Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic Part 17

Sch.e.l.ling looked upon mythology as a necessity for every art. Ideas are G.o.ds, considered from the point of view of reality; for the essence of each is equal to G.o.d in a _particular_ form. The characteristics of all G.o.ds, including the Christian, are _pure limitation and absolute indivisibility_. Minerva has wisdom and strength, but lacks womanly tenderness; Juno has power and wisdom, but is without amorous charm, which she borrows with the girdle of Venus, who in her turn is without the wisdom of Minerva. What would these G.o.ds become without their limitations? They would cease to be the objects of Fancy. Fancy is a faculty, apart from the pure intellect and from the reason. Distinct from imagination, which develops the products of art, Fancy has intuitions of them, grasps them herself, and herself represents them.

Fancy is to imagination as intellectual intuition is to reason. Fancy, then, is intellectual intuition in art. In the thought of Sch.e.l.ling, fancy, the new or artistic intuition, sister of intellectual intuition, came to dominate alike the intellect and the old conception of the fancy and the imagination, in a system for which reason alone did not suffice.

C.G. Solger followed Sch.e.l.ling and agreed with him in finding but little truth in the theories of Kant, and especially of Fichte. He held that their dialectic had failed to solve the difficulty of intellectual intuition. He too conceived of fancy as distinct from imagination, and divided the former into three degrees. Imagination he held to appertain to ordinary knowledge, "which re-establishes the original intuition to infinity." Fancy "originates from the original ant.i.thesis in the idea, and so operates that the opposing elements which are separated from the idea become perfectly united in reality. By means of fancy, we are able to understand things more lofty than those of common knowledge, and in them we recognize the idea itself as real. In art, fancy is the faculty of transforming the idea into reality."

For Solger as for Sch.e.l.ling, beauty belongs to the region of Ideas, which are inaccessible to common knowledge. Art is nearly allied to religion, for as religion is the abyss of the idea, into which our consciousness plunges, that it may become essential, so Art and the Beautiful resolve, in their way, the world of distinctions, the universal and the particular. Artistic activity is more than theoretical: it is practical, realized and perfect, and therefore belongs to practical, not to theoretic philosophy, as Kant wrongly believed. Since art must touch infinity on one side, it cannot have ordinary nature for its object. Art therefore _ceases_ in the portrait, and this explains why the ancients generally chose G.o.ds or Heroes as models for sculpture. Every deity, even in a limited and particular form, expresses a definite modification of the Idea.

G.G.F. Hegel gives the same definition of art as Solger and Sch.e.l.ling, All three were mystical aestheticians, and the various shades of mystical Aesthetic, presented by these three writers, are not of great interest. Sch.e.l.ling forced upon art the abstract Platonic ideas, while Hegel reduced it to the _concrete idea_. This concrete idea was for Hegel the first and lowest of the three forms of the liberty of the spirit. It represented immediate, sensible, objectified knowledge; while Religion filled the second place, as representative consciousness with adoration, which is an element foreign to art alone. The third place was of course occupied by Philosophy, the free thought of the absolute spirit. Beauty and Truth are one for Hegel; they are united in the Idea.

The beautiful he defined as _the sensible appearance of the Idea_.

Some writers have erroneously believed that the views of the three philosophers above mentioned lead back to those of Baumgarten. But that is not correct. They well understood that art cannot be made a medium for the expression of philosophic concepts. Not only are they opposed to the moralistic and intellectualistic view, but they are its active opponents. Sch.e.l.ling says that aesthetic production is in its essence absolutely free, and Hegel that art does not contain the universal as such.

Hegel accentuated the _cognoscitive_ character of art, more than any of his predecessors. We have seen that he placed it with Philosophy and Religion in the sphere of the absolute Spirit. But he does not allow either to Art or to Religion any difference of function from that of Philosophy, which occupies the highest place in his system. They are therefore inferior, necessary, grades of the Spirit. Of what use are they? Of none whatever, or at best, they merely represent transitory and historical phases of human life.

Thus we see that the tendency of Hegelianism is _anti-artistic_, as it is rationalistic and anti-religious.

This result of thought was a strange and a sad thing for one who loved art so fervently as Hegel. Our memories conjure up Plato, who also loved art well, and yet found himself logically obliged to banish the poet from his ideal Republic, after crowning him with roses. But the German philosopher was as staunch to the (supposed) command of reason as the Greek, and felt himself obliged to announce the death of art. Art, he says, occupies a lofty place in the human spirit, but not the most lofty, for it is limited to a restricted content and only a certain grade of truth can be expressed in art. Such are the h.e.l.lenic G.o.ds, who can be transfused in the sensible and appear in it adequately. The Christian conception of truth is among those which cannot be so expressed. The spirit of the modern world, and more precisely the spirit of our religion and rational development, seem to have gone beyond the point at which art is the chief way of apprehending the Absolute. The peculiarity of artistic production no longer satisfies our highest needs. Thought and reflexion have surpa.s.sed art, the beautiful. He goes on to say that the reason generally given for this is the prevalence of material and political interests. But the true reason is the inferiority in degree of art as compared with pure thought. Art is dead, and Philosophy can therefore supply its complete biography.

Hegel's _Vorlesungen uber Aesthetik_ amounts therefore to a funeral oration upon Art.

Romanticism and metaphysical idealism had placed art, sometimes above the clouds, sometimes within them, and believing that it was no good there to anyone, Hegel provided a decent burial.

Nothing perhaps better shows how well this fantastic conception of art suited the spirit of the time, than the fact that even the adversaries of Sch.e.l.ling, Solger, and Hegel either admit agreement with that conception, or find themselves involuntarily in agreement with it, while believing themselves to be very remote. They too are mystical aestheticians.

We all know with what virulence Arthur Schopenhauer attacked and combated Sch.e.l.ling, Hegel, and all the "charlatans" and "professors" who had divided among them the inheritance of Kant.

Well, Schopenhauer's theory of art starts, just like Hegel's, from the difference between the abstract and the concrete concept, which is the _Idea_. Schopenhauer's ideas are the Platonic ideas, although in the form which he gives to them, they have a nearer resemblance to the Ideas of Sch.e.l.ling than to the Idea of Hegel.

Schopenhauer takes much trouble to differentiate his ideas from intellectual concepts. He calls the idea "unity which has become plurality by means of s.p.a.ce and time. It is the form of our intuitive apperception. The concept is, on the contrary, unity extracted from plurality by means of abstraction, which is an act of our intellect. The concept may be called _unitas post rem_, the idea _unitas ante rem_."

The origin of this psychological illusion of the ideas or types of things is always to be found in the changing of the empirical cla.s.sifications created for their own purposes by the natural sciences, into living realities.

Thus each art has for its sphere a special category of ideas.

Architecture and its derivatives, gardening (and strange to say landscape-painting is included with it), sculpture and animal-painting, historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture, etc., all possess their special ideas. Poetry's chief object is man as idea. Music, on the contrary, does not belong to the hierarchy of the other arts. Sch.e.l.ling had looked upon music as expressing the rhythm of the universe itself.

For Schopenhauer, music does not express ideas, but the _Will itself_.

The a.n.a.logies between music and the world, between fundamental notes and crude matter, between the scale and the scale of species, between melody and conscious will, lead Schopenhauer to the conclusion that music is not only an arithmetic, as it appeared to Leibnitz, but indeed a metaphysic: "the occult metaphysical exercise of a soul not knowing that it philosophizes."

For Schopenhauer, as for his idealist predecessors, art is beatific. It is the flower of life; he who is plunged in artistic contemplation ceases to be an individual; he is the conscious subject, pure, freed from will, from pain, and from time.

Yet in Schopenhauer's system exist elements for a better and a more profound treatment of the problem of art. He could sometimes show himself to be a lucid and acute a.n.a.lyst. For instance, he continually remarks that the categories of s.p.a.ce and time are not applicable to art, _but only the general form of representation_. He might have deduced from this that art is the most immediate, not the most lofty grade of consciousness, since it precedes even the ordinary perceptions of s.p.a.ce and time. Vico had already observed that this freeing oneself from ordinary perception, this dwelling in imagination, does not really mean an ascent to the level of the Platonic Ideas, but, on the contrary, a redescending to the sphere of immediate intuition, a return to childhood.

On the other hand, Schopenhauer had begun to submit the Kantian categories to impartial criticism, and finding the two forms of intuition insufficient, added a third, causality.

He also drew comparisons between art and history, and was more successful here than the idealist excogitators of a philosophy of history. Schopenhauer rightly saw that history was irreducible to concepts, that it is the contemplation of the individual, and therefore not a science. Having proceeded thus far, he might have gone further, and realized that the material of history is always the particular in its particularity, that of art what is and always is identical. But he preferred to execute a variation on the general motive that was in fashion at this time.

The fashion of the day! It rules in philosophy as elsewhere, and we are now about to see the most rigid and arid of a.n.a.lysts, the leader of the so-called _realist_ school, or school of _exact science_ in Germany in the nineteenth century, plunge headlong into aesthetic mysticism.

G.F. Herbart (1813) begins his Aesthetic by freeing it from the discredit attaching to Metaphysic and to Psychology. He declares that the only true way of understanding art is to study particular examples of the beautiful and to note what they reveal as to its essence.

We shall now see what came of Herbart's a.n.a.lysis of these examples of beauty, and how far he succeeded in remaining free of Metaphysic.

For Herbart, beauty consists of _relations_. The science of Aesthetic consists of an enumeration of all the fundamental relations between colours, lines, tones, thoughts, and will. But for him these relations are not empirical or physiological. They cannot therefore be studied in a laboratory, because thought and the will form part of them, and these belong as much to Ethics as to the external world. But Herbart explicitly states that no true beauty is sensible, although sensation may and does often precede and follow the intuition of beauty. There is a profound distinction between the beautiful and the agreeable or pleasant: the latter does not require a representation, while the former consists in representations of relations, which are immediately followed by a judgment expressing unconditioned approval. Thus the merely pleasurable becomes more and more indifferent, but the beautiful appears always as of more and more permanent value. The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable. The complete representation of the same relations always carries with it the same judgment. For Herbart, aesthetic judgments are the general cla.s.s containing the sub-cla.s.s of ethical judgments. The five ethical ideas, of internal liberty, of perfection, of benevolence, of equity, and of justice, are five aesthetic ideas; or better, they are aesthetic concepts applied to the will in its relations.

Herbart looked upon art as a complex fact, composed of an external element possessing logical or psychological value, the content, and of a true aesthetic element, which is the form. Entertainment, instruction, and pleasure of all sorts are mingled with the beautiful, in order to obtain favour for the work in question. The aesthetic judgment, calm and serene in itself, may be accompanied by all sorts of psychic emotions, foreign to it. But the content is always transitory, relative, subject to moral laws, and judged by them. The form alone is perennial, absolute, and free. The true catharsis can only be effected by separating the form from the content. Concrete art may be the sum of two values, _but the aesthetic fact is form alone_.

For those capable of penetrating beneath appearances, the aesthetic doctrines of Herbart and of Kant will appear very similar. Herbart is notable as insisting, in the manner of Kant, on the distinction between free and adherent beauty (or adornment as sensuous stimulant), on the existence of pure beauty, object of necessary and universal judgments, and on a certain mingling of ethical with his aesthetic theory. Herbart, indeed, called himself "a Kantian, but of the year 1828." Kant's aesthetic theory, though it be full of errors, yet is rich in fruitful suggestions. Kant belongs to a period when philosophy is still young and pliant. Herbart came later, and is dry and one-sided. The romantics and the metaphysical idealists had unified the theory of the beautiful and of art. Herbart restored the old duality and mechanism, and gave us an absurd, unfruitful form of mysticism, void of all artistic inspiration.

Herbart may be said to have taken all there was of false in the thought of Kant and to have made it into a system.

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Germany is notable for the great number of philosophical theories and of counter-theories, broached and rapidly discussed, before being discarded. None of the most prominent names in the period belong to philosophers of first-rate importance, though they made so much stir in their day.

The thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher was obscured and misunderstood amid those crowding mediocrities; yet it is perhaps the most interesting and the most noteworthy of the period.

Schleiermacher looked upon Aesthetic as an altogether modern form of thought. He perceived a profound difference between the "Poetics" of Aristotle, not yet freed from empirical precepts, and the tentative of Baumgarten in the eighteenth century. He praised Kant as having been the first to include Aesthetic among the philosophical disciplines. He admitted that with Hegel it had attained to the highest pinnacle, being connected with religion and with philosophy, and almost placed upon their level.

But he was dissatisfied with the absurdity of the attempt made by the followers of Baumgarten to construct a science or theory of sensuous pleasure. He disapproved of Kant's view of taste as being the principle of Aesthetic, of Fichte's art as moral teaching, and of the vague conception of the beautiful as the centre of Aesthetic.

He approved of Schiller's marking of the moment of spontaneity in productive art, and he praised Sch.e.l.ling for having drawn attention to the figurative arts, as being less liable than poetry to be diverted to false and illusory moralistic ends. Before he begins the study of the place due to the artistic activity in Ethic, he carefully excludes from the study of Aesthetic all practical rules (which, being empirical, are incapable of scientific demonstration).

For Schleiermacher, the sphere of Ethic included the whole Philosophy of the Spirit, in addition to morality. These are the two forms of human activity--that which, like Logic, is the same in all men, and is called activity of ident.i.ty, and the activity of difference or individuality.

There are activities which, like art, are internal or immanent and individual, and others which are external or practical. _The true work of art is the internal picture_. Measure is what differentiates the artist's portrayal of anger on the stage and the anger of a really angry man. Truth is not sought in poetry, or if it be sought there, it is truth of an altogether different kind. The truth of poetry lies in coherent presentation. Likeness to a model does not compose the merit of a picture. Not the smallest amount of knowledge comes from art, which expresses only the truth of a particular consciousness. Art has for its field the immediate consciousness of self, which must be carefully distinguished from the thought of the Ego. This last is the consciousness of ident.i.ty in the diversity of moments as they pa.s.s; the immediate consciousness of self is the diversity itself of the moments, of which we should be aware, for life is nothing but the development of consciousness. In this field, art has sometimes been confused with two facts which accompany it there: these are sentient consciousness (that is, the feelings of pleasure and of pain) and religion. Schleiermacher here alludes to the sensualistic aestheticians of the eighteenth century, and to Hegel, who had almost identified art and religion. He refutes both points of view by pointing out that sentient pleasure and religious sentiment, however different they may be from other points of view, are yet both determined by an objective fact; while art, on the contrary, is free productivity.

Dream is the best parallel and proof of this free productivity. All the essential elements of art are found in dream, which is the result of free thoughts and of sensible intuitions, consisting simply of images.

But dream, as compared with art, is chaotic: when measure and order is established in dream, it becomes art. Thoughts and images are alike essential to art, and to both is necessary ponderation, reflexion, measure, and unity, because otherwise every image would be confused with every other image. Thus the moments of inspiration and of ponderation are both necessary to art.

Schleiermacher's thought, so firm and lucid up to this point, begins to become less secure, with the discussion of typicity and of the extent to which the artist should follow Nature. He says that ideal figures, which Nature would give, were she not impeded by external obstacles, are the products of art. He notes that when the artist represents something really given, such as a portrait or a landscape, he renounces freedom of production and adheres to the real. In the artist is a double tendency, toward the perfection of the type and toward the representation of natural reality. He should not fall into the abstraction of the type, nor into the insignificance of empirical reality. Schleiermacher feels all the difficulty of such a problem as whether there be one or several ideals of the human figure. This problem may be transferred to the sphere of art, and we may ask whether the poet is to represent only the ideal, or whether he should also deal with those obstacles to it that impede Nature in her efforts to attain. Both views contain half the truth. To art belongs the representation of the ideal as of the real, of the subjective and of the objective alike. The representation of the comic, that is of the anti-ideal and of the imperfect ideal, belongs to the domain of art. For the human form, both morally and physically, oscillates between the ideal and caricature.

He arrives at a most important definition as to the independence of art in respect to morality. The nature of art, as of philosophic speculation, excludes moral and practical effects. Therefore, _there is no other difference between works of art than their respective artistic perfection (Vollkommenheit in der Kunst)_. If we could correctly predicate volitional acts in respect of works of art, then we should find ourselves admiring only those works which stimulated the will, and there would thus be established a difference of valuation, independent of artistic perfection. The true work of art depends upon the degree of perfection with which the external in it agrees with the internal.

Schleiermacher rightly combats Schiller's view that art is in any sense a game. That, he says, is the view held by mere men of business, to whom business alone is serious. But artistic activity is universal, and a man completely deprived of it unthinkable, although the difference here between man and man, is gigantic, ranging from the simple desire to taste of art to the effective tasting of it, and from this, by infinite gradations, to productive genius.

The regrettable fact that Schleiermacher's thought has reached us only in an imperfect form, may account for certain of its defects, such as his failure to eliminate aesthetic cla.s.ses and types, his retention of a certain residue of abstract formalism, his definition of art as the activity of difference. Had he better defined the moment of artistic reproduction, realized the possibility of tasting the art of various times and of other nations, and examined the true relation of art to science, he would have seen that this difference is merely empirical and to be surmounted. He failed also to recognize the ident.i.ty of the aesthetic activity, with language as the base of all other theoretic activity.

But Schleiermacher's merits far outweigh these defects. He removed from Aesthetic its _imperativistic_ character; he distinguished _a form of thought_ different from logical thought. He attributed to our science a _non-metaphysical, anthropological_ character. He _denied_ the concept of the beautiful, subst.i.tuting for it _artistic perfection_, and maintaining the aesthetic equality of a small with a great work of art, he looked upon the aesthetic fact as an exclusively _human productivity_.

Thus Schleiermacher, the theologian, in this period of metaphysical orgy, of rapidly constructed and as rapidly destroyed systems, perceived, with the greatest philosophical ac.u.men, what is really characteristic of art, and distinguished its properties and relations.

Even where he fails to see clearly his way, he never abandons a.n.a.lysis for mere guess-work.

Schleiermacher, thus exploring the obscure region of the _immediate consciousness_, or of the aesthetic fact, can almost be heard crying out to his straying contemporaries: _Hic Rhodus, hi salta_!

Speculation upon the origin and nature of language was rife at this time in Germany. Many theories were put forward, among the most curious being that of Sch.e.l.ling, who held language and mythology to be the product of a pre-human consciousness, allegorically expressed as the diabolic suggestions which had precipitated the Ego from the infinite to the finite.

Even Wilhelm von Humboldt was unable to free himself altogether from the intellectualistic prejudice of the substantial ident.i.ty and the merely historical and accidental diversity of logical thought and language. He speaks of a _perfect_ language, broken up and diminished with the lesser capacities of lesser peoples. He believed that language is something standing outside the individual, independent of him, and capable of being revived by use. But there were two men in Humboldt, an old man and a young one. The latter was always suggesting that language should be looked upon as a living, not as a dead thing, as an activity, not as a word. This duality of thought sometimes makes his writing difficult and obscure. Although he speaks of an internal form of speech, he fails to identify this with art as expression. The reason is that he looks upon the word in too unilateral a manner, as a means of developing logical thought, and his ideas of Aesthetic are too vague and too inexact to enable him to discover their ident.i.ty. Despite his perception of the profound truth that poetry precedes prose, Humboldt gives grounds for doubt as to whether he had clearly recognized and firmly grasped the fact that language is always poetry, and that prose (science) is a distinction, not of aesthetic form, but of content, that is, of logical form.

Steinthal, the greatest follower of Humboldt, solved his master's contradictions, and in 1855 sustained successfully against the Hegelian Becker the thesis that words are necessary for thought. He pointed to the deaf-mute with his signs, to the mathematician with his formulae, to the Chinese language, where the figurative portion is an essential of speech, and declared that Becker was wrong in believing that the Sanskrit language was derived from twelve cardinal concepts. He showed effectively that the concept and the word, the logical judgment and the proposition, are not comparable. The proposition is not a judgment, but the representation of a judgment; and all propositions do not represent logical judgments. Several judgments can be expressed with one proposition. The logical divisions of judgments (the relations of concepts) have no correspondence in the grammatical division of propositions. "If we speak of a logical form of the proposition, we fall into a contradiction in terms not less complete than his who should speak of the angle of a circle, or of the periphery of a triangle." He who speaks, in so far as he speaks, has not thoughts, but language.

When Steinthal had several times solemnly proclaimed the independence of language as regards Logic, and that it produces its forms in complete autonomy, he proceeded to seek the origin of language, recognizing with Humboldt that the question of Its origin is the same as that of its nature. Language, he said, belongs to the great cla.s.s of reflex movements, but this only shows one side of it, not its true nature.

Animals, like men, have reflex actions and sensations, though nature enters the animal by force, takes it by a.s.sault, conquers and enslaves it. With man is born language, because he is resistance to nature, governance of his own body, and liberty. "Language is liberation; even to-day we feel that our soul becomes lighter, and frees itself from a weight, when we speak." Man, before he attains to speech, must be conceived of as accompanying all his sensations with bodily movements, mimetic att.i.tudes, gestures, and particularly with articulate sounds.

What is still lacking to him, that he may attain to speech? The connexion between the reflex movements of the body and the state of the soul. If his sentient consciousness be already consciousness, then he lacks the consciousness of consciousness; if it be already intuition, then he lacks the intuition of intuition. In sum, he lacks the _internal form of language_. With this comes speech, which forms the connexion.