play-drive in order
to think through and formulate a commonality between the formal drive
(Formtrieb) and the material drive (Stof ftrieb), he postulates a freedom
that is based on the ‘mixed nature’17 of humanity. In the fifteenth letter of
his Aesthetic Education, Schiller describes what happens when the formal
and material drives are simultaneously active:
The material drive, like the formal drive, is wholly earnest in its demands; for, in the
sphere of knowledge, the former is concerned with the reality, the latter with the
necessity of things; while in the sphere of action, the first is directed towards the
preservation of life, the second towards the maintenance of dignity: both, therefore,
towards truth and towards perfection. But life becomes of less consequence once
human dignity enters in, and duty ceases to be a constraint once inclination exerts
its pull; similarly our psyche accepts the reality of things, or material truth, with
greater freedom or serenity once this latter encounters formal truth, or the law of
necessity, and no longer feels constrained by abstraction once this can be accom-
panied by the immediacy of intuition. In a word: by entering in association with
ideas all reality loses its earnestness because it then becomes of small account; and
15 On the current state of research und for further literature see Zelle, Über die ästhetische
Erziehung, 424–437.
16 See Schiller, Über das Erhabene (On the Sublime), whose conception, with the aim
of educating (Erziehung zum Idealschönen), is clearly a part of the context of the
16th letter of Aesthetic Education.
17 Schiller, AE, 19, 373: ‘gemischte Natur’.
148 Marie-Christin Wilm
by coinciding with feeling necessity divests itself of its earnestness because it then
becomes of light weight.18
When the formal and material drives appear simultaneously, they are trans-
formed, according to Schiller, into a third drive, the ‘play-drive’ (Spieltrieb),
which is, however, to be understood not as a real third drive but simply
as the interaction, I am tempted to say the interplay, of the material and
formal drives.19
To counter the possible objection that beauty is here conceived as
‘mere play,’20 Schiller presents the formulation of his anthropology of a
mixed human nature that culminates in the initially cited postulation of
man as Homo Ludens:
But how can we speak of mere play, when we know that it is precisely play and play
alone, which of all man’s states and conditions is the one which makes him whole
and unfolds both sides of his nature at once? What you, according to your idea of
the matter, call limitation, I, according to mine – which I have justified by truth –
call expansion. I, therefore, would prefer to put it exactly the opposite way round
18 Schiller, AE, 15, 105. ‘Dem Stof ftrieb wie dem Formtrieb ist es mit ihren Forderungen
ernst, weil der eine sich, beym Erkennen, auf die Wirklichkeit, der andre auf die
Nothwendigkeit der Dinge bezieht; weil, beym Handeln, der erste auf Erhaltung
des Lebens, der zweyte auf Bewahrung der Würde, beyde also auf Wahrheit und
Vollkommenheit gerichtet sind. Aber das Leben wird gleichgültiger, so wie die Würde
sich einmischt, und die Pf licht nöthigt nicht mehr, sobald die Neigung zieht: eben so
nimmt das Gemüth die Wirklichkeit der Dinge, die materiale Wahrheit, freyer und
ruhiger auf, sobald solche der formalen Wahrheit, dem Gesetz der Nothwendigkeit,
begegnet, und fühlt sich durch Abstraktion nicht mehr angespannt, sobald die
unmittelbare Anschauung sie begleiten kann. Mit einem Wort: indem es mit Ideen
in Gemeinschaft kommt, verliert alles Wirkliche seinen Ernst, weil es klein wird, und
indem es mit der Empfindung zusammen trif ft, legt das Nothwendige den seinen
(Ernst) ab, weil es leicht wird.’
19 On the concept of play in Schiller’s ÄE see Nethersole, ‘… die Triebe zu leben, zu
schaf fen, zu spielen’, 167–188.
20 Schiller, AE, 15, 105: ‘bloßes Spiel.’
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 149
and say: the agreeable, the good, the perfect, with these man is merely in earnest;
but with beauty he plays.21
For Schiller, for Huizinga 150 years later, play thus stands for a temporally
and spatially limited, purposeless, that is, autonomous sphere in which
bodily and moral-logical determination of the individual human life are
nullified. Beauty, play and freedom are related to each other in Aesthetic
Education, just as they are in Homo Ludens, albeit in an inverse relation:
whereas for Huizinga the global existence of innumerable games indicates
that freedom is a form of being human beyond determination, for Schiller
the play of the powers of the psyche is the only basis of freedom amidst
the forms of determination to which we are always physically and mor-
ally subordinate. In Schiller’s anthropology, the aesthetic state fulfils an
indispensable function not only in the reception of art but also in enabling
rational action:
Man cannot pass directly from feeling to thought; he must first take one step back-
wards, since only through one determination being annulled again can a contrary
determination take its place. In order to exchange passivity for autonomy, a passive
determination for an active one, man must therefore be momentarily free of all deter-
mination whatsoever, and pass through a state of pure determinability.22
21 Schiller, AE, 15, 105. ‘Aber was heißt denn ein bloßes Spiel, nachdem wir wissen,
dass unter allen Zuständen des Menschen gerade das Spiel und nur das Spiel es ist,
was ihn vollständig macht, und seine doppelte Natur auf einmal entfaltet. Was Sie
(die Bedenkenträger) nach Ihrer Vorstellung der Sache, Einschränkung nennen, das
nenne ich, nach der meinen, die ich durch Beweise gerechtfertigt habe, Erweiterung.
Ich würde also vielmehr umgekehrt sagen: mit dem Angenehmen, mit dem Guten,
mit dem Vollkommenen ist es dem Menschen nur ernst, aber mit der Schönheit
spielt er.’
22 Schiller, AE, 20, 139. ‘Der Mensch kann nicht unmittelbar vom Empfinden
zum Denken übergehen; er muß einen Schritt zurückthun, weil nur, indem eine
Determination wieder aufgehoben wird, die entgegengesetzte eintreten kann. Er
muß also, um Leiden mit Selbstthätigkeit, um eine passive Bestimmung mit einer
aktiven zu vertauschen, augenblicklich von aller Bestimmung frey seyn, und einen
Zustand der bloßen Bestimmbarkeit durchlaufen.’
150 Marie-Christin Wilm
Our psyche passes, then, from sensation to thought via a middle disposition in
which sense and reason are both active at the same time. Precisely for this reason,
however, they cancel each other out as determining forces, and bring about a nega-
tion by means of an opposition. This middle disposition, in which the psyche is
subject neither to moral nor to physical constraint, and yet is active in both these
ways, pre-eminently deserves to be called a free disposition; and if we are to call the
condition of sensuous determination the physical, and the condition of rational
determination the logical or moral, then we must call this condition of real and
active determinability the aesthetic.25
23 ‘unbegrenzte Bestimmbarkeit’.
24 Within the debate on the question of how the connection between body and mind
is to be thought of, Huizinga’s placement of freedom beyond ‘the philosophical
problem of determinism’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 7) remains unsatisfactory as he
thereby avoids the logical possibility of simultaneity of freedom and necessity, which
was formulated exemplarily in Kant’s resolution to the third antinomy and had stood
at the center of anthropological discourse since the late eighteenth century.
25 Schiller, AE, 20, 141. ‘Das Gemüth geht also von der Empfindung zum Gedanken
durch eine mittlere Stimmung über, in welcher Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft zugleich
thätig sind, eben deswegen aber ihre bestimmende Gewalt gegenseitig aufheben, und
durch eine Entgegensetzung eine Negation bewirken. Diese mittlere Stimmung, in
welcher das Gemüth weder physisch noch moralisch genöthigt, und doch auf beyde
Art thätig ist, verdient vorzugsweise eine freye Stimmung zu heißen.’
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 151
Preliminary Conclusions
Both Huizinga and Schiller use the concept of play within a triad: beauty,
play and freedom are closely connected in both concepts of play. In terms
of the aesthetics of production, the form that is made possible by the expe-
rience of order and harmony (seen in contrast to the chaos of life)26 leads
in terms of aesthetics of ef fect to a state of disinterest and activity27 and
of ‘lofty equanimity and freedom of the spirit, combined with power and
vigour.’28 Both authors characterize this state as the experience of freedom:
Huizinga names it play, as man acting in this state is released from all pur-
poseful action, while Schiller speaks of an aesthetic state in which the powers
of man’s psyche are directed neither to the acquisition of knowledge nor
to his livelihood but rather to play as an end in itself.
Along with these structural similarities there is a fundamental dif fer-
ence in the theory of freedom underlying the two concepts of play: to
provide a basis for the aesthetic state as a state of freedom, Schiller uses the
figure – taken from mechanics – of opposites cancelling each other out: a
balance is in equilibrium when both scales carry equal weight. Applied to
the determination of human beings, which can under no circumstances
be dismissed, this means that man experiences himself as free when one
form of determination is set in opposition to the other in such a way that
the two cancel each other out.29
26 With the exception of the twenty-second letter, in which he speaks of the nature of
the art work, of its ‘aesthetic organisation’ and the ‘harmony of the whole’ (AE, 22,
157), Schiller’s remarks on the aesthetics of production in the Aesthetic Education
remain few and far between. Of course, there are also numerous comments, for
instance, in his correspondence with Goethe, that resonate with Huizinga’s thesis
on the aesthetics of production, which sees play, like beauty, as distinguished by
‘rhythm and harmony’ (Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10).
27 Compare Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 16.
28 Schiller, AE, 22, 153. ‘Gleichmüthigkeit und Freyheit des Geistes, mit Kraft und
Rüstigkeit verbunden.’
29 Compare Schiller, AE, 20.
152 Marie-Christin Wilm
30 Compare Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 168. Considering the subject matter, it would
have to be assumed that the eminently erudite Huizinga would also engage with the
Aesthetic Education, even if there were no mention of Schiller’s treatise.
31 Compare Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 16.
32 Schiller too wrote his Aesthetic Education in politically dif ficult times, against the
backdrop of the terror of the French Revolution, to whose inhuman realisation of the
noble ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity Schiller proposes an aesthetic and humane
freedom.
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 153
33 Schiller, AE, 13, 85. ‘Die beyden Triebe, die die den Begrif f der Menschheit erschöp-
fen, und ein dritter Grundtrieb, der beyde vermitteln könnte, ist schlechterdings ein
undenkbarer Begrif f.’
154 Marie-Christin Wilm
A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo
Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable
after all as the Eighteenth Century, with its worship of reason and its naive optimism,
thought us; hence modern fashion inclines to designate our species as Homo Faber:
Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens it is, as a
name specific of the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals
too are makers. There is a third function, however, applicable to both human and
animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making – namely, playing. It seems
to me that next to Homo Faber, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in
our nomenclature. (Homo Ludens, ix)
because its games are neither useless nor irrational, but rather calculating,
manipulative and authority-af firming.36
To conclude, it is therein that the decisive dif ference between Schiller’s
and Huizinga’s theories of play lies. Although we have seen that Schiller’s
theory demanded autonomy for play and the player, as well as promising
man freedom not as a rational being, but rather as a being of mixed nature,
who simultaneously thinks and feels, his evidence for the experience of free-
dom in the aesthetic state is a logical construct. When the scales are level
the balance is level; man automatically becomes free, as could be deduced
from the twentieth letter of Aesthetic Education, if only ‘sense and reason
are both active at the same time.’37
In view, however, of the mistrust of reason that we have seen Huizinga
to show, this equation cannot work out for him. Huizinga had served in
the First World War and had outlined the rising threat from Germany
very clear-sightedly in his 1935 work In the Shadow of Tomorrow. Given
the state of the world in the 1930s, he is mistrustful of the central role that
reason plays in the freedom-theoretical foundation of the concept of play
and thus also in Schiller’s aesthetics, however much he acknowledges and
describes the ‘play-forms in art’ (Homo Ludens, 173–174).
It is nonetheless clear that Huizinga limits himself to proclaiming
freedom for the sphere of actual games, as ‘none of these conditions entitles
us to speak of a play-element in contemporary art’ (Homo Ludens, 197).
In ‘contemporary civilization’ (Homo Ludens, 195) art has proven itself to
be not a place of aesthetic freedom but rather is
36 See also Huizinga’s critical analysis of his times in Im Schatten von Morgen (In the
Shadow of Tomorrow) of 1935.
37 Schiller, AE, 20, 375. ‘Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft zugleich thätig sind’.
Huizinga’s and Schiller’s Theories of Freedom 157
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston, MA:
Beacon Press, 2008).
——Im Schatten von Morgen. Eine Diagnose des kulturellen Leidens unserer Zeit, trans.
W. Kaegi (Bern: Gotthelf-Verlag, 1935).
Schiller, F. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans.
E. M. Wilkinson and L. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). Briefe
über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Serie von Briefen, Schillers
Werke. Nationalausgabe, Vol. 20 (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962),
309–412.
38 Huizinga’s thoughts on the (close) relationship of play to cult and sacred acts also
count among these: ‘it has been shown again and again how dif ficult it is to draw the
line between, on the one hand, permanent social groupings – particularly in archaic
cultures with their extremely important, solemn, indeed sacred customs – and the
sphere of play on the other’ (Homo Ludens, 12).
39 I would like to thank Jane Yager and Andy Simanowitz for the translation of this
article.
158 Marie-Christin Wilm
Secondary Sources
Now that American hotels are decorated with abstract paintings […] and
aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially af fordable, radicalism
itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical.1
Introduction
1 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 37. ‘da amerikanische Hotels mit abstrakten Gemälden […]
ausstaf fiert sind, der ästhetische Radikalismus gesellschaftlich nicht zuviel kostet, hat
er zu zahlen: er ist gar nicht mehr radikal’ (Ästhetische Theorie, 51).
160 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
subject to live more freely, will help illustrate the critical congruity of
Schiller and Greenberg.
The present study attempts to draw out these striking parallels in
order to investigate the contemporary relevance of the belief that the aes-
thetic contains the seeds of a potential political or social revolution. I will
suggest that Greenberg’s art criticism, as much a late manifestation of
Schillerian as Kantian aesthetics, may point to more than the demise of
his modernist commitments, but might also point forward to yet another
assertion of the transformative power of the aesthetic evident in recent
contemporary art.
By 1959, Clement Greenberg had given up hope in most of the artistic
production f lowing out of his formerly favored approaches. An imperious
critic of the post-World War II American art scene who was often accused of
being prescriptive, Greenberg reached such a point of critical exasperation
that he could no longer sanction the excesses of the Abstract Expressionist
painters. These artists had collectively wandered into regions that his critical
discourse could not follow, away from abstraction and into figuration and
away from self-imposed discipline into psychological depths; these paint-
ers and their second generation progeny became mired in a painterly mud
and were ‘choked with form, the way all academic art is.’2 As Greenberg
put it, de Kooning was a great painter, but he ‘led a generation […] to their
doom.’3 It was apparent to Greenberg that the only way that form could
carry the avant-garde forward was by further refining significant form
into chromatic Post-Painterly Abstraction. Greenberg’s dilemma thereby
amounted to much more than a shift in aesthetic delectation.
two recurrent critical axes: the idea of freedom (articulated in individual
experience); and the degree to which the aesthetic experience of freedom
makes good on its promise by realizing some revolutionary potential.
4 ‘uninteressierte freie Schätzung des reinen Scheins’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 204–205).
References to Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters will
come from the Wilkinson and Willoughby parallel text translation with using the
letter and page numbers, unless otherwise noted.
164 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
In the case of the eye and the ear, she herself has driven importune matter back from
the organs of sense, and the object, with which in the case of our more animal senses
we have direct contact, is set at a distance from us. […] The object of touch is a force
to which we are subjected; the object of eye and ear a form that we engender. […]
Once he does begin to enjoy through the eye, and seeing acquires for him a value of
its own, he is already aesthetically free and the play-drive has started to develop.5
In Schiller’s hierarchy of the senses, vision and hearing are most abstracted
from natural response and are therefore more capable of expressing the
freedom of the subject. Schiller takes the Kantian aesthetic and makes it
self-justifying and autonomous. Even though Schiller’s is an autonomy
with social purpose, it is aesthetic autonomy first.
Greenberg had a consistent interest in Kant that ‘over time’, suggests
John O’Brian, ‘loomed progressively larger in [his] thinking.’6 In 1967,
Greenberg develops one of his most extensive passages drawing on Kantian
notions of aesthetic judgment and the verdict of communal taste. In it, he
suggests that ‘aesthetic judgments are immediate, intuitive, undeliberate,
and involuntary […]’. That qualitative principles or norms are there some-
where, in subliminal operation, is certain; otherwise aesthetic judgments
5 ‘In dem Auge und dem Ohr ist die andringende Materie schon hinweggewälzt von
den Sinnen, und das Objekt entfernt sich von uns, das wir in den tierischen Sinnen
unmittelbar berühren. […] Der Gegenstand des Takts ist eine Gewalt, die wir erleiden;
der Gegenstand des Auges und des Ohrs ist eine Form, die wir erzeugen. […] Sobald
er anfängt, mit dem Auge zu geniessen, und das Sehen fur ihn einen selbständigen
Wert erlangt, so ist er auch schon ästhetisch frei, und der Spieltrieb hat sich entfaltet’
(Schiller, Letter XXVI, 194–195).
6 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. III, xxii.
Two Hundred Years of Aesthetic Modernism 165
would be purely subjective, and that they are not is shown by the fact that
the verdict of those who care most about art and pay it the most attention
converge over the course of time to form a consensus.7 While Greenberg
had already used Kant’s aesthetics as the basis for a class he taught at Black
Mountain College in 1950, his explicit references to Kant increase dramati-
cally in the period that he codifies his critical approach, from 1955–70. As
Greenberg says in 1955, Kant gives us ‘the most satisfactory basis for aes-
thetics we have yet’, the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.8
If Greenberg fancies himself a Kantian because he too is interested
in judgment and critical consensus, he nevertheless justifies modernist
abstraction on grounds that are more similar to those found in Schiller
than in Kant. Much as Schiller historically situates the dif ference between
naïve and sentimental forms of poetry, Greenberg argues that abstraction
develops as a historical response to particular contemporary subjective
needs rather than out of a categorical necessity. Like Schiller, Greenberg
believes that his audience needs the kind of aesthetic education that great
art provides in order to develop freedom, the freedom that the aesthetic
experience fosters and promises.
The key article indicating Greenberg’s turn to the Kantian tradition
is ‘The Case for Abstract Art’, which appeared in the Saturday Evening
Post in 1959. Greenberg’s choice of this middlebrow publishing venue
is particularly striking considering the fact that in 1939 he wrote ‘Avant-
Garde and Kitsch’, where he derided the popular art of Norman Rockwell’s
Saturday Evening Post covers in his very first line. Remarkably, Greenberg
addresses this magazine’s middle-class American readers by making an
argument for the relevance of abstract art on the basis of Kantian disin-
terestedness. Greenberg suggests that modernist art and especially abstract
art is an antidote to the ‘interested, purposeful activity’ which dominates
the life of the West, especially in the extreme case of America. Experience
in and for itself with no aim or purpose is what Greenberg has in mind
as an antidote to such a practical-mindedness: ‘I think a poor life is lived
by anyone who doesn’t regularly take time out to stand and gaze, or sit
and listen, or touch, or smell, or brood, without any further end in mind,
simply for the sake of the satisfaction gotten from that which is gazed at,
listened to, touched, smelled, or brooded upon.’9 Here, he suggests that,
historically, ‘traditional’ art (or, representational art) operated as the ‘self-
cure and self-correction’ to the hungers and desires fostered by Western
culture’s means/ends rationality. Arguing for disinterested form in this
essay, Greenberg supposes that, ‘traditional painting is like literature’ in
‘that it tends to involve us in the interested as well as disinterested by pre-
senting us with images of things that are inconceivable outside time and
action.’10 Schiller too believed that the formal quality of art held greater
potential for an experience of freedom in the subject than subject matter.
Schiller argues that, ‘in a truly successful work of art the contents should
ef fect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the
whole man af fected.’11 It is in this light that Croce suggests that Schiller
is ‘canceling content by form.’12
In ‘The Case for Abstract Art’, Greenberg argues that Western art
up to Impressionism was largely obsessed with eliminating distance and
detachment by depicting ‘things from which we cannot keep as secure a
distance for the sake of disinterestedness’, whereas works that have ‘abstract
decoration’ avoid engagement in a ‘practical’ way and prevent representa-
tion from shutting ‘out all other [pictorial] factors.’13 Aesthetic theorists
such as Schopenhauer separated responses to illusory representation from
responses to reality. But for both Greenberg and Schiller representation
necessarily taints the purity of aesthetic experience because it reminds us
of the experiences of life itself. Abstraction’s renunciation of subject matter
of fers freedom from the contingencies of personal response. Greenberg
14 Greenberg, Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. IV, 77, 80, 82.
15 ‘Der Inhalt, wie erhaben und weitumfassend er auch sei, wirkt also jederzeit ein-
schränkend auf den Geist, und nur von der Form ist wahre ästhetische Freiheit zu
erwarten’ (Schiller, Letter XXII, 154–155).
168 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
an individual’s sense of autonomy and freedom, a goal that easily fits with
the developing mid-twentieth century liberal American ideology of indi-
vidual freedom, as embodied in Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center of
1949. Earlier, Greenberg and the leftist intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s
argued for structural progressive changes in society. At the end of their
careers, both Greenberg and Schiller emphasize how works of art foster
individual transformation through aesthetic experiences of freedom; or,
as Greenberg put it, ‘how valuable so much in life can be made without
being invested with ulterior meanings.’16
A number of critics have identified Schiller as a key figure translating
the categorical Kantian tradition into a readily available critical tool. It
seems to me that the early revolutionary spirit present in both Greenberg
and Schiller lingers on in the manner that they each reformulate Kant for
their particular political moment. Schiller shifts judgment, Kant’s central
harmonizing faculty, and replaces it with the aesthetic experience itself.
Schillerian aesthetic experience is the lived experience of necessity and
freedom and sense and reason mediating each other and being resolved
in a unity of free play. Hegel, summarizing his understanding of Schiller’s
aesthetic, sees it as ‘actualiz[ing] unity and reconciliation in artistic
production.’17 Even if Greenberg explicitly justifies his critical judgments
on Kantian grounds, Schiller’s redemptive aesthetic is also clearly operative
in his mid-twentieth century criticism.
18 ‘nur die schöne Mitteilung vereinigt die Gesellschaft, weil sie sich auf das Gemeinsame
aller bezieht’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 214–215).
19 Knox, The Aesthetic Theories of Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, 73.
20 ‘Mitten in dem furchtbaren Reich der Kräfte und mitten in dem heiligen Reich
der Gesetze baut der ästhetische Bildungstrieb unvermerkt an einem dritten, fröh-
lichen Reiche des Spiels und des Scheins, worin er dem Menschen die Fesseln aller
Verhältnisse abnimmt und ihn von allem, was Zwang heisst, sowohl im Physischen
als im Moralischen entbindet’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 214–215).
170 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
21 ‘Das Schöne allein geniessen wir als Individuum und Gattung zugleich, d. h. als
Respräsentanten der Gattung’ (Schiller, Letter XXVII, 216–217).
22 ‘Man müßte also zu diesem Zwecke ein Werkzeug aufsuchen, welches der Staat nicht
hergibt […] dieses Werkzeug ist die schöne Kunst’ (Schiller, Letter IX, 54–55).
23 See Lukács, Goethe und seine Zeit, 109.
24 On Schiller’s supposed shift from political engagement to aestheticism, see Bürger,
Zur Kritik der idealistischen Ästhetik, 64; Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic,
109–122; and Woodmansee, The Author, Art and the Market, 57–86.
Two Hundred Years of Aesthetic Modernism 171
If Schiller’s Aesthetic Education was an attempt ‘to rescue the causes of
enlightenment and republicanism in the face of […] conservative criti-
cism,’ as Beiser suggests,31 how might this shift compare to Greenberg’s
late critical project? Greenberg was in the midst of the shifting political
allegiances on the Left from the 1930s to the 1950s. He famously said in
1961 that someday it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism which started
out more or less as Trotskyism turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby
cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.’32 But even here, in his
30 ‘weil es die Schönheit ist, durch welche man zu der Freiheit wandert’ (Schiller, Letter
II, 8–9).
31 Beiser, Schiller as Philosopher, 248.
32 Greenberg, Art and Culture, 230.
174 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
themselves. Like any other kind of picture, a modernist one succeeds when
its identity as a picture, and as pictorial experience, shuts out the awareness
of it as a physical object.’34
Rather than placing it in the history of the material medium, Greenberg
now justifies the visual character of modernist painting; the almost palpa-
ble push-pull pulsing of Cubist collage is been replaced by instantaneous
opticality. The cluster of terms that Greenberg uses around the concept of
‘visuality’ are ‘opticality,’ ‘visibility,’ ‘instantaneous unity,’ and ‘at-onceness.’
Each is a variation on or articulation of the unique purely visual experi-
ence of contemporary abstract painting that is ‘incorporeal, weightless and
exists only optically, like a mirage.’35 Even the formerly heralded material-
ity of the Abstract Expressionism ‘big painting’ is now transformed into
sheer visual field. Morris Louis’s large paintings of dif fuse color are said
to envelop the beholder to such an extent that their physical boundary,
the frame, no longer plays a significant role in their compositional char-
acter: ‘[the painting occupies] so much of one’s visual field that it loses its
character as a discrete tactile object and thereby becomes that much more
purely a picture, a strictly visual entity – an experience of boundlessness,
of anonymous and ambiguous space.’36
But to what purpose is this concentrated aesthetic attention put? If
Greenberg’s late aestheticism parallels Schiller’s changed moral role for the
aesthetic, what is his pinpointed aesthetic attention achieving? In some ways,
Greenberg’s late criticism follows Schiller directly in its theorization of the
immateriality of experience. After all, Schiller suggested that ‘this, precisely,
is the mark of perfect style in each and every art: that it is able to remove
the specific limitations of the art in question without thereby destroying
its specific qualities’.37 As tantalizing apt as Schiller’s comment might seem
as a description of late twentieth-century American abstract painting, it is
more defensible to suggest that Greenberg and Schiller are both involved
in a progressive humanistic enterprise. Mark Cheetham uses the term ‘stra-
tegic humanism’ in relation to similar sentiments in Kant. In Kant, Art
and Art History, Cheetham argues that Kant’s third Critique should not
be considered in isolation from his more explicitly political contemporary
works such as ‘An Answer to the Question “What is Enlightenment”’. As
a distinct argument and work, the third Critique thoroughly justifies art
on autonomous grounds. But when considered in the broader context of
Kant’s other writing, Cheetham suggests, Kant’s seemingly autonomous
aesthetic is a strategy for the preservation of that highest of all human
values for Kant, freedom as it is expressed in morality. If one extends this
logic to Greenberg’s criticism, his dogged defense of the independence of
the aesthetic, his increasingly doctrinaire formalism, and his disciplinary
myopia become similar strategic choices that attempt to preserve ‘human-
ity through the universality and purity of the aesthetic.’38
When Greenberg describes aesthetic experience as a ‘freedom of mind
and untrammeledness of eye,’ of being ‘summoned and gathered into one
point,’ becoming ‘all attention, which means you become, for the moment,
self less and in a sense entirely identified with the object of your attention,’39
it is clear that much more is at stake for him and for the art he supports
than mere pleasure. Contemporary subjects are so fully subsumed under
the rule of means-ends rationality that they can enjoy very little of experi-
ence for its own sake. Modernist painting trains the contemporary subject
for such an experience of freely enjoyed play. Greenberg says that, ‘this
pinpointing of attention, this complete liberation and concentration of
it, of fers what is largely a new experience to most people in our sort of
society.’40 In Greenberg’s late criticism, abstract art is not an antidote to
fascist or capitalist illusions, nor to any other social fantasy promoted to
draw people away from their material conditions; rather, aesthetic experi-
ence fosters a human need to experience freely.
Late in his career, from 6 to 22 April, 1971, Greenberg held a series of classes
called the ‘Bennington College Seminars’. Wide-ranging in themes, these
conversations were unruly and often tangential. They occurred at a stage in
his career in which he felt increasingly beleaguered by the most advanced
forms of art at the time, forms that did not adhere to the self-imposed
strictures of the modernist enterprise, such as Pop and Conceptualism.
In these seminars, Greenberg’s desire to explain himself and to defend
his modernist orthodoxy would have been touching, if it had not come
across as desperate. The following exchange, coming on the heels of a series
of observations on the relationship of artistic autonomy to social agency,
demonstrates Greenberg’s first-hand knowledge of at least one well known
element of Schiller’s aesthetic theory, the ‘play-drive.’
A questioner from the audience asks if it is possible to locate aesthetic
value (a value that Greenberg only discovers in autonomous art) in non-art
experiences such as games. Greenberg replies: ‘Friedrich Schiller was the
first to try to define art as a form of play or relate art to play, and he had
trouble with that. My own answer is I happen to think play is a form of art
and I would agree with Schiller in a way that would surprise and shock him.
But I would think [play] is a very low grade from of art form of art for the
most part.’41 Two things are clear from Greenberg’s anecdotal reference
to Schiller. First, he is familiar enough with the structure of Schiller’s three
faculties or states that he immediately calls this eighteenth-century aesthet-
ics reference to mind. He did so even though more contemporary references
to games and aesthetics were circulating, such as those by Wittgenstein
or Duchamp. Second, Greenberg doesn’t seem to know enough about
Schiller’s ‘play-drive’ to distinguish it from mere entertainment.
Such a comment allows us to do nothing more than to entertain the
possibility of proving a direct Schillerian inf luence on Greenberg. However,
as the above comparisons suggest, Schiller and Greenberg demonstrated
aesthetic theory of the journal October, artists now concerned with beauty
are said to have succumbed to the pressures of the market.
Artists as varied as Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Laib, Andreas Gursky,
Andy Goldsworthy and Olafur Eliasson move beyond Greenbergian for-
malist aesthetics without having to dismiss it. Their ef forts at constructing
powerfully sublime experiential art seem entirely in step with the notions
of aesthetic experience and beauty developed by Schiller and Greenberg,
even if they reach far beyond it. Using natural as well as technological means
to create spectacularly beautiful experiences, their work falls somewhere
between real life and artistic experience, nature and culture, object and
environment. As Kapoor’s Cloud Gate and Eliasson’s The Weather Project
demonstrate, this new form of aestheticism is capable of transforming not
just museum galleries but also civic space into a theatrical stage set on which
contemporary subjectivity is played out. The frequent critique of Schiller’s
transformation of Kant’s communal notion of taste into his individual
moral imperative suggests that he created an unbridgeable gap between
art’s appearance and reality. Freedom experienced aesthetically replaced
revolution in reality. The supposed gap that Schiller opens up between a
discrete aesthetic object or experience and reality, however, has very little
critical purchase when applied to contemporary works that refuse to be
held within the gallery or museum’s boundaries.
Even though new and spectacular forms of art are capable of bring-
ing forth such expansive experiences of freedom, experiences that seem
to stretch so far beyond the Greenbergian aesthetic frame as to make its
disciplinary strictures seem irrelevant, it is nevertheless time to look again
at critical theories that place some measure of hope in what aesthetic experi-
ence, rather than conceptual gamesmanship, has to of fer. If contemporary
art’s capacity to provoke and enthrall has so expanded its reach, is this not
a ref lection of our greater capacity to use the very aesthetic faculties that
each of these critics articulate in order to imagine a new reality that they
could not possibly conceive?
180 RANDALL K. VAN SCHEPEN
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JEROME CARROLL
Introduction
the world. Another way he puts this, in this case inThe Sources of the Self,
is that meaning is not ‘lodged not in the universe an sich but aris[es] in
our experience of it’.7 This reference to meaning arising in the moment of
experience reminds us that the expressivist tradition is usually associated
with the thinking of the early German Romantics, and in particular the
emphasis of individual creativity, imagination, and feeling. This is a tradi-
tion that Taylor traces in Sources of the Self, and indeed it is this inwardness
that Taylor sees as the ‘modern’ quality of the expressivist attitude. The idea
that ‘access to […] meaning requires that we turn within’8 suggests that
making sense of the world is bound up with ideas of selfhood, as expressed
in conceptions of meaning as self-articulation and self-realization. This
causes Taylor to assert that expressivism is ‘closely tied to the idea of a self,
a subject’, not to say to ideas of ‘radical individuation’.9 This conception of
meaning is clearly at odds with an ‘objectivist’ or ‘naturalist’ ontology that
sees reliable meaning as generated by accurate representations of already
given states of af fairs. But the radical individuation also seems to be at odds
with Taylor’s ethical concerns noted above. At the same time, Taylor sees
the ‘inward turn’ as only apparent. He thinks expressivist meaning actually
‘[sets] human beings […] in a larger natural order’, albeit that ‘our access
to this order is primarily inward’.10
However, tracing the links and tensions between Taylor’s concerns and
the expressivist tradition is not the primary aim of this chapter. Rather I
want to suggest that Taylor’s ref lections on subjectivity and agency have
important features in common with the tradition in German letters called
‘philosophical anthropology’, and moreover that this tradition has already
taken important steps in theorizing man’s seemingly uniquely ‘internal’
access to the external world. Charles Taylor himself identifies his ideas as
belonging to the tradition of philosophical anthropology,11 though he is
not explicit about what this might mean. Certainly the question of how
man relates to his ‘background’ world has been a central concern for those
writers and thinkers associated with philosophical anthropology, perhaps
second only to – and probably implicit in – the question of the ‘nature’
of the human being. The general issue of man’s place in the world is evi-
dently central to what is probably the most well known discourse of philo-
sophical anthropology, namely the twentieth century German tradition
to which Max Scheler and Helmut Plessner in the 1920s, Arnold Gehlen
in the 1940s and Hans Blumenberg in the 1960s have all contributed. This
tradition takes as its starting point what Axel Honneth and Hans Joas
call man’s ‘radical discontinuity’ with nature.12 This discontinuity might
be traced back to Herder’s reference to man’s paucity of instinct in the
‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’ (1772), or Kant’s insistence in his own
Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) that man’s essence is
not to be found in his ‘natural’ aspect.13 Blumenberg historicizes this split
from nature, citing Francis Bacon’s Novum Organon (1620) as the book
that captures the decisive modern turn, whereby man’s relationship to the
rest of nature is thoroughly reconceptualized. Nature ceases to be viewed
as a model to be replicated – as it was in the imitatio model of antiquity
– or a cosmos which determines the limits of possible knowledge. Rather
it becomes an object against which man must pit himself, or is reduced
to raw material for man’s potentially limitless scientific knowledge and
technical innovation.14
But this question of man’s relation to the world is also thematized in
the writings associated with philosophical anthropology in the second half
of the eighteenth century and at the turn of the nineteenth century. These
discussions turn on questions of man’s dual nature, comprising body and
soul, and the relationship between his allegedly essential freedom and his
‘biological’ or ‘natural’ aspect and indeed the surrounding external world.
Anthropology as ‘Naturalism’
21 Kant, ‘Review of J. G. Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity,
Parts 1 and 2’, 134. ‘So ist er überzeugt, daß sie [die Materialien zu einer Anthropologie]
weder in der Metaphysik noch im Naturaliencabinet durch Vergleichung des Skelets
des Menschen mit dem von andern Thiergattungen aufgesucht werden müssen […],
sondern daß sie allein in seinen Handlungen gefunden werden können, dadurch er
seinen Charakter of fenbart’ (Kant, ‘Erinnerungen des Recensenten der Herderschen
Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit’, 56).
22 Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, 3. ‘als freihandelndes Wesen, aus
sich selber macht, oder machen kann und soll’. (Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer
Hinsicht, 119)
23 See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 156–160, Kant und das Problem
der Metaphysik, 205–212.
24 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, 260. ‘mehr als der bloße Mensch’ (Heidegger,
‘Über den “Humanismus”: Brief an Jean Beaufret, Paris’, 89).
190 JEROME CARROLL
But in my view this ‘return to nature’ need not be taken as a privileging of
the physiological per se, but as an attempt to correct the perceived domi-
nance of accounts that defined man in terms of his rational faculties, as
well as the tendency to abstract human capacities for knowing from lived
experience, for which statements of our physiological nature may be taken
as a kind of shorthand. This significance of the physiological becomes
more apparent when one takes account of the context of the attempts by
anthropologists to define man in the second half of the eighteenth century,
which take place in the shadow cast by Cartesian dualism. That is to say,
this shadow is cast not by dualism per se, but by the sense that man’s dual
nature is somehow a problem; that man is made up of two dif ferent kinds
of substance – res cogitans and res extensa in Descartes’ terminology – that
do not add up. No one could dispute that we are both physical and mental
beings, but the question of how the two relate and combine has exercized
thinkers, then and now. This question of the interrelationship of man’s
physiological and supersensory capacities is a consistent thread in Friedrich
Schiller’s writings on culture. In the fourth of the Aesthetic Letters, which
he characterizes as an attempt at a ‘complete anthropological appraisal’ of
man, he assesses man’s unity as almost impossible to achieve, split as it is
between man’s reason and his natural aspect: ‘Reason does indeed demand
unity; but Nature demands multiplicity.’25 Carl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz
in 1800 refers to man as ‘the puzzling being, sensory and supersensory
bound into a unity’.26
But significantly not all proponents of philosophical anthropology in
this period see man’s dual nature as a problem. Numerous writers associated
25 Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, 19. ‘Einheit fordert
zwar die Vernunft, die Natur aber Mannigfaltigkeit.’ (Schiller, Über die ästhetische
Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, 316)
26 ‘Das rätselhafte, in uns zu Einem Ganzen verbundene, Wesen, als sinnlich-über-
sinnlich’ (Pölitz, Popülare Anthropologie, 5).
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity 191
27 See Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 43.
28 See Košenina, Ernst Platners Anthropologie und Philosophie, 30–34.
29 See Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegrif f, 42, 53.
30 See Platner, Anthropologie für Aerzte und Weltweise, xvi–xvii.
31 ‘In wechselseitigem Verhältnisse zu einander’ (Schmid, Empirische Psychologie, 11).
32 ‘Wissenschaft von der doppelten Natur des Menschen in ihrem Zusammenhange,
gegenseitigen Verhältnisse und Einf lüsse’ (Wezel, Grundriß eines eigentlichen Systems
der anthropologischen Psychologie, 13).
192 JEROME CARROLL
the ‘science of the whole, concrete person, a study of man’s internal and
external aspects together’.33
Others are more explicit in refuting the notion that man’s dual nature
is a problem, and asserting that if it were a problem it would not be one
that could be solved from one side of that dualist divide. Johann Georg
Heinrich Feder, Professor of Philosophy at Göttingen, insists that the inter-
connection of mind and body is a matter of everyday experience,34 which is
to say that it is not something that can be known ‘a prioristically’, or which
needs to be established theoretically. Likewise, in his Fundamentals of a
Pragmatic Anthropology (1807), Ernst Wenzel characterizes man as a citizen
of two worlds, the ‘supersensory’ and ‘visible’, but insists that no ‘theoreti-
cal proof ’ of the connection between mind and body is either possible or
required.35 Wilhelm Liebsch, in a work published in 1806, expresses this
equally strongly, dismissing the idea that the mind is separate and separable
from the body as an ‘erroneous and unprovable presupposition’.36 The key
issue here is not only that anthropology is seen to be a holistic discipline,
in a way that refutes any sense that the separation of mind and body is a
problem for anything other than the abstracting philosophical gaze, but
also that the investigation into the interconnections and mutual inf luence
of mind and body displaces the more theoretical concern of whether such
a connection is possible at all, as well as the academic question of which
aspect – physical or mental – man’s essential nature must ultimately be
ascribed to.
This approach has led some detractors to dismiss anthropology as
non-dialectical and without synthesis, and as failed attempt to solve the
mind-body problem.37 Some see it as a discipline forever split between man’s
These remarks need not just be taken as descriptions of man’s mental and
physical faculties – his ‘internal’ and ‘external’ nature – but might be under-
stood as a comment on the way he relates to the outside world. In my view it
is a small step from the anthropologists’ sensitivities to the connections and
mutual relationships and inf luences in man’s psycho-physical make up and
Charles Taylor’s sense that the world is not ‘external’ in any straightforward
way. Taylor’s point that our knowledge of the world is not ‘objective’, but
‘engaged’, is not a statement of our predominantly physiological nature, but
is also phenomenological – perception and understanding are interwoven in
a way that makes the boundary between internal mind and external world
less easy to draw definitively. Sometimes this phenomenological attitude is
made all but explicit in the writings at the turn of the nineteenth century
and after, as in Carl Heinrich Ludwig Pölitz’s comment, in his Popular
Anthropology of 1800, that anthropology is the ‘study of the external phe-
nomena and internal perceptions of man, insofar as they are phenomena
and perceptions’.39 Sometimes it is more oblique, discernible for instance in
Schleiermacher’s conception of a dialectic of man’s internal self-relation and
38 ‘Darf man nicht als eine Wissenschaft ansehen’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Einleitung und
Güterlehre’, 543).
39 ‘Lehre von den äussern und innern bleibenden Erscheinungen an dem Menschen, in
wiefern sie Erscheinungen sind’ (Pölitz, Popülare Anthropologie, 6).
194 JEROME CARROLL
40 ‘Das wirkliche Denken aufhört, wenn die Entgegensetzung von Subjekt und Objekt
aufhört’ (Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 33).
41 ‘Geöf fnetsein des geistigen Lebens nach außen’; ‘Komplex des Denkens’; ‘die gemein-
same Welt’ (Schleiermacher, Dialektik, 29, 33).
42 ‘Das große Rätsel’ (Schleiermacher, ‘Monologen: ein Neujahrsgabe’, 9).
43 ‘Denn die Philosophie erhebt den Menschen zum Begrif f seiner Wechselwirkung
mit der Welt.’ (Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, 347)
44 Bowie, ‘The Philosophical Significance of Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics’, 76.
45 See Linden, Untersuchungen zum Anthropologiebegrif f, 13.
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity 195
Anthropology as a Discipline
58 Herder, ‘How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit
of the People’, 27; ‘Einziehung der Philosophie auf Anthropologie’ (Herder, ‘Wie die
Philosophie zum Besten des Volks allgemeiner und nützlicher werden kann’, 132).
59 Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 6.
60 Honneth and Joas, Social Action and Human Nature, 41.
Philosophical Anthropology, Human Nature and Subjectivity 199
that Wenzel and others think that ‘theoretical proof ’ of the connection
between our ‘natural’ and our ‘free’ selves is not possible, but it is also
superf luous. Wenzel asserts precisely that that connection is the basis of
‘everything that our being experiences’.61
Moreover, the holism and environmentalism I have associated with
philosophical anthropology go a long way to undermine such traditional
‘philosophical’ dichotomies as biology/culture and nature/freedom, in
much the same way that Schleiermacher thinks is essential to the anthro-
pological attitude. This gives some weight to Honneth and Joas’ view of
anthropology as an attempt to ‘find a way out of traditional impasses’.62 As
suggested above, Schleiermacher is the thinker who develops the anthro-
pological attitude into a critique of philosophy that wants to treat subject
and object as fixed entities. To the same extent that he takes issue with
Kant’s compartmentalized thinking, it is the latter’s approach to the issue
of grounding any enquiry into human nature and knowledge that attracts
Schleiermacher’s criticism and underlies his assessment of Kant’s approach
as a ‘negation of all anthropology’.63
which the subject and the object are one and the same. Kant here aspires
for objectivity, whereas for Schleiermacher this is precisely an example
of a ‘false claim to objectivity’,65 which Kant himself had exposed in his
broader critical-philosophical project. This issue of the relationship between
subject and object, and indeed the claim of objectivity, also makes the link
to Charles Taylor’s ideas apparent. For Taylor the self can never become
fully self-transparent, ‘background’ and all. Such transparency would place
a hard and fast separation between the subjective and objective sides of
reality in a way that Taylor, like Schleiermacher before him, thinks is not
possible. It is because of our prior involvement with the world that Taylor
rejects the search ‘for an impossible foundational justification of knowledge
or […] total ref lexive clarity about the bases of our beliefs’.66 His point seems
to be that ‘grounding’ and ‘engagedness’ are two sides of the same coin,
which is to say that the dif ficulties associated with establishing grounds for
objective knowledge of the world are an indicator of our embeddedness
in the world. At the same time, Taylor sees this failure of philosophy to
provide firm foundational grounding as an indicator of one of the sources
of specifically human meaning. That is to say, he thinks that the inability
to reach full clarity about the sources of human knowledge either leads to
or is a consequence of the sense in which human meaning is not simply
representational of an already given reality, but is worked out in a process of
self-articulation. Taylor refers to this ‘working out’ of meaning as a ‘quest’,67
which suggests that it is a process that is at least in part individual, in that
this idea of meaning is ‘closely tied to the idea of a self, a subject’. As Taylor
puts it, ‘[e]xpression was the basis for a new and fuller individuation’.68
Taylor himself refers approvingly to this expressivist notion of the
self-constitution of meaning, referring to Romantic artists like Shelley
and Wordsworth as creating the universe anew, lifting the veil of familiar
reality.69 But where things become problematic is that what one might
Bibliography
Introduction
‘Über die Bedeutung der Ironie bei Sören Kierkegaard mit ständiger Rücksicht
auf Entweder/Oder’.
12 Kierkegaard will later introduce an additional stage of existence, the religious stage,
which will complement the aesthetic and the ethical stages that are in the centre of
Either/Or. In the present context, the particularities of this third stage of existence
are of minor importance considering that this paper mainly focuses on the aesthetic
stage, which, in Either/Or, obtains its pertinence first and foremost through its
oppositions to the ethical stage. It is noteworthy, however, that Kierkegaard does
not imply a ‘theory’ of the stages of existence as is often suggested. The introduc-
tion of a Kierkegaardian ‘theory’ in this context which turns the religious stage into
the synthesis of the aesthetic and the ethical stage makes his concept of the stages
of existence take a strangely Hegelian turn, which is hardly convincing if one takes
into consideration Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel’s philosophy and especially of
Hegelian dialectics. See Max Bense, Kierkegaard und Hegel, 23. Bense stresses that
Kierkegaard opposes a disruptive dialectic to Hegel’s dialectic of synthesises. One
might add, and this is probably the most important objection against a Hegelian
reading of the stages of existence, that Kierkegaard remains profoundly sceptical
about any philosophical system insofar as it is impossible to generalize about human
existence as the existence of this concrete human being, because any truth that is of
214 Sebastian Hüsch
between the ethical and the aesthetical unfolds its full momentum and
momentousness only in existential practice.
In the following, I would like to take the antagonistic construction
of the ethical and the aesthetic as a starting point in order to ask to what
extent the Kierkegaardian polemical (ab-)use of romantic poetology could
possibly be understood as an anticipation of a larger societal phenomenon
and thus serve as an interpretative grid applicable to certain tendencies in
the western societies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. To do so, I
will try to link the Kierkegaardian concept of the aesthetic to the main
idea developed in a study published in 1993 by the German sociologist
Gerhard Schulze and entitled: Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie
der Gegenwart.13 In his study, Schulze identifies a phenomenon which he
calls the ‘aesthetization of every day life’14 and which, according to the
author, constitutes a significant trait identifiable in all modern occiden-
tal societies. A closer consideration of the broad lines of his argumenta-
tion reveals that the aspects common to both Schulze’s observation of an
‘aesthetization’ of every day life and the Kierkegaardian construction of
an ‘aesthetic stage’ reach beyond a simple terminological parallel; rather,
these two concepts share much common ground and point both to the
very essence of modernity.
A comparative analysis of Schulze’s sociological phenomenology and
Kierkegaardian philosophy promises therefore a double insight. On the
one hand, Schulze’s ref lections shall help to demonstrate the topicality
of the Kierkegaardian concept of an aesthetic mode of existence; and on
the other hand, the harsh polemical dichotomization which characterizes
Kierkegaardian thought may help to elucidate certain aspects of Schulze’s
importance for the individual cannot be anything else but subjective truth. Thus, it
seems dif ficult to talk about a Kierkegaardian ‘theory’ of stages of existence because in
this context the very notion of ‘theory’ would imply the possibility of a generalization
where there is only subjectivity. For Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian dialectics see
his Concept of Anxiety; see also Röttgers, ‘Lügen(-)Texte oder nur Menschen’, 55.
13 Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart.
14 ‘Ästhetisierung des Alltagslebens’ (Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 3).
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage 215
concept and allow at the same time to integrate Schulze’s analysis into the
larger horizon of the history of ideas, a step he himself does not undertake,
seemingly out of methodological cautiousness.
Either/Or is not the first of Kierkegaard’s works to deal with early German
Romanticism. In fact, he dedicates a large part of his PhD dissertation, enti-
tled The Concept of Irony with continual reference to Socrates, to a profound
critique of the romantic concept of irony. According to Kierkegaard, roman-
tic irony results in a loss of reality, bringing forth a total ‘de-realization’
which comprises not only the world surrounding the ironist but also his
own Self.15 This double loss of reality introduces the possibility to poetically
(re-)create both the world and the Self. The idea that the ironic undermin-
ing of reality does not only cause a distance towards the surrounding world
but comprises also the Self is highly fascinating for Kierkegaard the writer,
but profoundly disturbing for Kierkegaard the person, and perfectly unac-
ceptable for Kierkegaard the Christian. It is disturbing and unacceptable
in that the possibility of creating one’s own Self is inevitably linked to a
world lacking transcendental anchoring. Only a Self that does not need
to give account to a transcendental institution can be free to create itself.
The possibility of creating one’s own Self poetically is thus synonymous
with saying that there is no transcendental institution which would or
could guarantee the existence of such a thing as a Self in the sense of a Self
which is not merely arbitrary. Possessing the freedom to poeticize one’s
15 See Søren Kierkegaard, Über den Begrif f der Ironie mit ständiger Rücksicht auf Sokrates,
289, SV XIII 354.
216 Sebastian Hüsch
own Self would thus imply a total transcendental rootlessness. So, if there
is freedom for the individual to invent himself – which is the seductive
part of the Kierkegaardian experiment of thought – there is also a price
to be paid: According to the ethicist B, the liberation from transcendental
accountability, which is at the same time a detachment from transcendental
embeddedness, will ultimately and necessarily bring about an existence in
despair. The dissolution of an authoritative and binding reality, B argues,
inevitably undermines the meaningfulness of existence.16
This apodictic assertion is all the more interesting in the light of the
Kierkegaardian interpretation of Socratic irony from which he distinguishes
the romantic understanding of it. In his dissertation, Kierkegaard defines,
following Hegel, irony as absolute and infinite negativity. This conception
of irony perfectly fits with the ethicist’s illustration of an aesthetic existence
as an existence in despair. However, when Kierkegaard discusses the case
of Socrates, even if he confirms this conception of irony as negativity, he
exempts Socratic irony from the destructive and annihilating consequences
he attributes to irony in its romantic form. He even stresses that Socratic
irony has to be understood as the expression of ‘the first and most abstract
determination of subjectivity’.17 Taking into consideration that Kierkegaard
can be regarded as the thinker of subjectivity, it is clear that his objections
are not to be read as a principal rejection of irony insofar as in its Socratic
form it does not induce the same annihilating consequences as modern
18 See Begrif f Ironie, 281 (SV XIII 347), where he describes romantic irony as ‘eine
überspannte Subjektivität, eine zweite Potenz der Subjektivität. Daraus ersieht man
zugleich, daß diese Ironie durchaus unberechtigt gewesen ist’.
19 Unlike in Socratic irony, ‘[ging] es nicht darum, ein Moment der gegebenen
Wirklichkeit durch ein neues Moment zu verneinen und zu verdrängen; vielmehr
wurde die gesamte geschichtliche Wirklichkeit verneint, um Platz zu schaf fen für
eine selbstgeschaf fene Wirklichkeit.’ (Begrif f Ironie, 280). See also Feger, 373: ‘War
die sokratische Ironie noch dem Absoluten unter der Form des Nichts verbunden,
kehrt die romantische Ironie dieses Verhältnis um und verschreibt sich nun einer
Wirklichkeit, die sie unter die Form des Nichts stellt.’
20 This would thus just be the next step after showing ‘the impossibility of positing
any fixed centres at all’ which M. Finlay stresses as one of the main characteristics of
Schlegel’s ironic writing. See Finlay, 265.
218 Sebastian Hüsch
does not only poeticize himself, he also poeticizes what surrounds him. Proudly with-
drawn the ironist stands there and lets […] the people pass by and does not find any
appropriate company. Thus, he continuously is in contradiction with the reality he
belongs to. That is why it is important for him to suspend what is at the origin of
reality, what regulates and carries it, to suspend thus ethics and morality. […] For
the ironist, all that exists in the given reality has only poetic validity in that he lives
poetically. However, if the given reality loses thus its validity, the reason for this is
not that it is a reality that has lost its legitimacy and thus would have to be replaced
by a truer reality but rather that no reality will ever be appropriate for him.21
21 ‘[Der Ironiker] dichtet nicht bloß sich selbst, er dichtet auch seine Umwelt. Stolz
verschlossen in sich selbst steht der Ironiker da, er lässt […] die Menschen an sich
vorüberziehen und findet keine ihm angemessene Gesellschaft. Dadurch gerät er nun
fortwährend in Widerstreit mit der Wirklichkeit, der er zugehört. Deshalb wird es
ihm wichtig, dasjenige, das da das die Wirklichkeit begründende ist, das sie ordnet
und trägt, nämlich Moral und Sittlichkeit, zu suspendieren. … Alles in der gegebenen
Wirklichkeit Bestehende hat für den Ironiker lediglich poetische Giltigkeit; denn er
lebt ja poetisch. Wenn nun aber die gegebene Wirklichkeit dergestalt für den Ironiker
ihre Giltigkeit verliert, so liegt dies nicht daran, daß sie eine überlebte Wirklichkeit
wäre, die von einer wahreren abgelöst werden muß, sondern daran, daß de[m] Ironiker
[…] keine Wirklichkeit die angemessene ist.’ (Begrif f Ironie, 289, my translation.)
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage 219
22 On Kierkegaard’s conception of the relation between possibility and reality see Hüsch,
‘Die menschliche Existenz im Spannungsfeld von Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit.
Überlegungen zum Möglichkeitsbegrif f bei Søren Kierkegaard mit ständiger
Rücksicht auf Entweder/Oder.’
23 In fact, Nietzsche speaks in favour of a new aesthetic approach in the tradition of
antiquity. For him, the arts have to accomplish what the ancient Greeks already had
a perfect mastery of but which has been lost through morality: ‘Oh diese Griechen!
Sie verstanden sich darauf zu leben: dazu thut Noth, tapfer bei der Oberf läche, der
Falte, der Haut stehen zu bleiben, den Schein anzubeten … Diese Griechen waren
oberf lächlich – aus Tiefe.’ (Nietzsche, ‘Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft’, 352)
24 The concept of the ‘interesting’ is of course a concept that is somewhat à la mode
in the nineteenth century and plays an important role also in Schlegel’s philos-
ophy. See Ostermann, ‘Das Interessante als Element ästhetischer Authentizität’
220 Sebastian Hüsch
about Johannes the seducer: ‘With a keenly developed sense for what is
interesting in life, he had known how to find it’ (Either/Or, 248).
The consequences of this revalorization of values and of the replac-
ing of ethical categories by aesthetical ones become most apparent where
the ethical and the aesthetic ‘collide’. If traditionally – one might think
namely of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative25 – we learn that we
shall never regard a human as a pure means but always as an end in itself,
the reader discovers in the Seducer’s Diary what it looks like when the
ethical is demoted to second place. Here, Johannes the seducer uses the
ethical for the sake of a perfectly poetical seduction. Ethical behaviour and
values become a kind of ‘modelling clay’ at the service of an ever better
distillation and shaping of the interesting. For the sake of the aesthetic,
Johannes thus violates ever too willingly the traditional priority given to
the ethical. He resorts to the ethical only and exclusively with the aim
to increase the seductive power of the aesthetic. To put it dif ferently: he
does not subordinate the aesthetic to the absolute claim of the ethical but
holds the aesthetic as of absolute value and subordinates the ethical to the
aesthetic in a quest for the ultimately interesting. In parallel with this rela-
tivization of the ethical, Johannes dissolves the traditional connection of
the notions of ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’. Johannes explicitly defines the ethical
– and thus the good – as aesthetically inferior and notes: ‘The ethical is just
as boring in life as it is in learning. What a dif ference! Beneath the sky of
the aesthetic everything is light, pleasant and f leeting; when ethics come
along everything becomes hard, angular, and unending ennui.’ (Either/Or,
305) What is light, ironic, ephemeral, interesting is thus opposed to the
seriousness required by reality. What from an ethical standpoint would be
considered ‘bad’ can nevertheless fulfil the criterion of being ‘interesting’,
and aesthetic value is thus disconnected from goodness.
From the ethicist B’s perspective, A and Johannes’ orientation, which
aims at identifying what is aesthetically interesting in existence, is an
and Oergel, Culture and Identity. Historicity in German Literature and Thought
1770–1815, 29f f.
25 See Kant, Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 414–416.
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage 221
orientation that is perfectly possible. He does not deny, then, that remain-
ing in the aesthetic stage is feasible, but what he tries to put forward is the
fact that A’s existence will reveal itself as essentially unsatisfying from a
transcendental perspective. He goes so far as to say that an existence which
follows the criterion of the interesting must be, ultimately, an existence in
despair. The quest for what is interesting and the poetic creation of the
own Self, which detach the individual from transcendental embeddedness,
signify at the same time an existence in the present, thus lacking narratabil-
ity over the whole lifespan. Such narratability, however, is indispensable
if one is to speak about ‘personality’. Without an identity, acquired in a
life lived in reality and in accordance with a somehow homogenous being
in the world, the construction of a Self, of a personality is impossible. By
trying to poetically create himself, the ironist finally fails to become who
he ought to become, he fails to seize himself as the one he is. His personal-
ity disintegrates in both arbitrariness and lacking of necessity.26 These two
aspects – the replacing of ethical principles by aesthetic principles and the
loss of personality, of one’s own Self – are thus interdependent and ulti-
mately lead to an erosion of meaningfulness.
26 See ‘Equilibrum between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of
Personality’ (Either/Or, 475–590).
222 Sebastian Hüsch
not posit that societies have been ‘better’ in the past and have lost a moral
orientation in the process of modernization. In fact, in his conception
of the aesthetic existence, Kierkegaard is not preoccupied with societal
phenomena. Instead, what only and exclusively interests him is the indi-
vidual. The dif ference between the aesthetic and the ethical stage is thus
a dif ference at the level of the individual; and according to Kierkegaard,
the individual’s existence is originally always, qua existing, an aesthetic
one. The possibility of an ethical existence occurs only a posteriori through
ref lectivity. Ref lectivity indicates possibilities of existence and thus the choice
between an aesthetic and an ethic way of existing; but ref lectivity always
comes second, that is after the individual’s mere existence which, as such,
is aesthetical. There is thus no idealising of a former, presumably ‘better’
society but an exclusive focus on the individual who finds himself facing
a choice, the absolute Either – Or introduced in the opposition of the
aesthetician A and the ethicist B. Kierkegaard criticizes the aesthetic exist-
ence – or rather has it be criticized through B –, only insofar as remaining
in the aesthetic stage after one has, through ref lection, access to the ethical
stage, is considered as leading to guiltiness, as the individual thus refuses
to become who he ought to be.29 However, this guiltiness is guiltiness
only from the ethicist’s point of view and only after the aesthetician has
had a glance of the ethical. The Kierkegaardian focus on the development
of the individual and on individual responsibility is therefore not at all
in contradiction with Schulze’s phenomenology of society, but seizes the
same phenomenon from a dif ferent angle.
To come back to Schulze’s conceptualizing of an Erlebnisgesellschaft,
his main thesis is then that a distinction can be made between a traditional
type of society, which is oriented toward survival, and the contemporary
occidental societies, characterized by Erlebnisorientierung. Schulze wants
thus to stress the fact that in modern Western societies, societal life is no
longer mainly a struggle for mere material survival, and that the focus on
survival which has lost its importance thanks to the relative richness of
modern occidental societies has been replaced by a new orientation which
30 This formula is dif ficult to translate as there is no English word covering the meaning
of the German ‘erleben’. It could be translated as: ‘Make an event out of your life’,
which goes beyond ‘enjoy your life’, a formula that does not include the aspect of an
aesthetic mise en scène of life.
31 ‘Das Leben schlechthin ist zum Erlebnisprojekt geworden. Zunehmend ist das
alltägliche Wählen zwischen Möglichkeiten durch den bloßen Erlebniswert der
gewählten Alternative motiviert: Konsumartikel, … Berufe, Partner, Wohnsituationen,
Kind oder Kinderlosigkeit.’ (Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 13) All English versions of
Schulze’s text are my own translations.
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage 225
no longer life itself but the meaning of life.’32 Schulze insinuates the same
fundamental problem which shines through in the writings of the aestheti-
cian A – first and foremost the relativity of that upon which the aestheti-
cian as well as the modern man observed by Schulze build their existence,
insofar as the interesting remains necessarily an immanent category and
cannot relate to anything transcendental. Hence, one could claim with
the ethicist B in Either/Or that the aesthetician as well as the man who
chases an eventful life, from a transcendental perspective, commit a logical
‘error’ which has existential consequences: they posit something relative
as an absolute.33
Every attempt to call into question what has been inaugurated as
values of reference in an aesthetic thought system is therefore potentially
an existential undermining of meaning as it brings to light that every deci-
sion taken on the basis of that same value system could always also have
been taken dif ferently. It is not unimportant to note that the aesthetician
himself is perfectly aware of this dif ficulty and therefore always aims at
undermining his own maxims and principles by ironizing them in his essays
and ref lections and by emphasizing that his propositions are completely
arbitrary.34 Through these remarks he shows a greater lucidity than the
32 ‘Was soll schon schwierig daran sein, sich ein schönes Leben zu machen, wenn man
halbwegs die Ressourcen dafür hat? … Man meint, Erlebnisorientierung sei der
Anfang vom Ende aller Schwierigkeiten. In Wahrheit setzen sich die Schwierigkeiten
auf einer neuen Ebene fort. Bedroht ist nicht mehr das Leben, sondern sein Sinn’
(Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 68).
33 If this is one of the main aspects of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Schlegel, Schulze prefers
to remain almost too explicitly implicit on this point for the reader not to make this
link himself.
34 See for example his ‘ecstatic lecture’: ‘My practical wisdom is easy to understand,
for I have only one principle, which is not even my starting point’ (Either/Or, 54).
Or see the following ref lection: ‘All classic works … rank equally high because each
one ranks infinitely high. Nevertheless, if one tries to introduce some order into this
procession, it is evident that one can base it on nothing essential’ (ibid., 65), which
undermines the whole development of the following argument trying to ‘prove’ that
Mozart’s Don Giovanni has to be ranked highest.
226 Sebastian Hüsch
The proliferation of the number of symbols is already the sign of collective disap-
pointment. […] The overdose of new objects generates ennui, what is exceptional
becomes banal, the symbols f loat by too fast, leaving us unable to construct deeply
felt significations for them.37
35 See Schulze, Erlebnisgesellschaft, 54, where Schulze stresses the ‘Vermehrung der
Möglichkeiten’ as a major trait of modernity.
36 ‘Hat sich der Ästhetiker für die eine Wahl entschieden, drängt sich die Möglichkeit
der anderen auf, wählt er diese, erscheint sie ihm gleichgültig angesichts einer weiteren,
noch zu ergreifenden. Die Gleichgültigkeit ruft aber Langeweile hervor’ (Vetter, 57;
emphazis by Vetter). The English translation of Vetter is my own.
37 ‘Das Wuchern der Zeichenmenge ist bereits ein Ergebnis kollektiver Enttäuschung.
… Die Überdosis des Neuen lässt Langeweile aufkommen, das Ungewöhnliche wird
alltäglich, die Zeichen treiben schneller an uns vorbei, als wir intensiv empfundene
Bedeutungen dazu konstruieren könnten’ (Schulze, 117).
From Aesthetics to the Aesthetic Stage 227
Conclusion
38 Visser correctly notes that Schulze clearly uses the term ‘Existenz’ in a philosophical
sense. See Visser, 273.
39 See Oergel, 78f f.
228 Sebastian Hüsch
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Foucault, M. ‘Le non du père’, Dits et Ecrits, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001),
189–203.
Kant, I. Grundlagen zur Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. J. Timmermann (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004).
Kierkegaard, S. The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 8 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981).
—— Either/Or. A Fragment of Life (London: Penguin Books, 1992). Entweder/Oder
Teil I und II (München: DTV, 1988).
—— Sickness unto Death, trans. A. Hannay (London: Penguin Classics, 1989).
—— Über den Begrif f der Ironie mit ständiger Rücksicht auf Sokrates (München:
Diederichs, 1995).
Musil, R. Tagebücher (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1983).
Nietzsche, F. ‘Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft’, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, ed. G. Colli
and M. Montinari (München: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1999).
43 ‘Es gehört ein hohes Maß ethischen Ernstes dazu, das Böse nie in ästhetischen
Kategorien auf fassen zu wollen’ (Entweder/Oder, 786; my translation).
230 Sebastian Hüsch
—— ‘Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik’, Werke in zwei Bänden.
Ausgewählt und eingeleitet von August Messer (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag,
1930).
Schlegel, F. ‘Philosophische Vorlesungen 1800–1807’, Kritische Friedrich Schlegel
Ausgabe, Vol. 7 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1964).
Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus logico-philosophicus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2001).
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Pattison, G. Kierkegaard and the Crisis of Faith (London: SPCK, 1997).
Pieper, A. Sören Kierkegaard (München: Beck, 2000).
Röttgers, K. ‘Lügen(-)Texte oder nur Menschen’, in K. Röttgers and M. Schmitz-
Emans, eds, Dichter lügen (Essen: Die blaue Eule, 2001), 37–60.
Schulze, G. Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am
Main: Campus-Verlag, 1993).
Vetter, H. Stadien der Existenz. Eine Untersuchung zum Existenzbegrif f Sören
Kierkegaards (Wien: Herder, 1979).
Visser, G. Erlebnisdruck. Philosophie und Kunst im Bereich eines Übergangs und
Untergangs (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2005).
NICHOLAS SAUL
This chapter takes up one thread of the discussion about modernism,
Silvio Vietta’s theory of aesthetic modernity as a macro-epoch, which
begins not (as conventional wisdom suggests) around 1900, but 1750. It
thus encompasses Enlightenment, Romanticism, and several varieties of
Realism as well as what we normally consider Modernist.1 Our major
cognitive interest is however less theory than the literary achievement of
a neglected modernist, Wilhelm Bölsche. In particular my paper breaks a
lance for the aesthetic quality of his novel The Noonday Goddess (1891)2
and attempts to reposition it in the modernist tradition. In what follows
I recall who Bölsche was and what he wrote, outline his Darwinian evo-
lutionary aesthetic, make explicit the definitions of literary modernism
here deployed, and finally focus from that angle in detail on The Noonday
Goddess. I argue not only for its relation to Schiller (surely the punctum sali-
ens of the modern movement), but also for The Noonday Goddess to be seen
in aesthetic terms as a hybrid novel. As such, contrary to received wisdom,
it transcends Naturalism, displays in addition to typical Naturalist features
many characteristic style features of full-blown fin-de-siècle aestheticism
and so signals Bölsche’s imminent move in that direction. This currently
non-canonical work thus merits more scholarly attention.3
A fact to start: Willi Bölsche (1861–1939) sold no fewer than 2.7 mil-
lion books during his writing career,4 which must place him near the top
of the absolute best- and longseller lists of the day. A committed monis-
tic Darwinist, Bölsche made his name in the grand German tradition of
scientific popularization inaugurated by Carl Vogt and Ludwig Büchner.
Darwinism was in several f lavours surely the most powerful cultural as well
as scientific force in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany,
the dominant discourse in the public sphere.5 Demonized as a socialistic
ideology by Rudolf Virchow in controversy with Ernst Haeckel in 1877,6
Darwin and Darwinism had to be read under the table in Kulturkampf
Germany, for the teaching of biology in Prussian schools was banned.
And this is just what Bölsche did in Cologne, like his later friends the
Hauptmanns and Alfred Ploetz in Breslau and the Harts in Münster. He
became the friend and ally of the monistic anti-Pope Ernst Haeckel in
October 1892, and Haeckel thought of him as the chief popularizer after
himself of what became the monistic doctrine. If Haeckel is of course
known for his hugely popular Natural History of Creation (1868) and best-
selling Riddles of the Universe (1899),7 Bölsche is perhaps best known for
his extraordinary Love and Life in Nature (1898–1902).8 This presents
the Darwinian evolutionary history of nature in three characteristic ways:
first, as a teleological process tending towards increasing complexity and
perfection both physiological and psychological; second, in an argument
derived from Darwin’s sexual selection, as a process motivated by and
culminating in erotic love; third, as a process best expounded in aesthetic
discourse, exploiting figures like prosopopœia and metaphor to promote
a consciousness of harmonious totality bordering on religious experience.
By way of illustration, its first chapter leaps from the collective orgasmic
love-death of the mayf ly, to the annual mass sex orgy and self-sacrifice
of herrings of f the Norwegian coast (Love and Life, I, 20), to Raphaël’s
5 See on the prestige of Darwinian discourse in late Wilhelmine culture and society
Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics.
6 See on this Virchow, Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft; Haeckel’s ripostes from the same
year are ‘Über die heutige Entwickelungslehre’ and ‘Freie Wissenschaft und freie
Lehre’, in E. H., Gemeinverständliche Vorträge.
7 Natürliche Schöpfungs-Geschichte; Die Welträthsel.
8 Das Liebesleben in der Natur. Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Liebe.
The Dark Side of Modernity 235
Madonna and Child as the present culmination of the evolution of love
in its struggle with death (I, 10–43) – all intended poetically to construct
that familiar oceanic fin-de-siècle sense of the fundamental unity of nature
and culture and inner identity of all things.9
Perhaps less well known is Bölsche’s other life as a literary writer. This
was never less Darwinian than his popular scientific writings. Bölsche was
a member of Durch!, the early modernist theory group around the Harts
and others. He moved in 1888 to Friedrichshagen on the Müggelsee at the
southeastern periphery of Berlin, where arose a bohemian writers’ colony.
When he went there Bölsche was already the author of two novels, Paulus
(1885) and The Enchantment of King Arpus (1887), both f luent produc-
tions in the seriously outdated idiom of the Wilhelmine historical novel.
The Noonday Goddess (1891), as we shall see, was a dif ferent kettle of fish
altogether. But Bölsche was in addition to his other gifts a well-qualified
literary critic. He edited the Freie Bühne with success from August 1890 to
September 1893, but in 1887 had already published perhaps the most signifi-
cant work of Darwinian literary theory in Germany before Max Nordau:
The Natural-Scientific Foundations of Literature.10 Most important for our
cognitive interest, this poses an issue central to the modernism debate then
and still virulent in scholarly debate: the legitimation of aesthetic discourse
in a culture dominated by the discourse of natural science.
In brief, Bölsche’s first move here is a frank concession. He recognizes
without further ado ‘the position of immense power occupied by modern
natural sciences’11 in contemporary German culture, and advises support-
ers of a more realistic aesthetic in place of poetic realism and historicism
to find their platform in ‘consensus with the natural sciences’.12 That does
mean the experimental novel in the style of Zola (7), if only to the extent
that like other German naturalists he rejects Zola’s a priori pessimism and
9 On this the frankly unsympathetic Kolkenbrock-Netz, 252–285; and the even less
sympathetic Gebhard, 330–428.
10 See W. B., Naturwissenschaftliche Grundlagen der Poesie.
11 ‘die gewaltige Machtstellung der modernen Naturwissenschaften’ (Bölsche, Natur
wissenschaftliche Grundlagen, 1).
12 ‘Fühlung mit den Naturwissenschaften’, 1.
236 NICHOLAS SAUL
milieu aesthetic of grime. The novelist must know scientific theories and
facts – in particular evolutionary theory, the deterministic laws of physi-
cal and psychological inheritance, the nature of the psyche as a relation of
material molecules in terms of the law of psychophysical parallelism (31),
and the origin of all beauty in Darwinian sexual selection. Thus he should
invest his imaginative resources as thought experiments in support of the
human dimension of that larger, natural-scientific cognitive enterprise (25).
Art has a strictly Darwinian purpose. Just as there is something in those
animal species which adapt physiologically and behaviourally to condi-
tions better than others and are therefore successfully selected (55), so in
human life in particular new ideas arise and fight in public discourse for
survival (56). The vehicle of this process are cultural media and literature
in particular. Here, then, Bölsche postulates something like Dawkins’s self-
ish gene or, better, selfish meme. Ideas battle for survival and reproduce
independently of their authors (56).
Now this is interesting for two reasons. It anticipates today’s debate,
launched by Daniel Dennett and conducted by Joseph Carroll, Karl Eibl13
and others, about the value of ‘Darwin’s dangerous idea’14 for the practice
and study of literature. If that idea is a universal, it must relate to litera-
ture. Yet its utility is dif ficult to define and has still to of fer more than
commonplace insights into literary meaning (The Iliad and Pride and
Prejudice as rehearsals of mating rituals). But Bölsche’s essay is also inter-
esting, because it posits in nineteenth-century avant-garde terms one of
the chief issues in aesthetic modernism: the legitimation of the social and
cultural role of literature in what Werner von Siemens defined as the age
of science. Now Bölsche seems in The Natural-Scientific Foundations of
Literature to abandon the sacred received doctrine of aesthetic autonomy,
recognize science as master discourse and designate literature as its servant.
But there is more to it. He is in fact keen to reserve some cognitive added
value for the aesthetic mode. Hence, curiously, we find him talking in his
13 See Carroll, Literary Darwinism; Eibl, Animal poeta. Forthcoming, with an overview
of the discussion: Saul and James, eds, Evolution of Literature.
14 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.
The Dark Side of Modernity 237
21 See Pytlik (Note 20) and Linse, ‘Der Spiritismus in Deutschland’; also Braungart,
‘Spiritismus und Literatur um 1900. Instructive on the British angle: Owen, The
Darkened Room. Bölsche’s knowledge of spiritualism was very extensive and his
240 NICHOLAS SAUL
sources of spiritualist lore very numerous, but include (qv. Die Mittaggsöttin II, 399)
the anonymous Confessions of a Medium and the neo-Kantian philosopher Schultze,
Grundgedanken des Spiritismus, on which what follows is based.
The Dark Side of Modernity 241
of matter and energy, the age when philosophers such as Friedrich Albert
Lange pointed to inconsistencies in atomistic materialism and the expan-
sion of the concept of matter,22 spiritualism was able to present itself up to
a point plausibly as the religion of the scientific age. Hence it welcomed
scientific investigation. Mediums readily acquiesced in being tied up with
sealed knots, placed in sacks or locked cages. The prestige of spiritualism
was certainly in 1891 still high inside and outside the scientific community.
Frauds were frequently exposed, notably Henry Slade, who was famously
condemned at London in 1876. (Darwin sent £10 to support the prosecu-
tion.) On the other hand Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer of the classic
theory of evolution, was a persuaded and unrepentent spiritualist,23 and the
members of the Society for Psychical Research (1882) included FRS William
Crookes, Francis Galton and two leading Germans, the pioneer psycho-
physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner, and the German Wallace, Friedrich
Zöllner, Professor of Astrophysics at Leipzig, author of a theory to explain
Slade’s feats through his access to a postulated fourth dimension of space,
and witness for the defence at his trial.24 Zöllner’s works feature in The
Noonday Goddess.
Back in Berlin, Wilhelm encounters the mediator of his spiritualism,
a figure known only as the Spreewaldgraf, a highly educated and uncon-
ventional, socialist aristocrat. In fact, his entry into the spiritualist world
is cunningly mediated through not one but two false starts. The first is
his meeting with the Graf at a séance, to which he has been invited by
Edmund. The medium is a fraud, and the evening ends in farce. But it turns
out that the Graf is both a believer in the new positivistic science, a fierce
sceptic and determined exposer of frauds, and a committed spiritualist;
so much so, that he keeps his own medium, an American girl called Lilly
E. Jackson. Her role is to keep him in spiritual contact with his beloved
late wife Nelly. Intrigued by this unique combination of scepticism and
ing by Alexander von Humboldt himself.26 The final twist comes from his
ensuing erotic infatuation with Lilly. As this culminates in an af fair (II,
253f f.), so her mediumistic powers decline. Her intended ultimate proof,
the manifestation of the noonday goddess herself, is also exposed as a trashy
theatrical illusion. A search reveals her box of tricks. Indeed she herself
admits that has been exploiting the Graf vampirically (I, 110; 141; II, 390),
merely pretending to manifest his beloved Nelly, as revenge for his refusing
to take her as a lover. The last intellectual prop of his existence gone, the Graf
shoots her and then himself. Little the wiser, Wilhelm returns permanently
to metropolitan Berlin. He commits once more to the struggle for life in
the concrete jungle, a commitment symbolized by Bölsche’s superlatively
lyrical rendering of the kiss that awaits him from Therese at the Anhalter
Bahnhof, as two thundering and hissing locomotives whistle greetings at
each other and veil the lovers in steam, Bölsche’s aesthetic reinvention of
love in the age of technology. The cigar smoke which concealed the riddle
of Wilhelm’s life at the start has metamorphosed by the end into the halo
of steam around his embrace of Therese.
Now The Noonday Goddess is often dismissed as a one-dimension-
ally Naturalistic text. Yes, it features Naturalistic elements. Unusually for
German Naturalistic novels (even Carl Hauptmann’s grim Mathilde), which
avoid the city milieu, there are impressive descriptions of disorientating, yet
intoxicating experience of streets choked by swaying masses, and intensely
evocative lyrical tracings of the novel sensual experience of fered by the
vast, kaleidoscopic electric light panoramas of Potsdamer and Leipziger
Platz. But Bölsche’s skilful evocation of the spirit of place serves more
than just a Naturalistic end. He searched out authentic evocative settings
for the action in Berlin, from Rathenowstraße in Moabit, to the litter-
polluted Grünewald and the Teufelssee. One can map them much like
Poldy Bloom’s movements in Dublin (even if one cannot remap them
onto Homer’s Mediterranean Sea). But these descriptions are not of fered
merely to evoke the new determinations of the psyche by the new modes
26 Much fun is had with the role of a spirit Humboldt by Fritz Mauthner in his satire
Die Geisterseher.
244 NICHOLAS SAUL
of life. They in fact of fer contrast in the scheme of the novel as the sym-
bolic psychogram of a nervous and sensitive modernist self, projected onto
not one, but two chronotopes. Of course the action also takes place in the
Spreewald, perhaps 100km SE of the city. This unique place (where the
delicious Spreewaldgurken are indeed mentioned in passing; I, 152) is the
symbolic site of the positivist’s confrontation with his Other, in the form
of the plausible ‘facts’ of spiritualism. The Spreewald is just as Wilhelm
describes it, a huge f lat territory, which by contrast to the sand, conifers,
brick and stone of Berlin and the Mark, possesses a rich, dark soil, is covered
by luxurious deciduous forest with opulent undergrowth, teeming with life,
and intricately veined throughout with hundreds of shallow channels of
the upper reaches of the Spree. If transport in Berlin is by Pferdebahn and
the new-fangled Stadtbahn, then in the Spreewald it is by pole and punt.
Wilhelm is struck by the strange Wendish dialect, the ancient Tracht of
the women, and the archaic, pear-shaped haystacks (still to be seen), which
remind him of the dwellings of those survivors of prehistory, the native
Australians (I, 175). Berlin is thus the metropolis, site of modernity. But
the Spreewald, as its domination by the spirit of Pschipolniza and the other
hints suggest, is not only the mysterious East, it is the past, and not only
the past, but also the symbol of the unconscious structures of the psyche.
It is no coincidence that Wilhelm consummates his sexual relationship
with Lilly after a labyrinthine voyage into the darkest reaches of the river
system (II, 243). The Noonday Goddess, then, stands in the tradition inau-
gurated by Bulwer-Lytton in The Last Days of Pompeii (1834), or, better,
its productive literary and psychological reception in Germany by Jensen
and Freud, which posits the existence of deep structures of the psyche,
links them with evolution, and images their exploration as the archæologi-
cal recovery of buried or preserved strata in ancient topographies. In this
Bölsche prefigures not only Jensen and Freud,27 but also Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice (1911) and Hofmannsthal’s Andreas (1907–30), both of
27 See Freud, Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens ‘Gradiva’; also Rohrwasser, Freuds
pompejanische Muse.
The Dark Side of Modernity 245
the unwilling, yet willing acolyte with incredible tactical subtlety, by first
seeming to share their scepticism and satisfaction at the debunking of a
false spirit seer, only then to lead them deeper into the water. Most obvi-
ous: Schiller’s Prinz, like Wilhelm, first encounters a world which is more
than it seems in Venice on the canals, and it is a trip along the Brenta by
gondola, culminating in a sensationally theatrical fraudulent séance, which
symbolizes the emergence of his unconscious landscape (55–56, 70). We
must not overdo the parallels. In the Schiller, it would seem, the Prinz is
destroyed and the power of the lie triumphs, which is clearly not so in the
optimistic Bölsche. In the fragmentary Schiller the power of the Armenian,
his conjurations of seemingly genuine spirits, is never exposed. And the
Graf is of course an honest seeker after truth, rather than a dæmonic and
guileful manipulator. The Noonday Goddess lacks the brooding atmosphere
of intrigue which Schiller so superbly achieves. Finally, of course, Bölsche
has nineteenth-century advances in the physiology of the senses on his
side. Wilhelm’s vision is ultimately exposed as unwitting self-deception, the
power of the unconscious to accept suggestion and of the optical nerves
to construct an overpowering inner hallucination (Noonday Goddess II,
419f f.). And this dethroning of the apparently sovereign ego is a chief
lesson of The Noonday Goddess.
One could go on positivistically detecting sources. Schiller and Wilhelm
Meister apart, I for one have not missed the equally obvious ironic rewriting
of Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, which this story of a young scientist’s abandon-
ment of his bourgeois lover and encounter in the forest with an archaic
goddess represents.30 Whatever about that, it is clear that The Noonday
Goddess stands self-consciously in that tradition of literary rewritings of the
compensatory encounter with the dark side in modernity which runs from
Schiller to Kleist’s ‘Bettelweib’, Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der
Naturwissenschaft, Hof fmann’s ‘Magnetiseur’, Brentano’s Emmerick writ-
ings, Kerner’s Seherin von Prévorst, Fechner’s Die Tagesansicht gegenüber
30 Die Lehrlinge zu Sais one can certainly see as a self-ref lexive allegory about Poesie in
Poesie. And surely Schiller’s Geisterseher should also be interpreted as a self-ref lexive
allegory about the ambivalent sensual cognitive power of the theatre.
The Dark Side of Modernity 247
der Nachtansicht, and many others. The Noonday Goddess clearly appro-
priates and experimentally re-writes these earlier, equally modernist and
experimental self-rewritings. It thus exemplifies not only the Naturalist
Großstadtroman and the sensation novel, but also the practice of liter-
ary modernism as defined by Uwe Japp: as an aesthetic experiment in
reconstruction of the threatened modern self which creatively destroys the
monuments of the literary tradition to perform that task.
In this context one quintessentially modernist dimension of The
Noonday Goddess has been overlooked: the sense in which it is only at
one level about spiritualism. For what can the desire as it were magically
to manifest and physically to touch the absent body of the lost loved one
actually signify, if not the primal urge of Pygmalion?31 And so the treat-
ment of spiritualism is more than a dead letter, it is a codified ref lexion
in art on art, coupled with a ref lexion on art and desire. As Hans Richard
Brittnacher memorably showed in his study of the chapter ‘Fragwürdigstes’
in Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg, the spiritualist séance habitually encodes
censored or forbidden love. There it reveals rather more about Hans Castorp
than he cares to know, namely his repressed gay passion for poor Joachim
Ziemßen, whose spirit form unexpectedly materializes.32 But it also codi-
fies heterosexual love, as is suggested to those with eyes to see in the bla-
tant mirroring of both birth and sexual ecstasy by the description of the
Danish medium Elly’s physical strugglings and pantings at the climax of the
séance (396–398). In The Noonday Goddess this encoding is equally clear.
Wilhelm’s relationship with Therese, as her saintly name suggests, is from
the outset desexualized, and so surely plays its part in the making of his
existential unrest at the start of his spiritualist adventure (Noonday Goddess
I, 18–19). The same is true of Lilly. After their sexual union, Lilly’s creativity
as a medium dissipates dramatically, so that Wilhelm worries that carnal
knowledge is responsible for the decline in spiritual energy (255). But that
is neither Wilhelm’s nor Bölsche’s final answer. Lilly, it turns out, is really
German, from a theatrical family, which still performs in a Friedrichstraße
music hall. After the death of her lover, an American medium, she has for
sheer material need picked up and duped the Graf in Paris, and since then,
rejected by him as a lover, systematically and vampirically (I, 110; II, 390)
deployed her theatrical talent to bleed him through the vessel of his desire.
Her failure as a medium after consummation of the af fair with Wilhelm
thus suggests that it was all along – tragically33 – conditioned by sublimated
desire. If there be any doubt about the intended identification of desire
for the spiritualist body with a woman’s sexuality in this novel, then this
description at the end of an automatic writing session of Lilly’s ecstatic
trance – inspiration for Thomas Mann’s Elly, perhaps? – may remove it:
But while (Walter) was still speaking and our eyes remained on the movements of
the pencil, Lilly’s face suddenly puckered, her hand sank limply down, – there was
a muf f led scream, an arching and bending of her body as if a wave of nervous ref lex
energy were running down her spinal column, so that her blond plait was brutally
jammed for some seconds against the wooden rest, then a second scream, louder and
stronger, and at the same time both arms jerked upward, so that the pencil f lew in
a broad arc from her outstretched fingers, – and her eyes opened, huge, transfixed,
with an expression of nameless terror. […] In its savagery the paroxysm was more
frightening than anything which had passed before, it was as if all of us had com-
pulsively witnessed the entire hurricane raging inwardly through the young girl’s
nervous system. (My translation, NDBS)34
33 Lilly is throughout linked with the tragic muse Euterpe (Mittagsgöttin II, 201; 281;
307; 400; 413–414; 419), and her existential predicament is suggested by Bölsche
to be rooted in the suspect aesthetic power of theatre to dupe us (414).
34 Aber während (Walter) noch sprach und unsre Augen auf die Bewegungen des Stiftes
harrten, zuckte Lillys Gesicht plötzlich zusammen, die Hand sank schlaf f hin, – ein
matter Aufschrei, ein Beugen und Krümmen des Körpers, als laufe eine erregende
Ref lexwelle das Rückenmark entlang, wobei der blonde Zopf sich mehrere Sekunden
lang scharf an die Holzlehne einklemmte, dann ein zweiter lauter und kraftvoller
Schrei, mit dem zugleich beide Arme so emporzuckten, daß der Bleistift in weitem
Bogen aus den gespreizten Fingern ins Gemach hinausf log, – und die Augen öf fneten
sich, groß, starr, mit einem Ausdruck namenlosen Entsetzens. […] Der Paroxysmus
hatte mehr noch als alles Voraufgehende etwas Beängstigendes in seiner Wildheit,
man glaubte unwillkürlich den ganzen Orkan mit anzusehen, der das Nervensystem
des jungen Mädchens innerlich durchtobte (II, 59f.; compare 416).
The Dark Side of Modernity 249
itself. The novel itself embodies e contrario the aestheticist triumph of the
transfigurative cognitive power of modern art in the experimental search
for the true self: as Lilly’s and Frey’s art is false, so the novel itself is true.
The lesson of The Noonday Goddess is that self-ref lexive, experimental art
is the discourse of truth finding beyond both Darwinism and spiritualism.
Bölsche of course does not abandon Darwinism. But The Noonday Goddess
reveals him at a crucial stage of his career, and typical of his age, as passing
from evolutionary aesthetics to evolutionary aesthetics.
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Bram Mertens
1 De Cauter, 34n.
256 Bram Mertens
2 Gasché insists that although ‘there is no doubt that his dissertation continues to
give us a correct and fruitful view of the early Romantic conceptions […] it also
remains true that the dissertation is thoroughly f lawed, not only for philological,
but for discursive-argumentative reasons as well’ (Gasché, 50–51). Andrew Bowie
goes even further, stating that ‘some of what Benjamin wrote has turned out to
of fer little which can be said to stand up to methodological scrutiny’ (Bowie, From
Romanticism to Critical Theory, 193). It is dif ficult to disagree with the latter when
one is confronted by a considerable corpus of secondary literature, particularly on
the Kunstkritik essay, which mostly succeeds in making murky waters murkier still.
Rebecca Comay’s essay on Benjamin’s dissertation, for instance, however astutely
written, is singularly unhelpful if the reader is after a degree of clarity on the work
in question (Comay, 134–151). Similarly, even Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s famous
introduction to the French translation of the dissertation fails to shed any light on
its contents, chief ly because it again seeks to speak the same mystical language as
the original text, thereby ef fectively masking the methodological shortcomings that
Andrew Bowie referred to (Bowie, ‘Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s The Concept
of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’, 421–432). A very clear and helpful, if brief,
discussion of some aspects of Benjamin’s reading of Fichte and Schlegel can be found
in Fred Rush, ‘Jena Romanticism and Benjamin’s Critical Epistemology’, 127–130.
3 ‘Methode dieser Arbeit: literarische Montage. Ich habe nichts zu sagen, nur zu zeigen.’
(Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, 574. Henceforth cited as GS plus volume
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism 257
relevant texts, Benjamin has come to the conclusion that Kant’s philoso-
phy of history would not be a fruitful avenue to explore, and instead f loats
the idea of discussing the concept of the ‘infinite task’, again in a letter to
Scholem, asking him in a marginal note: ‘what do you think of this?’6 A
further two weeks after that, the decision has clearly been made, as Benjamin
has come to the conclusion that Kant’s thought is ‘entirely unsuitable […]
as a point of departure or as an actual subject of an independent critique’.7
Benjamin’s disappointment stems from what he perceives or believes to
be Kant’s reductive assessment of history and historical knowledge, using
a methodological perspective which is modelled on the natural sciences,
and defines as inaccessible the ethical side of history in which Benjamin
is interested most of all. His chief objection, in other words, is epistemo-
logical. Towards the end of 1917, at the same time as he is considering his
dissertation topic, he commits these epistemological musings to paper in
what would become Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. In
this exploratory piece, Benjamin praises Kant’s project for being the first
and only one after Plato to take up the necessary task of seeking to ground
and justify all knowledge, but criticizes it for reducing this knowledge as
well as the reality with which he sought to ground it to ‘a reality of a low,
perhaps even the lowest order’.8 The reason why Benjamin believes this
to be the case is that the Weltanschauung of the Enlightenment, of which
Kant’s philosophy is both part and partial origin, takes the mathematical
model of Newtonian physics as the gold standard for its conception of
experience, excluding a good deal of the spectrum of human (and non-
human) experience and entrenching a religious and historical blindness
which has persisted to his day.9 The task of Benjamin’s future philosophy
is therefore ‘to establish the epistemological foundation of a higher concept
Kantian thought is to be retained. What this essence consists of and how one would
have to establish his system anew in order to let this come to the fore, I do not know
as yet. Yet it is my conviction: whoever does not sense the oscillation of the think-
ing of the Lehre itself in Kant and whoever does therefore not consider him and his
every letter with the utmost reverence as a tradendum, as something to be handed
down (however much he would have to be reorganized afterwards) knows absolutely
nothing about philosophy.12
This passage is not only very revealing about Benjamin’s own nascent epis-
temology, it also goes a long way to explaining why, in spite of his initial
enthusiasm, he ended up writing about Fichte, Schlegel and Novalis rather
than Kant. By his own admission Benjamin does not have any evidence to
support his conviction that the essence of Kant’s philosophy is part of this
elusive Lehre, nor indeed does he have a clear idea of what the essence of
12 ‘Ohne bisher dafür irgend welche Beweise in der Hand zu haben bin ich des festen
Glaubens daß es im Sinne der Philosophie und damit der Lehre, zu der diese gehört,
wenn sie sie nicht etwa sogar ausmacht, nie und nimmer um eine Erschütterung,
einen Sturz des Kantischen Systems handeln kann, sondern vielmehr um seine gran-
itne Festlegung und universale Ausbildung. […] In der Tat sehe ich nur die Aufgabe
wie ich sie eben umschrieben habe klar vor mir daß das Wesentliche des Kantischen
Denkens zu erhalten sei. Worin dieses Wesentliche besteht und wie man sein System
neu gründen muß um es hervortreten zu lassen weiß ich bis heute nicht. Aber es
ist meine Überzeugung: wer nicht in Kant das Denken der Lehre selbst ringen fühlt
und wer daher nicht mit äußerster Ehrfurcht ihn mit seinem Buchstaben als ein
tradendum, zu Überlieferndes erfaßt (wie weit man ihn auch später umbilden müsse)
weiß von Philosophie garnichts’ (GB 1, 389; Benjamin’s emphasis). In the same letter,
Benjamin singles out the philosophy of history as the locus where ‘die spezifische
Verwandtschaft einer Philosophie mit der wahren Lehre am klarsten hervortreten
müssen [wird]; denn hier wird das Thema des historischen Werdens er Erkenntnis das
die Lehre zur Auf lösung bringt, auftreten müssen.’ With a certain degree of foresight,
he adds that it is ‘nicht ganz ausgeschlossen daß in dieser Beziehung Kants Philosophie
noch sehr unentwickelt wäre’, but even if it were the case that not enough could be
extracted from Kant’s work, he would find himself ‘ein andres Arbeitsgebiet’ (GB
1, 391). This would appear to support the view that Benjamin came to his disserta-
tion with certain preconceived notions about what he was going to write, and that
it was never going to be a case of faithfully describing and analysing what certain
authors actually wrote, but more about finding subjects whose thought would fit
into Benjamin’s philosophy with as little resistance as possible.
262 Bram Mertens
Kant’s philosophy may be, but this does not appear to make his conviction
any less firm. Indeed, reading these very early descriptions and discussions,
it is dif ficult to avoid the impression that what came first to Benjamin was
unquestionably the feel, the Gesinnung, of his Lehre, which he would only
later attempt to pour into a more or less discursive mould.
The Lehre, inevitably and slightly unsatisfactorily translated as ‘doc-
trine’, is a concept whose importance to Benjamin’s work really cannot
be overestimated, as it is both the keystone and the summary of his epis-
temology.13 Significantly, it emerges in the autumn of 1917 in Benjamin’s
correspondence with Scholem on the topic of education and the role of
tradition, when he writes with his by now familiar conviction: ‘I am con-
vinced: tradition is the medium in which the learner continuously changes
into the teacher […]. These relationships are symbolized and summarized
in the development of the Lehre.’14 He goes on to describe the Lehre as
an undulating sea in which individuals are the rising and falling waves,
emerging from the tradition they are part of and disappearing back into
it without a trace, their individual subjectivity subsumed into the Lehre.
The concept makes another appearance in Über das Programm der kom-
menden Philosophie, this time again explicitly in connection with Benjamin’s
thoughts on Kant. Aside from the historical blindness and a reductive
concept of experience, Benjamin criticizes Kant’s epistemology for what
he terms the subject nature of the knowing consciousness, with its con-
comitant vision of the object world as objecta, standing opposite or even
opposed to the subject. Rather than focusing his epistemology on what
could be termed a predatory subject, which sees a more or less passive
13 As such I have always found it baf f ling that this concept was left out of Opitz and
Wizisla’s otherwise fine collection of essays entitled Benjamins Begrif fe. For a more
extensive discussion of the word and concept Lehre in Benjamin’s work, see my Dark
Images, Secret Hints: Benjamin, Scholem, Molitor and the Jewish Tradition, 169f f.
14 ‘Ich bin überzeugt: die Tradition ist das Medium in dem sich kontinuierlich der
Lernende in den Lehrenden verwandelt […]. Symbolisiert und zusammengefaßt
werden diese Verhältnisse in der Entwicklung der Lehre’ (GB 1, 382; Benjamin’s
emphasis). This letter is dated on and before 6 September 1917, his next letter to
Scholem, dated 22 September, contains the remarks on Kant quoted above.
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism 263
object world in front of itself and seeks the power of knowledge over it,
Benjamin attempts to shift the emphasis to the process or the sphere of
knowing itself. Just as both teacher and learner become subordinate to and
even subsumed into tradition, the subject and object in Benjamin’s future
philosophy become part of the ‘autonomous and very own sphere of knowl-
edge’, constructed along a ‘pure, systematic continuum of experience’.15 This
pure and systematic continuum of experience would be able to encompass
and accommodate all manner of experience overlooked or even outlawed
by the Enlightenment, including of course religious experiences, but also
those experiences which Benjamin says are termed primitive, pathologi-
cal or insane. In calling it a continuum, he suggests that the qualitative
dif ference between all these experiences is less stark than the reception of
Kant’s philosophy has led us to believe: ‘The knowing human being, the
knowing empirical consciousness is a form of insane consciousness.’16 And
in establishing an autonomous sphere of knowledge, Benjamin performs
a kind of Copernican turn away from the subject and towards the act and
process of knowing, in which the subject appears to take part on an equal
footing with the object, thereby transcending the subject-object distinction
itself. In conclusion, Benjamin writes that the task of future philosophy
should be, ‘to create a concept of knowledge on the basis of the Kantian
system to which corresponds a concept of experience, of which the knowl-
edge is Lehre’, before adding a terse Lehrsatz of his own: ‘Experience is the
homogeneous and continuous multiplicity of knowledge.’17
It is clear now that Benjamin’s reading of Kant in preparation for his
doctoral dissertation led him to form his own epistemological thoughts
and formulate some of them more or less systematically, if brief ly, in his
23 ‘Die Tathandlung ist eine setzende Ref lexion oder ein ref lektiertes Setzen, “… ein
sich Setzen als setzend … keineswegs aber etwa ein bloßes Setzen”.’ (Benjamin, Der
Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 23).
24 ‘In eine leere Unendlichkeit’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 33).
25 ‘Wegen seiner Unmittelbarkeit wird es eine Anschauung genannt. In diesem Selbst
bewußtsein, in dem Anschauung und Denken, Subjekt und Objekt zusammenfallen,
ist die Ref lexion gebannt, eingefangen und ihrer Endlosigkeit entkleidet, ohne ver-
nichtet zu sein.’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 26–27).
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism 267
Notiz on the human gaze: ‘How things withstand our gaze!’28 Another
reason why the Romantics found fault with Fichte’s philosophy is because
they wanted to restore the endlessly fruitful concept of ref lection at the
heart of their thought. By shifting the focus away from the intuited I back
towards the subject as part of the object world, and by fully rehabilitating
ref lection, the Romantics changed the emphasis of their epistemology
from individual and fixed entities to the process, removing the fixedness
of the entities in the process:
Whereas Fichte thinks he can locate ref lection in the original positing, in the original
being, this particular ontological distinction which lies in the act of positing falls
away for the Romantics. Romantic thought sublates being and positing in the act
of ref lection. The Romantics assume a pure thinking-it(s-) self as a phenomenon; it
is proper to everything, because everything is a self. To Fichte, only the I is granted
a self, that is to say ref lection exists only and exclusively in correlation to a posit-
ing. To Fichte, consciousness is ‘I’, to the Romantics it is ‘self ’, or, in other words: in
Fichte, ref lection is related to the I, in the Romantics it is related to thinking itself,
and it is exactly in this relationship […] that the actual romantic concept of ref lec-
tion is constituted.29
Unlike Fichte, the Romantics were not daunted by the prospect of ref lec-
tion as an endless process, indeed they welcomed it as an inexhaustible
source of knowledge in the broadest possible sense of the word. In the
words of Schlegel quoted above, thinking ourselves makes us appear
infinite, as finite as we are in real life. But to the Romantics, ref lection
clearly also happened in objects, not just in the subject. The object world
partakes of ref lection as much as the thinking subject, and both come
together in the medium of ref lection. Rather than remaining entirely
passive in the epistemic process, the object is itself a centre of ref lection
which is raised to higher power when it collides with the centre of ref lec-
tion that is the subject. Nor is the subject entirely active in this process,
as this too is af fected by the contact with the object: ‘in the medium of
ref lection, the thing and the knowing entity morph into one another.
They are both only relative units of ref lection.’30 It would not be a stretch
of the imagination to see this coincidence of subject and object in the
medium of ref lection as the very Denken der Lehre which Benjamin
was convinced he could see in Kant’s philosophy. It contains the same
emphasis on the process, on das bloße Denken, and on the resulting truth
not so much as a fixed object which can be manipulated, but as an activ-
ity which may enrich, enhance and serve as a prompt for further ref lec-
tion, but which can never be pinned down without being destroyed. As
Benjamin summarizes it in a letter to Scholem: ‘Truth is not so much
thought, rather it thinks.’31
To the romantics, the process of ref lection culminates in art and criti-
cism, in which the critic and the work of art as distinct centres of ref lection
come together in the ‘ref lexive medium of art’.32 Benjamin stresses that the
critical process is governed by the same laws that apply to the perception
and knowledge of the object world. Rather than issuing a value judgement
on a work of art, it is the task of the critic to awaken the self-ref lection of
the work of art, and in doing so bring it to awareness and knowledge of
30 ‘Im Medium der Ref lexion gehen das Ding und das erkennende Wesen ineinander
über. Beides sind nur relative Ref lexionseinheiten.’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der
Kunstkritik, 62–63).
31 ‘Die Wahrheit wird ebensowenig gedacht als sie denkt’ (GB 1, 409). Benjamin
would return to the concept of truth in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, where
he describes it famously as ‘ein aus Ideen gebildetes intentionsloses Sein’ and ‘der
Tod der Intention’ (GS 1, 216).
32 ‘Ref lexionsmedium der Kunst’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 70).
270 Bram Mertens
itself.33 Just as was the case with previous levels of ref lection, the result of
this process should be the (self-)knowledge of the work of art, not a verdict
as to whether a given work is good or bad. Therefore, just as Benjamin had
predicted, the aesthetic process of criticism is in its very essence an epistemic
process, in which both artwork and criticism are intimately intertwined.
The critique completes and fulfills the artwork, and as such becomes part of
it, raising both to a higher power of ref lection and awareness, and inviting
yet further ref lection in an endless process of creation and criticism. This
infinite critical process is the ref lexive medium of art, creating the infinity
of art itself, much as the infinite number of rising and falling waves create
the endlessness of the sea itself, to reprise Benjamin’s earlier image. Both
the artwork and the critic are part of this ref lexive medium, and in their
reciprocal ref lection, they are consumed by it and subsumed in it, sacri-
ficing their individuality to the greater glory of art itself, which is how it
should be: ‘The individual work of art should be dissolved into the medium
of art, but the only way that this process can properly unfold through a
multitude of successive critics is if these are not empirical intellects, but
personified stages of ref lection.’34 The emphatically secondary role given
to the subject compared to the process, both in Romantic epistemology
and Romantic aesthetics, is something which Benjamin clearly values, and
which echoes concerns he wrote about a good two years before finishing
his dissertation.35
In the closing chapter, Benjamin turns to the Romantic conception
of art itself, and this reveals an even more tantalising insight into why he
devoted his dissertation to Schlegel and Novalis rather than Kant. Having
33 ‘Kritik ist also gleichsam ein Experiment am Kunstwerk, durch welches dessen
Ref lexion wachgerufen, durch das es zum Bewußtsein seiner selbst gebracht wird’
(Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 70).
34 ‘[E]s soll das einzelne Kunstwerk im Medium der Kunst aufgelöst werden, dieser
Prozeß kann aber durch eine Vielheit einander ablösender Kritiker nur dann
sinngemäß dargestellt sein, wenn sie nicht empirische Intellekte, sondern personifi-
zierte Ref lexionsstufen sind’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 73).
35 It is this predilection which leads Menninghaus to characterize Benjamin’s disserta-
tion as ‘a theory of the “I”-less structures of ref lection’ (Menninghaus, 50).
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism 271
brought together the critic and the artwork in the ref lexive medium of art
and made an immanent critique an essential part of the artwork itself, art
will necessarily change from a static collection of immutable, canonical
works to a process of aesthetic cross-fertilisation in which the boundaries
between artwork and critique become blurred. And it is not just this dis-
tinction which becomes less stark, as traditional definitions of which forms
of expression should be seen as art are also questioned. Quoting the famous
116th Athenaeum Fragment, Benjamin states that the task of Romantic
aesthetics to Schlegel was ‘to reunite all separate genres of poetry […] it
encompasses everything so long as it is poetic, from the greatest systems
of art which contain further systems within themselves to the sigh, the
kiss, which is uttered in the artless singing of a child’s imagination […]’.36
This concept of art as a sliding scale of all expressions is what Benjamin
himself calls the ‘continuum of forms’ or ‘continuum of art forms.’37 True
to the manner of its construction as a ref lexive medium, this continuum
of forms is an organic whole, uniting all forms and works of art into one
single totality. This, Benjamin says, leads Schlegel to the mystical thesis
‘that art is a work of art itself ’.38 It is obvious that this vision of art as an
all-encompassing process in which meaning and knowledge are endlessly
created is an answer to Benjamin’s own call for a new philosophy in Über
das Programm der kommenden Philosophie. The Romantic ‘continuum of
forms’ is nothing less than the ‘pure systematic continuum of experience’
he claimed a new epistemology would have to establish if it were to lie at
the basis of a philosophy that was worthy of the name. This would be the
Lehre which is not limited to a depleted concept of experience and is thus
free to explore and explain the ‘the integrated and continuous multiplic-
ity of knowledge’, which should be the task of a true philosophy. In his
36 ‘Alle getrennten Gattungen der Poesie wieder zu vereinigen … sie umfaßt alles, was
nur poetisch ist, vom größten wieder mehrere Systeme in sich enthaltenden Systeme
der Kunst, bis zu dem Seufzer, dem Kuß, den das dichtende Kind aushaucht in kunst
losen Gesang […]’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 95).
37 ‘Kontinuum der Formen’ and ‘Kontinuum der Kunstformen’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f
der Kunstkritik, 95).
38 ‘Daß die Kunst selbst ein Werk sei’ (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 98).
272 Bram Mertens
39 ‘Extreme Formulierung’: ‘Eine Philosophie, die nicht die Möglichkeit der Weissagung
aus dem Kaf feesatz einbezieht und explizieren kann, kann keine wahre sein’ (Scholem,
77; Scholem’s emphasis). When Benjamin addresses the concept of art itself in the
context of the continuum of forms in the Kunstkritik essay, he also includes ‘die
geistige Weisekunst’ and ‘die Divinationskunst’, adding that Schlegel himself saw
criticism as a divinatory art (Benjamin, Der Begrif f der Kunstkritik, 97).
The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism 273
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274 Bram Mertens
Introduction
The theme of this chapter – Realism after Modernism – will no doubt seem
to many to be both otiose and obsolete in our postmodern era, and with
good reason. The modernist critiques of realist conceptions of reality and
realist representations of that reality blew apart the metaphysical and aes-
thetic frameworks underpinning nineteenth-century realism and plunged
the post/modernist artist into a mise-en-abîme of self-conscious images and
self-deconstructing mirages.1 As Terry Eagleton observed in a review essay
on Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, ‘We cannot compare an artistic representation
with how the world is, since how the world is is itself a matter of representa-
tion. We can only compare artistic representations with non-artistic ones,
a distinction which can itself be a little shaky.’2 Not surprisingly, socially
critical and politically committed artists in particular were faced with a
seemingly intractable dilemma, namely: how can advanced capitalism and
late modernity be represented if modernist critiques of realism are valid?3
1 See Sheppard, ‘The Problematics of European Modernism’, 1–51, and Sheppard,
Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism, 31–70.
2 Eagleton, ‘Pork Chops and Pineapples’, 17. Eagleton’s argument here reproduces
the idealist/modernist fallacy that reality is constituted – rather than mediated – by
language/representation.
3 Although advanced capitalism and late modernity overlap, they are not equiva-
lent or identical. The advanced industrial societies of the former Communist bloc
in Europe and contemporary China cannot be categorized as capitalist, and late
276 STEVE GILES
This dilemma was particularly acute for Marxist aesthetic theorists, and my
aim in this discussion is to revisit the various ways in which Brecht, Lukács
and Adorno engage with the possibility of realism after modernism, in the
context of their broader ref lections on representation and modernity. I shall
suggest that Brecht, Lukács and Adorno are rather closer theoretically than
is often assumed, not least as all three accept that classic realism is in crisis
because of the increasing abstraction and reification of late modernity,4
which undermines the Hegelian notion that essence must be mediated
in appearance. At the same time, they continue to be advocates of artistic
realism, sharing the view that realist art must reveal what Adorno terms
the ens realissimum of advanced capitalist society.
In order to substantiate these possibly contentious claims, I first present
a systematic critique of Lukács’s classic essay ‘Narrate or Describe’,5 which
provided a template for discussions of realism and modernism in Marxist
aesthetics and has been described as possibly the most convincing rep-
resentation of Lukács’s theoretical position.6 After noting significant
parallels between Lukács’s opposition of Narration and Description and
Brecht’s distinction between dramatic theatre and epic theatre, I move
modernity tends to be defined not just in socio-economic terms but also in relation
to a fundamental restructuring of time and space since the late nineteenth century
that had a drastic impact on modes of cultural representation: for further discussion
see Giddens, Harvey and Kern, and the discussion of Giddens and Harvey in rela-
tion to modernism in Giles, ‘Avant-Garde, Modernism, Modernity: A Theoretical
Overview’. Brecht’s critique of representation in The Threepenny Lawsuit draws on
key features of both advanced capitalism and late modernity.
4 Previous research in this area in the past four decades – from Bürger’s Vermittlung
– Rezeption – Funktion and Lunn’s Marxism and Modernism, through to Jameson
in Brecht and Method and Gerz in ‘Die Expressionismusdebatte’ – has tended to
focus on the oppositions between Brecht/Lukács, Lukács/Adorno, and Adorno/
Brecht, rather than their sometimes surprising theoretical af finities. A key aim of
my discussion is to provoke a reconsideration of that orthodoxy.
5 Lukács, ‘Erzählen oder Beschreiben?’ (first published in Internationale Literatur, 11
(1936) 100–118 and 12 (1936) 108–123).
6 See Bürger, 35. The most convincing critical accounts of Lukács’s position may be
found in Bürger, 31–43, and Jameson, Marxism and Form, 191–205.
Realism after Modernism 277
Lukács
9 Although Lukács does not cite specific modernist writers, key features of the
Descriptive text are clearly present in the work of – for example – Conrad, Joyce,
Kafka and Proust. Lukács’s model also applies to D. H. Lawrence: see Giles, ‘Marxism
and Form: D. H. Lawrence, St Mawr’, 54–64.
10 As Bürger notes in Vermittlung – Rezeption – Funktion, 41–42, Lukács’s account
of the relationship between narrative form and the socio-political position of the
author is inconsistent and problematic, and in my view is further undermined by
Lukács’s contentious conf lation of author and narrator.
Realism after Modernism 279
11 On Hegel’s theory of drama, see Giles, The Problem of Action in Modern European
Drama, 11–18.
280 STEVE GILES
home in the work, secure in its poetic projection of life in all its breadth
and wholeness.
The distinctive features of Description, as embodied in the ‘descrip-
tive’ text, radically distance it from the narrative text. While descriptions
in the narrative text are tightly integrated into the work as a whole, in the
descriptive text they function as padding and are only loosely related to the
overall action of the novel. The descriptive text thus becomes episodic, the
causality and sequentiality of the narrative text degenerates into chance
and mere succession or juxtaposition, and events give way to occurrences.
A crucial reason for this tendency to atomization and disintegration is
that the non-human world of nature and inanimate objects is no longer
closely interwoven with human praxis. Any intrinsic significance they
might have had disappears, and the author is compelled to impose poetic
significance on them from without. Furthermore, human beings themselves
are reduced either to the level of inanimate objects, or to a chaotic succes-
sion of moods or states of mind that are only tenuously connected with
their actions. Rather than interacting with the world in a dynamic fashion,
human beings seem to be mere spectators of their own lives, and the reader
too is forced into the position of an observer. However, as observers are
contemporaneous with the occurrences they are observing, they must soon
become lost in a welter of information whose significance is as yet unknown,
and are therefore incapable of correctly identifying events and explicating
their relationship to society as a whole. The same principle applies in the
novel, where the retrospection of the narrative text is superseded by the
contemporaneity of mere description. The author/observer is no longer
omniscient, loses all sense of proportion, sinks down to the level of his
characters’ perspectives, and simply mediates shifting points of view that
are unrelated to any overall epic context. As a result, the descriptive text
produces not a correct ref lection of objective reality, revealing its inner
dynamism grounded in the driving forces of human society, but a superficial
and distorted ref lection of the seemingly amorphous surface of life.
The notion that loss of intrinsic significance or immanent meaning is
a defining feature of late modernity is one that Lukács shares with other
major social and cultural theorists of the modernist era – one thinks imme-
diately of Durkheim, Simmel, Weber and Kracauer. Lukács suggests that
Realism after Modernism 281
12 See Hegel, Aesthetics, Volume II, 1046–1053; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 330–341.
See also Jameson’s discussion of Hegel in Marxism and Form, 352–354. Both Bürger
and Jameson provide particularly helpful discussions of Lukács’s indebtedness to
Hegel.
13 See Hegel, Aesthetics, volume II, 1053; Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 341.
14 Brecht, ‘Notes to the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, 68; ‘Anmerkungen
zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny’, 78–79.
282 STEVE GILES
Brecht
Although Brecht’s classic essays on realism were written between 1938 and
1940,17 he had formulated the core precepts informing his critique of real-
ism in his 1931 monograph The Threepenny Lawsuit. His primary target was
At the same time, Lukács could not have accepted Brecht’s advocacy
of abstraction, for two main reasons. First, he would have been highly
critical of Brecht’s structuralist approach to sociological analysis, with its
focus on functions and relations, because Lukács consistently emphasizes
the importance of the actions of individual agents. Secondly, whilst Lukács
insists that the reader must feel at home in the authentic realist narrative,
secure in its illusory projection of life in all its breadth and wholeness and
sharing in the experiences of the characters from whose standpoint events
are being narrated, Brecht’s more abstract conception of realism – which I
shall refer to as cognitive realism – is radically anti-empathetic. As Brecht
explains in The Threepenny Lawsuit, instead of motivating action in terms
of the individual’s character or inner life, cognitive realism should concen-
trate on the typical external behaviour of figures performing specific func-
tions. Cognitive realism does not seek to establish a bond of identification
between audience and work or audience and author, but wishes instead
to enable its audience to derive causal relationships inductively from the
behavioural attitudes presented in the work, and thus to make abstract
judgements. The audience must be given the opportunity to adopt a criti-
cal perspective on the political and economic relationships that underlie
observable social reality. For only then will it be possible for the audience
to see that human beings are conditioned by specific societal relationships,
yet are also capable of changing them.
Brecht’s interventions into the debate on realism and formalism imme-
diately question the hackneyed and confused premises that underlie it. In
the 1930s, the term formalism had come to be used in orthodox Marxist
circles in a decidedly pejorative fashion in order to condemn purely formal
or stylistic modes of innovation associated with modernist art. In his 1938
essays on Expressionism,25 Brecht points out that this approach ultimately
misconstrues the relationship between form and content, which in his view
is dynamic and symbiotic. If seeking new forms for an unchanging con-
tent exemplifies formalism, Brecht continues, then so does retaining old
Adorno
Adorno’s basic premise in his 1954 essay ‘The Position of the Narrator in
the Contemporary Novel’ is that the very process of narration has become
problematic, for two main reasons. First, life-experience, especially under
the impact of twentieth-century warfare, is no longer intrinsically coher-
ent and continuous, and can therefore no longer provide a firm basis for
Realism after Modernism 289
29 Adorno, ‘Position of the Narrator’, 32. ‘Will der Roman seinem realistischen Erbe
treu bleiben und sagen, wie es wirklich ist, so muß er auf einen Realismus verzichten,
der, indem er die Fassade reproduziert, nur dieser bei ihrem Täuschungsgeschäfte hilft’
(‘Standort des Erzählers’, 64).
30 Adorno, ‘Reading Balzac’, 128. ‘Um durchschaut zu werden, kann die Welt nicht mehr
angeschaut werden. Dafür, daß der literarische Realismus überholt ward, weil er als
Darstellung der Realität diese verfehlt, ist kein besserer zu zitieren als derselbe Brecht,
Realism after Modernism 291
der dann in die Zwangsjacke des Realismus schlüpfte, als wäre sie ein Maskenkostüm.
Er hat gesehen, daß das ens realissimum Prozesse sind, keine unmittelbaren Tatsachen,
und sie lassen sich nicht abbilden’ (‘Balzac-Lektüre’, 147).
31 The passage which Adorno quotes, using the 1960 edition of Bertolt Brechts
Dreigroschenbuch, is as follows:
‘The situation becomes so complicated because the simple “reproduction of reality”
says less than ever about that reality. A photograph of the Krupp factories or the AEG
reveals provides virtually no information about these establishments. True reality
has slipped over into functional reality. The reification of human relations, that is,
the factory, no longer delivers human relations to us’ (‘Reading Balzac’, 128).
‘Die Lage wird dadurch so kompliziert, daß weniger denn je eine einfache “Wiedergabe
der Realität” etwas über die Realität aussagt. Eine Fotografie der Kruppwerke oder
der AEG ergibt beinahe nichts über diese Institute. Die eigentliche Realität ist in
die Funktionale gerutscht. Die Verdinglichung der menschlichen Beziehungen, also
etwa die Fabrik, gibt die letzteren nicht mehr heraus’ (‘Balzac-Lektüre’, 147).
292 STEVE GILES
Bibliography
Primary Sources
32 At the end of the ‘Position of the Narrator’ essay, Adorno is confronted by an appar-
ently intractable dilemma. He concedes that the highly self-ref lexive aesthetic of
late modernist novels seems to lead into an artistic and socio-political cul-de-sac, in
that their radical attenuation of aesthetic distance entails capitulation in the face of
an overwhelming reality which, instead of being transfigured in aesthetic images,
needs to be transformed in the real world. This is, of course, an implicitly Brechtian
critique of late modernism.
33 See Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer’; ‘Der wunderliche Realist:
Über Siegfried Kracauer’.
34 Kracauer’s original text reads as follows: ‘The process leads directly through the centre
of the mass ornament, not away from it’ (‘The Mass Ornament’, 86); ‘der Prozeß
führt durch das Ornament der Masse mitten hindurch, nicht von ihm aus zurück’
(‘Das Ornament der Masse’, 67).
294 STEVE GILES
—— ‘Reading Balzac’, Notes to Literature. Volume One, trans. S. W. Nicholson (New
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Vielfalt der realistischen Schreibweise’, BFA 22, 424–433.
—— ‘Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht’, BFA 21, 443–444.
—— ‘The Expressionism Debate’, BAP, 213–214. ‘Die Expressionismusdebatte’, BFA
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—— ‘The Literarization of the Theatre. Notes to the Threepenny Opera’, Brecht on
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Methuen, 1964), 43–46. ‘Anmerkungen zur Dreigroschenoper’, BFA 24, 57–68.
—— ‘Notes to the Opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’, Brecht, Rise and
Fall of the City of Mahagonny, ed. and trans. S. Giles (London: Methuen, 2007),
63–74. ‘Anmerkungen zur Oper Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, BFA
24, 74–84.
——‘Notes on the Realist Mode of Writing’, BAP, 242–261. ‘Notizen über realistische
Schreibweise’, BFA 22, 620–640.
—— ‘On Non-objective Painting’, BAP, 239–242. ‘Über gegenstandslose Malerei’,
BFA 22, 584–586.
—— ‘On Socialist Realism’, BAP, 231–233. ‘Über sozialistischen Realismus’, BFA 22,
463–465.
—— ‘Popularity and Realism’, Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, 79–85.
‘Volkstümlichkeit und Realismus’, BFA 22, 405–413.
—— ‘Practical Thoughts on the Expressionism Debate’, BAP, 215–219. ‘Praktisches
zur Expressionismusdebatte’, BFA 22, 419–423.
—— The Threepenny Lawsuit, Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. M. Silberman
(London: Methuen, 2000), 148–199. Der Dreigroschenprozeß. Ein soziologisches
Experiment, BFA 21, 448–514.
Lukács, G. ‘Greatness and Decline of Expressionism’; ‘Größe und Verfall des
Expressionismus’, F. J. Raddatz, ed., Marxismus und Literatur. Eine Dokumentation
in drei Bänden (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1969), Band II, 7–42.
Realism after Modernism 295
Secondary Sources
The lyric poem, Theodor Adorno tells us in his essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and
Society’ (1956), is ‘the aesthetic test of the dialectical proposition’ that
‘subject and object are not rigid and isolated poles but can be defined only
in the process in which they distinguish themselves from one another and
from change’. And that change is history, whose pressures and defining
clauses shape the lyric and lyrical subject alike. In short, the poem, accord-
ing to Adorno (in one of his more memorable phrases), ‘is a philosophical
sundial telling the time of history.’1
The modest poetic text must, then, in Adorno’s essay bear the brunt
of an analysis that is both phenomenological in its focus and historical in
its ambit. The terms of the equation are dif ferent in Martin Heidegger’s
‘The Nature of Language’, published one year later in 1957. And yet in spite
of their radically diverging philosophical positions, both theorists pose
the same questions: ‘what does the aesthetic look like as a written form
of subjectivity?’ and ‘how does written subjectivity position itself in the
world?’ Given the shared priorities of these two essays, it seems appropri-
ate to consider them and their authors together.2
1 ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44 and 46, translation modified. ‘Subjekt und Objekt
[sind] überhaupt keine starren und isolierten Pole, sondern könnten nur aus aus dem
Prozeß bestimmt werden, in dem sie sich aneinander abarbeiten und verändern, dann
ist die Lyrik die ästhetische Probe auf jenes dialektische Philosphem’. And Adorno
sees ‘das Gedicht als geschichtsphilosophische Sonnenuhr.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 86–87 and 92)
2 For a recent comparative study, see Schwarte, Die Regeln der Intuition, in particular,
38–63 and 88–96. Gandesha brings the two philosophers together under the cen-
tral concept of ‘Gelassenheit’ in his ‘Leaving Home: On Adorno and Heidegger’.
298 Martin Travers
Walker, however, loses much in specificity by framing his comparison of Adorno and
Heidegger against the tradition of Hegelian aesthetics in his ‘Adorno and Heidegger
on the Question of Art: Countering Hegel?’.
3 See, for example, Kaufman, ‘Adorno’s Social Lyric’; Caygill, ‘Lyric Poetry before
Auschwitz’; and Aviram’s ‘Lyric Poetry and Subjectivity’.
4 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 37–38. One can only achieve a satisfactory
interpretation ‘wenn lyrische Gebilde nicht als Demonstrationsobjekte soziologischer
These mißbraucht werden, sondern wenn ihre Beziehung auf Gesellschaftliches an
ihnen selber etwas Wesentliches, etwas vom Grund ihrer Qualität aufdeckt.’ (‘Rede
über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 74)
5 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 39. ‘Denn Ideologie ist Unwahrheit, falsches
Bewußtsein, Lüge. Sie of fenbart sich im Mißlingen der Kunstwerke, ihrem Falschen
in sich und wird getrof fen von Kritik’. ‘Kunstwerke jedoch haben ihre Größe einzig
daran, daß sie sprechen lassen, was die Ideologie verbirgt. Ihr Gelingen selber geht,
mögen sie es wollen oder nicht, übers falsche Bewußtsein hinaus.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik
und Gesellschaft’, 77)
6 See ‘Extorted Realism’ where Adorno subjects Lukács’ ‘subsumptive modus operandi’
to scathing criticism. Adorno, ‘Extorted Realism’, 218–219; ‘Erpreßte Versöhnung’,
153–154.
‘Ek-Stasis’ 299
7 Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 32; ‘die Verherrlichung des
Abnormalen; einen Antihumanismus’ (Wider den missverstandenen Realismus,
32).
8 ‘Lyrical subject’ refers to the constellation of values, attitudes, psychological dis-
positions that appear in a poem even in the absence of a clear persona or speaking
subject. The term corresponds to the notion of ‘implied author’ in narrative works
of fiction.
9 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 38–39. This approach ‘darf danach nicht
unvermittlelt suf den sogenannten gesellschaftlichen Standort oder die gesellschaft
liche Interessenlage der Werke oder gar ihrer Autoren Zielen. Vielmehr hat sie aus-
zumachen, wie das Ganze einer Gesellschaft, als seiner in sich widerspruchsvollen
Einheit, im Kunstwerk erscheint; worin das Kunstwerk ihr zu Willen bleibt, worin
es über sie hinausgeht.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 76)
300 Martin Travers
commodities that has developed since the beginning of the modern era,
since the industrial revolution became the dominant force in life’.10 The
historical moment of the lyrical poem lies in its resistance to such forces:
‘the lyric reveals itself to be most deeply grounded in society when it does
not chime in with society’.11
As an instance of this, Adorno cites Eduard Mörike’s poem ‘Auf einer
Wanderung’ (‘On my Wanderings’, 1838), which relates an epiphany-like
experience registered by the poet as he wanders through a small town in
rural Germany. Adorno’s analysis fits in neatly with the theoretical priorities
that he has developed so far in his essay. The poem is, Adorno argues, a work
of historical compensation. In the face of an increasingly commercial world,
the subject has turned inwards. Nature is redeemed and art (represented by
the image of the bell in the poem, whose ‘Goldglockentöne’ tell not of real
sounds but of intangible transcendence) is posited as a substitute for the
aesthetic totality missing from the reality of nineteenth century German
bourgeois life. Mörike’s poem gives ‘signs of an immediate life that prom-
ised fulfilment precisely at the time when they were already condemned
by the direction that history was taking’.12 The lyrical subject in the poem
is where history registers itself as a form of regret, but that regret contains
within itself the seeds of protest. For Mörike’s poem shows us that ‘in the
lyric poem, the subject, through its identification with language, negates
10 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 40. ‘Die Idiosynkrasie des lyrischen Geistes
gegen die Übergewalt der Dinge ist eine Reaktionsform auf die Verdinglichung der
Welt, der Herrschaft von Waren über Menschen, die seit Beginn der Neuzeit sich
ausgebreitet, seit der industriellen Revolution zur herrschenden Gewalt des Lebens
sich entfaltet hat.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 78)
11 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43. ‘Darum zeigt Lyrik dort sich am tiefsten
gesellschaftlich verbürgt, wo sich nicht der Gesellschaft nach dem Munde redet.’
(‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 85)
12 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 50. ‘Zeichen eines unmittelbaren Lebens, die
Gewährung verhießen, als sie selber von der historischen Tendenz eigentlich schon
gerichtet waren.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 96–97)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 301
13 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. ‘Im lyrischen Gedicht negiert, durch
Identifikation mit der Sprache, das Subjekt ebenso seinen bloßen monadologischen
Widerspruch zur Gesellschaft, wie sein bloßes Funktionieren innerhalb der verges-
ellschafteten Gesellschaft.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 87)
14 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. ‘Je mehr aber deren Übergewicht übers
Subjekt anwächst, um so prekärer die Situation der Lyrik.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 87)
15 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. In this situation ‘wird all Lyrik zum va-
banque-Spiel.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 87)
16 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 44. In this process, the lyric poem ‘zugleich
sich entfernt von der Objektivität des Geistes, der lebendigen Sprache, und eine nicht
mehr gegenwärtige durch die poetische Veranstaltung surrogiert. Das poetisierende,
gehobene, subjektiv gewalttätige Moment schwacher späterer Lyrik ist der Preis,
den sie für den Versuch zu zahlen hat, unverschandelt, f leckenlos […] und erhalten’
[zu bleiben]. (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 88) Adorno castigates Rilke, in
302 Martin Travers
then deepens this observation into a full-blown critique whose terms are
known to all who are familiar with those critics who see literary production
in terms of the politics of class: ‘poetic subjectivity is indebted to privilege’,
it is the expression of ‘the refinement and gentility of those who can af ford
to be gentle’.17 The way forward for today’s poet is to discover the ‘collec-
tive undercurrent’ that sustains the artistic, allowing the poet to transcend
mere individuality in a positive way. And Adorno finds such work in two
poets in particular: Bertolt Brecht and Frederico García Lorca. Both writ-
ers remained in touch with the popular voice and the broader sweep of
human concerns, and thereby achieved linguistic integrity in their poetry
without degenerating into ‘esoteric’ formalism.18
There is, then, a fundamental tension in Adorno’s essay: the lyrical
poem may retain the historically positive moment of its articulation but
only by losing that which has made that moment possible: its aesthetic
particular, who ‘attempts to assimilate even alien objects to pure subjective expres-
sion’, which his part of his ‘obscurantist demeanour’. ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’,
40; ‘als Versuch, noch die fremden Dinge in den subjektiv-reinen Ausdruck hein
einzunehmen.’ This is simply a ‘geheimnistuerische Gestus’. (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 78) But what are ‘alien’ (‘fremd’) objects. Does Adorno mean strange
or non-familiar? But what does that mean? I suspect he means non-social, i.e. not a
part of either the good or bad notions of society that he works with, which focus on
the economic, the political, the industrial. If this is this is the case then it is Adorno
and not Rilke who is the victim of reification, because it is precisely the function of
the ‘Dinggedicht’ to identify the non-functional moment of aesthetic completion
that lies for example, in vase of f lowers or a sculpture (two noted objects of study
for Rilke). Once again, it is the pull of the Frankfurt school on Adorno, which leads
him at certain moments in his essay to define the real as something that must exist
beyond the personal.
17 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 45. ‘Die dichterische Subjektivität verdankt
sich selber dem Privileg’. The lyrical poem can only be written out of the ‘Feinheit
und Zartheit dessen, der es sich leisten kann.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’,
89)
18 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 46. This is a positive type of poet ‘dem sprach-
liche Integrität zuteil ward, ohne daß er den Preis des Esoterischen hätte entrichten
müssen’. (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 90) This is a strange judgement, given
the thoroughgoing Surrealism of much of Lorca’s verse.
‘Ek-Stasis’ 303
19 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 51. George’s poetry is that of ‘eines herrischen
Einzelnen’, who takes ‘das Ideal des Edlen’ from the medieval period. His poetry is
both unreal and reactionary ‘weil diese Lyrik aus keiner anderen Gesamtverfassung
als der von ihr nicht nur a priori und stillschweigend, sondern auch ausdrücklich
verworfenen bürgerlichen reden kann.’ This is poetry ‘die dem lyrischen Subjekt die
Identifikation mit dem Bestehenden und seine Formenwelt verweigert, während
es doch bis ins Innerste dem Bestehenden verschworen ist.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und
Gesellschaft’, 98–99)
304 Martin Travers
language’.20 We have, however, already been told that such a thing does not
exist, that language is essentially social, but Adorno seems to have forgotten
this, or if not forgotten, at least mentally relegated it to another less press-
ing area in his discourse. Now, in the final pages of his essay, language is
granted an empowerment that seems to make the social/asocial taxonomy
of his preceding analysis redundant. For Adorno is pulled up by four short
lines from the poem: ‘Nun muss ich gar/ Um dein aug und haar/ Alle tage/
In sehnen leben’ (‘now I must entirely/ for your eye and hair/ every day/
live in longing’) which Adorno finds ‘some of the most irresistible lines in
German poetry.’ In George’s poem, ‘language’s chimerical yearning for the
impossible becomes an expression of the subject’s insatiable erotic longing,
which finds relief from the self in the other’.21
Adorno concludes with a triumphal endorsement of George, and one
that is far from the terms of his previous model: ‘the truth of George lies
in the fact that his poetry breaks down the walls of individuality through
its consummation of the particular, through its sensitive opposition both
to the banal and ultimately also to the select’. And he adds, ‘this very lyric
speech becomes the voice of human beings between whom barriers have
fallen’.22 What has previously been perceived as a weakness now becomes
a strength, for ‘great works of art are the ones that succeed precisely where
they are the most problematic’.23 This is not simply analysis. What Adorno
20 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 52. ‘Das Subjekt muß aus sich heraustreten,
indem es sich verschweigt. Es muß sich gleichsam zum Gefäß machen für die Idee
einer reinen Sprache.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 101)
21 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 53. Adorno praises these four lines ‘die ich zu
dem Unwiderstehlichsten zähle, was jemals der deutschen Lyrik beschieden war.’ And
he concludes: ‘die schimärische Sehnsucht der Sprache nach dem Unmöglichen wird
zum Ausdruck der unstillbaren erotischen Sehnsucht des Subjekts, das im anderen
seiner selbst sich entledigt.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 101 and 103)
22 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 54. ‘George hat seine Wahrheit daran, daß
seine Lyrik in der Vollendung des Besonderen, in der Sensibilität gegen das Banale
ebenso wie schließlich auch gegen das Erlesene, die Mauern der Individualität durch-
schlägt.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 103)
23 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 53. ‘Die großen Kunstwerke sind jene, die
an ihren fragwürdigsten Stellen Glück haben.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’,
102)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 305
24 For an entirely dif ferent interpretation, one that sees only the critical in Adorno’s
reading of George, see Caygill, ‘Lyric Poetry before Auschwitz’, 78–81. Caygill seems
to overlook the discursive morphology of Adorno’s essay, the fact that it articulates
two competing methodologies, ef fecting a transition from one model (which we
might loosely call that of the Frankfurt School) to another, founded on a revaloriza-
tion of the aesthetics of reading. My argument is closer to that of Ross Wilson who
points out (in a dif ferent context) that ‘the trace of aesthetic pleasure [in Adorno]
is to be discerned precisely where it is refused’. Wilson, 271.
25 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43. ‘Anderseits aber ist die Sprache auch
nicht, wie es manchen der heute geläufigen ontologischen Sprachtheorien gefiele, als
Stimme des Seins wider das lyrische Subjekt zu verabsolutieren.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik
und Gesellschaft’, 86)
26 See, in particular, Mörchen, Adorno und Heidegger, and Ouattara, Adorno et
Heidegger. Neither, however, address the exact relationship between the literary
aesthetics of the two philosophers.
27 See Adorno, ‘Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry’. Adorno attacks Heidegger on
all fronts: stylistically (‘his pseudo-poetry testifies against his philosophy of poetry’),
methodologically (‘Heidegger’s sentences [ref lect] the will to detemporalize the truth
content of philosophy and literary works’), and politically (through the imputa-
tion that Heidegger is contributing to ‘the right-wing German cult of Hölderlin).
Adorno ‘Parataxis’, 114, 121 and 119. ‘Die Afterpoesie zeugt gegen seine Philosophie
der Dichtung’; ‘Heideggers Sätzen birgt sich der Wille, den Wahrheitsgehalt von
Dichtungen und Philosophie […] zu entzeitlichen; ‘der Hölderlin-Kultus der
306 Martin Travers
deutschen Rechten.’ (‘Parataxe: Zur späten Lyrik Hölderlins’, 163, 173 and 170)
Adorno deepened his criticism of Heidegger in his Jargon of Authenticity. ( Jargon
der Eigentlichkeit, see particularly 98–136.)
28 I follow Paul de Man here in seeing theory as ‘a screen of received ideas that often
passes, in literary instruction, for humanistic knowledge’. See de Man, ‘Return to
Philology’, 23. In a further essay, de Man targets those ‘methodologies that call them-
selves theories of reading but nevertheless avoid the function they claim to of fer’. See
his de Man, ‘Resistance to Theory’, 15. De Man mentions (strategically) no names,
but he is clearly targeting those methodologies that reduce all to base realities such
as ‘class’, ‘gender’ or ‘race’.
29 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43. ‘Die höchsten lyrischen Gebilde sind
darum die, in denen das Subjekt, ohne Rest von bloßem Stof f, in der Sprache tönt,
bis die Sprache selber laut wird.’ (‘Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft’, 85)
30 The others were ‘Die Sprache’ (1950), ‘Die Sprache im Gedicht’ (1952), ‘Aus einem
Gespräche von der Sprache’ (1954), ‘Das Wort’ (1958), and ‘Der Weg zur Sprache’
(1959). They have been collected as Unterwegs zur Sprache. The secondary literature
on Heidegger’s poetics is vast. Seminal studies are Kockelmans, On Heidegger and
Language, and Foti, Heidegger and the Poets. For a work that focusses exclusively
‘Ek-Stasis’ 307
and the unsayable and hence ‘deviate’ from the totalizing discourses that
would seek to close down meaning in the cause of explication. In the final
analysis, it goes without saying that the deviations of Paul Valery are also
the deviations of Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno.
The aesthetics of displacement also inform Heidegger’s project in
‘The Nature of Language’, where he attempts ‘to seek out the neighbour-
hood of poetry and thinking – which now means an encounter of the two
facing each other’.38 Initially, Heidegger approaches his task in terms of
poetic subjectivity and its relationship to language, using the poem ‘The
Word’ (‘Das Wort’, 1919) by Stefan George as a catalyst for his investigation.
George’s poem charts the venture of the poet into distant lands in search of
material for his poetry. He returns home, but the treasures he has brought
with him disappear at once. The poem ends with the lines ‘so I renounced
and sadly see:/ Where word breaks of f no thing may be.’39 The poem is a
self-ref lexive meditation on the impossibility of attaining poetic insight
by experience alone. As Heidegger notes, ‘the poet has learned renuncia-
tion. He has undergone an experience. With what? With the thing and its
relation to the word.’40 ‘The renunciation which the poet learns is of that
special kind of fulfilled self-denial to which alone is promised what has
long been concealed and is essentially vouchsafed already.’41 Certainly, the
lyrical subject likewise is within the formation of the text and is connected
to a real author (a connection that allows us to assert ‘Eduard Mörike says
this in his poem’; ‘Stefan George has written that’), but the nature of that
formation has been f luid, a process that Heidegger calls eundo assequi (to
38 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 82. His goal is ‘die Nachbarschaft von Dichten
und Denken aufzusuchen, d.h. jetzt: das Gegen-einander-über der beiden’ (‘Das
Wesen der Sprache’, 187).
39 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 60. ‘So lernt ich traurig den verzicht:/ Kein
ding sei wo das wort gebricht’. (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 163)
40 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 65. ‘Der Dichter hat den Verzicht gelernt. Er
hat eine Erfahrung gemacht. Womit? Mit dem Ding und dessen Beziehung zum
Wort.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 168)
41 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 66. ‘Der Verzicht, den der Dichter lernt, ist von
der Art jenes erfüllten Entsagens, dem allein sich das lang Verborgene und eigentlich
schon Zugesagte zuspricht.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 169)
310 Martin Travers
42 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 73–74. ‘Mit etwas eine Erfahrung machen, heißt,
daß jenes, wohin wir unterwegs gelangen, um es zu erlangen, uns selber belangt, uns
trif ft und beansprucht, insofern es uns zu sich verwandelt.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’,
177) Heidegger here echoes Adorno’s reading of Valery’s notion of the ‘subject’s self-
alienation’, seeing in the de-centring of the subject (both within and beyond the text)
as the essential moment in the articulation and engagement with poetic language. If
I understand Heidegger (and possibly Adorno via Valéry) correctly this involves the
withholding of the need to clarify understanding before understanding has taken
place. Indeed, for the reader all that may be possible is the internal charting of the
process of understanding, leaving the results of that process unspecified.
43 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 67. ‘Es schickt sich ihm etwas zu, trif ft ihn und
verwandelt sein Verhältnis zum Wort.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 170)
44 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 71. ‘Das Hören der Zusage dessen, was in Frage
kommen soll.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 175)
45 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 72. ‘Das Fragen ist die Frömigkeit des Denkens.’
(‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 175)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 311
46 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 81. ‘Manches spricht dafür, daß das Wesen der
Sprache es gerade verweigert, zur Sprache zu kommen.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’,
186)
47 Gosetti-Ferencei eloquently describes them as ‘formal strategies of indirection’
in her Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language, 99. In her read-
ing of Heidegger, Gosetti-Ferencei quite rightly implies af finities with Post-
Structuralism.
48 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 86. ‘Das Wort für das Wort läßt sich dort
nirgends finden, wo das Geschick die nennend-stiftende Sprache schenkt für das
Seiende, daß es sei und als Seiendes glänze und blühe.’ (Das Wesen der Sprache’, 192)
Adorno puts it even more succinctly. In the poetic text, ‘language itself speaks’. See
Adorno, ‘Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt’, 193. ‘Sprache
selber redet’ (‘Die beschworene Sprache’, 63).
49 See Malpas, J. Heidegger’s Topology. Heidegger’s spatial topoi equate to ‘concepts
of unity, limit and bound’, 2. They also frequently have for Malpas a geo-ethical
significance.
312 Martin Travers
counters, is the clearing that gives free rein, where all that is cleared and
free, and all that conceals itself, together attain open freedom.’50 What the
‘Gegend’ contains is the hidden riches of language, the contents of which
Heidegger leaves unspecified, but in his own writing it is clear that he is
referring to the poetic fund of language, its semantic force field, its forever
unclosing connotative potential. The poet enters this world without ever
definitively arriving. The process is one of reception rather than interpreta-
tion: the opening rather than the closing down of the promise of the word.
This is why the key term ‘unterwegs’ appears and reappears throughout
Heidegger’s discourse. The poet must remain in darkness, because that is
where being, for him, dwells. It is not he but language that is the dynamic
agent: logos, which is, as Heidegger says drawing upon the thoughts of Tao,
‘the mystery of mysteries of thoughtful saying’.51
It soon becomes clear that the poet’s exploration of language is also
that of the reader. Coming to terms with the poem means coming to terms
with the presence of language, what is says and what is doesn’t say. Indeed,
in Heideggerian terms, the two are coterminous: the richness of language
hides itself through silence. As he notes:
When does language speak itself as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot
find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or
encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly
giving it thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and f leet-
ingly touched us with its essential being.52
50 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 91. ‘Andeutend gesagt, ist die Gegend als
das Gegnende die freigebende Lichtung, in der das Gelichtete zugleich mit dem
Sichverbergenden in das Freie gelangt.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 197)
51 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 92. ‘Das Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse des
denkenden Sagens.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 198)
52 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 59. ‘Wo aber kommt die Sprache selber als
Sprache zum Wort? Seltsamerweise dort, wo wir für etwas, was uns angeht, uns an
sich reißt, bedrängt oder befeuert, das rechte Wort nicht finden. Wir lassen dann,
was wir meinen, im Ungesprochenen und machen dabei, ohne es recht zu bedenken,
Augenblicke durch, in denen uns die Sprache selber mit ihrem Wesen fernher und
f lüchtig gestreift hat.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 161)
‘Ek-Stasis’ 313
53 As Thomä notes, ‘Es geht hier nicht um den Inhalt des Gehörten, sondern um die
Tatsache des Hörens selbst’ (‘It is not a question here of the content of what is heard,
but of the fact of hearing itself ’. My translation). See Thöma, 309.
54 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 70. ‘Das Denken ist kein Mittel für das
Erkennen.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 173)
55 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 64. ‘weil wir darauf achten müssen, daß die
Schwingung des dichterischen Sagens nicht auf die starre Schiene einer eindeutigen
Ausssage gezwungen und so zerstört werde’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 167).
56 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 92–93. ‘Wir vermuten die genannte
Nachbarschaft als die Stätte, die es versattet, zu erfahren, wie es sich mit der Sprache
verhält. Was uns etwas verhaftet und erlaubt, gibt uns Möglichkeit, d.h. solches, was
ermöglicht. Die so verstandene Möglichkeit, das Ermöglichende, besagt anderes und
mehr als die bloße Chance.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’, 199)
314 Martin Travers
This is not a matter of ‘Wortmystik’ (of which many of Heidegger’s
critics have complained), of a purely irrational grasping of the text through
feeling and ‘sensibility’, which is put into language without clear semantic
boundaries. On the contrary, Heidegger makes it clear that the engagement
with language is also an exertion of the mind. As he showed elsewhere, he
was fully capable of sophisticated technical analysis.57 As he says, ‘poetry and
thinking are not separated if separation is to mean cut of f into a relational
void.’58 His argument is that by appropriating the poetic text exclusively in
their own terms conventional metalanguages close down rather than open
up the text as a fund of language; they are too eager to translate the f luid
and indeterminate into statements that are unequivocal, are, in short, ‘true’
within their own frames of reference.59 With Heidegger we never reach
a definitive or ‘true’ word. This does not mean for Heidegger a surrender
to indeterminacy, but the chance to retain a sense for the presence of the
object and a feel for the cognitive processes involved in experiencing this
presence.60 For those who need to establish firm interpretations, it is a frus-
trating experience. But the truth (as both Heidegger and Adorno might
well have said) lies in the frustration.61
57 As in the debate with Emil Staiger in 1951 where radically dif fering interpretations
of Mörike’s poem ‘Auf eine Lampe’ (‘To a Lamp’) involved a rhetorical investigation
of the poem and most notably of the single word ‘scheint’ (‘appears’). See Staiger,
‘Zu einem Vers von Mörike’.
58 Heidegger, ‘The Nature of Language’, 90. ‘Dichten und Denken sind nicht getrennt,
wenn Trennung heißen soll: ins Bezuglose abgeschieden.’ (‘Das Wesen der Sprache’,
196)
59 As Joughin and Malpas explain ‘aesthetic specificity is not, however, entirely expli-
cable, or graspable, in terms of another conceptual scheme or genre of discourse.’
See Joughin and Malpas, ‘The New Aestheticism’, 3.
60 Nor is it for Adorno. Their shared goal is ‘to think through and therefore beyond
the division of subject and object without merely assenting to their dissolution. See
Wilson, 276.
61 Malpas notes ‘that the task of reading Heidegger will indeed involve a certain “strug-
gle” both with Heidegger, and sometimes against him, seems to me an inevitable
result of any attempt to engage with Heidegger as a “live” thinker rather than a mere
“text”’. See Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology, 2.
‘Ek-Stasis’ 315
The poet’s naming of the poem involves us too in the naming of that
naming, although that naming may often go unnamed but remains some-
thing that is largely process. We register what is there, the formal rich-
ness, thematic complexities, resonance of imagery, the posing of questions
(through irony and paradox, for example), and launch ourselves into a
resolution of those questions. But we also register what is not there; not
there in the poem, but also not there in us, in terms of our failure or limita-
tions of understanding. We stand within the empowerment of interpreta-
tion, but also to one side of it. Our experience (our learning experience)
is that of Adorno’s ‘unwiderstehlich’, the displacement of ‘ek-stasis’. What
Heidegger is doing in ‘The Nature of Language’ is to work through (often
with repetition, sometimes with obscurity) that act of ‘unwiderstehen’. In
doing so, he explicates a conceptual terrain that precedes analysis, and this
surely is where the aesthetic (rather than the literary-theoretical) dwells. It
is here that Heidegger finds his own fore-grounding, in demarcating the
terrain where the possible remains possible, before it become impossible
in the final act of interpretation.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
—— Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowski and F. Will (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1973). Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
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Lyrik und Gesellschaft’ in Noten zur Literatur I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1958), 73–104.
——‘Parataxis’ in Notes to Literatur, Vol. 2, 109–149. ‘Parataxe’ in Noten zur Literatur
II, 156–209.
——‘Valery’s Deviations’, in Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, 137–173. ‘Valérys Abweichungen’,
in Noten zur Literatur II, 42–94.
Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper
& Row, 1962). Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1972).
——On the Way to Language, trans. P. D. Hertz (New York: Harper, 1982). Unterwegs
zur Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Günther Neske, 1959).
Lukács, G. The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. J. and N. Mander (London:
Merlin Press, 1963). Wider den missverstandenen Realismus (Hamburg: Classen
Verlag, 1958).
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intro. H. E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1989).
Secondary Sources
1 Habermas summarizes his critique in Habermas and Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity,
152–154.
320 ERIC S. NELSON
2 This argument is unfolded in chapter five of Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity, and in Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action I: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society, 382–390. See also Pensky, The Actuality of Adorno, 7.
3 See Fleming’s discussion of Habermas’s aesthetics in Emancipation and Illusion,
191.
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno 321
engage human capacities and organs. There are such moments, e.g., in free
natural beauty and the sublime, in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Whereas
the Kantian sublime shakes the subject yet issues in a renewed apprecia-
tion of human dignity, nature is inevitably encountered in human social-
historical terms that at times challenge those very terms in Adorno.4 Insofar
as experience has mimetic (imitative), sensuous, and material dimensions
that move toward the object as something non-identical to the subject,
however conditionally this might occur, natural events and phenomena
are potentially more than their intersubjective construction and concep-
tualization. They are ‘wordless’ but not thereby as powerless and mute as
Habermas suggests.5
It is the aesthetic that opens up non-human natural and animal worlds
in Adorno’s writings, and this element is lost in the reduction of the aes-
thetic to the expression of authenticity. Natural phenomena and animals
are shaped through human discourses and practices, especially normative
ones of beauty and use, yet nevertheless resist them. Such resistance and
irreducibility is illustrated in Adorno’s works on Wagner and Mahler. While
nature as represented in Wagner’s music is analyzed as ideology, i.e. as a
celebration of the aura and irrational power of nature that perpetuates the
domination of nature and humans in authoritarianism and racism, nature
as intimated in Mahler’s Song of the Earth suggests a ‘promise of happi-
ness’ in the aesthetic reconciliation of humanity, animals, and the natural
world. Music expresses human life, yet it potentially indicates more than
human worlds that extend beyond and potentially disrupt the injustice and
suf fering formed in the human world. This is because artistic and aesthetic
links with nature, joined to the sensuous and non-conceptual, are linked
with happiness or – at least – its promise.
4 On the historicity and racial context of Kant’s aesthetics of nature, see Nelson, ‘China,
Nature, and the Sublime in Kant,’ 333–346.
5 Habermas and Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity, 152.
322 ERIC S. NELSON
and other than that domination, which resists, escapes, interrupts, and
potentially challenges such domination. That is, ‘nature’ is not only a con-
struct for Adorno but aporetically an alterity to human constructs and
practices:
For our knowledge of nature is really so preformed by the demand that we dominate
nature (something exemplified by the chief method of finding out about nature,
namely the scientific experiment) that we end up understanding only those aspects
of nature that we can control. In addition there is also this underlying feeling that
while we are putting out our nets and catching more and more things in them, there
is a sense in which nature itself seems to keep receding from us; and the more we take
possession of nature, the more its real essence becomes alien to us.8
16 This argument is primarily based on Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, Prisms,
29–31.
17 Adorno, The Culture Industry, 30; on the dif ferent senses of being like a child, see
41 and 45.
18 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, 33.
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno 327
its world, and of reason with nature. Artworks in particular are enigmas in
their configuration of the mimetic and the rational.23 Mimesis binds to
the singular in experience; it is a necessary moment to art and to rationali-
ty.24 Reason, despite itself, is a moment of nature that has separated itself
from – without being free of – nature.25 Likewise, when image-oriented
thinking is freed from its absorption in immanence without losing con-
tact with it, and while not being eliminated in abstract conceptual think-
ing, it takes on an altered significance that is inherent in it from the start.
Mimesis is in this sense the promise of a playful and receptive spontaneity
of sensuous freedom not absorbed in the conformity and discipline of
social integration. Adorno described the latter aspect of mimesis as the
primal form of love.26
As such, mimesis is expression, eros, and moving toward what is
desired and loved.27 Mimetic expression is always more than communica-
tion.28 Mimesis can be a compulsive and possessive repetition of identity,
a coercive reconciliation with the object, yet it need not be an enemy of
the object as human activity and art – in abandoning reconciliation with
nature – can be reconciled with it.29 In contrast to the false appearance
of reconciliation, when it is imposed upon the subject, there is another
modality to mimesis. As a non-identical or transformative repetition, it is
a metamorphosis proceeding from the felt contact with and bodily nearness
to its objects. This involves sensuous and material freedom, playfulness,
and responsiveness toward objects or the things themselves. The an-archic
mimetic play, free from purposiveness in contrast with ‘the repetition of
mimetic ethics of fers a wider moral perspective than the reduction of the
ethical to the communicative symmetry of reason-giving human agents.
Nevertheless, to consider an objection to my thesis, there are additional
statements in their works that seem to limit the ethical status of animals
and nature for which I am arguing. In what might seem an excursus, I will
consider how these apparently contrary arguments do not undermine the
ethical character of human relations with animals and nature, but are rather
aimed at their ideological misuse in perpetuating injustice towards other
humans. These criticisms occur particularly in the context of assessing
discourses advocating the prevention of animal cruelty and the preserva-
tion of nature in some varieties of romantic, proto-fascist and National
Socialist ideologies.
Adorno notes of the romantic and fascist reification of animals, ‘The
prevention of cruelty to animals becomes sentimental as soon as compas-
sion turns its back on humanity.’40 Adorno’s attention to this sentimen-
tality about animals and indif ference toward other humans, which is still
found today in some animal rights discourses, refers to the strange fact that
National Socialism condemned the Jewish people for their supposed cruelty
to animals, while attempting to reduce them to less than animals, and for
their so-called rootless distance from nature even as National Socialism
uprooted and destroyed their existence. This concern with animal suf fering
and the ‘destruction’ of German blood, soil, and natural environments
masked the intensification of human suf fering and annihilation while
concurrently intensifying the technological domination of nature.
The National Socialist aesthetic of ‘returning to nature’ resulted in the
utmost exploitation and ruination of humans, animals, and environments,
and accordingly has been analyzed as the mythic and self-destructive fulfil-
44 Adorno, Mahler, 9.
45 Adorno associates dif ference with resistance, for example, in Culture Industry, 96;
compare also Derrida, The Animal that therefore I am, 53.
46 By potentially risking conf lating nature and fascism, Levinas recapitulates its ideo-
logical portrait of nature as war and pseudo-Darwinian struggle for existence: see
Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 21–30, and essays such as ‘Heidegger, Gagarin and Us’
in Levinas, Dif ficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, 231–234.
334 ERIC S. NELSON
Conclusion
in nature as well as in natural beauty and its joy.61 Such experiences are
sources of the irrational in human life, of the supernatural and fatalistic;
but also, as mimetic responsiveness, of the formation of meaning in aes-
thetics, ethics, and rationality.
Word and thing, experience and the experienced, are dialectically irre-
ducible yet intertwined moments; in their tension, neither moment can be
grasped or ‘intuited’ in an immediate or originary way without one-sidedly
missing the other.62 In contrast to much twentieth-century philosophy
and its dogmatic semanticism, which still informs contemporary critical
social theory – particularly Habermas – and is being increasingly prob-
lematized in the contemporary revival of materialism, Adorno maintained
both the centrality of language, as a medium in which words and concepts
are inseparable, and of physicality, as words cannot be separated from the
nexus and material relations of things.63
It is this materiality – or what Adorno described as the dynamic
non-identity that remains in tension with fixated words and concepts64
– of specific things that displaces and interrupts the logic of integration.
These moments of aporia, contradiction, and resistance are not limited to
inter-human relations. They extend to all human comportments, even in
regard to animals and environments, which are concepts that contain their
own conf licting tendencies. The dominant human discourse, according to
Derrida, ‘imagines the animal in the most contradictory and incompat-
ible generic terms.’65 Animals and environments are put to instrumental
use, exploited as resources, eliminated and exterminated and, conversely,
there are various ways – whether aesthetic or moral, emotional or concep-
tual – in which humans encounter and recognize them as other than this
prevailing discourse.
A potential opening-up of the medium of language in experimental
openness and receptivity to the thing for its own sake occurs in ‘freedom
toward the object.’ This assertion of the object’s freedom indicates a dif ferent
basis for considering the irreducible or additional significance of things,
which is necessary for a non-instrumental environmental and animal ethics
that refuses to appeal to reified essences.66 The texture, multiplicity, and
contingency of the material world resists its dwindling to an instrumen-
tal product and teleological purpose, not due to its having an inviolable
essence, substance, or natural law, but as the prospect of the inexhaustible
‘not yet’ that Adorno raises in his Aesthetic Theory. In the breakthrough and
interruption of the ‘not yet’ in mimesis, there is the trace of a memory and
an anticipation of what lies beyond the division of self and other, subject
and object.67 The ‘still not’ of nature, as something more and other than
social-historical constructions of nature and their sedimentation, is a mate-
rialist challenge to the idealism and social constructivism of contemporary
critical theory. The aporia of mimesis and construction, sensibility and
rationality, is not resolved in either direction without the diminishment
of human experience.68 Such non-identity is the condition of critique and,
as non-identity that is dialectically other to itself, challenges rather than
presupposes an underlying essence or substance of nature – much less some
mystical absorption in it.69
Whereas dissolving the natural material world in rationality and com-
munication is the goal of much contemporary theory, Adorno argued that
the loss of nature is a diminishment of the human and its possibilities.
It is a denial of the hedonistic promise of happiness without which art
and ethics lose their life and critical import. The loss of the object is the
impoverishment of the subject, and the loss of natural beauty is not merely
66 Negative Dialectics, 5–6, 25–26; Negative Dialektik, 17–18 and 36. See the excellent
discussion of freedom toward the object in Kern, ‘Freiheit zum Objekt: Eine Kritik
der Aporie des Erkennens’.
67 Aesthetic Theory, 46–47; Ästhetische Theorie, 75.
68 Compare Aesthetic Theory, 115; Ästhetische Theorie, 176.
69 My account thus provides an alternative to Vogel’s argument for the elimination of
nature and critique of Adorno as overly attached to nature in Vogel, Against Nature,
86–87.
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno 339
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—— Philosophische Terminologie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973).
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Germany (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006).
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2008).
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of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
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Research in Phenomenology 32, 1 (2002), 103–122.
Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F. Lawrence. (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2004).
—— Theory of Communicative Action I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society
(Boston: Beacon, 1984).
Habermas, J., and Dews, P. Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas
(London: Verso, 1992).
Hammer, E. ‘Metaphysics,’ in D. Cook, ed., Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (Durham:
Acumen Publishing, 2008).
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1986).
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—— and Adorno, T. W. Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2002).
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ed., Dialektik der Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
Levinas, E. Dif ficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990).
—— Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
—— Unforeseen History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
Müller-Doohm, S. ed. Adorno-Portraits (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007).
Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno 341
Nelson, E. S. ‘China, Nature, and the Sublime in Kant’, in S. R. Palmquist, ed.,
Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter,
2010), 333–346.
—— ‘The Dialectic of Environment: Nature as Ideology and Ethics in Adorno and
the Frankfurt School, Telos 155 ( June 2011).
—— ‘Priestly Power and Damaged Life in Nietzsche and Adorno’, in A. U. Sommer,
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Patterson, C. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust (New
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Vogel, S. Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996).
Martin Swales
Introduction
The subtitle of the conference from which this volume derives is ‘From
Schiller to Marcuse’; and German writers and thinkers figure overwhelm-
ingly in the schedule of topics covered. Why should this be so? The answer,
I would suggest, has to do with the fact that, from the late eighteenth cen-
tury on, German culture produces a consistent and coherent tradition of
philosophical aesthetics that is, as far as I am aware, simply without equal
in the rest of Europe. If, to invoke the title of the conference, aesthetics
and modernity enter into some urgent and revelatory interplay, they do
so with particular force in the German-speaking lands.
Before sketching in this tradition, I want to ref lect brief ly on the term
I have just used – philosophical aesthetics. By that I mean a particular intel-
lectual enterprise in which aesthetics is more than the systematic theory
of that particular branch of human activity known as art. Rather, I am
concerned with a tradition which sees aesthetics as the central philosophi-
cal activity bar none. I am thinking of a line that begins with Baumgarten
and Lessing and can be traced through Kant, Schiller, Friedrich Schlegel,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse,
Heidegger and Gadamer.
A. G. Baumgarten lays the foundation for the serious study of aes-
thetics in 1750. As Willoughby and Wilkinson put it: ‘What he wanted
to investigate was neither mere taste – individual likes and dislikes – nor
mere sensations – the feeling registered by a subjective response to a stimu-
344 Martin Swales
lus – but a mode of knowledge.’1 The grand claim – to uncover ‘a logic of
the imagination’ that would illuminate ‘the mental operations involved in
grasping promptly and undividedly, as wholes, the complex structures of
the sensible world’2 – is central to the German aesthetic project from the
word go. Kant, in his theory of knowledge, had focussed attention not
on what we know but on how we know it. A similar emphasis extends to
his aesthetics, in which the mode of judgment, in its disinterestedness,
runs parallel to the disinterestedness of the morally pure judgment. For
Schiller the aesthetic condition is one in which the complex range of
human faculties come together in the freedom of play. Schopenhauer
sees art as promising redemption from the desperate tumult of blind,
Will-driven living by of fering men and women the chance to contem-
plate, in a condition of aesthetic detachment, the workings of the Will.
For Nietzsche art is the one and only justification of the world, a jus-
tification that is as fragile as it is valuable. Benjamin, in his inspired
essay on art in the age of technical reproducibility, sees art as centrally
implicated in the value-structures of modern living. Adorno denounces
the mendaciousness of the culture industry. And so on. I do not want
to prolong this list of brief summaries of the aesthetic theories of major
philosophers; all I want to highlight is the presence, in their thinking,
of what one might call a totalizing tendency, whereby art provides the
key definition of value and purpose in a post-religious, individualist, sci-
entific – in a word, modern, culture. I use the term ‘totalizing tendency’
in a value-free way. I am seeking to draw attention to – and not to judge
– a particular propensity, in this tradition of thinking, to make art and
the aesthetic the litmus test in the quest for existential meaning in the
secularized modern world.
3 On tragic theory see Gelfert, Die Tragödie, Silk, Tragedy and the Tragic, and Szondi,
‘Versuch über das Tragische’.
4 On Greek tragedy see Aylen, Greek Tragedy and the Modern World and Vickers,
Towards Greek Tragedy.
346 Martin Swales
5 On the tradition of German tragic drama since the eighteenth century, see Hart,
Tragedy in Paradise and Wiese, Die deutsche Tragödie von Lessing bis Hebbel.
6 See Richter, Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain.
7 On Hegelian theory of tragedy, see A. and H. Paolucci, eds, Hegel on Tragedy.
Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic 347
Schiller speaks of one of his aims being to give ‘as it were to his protagonist
or to his reader the whole full load of suf fering’13 – an intensity of visceral
and visible emotion. Yet, as his theory makes clear, tragedy thematically
of fers sublimity by the emergence of knowledge, of privileged insight; and
stylistically it achieves aesthetic distance by foregrounding the very artifice
of art – for example by the use of the chorus. Schiller’s dramatic praxis of fers
us not a reconciliation of this dialectic, but the dramatic – often visceral –
statement of the constant currents of tension that f licker back and forth
between the two poles. Think of Maria Stuart, of Elizabeth’s worldly vic-
tory which is a pyrrhic victory, ashes and dust, of Maria’s transfiguration at
the end, a transfiguration disturbed by her confusing Leicester’s arms with
the outstretched arms of the crucified Saviour. Or take Wallenstein: the
moments of human dignity and profundity – Thekla’s grief, Wallenstein’s
lament for the dead Max – are all swept aside by history as one damn thing
after another. Let us remember Hegel’s outrage at the play: ‘Unbelievable,
revolting! Death triumphs over life! That is not tragic but horrifying.’14
For Hegel, Sophoclean tragedy is the great paradigm in which both horror
and redemption are eloquently expressed, whereas Wallenstein is all horror
and no redemption.
In the closing scenes of Kleist’s Penthesilea we have something approxi-
mating to (or a grotesque travesty of ) anagnorisis as the protagonist comes
to herself and realizes that, in her sexual and military frenzy, she has with
her teeth torn the f lesh from Achilles’s body:
13 ‘gleichsam seinem Helden oder seinem Leser die ganze volle Ladung des Leidens’
(Schiller, Werke und Briefe, 8, 424). On Schiller’s theory of tragedy see Janz, ‘Af fekt-
modellierung nach antiken Vorbildern? Schillers Wallenstein’.
14 ‘Unglaublich, abscheulich! Der Tod siegt über das Leben! Dies ist nicht tragisch
sondern entsetzlich.’ Quoted in Schiller, Werke und Briefe, 4, 912.
350 Martin Swales
In this speech she comes close to the kind of higher, meta-personal poetry
of which Leavis speaks; she formulates a key theme of the play, the inter-
play of metaphorical and literal significations in human cognition. Yet
somehow these intimations of wisdom amount to little more than an eerie
travesty of anagnorisis.
A similar sense of forfeited insight, of theodicy slithering into mad-
ness haunts Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Towards the end of Act III the
following exchange occurs:
15 Kleist, Plays, ed. W. Hinderer, 265–266. ‘So war es ein Versehen. Küsse, Bisse, / Das
reimt sich, und wer recht von Herzen liebt, / Kann schon das eine für das andere
greifen. … Wie manche, die am Hals des Freundes hängt, / Sagt wohl das Wort: sie
lieb’ ihn, oh, so sehr, / Dass sie vor Liebe gleich ihn essen könnte; / Und hinterher,
das Wort beprüft, die Närrin! / Gesättigt sein zum Ekel ist sie schon./ Nun, du
Geliebter, so verfuhr ich nicht. / Sieh her: als ich an deinem Halse hing, / Hab’ ich’s
wahrhaftig Wort für Wort getan; / Ich war nicht so verrückt, als es wohl schien’
(Kleist, Dramen 1808–1811, 254–255).
Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic 351
Throughout the play Danton is tormented by feelings of guilt for the part he
played in unleashing the bloodletting that has led to and been compounded
by the Reign of Terror. Yet at times he finds that he can comfort himself
by invoking the notion of historical determinism – the Revolution was
inevitable, he was merely one of its contingent agents. Such an argument
provides the comfort of negating any sense of human responsibility and
autonomy. But that comfort is so cold as to be unendurable. One can hear
this dilemma in the above quotation which expresses a drama of being and
non-being. Peace is to be found only if – in Schopenhauer’s sense – the
ceaseless cycle of material existence can be held at bay; but that possibility
depends on there being a first cause, a maker who brought creation into
being in the first place and who can therefore take back what he has made.
But Danton is an atheist; he believes neither in first things nor in last things
– but merely in things, in obscenely creative omnipresent matter from
which there is no escape. This last-ditch attempt at anagnorisis of fers little
meaning or comfort, little uplift. It sounds mad, but there is some truth
to it. How is one to play this moment of philosophical stocktaking in the
theatre? As manic, desperate grasping at straws? As a discursive statement
about possible intimations of meaning in the world? Well, perhaps as both.
And this is the measure of our inability, in a post-theological world, to
know where we stand on the sliding scale between Being and Nothingness.
16 Büchner, Complete Plays, 58. ‘Philippeau: Was willst du denn? Danton: Ruhe.
Philippeau: Die ist in Gott. Danton: Im Nichts. Versenke dich in was Ruhigers als
das Nichts, und wenn die höchste Ruhe Gott ist, ist nicht das Nichts Gott? Aber
ich bin ein Atheist. Der verf luchte Satz: Etwas kann nicht zu Nichts werden! Und
ich bin etwas, das ist der Jammer! – Die Schöpfung hat sich so breit gemacht, da ist
nichts leer, alles voll Gewimmels. Das Nichts hat sich ermordet, die Schöpfung ist
seine Wunde, wir sind seine Blutstropfen, die Welt ist gas Grab, worin es fault. – Das
lautet verrückt, es ist aber doch was Wahres daran’ (Büchner, Dichtungen, 72).
352 Martin Swales
The truth that Penthesilea and Danton come to know, as they themselves
perceive, is uncomfortably close to madness.
My last example is taken from Bertolt Brecht. Despite all his fond-
ness for dialectics of one kind or another, Brecht, as a theoretician, can be
remarkably undialectical. John J. White stresses Brecht’s fondness for a ‘not
A but B’ pattern of thought.17 While the positive advocacy (‘but B’) – epic
theatre – allows for much dif ferentiation and subtlety, that which is repudi-
ated (‘not A’) remains pretty much constant and undif ferentiated through-
out his creative life. It is, in a word, Aristotelian drama (as constructed for
polemical purposes by Brecht). Speaking through the (admittedly conserva-
tive) voice of the Dramaturg in the Messingkauf Dialogues, Brecht writes
that cathartic identification has been seen, for ever and a day, as the essence
of theatre itself: ‘Since Aristotle wrote that, the theatre has gone through
many transformations, but not on this point. One can only conclude that
if it changed in this respect it would no longer be theatre.’18
Brecht’s aversion to Aristotelian-tragic-cathartic-culinary theatre was,
to put it mildly, implacable – and totalizing. He disliked the implied meta-
physic of tragedy, notions of inevitability, necessity, of the Immutability
of the World Order (rather than the historical specificity, and therefore,
changeability of any particular social world). He also distrusted ideas of
heroism, believing that they def lected attention from the questionability
of a social world in which being human required great reserves of courage.
Moreover, he resented the sheer prestige of tragedy, in aesthetic theory and
practice, during the preceding centuries; and he wanted to re-align privi-
leged knowing, anagnorisis, towards critical ref lection and intervention.
Yet, in spite of all these reservations, Brecht on occasion came very
close to writing tragedy. Mother Courage is a case in point. And in the great
scene that depicts the death of Kattrin, Brecht finds a moment of both
thematic and stylistic redemption that has more than a little to do with the
19 Brecht, Mother Courage, 86. ‘Sie hat’s geschaf ft’ (Brecht, Werke, 6, 84).
354 Martin Swales
know as opera. There are, I think, three ways in which the musical form
interlocks with my argument.20 Firstly: I have been concerned to explore the
aesthetic dialectic at work in tragedy, one which I understand as a perilous
oscillation between (as one might put it) physicality and metaphysicality.
As one of the key philosophers whom I have mentioned, Schopenhauer,
saw, music may of its very nature (as both unleashing the Will itself and
as pure abstraction) embody that dialectic with particular urgency. For
him (to spell out the implications of his argument in a way that he does
not), music is, at one level, pure drive, pulse, energy; and at another it
is akin to pure maths, a nexus of structures and relationships that are of
their very nature insubstantial, disembodied even. There is one key work
of the European tradition of tragic drama, Goethe’s Faust, which engages
supremely with the philosophy of tragedy, with the two souls within human
selfhood, the impulsion towards both materiality and spirituality. And,
perhaps for that reason, it has, more than any other tragic fable, attracted
the attention of composers. From Gounod, Schumann and Berlioz via
Busoni to Schnittke, narrativity and ref lectivity, energy and abstraction
have conjoined in musical exegesis of the Faust legend. Secondly: there is
a weighty argument about the origins of tragic drama (and Nietzsche is
the all-important witness here) that sees it as emerging from and grounded
in corporate, choric utterance. Music – and opera is an obvious example
of this – is supremely able to blend one voice into an ensemble of any size
(duet, trio, quartet. full chorus etc). One could think here of the ‘Bella
figlia’ quartet in the final act of Verdi’s Rigoletto. There four voices – the
Duke, Maddalena, Gilda, and Rigoletto – can be clearly heard as they
express four dif ferent facets of the experience of love and desire. We hear
seductiveness from the Duke, f lirtatiousness from Maddalena, anguished
betrayal from Gilda, and vengefulness from Rigoletto. Yet, for all their
dif ferences, these four voices cohere musically. The overall ef fect is both
visceral and, in its stylized beauty, consoling. Or one could think of the
role of the chorus in opera. The famous ‘Va pensiero’ from Verdi’s Nabucco
became the unof ficial anthem of the Italian aspiration for national unity
in the nineteenth century; significantly the voices are in unison almost
throughout. The presence of the choric as part of that interrelationship
we know from Greek tragedy between the tragic victim, the scapegoat on
the one hand and the corporate world on the other can be heard in the
choric intensity of Moussorgsky’s Boris Godunov and Khovanchina. Boris
Godunov expresses the horrific vicious circle of historical turmoil. There
are few, if any, moments of ref lectivity or anagnorisis. The moments of
stocktaking vouchsafed to the major characters are vitiated by ambition or
raw guilt; time and again the music prefacing the entry of the voice begins
with swelling tremolo strings, and one has the sense that the characters are
driven, hounded at every turn by the f lux and tumult of their psychologi-
cal and political situation. (One is perhaps reminded of Hegel’s repudia-
tion of Wallenstein). The only moment that comes close to anagnoris is
the plangent, eerily circular lament for the vanity of all historical striving
expressed at the end of the opera by the Holy Fool. Or one could think of
the wordless chorus at the end of Janacek’s Katja Kabanova. Such choric
ef fects can rarely be replicated in modern worded drama, although there
are exceptions – T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and, more recently,
Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman come to mind.
Thirdly and finally (and this is a point to which I attach particular
importance): opera has at its disposal, in addition to the human drama
which it sets before us, the all-important dimension of the orchestra.
Through the nineteenth century, from Mozart’s Don Giovanni via Weber’s
Der Freischutz to Verdi, Wagner and beyond, one can register how opera
moves away from the action/reaction pattern of recitative and aria to a more
symphonic condition where the orchestra provides a constant stream of
articulation and ref lection. One issue is salient as regards the all-important
issue of anagnorisis: opera has the possibility that, even if the characters do
not come to a point of privileged knowing, the orchestra may express the
insights that are beyond the grasp of the characters themselves. In Act II of
Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, King Mark asks why Tristan has betrayed him.
Tristan cannot answer; but the orchestra responds with the motif of irresist-
ible longing that is the first statement the opera makes in its unforgettable
Tragedy and the Aesthetic Dialectic 357
prelude. At the end of Rhinegold, the first part of the Ring tetralogy, the
gods enter Valhalla to a blaze of orchestral sound that feels triumphalist
rather than heroic. In Act I of The Valkyrie, Sieglinde tells Siegmund of the
mysterious stranger who planted the sword in the tree. Neither of them
knows the identity of that stranger, but the orchestra does; it sounds the
Valhalla motif which is utterly identified with Wotan’s ambition and the
curse which steadily destroys all his works. In the closing scene of Twilight
of the Gods Brünnhilde sings of her knowingness:
And at this point the orchestra does more than simply accompany
Brünnhilde’s voice; rather, it embodies the totality that she knows – it
brings back the harmonies and textures of the sound world of the Rhine
to which restitution will now be made. The orchestra confirms that the
insight truly is a moment of anagnorisis. The Ring ends with Brünnhilde’s
self-immolation, with the destruction of Valhalla, and with the gold of
the ring being returned to its original home, the Rhine. The orchestra has
the last word; it sounds the great soaring phrase that has been associated
with the redemptive value of human love. The Wagner orchestra is always
the repository of profound memory, or recurrence, repetition and knowl-
edge. Thereby it enshrines one of the key motifs of European tragedy – the
notion of the past returning to haunt the present. At one level it expresses
entrapment, then. But recurrence can also produce insight, even, at times,
anagnorisis. The presence of the orchestra as a kind of meta-voice which
expresses an insight beyond that vouchsafed to any of the characters can
21 Wagner, The Ring, 358. ‘Mich musste/der Reinste verraten, / dass wissend wuerde ein
Weib! / Weiss ich nun, was dir frommt? / Alles, alles, / alles weiss ich / Alles ward
mir nun frei!’ (Wagner, The Ring, 357).
358 Martin Swales
be found in Alban Berg’s Wozzeck. At the end, after the murder of Marie,
Wozzeck wades into the lake in order to get rid of the knife. In response to
the news of the murder the children go on playing on their hobby horses.
In Berg’s world no one can say with Brünnhilde ‘all to me is revealed’. Yet,
in the unforgettable interlude that comes between the last two scenes,
Berg allows the orchestra to know, to know it all, and to grieve for it all.
Even in a deeply blighted world, anagnorisis, or its ghostly memory, makes
itself heard. The tragic issue will not go away, and it can be sensed in the
moments of insight vouchsafed in the orchestral intermezzi of (to look
beyond Germany for a moment) Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mitsensk
or Britten’s Peter Grimes. Opera then, in its varying ways, can still manage
to enshrine the animating dialectic of tragedy, the inherent drama of our
material entrapment and our yearning for spiritual freedom, the drama
of (to borrow and vary a phrase from T. S. Eliot) our knowing and partly
knowing.22
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Notes on Contributors
and his most recent publication is Philosophy and Literature and the Crisis
of Metaphysics (Würzburg, 2011).
Norman Kasper is research assistant to the chair for general and com-
parative literature, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany).
His main research interest is in aesthetic theory from the perspective of
cultural studies, visibility and mediality in the Enlightenment and German
Romanticism, and he has published on Ludwig Tieck, A. W. Schlegel, J. A.
Eberhard, Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld and Wolfgang Hilbig.
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368 Index