Rethinking Lessing's Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the 'Limits' of Painting and Poetry (Classical Presences) [Illustrated] 9780198802228, 0198802226

Table of contents :
Cover
Rethinking Lessing´s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Note on Laocoon Editions
Foreword: Why Lessing’s Laocoon Still Matters
Always Anachronize
The Confusion of Criticism
1: Introduction: Rethinking Lessing´s Laocoon from across the Humanities
Laocoon and the Exemplarity of Antiquity
Lessing and the Enlightenment
Aesthetics and Reception
Unordentliche Collectanea?
2: Laocoon Today: On the Conceptual Infrastructure of Lessing´s Treatise
Critical Judgment
Human Action
Emotion
3: Laocoon among the Gods,: or: On the Theological Limits of Lessing´s Grenzen
Die Fackel der Geschichte: The Inductive Illuminations of Classical Antiquity
Geistigkeit and materielle Schranken: Laocoon´s (In)Visible Theology
Conclusion: Lessing´s Lessening of the Gods
4: Lessing´s Laocoon as Analytical Instrument: The Perspectives of a Classical Archaeologist
5: Sympathy, Tragedy, and the Morality of Sentiment in Lessing´s Laocoon
Laocoon, Chapters 1-4 and the Turn to Sophocles
Smith´s Arguments about Sympathy and Lessing´s Reply
Structure, Not Spectacle: The Continuing Authority of Aristotle
6: Mendelssohn´s Critique of Lessing´s Laocoon
Rules and the Rationalist Tradition
Laocoon and the Rationalist Tradition
Lessing´s Deductive Argument
Mendelssohn´s Critique
Lessing´s Reply to Mendelssohn´s Critique in the Seventeenth Chapterof Laocoon
7: Naturalizing the Arbitrary: Lessing´s Laocoon and Enlightenment Semiotics
Lessing and Mendelssohn on Natural and Arbitrary Signs
Symbolic Cognition and the Classification of Signs
Beyond Wolff: Criticisms of Arbitrariness from Leibniz to Mid-Century France
The Diderot Connection
Conclusion
8: Temporalization?: Lessing´s Laocoon and the Problem of Narration in Eighteenth-Century Historiography
Division versus Integration of Space and Time: Lessing´s Laocoon and the Ars Historica
Time and Space, Succession and Coexistence as a Historiographical Problem
Is Gatterer´s Theory of History Based on Laocoon?
The Primacy of the Optical: Gatterer´s Plea for a Universal Historiography beyond the Successiveness of Language
The Concept of Action: Gatterer´s Omission, Lessing´s Attenuation
9: Criticism as Poetry?: Lessing´s Laocoon and the Limits of Critique
Pope-a Metaphysician!: Comparing Poetry and Metaphysics
Laocoon: An Attempt to Delimit the Concept of Criticism
Narrated Readings: Action and Plot
The Winckelmann Reading
Fictional Chronology
Criticism and Poetry
10: Suffering in Art: Laocoon between Lessing and Goethe
Goethe´s Classicism
Ideal versus Character in Classical Art
Goethe´s Anti-Naturalist Aesthetic
Suffering and Tragedy
11: Transparency and Imaginative Engagement: Material as Medium in Lessing´s Laocoon
The Transparency Theory of Art
The `Framework of Enlightenment Semiotics´
Imagination and `Answerability´ to the Work
Conclusion
12: Lessing´s Laocoon and the `As-If´ of Aesthetic Experience
`Viel Feind, viel Ehr´
Walton´s `Make-Believe´
Time and Space in and beyond Laocoon
13: Art and Necessity: Rethinking Lessing´s Critical Practice
The Amateur and the Critic
Staging the Imagination
Approaching Lessing´s `Limits´
14: Image and Text in Lessing´s Laocoon: From Friendly Semiotic Neighbours to Articulatory Twins
Historical Prelude
Lessing´s Laocoon
Language and Image
(i) Defining the Image
(ii) Image and Language
Sound Articulation
Evolutionary Conjectures: Twin Birth
Conclusion
15: Envoi: The Twofold Liminality of Lessing´s Laocoon
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors LORNA HARDWICK

J A ME S I . P OR T E R

CLASSICAL PRESENCES Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry

E DI TED BY

Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire 2017 © The copyright in individual chapters remains vested in their authors The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2017 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017935260 ISBN 978–0–19–880222–8 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Frontispiece. Photograph of the Vatican Laocoon statue-group, probably first century AD (after the twentieth-century restoration of Laocoon’s right arm; cf. Fig. 1.1). Photograph by Giovanni Ricci Novara, reproduced by kind permission of the Archiv, Institut für Klassische Archäologie und Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

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Acknowledgements The idea for an edited volume on Lessing’s Laocoon stems, appropriately enough, from discussions between the two editors in Berlin—during their time as Fellows at the Wissenschaftskolleg in 2012–13. Our initial conversations gave rise to a three-day international workshop in April 2015, held at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg (Institute for Advanced Study)— part of the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen. The workshop was made possible thanks to generous research grants from the LichtenbergKolleg and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung für Wissenschaftsförderung in Germany, with additional support from the Leverhulme Trust in the UK: it is a pleasure to acknowledge that financial assistance, as well as the support of colleagues at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, especially Martin van Gelderen, Dominik Hünniger, and Turan Lackschewitz. As we explain in the volume’s introduction, the Göttingen workshop aimed to bring together a range of disciplinary specialists: the objective was to rethink Lessing’s treatise from a spectrum of viewpoints across the humanities, with a particular view to the 250th anniversary of the essay’s publication in 2016. During the course of our discussions, contributors were able to benefit from the expertise of additional participants and respondents, among them Hans Erich Bödeker, Martin Gierl, Susan Gustafson, Anthony La Vopa, Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus, Alfred Nordmann, Alexander Schmidt, Andrea Speltz, Steven Tester, and Friedrich Vollhardt. Part of the proceedings took place in Wolfenbüttel: thanks to the generous support of Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Volker Bauer, and Jill Bepler at the Herzog August Bibliothek, participants were able to inspect the collection of the ducal library where Lessing served as chief librarian between 1770 and 1781. We were likewise able to discuss Laocoon in a public session held at the so-called ‘Lessinghaus’ (where Lessing himself resided during his time in Wolfenbüttel). Participants benefited from other sorts of academic expertise too: in particular, we are grateful to Daniel Gräpler for showing us how Lessing’s interests in Laocoon (and other works) relate to the eighteenth-century history of the Archäologisches Institut und Sammlung der Gipsabgüsse at the university in Göttingen.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In transforming our project from collaborative workshop to concrete book we have amassed numerous other debts. First, it is a pleasure to thank Steven Tester for translating the German essays by Daniel Fulda and Élisabeth Décultot (once again sponsored by the Lichtenberg-Kolleg and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung), as well as Joe O’Donnell (who translated Luca Giuliani’s chapter into English). Second, we are grateful to Tom Mitchell and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for their advice, and not least for gallantly book-ending the volume with their foreword and envoi. Third, we are indebted to Mary Morton, Jeff New, and Bethan Lee for their sharp-sighted assistance in copy-editing the book. Last but not least, we thank the team at Oxford University Press, as well as the two anonymous reviewers who read a preliminary draft of the manuscript and suggested a number of improvements. From initial submission to final page-proofs, Charlotte Loveridge, Tom Perridge, and Georgie Leighton at OUP have patiently steered us through the production process; likewise, as series editors, Lorna Hardwick and James Porter have provided their own distinctive encouragement—helping us to fine-tune the volume within the Classical Presences remit, and offering guidance both intellectual and practical. The present book cannot expect to have the last word on Lessing’s treatise. As the Laocoon essay finds new readers over the next quartermillennium, we nonetheless hope that our volume reflects different contemporary approaches, giving rise to still further critical perspectives. Perhaps most importantly of all, and in line with the aims of the Classical Presences series, we hope that our collective ‘rethinking’ will build some new cross-disciplinary intellectual bridges, above all between the study of ‘antiquity’, ‘Enlightenment’, and the ‘“limits”’ of painting and poetry’. Avi Lifschitz Michael Squire Berlin September 2016

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Contents List of Illustrations List of Tables List of Contributors Note on Laocoon Editions Foreword: Why Lessing’s Laocoon Still Matters W. J. T. Mitchell 1. Introduction: Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon from across the Humanities Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire

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2. Laocoon Today: On the Conceptual Infrastructure of Lessing’s Treatise David E. Wellbery

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3. Laocoon among the Gods, or: On the Theological Limits of Lessing’s Grenzen Michael Squire

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4. Lessing’s Laocoon as Analytical Instrument: The Perspectives of a Classical Archaeologist Luca Giuliani

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5. Sympathy, Tragedy, and the Morality of Sentiment in Lessing’s Laocoon Katherine Harloe

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6. Mendelssohn’s Critique of Lessing’s Laocoon Frederick Beiser

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7. Naturalizing the Arbitrary: Lessing’s Laocoon and Enlightenment Semiotics Avi Lifschitz

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8. Temporalization? Lessing’s Laocoon and the Problem of Narration in Eighteenth-Century Historiography Daniel Fulda

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CONTENTS

9. Criticism as Poetry? Lessing’s Laocoon and the Limits of Critique Élisabeth Décultot 10. Suffering in Art: Laocoon between Lessing and Goethe Ritchie Robertson 11. Transparency and Imaginative Engagement: Material as Medium in Lessing’s Laocoon Jason Gaiger

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12. Lessing’s Laocoon and the ‘As-If ’ of Aesthetic Experience Jonas Grethlein

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13. Art and Necessity: Rethinking Lessing’s Critical Practice Paul A. Kottman

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14. Image and Text in Lessing’s Laocoon: From Friendly Semiotic Neighbours to Articulatory Twins Jürgen Trabant

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15. Envoi: The Twofold Liminality of Lessing’s Laocoon Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

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Bibliography Index

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List of Illustrations Frontispiece. Photograph of the Vatican Laocoon statue-group, probably first century AD (after the twentieth-century restoration of Laocoon’s right arm; cf. Fig. 1.1). Photograph by Giovanni Ricci Novara, reproduced by kind permission of the Archiv, Institut für Klassische Archäologie und Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. Fig. 0.1. William Blake, Laocoon, 1826–7. Private collection of Robert N. Essick. Reproduced by kind permission of the William Blake Archive (http://www.blakearchive.org/).

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Fig. 0.2. René Magritte, La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), 1929. Los Angeles, County Museum of Art. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.

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Fig. 0.3. Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Linguistic sign’, as illustrated in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916: 101).

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Fig. 1.1. Photograph of the Vatican Laocoon statue-group before restoration (c.1880). Vatican, Musei Vaticani (Museo Pio-Clementino). © Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.2. Marco Dente, engraving of the Laocoon statue-group, early sixteenth century (housed in the Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest). © The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.3. Giovanni Paolo Panini, Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome, 1758 (featuring the Laocoon statue-group at the lower right). Paris, Musée du Louvre: inv. RF 1944–21. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.4. Opening plate from William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753), demonstrating how the ancient ‘line of grace’ is echoed in commonplace modern artefacts

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

(including cacti, candlesticks, and corsets); the Laocoon group is figured in the background (labelled no. 9), just left of centre. Photograph by M. J. Squire.

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Fig. 1.5. Hubert Robert, Architectural Capriccio with the Laocoon, early nineteenth century. Black ink and grey wash with watercolour over traces of black chalk on off-white antique laid paper, framing lines in brown ink; 33.2  48 cm. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; gift of Therese Kuhn Straus in memory of her husband, Herbert N. Straus, Harvard Class of 1903: inv. 1978.35. Photograph kindly supplied by the Imaging Department of the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Fig. 1.6. Anton von Maron, posthumous portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 1768. Today owned by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. © bpk, Berlin/Klassik Stiftung Weimar/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.7. Head of the Laocoon group (cf. Fig. 1.1). Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Archiv, Institut für Klassische Archäologie und Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

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Fig. 1.8. Frontispiece of Lessing’s first 1766 edition of Laocoon. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Fig. 1.9. Barbara Anna Rosina Lisiewska, Portrait of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, c.1768. Halberstadt, Das Gleimhaus (Museum der deutschen Aufklärung). © Snark/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 3.1. Charles Clement Bervic, engraving of the Laocoon statue-group, late eighteenth century. Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Gift of Willis O. Chapin, inv. 1891: 4.42. © Albright-Knox Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 3.2. Image of the ‘Sacrifice of Iphigeneia’ from the House of the Tragic Poet (Pompeii VI.8.3), first century AD. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale: inv. 9112. © Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 3.3. Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, Allegory of Iconoclasm, after 1566. London, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 4.1. René Magritte, La lectrice soumise (‘The submissive reader’), 1928. Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.

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Fig. 4.2. Late Geometric Attic cauldron-stand, c.740 BC. Athens, Kerameikos Museum: inv. 407. Photograph: D-DAI-Athen, Neg. Ker. 4830.

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Fig. 4.3. Alternative view of the same Late Geometric Attic cauldron-stand. Photograph: D-DAI-Athen, Neg. Ker. 4923.

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Fig. 4.4. Attic black-figure neck amphora, c.550 BC. Berlin, Antikensammlung der Staatlichen Museen (Preußischer Kulturbesitz): inv. F 1720. © SMB/Antikensammlung. Photograph: Johannes Laurentius.

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Fig. 4.5. Attic black-figure mixing-bowl, c.550 BC. London, British Museum: inv. 1867,0508.956. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Fig. 4.6. Detail of an Attic black-figure amphora, c.540 BC. Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen: inv. T 674. Photograph courtesy of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel (Antikensammlung).

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Fig. 4.7. Attic red-figure drinking-cup, c.520 BC. Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek: inv. SH 2618. Photograph: Renate Kühling.

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Fig. 4.8. Attic red-figure skyphos, c.480 BC. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum: inv. 3710. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Manuela Laubenberger.

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Fig. 11.1. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window, c.1655–60. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. 286

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Fig. 11.2. Domenico Ghirlandaio, An Old Man and his Grandson, c.1490. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. 289 Fig. 12.1. Nicolas Poussin, The Jews Gathering the Manna in the Desert, c.1637–9. Oil on canvas, 149  200 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © Eric Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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List of Tables 4.1. Table laying out the main features of Lessing’s theory in the Laocoon (setting the poles of narrative and description against the medium of language and painting)

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4.2. Table laying out a modification of Lessing’s theory in the Laocoon, as adapted from Table 4.1

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List of Contributors F REDERICK B EISER is Professor of Philosophy at Syracuse University. Previous publications in the field of German aesthetics include Schiller as Philosopher (2005) and Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (2009), both published with Oxford University Press. He has also published books on the neo-Kantian and historicist traditions, and is currently writing an intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen. É LISABETH D ÉCULTOT is Humboldt Professor at the Martin-Luther Universität of Halle-Wittenberg. Her research focuses on the history of art and aesthetics in Germany between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as on modes of reading and writing in modern scholarship. Much of her work is dedicated to the study of Winckelmann—the subject of her book, Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Enquête sur la genèse de l’histoire de l’art (2000, translated into German in 2005). She is also the editor of Johann Georg Sulzer’s Gesammelte Schriften, and curator of the 2017 exhibition Winckelmann: Modern Antiquity (at the Neues Museum in Weimar). D ANIEL F ULDA is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for European Enlightenment Studies at the Martin-Luther Universität of Halle-Wittenberg. He is the author of Wissenschaft aus Kunst: Die Entstehung der modernen deutschen Geschichtsschreibung 1760–1860 (1996) and Schau-Spiele des Geldes: Die Komödie und die Entstehung der Marktgesellschaft von Shakespeare bis Lessing (2005). His most recent book was published in 2017: ‘Die Geschichte trägt der Aufklärung die Fackel vor’: Eine deutsch-französische Bild-Geschichte. J ASON G AIGER is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the Ruskin School of Art, and a Fellow of St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. His publications include Aesthetics and Painting (2008) and an English edition of Johann Gottfried Herder’s Sculpture (2002); he has also co-edited Art in Theory: 1648–1815 (2000) and Art

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in Theory: 1815–1900 (1998). Current research interests focus on three main areas: the normativity of taste, the cognitive value of images, and the ‘mereological’ structure of pictures. L UCA G IULIANI is Rector of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and has taught Greek and Roman Archeology at Freiburg, Munich, and Berlin. Among his recent English publications is Image and Myth: A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art (2013). He is currently working on the emergence of narrative images in Greece in the seventh century BC, portraits of Socrates, and the history of the Vatican Laocoon group (the sculpture in Rome that Lessing himself, it seems, never cared to inspect). J ONAS G RETHLEIN is Professor in Greek Literature at Heidelberg, where he is currently directing the ERC group ‘Experience and Teleology in Ancient Narrative’. His most recent publications include Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity (forthcoming), Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography (2013), and The Greeks and their Past (2010). H ANS U LRICH G UMBRECHT is the Albert Guérard Professor in Literature at Stanford University; he is also a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Professeur Attaché at the Collège de France, and Professor Catedratico Visitante Permanente at the Universidade de Lisboa. Among his books in English are Making Sense in Life and Literature (1992), The Powers of Philology (2003), Production of Presence (2004), In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006), Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung (2012), and Our Broad Present (2014). He is currently working on a book with the tentative title Prose of the World: Diderot, Goya, Lichtenberg, Mozart, and an End of Enlightenment. K ATHERINE H ARLOE is Associate Professor in Classics and Intellectual History at the University of Reading. She is author of Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: Debates on Method in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft (2013—also published in Oxford University Press’s Classical Presences series), and co-editor of Thucydides and the Modern World: Reception, Reinterpretation and Influence from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). P AUL A. K OTTMAN is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the New School for Social Research in New York; he is editor of a new

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Stanford University Press book series entitled Square One: First Order Questions in the Humanities. His most recent book is Love as Human Freedom (2017), in addition to an edited volume on The Insistence of Art: Aesthetic Philosophy after Early Modernity (2016); he is also co-editor (with Michael Squire) of a forthcoming volume on The Art of Hegel’s Aesthetics. A VI L IFSCHITZ is Associate Professor of European History at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow of Magdalen College. Previously he taught European history for a decade at University College London (UCL). He is the author of Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (2012) and editor, most recently, of Engaging with Rousseau (2016) and Rousseau’s Imagined Antiquity (a special issue of History of Political Thought, 2016). He is currently working on an English edition of the philosophical works of Frederick the Great, and on the science of man in the German Enlightenment. W. J. T. M ITCHELL is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English, Art History, and Cinema at the University of Chicago; he has also served as editor of Critical Inquiry for forty years. Among his numerous books on literature, the visual arts, and media are Iconology (1986), Picture Theory (1994), The Last Dinosaur Book (1998), What Do Pictures Want? (2005), Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (2011), Seeing Through Race (2012), Occupy: Three Inquiries in Disobedience (with Michael Taussig and Bernard Harcourt, 2013), and Image Science (2015). He is currently working on a new book, Seeing Madness: Insanity, Media, and Visual Culture. R ITCHIE R OBERTSON is Taylor Professor of German at Oxford University. His books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985), Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (2009), and Goethe: A Very Short Introduction (2016); he also edited Lessing and the German Enlightenment (2013). He is currently writing a large-scale study of the international Enlightenment for Penguin Books. M ICHAEL S QUIRE is Reader in Classical Art at King’s College London. His research explores the interface between ancient art and literature (e.g. Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, 2009; The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae, 2011), as well as the critical reception of ancient visual culture (e.g. The Art of the Body:

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Antiquity and its Legacy, 2011). Previous edited volumes include The Art of Art History in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (with Verity Platt, 2010), Sight and the Ancient Senses (2016), and The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History (with Verity Platt, 2017). J ÜRGEN T RABANT is Professor Emeritus of Romance Linguistics at the Freie Universität Berlin. His latest books include Die Sprache (2009), Weltansichten: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachprojekt (2012), Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology (2013), and Globalesisch oder was? (2014). As part of a research group at the HumboldtUniversität zu Berlin, he is currently working on ‘symbolic articulation’ (focused on the embodiment of human thought in language and imagery). D AVID E. W ELLBERY is LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor at the University of Chicago. His books include: Lessing’s Laocoön: Aesthetics and Semiotics in the Age of Reason (1984), The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1996), Schopenhauers Bedeutung für die moderne Literatur (1998), and Seiltänzer des Paradoxalen: Aufsätze zur ästhetischen Wissenschaft (2006). He is co-editor of the Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte.

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Note on Laocoon Editions Throughout this book, contributors have been asked to refer to Edward Allen McCormick’s English translation of Lessing’s Laocoon, as well as to two recent German editions: Lessing, G. E. (1984) Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E. A. McCormick. Baltimore. Lessing, G. E. (1990) Laokoon; Briefe, Antiquarischen Inhalts (= Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, vol. V.2), ed. W. Barner. Frankfurt am Main. Lessing, G. E. (2012) Laokoon, oder: Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie, ed. F. Vollhardt. Stuttgart. Translations have been adapted to reflect our spelling of the Laocoon title, and sometimes additional modifications have also been introduced. Contributors have been asked to follow the German orthography of whichever edition that they cite. Given the plethora of editions and translations of other texts by Lessing (as indeed by other eighteenth-century writers), authors refer to a variety of different versions: details are provided in the consolidated bibliography at the end of the volume.

Foreword Why Lessing’s Laocoon Still Matters W. J. T. Mitchell Two and a half centuries after its first publication in 1766, a little book by German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing continues to fascinate scholars and theorists from a remarkable variety of disciplines. From the specific history of the Enlightenment and its status as a bridge (or for that matter border or Grenze) between ‘antiquity’ and ‘modernity’, to broad questions of aesthetics, semiotics, and media theory, Lessing’s Laocoon has become a ‘classical presence’ in its own right. Indeed, his essay straddles a crossroads in intellectual history that is impossible to avoid: it is both a work that demands precise and detailed placement in its historical context, and a polemic that raises arguments that still feel current today. The chapters collected in this volume—written by different specialists, from a range of academic perspectives—pay homage to both the historical and transhistorical parameters of Lessing’s treatise. Together, they comprise the first major English-language volume of essays dedicated to Laocoon. In their collective ‘rethinking’, contributors likewise showcase just how provocative Lessing’s text remains—whether in the context of classical antiquity, the German Enlightenment, or the medial ‘limits’ of painting and poetry. The aim of this short foreword is slightly different. To my mind, what is most important about Laocoon is the sense that it still matters—that it is still current today. My foreword is a prefatory attempt to draw out this contemporary relevance (a theme to which Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht returns in his envoi): to explain how Lessing’s essay remains so important, and indeed why.

Always Anachronize If Lessing were alive today to gauge the importance of his 1766 treatise, the last thing we would expect of him would be an emphasis on his own historical context in the mid-eighteenth century—or for that matter its ‘classical presences’ (as understood within the remit of this Oxford

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University Press series). He would appeal instead to the continuity of all his arguments with the wisdom of classical antiquity, and insist that his reflections on the ‘limits’ or ‘borders’ of painting and poetry transcend historical periodization: ‘it is the prerogative of the ancients never to have done too much or too little in anything.’1 Lessing was interested not in being au courant, but in resisting misguided contemporary fashions in the arts in favour of abiding, eternal principles; so it is, for example, that ‘Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian’ are introduced as his intellectual contemporaries and allies.2 His historical contemporaries—Winckelmann, Montfaucon, Spence, the Comte de Caylus, among others—are adversaries, precisely because they are creatures of their time, victims of false standards of taste. Winckelmann is particularly at fault because he is a historicist who thinks he can explain the restrained facial expression of the suffering Laocoon by appealing to Stoic doctrines of emotional restraint.3 The truth, for Lessing, that ‘the master of the Laocoon was obliged to exercise moderation in expressing physical pain’, lies wholly ‘in the special nature of the visual arts, their limitations, and their requirements’.4 These limitations are not historically contingent but those that are inherent to the ‘peculiar objects’ (bodies in space) and the medium (sculpture) by which they are represented. The wonderful paradox of Lessing’s Laocoon, however, is that its adherence to the wisdom of the ancients is not grounded in mere respect for the authority of antiquity, but in a conviction that those authorities glimpsed abiding, essential truths that are being newly revealed and confirmed by the ‘first principles’ of contemporary physics and metaphysics, namely the laws of space and time, along with the sensory laws that govern vision and hearing, and the laws of the signs that represent them.5 In a passage that sounds like an uncanny premonition of Saussure, Lessing makes the following declaration:6 1 All references to Laocoon follow E. A. McCormick’s English translation (Lessing 1984)—I quote here from p. 4. 2 Lessing 1984: 4. 3 Cf. the introduction to this volume, along with Squire’s chapter. 4 Lessing 1984: 23. 5 David Wellbery’s book, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Wellbery 1984), provides the best version of this argument: for the author’s own reflections on that project, see Wellbery’s chapter in this volume. 6 Lessing 1984: 78. For a detailed engagement with Lessing’s semiotics and its historical context here, see Lifschitz’s chapter in this volume.

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If it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colours in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive.

Lessing’s vocabulary of signs and signifieds (Zeichen and die Bezeichneten) foreshadows the synchronic, ahistorical lexicon of modern linguistics; the terminology of space/time echoes the first principles of the Newtonian universe, while anticipating the basic categories of Kantian intuition. At the same time, Lessing reaches back to the categories of Aristotle’s natural history of the arts, dividing the structure of mimesis into the kinds of objects imitated (now labelled the signified), the ‘manner’ or form of imitation (genres and modes such as lyric, narrative, and dramatic presentation), and the ‘means’ or what we would now call the medium of representation (opsis, mêlos, lexis, the spectacle, music, words, etc.). Thus, while Lessing can apologize for the rather ‘dry chain of reasoning’ that his appeal to ‘first principles’ has produced, he can defend them by insisting that they are ‘completely confirmed by the procedure of Homer’, and that it was ‘just this [Homeric] procedure that led me to my conclusions’.7 It is not surprising, then, that Lessing’s Laocoon has been an inspiring text for both reactionary humanists such as Irving Babbitt and avantgarde modernists such as Clement Greenberg. Babbitt and Greenberg share a common enemy called ‘Romanticism’, characterized by a common error, the ‘confusion of the arts’. Babbitt’s The New Laokoon (1910) and Greenberg’s essay on ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’ (1940), however great their ideological differences, aimed at a common purpose: a purification of the arts grounded in the policing of firm distinctions among the arts and media. This is a project that has survived in what might be called the ‘newest’ Laocoon of the second half of the twentieth century: Michael Fried’s ‘Art and objecthood’, which argues that ‘art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theater’, an irredeemable mixing of media that ‘lies between the arts’, and is symptomatic of a ‘corrupted or perverted sensibility’.8 7

Lessing 1984: 79. For more on this, see my essay, ‘Ut pictura theoria: Abstract painting and language’ (Mitchell 1994: 213–40). Fried’s remarks appear in his essay on ‘Art and objecthood’ (quotations from Fried 1967: 21, 23). One might also mention here Rosalind Krauss’s 8

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The Confusion of Criticism Fried’s emphatically moralistic language is useful insofar as it helps to return us to the milder, but no less crucial language of judgment in Lessing’s text. Recall that Lessing is also concerned with a certain ‘false delicacy’ and an ‘unseemly’ breaching of borders between the verbal and visual arts in the eighteenth century. Although Lessing consistently portrays the categories of time and space (or for that matter of the eye and the ear, and of painting and poetry) as grounded in ‘necessity’ and ‘first principles’ that are absolutely natural, his actual polemic is motivated by his conviction that the art of his time is systematically violating these principles and confusing what it should not be possible to confuse. In other words, Lessing’s claim that poets cannot paint, and likewise that painters cannot tell stories, is systematically confused with claims that artists should not do these things. The real confusion lies not with the artists, but with the critic himself, who confuses an argument from necessity (this cannot be done) with an argument from value and desire (this should not be done). But the borders between the arts are, as Lessing well knew, not like the natural boundaries of mountain ranges, but more like the borders of nations:9 But as two equitable and friendly neighbours do not permit the one to take unbecoming liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, yet on their extreme frontiers practice a mutual forbearance by which both sides make peaceful compensation for those slight aggressions which, in haste and from force of circumstance, the one finds himself compelled to make on the other’s privilege: so also with painting and poetry.

Lessing’s picture of the relations of verbal and visual arts is both ethical and political, fusing the personal relations of neighbours with the larger sphere of sovereign territories. But there is an even more insidious ruse smuggled into Lessing’s model of ‘equitable and friendly neighbours’, one that is familiar from our contemporary jargon of international diplomacy and ‘honest essay on ‘Grids’ (Krauss 1985: 8–22), which argues that the modernist ‘grid’ erected a ‘barrier . . . between the arts of vision and those of language’ which ‘has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech’ (p. 8). 9

Lessing 1984: 91: for further discussion, cf. e.g. the chapters by Squire, Grethlein, and Trabant in this volume.

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brokerage’ between warring neighbours. Lessing is very far from seeing these neighbours as equal partners. As Ernst Gombrich pointed out some sixty years ago, Lessing’s argument is ‘a tournament played by a European team’ in which national representatives of France, Germany, and England are the contestants.10 But the playing-field is far from level, and Adam Smith (‘an Englishman . . . —a man, therefore, not readily suspected of false delicacy’) is enlisted on the side of the northern European nations, against the egregious impropriety and unseemliness of France.11 One is tempted to ask a question here: for how did the stakes in policing the borders of poetry and painting get raised to a question of national honour? Are descriptive poetry and allegorical painting really such a threat to the stability of Europe? This question becomes even more insistent when we notice how Lessing’s language of ‘mutual forbearance’ (eine wechselseitige Nachsicht) gives way to an imperial rhetoric of inequality, domination, and absorption. Poetry turns out to have the ‘wider sphere’ because of ‘the limitless field of our imagination, and incorporeal nature of its forms’.12 All the ‘encroachments’ seem to be the fault of painting, which, in its allegorical modes, becomes ‘an arbitrary method of writing’, and tries to seduce poetry into settling for word-painting. Finally, Lessing will argue, it is not clear why we need painting at all, since its domain could easily be absorbed inside the greater sphere of poetry:13 But if the lesser cannot contain the greater, it can itself be contained in the greater. In other words, if not every trait used by the descriptive poet can have as good an effect on the painter’s canvas or sculptor’s marble, could not every trait of the artist be equally effective in the poet’s work? Undoubtedly, for that which we find beautiful in a work of art is beautiful not to our eyes but to our imagination through the eye.

As should be evident, I am arguing with Lessing as if he were my contemporary, not a canonized classic of world literature. And that is because he is my contemporary in a very real sense, insofar as his basic 10

Gombrich 1957: 139. Lessing 1984: 28–9: on Lessing’s attitude towards Smith, cf. Harloe’s chapter in this volume. Lessing was perfectly capable of reversing this estimation of the French when they enthusiastically received the production of his play, Minna von Barnhelm (first performed in 1767), while it was being degraded by acrobatic sideshows in Germany: ‘How far behind the French are we Germans in this particular! To speak plainly, as compared with them we are still true barbarians’ (quoted from Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie, after Zimmern 1878: 203). 12 13 Lessing 1984: 40. Lessing 1984: 41. 11

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critical moves are repeated almost word for word by critics such as Babbitt, Greenberg, and Fried in order to reinforce their standards of aesthetic judgment.14 The accusation of confusion of the arts is mustered in order to buttress certain norms seen as natural, and to conceal the confusion of the critics, in what a choreographer might call ‘the Lessing Two-Step’. First, ground your argument in ‘first principles’ that seem to be supported by historical precedent (whether ancient or modern) and by contemporary notions of what counts as ‘natural law’ (e.g. the ‘laws’ of time and space). Second, stage the argument on the high moral ground of fairness, equity, and ‘seemliness’. This little dance must then be performed as a pas de deux in which the gender roles of the dancers are made clear. Poetry is the masculine art, painting the feminine. They have separate domains which of course must be strictly segregated, at the same time that the masculine sphere is unquestionably larger, and even contains the feminine. As Irving Babbitt noted, ‘Lessing is the most masculine figure Germany has produced since Luther’;15 or perhaps, one might say, since Lessing’s own father, who wrote a Latin thesis at Wittenberg entitled De non commutando sexus habitu (that is, on the impropriety of women wearing men’s clothes and men women’s).16 In the year 2016, which looks to be remembered as a time when European national borders were overwhelmed by a flood of immigrants, and when American popular culture was flooded with images and narratives of transgender individuals whose identity confusion went beyond clothing to include genital alteration, Lessing still matters a great deal.17 But does Lessing only matter as a reactionary defender of a status quo disguised as natural law? I think not. Lessing is still worth reading because, as a critical essayist, his writing carried him well beyond his own system of polemical critical values grounded in national and gendered stereotypes. At every turn, Lessing qualifies his ‘first principles’ by noting the subtle ways in which the temporal and spatial arts are woven

For the significance of this ‘contemporaneity’, compare also Gumbrecht’s envoi to volume. 15 Babbitt 1910: 36; on Babbit’s comments here, and the significance of his comparative recourse to Luther, see Squire’s chapter in this volume. 16 Gombrich 1957: 146–7. 17 The final version of this foreword was submitted before the ‘Brexit’ referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election of Donald Trump in the United States. [The editors.] 14

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together in practice. It will turn out that ‘bodies’ and ‘actions’, the proper ‘objects’ of imitation in painting and poetry, can indeed be crossreferenced, if not cross-dressed, by ‘indirect’ means of ‘suggestion’.18 Indeed, Lessing hints as much when he renounces the goal of writing a ‘systematic book’ (since ‘we Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books’) and instead notes that the origin of his chapters was accidental (‘written as chance dictated and more in keeping with my reading than through any systematic development of general principles’).19 Lessing’s truly magisterial voice as a critic emerges most clearly when he departs from his utterly conventional ‘general laws’ and ponders the actual complexity of the relationship between language and graphic representation. Simply substitute the word ‘media’ for ‘emotions’ in the following passage, and you will see what I mean:20 Nothing is more deceptive than the laying down of general laws for our emotions. Their texture is so delicate and intricate that even the most cautious speculation can hardly pick out a single thread and follow it through all its interlacing. But even if such speculation were to succeed, what could we gain by it? In nature there are no single, unmixed emotions.

In my view, Lessing’s real contribution to media aesthetics is directly opposite to the system for which he has become famous. It lies in his finegrained tracing of the web of intermediality, not as a ‘confusion of the arts’, but as a fusion or interweaving of the senses, signs, and feelings they activate—words interacting with, seeking and struggling with images, and vice versa. Lessing’s basic lesson then would not be the ‘purification’ of media that Clement Greenberg derived from him, nor the avoidance of ‘corrupt and perverted sensibility’ that lurks in experiments ‘between the arts’ that Michael Fried decries. His timeliness for us lies in his lively awareness that all media (like all emotions) are mixed media, conduits of what we now call ‘transmedial’ phenomena, nowhere better illustrated than in the central icon of his own essay, the great statue of the Laocoon group with its rich textual history.

18

For discussion of this point, see my comments in Mitchell 1986: 100–1 (and cf. Beiser’s contribution to this volume). 19 Lessing 1984: 5: cf. the comments in the introduction by Lifschitz and Squire (p. 50)— along with e.g. pp. 109–10 (Squire) and 247–9 (Décultot). 20 Lessing 1984: 28.

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Fig. 0.1. William Blake, Laocoon, 1826–7. Private collection of Robert N. Essick. Reproduced by kind permission of the William Blake Archive (http://www. blakearchive.org/).

If only Lessing had been able to transport himself forward exactly sixty years, he would have been able to contemplate William Blake’s rendering of the Laocoon statue group as a ‘Sublime Allegory’ tracing the genealogy of human figures caught, not just in the coils of deadly serpents, but in a web of writing that deconstructs the segregation of word and image, and the entire Neoclassical aesthetic (Fig. 0.1).21 Blake shifts the origin of the 21

The precise date and origins of the engraving is debated: for discussions, cf. e.g. James 1983; Brilliant 2000: esp. 36–7; and Adams 2010: 74–81.

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classical group from ancient Greece (cf. Fig. 1.1) to biblical times, re-visioning it as an anachronistic tableau of ‘Jehovah & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomon’s Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or the History of Ilium’. In this fantastic genealogy, Blake’s God is not a transcendent lawgiver who judges mankind, but an agonized patriarch caught up in the same tangle of pain and death as his sons, Satan and Adam. This tangle is precisely the double serpent of ‘Good & Evil’, the roots of the Tree of Knowledge and the religions of ‘The Accusation of Sin’. Blake exhumes the biblical reading, in other words, not to validate the religion of Jehovah, but to illustrate the deeper origins of classical art in the cultures of war, imperialism, and money that have corrupted the arts since the beginning. The serpents, along with Adam and Satan, are the creations of ‘The Imagination . . . that is God himself ’. Laocoon becomes an image of humanity’s capacity for self-torture and destruction. Blake encircles the image, however, with his own serpentine tangle of words, a montage of aphorisms that offers a counter-spell to the venomous serpents and the oppressive systems behind them. Lessing’s most important lesson, then, may be the extent to which the border between words and images is never a merely technical matter to be settled by the systems of semiotics or philosophical aesthetics. It is more like a battleground in which the values of a culture are tested and waged. Michel Foucault saw this clearly in his meditation on the relation of words and images in This Is Not a Pipe (originally published in French in 1977 as Ceci n’est pas une pipe). Analysing Magritte’s famous composition, poignantly titled ‘La trahison des images’ (Fig. 0.2), Foucault characterizes the encounter between the text and the image as: ‘a whole series of intersections—or rather attacks launched by one against the other, arrows shot at the enemy target, enterprises of subversion and destruction, lance blows and wounds, a battle.’22 Foucault emphasizes the phenomenology of the borderline between word and image, ‘the small space running above the words and below the drawing, forever serving them as a common frontier’.23 But Foucault’s border is much more—or less—than a line. It is more like the DMZ, a zone of indeterminacy or ‘no man’s land’:24

22 24

Foucault 1983: 26. Foucault 1983: 28–9.

23

Foucault 1983: 28.

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Fig. 0.2. René Magritte, La trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), 1929. Los Angeles, County Museum of Art. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.

The slender, colorless, neutral strip, which in Magritte’s drawing separates the text and the figure, must be seen as a crevasse—an uncertain, foggy region now dividing the pipe floating in its imagistic heaven from the mundane tramp of words marching in their successive line. Still it is too much to claim that there is a blank or lacuna: instead, it is an absence of space, an effacement of the ‘common place’ between the signs of writing and lines of the image . . . No longer can anything pass between them save the decree of divorce.

Foucault’s concluding image of a ‘divorce’ between word and image echoes Lessing’s gendering of the relation of poetry and painting. Perhaps his figure of the ‘arrows’ launched between the two camps are what Blake would have called ‘arrows of desire’. Or Foucault could have been thinking of a more technical and proximate source for his arrows, namely Saussure’s picture of the linguistic sign as internally divided into the domain of the signifier (exemplified by the word arbor) and signified (exemplified by the image of a tree) (Fig. 0.3). The bar that divides and links Sr/Sd thus becomes an internal border in the domain of language, the frontier in a civil war or a battle of the sexes. From this it is only a short step to Lacan, and his replacement of Saussure’s picture of the linguistic sign with the figure of ‘urinary

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Fig. 0.3. Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Linguistic sign’, as illustrated in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (Saussure 1916: 101).

segregation’ in a pair of adjacent doors labelled ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’. For Lacan, words and images, like ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ ‘ . . . will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country’.25 This is the country where Lessing’s first principles of time and space reveal the identity that Blake already saw in them: ‘Time & Space are Real Beings. Time is a Man. Space is a Woman.’ But perhaps it is also the contemporary landscape of artistic promiscuity that Lessing dreaded, mixing media, genres, and genders in a utopian future where ‘Sexes must vanish & cease to be’ along with the ‘Vanities of Time & Space’.26 A quarter-millennium after its first publication, Laocoon remains not just a defining essay within aesthetics, medial theory, and the reception of antiquity. It is also a work that uniquely reflects—and helped to give shape to—residual cultural ideologies of words and images. Whether as consummate model or intellectual antitype, Lessing’s essay has defined the parameters of our thinking about its themes: wherever that unpredictable future of the arts will take us, we can be sure that Lessing will remain our predecessor, contemporary, and prophet.

I quote from Lacan’s essay on ‘Agency of the letter in the unconscious’ (as reproduced in Lacan 1977: 151–2). 26 The quotations come in the context of Blake’s Jerusalem (plate 92): cf. Erdman 1965: 250; on the abolition of ‘the vanities of time and space’, see Blake’s ‘A Vision of the Last Judgment’ (Erdman 1965: 353). 25

1 Introduction Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon from across the Humanities Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire

The first person to compare painting and poetry with one another was a man of fine feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect on him. Both, he felt, place before us absent things as present, and appearance as reality. Both create an illusion (beide täuschen), and in both cases the illusion is pleasing. A second person attempted to get at the inner core of this pleasure, and discovered that in both cases it springs from the same source. Beauty, the concept of which we first derive from physical objects, has general rules that allow themselves to be applied to numerous things: to actions, to thoughts, as indeed to forms. A third person—who reflected on the value and distribution of these general rules—observed that some of them reign more prominently over painting, others over poetry: that in the one case poetry can therefore help to elucidate and illustrate painting, and that in the other painting can do so for poetry. The first was the amateur (Liebhaber), the second the philosopher (Philosoph), and the third the critic (Kunstrichter) . . . 1

1

Translated after Lessing 2012: 7 (cf. Lessing 1984: 3). Throughout this introductory chapter, references are given to Edward Allan McCormick’s English version of Laocoon (Lessing 1984), albeit with translations sometimes significantly modified; our references to the German text follow Vollhardt’s edition of Lessing 2012 (complete with detailed notes and further bibliography at pp. 291–384).

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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoon, first published in 1766, has proved one of the most abiding texts of the European Enlightenment. As the original, full title of the essay makes clear, Laokoon, oder: Über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (‘Laocoon, or: On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry’) takes on no less a subject than the ‘limits’— Grenzen—of visual and verbal representation: it tackles the essential ways in which ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ affect their readers and viewers. But while shaping modern critical debates about the arts, sensory perception, and aesthetic experience, Lessing’s treatise is also rooted in the historical interpretation of ancient art and literature. For Lessing, thinking about the medial mechanics of ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ went hand in hand with reflections on the paradigmatic models of Greece and Rome: if the Laocoon has played a key role in recalibrating modern aesthetics, it takes its lead from a particular engagement with—and indeed construction of—the classical past.2 The present volume brings together a range of different disciplinary perspectives to re-examine the aesthetic arguments, intellectual debts, and manifold influences of Lessing’s text. Our objective has not been to impose some particular ‘party line’, directing contributors towards a specific framework for interpreting (or indeed refashioning) its critical core; given the interpretive richness and wide-ranging afterlife of Lessing’s treatise, moreover, we have not tried to offer a single ‘handbook’ guide to this text and its reception. In devising our anthology—the first such edited book dedicated to Laocoon in English3—we have instead taken our cue from the essay’s 250th anniversary (1766–2016). Individually, all of the subsequent chapters tackle a particular aspect of Lessing’s essay, its thinking or its historical context. As a collective, though, the volume

2 We use ‘aesthetics’ here in its modern meaning of a theory of the arts rather than in its eighteenth-century sense of a theory of sensual perception (as defined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in 1750—namely, as a scientia cognitionis sensitiuae: Baumgarten 2007: I.21). 3 The most important previous edited volume (in German) is that of Robert and Vollhardt (eds.) 2013—albeit focused primarily on the text’s Entstehungsgeschichte. Previous edited collections include Gebauer (ed.) 1984 and Baxmann, Franz, and Schäffner (eds.) 2000, both dedicated to the semiotic implications of the essay, and with only minimal interest in its Enlightenment historical context; Koebner (ed.) 1989, focused on elaborating the theoretical insights of Laocoon for contemporary art criticism; a special issue of Poetics Today (= Burwick (ed.) 1999); and Beyer and Valentin (eds.) 2014 (albeit not concentrating on the Laocoon exclusively).

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exploits Laocoon’s anniversary to offer an array of different celebratory (as indeed critical) evaluations, and from multiple vantage-points from across the humanities. That broad spectrum of responses is hugely important. In bringing together a motley crew of classicists, intellectual historians, philosophers, literary critics, and historians of art (among others), the book’s foremost aim is to spark new sorts of dialogue between different disciplinary specialists. Lessing’s very attempt to delineate the Grenzen of literary and artistic media, we might say, tenders a unique opportunity to move backwards and forwards across the disciplinary boundaries of modernday academia. The fact this book should appear within a series dedicated to ‘classical presences’ also has a programmatic significance. One recurrent interest in the essays that follow concerns Laocoon as a work of classical reception. As we shall see, Lessing played a key role in directing nascent eighteenth-century traditions of Altertumswissenschaft:4 discussing aspects of classical philosophy, critiquing ancient traditions of imagemaking, and contemplating both the proximity and distance between the Graeco-Roman world and Lessing’s own, this treatise articulates a certain view of the Greek and Roman past. But the ‘classical presences’ run much deeper. As an anthology, our book is concerned not just with the reception of antiquity, but also with the legacy of that reception over the ensuing 250 years—stretching right up to the present day. While some contributors draw on Laocoon’s engagement with its Graeco-Roman heritage, others explore how Lessing’s text, so heavily indebted to classical thinking, has itself determined the direction of more modern criticism about the ‘arts’. Laocoon, we suggest, is a liminal text that has helped define ‘modernity’ against an ‘ancient’ alter ego: in grappling with Lessing’s Laocoon over the last quarter-millennium, and thereby with Lessing’s own thinking about the legacy of antiquity, modern aesthetic traditions too have grappled with ‘classical presences’—albeit often without fully recognizing the fact. 4 See pp. 5–22, 28–9. On Greek antiquity’s grip over the aesthetic thinking of the German Enlightenment, see now Valdez 2014 (discussing Laocoon at pp. 44–52), along with the masterful overview of Marchand 1996 and the earlier analysis of Butler 1935. On the formation of German Altertumswissenschaft—in the mid-eighteenth century, and especially in Winckelmann’s wake—see Harloe 2013; cf. Marchand 1996: esp. 16–24; Heidenreich 2006.

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Before outlining the specific contributions of individual chapters (pp. 49–57), we use this introduction to sketch just some of the different disciplinary horizons that our book brings together. In the opening paragraphs of his Laocoon preface—translated in our epigraph—Lessing situated his project against the background of a wide-ranging critical tradition. Right from the outset, Laocoon sketches a tripartite development in thinking about the arts, and from an array of intellectual perspectives: for Lessing, it is a history that progresses from the ‘amateur’ (Liebhaber) who first compared painting and poetry, through the ‘philosopher’ (Philosoph) who related both forms to the aesthetics of beauty, and then third to the ‘critic’—literally ‘art-judge’ (Kunstrichter)—who distinguished between the aesthetic workings of each medium. The Laocoon essay will champion the ‘critical’ acumen of its author: Lessing emerges as the ultimate Kunstrichter, albeit one whose verdicts have judicious recourse to the verdicts of earlier ‘judges’.5 Yet intrinsic to this opening paragraph is the concession that a project as ambitious and all-encompassing as Lessing’s had to encompass different critical perspectives. Indeed, one of the reasons Laocoon has proved so stimulating and provocative a text over the last 250 years lies precisely in the way it brings together such diverse materials, argumentative modes, and critical insights. Although Lessing’s three strands cannot in any straightforward way be mapped onto the interdisciplinary perspectives brought together in this book, the remainder of our introductory overview likewise situates our anthology against a triad of different academic perspectives. First, we introduce some of the many ways in which Laocoon forged its conceptual archaeology from the literary and material traces of antiquity: as a piece of aesthetic criticism, the essay is founded upon the assumed aesthetic exemplarity of the classical past. Lessing’s self-consciously ‘modern’ intervention in ‘ancient’ critical debates leads us, second, to Laocoon’s own eighteenth-century contexts—that is, to the essay’s place within the Enlightenment, its engagement with contemporary debates, and not least its relationship with Lessing’s other works. Third, we briefly chart the importance of Laocoon within ongoing debates about semiotics, aesthetics, 5 On the abiding importance of the amateur’s response, however, and its implication for understanding the nature of Lessing’s ‘criticism’, see Kottman’s chapter in this volume, also discussing the opening of the Laocoon preface.

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and Medienwissenschaft: over the last 250 years, we argue, Lessing’s treatise has played a key role in mediating between the legacies of antiquity and modern aesthetic critical theory.

Laocoon and the Exemplarity of Antiquity The opening paragraph of Laocoon’s preface—with its tripartite history of the amateur, philosopher, and critic—launches us directly into the text’s ‘classical presences’. Already in his first paragraph, Lessing situates his essay against the background of an ancient history of comparing painting with poetry. The prefatory paragraphs that follow develop this point, introducing some of antiquity’s most celebrated painters (‘Apelles and Protogenes’) and writers (‘Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian’): ‘it is the prerogative of the ancients never to have done too much or too little in anything’, as Lessing muses.6 Before commenting further on how Lessing exploits that classical heritage, it is perhaps worth saying something more about the particular thesis developed in his essay. At the core of Laocoon, we have said, is an argument about the operative mechanics of visual and verbal art forms, no less than a prescription about the proper ‘boundaries’ of what Lessing labels ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’. Yet as our epigraph makes clear, this thesis is itself indebted to a particular idea of representation. For Lessing, visual and verbal media both work mimetically, according to what Lessing programmatically calls Täuschung (‘illusion’, ‘deception’, ‘fallacy’): painting and poetry represent ‘absent things as being present and appearance as reality’ (Beyde . . . stellen uns abwesende Dinge als gegenwärtig, den Schein als Wirklichkeit vor).7 Despite (or rather because of) their shared mimetic workings, not to mention their similarity in pleasing effect, painted and poetic media are said to differ from one another in both the form and manner of their imitation: for all their shared

6

Lessing 1984: 4. Particularly insightful on Lessing’s recourse to ancient precedent is Sichtermann 1968. 7 On Lessing’s debts to—and recalibrations of—ancient ideas of mimesis, see especially Halliwell 2002: 119–21, along with the chapters by Grethlein, Squire, and Trabant in this volume.

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nature as ‘signs’, the material forms of painting differ from the immaterial representations of poetry.8 The clearest articulation of this difference can be found in Laocoon’s sixteenth chapter. In a passage to which numerous contributions to this volume will return, Lessing explains how painting handles bodies that exist in space, whereas poetry represents actions unfolding in time:9 Painting can use only a single moment of an action in its coexisting compositions and must therefore choose the one which is most suggestive and from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible. Similarly, poetry in its progressive imitations can use only one single property of a body. It must therefore choose that one which awakes the most vivid image of the body, looked at from the point of view under which poetry can best use it. From this comes the rule concerning the harmony of descriptive adjectives and economy in description of physical objects.

For all its diverse contributions and observations, at the heart of Laocoon lies an argument about medial distinction: Lessing brings aesthetic criticism into line with an Enlightenment dialectic of space and time.10 We shall return in the third section of our introduction to the larger framework of Lessing’s argument in this passage, as well as its subsequent reception over the last 250 years (pp. 38–49). For now, though, we restrict ourselves to a more basic point. After all, Laocoon’s thesis is here premised on a series of close engagements with the literary and artistic exempla of Graeco-Roman antiquity. At the beginning of chapter 16, Lessing introduces his programmatic thesis by signposting a shift in argumentative mode: his formulation attempts ‘to derive the matter from its first principles’ (die Sache aus ihren ersten Gründen herzuleiten).11 Throughout the treatise, however, it is classical materials that provide the basis for Lessing to construct his modern critical argument: ancient case studies provide the essential thread from which Laocoon is spun. If Lessing’s thesis is derived from a careful analysis of ancient art and literature, the same ancient materials also serve as a barometer for testing

8 The key analysis of Lessing’s theory of ‘signs’ here are Todorov 1973 and 1982, and Wellbery 1984 (as discussed here, pp. 42–6); cf. the discussions by Wellbery, Beiser, Gaiger, Lifschitz, Grethlein, Robertson, Squire, and Trabant in this volume. 9 Lessing 1984: 78–9: for an explanation of Lessing’s thinking, see Giuliani in this volume, with further discussions by e.g. Squire, Fulda, and Grethlein. 10 For the key championing of this point, see Mitchell 1984a (revised in Mitchell 1986: 95–115). 11 Lessing 1984: 78.

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his hypotheses. The sixteenth chapter itself nicely demonstrates the point. No sooner does Lessing embark on his self-declared ‘dry chain of reasoning’ (diese trockene Schlußkette) than he tests his proposition against the touchstone of ancient precedent—and above all, the supreme paradigm of Homeric epic:12 I should put little faith in this dry chain of reasoning did I not find it completely confirmed by the procedure of Homer, or rather if it had not been just this procedure that led me to my conclusions. Only on these principles can the grand style of the Greek be defined and explained, and only thus can the proper position be assigned to the opposite style of so many modern poets, who attempt to rival the painter at a point where they must necessarily be surpassed by him.

As a work of modern aesthetics—and one, as we shall see, that is addressed as a corrective to ‘modern poets’ (neuere Dichter) in particular13—the arguments of Laocoon are founded on the models of the Greek and Roman past: this is a treatise that bridges history and criticism, founding its aesthetic decrees on the historical study of ancient precedent, while also exploiting those arguments to shed new light on classical materials. Of all the varied ‘classical presences’ that illuminate Laocoon, none proves more luminescent than the Vatican statue-group that provided the essay with its title (Fig. 1.1).14 The marble sculpture has attracted a large bibliography in its own right—both as a work of ancient art, and as an image that has spurred all manner of artistic and critical responses since its 1506 unearthing in Rome (cf. Fig. 1.2):15 for eighteenth-century audiences, the group was understood as one of classical art’s most iconic survivals—a must-see among imagined Grand Tourists to Rome (cf. e.g. Fig. 1.3),16 a case study for formalist explorations of beauty

12

Lessing 1984: 79. On the underlying theme of the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, see pp. 24–7. 14 On the importance of the Laocoon group to Lessing’s argument, see Squire (this volume), with further bibliography. 15 Muth 2005 provides the best introduction to the ancient statue; cf. Simon 1992; Ridgway 2000: 87–90; and the more detailed bibliographic overview in Squire 2012: 471–8. On the statue’s discovery and immediate Renaissance impact, see also Barkan 1999: esp. 2–17. 16 For a lavishly illustrated introduction to the eighteenth-century Grand Tour (accompanying a landmark exhibition at the Tate Gallery), see Wilton and Bignamini 1996: Fig. 1.3 is discussed there at pp. 277–8, no. 233 (for contemporary depictions of the eighteenthcentury display of the group in the Cortile del Belvedere, cf. also pp. 248–9, nos. 201–2). 13

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Fig. 1.1. Photograph of the Vatican Laocoon statue-group before restoration (c.1880). Vatican, Musei Vaticani (Museo Pio-Clementino). © Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.2. Marco Dente, engraving of the Laocoon statue-group, early sixteenth century (housed in the Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts), Budapest). © The Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 1.3. Giovanni Paolo Panini, Gallery of Views of Ancient Rome, 1758 (featuring the Laocoon statue-group at the lower right). Paris, Musée du Louvre: inv. RF 1944–21. © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 1.4. Opening plate from William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753), demonstrating how the ancient ‘line of grace’ is echoed in commonplace modern artefacts (including cacti, candlesticks, and corsets); the Laocoon group is figured in the background (labelled no. 9), just left of centre. Photograph by M. J. Squire.

(e.g. Fig. 1.4),17 and a spur for imagining the original contexts of ancient sculpture, as well as its Renaissance discovery (cf. e.g. Fig. 1.5).18 The 500th anniversary of the statue’s discovery in 2006 occasioned a particularly rich spate of publications, prompting scholars to re-evaluate the statue and its varied receptions over the last half-millennium.19 In the case of the Laocoon group, issues of reception have influenced not only how the statue has been seen, but also, in a literal sense, its physical 17 For discussion of Hogarth’s image, see Burke 1955: xi–xii, with further comments in Squire 2011: 15–16. 18 For discussion, see Faroult and Voiriot 2016: 252–3, no. 63. 19 Particularly important anniversary publications include Buranelli, Liverani, and Nesselrath (eds.) 2006; Schmälzle (ed.) 2006; Bejor (ed.) 2007; and Gall and Wolkenhauer (eds.) 2009. On the statue’s reception, see e.g. Bieber 1967; Haskell and Penny 1981: 243–7; Settis 1999: esp. 85–230; Brilliant 2000; Décultot, Le Rider, and Queyrel (eds.) 2003; specifically on the German reception of the group, see Nisbet 1979. Muth (ed.) 2017 provides the most recent overview—a catalogue accompanying an exhibition at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; the book was published while the current volume was in production.

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Fig. 1.5. Hubert Robert, Architectural Capriccio with the Laocoon, early nineteenth century. Black ink and grey wash with watercolour over traces of black chalk on offwhite antique laid paper, framing lines in brown ink; 33.2  48 cm. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; gift of Therese Kuhn Straus in memory of her husband, Herbert N. Straus, Harvard Class of 1903: inv. 1978.35. Photograph kindly supplied by the Imaging Department of the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum; © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

form: in the mid-twentieth century, the debatable decision was made to remove the right arm of Laocoon that had been created in the sixteenth century (cf. Fig. 1.2), replacing it with an ‘original’ ancient fragment (albeit one that was alien to the composition of the statue as known in the centuries since the Renaissance—and indeed, as it would have been recognized by Lessing’s contemporaries: cf. Fig. 3.1).20 So what did Lessing see in the Laocoon group, and why did he decide to structure his essay around this particular example? Before tackling that question, it is worth noting that, at least by 1766, Lessing had not cast eyes on the original statue-group. Barring a brief spell in Paris during the early nineteenth century (following Napoleon’s conquests in Italy), the statue has been displayed in Rome ever since its discovery; as 20

On the issue of restoration, see Wiggen 2001; Hofter 2003; Muth 2005: 78–82; cf. also several of the essays in Muth (ed.) 2017. A photograph of the statue’s modern-day presentation can be found as the frontispiece of this book.

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far as we know, Lessing did not inspect a plaster cast of the statue either—he must have derived his knowledge of the group entirely from critical descriptions and contemporary engravings (e.g. Fig. 3.1).21 For Lessing, the Laocoon group could nonetheless be harnessed as an iconic frame: not only did it allow him to anchor his argument in a series of inductive inferences about a particular case study, it also provided a means of relating Lessing’s own response to a much longer critical tradition—one that stretched from Lessing’s immediate contemporaries, through Renaissance reactions (including Sadolet’s famous poetic response on its discovery),22 all the way back to ancient musings (not least the Elder Pliny’s discussion of either this or a related group, associated with three Rhodian artists named Hagesander, Polydorus, and Athanadorus: HN 36.37).23 In Lessing’s hands, the chief importance of the Laocoon group lay in its relationship with literary narratives of the same mythical story. What we see in the statue is of course Laocoon, a Trojan priest,24 along with his two sons, struggling in vain against the ensnaring embrace of two snakes. According to ancient mythology, Laocoon had advised his fellow Trojans against accepting the wooden horse left outside the city’s walls: the snakes that envelop Laocoon in the statue-group had apparently been sent by the gods—dispatched as a conspicuous portent to punish the priest on the one hand, and to persuade the Trojans that his fears were unfounded on the other. Like numerous other critics, and none more so than Johann Joachim Winckelmann (Fig. 1.6), Lessing looked to the Laocoon group as an embodiment of the supreme achievements of ancient art. Ultimately, however, Lessing’s interest lay less in the group itself than in its relationship with poetic renditions of the underlying story: as a work of critical appreciation, Lessing’s Laocoon aimed to shed light on the statue (and indeed on the workings of the visual arts tout court) by comparing its

21

For the point, see especially the chapters in this volume by Squire (pp. 92–4, with further bibliography) and Giuliani (p. 136). 22 Cf. Lessing 1984: 42–4, along with the note at 178–81 (labelling Sadolet’s poem ‘worthy of an ancient poet’). 23 The attribution of the statue—not to mention its relationship to other ‘Rhodian’ works—has attracted an enormous bibliography: for an overview, cf. Kansteiner et al. 2014: V.491–503, nos. 4106–17 (discussing the Laocoon group at 496–8, no. 4110). 24 The unspoken religious themes at work here—Laocoon as not only a priest, but also an iconoclast (who advocates, in vain, the destruction of fetishized and treacherous images)— have been rather underplayed among those charting the reception of the statue-group in Germany: cf. Squire (this volume).

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Fig. 1.6. Anton von Maron, posthumous portrait of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 1768. Today owned by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. © bpk, Berlin/Klassik Stiftung Weimar/Art Resource, NY.

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form and interpretative effects with those of Greek and Latin poetry, above all with regards to Virgil in the second book of the Aeneid.25 This aspect helps to explain Laocoon’s ring-compositional structure in its opening and closing chapters, organized around a response to Winckelmann’s descriptions of the statue, first in his 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, and later in his 1764 Geschichte der Kunst der Alterthums.26 More than any of his contemporaries, Winckelmann set the agenda for late eighteenth-century views of the classical (especially ‘Greek’) past, and not least the Enlightenment’s recourse to classical art as aesthetic paradigm. In the opening paragraph of Laocoon’s first chapter, Lessing homes in on Winckelmann’s famous celebration of the ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ (edle Einfalt und stille Größe) of Greek art. But he nonetheless takes issue with Winckelmann’s conclusions about the Laocoon group, citing his 1755 description in full:27 Such a soul is depicted in Laocoon’s face—and not only in his face—under the most violent suffering. The pain is revealed in every muscle and sinew of his body, and one can almost feel in oneself the painful contraction of the abdomen without looking at the face or other parts of the body at all. However, this pain expresses itself without any sign of rage either in his face or in his posture. He does not raise his voice in a terrible scream, which Virgil describes his Laocoon as doing; the way in which his mouth is open does not permit it. Rather he emits the anxious and subdued sigh described by Sadolet. The pain of the body and the nobility of the soul are distributed and weighed out, as it were, over the entire figure with equal intensity. Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles; his anguish pierces our very soul, but at the same time we wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man does. Expressing so noble a soul goes far beyond the formation of a beautiful body. The artist must have felt within himself that strength of spirit which he imparted to his marble. In Greece artists and philosophers were united in one person, and there was more than one Metrodorus. Philosophy extended its hand to art and breathed into its figures more than common souls . . .

With this quotation, Lessing at once relates his project in Laocoon to Winckelmann’s responses and introduces a key interpretive departure. 25

For Lessing’s discussion of the group and its relationship to the Virgilian description of the episode (Aen. 2.213–24), see above all Laocoon’s fifth chapter (= Lessing 1984: 33–9). 26 On Lessing’s response to Winckelmann, cf. Squire and Décultot (this volume). 27 Lessing 1984: 7; for the original context of the passage, in English translation, see Winckelmann 2006: 30–1.

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By examining the statue-group in relation to poetic narratives of the same episode (including texts by Sophocles, Virgil, and Sadolet’s poetic rhapsody in 1506), Lessing argues, Winckelmann had been right to observe a disparity between the visualization of the story and its ancient literary renditions: as Winckelmann had recognized, the sculpted protagonist ‘does not raise his voice in a terrible scream, which Virgil describes his Laocoon as doing’ (cf. Fig. 1.7). Where Lessing deems Winckelmann mistaken, however, is in his explanations of why poetic and visual representations differ from one another. Turning to a variety of ancient sources, and correcting (what he considered to be) Winckelmann’s ‘disparaging reference to Virgil’,28 Lessing argues that crying aloud was the natural and proper response to physical suffering in antiquity. Since ‘crying aloud when in physical pain is compatible with nobility of soul’— ‘especially according to the ancient Greek way of thinking’ (besonders nach der alten griechischen Denkungsart)—‘then the desire to express such nobility could not have prevented the artist from representing his scream in his marble’: ‘there must be another reason why he differs on this point from his rival the poet, who expresses this scream with deliberate intention.’29 The question of the statue-group’s ‘invisible scream’—and above all its departure from the Virgilian telling of the same moment of Laocoon’s death (Aen. 2.220–4)—emerges as the central fulcrum around which the Laocoon essay revolves. On the one hand, the statue-group provides a skeletal frame for the serpentine twists and turns of Lessing’s argument. On the other, the exemplarity of the statue is imbued with a looming presence: the group presides over Lessing’s prescriptions about the realm of the visual arts in relation to poetry—and not only in its first chapters, but also at its close (where, in chapters 26 to 29, Lessing ends the essay by evaluating Winckelmann’s discussion of the statue in his Geschichte).30 In his preface, Lessing acknowledges that presence explicitly, explaining his choice of title, while also justifying his decision to centre a critical work on ‘painting’ around a sculptural touchstone:31 28

Lessing 1984: 8. Lessing 1984: 11 (translation adapted): for further discussion, cf. Squire (this volume). 30 On the ring-compositional rationale—and the deliberate avoidance of Winckelmann’s Geschichte in the opening chapter—see Décultot (this volume). 31 Lessing 1984: 5–6. On Lessing’s programmatic collapsing of ‘sculpture’ into ‘painting’, see especially Grethlein (this volume). 29

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Fig. 1.7. Head of the Laocoon group (cf. Fig. 1.1). Photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Archiv, Institut für Klassische Archäologie und Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich.

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Since I started, as it were, with the Laocoon and return to it a number of times, I wished to give it a share in the title too. Other short digressions on various points of ancient art history contribute less to my intent and are included only because I can never hope to find a more suitable place for them. I should like to remark, finally, that by ‘painting’ I mean the visual arts in general; further, I do not promise that, under the name of poetry, I shall not devote some consideration also to those other arts in which the method of presentation is progressive in time.

Lessing’s comments in this passage anticipate a key organizational aspect of his essay: taking its lead from the statue-group, Laocoon will be structured around a series of inductive arguments, organizing its critical comments around the historical interpretation of a material case study and associated literary parallels. As this prefatory passage indicates, Laocoon will contain all manner of ‘short digressions’ on points of ancient art history. Crucially, however, such observations do not take on a subsidiary role: they will be tied to Lessing’s broader critical arguments about the respective ends to which painters and poets can—and should—aspire. For modern classicist readers, it can be all too tempting to approach Laocoon’s detailed comments on various aspects of Graeco-Roman art and literature as historicist footnotes, seemingly removed from the essay’s larger critical remit. For Lessing, however, such details of historical interpretation frequently play a critical aesthetic role. One thinks in particular of Lessing’s arguments about the chronological precedence of Virgil’s poetic account of the Laocoon episode over the statue-group. Among classical archaeologists, much ink has been spilt trying to settle arguments about the sculpture’s date—the question of whether we are dealing with a second-century BC Hellenistic ‘original’, or else a Roman ‘copy’ of the first century AD.32 Within the Laocoon essay, by contrast, Lessing’s thesis that the statue post-dates Virgil takes on a programmatic critical significance: were the Virgilian account to have followed the sculpture, Lessing explains, the poetic description would ‘lose its merit’, grounding its progressive narrative of the story in the material details of the statue.33 Not only might the material and literary remains of antiquity lead the critic to a better understanding of aesthetics; by the same logic, aesthetic considerations can themselves also shed light on the historical interpretation of ancient texts and images. 32

On the vexed issue of date, cf. Himmelmann 1991; Maurach 1992; Simon 1992: 199–201; Kunze 1996 and 2009: 41–3; Brilliant 2000: 67–71. 33 See Squire (this volume), with further discussion at p. 104, n. 58.

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Yet the ‘classical presences’ of Lessing’s essay are not limited to discussions of ancient material and literary case studies alone. Along the way, Laocoon certainly introduces a staggering array of Greek and Latin texts—ranging from a long excursus on the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Il. 18.478–608) in chapter 18,34 to supporting asides on wholly less canonical passages and authors (among them Petronius, Lucian, and Quintus of Smyrna);35 likewise, all manner of ancient images are introduced—from discussions of extant sculptural objects, to (even more frequent) analyses of ancient texts responding to lost Greek artworks.36 But throughout the treatise, Lessing relates these material and literary examples to the fundamental question of how visual and verbal representations differ from one another, and indeed what these differences mean for conceptualizing respective modes of aesthetically responding to paintings and pictures. Lessing’s Laocoon does not just discuss the aesthetic exemplarity of ancient exempla, then; it also relates these examples back to a critical tradition of comparing and contrasting the resources of poetic and painted media—and one that itself follows in the footsteps of an ancient critical tradition. As Lessing knew full well, Laocoon’s central theme of the relationship between visual and verbal representation was one with which Greek and Roman thinkers themselves had wrestled.37 From Simonides’ famous analogy between painting and poetry in the fifth century (‘painting is silent poetry, and poetry is talking painting’),38 to Horace’s celebrated firstcentury BC aphorism of ut pictura poesis (‘as is painting, so is poetry’),39 34 See Lessing 1984: 94–7, with discussion in Iribarren 2012: 308–11; and Squire 2013: esp. 160–1. 35 Petronius: Lessing 1984: 170–5 (note to chapter 5); Lucian: Lessing 1984: 109–10; Quintus of Smyrna: Lessing 1984: 203–4 (note to chapter 12). For Lessing’s frequent textual critical emendations of classical texts, see also Squire (this volume), p. 88, n. 5. 36 Particularly important in this regard are Lessing’s discussions of lost paintings by Timomachus (Lessing 1984: 20–1), Timanthes (Lessing 1984: 16–17 (cf. Fig. 3.2)), and Zeuxis (Lessing 1984: 115–20); the names and works of numerous other artists are mentioned in passing (e.g. works by Apelles, Lysippus, Myron, Pasiteles, Pausias, Pauson, Pheidias, Polyclitus, Polygnotus, Posidonius, Praxiteles, Pyraeicus, and Scopas). 37 For an overview here, see Benediktson 2000, along with the important analysis of Männlein-Robert 2007. On ancient traditions of comparing/contrasting the literary and visual arts—and a guide to the extensive bibliography—see Squire 2015. 38 Cf. Plut. Mor. (De glor. Ath. 346f): πλὴν ὁ Σιμωνίδης τὴν μὲν ζωγραφίαν ποίησιν σιωπῶσαν προσαγορεύει, τὴν δὲ ποίησιν ζωγραφίαν λαλοῦσαν: for discussion, see e.g. Carson 1992; Manieri 1995; Franz 1999: 61–83; Sprigath 2004; Männlein-Robert 2007: 20–2. 39 See Ars P. 361–5, with Brink 1971: 368–72; Trimpi 1973; and above all Hardie 1993. Much has been written on the subsequent European tradition of the ‘sister arts’ (following

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antiquity had laid the ground for Lessing’s own exploration of medial distinction. So important was that ancient legacy that Lessing emblazons it on the frontispiece of his essay (Fig. 1.8): on the one hand, this title-page bills Laocoon as an essay complete ‘with passing elucidations of different points of ancient art history’ (mit beiläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte); on the other, the frontispiece seals the treatise with an epigraph from Plutarch, one that sums up the essay’s argument that painting and poetry ‘differ in their medium and manners of mimesis’ (ὕλῃ καὶ τρόποις μιμήσεως διαφέρουσι: Mor. (De glor. Ath.) 347a).40 Once again, Lessing unpacks the thinking in his preface:41 The brilliant antithesis of the Greek Voltaire42 that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking painting was doubtless not to be found in any textbook. It was a sudden fancy—among others that Simonides had—and the truth it contains is so evident that one feels compelled to overlook the indefinite and untrue statements that accompany it. The ancients, however, did not overlook them. In restricting Simonides’ statement to the effect achieved by the two arts, they nevertheless did not forget to stress that, despite the complete similarity of effect, the two arts differed both in the objects imitated as well as in the manner of imitation (ὕλῃ καὶ τρόποις μιμήσεως). Still, many of the most recent critics have drawn the most ill-digested conclusions imaginable from this correspondence between painting and poetry just as though no such difference existed. In some instances they force poetry into the narrower limits of painting; in others they allow painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry. Whatever one is entitled to must be permitted to the other also; whatever pleases or displeases in one must necessarily please or displease the other. And so, full of this idea, they pronounce the shallowest judgments with the greatest self-assurance and, in criticizing the work of a poet and a painter on the same subject, they regard the differences of treatment observed in them as errors, which they blame on one or the other, depending on whether they happen to prefer painting or poetry. Indeed, this spurious criticism has to some degree misled even the masters of the arts. In poetry it has engendered a mania for description and in painting a mania for allegory, by attempting to make the former a speaking picture, without actually knowing what it could and ought to paint, and the latter a silent poem, without having considered to what degree it is able to express general ideas

in particular Hagstrum 1955; Lee 1967; and Praz 1970): for a provocative guide and further bibliography, see Barkan 2013. 40 On the importance of this Plutarchian ‘classical presence’, see Teinturier 2014: 47–8; for a recent overview of Plutarch’s own ideas about the relationship between visual and verbal modes of presentation, see now Hirsch-Luipold 2002, discussing this passage at pp. 55–72. 41 Lessing 1984: 4–5. 42 On this loaded reference to Simonides, see Vollhardt’s note at Lessing 2012: 293.

Fig. 1.8. Frontispiece of Lessing’s first 1766 edition of Laocoon. © Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library/Alamy Stock Photo.

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without denying its true function and degenerating into a purely arbitrary means of expression. To counteract this false taste and these unfounded judgments is the principal aim of the following chapters . . .

The ‘ancients’ are here presented as Lessing’s foremost ally.43 Where modern critics are said to have overlooked the critical differences between painting and poetry—and where modern writers and artists are said to delight in ‘pictorial’ poems that wallow in description, or ‘poetic’ pictures that allegorize and abstractify—antiquity can serve to remind us of the proper ‘boundaries’ between the two media. Just as ancient literature and art therefore set the standard to which modernity should aspire, so too should modern criticism be founded on a more solid understanding of its ancient roots. All this makes Laocoon a key text for anyone interested in the eighteenth-century reception of ancient materials, and above all the Enlightenment’s recalibration of a classical critical tradition. For classicists, what is perhaps most striking about the essay is the way it harnesses different philosophical schools: from its fundamental distrust of matter, to its systemic theorizations of mimesis and imagination (Einbildungskraft), this is a text that navigates between Platonic and Aristotelian philosophical traditions, while always situating its readings of ancient texts against the backdrop of the insights (as indeed the antitypes) of more modern critical thinkers, poets, and artists. No less importantly, Laocoon also constructs a particular view of classical antiquity: it has played a key role in recalibrating what the ‘ancients’ mean to the ‘moderns’, engendering a certain view of the classical past that has continued to resonate all the way down to the present day. One need only think of Laocoon’s contribution to the development of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century— above all, its formulation of an ideal of painting’s ‘pregnant moment’, one that would be replayed in the classicizing tableaux of Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Jean-Baptiste Greuze (among numerous others).44

43

On the underlying Querelle des anciens et des modernes at stake here, see below, pp. 24–7. 44 For Lessing’s palpable influences on Neoclassical painting, above all in France, Gombrich 1957 is key. For Lessing’s argument about the ‘pregnant moment’ (Lessing 1984: 99), see e.g. Giuliani and Squire (this volume): the most important recent return to

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Lessing and the Enlightenment So far in this introduction we have focused on Laocoon as a work of classical reception, one that forges its aesthetic critique from the analysis of ancient works of poetry and painting. Yet for all the ‘classical presences’ of Lessing’s essay, we have also said that Laocoon’s arguments construct a particular view of antiquity, one bound up with the intellectual preoccupations of the eighteenth century. At this point, we therefore attempt to contextualize Laocoon against a wider set of cultural attitudes towards the classical past in the eighteenth century, both in Germany specifically and within Europe at large. After surveying the Enlightenment’s complex attitudes towards the classical heritage, we sketch Lessing’s own biography, situating Laocoon (and its concern with ancient materials) within Lessing’s other antiquarian, theatrical, and critical works. In 1764, when Laocoon was first published, Neoclassicism in the arts was but one way in which Lessing’s contemporaries played out their fascination with antiquity. This is not necessarily an obvious point: after all, the Enlightenment is often equated with a straightforward rupture in Western thought, one in which all forms of knowledge (not least ‘science’ or Wissenschaft) were established on a radically new foundation. So what sort of place did the Enlightenment find for the traditions of GraecoRoman art, literature, and thinking? How could the models of the past be reconciled with a new vision for the present and future? And what did the ‘ancients’ mean to the ‘moderns’? The most obvious way of tackling those questions is in relation to the ‘second observer’ of Lessing’s preface—namely, the ‘philosopher’ who, in his attempt to understand why painting and poetry both pleased their respondents, ‘discovered that both proceed from the same source’. During the seventeenth century, as is well known, the project of philosophy had been profoundly rethought. According to René Descartes (1596–1650), the only tenets to be retained were those which were demonstrably—which is to say rationally—‘true’.45 Such Cartesian strictures might be expected the concept—illustrated once again, among numerous other examples, using classical Greek and Roman materials—is Westerkamp 2015. 45 For the clearest articulation of the thinking, cf. Descartes 2013: 23: ‘I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. . . . Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my

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to leave little of the classical legacy intact: after all, information transmitted through the ages, prestigious as its point of departure might have been, could not aspire to more than mere probability. Yet already in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Cartesian epistemology found vociferous critics—from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in England to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany and Giambattista Vico in Italy. Throughout this period, and right up to the time when Lessing was writing, the classical tradition never lost its place as a formative (if not necessarily all-encompassing) model for Enlightenment authors. One conventional critical framework for approaching the ‘classical presences’ of this period has been in relation to the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. This ‘quarrel’ was one of the chief ways in which French poets and scholars assessed the cumulative achievements of European culture since the Renaissance by measuring them against those of Graeco-Roman antiquity.46 It is frequently assumed that, by the time of Louis XIV’s death in 1715, the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’ had, even if it had never quite been settled, at least fizzled out. But as Patrick Riley has reminded us, the ‘quarrel’ remained a recurring trope in the Enlightenment—and one that even extended well into the nineteenth century.47 While the first stage of this ‘quarrel’ was the well-known debate among French authors, from around 1685 to 1715, about the aesthetic superiority of ancient or modern literature, a second—much broader but less widely recognized—dimension of it was pan-European, unfolding in a variety of political, cultural, and philosophical realms. Lessing’s Laocoon demonstrates the point in a very tangible way: in the passage of the preface cited above (pp. 20–2), Lessing establishes a clear polarity between ‘the ancients’ (die Alten) and ‘many of the most recent critics’ (viele der neuesten Kunstrichter); modern poets and painters have misunderstood the ancient thinking of ut pictura

assent from opinions which are not completely certain and indubitable just as carefully as I do from those which are patently false.’ 46 For a useful overview of responses to antiquity in eighteenth-century thought, see Grell 1995. Among a plethora of recent publications, see e.g. Moore, Macgregor Morris, and Bayliss (eds.) 2008 and Elm, Lottes, and de Senarclens (eds.) 2009. On the Querelle specifically, see Levine 1991 and 1999; DeJean 1997; and Fumaroli 2001; on the German reception of this French trope, key contributions include Jauss 1970: 67–106 and Kapitza 1981. 47 Riley 2001: 86.

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poesis, Lessing argues, whether in their mania for poetic description (Schilderungssucht), or else in the painterly turn to ‘allegorization’ (Allegoristerey).48 The very framework of Laocoon’s argument here shows how antiquity enjoyed a continuous presence in the 1760s: Lessing at once refashions the ‘quarrel’ of Francophone critics and renders it a polemic against contemporary ‘French’ tastes.49 Riley’s argument about the recurring Querelle des anciens et des modernes, and above all its eighteenth-century extension from France to other European lands, in turn embroils us in a larger academic ‘quarrel’ about how eighteenth-century intellectuals approached the classical past. The controversy is best represented by a debate, played out in the late 1960s and early 1970s, between two eminent intellectual historians: Franco Venturi and Peter Gay. For Venturi, whose cross-European research focused on political and economic reforms, the political experience of the surviving republics in Europe eclipsed manifestations of the classical legacy.50 Venturi’s prioritization of actual experience over ancient echoes may be attributed to his principled resistance to Italian fascism and its abuse of the Roman legacy, but it also provided a rejoinder to Peter Gay’s seminal study, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (published as two volumes in 1966 and 1969). The first volume of Gay’s study, subtitled The Rise of Modern Paganism, emphasized the multiple ways in which Enlightenment authors resorted to antiquity as an inexhaustible source for arguments against Christianity on the one hand, and as a tool to refashion Christian faith on the other. For Gay, the Enlightenment did not draw on the classical heritage in any single or simplistic way; instead, Gay insisted on the modernity of the philosophes’ amalgam—dependent as it was on both the ancient legacy and eighteenth-century concerns and realities.51 Venturi himself

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On Lessing’s polemic against Allegoristerey here, see Squire (this volume). For a brief sketch of those French traditions, see Iribarren 2012: 303–8—along with the broader history of Wallenstein 2010. On Laocoon’s self-consciously ‘German’ responses to ‘French’ sensibilité (above all to the Comte de Caylus in chapters 11 to 14), cf. e.g. Lessing 1984: 5, 27; cf. Robert 2013: esp. 26–32; and the discussions by e.g. Squire, Harloe, and Grethlein (this volume). 50 Venturi 1971: 18. On Venturi’s magnum opus, the multi-volume Settecento Riformatore (1969–90), see Robertson 1992 and Ricuperati 1997; on the historian himself, cf. Viarengo 2014. 51 Cf. Gay 1966: xi: ‘I see the philosophes’ rebellion succeeding in both of its aims: theirs was a paganism directed against their Christian inheritance and dependent upon the 49

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was unconvinced about such ‘classical presences’: responding to Gay’s arguments, he countered that ‘the survival of the ancient world may not be a presence, an identification, as Peter Gay maintains’; for Venturi, rather, ‘it is often an ornament, not a reality; a superstition, not a religion’.52 More recent studies have tended to side with Gay rather than Venturi, highlighting the constitutive role that the classical legacy played in shaping the self-consciously ‘Enlightened’ parameters of eighteenthcentury culture. A particular landmark comes in Dan Edelstein’s 2010 book, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. In this study, Edelstein attempted to recover the historical self-awareness of the age through the narrative it constructed of its own genesis. In doing so, he criticized teleological accounts of the Enlightenment as the self-evident origin of present-day ‘modernity’, which are for Edelstein ‘thinly veiled ideological manifestos or pale reflections of current trends’.53 Edelstein consequently suggested that eighteenth-century identifications of the age with lumières or the esprit philosophique reflected an awareness of the cumulative intellectual and (no less significantly) social change ever since the break with scholastic philosophy and the scientific revolution. It follows, according to Edelstein, that the Querelle des anciens et des modernes functioned less as a cause of the Enlightenment than a catalyst for the formation of a narrative that served to explain the Enlightenment to itself. Fundamental to this eighteenth-century account was the gradual extension of new forms of knowledge and critical attitudes from professional scholars to society at large. Just as Gay had emphasized the appeal of the ancients’ unprejudiced investigation of man and nature, Edelstein finds that in different domains ‘the philosophes themselves ultimately owed more to the party of the Ancients, who could accommodate modern scientific

paganism of classical antiquity, but it was also a modern paganism, emancipated from classical thought as much as from Christian dogma.’ 52

Venturi 1971: 6. Edelstein 2010: 17. The main target of Edelstein’s critique is Jonathan Israel’s project concerning the radical Enlightenment, emphasizing a philosophical combination of materialism or ‘one-substance monism’, atheism, and political commitment to democracy and egalitarianism—a synthesis which Israel ultimately traces back to Spinoza’s works (see Israel 2001, 2006, 2011, and 2014). Among Israel’s critics, see La Vopa 2009 and Lilti 2009. On the pitfalls of habitually identifying Enlightenment with ‘modernity’, see also Robertson 2015: 121–30. 53

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achievements into their platform, than to that of the Moderns, who could not find any place for antiquity’.54 Lessing’s own example corroborates Edelstein’s portrait of the Enlightenment as more self-consciously ‘ancient’ than ‘modern’. Like numerous other contemporary writers, Lessing went out of his way to present himself as a direct inheritor of the ancient legacy, recovering the impartial spirit of classical inquiry (unencumbered by layers of religious dogma and philosophical scholasticism), while also harnessing the latest scholarship to his arguments. In a recent study of the contexts of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), J. G. A. Pocock has argued that ‘the function of ancient history was to problematise modernity’.55 If we substituted ‘the eighteenth-century present’ for the value-laden concept of ‘modernity’, Pocock’s observation would hold true for numerous other Enlightenment thinkers elsewhere in Europe—not just for Lessing, but also for (inter alios) Giambattista Vico, Adam Ferguson, and Johann Gottfried Herder. Whatever else we make of such scholarly debates, the important point lies in the active recourse to antiquity to define the intellectual, social, and cultural predicament of the eighteenth century. As measure, mirror, or model—and not least, at times, also as antitype—antiquity lit up the Enlightenment: the ancient world provided a mirage against which the eighteenth century could both inspect, and indeed refashion, itself.56 This point holds true not only for the French Enlightenment, the focus of Edelstein’s and Gay’s works, but also specifically for the German

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Edelstein 2010: 37. Edelstein’s approach echoes the views of other recent works—not least, Levent Yilmaz’s study of the ‘Quarrel’, which claims that the controversy was actually between two modern factions: the ‘ancients’ were all the more flexible and modern, Yilmaz argues, in their ability to create a ‘dialectical synthesis between two only apparently opposed claims’ (Yilmaz 2004; Edelstein 2010: 40). 55 Pocock 2003: 349. 56 For an exemplary demonstration of the point in the context of late eighteenth-century Germany, see Güthenke 2008: esp. 20–43. On the one hand, the legacy of classical antiquity, in Güthenke’s suggestive image, constituted the ‘Greek landscape of the German soul’ (pp. 44–92). On the other, it also gave rise to a particular self-defining attitude of ‘modernity’, shaped by the Hellenophilia of German Romanticism: ‘ “Modern” is seen in opposition to two notions: that of the complete or harmonious or not fragmented, which is its lost origin and in an altered shape its driving goal, and secondly, that of the past or ancient, especially at a time when artistic debate redefined or at least still remembered the normative character of ancient models. The difference from the past becomes the condition of modernity . . . Here Greece enters’ (p. 41).

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Enlightenment, or Aufklärung. During the second half of the eighteenth century in particular, it was Germany that pioneered new methodologies for historical research, above all with regard to the scientific study of antiquity (Altertumswissenschaft).57 In German universities, ancient sources and authors loomed large in the emergence of novel ways to assess probability in the transmission of sources from all periods and areas (especially at the University of Göttingen, which Lessing at one point considered joining as an assistant to the renowned classicist Johann Matthias Gesner).58 Likewise, recent reinterpretations of the Enlightenment place the German Aufklärung on a par with its Scottish, French, and Italian equivalents.59 It is now clear that German Aufklärer were self-consciously engaged (from the late seventeenth century onwards) in attempts at political, educational, legal, and religious reform. From this perspective, Jürgen Habermas’s thesis concerning the late arrival and politicization of the Enlightenment in Germany has proved unsustainable on several counts,60 while Reinhart Koselleck’s early critique of Enlightenment authors as hypocritically subverting the political sphere has been undermined (along with his almost exclusive focus on masonic lodges as venues of Enlightenment sociability).61 Though many contributors to the German Enlightenment held academic positions, the main thrust of the Aufklärung was—just as in France—directed not at professional scholars (Gelehrte) but rather at the general educated public (Gebildete).62 The most renowned intellectual groups working towards the realization of this ideal were based in Berlin, where the lack of a university in the eighteenth century meant the absence of a professoriate

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Cf. n. 4. Nisbet 2013a: 86–7. On the new historical scholarship in Göttingen (above all the likes of Chladenius, Gatterer, and Schlözer) see Reill 1975 and 1985; Bödeker, Iggers, and Knudsen (eds.) 1986; Blanke and Fleischer (eds.) 1990; Marino 1995; Escudier 2006; and Gierl 2012. See also Fulda (this volume). 59 On the perennial question of the intellectual unity of the Enlightenment in relation to its geographical and cultural diversity, see Porter and Teich (eds.) 1981; Pocock 1999 and 2008; Robertson 2005; and Butterwick, Davies, and Sánchez Espinosa (eds.) 2008. 60 For Habermas’s thesis (first published in German in 1962), see Habermas 1989, along with the reassessments in Vierhaus (ed.) 1987; Bödeker and Herrmann (eds.) 1987; Gestrich 1994; and Goldenbaum (ed.) 2004; cf. also Mulsow 2002. 61 For Koselleck’s early work—first published in German in 1959—see Koselleck 1988 (esp. his preface on pp. 1–4); for discussions, cf. La Vopa 1992 and Bödeker 2013. 62 See recently Goldenbaum (ed.) 2004 and Schmidt 2009. A helpful overview of the historiography of the German Enlightenment can be found in Whaley 2007. 58

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enjoying corporate academic privileges (including, at times, the censorship of local publications). The Academy of Sciences in the Prussian capital, revamped by Frederick II and the French physicist Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, differed in structure as well as function from traditional universities, providing substantial stimuli for intellectual debates across Germany from the mid-1740s until the end of the century.63 Lessing’s own career epitomizes the Aufklärung’s openness to the wider educated public, above all in the context of research into the classical past; indeed, Lessing himself may be considered the first German ‘public intellectual’ in today’s sense of the term.64 In contrast to his contemporaries at German universities—as indeed to authors such as Leibniz, who spent their entire careers at the service of rulers—Lessing played alternately (and at times simultaneously) the roles of journalist, playwright, critic, poet, scholar, and controversialist; moreover, he did so in diverse areas and genres—extending from comedy, fables, and poetry to theology, history, and aesthetics. Despite his peripatetic lifestyle, Lessing kept in constant touch with his Berlin acquaintances of the 1750s, especially the publisher-author Friedrich Nicolai and the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, with whom he collaborated on various projects.65 In all these activities, Lessing’s familiarity with—and recurrent recourse to—the literary and intellectual heritage of the Graeco-Roman world is striking. To demonstrate what we mean here, it is necessary to say a little more about Lessing’s works and their place within his larger biographical trajectory.66 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born the son of a Lutheran pastor on 29 January 1729 in the small town of Kamenz in Saxony (north-east of Dresden). The Lutheranism with which the young Gotthold Ephraim was inculcated would be a spur for constant reflection throughout his career.67 Following a rigorous classical training at the distinguished boarding school of St Afra in Meissen (1741–6), Lessing enrolled 63

Cf. Förster (ed.) 1989; Goldenbaum and Košenina (eds.) 1999–2013; Lifschitz 2012a. Cf. Demetz 1991: xxi. 65 There is a useful discussion of ‘Lessing und die Berliner Aufklärung’ in Weber 2006: 41–60. 66 The most detailed biography of Lessing is Nisbet 2013a, first published in German as Nisbet 2008. Since Nisbet provides a masterful survey of the huge bibliography dedicated to all aspects of Lessing’s career and writings, we refer readers to Nisbet’s more extensive discussions. 67 Cf. n. 79. 64

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as a student of theology at the University of Leipzig, his first experience of a larger city (1746–8). The theatrical scene in Leipzig profited from a range of different performing groups in various genres, as well as from Johann Christoph Gottsched’s attempts to raise the status of theatre in German on the model of French Neoclassical drama. Lessing was attracted by the buoyant social life in Leipzig, where his first comedy (‘The Young Scholar’—Der junge Gelehrte) was performed in 1748, and where he began to compose Anacreontic poetry. Yet financial troubles— and the emergence of a newer cultural centre—attracted him in 1748 to Berlin, where he worked intensively as a journalist, critic, translator, and playwright. Already in his early career, Lessing reiteratively turned to ancient materials in his attempts to recalibrate the ‘modern’—above all in religious, literary, or philosophical debates. In doing so, he engaged in specific antiquarian controversies, taking on those adversaries who posed as guardians of the classical legacy.68 From the outset, Lessing’s pronounced refusal to bow before accepted intellectual, religious, and social opinions involved innovative mobilizations of antiquity. On the one hand, Lessing’s earliest theatrical comedies reassessed common prejudices concerning women, religious minorities, dissenters, and clergymen—including in his 1748 ‘The Misogynist’ (Der Misogyn), and during the following year in his ‘The Freethinker’ (Der Freigeist) and ‘The Jews’ (Die Juden). On the other hand, Lessing’s translations of Plautus’ plays (and his essay on the Roman playwright) acted both as homage to ancient theatre and as an attempt to reinvigorate a ‘modern’ German genre.69 Despite shorter sojourns in Wittenberg (1751) and Leipzig (including an abortive Grand Tour as a tutor to the son of a local merchant, 1755–8), Lessing stayed in Berlin until 1760. It was during this time in the Prussian capital that he wrote Miß Sara Sampson (1755), widely 68 As Nisbet puts it, pointing to a recurrent pattern in Lessing’s writings, the young Lessing deemed ‘the ancients . . . far too useful as allies to be left in the hands of the conservatives’ (Nisbet 2013a: 70). On Lessing’s setting and transgressing of ‘boundaries’, see Zeuch (ed.) 2005. 69 In his early twenties Lessing further wrote an essay ‘On the Pantomime of the Ancients’ and translated three volumes of Charles Rollin’s Histoire romaine. These early works would later be complemented by treatises on Hercules and Omphale, the tragedies of Seneca, Latin fables, Sophocles, Horace, and Aristotle’s Poetics (among numerous other ancient texts and classical subjects).

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regarded as the first ‘bourgeois’ or domestic tragedy in German (and a model for playwrights of Schiller’s generation and their successors). It was also in Berlin that Lessing, together with his cousin and close collaborator Christlob Mylius, founded a periodical entitled Beyträge zur Historie und Aufnahme des Theaters, initiating his long-lasting collaborations with Nicolai and Mendelssohn. With the latter he composed a mock entry to a prize contest at the Berlin Academy (Pope—ein Metaphysiker!, 1755) which set out to vindicate the autonomy of poetry.70 The collaboration between Lessing, Nicolai, and Mendelssohn found additional public outlets in their journal Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste and afterwards in Briefe, die Neueste Litteratur betreffend, as well as in the renowned correspondence between the three friends on the theory of tragedy (1756–7). In these epistolary exchanges Lessing emphasized the foremost importance of pity or sympathy (Mitleid) in dramatic theory and practice, while somewhat downplaying the issue of illusion that would play a more central role in his Laocoon.71 The same years also provided a catalyst for Lessing’s theatrical compositions. While in Berlin, Lessing published his one-act tragedy Philotas (1759), whose main topic was self-sacrifice for the fatherland—a muchdiscussed issue in Prussia in the middle of the Seven Years War.72 Lessing continued to be well informed about dramatic and philosophical developments elsewhere (above all in France), publishing in 1760 his translations of and commentaries on Diderot’s plays in Das Theater des Herrn Diderot. In the following five years Lessing was mainly based in Breslau as secretary of the Prussian general and governor of Silesia, Friedrich Bogislav von Tauentzien. Beyond studies of Spinoza’s philosophy, Lessing closely engaged in the Silesian capital with classical antiquity; he likewise began work on Laocoon. Lessing’s observation of military life and bureaucracy in Silesia was manifest in what is now his

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On Lessing’s collaboration with Mendelssohn on Pope—ein Metaphysiker!, see Décultot (this volume). During this time, Lessing also encouraged Mendelssohn to publish the first translation of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’inégalité into German (1756)—a treatise to which Mendelssohn appended an essay addressed to Lessing, based on their discussions of Rousseau’s groundbreaking tract. 71 For the continuities between this correspondence and the Laocoon, see Harloe (this volume). 72 Cf. Clark 2006: 219–30; Van der Zande 2007.

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best-known theatrical comedy, Minna von Barnhelm (published in Berlin in 1767), which dealt with the tension between a Prussian officer and his Saxon fiancée, the eponymous Minna. The premiere was held at the new National Theatre in Hamburg, where Lessing moved earlier in 1767 to act as a dramatic adviser and critic; it was during this time that one of the most iconic portraits of Lessing was painted (by Barbara Anna Rosina Lisiewska) (Fig. 1.9). Lessing’s experience at the short-lived National Theatre formed the basis for his theoretical musings on drama, Hamburgische Dramaturgie, published as a book in 1769. While continuing and sharpening his critique of French Neoclassical drama, Lessing also took his dramatic theory in directions different from the ones explored in the correspondence of the previous decade with Mendelssohn and Nicolai; here, and following the earlier work represented by Laocoon, theatrical illusion received much greater critical attention. Finally, in 1770, Lessing succeeded in his long quest to secure a more permanent position as a librarian or curator. He was appointed ducal librarian at Wolfenbüttel, where local rulers had built up one of the most impressive European collections (and where Leibniz had earlier acted in a similar capacity). In 1772 the small town witnessed the premiere of Lessing’s tragedy Emilia Galotti (a modern retelling of the Roman legend of Virginia). The treasures of the local library and Lessing’s protected position also allowed him to publish the series of essays that formed the basis of the Fragmentenstreit (‘Fragment Quarrel’) over the reliability of Scripture. This public debate eventually prompted the duke to withdraw Lessing’s immunity from censorship in religious matters. Parallel to essays in the context of the Fragmentenstreit, Lessing published two other important works: on the one hand, a dialogue on freemasonry which touched upon various ethical, theological, and political issues (Ernst und Falk, 1777–8); and on the other, the first part of Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (‘The Education of Mankind’, 1777)—a conjectural account of the evolution of religious and ethical thought, focused on the tension between revelation and reason (its final sections were published in 1780). After his subjection to censorship in religious affairs following the Fragmentenstreit, Lessing took to the stage to express his liberal theological stance, as apparent in his final masterpiece, written in 1779, ‘Nathan the Wise’ (Nathan der Weise, first performed in Berlin in 1783). The play—which is still one of Lessing’s most respected dramatic

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Fig. 1.9. Barbara Anna Rosina Lisiewska, Portrait of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, c.1768. Halberstadt, Das Gleimhaus (Museum der deutschen Aufklärung). © Snark/ Art Resource, NY.

works, and taught as an established ‘classic’ in the German literary canon—takes place in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades. It deals with the story of its eponymous Jewish protagonist (Nathan) and his daughter (Recha), who are embroiled in familial, religious, and economic

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complications involving a Christian Templar knight and the Muslim ruler Saladin. The most famous section of the play comes in the ‘parable of the rings’ that Lessing puts in the mouth of Nathan (a character probably modelled on Mendelssohn). Developing a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron, the parable likens the three monotheistic religions to the rings inherited by three brothers. The brothers, Nathan recounts, do not know which of them possesses the genuine ancestral ring from their father—the one that renders its owner pleasing to God and mankind alike; at this point, a wise judge suggests that, since the real ring cannot be adequately distinguished, all of the brothers must lead their lives in such a way as to please God and their fellow men, thereby meriting the alleged power of the original ring. While Nathan der Weise might not reveal the depth and multifaceted character of Lessing’s long-lasting engagement with theological issues, it has come to represent his various pleas for religious toleration (which, as noted above, were already conspicuous in his earliest plays).73 Although he wrote the play in 1779, Lessing himself never saw Nathan der Weise on the stage: he died on 15 February 1781 during a visit to Braunschweig. This brief biographical sketch provides an important lens through which to make sense of Laocoon. First published in 1766, Laocoon enjoys a central position both chronologically and intellectually within Lessing’s oeuvre. While drawing on the author’s permanent fascination with classical literature, the essay was written at a time of change—above all, from his early plays to what Lessing scholars would call the ‘mature drama’ (represented mainly by Minna von Barnhelm, Emilia Galotti, and Nathan der Weise). Although this shift is usually associated with Lessing’s subsequent Hamburgische Dramaturgie in the late 1760s, the Laocoon essay already contains in it the seeds of Lessing’s modified views about aesthetic experience. If Laocoon distinguishes between the media employed in different forms of arts, Lessing still adheres to a view of their shared mimetic purpose. In this context, Laocoon encourages the creative poet (perhaps unexpectedly in a treatise on the ‘limits’ of poetry and painting) to engage in what he labels ‘poetic painting’ (poetisches Gemählde). What matters, Lessing suggests, is the vividness of illusion 73 In the twentieth century especially, the play enjoyed a symbolic prominence: banned by the Nazi regime, Nathan der Weise inaugurated the programme of many German theatres as they reopened in 1945 (cf. Fischer and Fox 2005: 33; Nisbet 2013a: 621).

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that would make readers ignore (at least momentarily) the linguistic medium, immersing themselves in instantaneous action—and thereby, at least according to Lessing, emulating an ideal mode of responding to pictures.74 As several contributors to this volume point out, Lessing would later emphasize that, of all poetic genres, drama alone can approximate this feat in its act of rendering arbitrary signs natural.75 At any rate, Lessing’s new emphasis on illusion rather than sympathy or pity is elaborated in Laocoon despite the absence of explicit discussions of drama in the published work.76 Seen from the perspective of Lessing’s later works, Laocoon also marks the beginning of a particularly intensive period of engagement with ancient Greek and Roman themes. Lessing’s ‘Letters of Antiquarian Content’ (Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts, 1768–9) were quite unlike Laocoon in the sense of lacking a strong central thesis, primarily focused on a demolition of the arguments made by Christian Adolph Klotz in various essays (especially on ancient gems) and reviews (not least a review of Lessing’s own Laocoon). As with those later letters, however, Laocoon starts out from a series of ‘antiquarian’ insights—explicitly heralded as a work containing, as we have said, ‘passing elucidations of different points of ancient art history’ (mit beiläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte). The Laocoon’s explicit art-historical concerns also prepare the ground for a series of subsequent forays into ancient visual culture, not least in Lessing’s essay—published in autumn 1769—on ‘How the Ancients Depicted Death’ (Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet). The starting point for this treatise was yet another disagreement with Klotz. In a footnote to chapter 11 of Laocoon, Lessing had claimed (against the Comte de Caylus) that death and sleep were usually depicted as young twins in antiquity, thereby highlighting the difference between this portrayal and the modern image of death as a terrifying skeleton.77 Klotz had replied, earlier in 1769, that skeletons had been portrayed in ancient art. 74 See especially the critical note to chapter 14 (Lessing 1984: 207–8), with particular reference to Pseudo-Longinus’ On the Sublime. 75 Lessing to Nicolai, 26 May 1769, in Lessing 1987: 608–10: for an English translation, see Nisbet 1985: 133–4. 76 Note, though, that drama does play an important role in Laocoon’s first four chapters: see Harloe (this volume). 77 Lessing 1984: 200–1.

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Responding to Klotz, Lessing’s 1769 essay argues that such skeletons were primarily intended to depict dead individuals rather than symbolize death in a general manner. According to Lessing, death was represented more often by Thanatos in the form of a beautiful boy (usually holding his torch upside-down).78 As critics from Herder onwards have noted, Lessing’s theory here—like many of his points in Laocoon itself—is rather general, and at times plainly mistaken from the vantage-point of more recent classical archaeological research. Yet Lessing’s dichotomous distinction between a more positive (or neutral) ancient depiction of death and what he saw as an excessively foreboding Christian image had its parallels in his negative reaction to Catholic imagery and its uses throughout his career.79 If Laocoon anticipates much of Lessing’s later critical takes on ancient art, literature, and philosophy, it also capitalizes on some of the author’s earlier formative exchanges. Most of the Laocoon essay was written while Lessing was in Breslau, away from his friends and collaborators in Berlin. By charting the development of the essay through successive drafts, however, we can see how it came to respond to the specific critiques and interventions of his contemporaries. With those contemporary critiques in mind, we should perhaps note here that scholars have charted the archaeology of Laocoon through at least three distinct rewritings between 1762 and 1765. Despite being based in Breslau, Lessing used the opportunity of a visit to Potsdam in the summer 1763 to send his initial plans to Mendelssohn and Nicolai; indeed, the immediate incentive for the essay might have been the publication in 1761 of Mendelssohn’s philosophical works, including a new edition of his treatise on differences between the arts and their media.80 During the 1763 visit to Potsdam, Lessing discussed with Mendelssohn and Nicolai their observations on the first drafts of the treatise, paying particular attention to Mendelssohn’s detailed 78

Lessing 1914: 171–226. As a handful of recent critics have suggested, Lessing’s own Lutheran background was critical in moulding his attitudes towards the visual: cf. especially Mitchell 1986: esp. 109–12; Pizer 1994; and Squire 2009: 90–113 (as well as Squire’s chapter in this book). 80 Our account here is indebted to Nisbet 2013a: 304–7; cf. Lessing 1990: 631–50; Lessing 2012: 442–6. Mendelssohn’s treatise was originally published in 1757 with the title Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften; the subsequent version in the Philosophische Schriften of 1761 was called Über die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften. See Fritz Bamberger’s introduction in 1929–: I.xxxiv–xxxvi. 79

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comments. We know that it was in the resulting second draft of the essay (possibly written in winter 1763–4) that Lessing made the Laocoon statue-group its focal point. In a third draft (probably composed in summer 1764), the analysis of different representations of Laocoon’s pain was moved to the forefront of the essay, while the analytic distinction between different art forms, their objects, and their signs was delayed to the end; likewise, it was in this third version that Lessing further integrated a discussion of Winckelmann’s recent Geschichte (which appeared in late 1763).81 Having returned to Berlin from Breslau, Lessing composed the final manuscript of Laocoon in late 1765, preparing the book for publication in April 1766. Crucially, however, this was never intended as Lessing’s last word on the Grenzen of the arts: following Mendelssohn’s example, the published version of the essay repeatedly mentions its author’s plans to extend his analysis to drama, music, and other artistic genres. Although these plans were never realized, a particular scholarly concern among those working on Laocoon has been to reconstruct the development of Lessing’s thinking, using his earlier drafts and subsequent notes (Paralipomena) to chart the author’s changing views. Why should readers of Laocoon care about the essay’s Enlightenment context, or indeed about its place within Lessing’s life-history and larger oeuvre? As numerous contributors to this volume emphasize, the various historical, biographical, and critical contexts of the text matter precisely because they illuminate what it was that Lessing saw himself to be doing in Laocoon. Whether we are interested in the essay as a case study for thinking about the eighteenth-century German reception of the classical past, or as a work of transhistorical aesthetic criticism, considering its Enlightenment Entstehungsgeschichte helps us to understand our own relationship with Lessing’s arguments. In spite of its retrospective championing of classical paradigms, Lessing’s essay is ultimately rooted in the intellectual and cultural history of eighteenth-century Germany and the wider European Enlightenment. Indeed, Laocoon’s recourse to classical materials can only be appreciated in light of its eighteenth-century milieu—the present concerns which illuminate (and indeed determine) Lessing’s own view of the Graeco-Roman past. Approached from this

81

On the chronology here, cf. Décultot’s chapter in this volume.

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perspective, Laocoon provides an important gateway for tackling a much larger nexus of issues in intellectual history, whether in relation to Lessing’s other works, or indeed those of his contemporaries and successors.

Aesthetics and Reception Laocoon’s contemporary and subsequent reception leads to our third framework for introducing the text: namely, in relation to the history of modern aesthetic criticism. Regarded by some as paradigmatic model, and debunked by others as flawed foil and antitype, Lessing’s essay has served as the bedrock for wholly different theories not just about words and images specifically, but also about the role of the subjective imagination in aesthetic experience, the nature (and conventions) of signs, and by extension the privileged realms of pictorial and poetic ‘art’. Often such aesthetic readings have been developed without considering either Lessing’s own eighteenth-century intellectual context, or indeed his defining recourse to ancient literary, artistic, and philosophical exempla. Over the last thirty years or so, however, some of the most scintillating work on Laocoon has sought to understand Lessing’s particular aesthetic ideas in relation to their own Enlightenment context, and not least Lessing’s particular view of his classical heritage.82 The huge influence—some might say burden—of Laocoon on subsequent thinking means that we are unable to survey every aspect of its afterlife here.83 Suffice it to say that, just as Laocoon helped define the direction and scope of Enlightenment and Romantic aesthetics in Germany (and indeed beyond), so too it has shaped the very form and practices of modern European poetry and painting. At different moments within the twentieth century in particular, Lessing has been both heroized and demonized for his carefully calibrated (and for many,

82 Particularly important are Mitchell 1984a (revised in 1986: 95–115) and Wellbery 1984, discussed here, pp. 45–6, 48–9. 83 On the ‘productivity’ of Laocoon, especially in the twentieth century, see Wellbery (this volume); cf. also Sternberg 1999. More generally, see the contributions in McCarthy, Rowland, and Schade (eds.) 2000 (= Lessing Yearbook 33), covering Lessing’s international influence from a variety of different angles.

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deeply hierarchical)84 delineation between the temporal linearity of poetry and the spatial field of the visual arts. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of Laocoon’s legacy lies in giving rise to so many modernist ‘new Laocoons’, each one finding an earlier archaeology for its own view of what art and poetry are (or rather, what art and poetry should be). For Irving Babbitt in 1910, for example, Lessing’s essay could provide the basis for a ‘New Humanist’ manifesto—a self-declared ‘New Laokoon’ that rallied against a supposed ‘Romantic’ mongrelization of literature with music and painting (whereby contemporary poems are said to ‘depict’, contemporary music to ‘narrate’, and contemporary paintings to seek the effects of music and literature).85 Perhaps still more influentially, Clement Greenberg would turn to Lessing to herald a new mode of painterly modernism in the 1940s. Greenberg’s ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’ essay, first published in 1940, focused above all on the paintings of Jackson Pollock: making explicit reference to Lessing’s model, Greenberg laid out a new materialist programme for contemporary sculpture and painting, arguing that the visual artwork should aim to ‘exhaust itself in the visual sensation it produces’.86 Our aim in introducing these various engagements is not to propose that Lessing gave rise to some single model or theory. Instead, we suggest that Laocoon’s richness lies precisely in spurring such a range of critical responses and reactions, and in the wake of divergent ‘modern’ cultural, artistic, and literary movements: in engaging with the essay, different generations have made Lessing’s essay mean radically different things, shaped by their own critical and aesthetic outlooks. If Laocoon has been a

84 See the discussions in this volume by e.g. Squire, Giuliani, and Trabant. Foundational on the hierarchical distinctions of Laocoon are Gombrich 1957 and 1984: 28–40. 85 Babbitt 1910, esp. 217–52. Claiming to be a ‘humble imitator of Lessing’ (p. viii), Babbitt complains of the same ‘general confusion of the arts, as well as of the different genres within the confines of each art’ (p. ix), citing the work of (among others) Gautier, Rossetti, and Mallarmé as examples; for further discussion, cf. the chapters by Mitchell and Squire (this volume). 86 Greenberg 1940: 307. Cf. Greenberg 1940: 305: ‘the arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums, and there they have been isolated, concentrated and defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity of its medium must be emphasized. For the visual arts the medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator physically.’ For Greenberg’s debt to Lessing, see Greenberg 1940: 298–9; for a brief discussion of Greenberg’s thinking, see Prettejohn 2005: 180–91. More generally on the twentieth-century aesthetic reception, see also Allert 2000.

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constant companion for traversing moments in the history of modern aesthetics, it has also mediated a particular view of the Graeco-Roman heritage, leading critics—whether knowingly or not—to define different episodes of modernity against a particular backdrop of antiquity. To put the point more strongly, we might say that Lessing’s Laocoon has made the classical ‘present’ in a way rivalled by few other critical treatises over the last 250 years. Although this is not the place to attempt a full chronological survey of responses to Laocoon, nor to chart how Lessing’s essay has been read from different national traditions, it is worth emphasizing how its sway extends all the way back to the late 1760s and 1770s. Winckelmann himself—around whose responses to ancient art the essay, as we have said, was framed—never tendered an official reaction (privately feigning bemusement at Lessing’s criticisms).87 But other German critics were quick to respond at length, sometimes even drawing elaborate comparisons between the respective critical modes of Winckelmann and Lessing, as indeed between their different approaches to the classical past. Particularly important here are the reactions of the young Johann Gottfried Herder. So enthused was Herder by Laocoon, or so the author recounts, that he read the entire treatise three times in one sitting.88 Not everything in Lessing’s essay proved convincing to Herder. In the first of his ‘Critical Groves’ (Kritische Wälder), the author lamented the absence of music in Lessing’s bifocal discussion: for Herder, attention to an art that employs natural signs successively could have qualified Lessing’s strict delimitation of poetry and painting. Concentrating on the meaning of words rather than on their medial function, Herder also claimed that temporal successiveness was not the main feature of poetry (which, instead, should consist in ‘the force that arbitrarily attaches to these sounds and operates on the soul according to laws other than the succession of sounds’).89 Despite this criticism, Herder nonetheless praised Laocoon as a milestone in contemporary aesthetics. Perhaps most memorably, his response also gave rise to a telling comparison between the respective styles of Lessing and Winckelmann:90

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For discussion, see especially Décultot 2014a (with further bibliography at 95, n. 33). 89 Herder 2006: 7–8. Herder 2006: 144. Herder 2006: 54 (as also discussed in Décultot’s chapter in this volume, p. 255). On the model of the ‘shield of Achilles’—as itself discussed by Lessing—see n. 34. 88 90

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Winckelmann’s style is like an ancient work of art. Formed in all its parts, each thought obtrudes and stands there, noble, simple, sublime, complete: it is. . . . Lessing’s style of writing is that of a poet, that is, of a writer, one who has not made but is making, who does not present a finished train of thought, but who thinks out loud; we see his work as it comes into being, like the shield of Achilles in Homer.

Both Lessing and Winckelmann, Herder suggests, wrote in ways that uncannily resemble what they wished to celebrate—poetry in Lessing’s case, and the plastic arts in Winckelmann’s writings. At the same time, Herder characterizes both champions of Enlightenment criticism in relation to ancient exempla: it is not just that Winckelmann’s style brings to mind an artwork, and Lessing’s a work of poetry; rather, each modern stalwart embodies an aspect of ancient art and literature. Taking his inspiration from Lessing, Herder would later return to the medium that, in his view, Laocoon had conspicuously downplayed. In his 1778 Plastik: Einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume (‘Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream’), Herder developed the critical framework of Laocoon in order to discuss the specific relationship between painting and sculpture, with particular reference to ancient case studies and philosophy.91 If Herder encapsulates one strand of Laocoon’s immediate reception, a still more influential reaction came in the reactions of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.92 In his autobiographical work ‘Poetry and Truth’ (Dichtung und Wahrheit), Goethe described the indelible mark Laocoon essay had left upon him as a young student. This now-famous tribute is worth quoting in full, not least because of the considerable authority with which it endowed Laocoon for subsequent generations:93 One has to be a young man to visualize what an effect Lessing’s Laocoon had on us, this work that swept us away from the regions of meager contemplation and onto the open terrain of thought. The saying ‘ut pictura poesis’, so long misunderstood, was now suddenly set aside, and the difference between the pictoral [sic] and verbal arts was now clear. The peaks of both now appeared separate, however closely they touched at the base. . . . The full consequence of this brilliant

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For a translation (with useful introductory discussion), see Herder 2002. On Goethe’s reformulation of Lessing’s thinking—in particular, with regard to the aesthetics of representing pain—see Robertson (this volume), with further bibliography; cf. Barner 2001, along with Nisbet 1979. 93 Goethe 1995: IV.238. 92

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thought was illuminated for us as though by a flash of lightning. We cast off all previous critical instructions and judgments like a worn-out coat, we considered ourselves delivered from all evil, and we felt justified in looking down somewhat pityingly at the otherwise very magnificent sixteenth century.

The young Goethe had good reason for finding Laocoon so productive (a ‘flash of lightning’, to quote the author’s own illuminating metaphor). Seen from Goethe’s later perspective, Lessing’s whole attempt to reconfigure the spheres of modern poetry and painting—itself founded upon a judicious and historical re-evaluation of ancient exempla—could be thought to align with a radical new aesthetic programme. Just as Lessing’s prescriptions about the properly ‘spatial’ realm of painting had an incalculable influence on contemporary painting, so too his emphasis on poetry as a mode premised around temporal action rather than description in one sense can be said to have laid the ground for German Romanticism.94 If Laocoon has had a profound influence on the actual forms of Western literature and art over the last 250 years, a still greater bequest arguably lies in its impact on the broader development of philosophy, aesthetics, and semiotic theory. A full account of Lessing’s place within the history of modern aesthetics would have to take into account its numerous anticipations of (if not overt influence on) late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German philosophy—including Kant’s third Critique (his Kritik der Urteilskraft, or ‘Critique of Judgment’), and not least Hegel’s 1820s ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ (Vorträge über die Ästhetik).95 For our purposes here, however, a more immediate focus comes in multifarious recourse to Laocoon to articulate the nature of visual and verbal signs, as indeed the evolving Western intellectual history of semiotics. A particular resurgence of interest in Laocoon came amid late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘structuralist’ approaches to the signs of language and visual imagery. This should come as no surprise, for Lessing not only related the differences between art forms to their use of space and time, but also made a decisive distinction between the signs that they employ. The painter, Lessing argues in chapter 16 of Laocoon, 94

For the relationship, see the insightful early analysis of Hamann 1878: xxvi. Specifically on the relationship between the aesthetics of Lessing and Hegel, see now Hien 2013 (along with Squire, this volume). 95

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makes use of signs that are ‘figures and colours in space’ (Figuren und Farben in dem Raume), while the poet must resort to ‘articulated sounds in time’ (artikulirte Töne in der Zeit). For Lessing, the signs of each medium of art must bear a ‘suitable relation (bequemes Verhältniß) to the thing signified’: spatially contiguous signs can depict ‘only objects whose wholes or parts coexist’ (namely, in Lessing’s term, ‘bodies’), while temporally successive signs ‘can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive’ (namely ‘actions’).96 Lessing’s comments here set the agenda for more recent semiotic theory, not least following the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (in his posthumous Cours de linguistique générale, 1916) and Charles Sanders Peirce’s distinctions between ‘iconic’, ‘symbolic’, and ‘indexical’ signs. In both cases, we find a tradition of formalist semiotics (whether treating verbal or visual signs) wrestling with Lessing’s distinctions between signs that are either ‘arbitrary’ or ‘natural’. In his Cours de linguistique générale, Saussure made the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign a major tenet in his theory of semiotics (cf. Fig. 0.3).97 This point may sound similar to Lessing’s central thesis about the conventionality of language as a poetic medium, something that renders it particularly useful for the description of action in time. Yet as the chapters in this volume by Beiser and Lifschitz highlight, Lessing did not himself adhere to his own initially strict distinction between natural signs in painting and arbitrary ones for poetry. This assertion, made in the drafts for Laocoon, was significantly qualified in the final version of the essay; indeed, one of Lessing’s major points in the published treatise is that the poet must endeavour to naturalize the arbitrary signs of poetry.98 It was in fact in the wake of such formalist and structuralist thought— during the time when Saussure’s theory began to be systematically

96 Cf. Lessing 1984: 78: for the key terms of the original German text, see Lessing 2012: 115; on the problematic thinking behind Lessing’s ‘bequemes Verhältniß’, see especially Beiser’s chapter in this volume. 97 Saussure 1916: 102. On the differences and similarities between Saussure’s notion of arbitrariness and Enlightenment views, see Lifschitz 2012b. 98 In Saussure’s system, moreover, arbitrariness refers primarily to the unmotivated character of the linguistic sign, or else to the lack of any necessary or ‘natural’ link between it and the signified. It does not relate to any free choice on the part of the speaking subject; indeed, within Saussure’s synchronic system there is little that a single speaker can, as an individual, do to modify the value of signifiers (cf. Saussure 1916: 103, with Derrida 1997: 44–73).

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questioned—that Lessing’s Laocoon enjoyed a new lease of life. Among ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers, and above all theoreticians of language, the essay could be harnessed not just as a blueprint for Saussurian structuralism, but also a useful alternative and corrective. In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s there emerged a new generation that challenged earlier structuralist approaches to signs; likewise, it was argued, the history of semiotics could open up new perspectives on larger patterns of cognition, mental processing, and cultural organization. This new development is most discernible in Michel Foucault’s classic 1966 work, Les mots et les choses (translated into English as The Order of Things).99 In this book, published exactly 200 years after Lessing’s Laocoon, Foucault traced the transition between different historical semiotic regimes. Such epistemes, Foucault argued, could provide the conceptual grids for almost every intellectual activity in a certain period, ranging from religious worship to the classification of nature to economic theory. Although Foucault was fairly deterministic in this respect—each period was characterized and controlled by a single ‘general theory of the sign’ that necessarily pervaded all intellectual domains—he attempted to highlight the most significant changes in a pattern of evolution; above all, he traced an early modern shift away from a Renaissance Weltanschauung (focused on the resemblance between sign and world). According to Foucault, the âge classique of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was dominated by a very different theory of signification (one that came to replace ‘resemblance’), prioritizing conventional signs that could be manipulated in analysis, combination, and their various applications in the theory of probability, natural history, and other scientific and social domains.100 Writing in the following year, but approaching his subject from a different critical angle, Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (‘Of Grammatology’) waged its own attack on Saussure and strict linguistic structuralism. Derrida highlighted the fissure in Western thought between writing, usually seen as secondary and derivative, and the vocal aspects of language (which had been considered its essence, thereby providing a supposedly reliable link to mental processes).101 By reassessing the importance and indispensability of writing, Derrida enhanced the 99 101

100 Foucault 2002. Foucault 2002: esp. 64–70. For fierce criticism of Saussure on this point, see Derrida 1997: 30–44.

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diversification of semiotic theories by emphasizing the very media of signification—that is, how they signified, rather than just what they conveyed. In 1970 Jürgen Trabant added his own contribution to this ongoing reassessment of structuralism by emphasizing the speech acts involved in the actualization of literary texts during aesthetic reception— embedded as the original texts may have been in particular structural contexts and constraints.102 Needless to say, these larger shifts in twentieth-century critical thought were not always directed against (or indeed oriented around) Lessing’s Laocoon alone. Yet, throughout the various debates that ensued, Lessing’s writings about the signs of painting and poetry were harnessed for different critical and intellectual-historical ends. Indeed, the very reception of Lessing’s text, focused around its own reception of classical materials, in turn testifies to shifting critical attitudes to linguistic and visual media, aesthetic reception, and theories of semiotics. Two particularly decisive interventions deserve mention here: first, Tzvetan Todorov’s analysis of Laocoon (on the one hand his 1973 article on eighteenth-century semiotics, and on the other his 1977 book, translated into English in 1982 as Theories of the Symbol); and second, David Wellbery’s groundbreaking book of 1984, Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason.103 The chief importance of Todorov’s Theories of the Symbol lay in the author’s self-conscious attempt to pluralize theories of the sign through historical contextualization (despite, or rather on account of, Todorov’s view of historical fact as ‘wholly constructed’).104 For Todorov, Lessing’s Laocoon explicitly embodied a transition from a ‘classic’ mimetic theory of art and language to a Romantic theory of poetry. Examining theories that treat imitation in art as the motivation of its signs, Todorov located the difference between Lessing and his predecessors in his view that both painting and poetry employed motivated signs (instead of the traditional distinction between ‘natural painting’ and ‘arbitrary poetry’). It follows, according to Todorov, that Lessing’s attempt to defend a theory of artistic imitation is contradicted precisely by his insistence that the poetic sign can be motivated or naturalized.

102 Trabant 1970: esp. 13–17. For Trabant’s turn to the historical anthropology of language, cf. also Trabant 1990, 1998, and 2003 (along with Trabant’s contribution to this volume). 103 104 Todorov 1973, 1982; Wellbery 1984. Todorov 1982: 12.

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Despite himself, as Todorov puts it, Lessing ‘proved a contrario that the reign of imitation over aesthetic thought was approaching its end’.105 Like Todorov, David Wellbery attempted to situate Laocoon’s semiotic thinking against a larger historical backdrop. For all Lessing’s recourse to the exemplary paradigms of antiquity, Wellbery argued, Laocoon is founded upon a number of aesthetic assumptions, themselves rooted in a specific cultural outlook. Wellbery’s argument is founded on the following two premises in particular:106 (1) that the production, circulation and interpretation of signs within a culture are governed by a kind of deep-structural theory, a system of assumptions, let us say, about what constitutes a sign and what it is proper to do with one; and (2) that this general theory of language and signs lays down guidelines for the organization of the aesthetic field (as well as other domains).

This view of the connection between theories of language and art proved especially fruitful for an analysis of Laocoon, where such a link is overtly stated and discussed. Wellbery set out to reconstruct the Enlightenment’s theory (sometimes rechristened a ‘myth’ or a ‘metasemiotic’) of the sign, which he regarded as possessing an overall ‘systematic coherence’.107 In an important epilogue, and one that progresses from historical contextualization to transhistorical aesthetic critique, Wellbery also reflected on his own endeavours in the early 1980s, finding hitherto neglected similarities between Enlightenment semiotics and some presuppositions of modern phenomenology and universal pragmatics. Wellbery even suggested ways in which, just as contemporary semiotics could inform a reading of Laocoon, Lessing’s essay itself could contribute to contemporary semiotics. Among the areas Wellbery marked for further elaboration were accounts of the ‘changes in the mode of sign production within individual arts’ and the temporal instantiation that is involved in narrative.108 If Laocoon has spurred numerous aesthetic debates about semiotics and the changing history of Western ‘sign systems’, it has also, of course, served as both paradigm and punch-bag within attempts to articulate the 105

106 107 Todorov 1982: 146. Wellbery 1984: 2. Wellbery 1984: 5. Wellbery 1984: 245–6. Some of the chapters in this book duly follow up on Wellbery’s suggestions: for example, Robertson discusses changes in the poetic and pictorial depiction of pain during the turn between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; likewise, Grethlein reads Laocoon through the lens of modern narratology. For Wellbery’s retrospective reflections on that earlier work, and commentary on its particular intellectual context in the 1980s, see his contribution to this volume. 108

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specific differences between visual and verbal media. Once again, the ‘boundaries’ or Grenzen that Lessing attempted to draw up between the ‘temporality’ of actions mediated by poetry and the ‘spatiality’ of bodies that are the subject of painting have sparked divergent responses. Among literary critics, numerous scholars have attempted to address the means by which literary texts might aspire to a ‘spatial’ dimension— demonstrated by Joseph Frank’s 1945 essay on ‘Spatial form in modern literature’,109 for example, or indeed Murray Krieger’s analysis of the ‘spatiality’ of literary ekphrasis (whereby ‘the stilled world of plastic relationships’ can be ‘superimposed on literature’s turning world to “still” it’).110 Within the field of art history, too, Lessing’s distinctions have challenged scholars to think about how visual media might aspire to ‘poetic’ qualities—about the different ways in which images might visualize narrative texts, rendering their ‘spatial’ medium ‘temporal’.111 These various interventions also, of course, extend back earlier to the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Indeed, in a very real sense Lessing’s essay defined the whole field of what German-speaking scholars today call Medienwissenschaft (and, albeit in a rather different guise, the ‘media studies’ of the Anglo-Saxon world). As ever, it was also against the context of later twentieth-century poststructuralist debates that Lessing’s medial distinctions between visual and verbal signs were most vehemently fought over. Foucault himself addressed Lessing’s question of the specific resources of words and pictures (not least in his Ceci n’est pas une pipe, written in response to Fig. 0.2): ‘the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation’, he concluded, treating the fraction and fissure between the sayable and seeable as a fundamental dialectic that structures human knowledge, power, and history.112 In the 109

Frank 1945 (reprinted, along with several other seminal contributions, in Frank 1991). Krieger 1967: 5—in the context of an essay on ‘the Laocoon revisited’; cf. Krieger 1992: esp. 285. The larger topic of ekphrasis has spurred a large bibliography (with much of the thinking indebted directly or indirectly to Lessing): for an introduction, and references to the wider critical literature, see e.g. Brassat and Squire 2017. 111 Particularly important here is Schapiro 1973, on the differences between the two media that arise from ‘the conciseness or generality of the word and from the resources peculiar to verbal and visual art’ (12); the essay is reprinted in Schapiro 1996: 11–114. 112 Foucault 1983; cf. Foucault 2002: 10: ‘It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted with the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other’s terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say. And it is in vain that we attempt to show, by the use of images, metaphors, or similes, what we are saying; the space where they achieve their splendour is not that deployed by our 110

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wake of Foucault, Derrida, and others, Lessing’s essay has come to play a key role not just in the emergence of ‘visual cultural’ studies,113 but more specifically in the rise of a field dedicated precisely to the intersection between ‘words’ and ‘images’.114 From the late 1970s onwards, Laocoon has served as a recurrent arena for debating the ways in which visual and verbal media function in ways that are like or unlike the other. Numerous critics might be cited here, among them Mieke Bal, Norman Bryson, Michael Camille, James Elkins, and Wendy Steiner.115 But arguably the most influential has been W. J. T. Mitchell, who tackled Lessing’s Laocoon head-on in an article first published in 1984.116 Analysing the inherent ‘ideological’ stakes of Lessing’s distinction between painting and poetry, and self-consciously approaching Laocoon from the perspective of what he labelled the ‘pictorial turn’ of the late twentieth century,117 Mitchell’s reading forms part and parcel of a larger argument about the shared mechanics of words and pictures. Both visual and verbal media are mixed media, Mitchell argued, comprising a combination of natural and arbitrary signs alike: ‘there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts’, it follows, ‘though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism’.118 While approaching the question from a different theoretical perspective, Mieke Bal reaches a similar judgment about the eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax.’ On Foucault’s contributions here, see above all Deleuze 1988: esp. 47–69; Mitchell 1994: esp. pp. 58–76, 83–4. For the rise of ‘visual culture’ as a critical term, see e.g. Herbert 2003, together with the discussions in Bryson, Holly, and Moxey (eds.) 1994; Jencks (ed.) 1995; Mitchell 1995; and Mirzoeff 1999. For some sharp-sighted overviews of the term’s epistemological stakes, see Moxey 2001: 103–23; Bal 2003; and Cherry 2004. The earliest programmatic use of the term known to us is Alpers 1983: xxv. 114 The explosion of interest in the theme is best represented by the international journal Word and Image: A Journal of Visual and Verbal Interaction, founded in 1985. Bateman 2014 offers a useful ‘critical introduction’. 115 See especially Bal 1991, 1998; Bal and Bryson 1991; Bryson 1981, (ed.) 1988; Camille 1985a, 1985b, 1992; Steiner 1982, 1988; Elkins 1998. 116 Mitchell 1984a, revised in 1986: 95–115; cf. also Mitchell 1980, Mitchell 1994; and the concise overview in Mitchell 2003. 117 On the ‘pictorial turn’, see Mitchell 1994: 11–34, along with e.g. Mitchell 2002: 240–1; compare also Boehm 1995. 118 See Mitchell 1994: 5. Mitchell imbues the point with a more programmatic significance (p. 161): ‘one lesson of a general semiotics, then, is that there is, semantically speaking (that is, in the pragmatics of communication, symbolic behavior, expression, signification) no essential difference between text and images; the other is that there are important differences between visual and verbal media at the level of sign-types, forms, materials of 113

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modern ‘dichotomistic fallacy’ that underpins Lessing’s essay.119 Arguing that such strict delineations between verbal and visual realms are an artificial invention of modern academia rather than an essential category of cultural life, Bal suggested that the formal differences between images and texts (the demonstrable fact that images can never simply ‘visualize’ a verbal story) do not belie their cultural inextricability. If we define images as ‘visual’ on the grounds of their material form, and not least because of our ‘clichéd norms of word-and-image distinctions’, any response to an image inevitably engages with, and thereby reshapes, verbal discourse (and vice versa). ‘Just as all language is an articulation of nonverbal as well as verbal practices’, in the words of Paul Mattick, ‘so nondiscursive form—visual, aural, and other—shares its world of meaning with that constructed in speech.’120 Such (post-)postmodern responses will hardly constitute the last word on Laocoon’s aesthetic and medial arguments. Indeed, it can be no coincidence that recent crusades against Lessing’s ‘boundaries’ come at precisely the time when twenty-first-century technologies are reconfiguring modes of visual and verbal communication—from the SMS-‘language’ of Emoji to the visual-verbal workings of contemporary social media. Yet whether we read Laocoon with a view to articulating essential medial distinctions, or else in order to situate our own culturally loaded views against those of our forebears, the fundamental questions asked in Lessing’s essay show no sign of abating. More than that, Lessing’s special blend of antiquarian retrospection and aesthetic critique responds to a timeless problem, namely that of navigating between historical critique and essentializing philosophical evaluation: within a series dedicated to ‘classical presences’, Laocoon reminds us just how much modern aesthetics can learn from the perspectives of the past—and not least, from our simultaneous proximity to and remove from the precedents of antiquity.

Unordentliche Collectanea? Much more could be said by way of introduction. The tripartite framework of the preceding overview nonetheless reflects the presiding representation, and institutional traditions.’ For a concise recapitulation of these critical ideas, see Mitchell 2003. 119

See Bal 1991: 27.

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Mattick 2003: 6–7.

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concerns of our larger volume, simultaneously dedicated (as the subtitle puts it) to ‘Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the “Limits” of Painting and Poetry’. In bringing together these different interests, our collection of essays responds to the very fabric of Lessing’s essay. After all, one of the reasons Laocoon has proved so stimulating over the last quartermillennium lies is in its varied critical texture—its shifting argumentative modes, diverse materials, and oscillation between ancient and modern frames of reference. Throughout the treatise, Lessing refers to his essay as a sort of metaphorical ‘journey’: it is said to comprise a meandering ‘stroll’ across diverse fields of intellectual enquiry.121 More programmatically still, the preface presents Laocoon as a sort of ‘rag-bag’—a ‘disorderly collection’, or unordentliche Collectanea, that flies in the face of German rationalist traditions:122 [The following chapters] were written as chance dictated and more in keeping with my reading than through any systematic development of general principles. Hence they are to be regarded more as unordered notes for a book than as a book itself. Yet I flatter myself that even in this form they will not be treated wholly with contempt. We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions.

Lessing’s self-deprecating rationale here—his supposed rejection of any ‘systematic development of general principles’—to some extent foreshadows our own thinking in this book. Whether or not our anthology should be ‘regarded more as unordered notes for a book than as a book itself ’ we leave our readers to decide. Yet what motivates the collection is precisely the provocation of Lessing’s essay, and across so wide a range of academic fields. As a collection, the overriding remit of this book is to combine different modes of approaching the text, at once rethinking the medial ‘limits’ defined by the Laocoon, and situating the text within its Entstehungs- and Rezeptionsgeschichte. Rather than just engage in polarized debates about whether or not Lessing was right in his delineations of

121 For further discussion (and further references), see the chapters by Squire, Décultot, and Grethlein in this book. 122 Lessing 1984: 5. The phrase ‘unordentliche Collectanea’ also provides a title for the essays in Robert and Vollhardt (eds.) 2013.

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poetry and painting, the book engages scholars from divergent academic backgrounds, each reading the text with their own concerns, questions, and interests. Some contributors address Laocoon from a systematic theoretical and conceptual perspective, returning to timeless issues about the ‘boundaries’ between word and image (no less than hierarchies between poetry, drama, sculpture, and painting). Other chapters, by contrast, stress the historicizing stakes—whether exploiting aspects in the text’s reception to shed light on its original theoretical framework, or championing the historical and ideological conditions that moulded the systematic conclusions of Lessing’s essay (as indeed his particular view of the classical past). Our objective has been to rally behind—rather than reconcile—such divergent diachronic, conceptual, and historicizing approaches: the Ordnung of these unordentliche Collectanea lies in bringing different modes of criticism into closer contact with one another. The point lies at the heart of the following chapter by David Wellbery, who begins by charting some of the ways in which Laocoon has been ‘good to think with’ among the various artistic and literary theoreticians of the twentieth century. In Lessingian circles, as we have said, Wellbery is best known for his work on Laocoon’s relation to Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Wellbery 1984). In his chapter here, though, Wellbery revises his earlier readings: rather than see ‘media theory’ as Lessing’s primary contribution (a view bound up with the intellectual preoccupations of the 1980s), Wellbery suggests that this might in fact amount to something of ‘secondary’ importance. For contemporary readers, Lessing’s contribution in the field of semiotics is arguably less valuable than the ‘conceptual constellation’ of his essay (as discussed here in terms of the nature of critical judgment, the primacy of human action, and the texture of human emotion). If Laocoon is a work of classical reception, reading this text in light of its own posthumous receptions can illuminate both what Lessing shares with his critical heirs and, no less importantly, where posthumous responses part company with Lessing’s own intellectual assumptions. In the following chapter, Michael Squire throws a spotlight on how Greek and Roman materials might illuminate Lessing’s essay. The project of Laocoon can in part be understood as a historicist one, Squire demonstrates: as we have already noted, the opening and closing sections of the essay are structured around the interpretation of a single ancient statue-group (together with Winckelmann’s interpretation of it), introducing all manner

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of ancient historical testimonia to illuminate the transhistorical differences between ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’. Yet for all its debts to ancient thinking, the Laocoon’s conclusions about the two media—not least, Lessing’s implicit argument concerning the superiority of ‘ancient’ words over images—are predicated on a particular set of ‘modern’ ideas, themselves conditioned by a certain theological outlook. While purporting to talk about antiquity, Lessing re-imagines that Graeco-Roman ‘world full of gods’ in distinctly ‘Protestant’ terms: it is Lessing’s deeply Lutheran assumptions that ultimately instantiate his delineation of poetry from painting on the one hand, and his demonization of the visual arts on the other. Luca Giuliani likewise approaches Laocoon from the perspective of contemporary classical scholarship. Just as Lessing grounded his analysis of medial limits in inductive arguments drawn from ancient Greek and Roman case studies, Giuliani evaluates Laocoon as an ‘analytical tool’ for the twenty-first-century classical archaeologist. In doing so, Giuliani returns to some of the same literary case studies that so engrossed Lessing 250 years ago—and none of them more so than Homer’s Iliad. At the same time, Giuliani introduces into the mix (what we now know to be) our best source for Archaic and Classical Greek Malerei: namely Greek vase-painting. By probing Lessing’s theories of the respective workings of art and text, and exploring them in the context of ancient depictions of the Iliad (especially seventh- and sixthcentury BC vase-paintings), the chapter explores both the virtues and problems of Lessing’s account. As Giuliani argues, this historical perspective can help us formulate (and indeed delimit) the analytical importance of Lessing’s framework; at the same time, the perspective of ancient art can help us see how Lessing’s text is as much a treatise against as about the visual arts. While many of the chapters in this volume focus on Lessing’s distinction between ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’, Katherine Harloe demonstrates Laocoon’s important contributions to the wider field of eighteenthcentury aesthetics. The particular focus of her chapter lies in Lessing’s thinking about ‘sympathy’ (Mitleid), above all in the context of drama. Anticipating numerous aspects of Lessing’s later Hamburgische Dramaturgie, Laocoon shows Lessing—himself a major playwright—forging a theory of drama against the backdrop of both Aristotelian philosophy and ancient dramatic paradigms. Harloe homes in on a particular passage in the fourth chapter of Laocoon, where Lessing has recourse to

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Sophocles’ Philoctetes in order to engage with Adam Smith’s arguments about the moral force of sympathy. In doing so, she champions the wide range of contemporary critical themes brought together in the essay, as well as the international scope of Lessing’s Enlightenment thinking. Where Harloe focuses on Laocoon’s engagement with the work of Adam Smith, Frederick Beiser’s chapter deals with the palpable impact of another central eighteenth-century author (and one of Lessing’s closest personal friends): Moses Mendelssohn. As noted above, Mendelssohn composed his own treatise about the differences between the arts in 1757, paying particular attention to hybrid artistic forms that combined ‘natural’ and ‘arbitrary’ signs through their fusion of ‘successive’ and ‘instantaneous’ elements. In his comments on an early draft of Laocoon, Mendelssohn reminded Lessing that poetry—due to the arbitrariness of its signs—could also succeed in expressing objects that coexist with one another rather than only consecutive actions in time. Of all Mendelssohn’s comments on Laocoon, Beiser argues, this was the one that most troubled Lessing. Although Beiser does not find Laocoon’s response to Mendelssohn convincing, he uses the exchange between the two writers to clarify aspects of Lessing’s own thinking, demonstrating how Lessing’s arguments are bound up with a larger nexus of contemporary debates, ideologies, and assumptions. Lessing’s arguments about the ‘arbitrariness’ of poetic signs—together with his response to Mendelssohn’s objections in Laocoon’s seventeenth chapter—likewise provide the backdrop for Avi Lifschitz’s essay. As Beiser’s chapter makes clear, Lessing dismisses Mendelssohn’s counterarguments by pointing out that while language in general is arbitrary, this should not be the specific attribute of poetry. According to Lessing, who bases his arguments on the analysis of ancient case studies, the particular purpose of poetry must be the creation of a vivid illusion that approximates the immediacy of pictorial representation. Lessing attempts to cast the poet as ‘elevating’ arbitrary linguistic signs to the status of the natural signs of painting. Lifschitz sets out to explore the seeming paradox of this position. He argues that Lessing drew upon a wide range of French and German thinkers who downplayed the arbitrariness of language while simultaneously emphasizing its natural features (among them, Rousseau’s projection of a performative ‘language of signs’ onto classical antiquity, Condillac’s ‘language of action’, and not least Diderot’s musings on what he termed ‘poetic hieroglyphs’).

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Lifschitz consequently shows how Laocoon takes its inspiration from multiple sources, extending far beyond the intellectual remit of Christian Wolff and his German followers: Lessing’s call for the naturalization of arbitrary signs, and his discussion of ancient poetry in this light, can only be understood against the backdrop of a cross-European debate about linguistic signs. Whereas Beiser and Lifschitz examine Laocoon as a key contribution to eighteenth-century semiotics, Daniel Fulda evaluates the text against the backdrop of contemporary historiography. For many scholars, Laocoon’s edicts have been understood to pertain to ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’ plain and simple. But as Fulda explains, Lessing’s underlying prescriptions about painterly ‘space’ and poetic ‘time’ are also shaped by debates on how to write history—debates that themselves stretch all the way back (as indeed waged in response) to Graeco-Roman precedent. Ultimately, Fulda argues, Lessing’s prescriptions about the proper ‘limits’ of ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’ respond to what was seen as a weakness of German historiography in the eighteenth century: namely, the struggle to reconcile the spatial and temporal dimensions of historical writing. With Élisabeth Décultot’s chapter we shift attention to the actual medium of Lessing’s text. If Laocoon constitutes an attempt to delineate the boundaries of poetry and painting, to what extent can these categories be applied to Lessing’s essay? How aware of these poles is the author in writing his own text that unfolds in time? Indeed, might Laocoon itself be understood as an exercise in ‘poetry’? To answer these questions, Décultot first turns to a 1755 text that Lessing had earlier composed with Mendelssohn (Pope—ein Metaphysiker!), a treatise in which both thinkers had tried to delineate the different realms of poetry and philosophy. Décultot proceeds to argue that there is a close proximity between what Lessing calls ‘poetry’ and his own philosophical writing: criticism, at least as practised in Laocoon, narrates action in time through the representation of a sequence of readings and debates with Lessing’s contemporaries. Along the way, the chapter argues that Lessing’s respective methods of distinguishing between two domains—whether between metaphysics and poetry (in Pope—ein Metaphysiker!), and between poetry and painting (in Laocoon)—prepared the way for an expanded aesthetic understanding of poetry. Moving forward to the immediate reception of Lessing’s Laocoon— that is, to the reception of Lessing’s own reception of classical art and

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literature—Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within emerging debates over the proper depiction of suffering in art. More specifically, Robertson’s chapter focuses on Goethe’s writings on the ancient Laocoon group, as well as on other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century treatises dealing with the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s understanding of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal for Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art (a crusade that Goethe waged in alliance with Schiller), Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay instead in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’). The topic of beauty resurfaces in a different form in Jason Gaiger’s chapter, which examines Lessing’s approach to the medium of the artwork from an unabashedly art-theoretical perspective. One of the most challenging—and widely misunderstood—aspects of the essay, in Gaiger’s view, is its argument about the interplay between an artwork and the imaginative response of the subject. What role does the actual medium of a representation play in Laocoon? Does Lessing champion a ‘transparency theory of art’ (whereby the medium of representation is ideally ‘transparent’ to what it represents)? Or does Laocoon assume a more dynamic mode of engagement between material form and subjective imagination? Gaiger explores how different critics have differently approached these questions (with particular reference to the work of Anthony Savile, Arthur Danto, and David Wellbery). In casting doubt on the idea that Lessing subscribed to a ‘transparency theory of art’, moreover, Gaiger joins Lifschitz in suggesting that Laocoon works within a more complex framework of semiotic theory than is often assumed. Jonas Grethlein, like Gaiger, tackles Laocoon from the perspective of contemporary aesthetics, developing Gaiger’s interest in issues of subjective imaginative response. Grethlein begins by surveying some of the different ‘ideological’ critiques of Lessing’s thesis—its notional nationalist undertones, its supposed anti-visual stance, and not least the gendered stakes of its dichotomy between painting and poetry.

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Responding to such ‘deconstructionist’ readings, Grethlein argues that Lessing’s insights are fundamental for articulating how aesthetic experience works, and in a series of transhistorical ways. Reformulating Lessing’s categories of temporal ‘poetry’ and spatial ‘painting’, while also concentrating on aesthetic response rather than formal medial difference, Grethlein treats the essay as a guide for delineating what he labels ‘narratives’ and ‘pictures’: Lessing’s arguments about ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’ can help to advance a phenomenological argument about the ‘as if ’ (in Kendall Walton’s terms) of aesthetic experience, in particular the different modes of spatial and temporal response involved in reacting to narratives and pictures. Where Grethlein (like others in the book) focuses first and foremost on the medial distinctions at work in Lessing’s essay, Paul Kottman sets out to rethink Lessing’s fundamental contribution to the history of aesthetics. For Kottman, Lessing talks of the differences between visual and verbal media primarily only to demonstrate their shared aesthetic effects. At stake, Kottman claims, is the very question of how art contributes to criticism—as played out in Lessing’s opening distinction between the perspectives of the ‘amateur’, ‘philosopher’, and ‘critic’. Like Wellbery, Kottman subsequently argues that what drives Lessing’s interest in different media is less their specific properties or constraints than their respective ways of soliciting the aesthetic imagination: through its careful examination of literary and visual products, Lessing’s essay is an attempt to grapple with the special ways in which the practice of art makes the world intelligible. If Gaiger, Grethlein, and Kottman all approach Lessing’s treatise from the critical viewpoints of modern aesthetics, Jürgen Trabant introduces an anthropological-historical perspective. For Trabant, Lessing’s distinction between poetry and painting can stand for a wider controversy about the respective status (and indeed relative developmental history) of words and images. The historical anthropology of language, Trabant argues, can help substantiate many of Lessing’s theories, not least the idea that word and image share substantial common ground as embodiments of human thought. In particular, Trabant explores Lessing’s Grenzen in relation to the concept of ‘articulation’—not only of sounds, but also of cognitive distinctions. Returning to the themes discussed by (among others) Beiser and Lifschitz, Trabant concludes that the specific structure of phonetic articulation allows greater arbitrariness and combinatory possibilities than visual images. Ultimately, he suggests, it is

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phonetic articulation that enabled the rise of human culture: if Lessing prompts us to imagine ‘word’ and ‘image’ as occupying two floors within a shared house, we are justified in assuming a certain topography—one in which language occupies the first floor above the realm of visual imagery. In his closing epilogue, returning full-circle to the themes explored in W. J. T. Mitchell’s preface, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ends the volume by examining what it means to read Lessing’s text from a distance of 250 years. Throughout the book, several contributors make reference to Gumbrecht’s arguments concerning aesthetic ‘presence’, in particular his polemics about the legacy of Enlightenment semiotic modes. In tackling issues about hermeneutics, materiality, and the reception of the past head-on, however, Gumbrecht explores both the proximity and distance between our intellectual concerns in 2016 and those that motivated Lessing’s essay in 1766. The mediation of so many ‘classical presences’ within Lessing’s treatise, we might say, finds a parallel in our own mediations of Lessing’s essay. So much for the parts. But what of the volume as a whole? We end this introduction by reiterating that this book offers only a selective ‘rethinking’ of Lessing’s Laocoon: just as Lessing’s views of ancient art and literature were coloured by the concerns of his Enlightenment milieu in 1766, so too are our own responses to Laocoon no doubt shaped by our own specific disciplinary and cultural contexts on the occasion of the essay’s 2016 anniversary. We do not claim to have addressed every aspect of Laocoon; indeed, our combined argument is that so wide-ranging an essay must resist any such closure. Yet it is the very breadth of responses, drawn from across the humanities, that our book sets out to champion. The sentiment seems a fitting tribute to the provocations of Lessing’s original essay: as the essay embarks on its next quarter-millennium, we hope that future audiences will find in it as much to entice, bait, and goad as previous readers have done over the last 250 years.123

123 We are grateful to contributors to this volume—as well as to Jaś Elsner, Constanze Güthenke, and Oxford University Press’s two anonymous readers—for their comments on an earlier draft of our introduction.

2 Laocoon Today On the Conceptual Infrastructure of Lessing’s Treatise David E. Wellbery

This was more hesitation than conviction: all I can say is that I tended to foresee misalliance of some sort between the impersonal, instantaneous thereness of the picture on one side of the page, and the personal, time-stretching pleas of the verse on the other. Seamus Heaney (Heaney 1992: vii)

Compared with other eighteenth-century critical treatises, Lessing’s Laocoon stands out in virtue of its robust afterlife. The affine writings of, for example, the Abbé Dubos, James Harris, Charles Batteux, Lord Kames (Henry Home), or Johann Jakob Engel, however important in their historical moment, today barely arouse even antiquarian interest. By contrast, 250 years after its publication (1766) Lessing’s Laocoon continues to sponsor original thinking about the arts. Four dates from the cutting edge of early twentieth-century critical reflection may serve to demonstrate the work’s fecundity: 1901—In a brilliant book that would prove influential among the Russian Formalists, Theodor Meyer draws on Lessing to delineate the specifically linguistic character of the poetic imagination;1 1938—A seminal essay on sound in film by Rudolf Arnheim advertises its indebtedness to Lessing in its title;2

1

Meyer 1990. Arnheim’s 1938 essay on ‘A new Laocoon: artistic composites and the talking film’ is reprinted as Arnheim 1957: 199–230. 2

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1940—Clement Greenberg invokes Lessing’s example in his trenchant advocacy of modernist abstraction, setting the agenda of art criticism for decades;3 1945—Joseph Frank dialectically shapes the argument of his groundbreaking essay ‘Spatial form in modern literature’ as a confrontation with Lessing’s ideas.4 More recently, interest in Lessing has surged along with interest in semiotics and media theory.5 In fact, it can be said (and this applies to the present volume as well) that the actualité of Laocoon has typically been galvanized by Lessing’s indisputable achievement as a theorist of artistic media and modes of signification. In view of such massive consensus, it is worth asking whether other strata of Lessing’s theory deserve our sustained attention. The project of this chapter is to explore that question. I shall try to make the case that Lessing’s thought in Laocoon can be understood as organized around three foci of intellectual concern: (1) the nature of critical judgment; (2) the primacy of human action; and (3) the texture of human emotion. As will become clear, these are interwoven themes, and this is because they are components of a larger vision of the character and purpose of human life. If Lessing continues to deserve our practical (not merely antiquarian) interest, it is because his theoretical work always has this encompassing picture in view. Of course, I would be the last to deny that Lessing’s contribution to semiotics and media theory is immense.6 But we do him justice only if we hold in view the fact that this contribution was in the service of an overriding endeavour to bring to articulate awareness the moral character of human life. What I refer to here as the conceptual infrastructure of Laocoon is the constellation of leading concepts that gives shape to that endeavour as it unfolds in the aesthetic domain.7

3

The 1940 essay is reprinted as Greenberg 1986. The essay is republished with additional material in Frank 1991: 1–38. 5 Among countless examples, one might think of Franz et al. (eds.) 2007. More generally on Laocoon’s reception, see the introductory comments in the introduction to this volume by Lifschitz and Squire, pp. 38–49. 6 See Wellbery 1984. 7 For an elaboration of the point—on Lessing’s concern with the very contribution of criticism, and his understanding that art yields a special sort of understanding (earned 4

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Critical Judgment In the vocabulary of contemporary humanistic research, the concept of ‘theory’ (bereft of an objective genitive) has replaced the designation that since Pope’s cunningly rhymed Essay on Criticism (1711) had marked responsible intellectual engagement with the arts. For this reason, it is worth highlighting the fact that Lessing begins the preface to Laocoon by distinguishing the work of the critic (Kunstrichter) from the response to art and poetry on the part of the amateur (the Liebhaber or ‘lover’ of the arts), on the one hand, and the aesthetic ruminations of the philosopher, on the other. Interestingly, the distinction bears on the critic’s peculiar susceptibility to error, which is to say: on the risks encountered along the path to just critical appraisal. For the philosopher’s reflection unfolds in the space of first principles and deductions from these (Lessing has the deductive method of Baumgarten and his amanuensis Meier in mind), while the amateur’s response abides within the immediacy of sensibility. Philosopher and amateur rest on the secure foundations, respectively, of syllogistic reason and incontrovertible affection. The critic, however, shuttles between these regions, seeking words that mediate between general rule and particular instance, and here there is no guarantee of rightness of fit. Hence the excesses of criticism: its overstatements, its metaphorical extravagance, or—the reverse error—its rigid literalism. These are tendencies that modernity exhibits in the extreme, and the argument of Laocoon aims to contravene them. Targeted above all, of course, is the modern critic’s literalist interpretation of the ancient conceit that poetry is a talking painting.8 As the work’s subtitle—‘On the Limits of Painting and Poetry’—suggests, the task of Laocoon will be to remedy this error by carving out the limits of each art form. The thought just reviewed advances so quickly toward what will prove to be the heart of the book’s argument—the elaboration of the semioticmedial differences foreclosing the equation of painting and poetry—that it is easy to overlook the more fundamental intellectual commitments it carries. Pope, of course, had stressed the fact that criticism is prone to through the careful consideration of the achievements of specific artworks and practices)— see also Kottman’s chapter in this volume. 8 For the ancient Simonidean and Horatian backdrop to the thinking—and more generally on Lessing’s preface to Laocoon—see the editors’ introduction to this book (esp. pp. 19–20).

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error and that its errors all too easily entrench themselves as common opinion. This background can make Lessing’s opening polemic against the false steps of modern criticism seem conventional. It is noteworthy, however, that Lessing makes the point in the context of a comparison that renders fallibility—the very possibility of getting the judgment wrong—a precondition of substantial content. Although the amateur’s ‘feeling’ is immune to error (he feels just what he feels), it is likewise hopelessly delivered over to the particular instance. Not only has the amateur no wrong reasons for his preferences, he has no reasons at all. Submerged in sensate response, he is conceptually mute, incapable of accounting for his reactions. The corresponding gloss on the philosopher’s deductions (Schlüssen) brings out the flaw that, although these may flow with certainty from premise to conclusion, their invulnerability to error comes at the cost of insulation from the case at hand. Lessing’s dawning suspicion of the deductive form of philosophical aesthetics, the concepts of which he had inherited from Baumgarten, Meier, and Mendelssohn, becomes audible here.9 When held up to the insistent particularity of artworks, the derivation of concepts from concepts from concepts comes to feel like vacuous wordplay. Hence the sardonic comment: ‘To derive whatever one wishes in the loveliest order from a few accepted verbal definitions: that is something we [Germans] know how to do better than any nation in the world.’10 We thus come to see that Lessing’s polemic against the errors of modern critics harbours the insight that the error-free zones in which the amateur and the philosopher operate are, for opposed but symmetrical reasons, cognitively barren. One is reminded of Kant’s dictum: ‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.’11 Kant’s thought is formulated in the course of considering the juncture of spontaneity and receptivity in empirical judgments, and just that—the focus on judgment—is the point of linking Lessing’s thought with his. In other 9 I have traced this genealogy in Wellbery 1984; see also Beiser 2009 and Beiser’s chapter in this book. 10 Lessing 2012: 9 (Preface): ‘Aus ein Paar angenommenen Worterklärungen in der schönsten Ordnung alles, was wir nur wollen, herzuleiten, darauf verstehen wir uns, Trotz einer Nation der Welt.’ In what follows I refer to Friedrich Vollhardt’s German edition of Lessing’s essay (Lessing 2012); unlike other contributors to this volume, I have opted to provide my own English translations—although by providing chapter references, I hope to facilitate reference to the McCormick translation of Lessing 1984. 11 For the comments in Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft, see Kant 1956: 95 (= A 51/B 75).

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words, Lessing’s comparison of the critic’s position with those of the amateur and the philosopher establishes the primacy of critical judgment in any attempt to give theoretical form to our encounter with the arts. Criticism is not the application of theory, but the risk-laden domain in which theoretical concepts are first articulated and tested for pertinence. In other words, headline theoretical concepts such as simultaneity and successivity—what Joyce, alluding to Lessing, called the ‘ineluctable modalities’ of the audible and the visible12—bear genuine import just to the degree that they express concerns actuated in compelling judgments of aesthetic value. We can deepen this point by considering a second aspect of Lessing’s opening polemic. The preference he accords the ‘ancient’ critics as opposed to their ‘modern’ counterparts is not mere favouritism, but rather is supported by an argument neatly condensed in the apothegm: ‘It is the privilege of the ancients in every matter to do neither too much nor too little.’13 A good critic, that is to say, exercises ‘moderation’ (Mäßigung) in his judgments, and moderation is not a concept applied but a virtue evinced in the course of right practice. Now in saying this, Lessing is not merely praising the ancient critics. Rather, he is locating the critic’s job of work within the sphere of practical reason (phronêsis) as the ancients conceived it. Here Lessing’s Aristotelian commitments, well documented in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, are on display. Lessing understands right critical practice as taking place within a general understanding of what is good for human flourishing, as requiring sensitivity to the particulars of situation, as drawing on knowledge and skills acquired over one’s life history, as embodying virtues (such as moderation), in short: as reason-realized-in-doing (not merely contemplative or theoretical).14 Critical judgment brings the objects encountered (artworks) within the orbit of the overall course of human life, relates them to an encompassing context of concerns, and, in doing so, deepens and refines the articulation of those concerns. Appraisal does not follow objective description ex post. Rather, discrimination and 12

For the comment (from Ulysses), see the edition of Joyce 1986: 31. Lessing 2012: 8 (Preface). ‘Es ist das Vorrecht der Alten, keiner Sache weder zu viel noch zu wenig zu thun.’ 14 On the Aristotelian background, see especially Gadamer’s comments in ‘Praktisches Wissen’, Gadamer 1985: 230–48, and ‘Vernunft und praktische Philosophie’, Gadamer 1995: 259–86. 13

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evaluation are unified in the act of critical judgment, the source from which good theory springs. These general considerations drawn from the preface suggest a reading of Laocoon not principally as a theory of artistic media, but rather as the demonstration—better: the dramatization—of critical judgment. Tracing the meandering path of reflection Laocoon carves out, the reader is afforded an inside view of the formation of critical thought, as if the text were framed with the meta-pragmatic guideline: ‘Watch! This is how criticism is done!’ Moreover, since dramatic poignancy is achieved through the staging of conflict, the dramatic performance of Lessing’s prose assumes the form of critical debate throughout.15 We may take as an example for closer study the debate that engages Lessing’s worthiest opponent, the altercation with Winckelmann. According to the dramaturgy of Lessing’s text, it is a remark of Winckelmann’s—and a passing one at that—that first draws Lessing’s attention to the Laocoon statue. I take this arrangement to highlight the factor of contingency in aesthetic judgment, its initiation in a singular encounter. In the course of Lessing’s reflection, however, such intellectual resonance accrues to that encounter that the particular statue advances to the status of exemplar, becoming the site where the nature of sculpture in general can be studied. This must be considered a cardinal achievement of Lessing’s Laocoon as well as a principal source of its influence across two and a half centuries. Goethe nicely put the point in his essay ‘About Laocoon’ (1798) by claiming that all of art (die ganze Kunst) is contained in the statue.16 Since Lessing’s intervention, the paradigm case has become the indispensible focal point of critical reflection. It is insufficient to say that reflection takes its starting point from the statue. Lessing’s dramatization homes in on the precise point of puzzlement from which critical judgment springs. At issue is a striking detail, a particular fact about the statue’s shape that seems to pose a conundrum. And that’s what Lessing highlights: that criticism has its incipience in a perplexing observation and unfolds as a working through of the perplexity to the point where it is resolved such that the wisdom (Weisheit) of the

15 On Lessing’s criticism as a form of dramatic ‘poetry’, see Décultot’s chapter in this volume. 16 Goethe’s essay is reprinted in Goethe 1986–2000: XVIII.489–500. On Goethe and Lessing’s Laocoon, see also Ritchie Robertson’s contribution to this volume.

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artistic arrangement shows through.17 Note that the puzzlement does not occur automatically. It requires keenness of attention and it presupposes that features noted are being checked against expectations of normal (perhaps: natural) coherence. This emerges when we attend to the detail in question. The puzzling observation that Winckelmann and Lessing share picks out the fact that the statue presents Laocoon as merely sighing or gasping, although in view of his physical agony one would expect a scream. Resolution of the perplexity will be achieved by disclosing the ‘rule’ (Regel) or piece of artistic ‘wisdom’ to which the deviation from what would normally be expected conforms. Criticism moves from perceived conundrum to comprehended regularity. The dissension between Lessing and Winckelmann stems from the fact that they each draw their explanatory resources from different frameworks of intelligibility. Our interest here is with Lessing’s practice of criticism, and we can therefore confine ourselves to a compact characterization of the direction taken by Winckelmann’s critical reflection. Winckelmann seeks resolution of the conundrum in what he holds to be the deepest values of Greek culture. His claim is that Laocoon’s sigh expresses ‘grandeur of soul’ (Grösse der Seele), a key component, in his view, of the human ideal as conceived by the philosophers and artists of ancient Greece. The possessor of such grandeur is capable of maintaining composure even while enduring extreme pain and adversity. The wisdom expressed in the statue, then, is the visionary apprehension of an ideal life form. The sculpted Laocoon’s sigh loses its perplexing character when it is understood as conforming to this overarching vision of what human life ought to be. Winckelmann’s is an ethical-aesthetic criticism (with powerful Platonic commitments). It finds aesthetic excellence where ethical ideals achieve startling, gripping, elevating embodiment in visible beauty. Indeed, it is embodiment of the ideal that constitutes visible beauty.

17 The point I am eliciting from Lessing’s dramaturgy is handsomely formulated in this remark of Stanley Cavell’s (in the context of his essay on ‘Music discomposed’: Cavell 2002: 182): ‘Nothing could be commoner among critics of art than to ask why the thing is as it is, and characteristically to put this question, for example, in the form: “Why does Shakespeare follow the murder of Duncan with a scene which begins with the sound of knocking?” or “Why does Beethoven put in a bar of rest in the last line of the fourth Bagatelle (Op. 126)?” The best critic is the one who knows best where to ask this question, and how to get an answer.’

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Lessing begins by falsifying Winckelmann’s claim that such fullthroated emotional expressions as screams and woeful lamentation were banished from Greek life, or even from artistically represented Greek life, with Homer and Sophocles providing the telling counterexamples. Of course, more than historical accuracy is at stake here. Lessing very much wants to extricate ancient art from what he sees as Winckelmann’s ideal of Stoic valour and to promulgate instead a conception of classical Greek culture that mirrors his own compassion-based Enlightenment humanism. But the major thrust is to demonstrate that ethical idealization fails to offer the framework of intelligibility required to make sense of Laocoon’s sigh. At the close of the first chapter Lessing flags this conclusion: And now I come to my inference [from the assembled historical data]. If it is true that screaming when sensing corporeal pain, especially according to the ancient Greek way of thinking, is indeed compatible with a great soul, then the expression of such a soul cannot be the cause on account of which the artist nonetheless did not want to represent such screaming; rather, there must be another reason why he here departs from his rival, the poet, who deliberately expresses the scream.18

If the historical context of ethical-aesthetic ideals won’t do the job, what is, on Lessing’s view, the framework of intelligibility required to account for Laocoon’s sigh? The most straightforward answer to this question is: the art form. The default context one has to look to in order to understand the success (or, for that matter, the failure) of even perplexing artistic choices is, in the case at hand, the order of ‘painting’ itself.19 Stationary visible arrays with representational content displayed for extended contemplation: such are the material/perceptual conditions of

18 Lessing 2012: 15 (chapter 1): ‘Und nunmehr komme ich zu meiner Folgerung. Wenn es wahr ist, daß das Schreyen bei Empfindung körperlichen Schmerzes, besonders nach der alten griechischen Denkungsart, gar wohl mit einer grossen Seele bestehen kann: so kann der Ausdruck einer solchen Seele die Ursache nicht seyn, warum dem ohngeachtet der Künstler in seinem Marmor dieses Schreyen nicht nachahmen wollen; sondern es muß einen andern Grund haben, warum er hier von seinem Nebenbuhler, dem Dichter, abgehet, der dieses Geschrey mit dem besten Vorsatze ausdrücket.’ Note that ‘cause’ (Ursache) is not meant in the sense of mechanism, but in the sense of ‘reason’ (Grund) for doing something. 19 As has been pointed out since the earliest reviews of Laocoon, Lessing’s use of ‘painting’ to cover both painting and sculpture is a questionable practice. I shall employ the umbrella term plastic arts, but on occasion use of the term ‘painting’ in Lessing’s dilated sense is unavoidable.

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the plastic arts. If these conditions are to be actualized as an art form, they must be subjected to a set of rules that allow, or disallow, painterly selections of means and content. Such rules constitute the ‘wisdom’ of the artist, the know-how required by the art form within which he works. They are the rules—one might also say: the ‘reason’—emergent from and embodied within the practice. In the context of the plastic arts as paradigmatically practised by the ancients, the supreme rule is what Lessing calls the law of beauty: ‘I merely wanted to establish that for the ancients beauty was the highest law of the plastic arts.’20 The law is supreme in the sense that in painting the achievement of beauty trumps all other ends, such as accuracy of representation or emotional expression. This can sound like a variety of aestheticism: the elevation of beauty above all other values, beauty for beauty’s sake; but in fact Lessing’s claim involves a radical demotion of the concept of beauty. For the point he is driving at is that an art form that realizes itself within a stationary visible array must first of all guarantee that the display doesn’t perceptually offend the sensibility of its beholder. Beauty here is an utterly trivial perfection, the function of which is to ensure that the visual array is capable of sustaining the sort of undisturbed and pleasing attention within which other and deeper values can become present to the imagination.21 Had the artist sculpted a Laocoon screaming in pain, then that baseline beauty would have come to ruin, and with it the entire artistic effect: ‘Merely the wide opening of the mouth—setting aside how violently and repulsively the other parts of the face would have been distorted and displaced—appears in painting as a blotch and in sculpture as a cavity, the effect of which is most adverse.’22 The difference from 20 Lessing 2012: 19 (chapter 2): ‘Ich wollte bloß festsetzen, daß bey den Alten die Schönheit das höchste Gesetz der bildenden Künste gewesen sey.’ 21 On the triviality of beauty, see the comment at Lessing 2012: 29 (chapter 4): ‘ . . . this much is indisputable, that, since the entire immeasurable realm of perfection is available for poetic presentation, this visible cover beneath which perfection becomes beauty can only be one of the most unimportant means through which the poet knows to interest us for his figures.’ (‘ . . . so ist so viel unstreitig, daß, da das ganze Reich der Vollkommenheit seiner Nachahmung offen stehet, diese sichtbare Hülle, unter welcher Vollkommenheit zu Schönheit wird, nur eines von den geringsten Mitteln seyn kann, durch die er uns für seine Personen zu intereßieren weis.’) 22 Lessing 2012: 23 (chapter 2): ‘Die bloße weite Öfnung des Mundes,—bey Seite gesetzt, wie gewaltsam und eckel auch die übrigen Theile des Gesichts dadurch verzerret und verschoben werden,—ist in der Mahlerey ein Fleck und in der Bildhauerey eine Vertiefung, welche die widrigste Wirkung von der Welt thut.’

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Winckelmann’s view could hardly be more pronounced. For Winckelmann ‘beauty’ is the becoming-visible of a transcendent ideal; for Lessing it is the minimal requirement of artistic success within the constraints of visual-spatial representation. The Winckelmann–Lessing debate juxtaposes a mode of critical reflection and judgment oriented toward an ethical-aesthetic (indeed, metaphysical) framework of intelligibility with a critical practice oriented toward a technical-aesthetic framework. One could write an account of the subsequent history of criticism as a series of pendulum-swings between these two positions.

Human Action The foregoing discussion could leave the misleading impression that to look toward the order of the art form as a framework of intelligibility for critical judgment is an action kindred to consulting a stone tablet on which the ‘rules’ constituting the ‘wisdom’ of the art form in question have been inscribed for all eternity. On the contrary, such practiceembodied rules only achieve articulation in and through the work of the critic. This involves delicate attention to the complexities of the individual case and risky generalization to the norms internal to the art form. The critic discloses and lends explicit formulation to the intuitively understood regularities of successful artistic production. In barest outline, this is what is meant by critical judgment. Lessing’s reflection on the artistic wisdom revealed in the crafting of a ‘sighing Laocoon’ addresses an elementary case, but it nonetheless places on exhibit the logic of critical judgment. To get a fuller sense of Lessing’s critical practice, however, it is instructive to consider a richer example, and for this we may take Lessing’s most important contribution to the criticism of the plastic arts (in particular, of painting), his doctrine of the pregnant moment. The force of this doctrine is misconstrued if it is conceived as a codified rule that artists must obey. Rather, it is an explanation developed, as in the example of Laocoon’s sigh, from the observation of a feature that prompts the question: Why has the artist selected this rather than something else? Reading a description of Timomachus’ painting of Ajax’s rage, Lessing’s attention is arrested by the fact that the artist chose to present the moment following the actual outburst of mad, violent fury: ‘Ajax did not appear among the herds in his fury, binding and slaying the cattle and goats he took for men. Rather,

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the master painter showed him as he sits there, exhausted after completing these insane heroic deeds, and now forms the intention of killing himself.’23 Of the same artist’s Medea, Lessing notes: ‘He did not take Medea at the moment in which she actually kills her children, but a few moments earlier, when maternal love and jealousy do battle within her.’24 These are two instances of the type of choice previously encountered in the alternative sigh/scream: the selection of the moment before (Medea) or after (Ajax) the culminating event within a narrative rather than the moment of that violent culmination itself. The critic asks: Why this rather than that? He imaginatively plays through the alternatives.25 And this leads him, as he abstracts from the particulars (the Ajax and Medea paintings of Timomachus), to an insight bearing on the art form generally. That insight has the shape of a rule that conjoins a constraint intrinsic to the physical-perceptual conditions of the art form with a norm of successful artistic achievement: (a) Painters who draw on a narrative sequence must, due to the constraint of single-moment representation, select just one moment from the sequence as their sujet. (b) They ought to select not the apex of the action, its moment of greatest intensity, but rather a moment preceding or following from which the entire narrative may be imaginatively developed. That is the pregnant moment; it is pregnant with narrative implications that imaginatively unfurl in the course of the beholder’s contemplation. As regards Timomachus’ Ajax, such imaginative ‘seeing’ can look like this: ‘And that actually is the raging Ajax; not because he rages in this very moment, but rather because one sees that he has raged; because one has the most vivid impression of the immensity of his rage from the despair and shame he himself now feels. One sees the storm in the ruins

23 Lessing 2012: 28 (chapter 3): ‘Ajax erschien nicht, wie er unter den Heerden wüthet, und Rinder und Böcke für Menschen fesselt und mordet. Sondern der Meister zeigte ihn, wie er nach diesen wahnwitzigen Heldenthaten da sitzt, und den Anschlag fasset, sich selbst umzubringen.’ 24 Lessing 2012: 27 (chapter 3): ‘Die Medea hatte er nicht in dem Augenblicke genommen, in welchem sie ihre Kinder wirklich ermordet; sondern einige Augenblicke zuvor, da die mütterliche Liebe noch mit der Eifersucht kämpfet.’ 25 The method of imaginative variation, philosophically ennobled in the twentieth century by Husserl, has always been an indispensable tool of criticism.

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and corpses that he has cast across the land.’26 Here it is abundantly clear (and we may thus consider the matter settled) that there is no direct line leading from the physical-perceptual conditions of the art form to aesthetic achievement within that art form, no determinism of the ‘medium’, if that term is taken to denote the physical-perceptual conditions. Rather, the crucial matter is that art—the art form of painting, for example, with its possibilities of presentation—finds its way to realization under those conditions, and this requires invention: selecting, for example, the right moment, the right gesture, the right colour to present this Medea or this Ajax to the imagination. The ‘rule’ will always have to be interpreted anew, and this by both artist and critic in their parallel explorations of the possibilities of the art form. Lessing’s concept of the pregnant moment is revealing of another dimension essential to his critical thinking, namely the fact that he is concerned throughout Laocoon to assess the place of art forms within our overall understanding of what it is to be human. Art, in Lessing’s view, has its importance as a mode of human self-awareness. This means that art forms—in Laocoon, painting and poetry—can and must be evaluated as to their specific contribution to this self-understanding. The discussion of the pregnant moment bears on this issue because it shows that for Lessing the highest achievements of painting are to be located at the point where painting overcomes the physical-perceptual constraint of the single moment and provides access to a narrative rendering of the subject matter in question. Painting for Lessing is at its best when it transcends the state of painting. Why is this so? The passage on Ajax cited above points toward an answer to this question. When Lessing writes that the Ajax we would see in Timomachus’ painting actually is the raging Ajax, he is making an ontological claim. The purport of that claim is not that the Ajax of the hypothetical painting showing him madly raging here and now is somehow a counterfeit. The point is, rather, that Ajax is only given to us in the truth and fullness of his being if we apprehend the entire arc of his life course: the heroic

Lessing 2012: 28 (chapter 3): ‘Und das ist wirklich der rasende Ajax; nicht weil er eben itzt raset, sondern weil man siehet, daß er geraset hat; weil man die Grösse seiner Raserey am lebhaftesten aus der verzweiflungsvollen Scham abnimt, die er nun selbst darüber empfindet. Man siehet den Sturm in den Trümmern und Leichen, die er an das Land geworffen.’ 26

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pride, the wound of felt injustice, the mad blindness of his erupting rage, the senselessness of the animal slaughter, the awful shame and shattering despair that befall the hero when he becomes conscious of his grotesque act, and finally his suicide. To the degree that, through the selection of a pregnant moment, the painting succeeds in evoking this tragic parcours, it gives us to comprehend Ajax in the full actuality of his being. That Being is best understood as activity is a deep Aristotelian thought with which Lessing’s doctrine of the pregnant moment is in full concord.27 The doctrine of the pregnant moment bears not simply on the question of how best (at which moment) to represent a narrative content. The deeper issue is truth to the nature of human life as Being realized in actions that unfold over time, involve motivational and moral complexity, and achieve a completeness that is irreducible to a single temporal slice. To transcend painting within painting, then, is not merely to dilate a single depicted moment to an imagined sequence. It is, rather, to afford access to a principle of intelligibility in which, for example, insane fury and unbearable shame co-belong. Achieving the pregnant moment (no simple thing) transforms the unity of the painted content from the oneness of an instant within time into the oneness of time comprehended. A second, somewhat more complex example brings the issue into sharper focus. Once again it is a question of Laocoon—not, however, the sculpted figure, but the priest whose terrifying demise Virgil depicts in the second book of the Aeneid. Comparing Virgil’s description to what had already been remarked of the sculpture, Lessing writes:28 Even if it were a violation of propriety for a man in violent pain to scream, how can such a minor, passing impropriety count for us as a deficiency with regard to someone whose other virtues have already won us over? Virgil’s Laocoon screams, but this screaming Laocoon is the very same one whom we already know and love as the cautious patriot and the warmhearted father. We don’t

27

For a full account, see Kosman 2013. Lessing 2012: 30 (chapter 3): ‘Wäre es also auch wirklich einem Manne unanständig, in der Heftigkeit des Schmerzes zu schreyen; was kann diese kleine überhingehende Unanständigkeit demjenigen bey uns für Nachtheil bringen, dessen andere Tugenden uns schon für ihn eingenommen haben? Virgils Laokoon schreyet, aber dieser schreyende Laokoon ist eben derjenige, den wir bereits als den vorsichtigsten Patrioten, als den wärmsten Vater kennen und lieben. Wir beziehen sein Schreyen nicht auf seinen Charakter, sondern lediglich auf sein unerträgliches Leiden. Dieses allein hören wir in seinem Schreyen; und der Dichter konnte es uns durch dieses Schreyen allein sinnlich machen.’ 28

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relate his screaming to his character, but solely to his unbearable suffering. Only this is what we hear in his scream; and only through this means could the poet make that suffering sensible to us.

The thought here is that the poem gives us a richer Laocoon than the sculpture precisely because the meaning elements it selects are understood as relative to time and situation. Even if we assume (counterfactually) that screaming does not comport with manly composure, the passing scream will not dominate our overall response. The scream is understood to be an anomaly, caused by the momentary excruciation, and it by no means erases everything else the poem has taught us about Laocoon: his patriotism, his cautious council, his devotion as a father. As narrative, the poem can make all these aspects present to us and balance them against one another within a historical or narrative understanding of Laocoon’s character. The sculpture cannot do this, and this incapacity is not merely a quantitative matter but a question of truth. Limited to the depiction of a single moment, the sculpture necessarily magnifies whatever features it selects such that those few features suffuse the represented figure’s being. As sculpted, a screaming Laocoon would be entirely that: a screamer in every fibre of his character. The sculpture reduces the complex totality of the priest’s life in time to a momentary configuration and, in doing so, essentializes merely perceptible qualities. On Lessing’s view, this impoverishes human self-understanding. A remark of Lessing’s on modern poetic allegory brings out what I take to be the core thought behind these remarks. Poets who clutter their characters with allegorical attributes, Lessing claims, ‘for the most part fail to understand the main task at hand: namely to have their beings act and to characterize them through their actions’.29 Representing the poetic figures as acting is the poet’s main task (Hauptwerk) because action is the dimension in which human being realizes itself. We are the history of our actions. This thought, the deepest conviction of Lessing’s theological, critical, and literary work, has thus far become visible to us only in an occasional manner. It is, however, the organizing thought of Laocoon, the thought that guides every local comparison of the art forms of painting and poetry. Ernst Gombrich once remarked: ‘The more one 29 Lessing 2012: 90 (chapter 10): ‘ . . . verstehen sich meistentheils auf das Hauptwerk am wenigsten: nehmlich, ihre Wesen handeln zu laßen, und sie durch die Handlungen derselben zu charakterisieren.’

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reads the Laokoon, the stronger becomes the impression that it is not so much a book about as against the visual arts.’30 The impression is true, and the animus has its source in Lessing’s judgment that ‘painting’ (in the sense he used the term) is incapable of bringing human agency into imaginative presence, except, of course, by rendering its depicted moment pregnant and thereby transcending the state of painting. The natural habitat of poetry, on the other hand, is action, and the second prong of Lessing’s polemic spears efforts such as poetic descriptivism that seek to approximate painterly effects in verse. The crucial matter here is not so much time, but time as the dimension in which human action achieves itself. In order to see how thoroughly the concept of human action shapes Lessing’s aesthetic criticism it is useful to return to the analysis of Laocoon’s sigh from which we started. Lessing’s argument was that the selection of the sigh is motivated by the fact that ‘beauty is the supreme law’ of the art form. At the time I passed rather quickly over this passage, noting merely that in Lessing’s view beauty is a rather trivial perfection. But what is beauty exactly? ‘Corporeal beauty’, Lessing writes rather late in Laocoon, ‘arises from the harmonious effect of manifold parts that can be surveyed at once.’31 Beauty is the perfection that becomes present in painting as the unity and pleasing harmony of a visible array. But if this is the case, then it follows that beauty is inaccessible to poetry, and this, of course, is precisely the point Lessing is driving at: ‘The poet, who would only be able to show the elements of beauty in succession, therefore refrains from the depiction of corporeal beauty, as beauty, altogether.’32 With this sentence Lessing removes the last fetter linking poetry to the paradigm of painting. He emancipates poetry from the obligation of understanding itself in terms of beauty and, in fact, dethrones beauty as the cardinal value of aesthetics. To say that the poet refrains from the representation of beauty as beauty means that the poet need not endeavour to achieve the perceptible unity of arrangement (concord of visible manifold) that beauty in fact is. When Homer has Helen appear before 30

Gombrich 1957: 140. Lessing 2012: 145 (chapter 20): ‘Körperliche Schönheit entspringt aus der übereinstimmenden Wirkung mannigfaltiger Theile, die sich auf einmal übersehen lassen.’ 32 Lessing 2012: 145 (chapter 20): ‘Der Dichter der die Elemente der Schönheit nur nacheinander zeigen könnte, enthält sich daher der Schilderung körperlicher Schönheit, als Schönheit, gänzlich.’ 31

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the elders, her beauty—the self-presentation of a harmonious perceptual array—is not the telos of poetic representation. Rather, Homer makes of it something entirely different: a powerful motivating factor within an encompassing pattern of action. The emancipation of poetry from the thrall of painting would seem to leave the former without a principle of unity, but this is not the case. Lessing’s conviction that action is the dimension in which the human being realizes itself as what it is points toward the possibility of a principle of unity that holds even across succession, and that is, of course, the unity of purpose constitutive of action as such. Lessing’s boldest stroke in Laocoon (a stroke, however, that is deeply Aristotelian) is to introduce action as a self-standing (beauty-independent) principle of aesthetic organization. From this it follows that poetry, just insofar as it lends imaginative presence to complexly structured actions, affords a truer self-understanding of human life than what Lessing on occasion calls, not without disparagement, the ‘material art’ of painting. Just as beauty unifies a manifold of visually perceptible features to a consonant whole, action emerges as the synthetic unity of a manifold of temporal moments. That, however, is a merely formal definition. The crucial matter to see is that actuated human purpose—the effort to realize desired ends—brings forth the unity in question. Unity is immanent in the very concept of action, but, of course, the actions constitutive of normal human life do not ordinarily coalesce into a unity apprehended as such. In its quotidian manifestation, human action is fragmentary or thoughtless or desultory or routine. Awareness of both the unity and the internal tensions of our actions is not a given, but an exceptional achievement. Poetry, on Lessing’s conception, affords a self-understanding of human being otherwise not available, in the sense that it configures complex histories and intersecting motivations as salient unities. Consider the arc that describes Ajax’s life history from hero to suicide (on the very sword that is the emblem of his heroism!) via the stations of felt injustice, mad rage, despair, and shame. In the tragic mythos, these structural moments coalesce into an intelligible pattern, lifting into consciousness a possible shape of human life. Lessing’s rejection of Winckelmann’s position has its deepest source in this thought. Winckelmann understood that the plastic arts give us the beautiful human being, but he confused this mode of presentation of the human with an ethical ideal. Lessing’s aesthetics is animated by the notion that the self-awareness of our moral

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being is achievable only in that art form the inner principle of which is the form of human action itself. Homer’s ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield, in Lessing’s brilliant analysis (in Laocoon’s eighteenth chapter), emblematizes this insight by transforming visual stasis into poetic movement.33

Emotion Contemporary scholarship on Lessing tends to treat the theory of the sentiments (Empfindungen) as a dull and pale sibling of his semiotics, and it is easy to understand why. The theory can seem like a cookbook (ugliness combined with a dash of perfection yields the ridiculous) and the entire enterprise a pointless exercise in taxonomy. It is noteworthy, however, that some of the most searching minds of the eighteenth century devoted themselves to the topic. Lessing’s major interlocutors on questions of the sentiments, after all, were Adam Smith and Moses Mendelssohn.34 But concerns other than historical accuracy recommend devoting serious attention to this strand of eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and criticism. By examining how the discussion of the emotions is interlaced with the previously developed themes of action and criticism, we can excavate insights relevant to contemporary theoretical inquiry. It is useful to begin by sketching the general framework of theoretical concern within which the theme of the emotions comes to the fore.35 With reference to aesthetic theory, the emotions generally become a topic with regard to questions of aesthetic response. They apply to the attitude the beholder or auditor (or reader) assumes toward the aesthetic presentation.36 Response is a bi-level affair. It is directed, on a first tier, toward the representation itself, while on its second tier it attends to the content of the representation, which, in the most interesting cases such as the Laocoon statue or Virgil’s poetic rendering of Laocoon’s fate, will 33 Approaches to this thought in the ancient debates on ekphrasis are discussed in Squire 2013: esp. 184–5, n. 24. 34 On Lessing and Smith, see Harloe’s contribution to this volume; on aesthetic criticism in the relationship between Lessing and Mendelssohn, see the chapters by Beiser and Lifschitz. 35 I use the term ‘emotion’ throughout this section because the terms commonly employed in both the eighteenth-century English (sentiment) and the contemporary German (Empfindung) discussions have lost their full range of meaning. The term Empfindung, for example, applies today almost exclusively to sensations. 36 My characterization of emotions as attitudes is adapted from Wollheim 1999.

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be a human being. When we arrive at the second tier, of course, we are no longer operating in an exclusively aesthetic domain, since attitudes toward human beings will generally include other, preeminently moral, sentiments. The emotions, then, are located at the confluence of aesthetics and morality; they constitute the dimension of experience in which artistic presentation acquires moral significance. With this skeletal account in mind, I want briefly to consider emotions that occur on the first tier of aesthetic response. The emotions involved here are primitive, they lack internally differentiated content, but they nonetheless have far-reaching ramifications for the comparison of the arts. The most immediate emotional response arises due to the fact that the material substratum of the plastic arts has the potential for flagrancy.37 Actualized flagrancy overwhelms the entire process of aesthetic reception, fixes the beholder within a perceptual-affective loop, and as a result blocks accession to the represented content. An example of this was pointed out above when we noted why the representation of a Laocoon crying out in pain is inimical to the plastic arts. Painted, a scream becomes a blotch; sculpted, a gaping cavity. One descriptor Lessing applies to such traits is grässlich38—ghastly or horrid—which nicely captures the engulfing aspect of the emotion, the complete fusion of trait and attitudinal response (a kind of shrinking back, as if in fright or revulsion). A slightly more complicated emotional response that is nonetheless rooted in the material constitution of the plastic arts derives from asynchronous linkages of representation and represented content. Dissonances of this sort come to the fore in attempts to represent transient phenomena such as laughter. Because of its material constitution, the ‘painting’ freezes the flow of the content, rigidifies the laughter to a perduring grimace. Cases where this occurs eventually elicit either ‘revulsion or abhorrence’,39 likewise primitive and consuming affects. Closely related is the representation (contrary to the rule of the pregnant moment) of the affective apex of an action, for this arrests not only the transitory content, but also the movement of the imagination. These examples show clearly (and this is a point we shall return to) that critical judgment as Lessing practices it endeavours to achieve clarity regarding

37 38

The term ‘flagrancy’ is introduced in Wellbery 1984: 114–23. 39 Lessing 2012: 24 (chapter 2). Lessing 2012: 26 (chapter 3).

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the regularities of emotional response in aesthetic contexts. Of course, the identification of ‘ghastly’ or ‘revolting’ effects does not require refined capacities of discrimination, but exactly that is the point of Lessing’s interest in them. From the perspective of a comparative criticism of the arts, it is a telling finding that material-perceptual conditions tether the plastic arts to emotional strata that can derail aesthetic experience altogether. By far the most interesting aspect of Lessing’s discussion of emotion in Laocoon deals with the response to aesthetic content. In fact, it is a foundational conviction of Lessing’s theory that aesthetic experience just is an emotional experience of a certain kind. Art not only represents human beings in emotional states, it provides the viewer with a unique kind of access to these: a second-order emotion in which the affective experience of the depicted human figures is reflectively actualized. Lessing’s term for the emotion in which this co-experience—this resonance of the actual affect—comes to awareness is ‘compassion’ (Mitleid). Compassion, of course, is a central concept in the social and moral theory of the eighteenth century, and it is part and parcel of the entire theory of the (moral) sentiments as developed, for example, by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith. Lessing’s employment of the concept in an aesthetic context is most familiar from the theory of tragedy worked out across the Hamburg Dramaturgy, but in Laocoon it also plays a central role. Indeed, the precedence of beauty over expression that Lessing’s critical investigation discloses as the ‘supreme law’ of the plastic arts has its theoretical justification in the fact that beauty alone enables the spectator to pass from perception to the imaginative-emotional meta-experience of co-feeling. Here is the paradigmatic thought experiment: For one need only tear open Laocoon’s mouth in thought, and judge. Allow him to scream, and look. It was a form that afforded an influx of compassion, because it displayed beauty and pain simultaneously; now it has become an ugly, revolting form from which one would like to avert one’s gaze because the sight of pain arouses displeasure where beauty is not there to transform this displeasure into the sweet feeling of compassion.40

40 Lessing 2012: 23 (chapter 2): ‘Denn man reisse dem Laokoon in Gedanken nur den Mund auf, und urtheile. Man lasse ihn schreyen, und sehe. Es war ein Bildung, die Mitleid einflößte, weil sie Schönheit und Schmerz zugleich zeigte; nun ist es eine häßliche, eine abscheuliche Bildung geworden, von der man gern sein Gesicht verwendet, weil der Anblick

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Our previous discussion of ‘blotch’ and ‘cavity’ has shown that the problem to be overcome here is rooted in the material-perceptual basis of the art form. It is not only, or even primarily, the corporeal agony of the priest that causes the beholder to avert his gaze, but the immediate expression of that pain in the distorted, maculate features. This is where the primitive affects discussed above come into play as the experience of the ghastly and the repulsive. Beauty (that trivial perfection) alleviates the repellent effect of immediately expressed pain, invites the beholder imaginatively to enter into and abide within the represented content, and thus makes possible the co-experience of the priest’s excruciation. One can discern an aesthetic and an ethical moment within the emotion. Ethically, it is the becoming present of shared humanity, the felt awareness of the meaning of being human.41 This is the most concrete sense in which art enhances human self-understanding. As employed by Lessing, however, the concept of compassion is also an aesthetic concept, and this for the reason that it bears on a type of experience achieved through imaginative projection. The compassionate subject is the self in the place of the other or a reflection of the other’s feeling into the self. To employ Lessing’s own heuristic metaphor (think of a violin): aesthetic compassion is not the plucked string of urgent first-order feeling, but the co-resonant string moved to second-order reverberations without itself being struck.42

des Schmerzes Unlust erregt, ohne daß die Schönheit des leidenden Gegenstandes diese Unlust in das süsse Gefühl des Mitleids verwandeln kann.’ 41 Drawing on Hegelian-Marxist terminology, one could interpret the thought in this way: compassion is immediate awareness of one’s species being. 42 The relevance to contemporary issues in the theory of literature and the arts I alluded to above might be specified here with reference to Stanley Cavell’s thoughts about acknowledgment in the theatre (in the context of his essay on ‘The avoidance of love: A reading of King Lear’: Cavell 2002: 334): ‘Then what expresses acknowledgment in a theater? What plays the role there that revealing ourselves plays outside? That is, what counts as putting ourselves into a character’s presence? I take this to be the same as the question I asked at the beginning of this discussion: What is the mechanism of our identification with a character?’ From the perspective of our inquiry into Lessing’s thought the answer Cavell offers to this question is deeply suggestive. The ‘mechanism’ of theatrical identification or acknowledgment, he will claim, is the coordination of our time with that of the figures on the stage: ‘I will say: We are not in, and cannot put ourselves in, the presence of the characters; but we are in, or can put ourselves in, their present. It is in making their present ours, their moments as they occur, that we complete our acknowledgment of them.’ Perhaps it is not altogether superfluous to emphasize that this cross-reference from Lessing to Cavell by no means implies that their positions are identical. Were that the case, the comparison would be otiose.

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Not surprisingly, the discussion of the emotions becomes genuinely interesting in the context of Lessing’s remarks on poetry, and it is worth noting why this is the case. Generally speaking, the emotions are ways of being in the action. They are interests in the etymological sense, engaging us inter esse by giving us a stake in things. I previously used the term ‘attitude’ to characterize the emotions, and it may be fairly said that it is the work of the emotions to invest or imbue things, persons, actions, gestures, situations, or whatever, with our attitudes toward them. Through such investment things come to have an emotional valence, a meaning-for-us. And of course this happens culturally and collectively as well as personally and individually. Such investments inflect the context of meaning within which actions are carried out, and for this reason they are a constitutive aspect of poetic effect. For poetry, as noted above, brings to salience the form of action as the very form of human being. Any individual realization of this form as plot will therefore necessarily have a specific emotional shape. A second bond between poetry and the emotions derives from the linguistic character of poetry. Lessing’s comparison of painting and poetry brings out potencies of language that are unavailable to visual representation: abstraction, rapidity of combination, compactness of allusion, semantic differentiation, even negation—and his remarks on concrete poetic effects are often designed to show how the particular effect in question draws on these potencies. For example, referring to Virgil’s phrase at Aen. 2.222—clamores horrendos ad sidera tollit—he notes that it is a ‘sublime trait for audition’, whatever it might be (that is to say: practically nothing) for the visual imagination.43 I take the reference to audition (für das Gehör) to be a synecdoche for ‘understanding of linguistic meaning’, although Lessing may also be alluding to Virgil’s sonorous art (as in the deep vocalic sequence -or/-or/-os in contrast with the high-pitched sidera). The emotional effect of sublimity stems mainly, though, from the synthesis of two incompatible meanings: the horrific human suffering on the one hand and the unreachable serenity of astral perfection on the other. Such is Laocoon’s excruciation that his screams cast their vibrations even to the unshakeable stars. A moment within the nexus of human action (which, of course, includes

43

Lessing 2012: 29 (chapter 4).

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passion) is thus rendered accessible in the nuance of its emotional investment. The poetic gesture44 elevates sufferance onto the plane of felt reflection and understanding becomes compassion. It is the task of the critic—and this does require delicacy of discrimination—to weigh the nuances of emotional meaning. There are generalizations to be made in this area, of course, but they are always open to modification according to the case at hand. In this regard, Lessing’s critique of a thesis put forward by Adam Smith is especially interesting because the polemical context provides yet another opportunity to contrast the critic’s job of work with the philosopher’s speculation. Here is the familiar point applied to a new context: Nothing is more deceptive than general laws for our sentiments. Their weave is so delicate and intricate that it is hardly possible even for the most scrupulous speculation to pick out a single thread with complete clarity and trace its passage through all the intersecting threads. And were it to succeed, what would be the use? In nature there is no single pure sentiment; with each one a thousand others simultaneously arise, even the most insignificant of which completely alters the basic sentiment, with the result that exceptions accumulate upon exceptions and finally limit the so-called universal law to the experience of a few individual cases.45

Smith had claimed in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that the violent expression of sentiments and passions with which others can only minimally sympathize is experienced as repellent.46 Is this generalization applicable to Sophocles’ Philoctetes? Here certainly there is physical pain (difficult to sympathize with because the imagination finds within the idea of pain very little to differentiate), and here there is extremity of expression: moaning, wailing, and cascades of lamentation. But the success of the drama—actualization for the spectator as a possibility of human action—depends upon the achievement of the reflective or second-order

44 Lessing’s erhabener Zug, translated literally as ‘trait’, is better thought of as being actively drawn in the performance of it, hence ‘gesture’. 45 Lessing 2012: 38 (chapter 4): ‘Nichts ist betrüglicher als allgemeine Gesetze für unsere Empfindungen. Ihr Gewebe ist so fein und verwickelt, daß es auch der behutsamsten Speculation kaum möglich ist, einen einzeln Faden rein aufzufassen und durch alle Kreuzfäden zu verfolgen. Gelingt es ihr aber auch schon, was für Nutzen hat es? Es giebt in der Natur keine einzelne reine Empfindung; mit einer jeden entstehen tausend andere zugleich, deren geringste die Grundempfindung gänzlich verändert, so daß Ausnahmen über Ausnahmen erwachsen, die das vermeintlich allgemeine Gesetz endlich selbst auf eine bloße Erfahrung in wenig einzeln Fällen einschränken.’ 46 On Lessing’s debt to Smith, see Harloe’s chapter in this volume.

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emotion of compassion (Smith’s ‘sympathy’). Clearly, if Smith’s generalization is correct, then Philoctetes must fail as a tragedy. This is, as it were, the challenge that Lessing sets up in order to demonstrate across the brilliant fourth chapter of Laocoon the work of the critic on the one hand and the excellence (that is, the deep human significance) of Sophocles’ play on the other. It is a demonstration of the agility of mind and precision of observation required to understand the complex weave of meaning and motivation out of which the emotional arc of the dramatic action emerges. One could also say: it is a demonstration of compassion made explicit, which may be taken as a definition of critical judgment. As we follow out Lessing’s demonstration of the critic’s work, it becomes clear that the emotions are not a matter of pure internality, accessible only as waves of feeling. They have intentional content, they are attuned to the specifics of situation, they are tied to desire and belief. Philoctetes’ pain, for example, has its source in a poisonous wound; it bears the import of desecration. Moreover, it is a divinely inflicted wound, the long sufferance of which, then, constitutes a destiny. An entire constellation of emotional investments involving such intentional themes as ‘sacrilege’ and ‘divine punishment’ comes into play here. Moreover, the physical pain is combined with the anguish of abandonment, particularly acute, as Lessing points out, for the Greek, for whom society is everything. Abandonment, helplessness, and physical/moral anguish come together in such a way as to make an extreme possibility of human sufferance dramatically present. And all these meanings, as Lessing keenly remarks, achieve a kind of redoubled investment in Philoctetes’ bow: his hold on life, the sacred relic of his heroic identity. Of this too (which is to say: of everything) cunning Odysseus would deprive him, and with this dramatic move we reach the limit: ‘We see before us nothing but despair in its most terrifying form, and no compassion is stronger, none melts the entire soul so thoroughly, as compassion blended with thoughts of despair.’47 The ‘melting of the soul’ sounds like a (sentimental) cliché, but it deserves to be taken seriously as marking the release from armoured self-interest that occurs in the felt awareness of human belonging. In Lessing’s discussion of Philoctetes we have, in short, an exemplary demonstration of the poetic capacity of

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Lessing 2012: 36 (chapter 4).

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rendering salient the course of emotion that fills action with its urgency and of the (rare) critical capacity to chart the flow of such emotion. Regarding Smith’s proposed law of the blockage of sympathy Lessing again looks to the specific motivational content. Will sympathy fail to occur vis-à-vis expressive vehemence if it is the first time such expressions occur? Will it fail if the suffering individual does all he can to suppress the expression of his anguish? What if we know him to have been otherwise steadfast and unwavering? What if we see him refuse to abandon his values even though it would bring about the end of his pain? Are we not moved to compassion if, through all his pain, the sufferer nonetheless feels sorrow upon learning of the death of his compatriots? We might call these questions ‘grammatical’ in the sense that they ask after the criteria governing our application of emotional language. But language and emotion are intertwined and the criteria disclosed are therefore those governing the differential spectrum of emotional response. Lessing’s discussion of Philoctetes thus reveals that the emotions, far from being explainable by a causal generalization of the form: if cause x, then emotional response y, involve complex discriminations of situational, historical, and comparative factors. The critic emerges here as a grammarian of emotion, demonstrating that there is in the play no ‘single thread’ of sentiment, but rather an intricate ‘weave’ of conditioning factors, motivations, investments, focal objects, and past actions shaped into the unifying contour of dramatic plot. Before such complexity Smith’s proto-science of the sentiments proves helpless. Genuine knowledge in this domain—call it compassionate understanding—is achieved in criticism. * * * The foregoing remarks have attempted to articulate a conceptual constellation, the three stellar points of which are the concepts of criticism, action, and emotion. The claim is that this constellation constitutes the intellectual foundation of Laocoon, the framework of thought within which Lessing’s project becomes intelligible. Only in passing have I addressed matters of semiotics and media theory, the topics at the centre of my 1984 book on Lessing. The fact is that those topics now seem to me secondary not only with respect to the argument of Laocoon itself, but also in terms of their contemporary importance to the study of literature and the arts. Let me briefly say why this is so.

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The study of art and literature can take many paths, even vigorously ‘scientific’ ones, but as long as it is the study of art and literature as such, as opposed to their examination as evidence replaceable by non-artistic objects, it must rely on acts of critical judgment. For criticism, in its most basic form, is the discrimination of excellence in a field within which no purely descriptive (non-evaluative) criteria are available.48 In this vein, Kant argued that: (a) there can be no science, but only criticism of the beautiful (where beauty is considered the predicate of excellence in aesthetic matters); and (b) criticism can yield judgments that lay claim to general agreement.49 Kant made this case in 1790, at the end of a century that had witnessed the advancement of the intellectual activity of criticism to a position of cultural centrality, and certainly Lessing must be regarded as one of those responsible for giving shape to that activity. Of course, by claiming that it is an urgent task of literary scholarship today to do justice to, and thus inherit, this dimension of Lessing’s achievement, I do not mean to urge replication of Lessing’s critical practice in the details of its execution. At issue is the larger architecture of critical theory. In this regard, the most significant feature of Laocoon resides in the affirmation of critical judgment as central to the study of literature and the arts. To follow Lessing’s writing is to learn that the moment of judgment is ineluctable. Moreover, his work demonstrates that, although such judgment is rooted in the singular encounter of sensibility and work, it nonetheless unfolds as a giving of reasons. It earns its substantial content. And the first order within which those reasons find elaboration is the art form itself conceived as a normative practice. Not everything goes, and the critic’s task is to work out what does and doesn’t, and why. However powerful the Kantian refutation of ‘objectivity’ in the judgment of the beautiful, judgment without knowledge of how the art form works, of what its potencies and limitations are, and of where its finest exemplars are to be found is mere vapour. Lessing, I claimed, is the founder of a technical-aesthetic criticism; that is an achievement worth holding on to. But there is a second aspect of Lessing’s work that transcends the technical, and just for that reason is equally important. The linkage to the notions of action and emotion 48

This is the point brilliantly brought out in Strawson 1974. In nuce, this is the thesis of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, first published in 1790: for an English translation, see Kant 1987. 49

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emancipates criticism from the incarceration of departmental specialization and opens it to the concerns of ethical and social life. Lessing, we might say, develops a criticism that moves between the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of practice. He sees art within the context of our socially articulated mindedness, and in this sense his criticism constitutes a powerful demonstration of why art matters (as art). A handy formula for this achievement might be that it is the synthesis of the technical and the moral. By my lights, this synthesis is the source of Lessing’s contemporary relevance. Criticism loses its intellectual force when it becomes aestheticist, when extreme refinement of discrimination is applied to a field artificially cordoned off from broader contexts of human self-understanding. This is why I have emphasized the centrality of the interlaced spheres of action and emotion to Lessing’s enterprise. The technical understanding of art forms, for which, indeed, certain semiotic tools can be useful, only has point with reference to the field of emotionally invested action to which art, on Lessing’s view, lends shape and articulation. What distinguishes the meanings and values native to this field is their exclusively first-person intelligibility. To understand such invested meanings is to feel their import, to have a sense of what it is to experience them oneself.50 This is the reason that the capacity of reflective compassion (in the special sense developed above) is a virtue of the critic, who must not only imaginatively actualize the particular force of the actionemotion nexus involved, but also find the words to mark the artwork’s achievement in bringing that nexus to perspicuous presentation. To segregate this aspect of the critic’s job of work from what I have called the technical aspect of criticism, to think of the former as extra-artistic and the latter as truly or purely artistic, would clearly be a misguided enterprise. It would be equally misguided to attempt to develop a language of aesthetic inquiry that is purged of the first-person actualizations requisite for the understanding of emotionally invested (actionembedded) meanings. A ‘pure’ methodology in this sense would deprive itself not just of an important tool, but of access to art as such. In many respects, the fall into desuetude of the term ‘criticism’ and the corresponding advance of the term ‘theory’ to prominence in literary studies On irreducible first-person understanding, emotion, and meaning, see Taylor 2016: 190–1. 50

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during the past fifty years were driven by the desire for such a methodology. Certainly my own effort to make out Lessing’s elaboration of semiotic and media-theoretical concepts to be the core achievement of Laocoon participated in that trend. In the present historical moment, however, the pressing need is for a renewed articulation of the concept of criticism, a task that requires study of the work of its finest practitioners. Friedrich Schlegel’s engagements with Lessing’s work were an effort to understand and inherit what Schlegel referred to as the ‘spirit of criticism’ (Geist der Kritik). That remains a compelling project today.

3 Laocoon among the Gods, or: On the Theological Limits of Lessing’s Grenzen Michael Squire

Aber seit Luther hat Deutschland keinen größeren und besseren Mann hervorgebracht als Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Diese beiden sind unser Stolz und unsere Wonne. In der Trübnis der Gegenwart schauen wir hinauf nach ihren tröstenden Standbildern, und sie nicken eine glänzende Verheißung. Heinrich Heine1

Here is the point that must have chief emphasis in any right praise of Lessing. He is in some respects the most masculine figure Germany has ever produced since Luther; and without being too fanciful one may follow out certain analogies between the role played by Luther and that played by Lessing in an entirely different field. Irving Babbitt2

One reason why Laocoon proves as rich a read in 2016 as it did in 1766 lies in the breadth of its addressed audience. On the one hand, we are dealing with a work of painstaking antiquarian scholarship: Lessing’s essay—self-deprecatingly heralded as ‘more unordered notes for a book (unordentliche Collectanea zu einem Buche) than a book itself ’3—brings 1

Schriften zur Literatur und Politik, vol. I (Sämtliche Werke, vol. III) (Darmstadt: 1992),

469. 2

The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (Boston: 1910), 36–7. For the claim in Laocoon preface, see Lessing 1984: 5; cf. Robert 2013: esp. 9–12, and the introduction to this volume, pp. 49–51. Throughout this chapter, references are given to Edward Allan McCormick’s English translation of Laocoon (Lessing 1984): I have often 3

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together numerous feats of (what would by the end of the century) be labelled Altertumswissenschaft;4 just as Lessing analyses works of ancient poetry, painting, and sculpture, moreover, so too does he delve into minutiae of textual critical emendation and translation.5 On the other hand, Laocoon looks to classical materials in order to prescribe some wholly more essential—and essentialist—lessons. Lessing’s text is a work not just of historical (or for that matter historicist) criticism, but also of transhistorical aesthetic critique. It is for this reason that the essay has spurred such landmark ‘new Laocoon’ responses—attempts to refine, revise, and update Lessing’s conclusions in light of later social, cultural, and artistic developments.6 For Lessing in 1766, the Grenzen between historical interpretation and aesthetic critique were markedly more permeable than they have been for his successors over the last 250 years.7 Like Johann Joachim Winckelmann—around whose responses to ancient art Laocoon is framed—Lessing saw the interpretation of ancient painting and literature as inseparable from the critique of the arts tout court. It is on this basis, Lessing explains, that he decided to give the Laocoon statue-group ‘a share’ in the work’s title; likewise, the preface continues, Lessing’s essay

adapted McCormick’s translations, using the German text of Vollhardt’s Studienausgabe (Lessing 2012). 4 On the formation of German Altertumswissenschaft as a self-standing scholarly field, especially in Winckelmann’s wake, see now Harloe 2013, along with Marchand 1996: esp. 16–24. More generally on Greek antiquity’s grip over the aesthetic thinking of the German Enlightenment, see Valdez 2014 (discussing the Laocoon at pp. 44–52), along with the masterful overview of Marchand 1996 (building on Butler 1935). 5 For some selected examples, see Lessing 1984: 164–5 (note to chapter 3), 165–8 (note to chapter 4), 165 (note to chapter 5), 225–7 (note to chapter 22). Cf. Nisbet 2013a: 306: ‘As in the unfinished Sophocles, Lessing’s fascination with philological and antiquarian detail often spills over into long, Bayle-like footnotes—albeit with a lightness of touch and an eye for entertaining examples which are rarely present in the earlier work.’ On Lessing’s attitudes towards antiquity, see the concise overview of Sichtermann 1968, along with the first section of this volume’s introduction (pp. 5–22). 6 See Wellbery (this volume), pp. 59–60: among the most important, in my view, are Babbitt 1910: esp. 217–52; Greenberg 1940: esp. 298–9; and Wimstatt 1976: 40–73; one might also consider Lessing’s influence on the work of Michael Fried—as reflected not only in his brief introduction to McCormick’s English translation (Lessing 1984: vii–viii), but also indirectly in his foundational essay on ‘Art and objecthood’ (Fried 1967). For further discussion, see also the essays in e.g. Koebner (ed.) 1989 and Curtis and Feeke (eds.) 2007, along with Sternberg 1999. 7 For an account of antiquity’s ‘paradigmatic’ example for conceptualizing the visual arts between the Renaissance and nineteenth century, see now Koch 2013.

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will contain ‘other short digressions (andere kleine Ausschweifungen) on various points of ancient art history . . . because I can never hope to find a more suitable place for them’.8 This is not to say that Lessing was oblivious to the different interpretative concerns of what he labels the connoisseur-critic (der Kenner) and antiquarian (der Antiquar). In the ninth chapter, Laocoon even talks of the difficulty scholars of antiquity and art critics face in understanding one another: just as the Antiquar ‘believes that he can refute the critic with the first statue that comes to hand’, so too the Kenner, ‘without scruple, and to the great scandalization of the world of scholarship, condemns the same statue to the dust from which it was dug’.9 The intellectual frisson that Lessing diagnosed 250 years ago applies even more strongly to our scholarly landscape today: if Laocoon demonstrates the challenge of squaring history (the ‘limits’ of painting and poetry in antiquity) with systematic aesthetic critique (the ‘limits’ of painting and poetry across the ages), that challenge of working across disciplinary Grenzen remains very much with us.10 Of course, to read Laocoon from an exclusively ‘antiquarian’ viewpoint would go against the intellectual grain of Lessing’s project: it risks adumbrating the essay in historicist footnotes, without properly engaging with its larger systematic framework. But because Lessing founds his prescriptions about ‘good’ (or for that matter ‘bad’) painting and poetry on the historical critique of antiquity, the intrinsic ‘presence’ of those classical materials strikes me as important. How does Laocoon interweave Graeco-Roman perspectives into its larger aesthetic critique? To what extent do ancient materials ratify and corroborate Lessing’s position about medial ‘limits’? And in what ways—as indeed, to what ends—does Lessing collapse cultural and intellectual historical differences?

8 Lessing 1984: 5–6. A related sentiment was emblazoned on the essay’s cover (Fig. 1.8) (cf. Teinturier 2014: 47–8): below the main title, and an epigraph citing Plutarch, the cover heralds an essay complete ‘with passing elucidations of different points of ancient art history’ (mit beiläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte). 9 Lesssing 1984: 56, with detailed note at 193–4. 10 For one bleak (but not entirely unjustified!) evaluation of the contemporary classical art historian’s place within the broader disciplines of art history and aesthetics, see Wood 2012: 17: ‘Art historical classicists are in fact so lacking in self-assertiveness that they have more or less retreated into a corner of their own, isolated from the rest of the discipline . . . nor does any classicist dare to build a case for the unavoidability of their field, any case at all.’

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In addressing these questions, the present chapter sets out to reassess Laocoon’s aesthetic arguments in light of its ancient exempla. Far from simply aligning with the medial Grenzen elucidated in Lessing’s essay, I suggest, Laocoon’s manifold references to Graeco-Roman antiquity throw the conceptual limitations of Lessing’s medial limits into relief, above all his ideological assumptions about what ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ are (or indeed what they might or should be). Of course, our own views of ‘Graeco-Roman antiquity’ are no less mediated in 2016 than they were for Lessing in 1766.11 Yet what interests me is precisely how Lessing mediates that classical heritage—as viewed from my own perspective, not as a Lessing specialist, but as a classicist concerned with the workings of Greek and Roman visual culture. The particular concern in this chapter will be with an aspect of Lessing’s thinking that has received relatively little attention over the last 250 years: namely, Lessing’s assumptions about imaging (no less than imagining) the gods. Issues of religion—about the ‘proper’ or ‘natural state of the gods’ (der natürliche Zustand [der] Götter)12— recur throughout Laocoon; indeed, it is in connection with ‘the influence of religion on art’ (den Einfluß der Religion auf die Kunst) that Lessing frames his comments about the respective approaches of the ‘critic’ and the ‘antiquarian’ in the ninth chapter.13 What strikes me as significant about Lessing’s assumptions about the ancient gods, however, is their distinctly ‘modern’ conceptual scaffolding, derived from a set of (broadly defined) ‘Lutheran’ theological ideas about the Judaeo-Christian God.14 If the whole framework of Laocoon is rooted in a deeply Protestant paradigm of approaching words and images, what makes that ideology 11 For some broader discussions of these methodological issues—analysing the place of ‘reception studies’ within the larger (or, depending on one’s perspective, narrower) field of classical art history—see my comments in Squire 2015 (with detailed bibliographic overview), responding in particular to Prettejohn 2012. 12 13 Lessing 1984: 70. Lessing 1984: 56. 14 For an important (albeit all-too-rare) reminder of the important religious underpinnings of Enlightenment aesthetics, also focused around Lessing, see now Wild 2014: ‘all too often overlooked by eighteenth-century scholarship is the fact that aesthetics, like so many other developments of German eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural history, was a largely Evangelical and, more particularly, Pietist affair. It was conceived and elaborated by products of a Pietist upbringing such as Baumgarten, his student Georg Friedrich Meier, or Immanuel Kant and Karl Philipp Moritz or by sons of Evangelical pastors or students of Evangelical schools such as Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger, or Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Johann Gottfried Herder’ (p. 490).

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all the more conspicuous is the essay’s recourse to ancient case studies: there seems to be a fundamental mismatch between Lessing’s essentializing conclusions and the Graeco-Roman materials used to support them.15 To demonstrate what I mean here, the present chapter proceeds in two parts.16 I begin by briefly laying out Lessing’s systematic thesis and his recourse to ancient examples: Laocoon, I argue, appropriates the weight of classical precedent to advance a transhistorical argument about the operative ‘spatial’ bodies of pictures and the ‘temporal’ actions of poetry.17 The second part of the chapter then turns to what W. J. T. Mitchell has labelled the ‘ideological’ frames of Laocoon.18 For all his recourse to classical materials, Lessing looks to antiquity through a decidedly loaded lens. In particular, his medial Grenzen are staked on a set of theological ideas about the divine—and, above all, about the stakes of visually and verbally mediating divine powers: while Lessing tries to sanctify his claims here with recourse to ancient examples, his thinking is derived from a very different set of assumptions about words, images, and the respective ‘limits’ of the two.

Die Fackel der Geschichte: The Inductive Illuminations of Classical Antiquity As the introduction to this volume has already discussed, Lessing’s Laocoon is steeped in an array of ‘classical presences’. Throughout the essay, Lessing harnesses the lessons of Graeco-Roman antiquity to counteract ‘many of the most recent critics’ (viele der neuesten Kunstrichter), framing his treatise as a response to the ‘false taste’ and ‘unfounded judgments’ of his contemporaries 15 Needless to say, the problematic of this ‘mismatch’ extends far beyond Lessing and his Laocoon; indeed, one might say that they define the cultural parameters of the German Enlightenment (and its aftermath) at large. Particularly important here is the stimulating account of Güthenke 2008: although only tangentially interested in issues of religion, Güthenke puts her finger on precisely the problems that come from making the lost relics of Greece the ‘soul’ of the German Enlightenment. 16 Parts of this chapter develop an argument first tentatively sketched in my 2009 book Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: cf. Squire 2009: 1–193, esp. 90–113. 17 In this connection, it is worth noting how many discussions of the relationship between ‘art’ and ‘text’ in Graeco-Roman antiquity begin by acknowledging an intellectual debt to Lessing (e.g. Stansbury-O’Donnell 1999: 8–9; Benediktson 2000: 3–11; Giuliani 2003: 23–37/ 2013: 1–18 (albeit with important critique)). Often, though, classicists rely upon Lessing’s distinctions of poetic ‘temporality’ and painterly ‘spatiality’ without duly acknowledging the debt to Lessing (e.g. Hanfmann 1957: 61; Brilliant 1984: esp. 15–20; Small 1999). 18 See Mitchell 1984a (revised in 1986: 95–115); cf. Mitchell’s foreword to this volume.

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(above all in France).19 As such, Laocoon is a work of aesthetic criticism inexorably bound up with the historical interpretation of antiquity, and vice versa. Lessing is explicit about that approach. Purportedly halting in his tracks after the publication of Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, for example, Lessing writes in chapter 26 that ‘the ancients also knew the bonds connecting painting and poetry, and they have not, I believe, drawn them more tightly than was advantageous for both’: ‘what their artists did will teach me what artists in general should do’ (Was ihre Künstler gethan, wird mich lehren, was die Künstler überhaupt thun sollen), his conclusion runs; where Winckelmann carries ‘the torch of history’ (die Fackel der Geschichte), Lessing’s ‘speculations’ can boldly follow.20 Of all the ancient references that light up Lessing’s essay, none proves more illuminating than the statue-group that lends Laocoon its title (Fig. 3.1; cf. Figs. 1.1–1.5, 1.7).21 When he wrote the essay, Lessing had not seen the sculpture (displayed in the Vatican’s Cortile del Belvedere), nor does he seem to have been particularly interested in doing so;22 indeed, Lessing appears to have known the statue-group only from prints and engravings (e.g. Fig. 3.1)—a fact that goes some considerable way in 19 Lessing 1984: 4, 5: diesem falschen Geschmacke, und jenen ungegründeten Urtheilen entgegen zu arbeiten. Cf. Lessing 1984: 3–4, pitching the lost writings of painters such as Apelles and Protogenes (who applied to painting the ‘already established rules of poetry’), as well as the extant work of rhetoricians such as Aristotle, Cicero, Horace, and Quintilian, against their modern counterparts: ‘it is the prerogative of the ancients (das Vorrecht der Alten) never to have done too much or too little of anything’, Lessing concludes; by contrast, ‘we moderns (wir Neuern) have considered ourselves far superior, when we transformed their pleasant little lanes into highways . . . ’. On the underlying debt to the French Querelle des anciens et des modernes, see the introduction to this volume, along with Vollhardt’s discussion in Lessing 2012: 292–3. 20 Lessing 1984: 138. Still more explicit is Lessing 1984: 60, discussing the proper use of ‘symbols’ (Sinnbilder) in painting and poetry: ‘Just as this rule is confirmed by the practice of the ancients (So wie diese Regel durch die Befolgung der Alten bewähret ist), so is its intentional violation the favourite fault of modern poets.’ 21 On the importance of the Laocoon group to the development of German aesthetics, see the excellent guide of Nisbet 1979, now supplemented by Gratzke 2007. 22 Cf. Giuliani 1999: 313. When later visiting Rome in 1775, Lessing must have had the opportunity to see the sculpture in person (cf. e.g. Bäbler 2009: 237–8; Robert 2013: 19; Schmälzle 2014: 59–60)—although there is no record to suggest that he did so (cf. Giuliani’s chapter in this volume). As Lessing puts it in a later letter (Lessing 1990: 398, no. 13; cf. Schmälzle 2014: 68–9; Nisbet 2013a: 309), and in stark contrast to Winckelmann (cf. Vollhardt 2013: esp. 177–81), Lessing seems to have deemed such autopsy unimportant: ‘Was kommt hier auf das selbst Sehen an? Ich spreche ja nicht von der Kunst; ich nehme ja alles an, was die, die ihn selbst gesehen, an ihm bemerkt haben; ich gründe ja meine Deutung auf nichts, was ich allein daran bemerkt haben wollte.’

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Fig. 3.1. Charles Clement Bervic, engraving of the Laocoon statue-group, late eighteenth century. Buffalo, NY, Albright-Knox Art Gallery: Gift of Willis O. Chapin, inv. 1891: 4.42. © Albright-Knox Art Gallery/Art Resource, NY.

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explaining Laocoon’s collapsing of ‘sculpture’ into ‘painting’.23 Lessing nonetheless exploits the Laocoon group as a pivotal organizational device: the whole essay is structured around the statue’s critical reception, above all in the wake of Winckelmann’s celebrated response (in the context of his 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst).24 Lessing’s treatise is not just a work of classical reception, then, but also a work that responds closely to previous receptions of the classical past.25 It is for this reason that the first chapter begins with a detailed rejoinder to Winckelmann and his critical take on the Laocoon group. Starting with what Winckelmann had termed Greek art’s ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ (edele Einfalt und stille Größe), Lessing summarizes Winckelmann’s response: for Winckelmann, the special privilege of Greek art lay in its embodying of ‘a great and composed soul’ (eine große und gesetzte Seele); the Laocoon duly demonstrates the persistence of that ideal even in Greek art’s most extreme figurations of passion and suffering (Leidenschaft).26 But Lessing also delivers an important

23 Lessing 1984: 6 is explicit about this medial collapsing, in the context of Laocoon’s preface: ‘I should like to remark, finally, that under the name of “painting” (Mahlerey) I mean the visual arts in general (die bildenden Künste überhaupt).’ The medial collapse did not escape Lessing’s earliest critics (cf. Grethlein, this volume). At certain points, moreover, Laocoon does draw a distinction between painting and sculpture (e.g. Lessing 1984: 203–4, where—in a note to chapter 12—the author promises to return elsewhere to the reasons why the ‘colossal’ (das Kolossalische) has a greater effect in Bildhauerey than in Mahlerey). 24 On Lessing’s relationship with Winckelmann, see most recently Décultot 2013 and 2014a (with further bibliography at 93, n. 2), along with Décultot’s chapter in this volume. Winckelmann’s writings served as a useful ring-compositional device: while the first chapter fashions a response to Winckelmann’s 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, the final four chapters (chapters 26–9) are written in supposed immediate reaction to his 1764/2006 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums. ‘Without Winckelmann’s provocation,’ Beiser 2009: 246 concludes, ‘it is doubtful the Laokoon would have been written’; cf. e.g. Danzel and Guthrauer 1881: II.1–53; Rudowski 1986; Srensen 2004–5; and Beiser 2009: 277–82. 25 Lessing seems intently aware of those various mediations—that, to have any hope of understanding the Laocoon, the critic must deal with an array of previous critical and historical responses (cf. Wolkenhauer 2013). These stretch all the way back to the Elder Pliny’s comments on a Laocoon statue (Lessing 1984: 146–9), as well as to a late-antique miniature of a related schema in the ‘Vatican Virgil’ (cf. the Paralipomena at Lessing 2012: 267); Lessing also interweaves into his account Sadolet’s hexameter-poetic response after the statue’s 1506 discovery (which he declares ‘worthy of an ancient poet’: Lessing 1984: 42–4, with note on the sixth chapter at 178–81). 26 Lessing 1984: 7, citing Winckelmann 1755: 21–2 (translated in Winckelmann 1765: 30–1). Buranelli, Liverani, and Nesselrath (eds.) 2006: 173–6, no. 70 offers an excellent overview of Winckelmann’s account, surveying further bibliography.

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critique. Like Winckelmann, Lessing agrees that the ‘pain in Laocoon’s face is not expressed with the same intensity that its violence would lead us to expect’.27 When it comes to the ‘true pathos of suffering’ (das wahre Pathetische des Schmerzes), the artist has rejected a ‘natural’ rendering. He has also created a very different image from the one described in Virgil’s Aeneid: in Winckelmann’s words, Laocoon ‘does not raise his voice in a terrible scream, which Virgil describes Laocoon as doing’.28 So how should this discrepancy between expression and expectation be understood? For Winckelmann, the underlying explanation lay in Greek ethics: ‘we wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man does’; in line with a long-standing (broadly Platonic) conflation of beauty with philosophy, Winckelmann assumes that morality and aesthetics go hand in hand. But where Winckelmann had recourse to a Greek ‘nobility of soul’ (Grösse der Seele) and ‘strength of spirit’ (Stärke des Geistes)—a moralist self-restraint that modernity should aspire to recover—Lessing paints a different philological picture. As so often in the essay, Lessing looks to antiquity to offer a historicist critique: he re-examines ancient materials to yield a historically accurate framework for approaching the statue, one that trumps Winckelmann’s own aestheticizing account. Unlike the heroes of northern European legend, with their telltale ‘traits of old Nordic heroic courage’ (Züge des alten nordischen Heldenmuths), the ancient Greek not only ‘felt and feared’ (Er fühlte und furchte sich), but also ‘gave outward expression to his pain and grief ’ (er äusserte seine Schmerzen und seinen Kummer).29 After surveying ancient materials and validating his historical argument (including along the way a lengthy excursus on Sophocles’ Philoctetes), Lessing arrives at his critical preliminary conclusion:30 If it is true that crying aloud when in physical pain is compatible with nobility of soul, especially according to an ancient Greek way of thinking (besonders nach der alten griechischen Denkungsart), then the desire to express such nobility could not have prevented the artist from imitating his scream in his marble. There must be another reason why he differs on this point from his rival the poet, who expresses this scream with deliberate intention. 27

Lessing 1984: 8. Lessing 1984: 8, 7. On Lessing’s place within larger Enlightenment debates about the aesthetics of pain, see above all Richter 1992, along with Richardson’s chapter in this volume. 29 30 Lessing 1984: 9. Lessing 1984: 11. 28

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Lessing here articulates a point of systematic principle that finds ratification in classical precedent: the Denkungsart of ancient Greece at once corroborates a general hypothesis (that crying aloud is not incompatible with moral fortitude), and confirms the validity of that principle when approaching the historical past that gave rise to the Laocoon statue. As such, Lessing’s project in Laocoon springs from a conundrum not just about the ancient statue, but also about its modern aesthetic reception: responding to his predecessor, Lessing tackles a formal aspect of the image that Winckelmann had first noticed, but which he had failed adequately— from both a historical and transhistorical perspective—to explain. The conundrum of the Laocoon’s invisible scream—his ‘anxious and subdued sigh’ (ängstliches und beklemmtes Seufzen)—leads to Laocoon’s central theme of medial difference. Before introducing the statue, Laocoon’s preface had already sketched a three-part history of approaching visual– verbal relationships, centred on the ‘amateur’s’ comparison of the two media, the ‘philosopher’s’ delineation of their shared aesthetic derivation, and the ‘critic’s’ observations about the respective merits and deficiencies of one medium in relation to the other.31 In starting with this potted history, Lessing was of course aware of his own intellectual debts, stretching all the way back to Simonides (‘the Greek Voltaire’), who famously likened painting to mute poetry and poetry to speaking painting in the early fifth century BC.32 But in line with what Lessing terms the ‘critic’ (or more properly, ‘art-judge’: Kunstrichter), Lessing sought to elucidate not just the similarities but also the differences between the two media. For Lessing, those differences paradoxically stem from what painting and poetry have in common. As even the ‘amateur’ (Liebhaber) experienced, ‘both arts produced upon him a similar effect’: since painting and poetry alike ‘represent absent things as being present, and appearance (den Schein) as reality (Wirklichkeit)’, both work by means of illusion, and an illusion that pleases the viewer/reader alike (beyde täuschen, und beyder Täuschung gefällt). This opening language of Täuschung is crucial to everything that follows. As David Wellbery has argued, Laocoon is first

31

Lessing 1984: 3: for the passage, see the introduction to this volume, pp. 1, 4. On Lessing’s assimilation of Simonides and Voltaire, see Vollhardt’s note in Lessing 2012: 293. For Simonides’ analogy—one that was ‘frequently repeated’, as Plutarch puts it (θρυλούμενον: Mor. [Quomodo adul.] 17F)—see e.g. Carson 1992; Franz 1999: 61–83; and Sprigath 2004. 32

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and foremost a work of semiotics, descended from a distinctly German philosophical tradition (one that stretches back, via the likes of Christian Wolff and Moses Mendelssohn, to the thinking of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz).33 For all the differences in how they make ‘absent’ things present, words and pictures both work by way of deceptive fantasy, depending upon the creative response of the subject who experiences them. Although earlier critics (among them Roger de Piles, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and Joseph Spence) had analysed ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ according to a related language of ‘signs’, their comparisons had nonetheless relied on a blurry distinction between the arbitrary signs of language and the natural signs of imagery. For Lessing, by contrast, signs are always significatory, regardless of whether they are poetic and arbitrary (willkührliche Zeichen) or pictorial and natural (natürliche Zeichen); despite their differences, all signs must ultimately rely on a subject to make significatory sense of them.34 It is in this context that Lessing’s talk of a capacity for ‘imagination’— or Einbildungskraft—should be understood.35 Unlike its standard English translation, Einbildungskraft suggests a subjective capacity (Kraft) to summon up an ‘image’ (Bild) within the mind: as such, Lessing’s very terminology goes hand in hand with a model for theorizing how visual and verbal response works.36 One particularly clear formulation of the approach can be found in Laocoon’s sixth chapter:37 the thing which we find beautiful in a work of art is beautiful not to our eyes but to the imagination (Einbildungskraft) through our eyes. Thus, just as the same 33 Wellbery 1984: esp. 99–227; cf. also the essays in Gebauer (ed.) 1984 and Baxmann, Franz, and Schäffner (eds.) 2000. 34 For the terms, see Lessing 1984: 41, with the discussions in this volume by Beiser and Lifschitz (on the problems of Lessing’s semiotic distinctions, and Lessing’s response to Mendelssohn’s critique); cf. Barasch 2000: II. esp. 153–4 on the relationship with Roger de Piles and the Abbé Dubos. For the longer history of conceptualizing ‘art’ and ‘poetry’ as ‘sister arts’ (a tradition to which Laocoon explicitly alludes at Lessing 1984: 54), see above all Praz 1970: esp. 3–27; cf. e.g. Hagstrum 1955; Lee 1967; Schweitzer 1972; Graham 1973; Steiner 1982; Marshall 1997. 35 For discussion, see especially van Laak 2013 (with references to earlier bibliography). 36 As Lessing explains in a note to chapter 14 (Lessing 1984: 207), poetry produces (what we call) ‘pictures’ too. But taking his lead from Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy (in particular Longinus and Plutarch), Lessing distinguishes between the modern delineation of ‘poetic pictures’ (poetische Gemählde) and what ‘the ancients’ called phantasiae: ‘I wish very much that modern treatises had used this terminology’, Lessing writes, since ‘poetic phantasiae would not have been so readily confined to the limits of a material painting’ (eines materiellen Gemähldes). For discussion, see especially Bohn 2014: 122–3. 37 Lessing 1984: 41.

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image may be conjured up by means of arbitrary or natural signs, the same pleasure will be aroused, though not always to the same degree.

Lessing’s position at once looks back to the rationalist aesthetics of Baumgarten and others, while also anticipating an aspect of Kant’s third Critique (centred on the ‘Critique of Judgment’):38 what is ultimately said to matter is not the form of a stimulus, but rather the creative reaction of the subject responding to it.39 Before explaining the significance of Einbildungskraft for approaching the Laocoon group, Lessing first turns to a number of other ancient case studies. Among the most revealing is his recourse to the precedent of Timanthes—a fourth-century BC painter famous, among other things, for a picture of Agamemnon that portrayed him in the act of sacrificing his daughter, Iphigeneia. Taking his lead from ancient writers (above all the Elder Pliny, HN 35.36), Lessing notes the artist’s portrayal of his central protagonist: in line with an image-type that survives from later Roman copies (e.g. Fig. 3.2), albeit unknown to Lessing, the grieving Agamemnon was said to have been painted with veiled face.40 Such anecdotes are cited 38 Cf. Robert 2013: 17–23. For an encapsulation of the Kantian position (albeit in the context of a very different project), see Kant 1987: 46: ‘We can easily see that, in order for me to say that an object is beautiful, and to prove that I have taste, what matters is what I do with this presentation within myself, and not the [respect] in which I depend on the object’s existence.’ For Lessing’s anticipation of the Kantian rhetoric of imaginative ‘free play’ (freies Spiel), see pp. 104–5: as Halliwell 2002: 119 notes, ‘Lessing’s aesthetic in Laokoon exhibits, among much else, the modification of a fundamentally mimeticist position by a stress on imaginative expression and suggestiveness; and in this respect he marks a tendency of thought and sensibility that is a harbinger of, and was soon to culminate in, romantic revisionism toward the whole notion of mimesis’; on the important distances between Lessing and Kant, however, see Rialland 2014: esp. 109–10. 39 ‘What we see in aesthetic experience is, in actual fact, the product of an interaction between the work qua natural, material object and the beholder’ as Barasch 2000: II.156 paraphrases: ‘if ever there was a thinker who granted the beholder a real share in aesthetic experience, it was Lessing.’ In this connection, it is worth noting that the very ability of humans to create inner, mental pictures—their capacity for Einbildung—is what distinguishes human subjects from other animals: ‘animal eyes (thierische Augen) see nothing but what they see’, as a note in the Paralipomena puts it (Lessing 2012: 245), and they are consequently ‘more difficult to deceive’ (schwerer zu täuschen); by contrast, when it comes to ‘the imagination (Einbildung) leads us by contrast to believe we see even that which we do not see’. 40 For the ancient materials, see Kansteiner et al. 2014: II.800–9, nos. 1613–37, esp. nos. 1614–19. For one recent discussion of how Agamemnon’s grief was understood ‘to surpass the limitations of painterly ars’ in Timanthes’ painting (p. 225), see Platt 2014: esp. 222–31. Fig. 2.2 comes from the House of the Tragic Poet (Pompeii VI.8.3): on its place within the house, and above all its relationship with other adjacent pictures, see Bergmann 1994.

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Fig. 3.2. Image of the ‘Sacrifice of Iphigeneia’ from the House of the Tragic Poet (Pompeii VI.8.3), first century AD. Naples, Museo Archeologico Nazionale: inv. 9112. © Alinari/Art Resource, NY.

to make a historical point: they demonstrate Greek art’s restriction to ‘the imitations of beautiful bodies only’, and thereby confirm his theory that, ‘among the ancients, beauty was the supreme law of the visual arts’.41 At the same time, classical precedent bears a heavier inductive weight, as Lessing explains in the second chapter:42 But Timanthes knew the limits (die Grenzen) which the Graces had set for his art. He knew that the anguish appropriate to Agamemnon as the father would have

41 42

Lessing 1984: 12, 15. Lessing 1984: 16. For discussion, see now Westerkamp 2015: 46–8.

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to be expressed through distortions, which are always ugly. He went as far as he could in combining beauty and dignity with the expression of anguish. He would have preferred to pass over the ugly or to soften it, but since his composition did not permit him to do either, there was nothing left him but to veil it. What he was not allowed to paint he left to conjecture (Was er nicht mahlen durfte, ließ er errathen). In short, this concealment is a sacrifice that the artist has made to beauty; it is an example, not of how one pushes expression beyond the limits of art, but how one should subject it to the first law of art, the law of beauty (sondern wie man ihn dem ersten Gesetze der Kunst, dem Gesetze der Schönheit, unterwerfen soll).

Of course, Timanthes could have visually depicted the intensity of Agamemnon’s grief; indeed, Lessing adds, ‘nothing is easier in art than to express this’ (nichts ist der Kunst leichter, als diese auszudrücken). But because the ideal of the (ancient) visual arts was to ‘attain the highest beauty under the given condition of pain’,43 Timanthes instead opted at once literally and metaphorically to ‘veil’ (verhüllen) such expression. The anecdote’s specific lesson lies in what it conveys about ancient attitudes about painting’s ‘limits’.44 Working alongside such historicism, however, is a transhistorical claim, as evidenced by the slippage from past tense to the final modal auxiliary verb in the cited passage (itself repackaging historical interpretation as a prescriptive obligation about the ‘first law of art’). This transition from past to present enables Lessing to arrive at his inductive conclusion. As the ancients well understood, the power of the visual arts lies not merely in their mimetic virtuosity—their ability to replicate what we see—but rather in their power to stimulate the imagination. Despite its recourse to more ‘natural’ (and naturalistic) signs, our response to an image depends on the creative fantasies that that image stirs: it is what the person does with the image that is important.45 43

Lessing 1984: 17. Compare here Lessing 1984: 20–1, discussing ancient literary responses to Timomachus’ paintings of Medea and Ajax in the third chapter (with analysis in this volume by Wellbery, pp. 68–71): ‘from the descriptions we have of them it is clear that he thoroughly understood and was able to combine two things: that point or moment in which the beholder not so much sees as adds to in his imagination (jenen Punkt, in welchem der Betrachter das Äusserste nicht sowohl erblickt, als hinzu denkt), and that appearance which does not seem so transitory as to become displeasing through its perpetuation in art.’ So it is, Lessing explains of Timomachus’ paintings, that ‘our imagination (unsere Einbildungskraft) takes us far beyond what the painter could have shown us in this terrible moment’; moreover, the ancient epigrammatic responses to the picture—as cited in Laocoon—may themselves be said to comment upon the imaginative potential of the picture. 45 This is not to say that the stimulus is unimportant, however: ‘Lessing stops short . . . of the romantic move of supplanting the external eye with the exercise of an internal, spiritual 44

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Such a combined historical and aesthetic approach leads Lessing back to the essay’s eponymous statue-group. Like Timanthes, the ancient sculptors could have rendered Laocoon in the extremes of emotional agony. But to have done so would have been to compromise the statue’s aesthetic workings:46 The master strove to attain the highest beauty possible under the given condition of physical pain. The demands of beauty could not be reconciled with the pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting (ekelhafte) manner. Simply imagine Laocoon’s mouth forced wide open, and then judge! Imagine him screaming, and then look! From a form which inspired pity because it possessed beauty and pain at the same time, it has now become an ugly, repulsive figure from which we gladly turn away. For the sight of pain provokes distress; however, the distress should be transformed, through beauty, into the tender feeling of pity. The wide-open mouth, aside from the fact that the rest of the face is thereby twisted and distorted in an unnatural and loathsome manner, becomes in painting a mere spot (ein Fleck) and in sculpture a cavity (eine Vertiefung), with the most repulsive effect in the world (welche die widrigste Wirkung von der Welt thut).

Once again, understanding the sculpture’s historical motivation coalesces with the task of present aesthetic critique, centred on the response of the viewing subject (regardless of whether that viewer is ‘ancient’ or ‘modern’). Classical sculptors understood their task as being to give ‘free play to the imagination’ (der Einbildungskraft freyes Spiel). But because such ‘free play’ holds true across distinctions of time and culture, Lessing is able to move from the past of the sculptor to the reactions of modern-day viewers. This explains Lessing’s recourse to the first person plural. Despite earlier analysing the original motivations of the artists (in the past tense), responses to the sculpture can be framed not only in the present, but also around an ‘us’ that cuts across time and place: ‘the more we see, the more we must be able to imagine’ (je mehr wir sehen, desto mehr müssen wir hinzu denken können); likewise, ‘the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must believe that we see’ (je mehr wir darzu denken, desto mehr müssen wir zu sehen glauben).47 Completing the circle, such reflection

eye (a motif of Platonic and Neoplatonic ancestry). He does not wish to discard the idea of sensory representation as the creative foundation of aesthetic possibilities’ (Halliwell 2002: 119–20). 46

Lessing 1984: 17.

47

Lessing 1984: 19.

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on our present responses can help us to understand the historical motivations of the original maker: rejecting the vacant ‘spot’ or gaping ‘cavity’ (with all its associations of empty matter),48 the statue’s artists had to show the protagonist sighing so as to allow his viewers to imagine him screaming.49 A similar inductive recourse to ancient materials characterizes Lessing’s approach to poetry. Like the visual arts, poetry must also appeal to our imagination, Lessing argues. Yet the illusions of the poet operate quite differently from those of the painter or sculptor. The visual arts must settle upon a single moment, or Augenblick (a word that connotes a freeze-framed temporal unit through its suggestion of a material ‘look of the eye’); as Lessing famously explains later in the essay, the visual artist must render that moment as ‘fruitful’ or ‘pregnant’ as possible.50 But the poet is not constrained by the physical form of his medium (nor consequently by concerns about its ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness’).51 In this sense, the very medium of poetry, which appeals directly to the imagination, has already carried out the ‘de-materializing’ work upon which visual response ultimately depends.52

For the supposed gendered stakes of the formulation—in terms of a ‘feminine’ gape (Vertiefung)—see especially Gustafson 1993: 1088–90. 49 Cf. Lessing 1984: 20: ‘Thus, if Laocoon sighs, the imagination (Einbildungskraft) can hear him cry out; but if he cries out, it can neither go one step higher nor one step lower than this representation without seeing him in a more tolerable and hence less interesting condition. One either hears him merely moaning or sees him dead.’ 50 Cf. Lessing 1984: 99: the painter ‘makes this single moment as pregnant as possible and describes it with all the illusion which makes art superior to poetry in the portrayal of visible objects’. On the thinking, see in particular Szarota 1959: 97–113 and Wellbery 1984: esp. 167–70. More generally on the metaphor in eighteenth-century aesthetics and rhetoric, see Adler 1998; for a hugely stimulating argument about the theological conditioning of the concept—comparing the discussion in Laocoon with Lessing’s earlier work on Berengar of Tours and eleventh-century theories of the Eucharist (as ‘pregnant sign’, prägnantes Zeichen)—see Wild 2014. For a recent attempt to develop Lessing’s notion of the ‘pregnant moment’—combined with new considerations of Gestalt-philosophy, and above all Cassirer’s ideas of ‘symbolic pregnancy’—see Westerkamp 2015: esp. 9–34 (discussing Lessing at 18–20), 46–51. 51 On the comparative resources of painting and poetry to engage with ‘ugly’ subjects and give rise to the affect of ‘disgust’, see chapters 23–5 of Laocoon (Lessing 1984: 121–37), with Gibhardt 2014. 52 For the clearest explication of the point, see Wellbery 1984: 134: ‘The advantage of poetry is that the task of rendering the object existentially absent has already been accomplished by language’; cf. also Wellbery 1994; Richter 1992: 174 (‘language as material has already attained a high degree of immediacy compared to the signs of painting’); Pizer 48

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In defining poetry’s ‘limits’, Laocoon arrives at its systematic conclusions through inductive recourse to classical case studies. More than any other poet, ancient or modern, it is Homer who is championed as the paradigmatic model.53 In the context of the Laocoon statue, however, Lessing compares and contrasts the workings of the statue-group in relation to a different poetic text—the Virgilian description of the Laocoon episode (Aen. 2.218–19):54 Bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum Terga dati, superant capite et ceruicibus altis. Twice they now hug his waist; twice they now wrap their scaly backs around his neck, stretching above him with their heads and high necks. This picture satisfies our imagination (Einbildungskraft) fully; the most essential parts of the body are squeezed to the point of strangulation, and the venom is aimed towards the face. However, this is no picture for the artist, whose object is to show the physical effects of the venom and pain.

In poetry, as in painting, the historical exempla of antiquity—in this case, Virgil’s Aeneid 55—are exemplary of a transhistorical argument. For Lessing, the differences between the arts of painting and poetry boil down to one fundamental disparity: where the sculptor is constrained by the material form of his representation, the poet’s metaphorical picture (Bild) bypasses any such physical mediation so as to appeal directly to the subject’s imagination. At stake here is a larger rhetoric of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’, itself instantiated in the symbolic significance of the statue’s lack of clothing.56 Virgil makes no reference to what Laocoon was wearing, Lessing observes; even if he had done so, the reference would not have mattered in the context of poetry (a garment ‘conceals nothing’, since ‘our 1994. On the hierarchical distinctions at work here, see also the chapters by Giuliani and Trabant in this volume. 53 ‘Homer is the best model of all’ (das Muster aller Muster), as Lessing 1984: 104 explains, precisely because his poetry pays heed to poetry’s temporally unfolding actions and affects: ‘I find that Homer depicts (mahlet) nothing but progressive actions (fortschreitende Handlungen), and he depicts (mahlet) all bodies and single objects only when they contribute towards these actions, and then only by a single trait’ (p. 79). 54 Lessing 1984: 37. 55 Note, though, Laocoon’s later criticism of Virgil, discussing the respective descriptions of the Homeric shield of Achilles and Virgilian shield of Aeneas in chapter 18 (Lessing 1984: 91–7). 56 Lessing 1984: 38–9, with discussion in Wellbery 1984: 123–8.

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imagination sees right through it’). When it comes to the visual arts, by contrast, the artist cannot avoid such issues of concrete form. In the case of the Laocoon statue, the sculptors rightly decided to reveal the body rather than cover it up, since ‘beauty was their highest goal’: ‘necessity was the inventor of clothing,’ as Lessing notes, ‘and what has art to do with necessity?’57 For all their shared appeal to the subject’s Einbildungskraft, the arts of painting and poetry develop their illusions by different means, the one grounded in material form, the other free of such physical anchors.58 The issue of ‘freedom’ proves intrinsic to the distinction between the visual and literary arts in another way besides. In one sense, of course, the topos of Freiheit resonates with other responses to classical art in the eighteenth century. But where Winckelmann had deemed the artist’s ‘freedom’ a prerequisite for the greatest sculpture and painting of the

57 Lessing 1984: 39. In this sentiment, Lessing foreshadows Kant’s famous comparison between such ‘ornaments’ (Zieraten) as the ‘frames of pictures’ (Einfaßungen der Gemälde), colonnades (Säulengänge), and the ‘drapery’ (Gewänder) of statues: as Parerga (according to the title given to them in the 1793 edition of the Critik der Urteilskraft), such elements ‘do not belong to the complete presentation of the object internally as a constituent, but only externally as a complement’ (was nicht in die ganze Vorstellung des Gegenstandes als Bestandstück innerlich, sondern nur äußerlich als Zuthat gehört): see Kant 1987: 72 (adapted), translating Kant 1793: 43; for Derrida’s infamous response, see Derrida 1987 (translating Derrida 1978). 58 In this case, Lessing’s aesthetic considerations lead him to a crucial historical deduction about the priority (in every sense) of the Virgilian account over the Laocoon statue. The precise relationship between the statue and the Virgilian narrative of the Laocoon episode remains much debated (cf. Maurach 1992; Settis 1999: 88–9). But Lessing suggests that a systematic aesthetic critique can lead the critic towards a historical argument of probability. In chapters 6–7 (Lessing 1984: 40–9), Lessing explains that it must have been the poets who gave the artists of the sculpture a model, not the other way round (a point to which chapter 26 returns in the context of Winckelmann’s Geschichte: Lessing 1984: 138–45): ‘if Virgil had imitated the statue of Laocoon,’ as the eleventh chapter puts it, ‘this would have been an imitation in the second meaning of the term, for he would have imitated not the statue, but what the statue represents, and only the details of his imitation (die Züge seiner Nachahmung) would have been borrowed from the statue . . . ’ (p. 45); likewise, ‘if Virgil had copied the winding of the serpents about Laocoon and his sons from the statue, his description would lose its merit, for what we consider the greater and more difficult part would already have been done, and only the less significant part (das geringere) would have remained’ (p. 62). ‘I am fully aware how much this probability falls short of historical certainty (wie viel dieser Wahrscheinlichkeit zur historischen Gewißheit mangelt)’, Lessing concludes, ‘but as I do not intend to draw any further historical conclusions from it, I believe that we can at least admit it as a hypothesis, on which the critic may base his observations.’

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ancients,59 Lessing instead champions the freedom of the viewing/reading subject: it is the ‘free play’ (freies Spiel) of the individual imagination that matters. As the eighth chapter of Laocoon argues, the poet’s remove from the material medium of painting grants him a greater freedom than that of the sculptor or painter:60 ‘we see in the poet’s work the origins and formation of that which in the picture we can hold as completed and formed.’61 Likewise, where the material image can only provide a single image, the poet can lead his audience ‘through a whole gallery of paintings’.62 The first part of Laocoon proceeds inductively: it moves from ancient poetic and artistic examples to arrive at the fundamental principles of the two arts, using modern case studies (above all the work of Caylus and Spence) as counterfoil. But in the sixteenth chapter—at the approximate mid-point of the essay—Lessing changes tack, developing a deductive argument about the ‘temporal’ workings of poetry as opposed to the ‘spatial’ dimensions of painting.63 Approaching the ‘matter from its first principles’ (die Sache aus ihren ersten Gründen), Lessing turns his earlier comparative critique about Virgil and the Vatican statue-group (among other case studies) into an abstract, a priori principle—one that will in turn then allow him to draw specific conclusion from a general hypothesis:64 But I shall now attempt to derive the matter from its first principles. I reason thus: if it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs (ganz andere Mittel, oder Zeichen) than does poetry, namely figures and colours in

On Winckelmann’s interweaving of ‘the overall rise and decline of Greek art’ with ‘the larger rise and decline of Greek freedom’, especially in the second part of the Geschichte, see e.g. Potts 1994: 57; more generally on Winckelmann’s thinking about ‘freedom and desire’, as manifested in his other writings and letters, see Potts 1994: 183–221. 60 Lessing 1984: 52. 61 Lessing 1984: 84 (Und so, wie gesagt, sehen wir bey dem Dichter entstehen, was wir bey dem Mahler nicht anders als entstanden sehen können). 62 For Lessing, the ultimate example was the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Lessing 1984: 94–7; cf. Squire 2013: esp. 160–1): Homer does not paint the shield as something ‘finished and complete’ (ein fertiges vollendetes), Lessing argues, but as a shield that is being made (ein werdendes Schild); coexistent imagery is thus transferred into something consecutive—‘thereby making a living picture of an action out of the tedious painting of an object’ (und dadurch aus der langweiligen Mahlerey eines Körpers, das lebendige Gemählde einer Handlung zu machen). 63 On the change in argumentation, see Barner 2003 and Nisbet 2013a: 306–7. 64 Lessing 1984: 78. 59

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space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation (bequemes Verhältniß) to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive. Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting. Objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions. Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of poetry.

Where painting deals with the ‘visible properties’ (sichtbaren Eigenschaften) of ‘bodies’ (Körper), poetry handles ‘plots’ or ‘actions’ (Handlungen). While bodies exist in space, moreover, actions must necessarily unfold in time. Proceeding from a historical interpretation of ancient materials, Lessing moves from past to present. Yet what Lessing here calls his ‘dry chain of conclusions’ (diese trockene Schlußkette) is itself derived from a combined historical and aesthetic critique: it is the analysis of ancient case studies that leads to his formulation of essential medial difference.65

Geistigkeit and materielle Schranken: Laocoon’s (In)Visible Theology So far in this chapter, I have attempted to sketch Laocoon’s arguments and their relation to historical case studies: throughout the essay, antiquity is cast as the paradigmatic example for understanding the proper limits of ‘poetry’ and ‘painting’. At this stage, I return to Lessing’s particular comments about how the two media function, and above all to his arguments about the greater medial ‘limitations’ of painting as compared with poetry. For if Laocoon establishes a clear hierarchy between painting and poetry, I suggest, that attitude is premised on a set of decidedly modern ideas about matter. At stake in Lessing’s essay is a certain theological ideology, one that approaches images and words in

65 Cf. Lessing 1984: 79: ‘I should put little faith in this dry chain of reasoning (diese trockene Schlußkette) did I not find it completely confirmed in the procedure of Homer, or rather if it had not been just this procedure that led me to my conclusions. Only on these principles can the grand style of the Greek be defined and explained, and only thus can the proper position be assigned to the opposite style of so many modern poets, who attempt to rival the painter at a point where they must necessarily be surpassed by him.’

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terms of a dialectic between body and soul.66 What makes that ideology so conspicuous, moreover, is the recourse to ancient examples in the first place: in appropriating classical ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ within a peculiarly modern Protestant Christian outlook, Laocoon anachronistically conflates very different intellectual outlooks. Before proceeding, it is worth first asking whether Laocoon’s generic boundaries hold. To what extent is Lessing justified in his systematic delineation of the ‘temporality’ of poetry and the ‘spatiality’ of painting? Indeed, how cogent are his distinctions on their own categorical terms? Of course, the great originality of Laocoon’s contribution lies in his apparent squaring of subjective aesthetics with objective Enlightenment science: Lessing purports to bring the poles of pictorial and poetic representation into line with Newton’s universals of space and time.67 But as numerous critics have argued, the supposed dialectic between ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ can never align in any straightforward way with a spatial/temporal binary. Responding above all to a late twentieth-century concern with ‘word and image’ studies, poststructuralist critics have very much championed the point: ‘there are no “purely” visual or verbal arts’, as W. J. T. Mitchell writes, ‘though the impulse to purify media is one of the central utopian gestures of modernism.’68 66 My argument here develops a key aspect of Pizer 1994, positing a connection between Laocoon’s aesthetic distinctions and the segregation between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ in Lessing’s theological and metaphysical works; these aesthetic and theological concerns, Pizer demonstrates, come together in Lessing’s 1780 work, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts. Drawing in particular on Wellbery 1984, as well as on discussions of Lessing’s responses to Spinoza, Pizer noted a scholarly reluctance to work across the interconnected fields of Lessing’s scholarship: ‘no studies have examined in a sustained manner the way in which Lessing’s endorsement of the immaterial in the aesthetic realm virtually parallels his preference for the physically undisclosed in the domains of metaphysics and theology’, as he puts it: ‘Lessing’s attempt to bracket the soul as nonphysical and thus discrete in relation to the body can be fruitfully compared’ (p. 56). 67 Cf. Mitchell 1986: 96, 111: ‘If Newton reduced the physical, objective universe, and Kant the metaphysical, subjective universe to the categories of space and time, Lessing performed the same service for the intermediate world of signs and artistic media . . . He places himself with Newton and Kant above the realm of ideology and sexuality in a transcendental space where the laws of genre are dictated by the laws of physical nature and the human mind—and there he has remained.’ 68 Mitchell 1994: 65, 161. ‘Instead of Lessing’s strict opposition between literature and the visual arts as pure expression of temporalty and spatiality’, as Mitchell 1980: 565 had earlier concluded, ‘we should regard literature and language as the meeting ground of these two modalities’; cf. also Mitchell 1984a (revised in Mitchell 1986: 95–115), the short overview of Mitchell 2003, and Mitchell’s preface to the present volume. Other important

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One of Laocoon’s greatest feats is that it itself foreshadows such arguments: throughout the essay, we find painting and poetry exceeding the ‘limits’ laid out for them. We have already cited chapter 16, with its distinction between the spatial ‘bodies’ of painting and the temporal ‘actions’ of poetry. But no sooner does Lessing make this absolute distinction than he adds a relativizing qualification: since ‘bodies’ exist in both space and time, and ‘actions’ require bodies in space, ‘painting too can imitate actions, but only through suggestion (andeutungsweise) through bodies’, just as ‘poetry also depicts bodies, but only by suggestion (andeutungsweise) through actions’.69 Ultimately, Lessing concedes, these medial Grenzen do not rely upon some defining physical quality, but rather upon what he calls the ‘suitable relation’ (bequemes Verhältniß) between signs and the thing signified.70 Seen from this perspective, Lessing’s prescriptions are derived as much from the aesthetic effects of each medium as from some intrinsic difference in their significatory function. Again and again, Laocoon’s comments about what painting and poetry can do slip into prescriptions about what they should do: the ‘intrusions’ of one medium into the other come down not to some objective impossibility, but rather to subjective aesthetic judgment—to a medial infringement ‘which good taste can never sanction’ (den der gute Geschmack nie billigen wird).71 Throughout the essay, the categories of ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’ end up slipping through the crevices of Laocoon’s dividing-lines. In his effort to demarcate the ‘proper’ Grenzen of the two media, Lessing is forced to take refuge in additional subcategories, whether distinguishing between ‘poetry’ and ‘language’,72 or indeed between ‘painting as a fine art’ and critiques here include Frank 1945; Krieger 1967, 1992; Steiner 1988; Bal 1991; Klee 1991: 62–3; Mattick 2003: esp. 6–7; cf. also Grethlein (this volume), along with the concise critique of Giuliani 2003: 23–37 (= 2013: 1–18) and Giuliani’s chapter in this volume. 69

Lessing 1984: 78: cf. e.g. Mitchell 1986: 100–4; Wellbery 1984: 191–227. Lessing 1984: 78, with important discussion by Stierle 1984: esp. 39–51. On the problems in Lessing’s argument here—as pointed out to him by Moses Mendelssohn— see especially Beiser 2009: 275–7, along with e.g. Robert 2013: 16–17, and Vesper 2013; see also the chapters by Giuliani, Beiser, and Lifschitz in this volume. 71 Lessing 1984: 91; cf. in the same chapter (Lessing 1984: 95) the recourse to einem feinern Geschmacke—concluding that ‘readers of more refined taste will grant that I am right’. As Mitchell 1986: 104 nicely puts it, ‘there would be no need to say that the genres [of spatial painting and temporal poetry] should not be mixed if they could not be mixed’. 72 See e.g. Lessing 1984: 88: ‘I do not deny to language altogether (der Rede überhaupt) the power of depicting the corporeal whole according to its part . . . But I do deny it to 70

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‘painting as an imitative skill’.73 When on 26 May 1769 Lessing wrote to Friedrich Nicolai (commenting upon a review by Christian Garve published in Nicolai’s Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek), he admitted that ‘various things in the work are not sufficiently precise’ (daß Verschiedenes darin nicht bestimmt genug ist):74 although explaining his rationale—and promising that a new edition of the essay will clarify matters—Lessing goes some way in anticipating the criticism that his ‘distinction [between painting and poetry] cannot be the basis for any rigorous differentiation of kind’.75 That Laocoon should sow the seeds for its own critique strikes me as important. Where so many critics have sought to iron out Lessing’s contradictions,76 Lessing evidently preferred to conceptualize his essay as a sort of metaphorical ‘journey’ or ‘walk’—an intrinsically open work that flies in the face of neat systematization.77 Whether the essay ‘deliberately

language as the medium of poetry (der Rede als dem Mittel der Poesie), because the illusion, which is the principal object of poetry, is wanting in such verbal descriptions of bodies.’ On Lessing’s comments in this seventeenth chapter, and their attempt to respond to the critique of Mendelssohn, see the chapters by Beiser and Lifschitz in this volume. 73

See e.g. Lessing 1984: 126, in the context of the respective ability of poetry and painting to make use of ‘ugliness of forms’ (Häßlichkeit der Formen): ‘Painting, as an imitative skill (als nachahmende Fertigkeit), can express ugliness; painting as a fine art (als schöne Kunst) refuses to do so.’ 74 For the letter, see Lessing 2012: 269–72 (with abridged English translation in Nisbet 1985: 133–4). ‘Both [painting and poetry] can be either natural or arbitrary’, Lessing tells Nicolai; he then posits a ‘double’ category of painting and poetry (eine doppelte Mahlerey . . . eine doppelte Poesie], ‘a higher and a lower category of each’ (von beiden eine höhere und eine niedrige Gattung). ‘It is not true that painting uses only natural signs, just as it is not true that poetry uses only arbitrary signs. But one thing is certain: the more painting departs from natural signs, or employs natural and arbitrary signs mixed together, the further it departs from its true perfection (desto mehr entfernt sie sich von ihrer Vollkommenheit), just as conversely poetry draws all the closer to its true perfection (ihrer Vollkommenheit nähert), the closer it makes its arbitrary signs approach the natural.’ For discussions, see Rudowski 1971; Wellbery 1984: 226–7; Beiser 2009: 276–7 (though dating the letter to ‘March 26 1759’); Nisbet 2013a: 322–3. 75 Mitchell 1986: 102. 76 Cf. Mitchell 1986: 111, arguing that ‘it is Lessing’s readers who have turned his irregular, associative argument into a system, converting his embattled, value-laden terms into “neutral critical fictions” ’. 77 On Laocoon’s ‘strolling’ metaphors—presenting the author as a Spaziergänger (Lessing 1984: 104)—see Teinturier 2014 (who adds that the spatial metaphor is itself instantiated in the reader’s navigation of the essay’s note-riddled pages: 58, n. 19). More generally on the text’s gestures of ‘incompleteness’, see especially Nisbet 2006; Robert and Vollhardt 2013: 1–3; Robert 2013: 23–6. On the complexity of the preface’s frame, and its importance for understanding Laocoon’s place within a longer German rationalist tradition, see especially Beiser 2009: esp. 269–70 and Robert 2013: esp. 9–12.

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invites’ readers to unravel his semantic classifications is debatable.78 What seems beyond doubt, however, is that Laocoon knowingly defines itself against a particular tradition of systematic philosophy. Just as the preface warns audiences against reading the essay as some finished work (it should be regarded, rather, as the ‘unordered notes for a book’ (unordentliche Collectanea zu einem Buche)),79 so too does Lessing emphasize how his labours have unfolded in time, following the chronological order of his readings (nach der Folge meiner Lectüre).80 As literary artefact, the path of Lessing’s spatial ‘stroll’ subscribes to the temporal prescriptions that characterize good ‘poetry’.81 The essay nonetheless defines any straightforward ‘end’. The chapters may not proceed through a ‘methodic development of general principles’ (methodische Entwickelung allgemeiner Grundsätze), as Lessing continues:82 Yet I flatter myself that even in this form they will not be treated wholly with contempt. We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books (An systematischen Büchern haben wir Deutschen überhaupt keinen Mangel). We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions.

Poking light-hearted fun at a German obsession with systematischen Büchern, the systematic theorizing here constructs a different sort of argumentative mode. Of course, we know that Lessing intended to revise and lengthen his treatise. But the very fact that Lessing never delivered on this promise, leaving the work in its original published form (supplemented by handwritten Paralipomena), is revealing: Lessing perhaps realized that the essence of his essay lay in its provocations—its incomplete stimulus for further reflection.83

78

Mitchell 1986: 111. Lessing 1984: 5. On the sentiment, see—in addition to Décultot’s chapter in this volume—e.g. Barner’s comment in Lessing 1990: 662–3 (Lessing ‘stellt etwas gemischtes dar: nicht selbst schon bestimmte neue Form, aber ein Experiment zu neuen Zwecken’); Stiening 2013. 80 Lessing 1984: 5. 81 Lessing’s immediate critics appreciated the point, as Schmälzle 2014: 61–2 (with 77–8, n. 14) makes clear. 82 Lessing 1984: 5. 83 See most recently Teinturier 2014: ‘Le Laocoon . . . se présente de facto comme un fragment, dont l’inachèvement conditionne la lecture’: as a result, the readings advanced by Lessing, for all their apparent definitive form, function ‘comme un début ou, plutôt, comme un amorce nécessairement à completer’ (p. 43). 79

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To ‘deconstruct’ the binaries of Laocoon need in no way lessen the essay’s value. What is required is a recalibration of exactly where the text’s value lies—and one that arguably responds more carefully to Lessing’s own critical frame. Approached from a cultural-historical viewpoint, the significance of Lessing’s treatise resides not just in its attempt to set out the respective limits of painting and poetry, but also in the rhetoric of its dialectic distinction. Once again, W. J. T. Mitchell has championed the point, developing the critical line of Ernst Gombrich in an essay published in 1957.84 As Gombrich, Mitchell, and numerous other (above all anglophone) readers have pointed out, Lessing’s quest to formulate an essential medial disparity ends up replaying related tropes of political, social, and cultural difference. When chapter 18 turns the Horatian maxim of ut pictura poesis into a geopolitical metaphor, for example, Lessing exploits a national analogy for approaching the respective boundaries of each medium: painting and poetry become ‘two equitable and friendly neighbours’ (zwei billige freundschaftliche Nachbarn), each practising a ‘mutual forbearance on their extreme borders’ (auf den äussersten Grenzen eine wechselseitige Nachsicht).85 No less important are Laocoon’s gendered dynamics, aligning poetry and painting with the expected social conventions of the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ realms respectively.86 Lessing himself relies only on loose associations, of course.87 But the text’s subsequent reception—above all, the ‘new 84

See Mitchell 1986: 95–115; Gombrich 1957, 1984: esp. 29–40. Lessing 1984: 91, returning to the analogy at p. 93: for discussion, see especially Gombrich 1957: 139–42 and Mitchell 1986: 104–6. Earlier, in Laocoon’s first chapter, Lessing had explicitly referred to the French as Germany’s own ‘well-mannered neighbours’ (unsern artigen Nachbarn) (Lessing 1984: 10–11): Laocoon set out to correct the perceived sensibilité of the French (especially in the field of drama)—to speak up against the ‘miserable taste’ of a nation (dem armseligen Geschmacke seiner Nation) (Lessing 1984: 27). More generally on the ‘buchstäblich kriegerischer’ (p. 9) aspect of the text, see Robert 2013: esp. 26–32: ‘Wenn Lessing wiederholt von Grenzen und Schranken spricht, so zeigt dies ein Bemühen, diesen eingeführten Sprachgebrauch auf die Ästhetik und die paragoneDiskussion zu übertragen’ (p. 32). 86 See especially Mitchell 1986: 109–12: cf. Gustafson 1993 (along more generally with Gustafson 1995: 19–122 on ‘Lessing’s gendered aesthetics’); Scott 1994: esp. 35–7; Richter 1999: esp. 158–9; Mattick 2003: 53–60. 87 Mitchell 1986: 110: ‘Paintings, like women, are ideally silent, beautiful creatures designed for the gratification of the eye, in contrast to the sublime eloquence proper to the manly art of poetry. Paintings are confined to the narrow sphere of external display of their bodies and of the space which they ornament, while poems are free to range over an infinite realm of potential action and expression, the domain of time, discourse, and history.’ The critique has not always convinced: Heslin 2015: 14 dismisses such ‘mere 85

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Laocoon’ responses of the early twentieth century—would draw out a trope that already inheres in Lessing’s original treatise. When in 1910, for example, Irving Babbitt introduced his ‘new Laocoon’ project in terms of a ‘biological analogy’, he showed himself to be more than a ‘humble imitator of Lessing’.88 Taking his lead from Laocoon, Babbitt transforms the gendered ideology of Lessing’s distinction into a ‘New Humanist’ manifesto:89 To set color above design, illusion above informing purpose, suggestiveness above symmetry, is to encourage that predominance of the feminine over the masculine virtues that has been the main course of the corruption of literature and the arts during the past century,—what one may in fact term the great romantic, or it might be more correct to say Rousseauistic, error.

In contrast to ‘Lessing’s virile emphasis on action’, contemporary literature is said to be ‘appealing more and more exclusively to women, and to men in their unmasculine moods’.90 Such deviant ‘couplings’ of ‘poetry’ with ‘painting’ are consequently declared to be morally devious—and to contradict ‘proper’ gender roles: ‘we all know what this Rousseauistic side of romanticism has come to in its last pitiful representatives,’ Babbitt’s extraordinary conclusion follows ‘—an Oscar Wilde or Paul Verlaine.’91 Of course, we can hardly blame the teacher for his student’s response. My point, rather, lies in the fact that there is—and, as W. J. T. Mitchell reminds us, there must always be—more at stake in distinguishing between poetry and painting than objective critique alone. To claim that Laocoon is a work of ideological distinction may hardly be news (even if such modes of reading have still properly to filter through to ‘Lessingian’ circles).92 What interests me, rather, is how Laocoon squares its own ideology of poetry and painting with the exempla of antiquity:

inferences’, arguing that ‘Lessing never says or implies anything of the kind . . . Mitchell completely misunderstands and misrepresents both the ancient anecdotes and what Lessing is trying to say with them’; cf. Sternberg 1999: 349–51 (‘in pressing the buttons of political correctness’, Mitchell ‘pushes an argument so extraordinary that I find it almost embarrassing to confront’). 88

89 Babbitt 1910: 215, viii. Babbitt 1910: 249. 91 Babbitt 1910: xiv, 207, 244. Babbitt 1910: 243. 92 Note, for example, the lack of reference to Mitchell’s work among the essays in Beyer and Valentin (eds.) 2014, and the sole reference among the contributions of Robert and Vollhardt (eds.) 2013 (Robert 2013: 29, n. 95). 90

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Lessing’s recourse to antiquity has the effect of essentializing his own thinking about painting and poetry, lending his assumptions the illusion of transhistorical authority. Intrinsic to my argument here are the hierarchical distinctions that underpin Laocoon’s medial partitions. As the first part of this chapter has already indicated, poetry and painting are not just generically different from one another in Laocoon, they also occupy different tiers of value. When Gombrich declared Laocoon a book less ‘about’ than ‘against’ the visual arts, he put his finger on precisely this aspect.93 Throughout his essay, Lessing uses ‘painting’ as a foil for ‘poetry’: despite the scattered chastisements of contemporary artistic practice (above all, the Comte de Caylus’s 1757 Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade, de l’Odyssée, et de l’Enéide), Laocoon is essentially uninterested in the visual arts except for what they teach about the proper ‘limits’ of painting.94 Still, there can be no denying Laocoon’s recurrent ranking of the two media: while ‘the whole infinite realm of perfection’ (das ganze unermeßliche Reich der Vollkommenheit) lies open to the poet, of which ‘bodily beauty’ is ‘only one of its the least significant means’ (nur eines von den geringsten Mitteln),95 visual artists are necessarily restrained by the ‘material limitations’ (materiellen Schranken) of their medium.96 Those materielle Schranken prove fundamental to Laocoon’s argument. As Moshe Barasch has pointed out, Lessing ‘does not tell us

See Gombrich 1957: 140: ‘It has often been said that Lessing did not know much about art. I am afraid the truth may be even more embarrassing to an historian of art . . . : he had not much use for art . . . The more one reads Laokoon, the stronger becomes the impression that it was not so much a book about as against the visual arts’; cf. Beiser 2009: 281–2; Robert 2013: 37–40 (with further bibliography); Rialland 2014: esp. 107–10. As Wellbery 1984: 161 comments on Gombrich’s evaluation, ‘the reason for this . . . is not merely Lessing’s resistance to the neo-classical style, as Gombrich argues, but is ultimately Lessing’s commitment to the ideal of imaginative freedom and autonomy and his assumption of a progressive process of semiosis as the vehicle by which the spirit liberates itself from the entanglements of worldliness’: I would only add that it is the theological backdrop that seems to be driving this dichotomy between Geistigkeit and materielle Schranken. 94 Cf. Nisbet 2013a: 313: ‘The more narrowly the limits of visual art were drawn, the more scope was left for poetry, which interested him far more profoundly.’ On the motivations behind the thinking—oriented towards defending a certain intellectual view of poetry—see Beiser 2009: esp. 281–2: ‘In this respect, as in so many others, Lessing was still a child of the rationalist tradition.’ 95 Lessing 1984: 23. 96 Lessing 1984: 19; cf. Lessing 1984: 4 on the ‘narrower limits of painting (die engern Schranken der Mahlerey)’ as compared with poetry. 93

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what his yardsticks are for measuring the value of the individual arts, or how they are linked to his overall view of art’.97 But throughout the essay, the supremacy of the poet is staked not just on his capacity to stimulate a human subject’s imagination, but also on his freedom from the delimiting restraints that characterizes the visual arts. On the one hand, the poet can deal with a wider range of subjects (not just the ‘beautiful’ subjects of art, but also ‘ugly’ and ‘disgusting’ ones). On the other, poetry can treat those subjects in a more complex way: unlike the painter, the poet is not restricted to the realm of the visible. It follows, as Wellbery concludes, that ‘poetry is located at a more advanced level in the progress of semiosis by which mind liberates itself from actuality’.98 Laocoon’s hierarchies here stem from a certain attitude towards the material realm, as well as an assumed pecking-order of the senses.99 But where does this attitude come from? To be sure, there certainly is a ‘classical presence’ at work here: between his distrust of art’s materielle Schranken on the one hand, and his aesthetic championing of the imagination on the other, Lessing wavers somewhat uneasily between Platonic and Aristotelian traditions.100 But as Jim Porter has recently reminded us, such a deeply antimaterialist polemic—bound up with the deeply unsensuous rhetoric of Neoclassicism—is also fundamentally removed from ancient thinking, even to some extent from that of Plato and Aristotle themselves.101 Ultimately, I suggest, Lessing’s distrust of matter, no less than his turn to the freies Spiel of the subjective imagination, is conditioned by a particular theological outlook: it is not just a Judaeo-Christian credo, but

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Barasch 2000: II.159–64 (quotation from 159). Wellbery 1984: 135–6: ‘language negates worldliness, rendering empirical objects existentially absent, so that the mind can imaginatively attend to its contents without material interference.’ 99 For Laocoon’s hierarchy of the senses, see especially Lessing 1984: 131–2: discussing the respective abilities of sight and sound to stir repugnance (Widerwille) before disgusting subjects, Lessing concludes that ‘taste’ (Geschmack), ‘smell’ (Geruch), and ‘touch’ (Gefühl) amount to dunkeln Sinne. 100 On the Platonic (and Neoplatonic) debts of Lessing’s idea of the ‘inner eye’— contrasting the ‘physical eye’ (das leibliche Auge) with the ‘inner eye’ of the imagination (die Sphäre meines innern Auges)—cf. Halliwell 2002: 120, n. 9 (citing Pl. Resp. 7.533d, 540a, Soph. 254a and Plotinus, Enn. 1.6.8–9). Lessing here foreshadows one of the central tropes of romanticism. But his associated concern with phantasia (cf. n. 36), and not least his frequent recourse to the Poetics (see especially Lessing 1984: 127–8), are symptomatic of his simultaneous Aristotelian debts. 101 See Porter 2010: esp. 14–17. 98

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specifically the thinking of the German Reformation that determines Laocoon’s conceptual and hierarchical framework. As his many tracts on religious beliefs, practice, and worship make clear, Lessing himself had a complex relationship with that theology, engaging with some of the most pressing theological questions of his day (from Pietism, through Lutheran orthodoxy and an associated Schriftprinzip, to scholasticism); it hardly needs saying, moreover, that Lessing was one of the most tolerant thinkers of the Enlightenment.102 Yet I am not making a claim here about what Lessing ‘actually’ believed. Rather, my suggestion is that Laocoon’s attempt to ‘reform’ painting and poetry, founded on a specific understanding of their semiotic modes, finds its intellectual ancestry in the religious protestations of the Reformation: the ascendancy of the ‘inner’ workings of poetry over the limiting ‘outer’ confines of painting is invested in a theological paradigm, bound up above all with a faith in invisibility.103 In this sense, perhaps the most formative influence of the Laocoon was that of Martin Luther himself. As Joseph Koerner has convincingly argued, Luther’s attitudes towards the visual would reorient the entire subsequent Western tradition—‘the Reformation reshaped what the image is’.104 Luther’s ‘Reformed’ vision of Christianity was centred on

102 Pons 1964 remains the classic work on Lessing’s theology. Translated selections of Lessing’s theological writings are collected in Chadwick (ed.) 1956 (with a useful introduction in pp. 1–49) and Nisbet (ed.) 2005 (with further bibliography at pp. xi–xii); note also the excellent overviews of Schilson 2005 (with detailed bibliography at pp. 179–80, n. 2 and important discussion of Nathan der Weise at pp. 174–7) and Bultmann 2012: 66–86 (on Lessing’s attitudes to the Bible). For a brief introduction to Lessing’s religious upbringing, and its influence on his philosophy of subjectivity and personal autonomy, see McClelland 1986: 122–3: ‘Lessing was in harmony with the Pietists, particularly on those points regarding Christian practice’, McClelland concludes; ‘again and again Lessing stresses the importance of the inner person and the necessity of internalizing revealed truths’ (p. 122). Yasukata 2002: 140–5 discusses Lessing’s dialectical, ‘Janus-faced’ contribution to the history of Protestantism, and above all his commitment to the ‘spirit’ rather than the ‘letter’ of Lutheran theology: ‘the dogmatic, institutional religion of early Protestantism has thus been transformed into the subjective, individualistic religion of modern Protestantism’ (p. 141). 103 For Lessing’s theological commitment to an idea of the ‘inner truth’ (die innere Wahrheit), see Yasukata 2002: esp. 27–8. On Lesssing as a ‘reformer’ of aesthetics, see most recently Beiser 2009: esp. 245: ‘If Mendelssohn defended the rationalist tradition, Lessing was its reformer’, Beiser concludes; ‘while Mendelssohn defended this tradition against the many outside forces marshaling against it, Lessing liberalized it from within by freeing it from a dogmatic reliance on rules and servitude to French models’. 104 Koerner 2004 (quotation from p. 246); cf. Koerner 1993: 363–410; Koerner 2002. I have discussed the German sixteenth-century ‘Reformation of the image’ in Squire 2009: esp. 15–43 (with more detailed bibliography at e.g. 24, n. 32).

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an individualistic, subjective turn, premised on the theology of ‘faith alone’, or sola fides. Intrinsic to this position, moreover, was an outright rejection of the material—and specifically visual—trappings of religion: ‘Christianity will not be known by sight, but by faith, and faith has to do with things not seen’, as Luther opines;105 ‘Christ’s kingdom is a hearing kingdom, not a seeing kingdom: for the eyes do not lead and guide us to where we know and find Christ, but rather the ears do this.’106 Among Luther’s contemporaries, a related polemic led to numerous feats of iconoclastic destruction. Commenting On the Removal of Images in 1522, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt explicitly defended such action, poignantly foreshadowing Lessing’s own rhetoric of materielle Schranken:107 Certainly you must say that one learns from them [pictures] nothing but the life and the suffering of the flesh and that they do not lead further than the flesh. More they cannot do (das man eytel fleischlich leben ynd leyden darauß lernet ynd das sie nit weider furen dan yns fleisch ferner mogen sie nit brengen). For example, from the image of the crucified Christ you learn only about the suffering of Christ in the flesh, how his head hung down, and the like . . . Since, then, images are deaf and dumb, can neither see nor hear, neither learn nor teach, and point to nothing other than pure and simple flesh which is of no use, it follows conclusively that they are of no use. But the Word of God is spiritual and alone is useful to the faithful (Aber das wortt gottis ist geystlich und allein den glaubigen nutze).

With pious nods to the Word of God itself, von Karlstadt draws a distinction between the ‘spirituality’ of language on the one hand, and the ‘corporeality’ of images on the other. Where pictures ground us in the ‘flesh’, it follows, Christianity must be rooted in the immaterial prescriptions of Scripture.

105 In what follows, I refer to the Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther’s collected works (Luther 1883–2009): for this reference, see VII.418 (on Hebrews 11:1), with Koerner 2004: 201–11. Zwingli would express the sentiment more vehemently: ‘Now let someone show us where [the saints] have painted or copied this faith. We cannot show it save in their hearts. Therefore it must follow that we also must learn that faith is necessary in our hearts if we want to do anything pleasing to God. This we cannot learn from walls but only from the gracious pulling of God out of his own word’ (quoted in Thiessen (ed.) 2005: 136). 106 Luther 1883–2009: LI.11. 107 The tract is edited and translated in Mangrum and Scavizzi 1998: 21–43 (quotation from p. 27). On the position, see especially Michalski 1993: 43–50 and Koerner 2004: 137–52.

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Von Karlstadt’s anti-materialist invective is revealingly—if somewhat paradoxically—materialized in a later engraving by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, made in the Low Countries during the late 1560s (Fig. 3.3).108 The engraving shows the idolatries of the Roman Catholic Church fleshing out the rotting skull of a tonsured Catholic monk (complete with snakes and barren trees for hair): the Church’s visceral sacraments are censoriously depicted in the corresponding parts of the head (confession in the ears, Eucharist in the mouth, matrimony and holy orders in the eyes); each ritual is interspersed with other scenes of materialist devotion (the sale of indulgences, bell ringing, pilgrimage, etc.). The worst abomination of all is reserved for the nasal crux: a woman is shown kneeling before an image of the crucified Christ. All other Catholic heresies derive from this one profanation. Like the idols of Roman Catholic idolatry, the Catholic body must wither, rot, and fester; grounded in its own corporeality, Roman Catholicism is denied the ascension of spiritual redemption. Unlike von Karlstadt, Luther himself did not end up condoning the iconoclastic destruction of images. Developing a theological justification for images, Luther was in fact markedly less antagonistic than other Reformation thinkers (among them, Ulrich Zwingli, Philip Melanchthon, and John Calvin).109 Crucially, though, the Lutheran defence was founded upon a set of semiotic prescriptions. The thinking comes to the fore in a 1525 tract Against the Heavenly Prophets (which explicitly condemned earlier iconoclastic acts): ‘if it is not a sin, but a good thing, that I have Christ’s image in my heart,’ Luther preaches, ‘why then should it be sinful to have it before my eyes?’110 Images are here understood as a material means for an immaterial end—an intercessionary aid for a more spiritual mode of reflection. Yet such visual prompts pale in significance compared with the spiritual resources of language. Where images fail to materialize an invisible God, the invisibility of words gives them a spiritual edge: enshrined in Luther’s commitment to scriptura sui ipsius interpres is an 108 On the engraving, see Hodnett 1971: 26–7; Koerner 2002: 164–6 and 2004: 111–13. Note also the engraving’s use of written letters—its use of a (now lost) verbal key to explain the various depravities and their likely citation of biblical prescriptions (cf. Aston 1993: 168–71). 109 Cf. Cottin 1994 (with concise overview at pp. 312–14); Pettegree 2000. 110 Luther 1883–2009: XVIII.83, discussed in Koerner 2004: 159–64; cf. e.g. Christensen 1970; Michalski 1993: 1–42; Squire 2009: 23–7.

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Fig. 3.3. Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, Allegory of Iconoclasm, after 1566. London, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

idea about the directness of verbal language, whereby faith is mediated by Scripture alone, and Scripture is mediated by nothing other than itself. The Reformation’s denigration of the visual, in other words, went hand in hand with an elevation of the verbal: because ‘the Reformation taught the dominion of the word . . . ’, Hans Belting concludes, the Protestant task

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was to ‘rediscover the primal sound of the word, free of all the dross and errors of papism, and to teach it to the congregation’.111 The legacy of the Reformation would direct the whole course of modern intellectual history, not least in northern Germany. Luther’s theological invectives in the sixteenth century constituted at once a challenge and a spur for developments of German aesthetic rationalism.112 In the eighteenth century too, the ghosts of the Reformation continued to haunt even the most (seemingly) secularist of thinkers: the German Enlightenment can only be understood in relation to its longer, Protestant heritage.113 The point leads us squarely back to Laocoon. For what ultimately shapes Lessing’s Grenzen between the ‘bodies’ of painting and the ‘actions’ of poetry, I suggest, is a set of theologically coloured assumptions—a semiotic mode of conceptualizing words and images on the one hand, and a hierarchical distinction that champions immaterial words over material forms on the other. In this connection, it is worth noting those few passages where Laocoon discusses Christian themes explicitly. Take the fourteenth chapter, where Lessing talks about poetry’s capacity to appeal not to the human subject’s ‘physical eye’ (das leibliche Auge), but rather the ‘inner eye’ of the imagination (die Sphäre meines innern Auges):114 Milton’s Paradise Lost is no less the finest epic after Homer because it furnishes few pictures, than the story of Christ’s passion is a poem (als die Leidensgeschichte Christi deswegen ein Poem ist), because one can hardly touch it anywhere without

111 Cf. Belting 1994: 465. Compare Eire 1986: 315: ‘The stripped, whitewashed church in which the pulpit replaced the altar became the focal point of a cultural shift from visual images to language . . . This shift from the visual to the verbal as a means of communication went beyond merely aesthetic considerations.’ 112 See especially Hatfield 1964, along with Beiser 2009: 34 on Leibniz’s key seventeenthcentury contributions: ‘It was Leibniz . . . who gave refuge and comfort to Diotima amid all the efforts of Protestant clerics to persecute and banish her.’ 113 For the general argument, see Squire 2009: 1–74. Cf. more recently Wild 2014: 491: ‘Ultimately, this debate about the soteriological and moral status of aesthetic media can be traced back to the comprehensive reform of religious and profane media Martin Luther and other Evangelical reformers inaugurated . . . If this lineage is correct, then a more or less direct line can be drawn from Reformation controversies about religious media to the Enlightenment debates about aesthetic media; then it can be argued that the foregrounding of aesthetic mediality in general, a major characteristic and innovation of enlightenment aesthetic discourse, as well as the sensitivity to the particularity of individual media, which thinkers like Lessing, Herder, and Moritz exhibited, are owed to the extensive and intensive reflection and critique of religious and profane media at the centre of the media reform of the sixteenth century.’ 114 Lessing 1984: 74.

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hitting on a spot that has suggested subjects to a multitude of the greatest artists. The evangelists recount the fact (das Faktum) with the barest possible simplicity (mit aller möglichen trockenen Einfalt), and the artist makes use of its numerous parts without the former having demonstrated the slightest spark of poetically pictorial genius (ohne daß sie ihrer Seits den geringsten Funken von mahlerischem Genie dabey gezeigt haben). There are paintable (mahlbare) and unpaintable (unmahlbare) facts, and the historian can relate the most paintable ones just as unpicturesquely as the poet is able to present the most unpaintable ones in a picturesque way.

The very question of ‘paintability’ takes on here a decidedly theological hue. Despite the driest possible ‘simplicity’ of its New Testament narrative, the story of Christ’s Passion (Leidensgeschichte) is declared a ‘poem’. Admittedly, it is a different sort of poem from Milton’s Paradise Lost (a text, we recall, that is itself theologically motivated). But just as Milton’s epic cannot be degraded on the grounds that it fails to yield paintable pictures (as Lessing lampoons the Comte de Caylus), so is Christ’s Passion no less a poem because of the multitude of artistic images that it has fostered. Whether one thinks about Milton’s actual poem or the metaphorical poetry of Christ’s Passion, what matters is the imaginative appeal of the story. Were we to unpack the associative thinking, we might think Christ’s Leidensgeschichte to be the greatest poems of all: by quite literally repudiating the body, the story of Christ’s death and resurrection enacts a spiritual ascension over the material confines of the flesh. Later in his essay, Lessing returns to a Christian example to critique the limits of painterly expression. In chapter 25 (in what is effectively the final paragraph before the coda on Winckelmann’s Geschichte), the idea of Christ in the tomb serves to demonstrate the different capacities of painting and poetry to engage with ‘disgusting objects’ (eckelhaften Gegenstände). ‘In a painting of the burial of Christ, Pordenone pictures one of the bystanders holding his nose’, Lessing observes.115 But whether one thinks of this story, or indeed Jesus’ miraculous revival of Lazarus, such representation (Vorstellung) is judged ‘unbearable’ (unerträglich): although the gesture does not convey the actual stench of rotting flesh, it does materialize the disgusting idea of it. For Lessing, the example demonstrates painting’s inferiority when it comes to certain subjects. Whereas a poetic representation allows the imagination to transcend the

115

Lessing 1984: 137.

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repugnant effect (Wirkung) of something disgusting, the picture traps us ‘in its own crude form’ (in seiner eigenen cruden Gestalt): a ‘visible imitation’ (sichtbare Nachahmung) here imprisons us more forcefully than an ‘audible’ one (als in einer hörbaren).116 The observation is duly related back to what Lessing already concluded about ‘ugly’ subjects:117 I must point out, however, that . . . painting and poetry are not in exactly the same position. In poetry, as I have already noted, ugliness of form (die Häßlichkeit der Form) loses its repulsive effect (ihre widrige Wirkung) almost entirely by the change from coexistence to the consecutive. From this point of view it ceases to be ugliness, as it were, and can therefore combine even the more intimately with other qualities to produce a new and special effect (eine neue besondere Wirkung). In painting, on the other hand, ugliness exerts all its force at one time and hence has an effect almost as strong as in nature itself.

In the case of both ugly and disgusting subjects, the temporal workings of poetry are said to render it capable of engaging with unpleasant subjects in a pleasing way. In the visual arts, by contrast, such pleasure is denied: because its ‘spatial’ dimensions rule out such conversion, painting leaves its ugly subjects ‘abominable’ (abscheulich), ‘deformed’ (das Unförmliche), and ‘unchanged’ (unverändlich). Whatever else we make of the passage, the very recourse to Christian precedent strikes me as significant. In one sense, Lessing’s comments foreshadow an aspect of G. W. F. Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (as delivered in Berlin during the 1820s). Particularly important is Laocoon’s resonance with what Hegel would label the ‘Romantic’ art of (Reformed) Christianity: where the ‘Classical’ art of antiquity had been premised upon the divine revelations of material form, Hegel argues, the ‘Romantic’ champions a ‘beauty of inwardness’ (Schönheit der Innigkeit). Because Christianity depends upon the ugly material necessity of Christ’s Passion, the beautiful spiritual truth of the Resurrection

116 Lessing 1984: 137— responding to Jonathan Richardson; the reference to Pordenone’s Lazarus image seems to refer to a painting of c.1516, housed in Prague (Obrazárna Pražského hradui, inv. O 248; cf. Fučíková and K. Schütz 1996: 54, no. 17). On Lessing’s view of the ‘disgusting’ here, and its place within a longer intellectual history, see especially Menninghaus 2003: 45–9; on the ‘stench of Lazarus’—as famously depicted by Giotto—see especially Danto 1999: 106–22. 117 Lessing 1984: 128.

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cannot be understood by visual means, but instead by spiritual contemplation alone:118 Christ scourged, with the crown of thorns, carrying his cross to the place of execution, nailed to the cross, passing away in the agony of a tortured and slow death—this cannot be portrayed in the forms of Greek beauty.

Lessing’s talk of the ‘inner eye’—and his championing of the subjective imagination—aligns rather neatly with what Hegel would historicize as the Romantic condition. From a Hegelian perspective, Lessing’s championing of poetry over painting is itself inextricable from a theologically derived outlook: it is indebted not just to Christian ideas, but to the fulfilled spiritual revelations of the Protestant Reformation.119 Whether or not one subscribes to Hegel’s larger Geistesgeschichte, the point I wish to make is that Lessing collapses a difference between what Hegel labels the ‘Classical’ and the ‘Romantic’, imposing a theologically coloured, anti-materialist ideology back onto antiquity. For Lessing, it is ultimately the ‘spirituality’ of poetry’s images (die Geistigkeit ihrer Bilder), existing in the ‘limitless field of our imagination’ (dem unendlichen Felde unserer Einbildungskraft), that gives them the upper hand over painting.120 When Lessing applies that thinking to ancient materials, however, his ideological position comes to the fore. Among classicist circles, one of the aspects of Greek and Roman religion that has proved most fruitful in recent years has concerned its materialist mediations:121 images could be understood not just to represent the gods, numerous scholars have emphasized, but also to make them physically, visually, and even tangibly 118

Hegel 1975: II.543–4. On Hegel and his relationship to Lessing’s Laocoon, see now Hien 2013, and cf. Squire, forthcoming; specifically on Hegel’s thinking about the Laocoon statue, and his response to Winckelmann and Lessing, see König 2011: esp. 109–17. A longer study of how aspects of Laocoon foreshadow Hegel’s Geistesgeschichte is a desideratum: note in particular Lessing’s comments about Egyptian art in his Paralipomena (Lessing 2012: 245–53), which anticipate numerous aspects of what Hegel would label the ‘Symbolic’. 119 Cf. Hegel 1975: I.103: ‘When the urge for knowledge and research, and the need for inner spirituality, instigated the Reformation, religious ideas were drawn away from their wrapping in the element of sense and brought back to the inwardness of heart and thinking.’ 120 Lessing 1984: 40. 121 Foundational are Gordon 1979 and Vernant 1991: 27–49; cf. e.g. Gladigow 1985–6 and Versnel 1987. For some samples of recent work, see e.g. Gaifman 2006 and 2012: esp. 1–16; Tanner 2006: esp. 40–55; Elsner 2007: esp. 1–48; Mylonopoulos (ed.) 2010; Platt 2011; Squire 2011: 154–201.

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present.122 If antiquity can be understood as a ‘world full of gods’ (in Keith Hopkins’s memorable allusion to Thales),123 images revealed those gods to be visible and material entities, acting within the external world of the viewer rather than the internal world of the subjective imagination. Lessing starts out from a wholly different perspective. Subscribing to a Lutheran idea that the divine is necessarily invisible, Laocoon argues that it is poetry alone that can—and that historically could—render the divine intelligible. In few passages is this ideology more conspicuous than in Laocoon’s twelfth chapter. Lessing here begins by distinguishing between ‘two kinds of beings and actions—visible and invisible’ (eine doppelte Gattung von Wesen und Handlungen; sichtbare und unsichtbare).124 Homeric poetry is able to make such a distinction, Lessing argues. But painting renders ‘everything visible, and visible in but one way’. It follows that when the Comte de Caylus attempts to translate Homeric poetry into painting, his paintings distort their poetic model, merging invisible actions into visible ones on the one hand, and beings that cannot be seen into those that can on the other.125 Citing numerous Homeric examples, Lessing pitches such poetic passages against Caylus’s own painterly renditions:126 The worst of it is that when painting erases the distinction between visible and invisible beings it simultaneously destroys all those characteristic features by which this latter, higher order is raised above the lower one.

122

In this sense, my approach to the cultic workings of ancient images respectfully parts company from that of Grethlein (this volume). While not talking about classical antiquity, Grethlein introduces ‘Hindu darshan’ as a form of ‘seeing in’; I wonder, though, whether his championing of subjective experience (‘the viewer . . . has to recognize the represented in the representation’) already starts from a culturally conditioned viewpoint, reducing ‘presence’ to ‘representation’. Fundamental to darshan, as indeed Greek theôria (cf. Rutherford 2000; Nightingale 2004: 40–71; Elsner 2007: 22–6), is not just the subjective experience of ‘seeing’ an image’s divinity, but also the notion that that image-divinity sees you . . . 123 124 Hopkins 1999. Lessing 1984: 66. 125 Lessing 1984: 66: ‘When Count Caylus does this, I say, the series as a whole as well as a number of single pictures become extremely confused, incomprehensible, and selfcontradictory (äusserst verwirrt, unbegreiflich und widersprechend)’. 126 Lessing 1984: 66 (Das schlimmste dabey ist nur dieses, daß durch die mahlerische Aufhebung des Unterschiedes der sichtbaren und unsichtbaren Wesen, zugleich alle die charakteristischen Züge verloren gehen, durch welche sie diese höhere Gattung über jene geringere erhebet).

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Poetry constitutes a ‘higher’ representational mode than the ‘lower’ sphere of painting, then, precisely because it aligns with the assumed ontological realm of the gods.127 A little later in the same chapter, Laocoon voices this assumption explicitly. According to the ‘spirit of the poet’ (den Geist der Dichter), we are told, ‘being invisible is the natural condition of his gods’ (unsichtbar seyn, ist der natürliche Zustand seiner Götter).128 By contrast, painting necessarily collapses that distinction between visible and invisible forces, reducing its gods to men:129 Painting carries out this reduction (Herabsetzung). In it everything which in the poem raises the gods above the godlike creatures vanishes (verschwindet) altogether. Size, strength, and swiftness—qualities which Homer always has in store for his gods in a higher and more extraordinary degree (wovon Homer noch immer einen höhern, wunderbarern Grad für seine Götter in Vorrath hat) than that bestowed on his finest heroes—must in the painting sink to the common level of humanity. Jupiter and Agamemnon, Apollo and Anchises, Ajax and Mars all become exactly the same kind of beings, recognized by nothing more than their outward conventional features (nichts als an äusserlichen verabredeten Merkmalen).

Lessing’s talk of a painterly ‘reduction’ poignantly reverses the materialist underpinnings of ancient anthropomorphism: just as antiquity’s gods could be mediated through human form, so too might that human form in turn be visually made present through material means. Yet in Laocoon it is the supposed invisibility of the gods that leads to an evaluation of poetry as a ‘higher’, ‘greater’, and ‘more capacious’ medium. In the visual arts, the very quality of divinity is said to ‘vanish’ (verschwinden): ‘we lose 127 Cf. Lessing 1984: 66: ‘This invisibility gives the imagination free rein to enlarge the scene and envisage the persons and actions of the gods on a grander scale than the measure of ordinary man—and always as much as it likes (diese Unsichtbarkeit erlaubet der Einbildungskraft die Szene zu erweitern, und läßt ihr freyes Spiel, sich die Personen der Götter und ihre Handlungen so groß, und über das gemeine Menschliche so weit erhaben zu denken, als sie nur immer will). But painting must adopt a visible scene, whose various indispensable parts become the scale for the figures participating in it—a scale which the eye has ready at hand and whose lack of proportion to the higher beings makes them appear enormously monstrous (ungeheuer) on the artist’s canvas.’ As Wellbery 1984: 147–55 concisely puts it, drawing an important connection with Lessing’s 1769 essay on Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet, ‘poetry attains to a concreteness of content substance which avoids both particularity and empty abstraction’ (p. 154). 128 Lessing 1984: 70. On Lessing’s underlying ideas of Geist and the ‘seelische Wirkung’ of poetry here, cf. Achermann 2013: esp. 244–57. 129 Lessing 1984: 67–8.

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infinitely much of the sublime aspect of Homer’s gods by thinking of them as being of ordinary size, such as they are generally depicted, in the company of mortals, on canvas.’130 But Laocoon goes still further. Not only does Lessing construct the ancient gods in Lutheran guise, as invisible entities that thereby demonstrate immaterial poetry’s upper hand over material painting. He also suggests that—because of painting’s necessary recourse to ‘outward conventional features’ (äusserlichen verabredeten Merkmalen)—it is painting, not poetry, that renders the gods unreal. The argument is central to Lessing’s arguments in chapters 8 to 10, developing the preface’s opening polemic against the ‘allegorizing mania’ (Allegoristerey) of contemporary artists:131 The gods and spiritual beings, as the artists portray them, are not precisely those whom the poet needs in his work. To the artist they are personified abstractions (personifirte Abstracta) which must always retain the same characteristics if they are to be recognized. To the poet, on the other hand, they are real, acting beings (wirkliche handelnde Wesen) who, in addition to their general character, possess other qualities and feelings which, as circumstances demand, may stand out more prominently than the former. To the sculptor Venus is simply Love; hence he must give her all the modest beauty and all the graceful charm (alle die holden Reitze) which delight us in an object we love and which we therefore associate with our abstract conception of love . . . To the poet, on the other hand, Venus is, to be sure, Love, but she is also the goddess of love who has, besides this characteristic, her own individual personality and hence must be just as capable of the impulses of aversion as those of affection.

Lessing must have delighted in the paradox. The very attempt visually to incorporate the gods, it is claimed, renders those gods insubstantial: where poetry can portray such forces in all their ontological complexity, the material substrata of painting ends up abstractifying—transforming the divine into ‘personified abstracts’ (personifirte Abstracta).132 In order to demarcate the removed, non-material realm of such beings, the visual arts must turn to allegorizing attribute: their only hope lies in what Lessing 130

Lessing 1984: 204 (note to chapter 12). Lessing 1984: 52–3; cf. Lessing 1984: 5. There are important links here with Winckelmann’s 1766 essay, Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst, arguing that ancient images of the gods were only ever material allegories—quite distinct from their ideal immaterial forms, mediated through language (cf. Potts 1994: 96–101, esp. 97–8, along with Niklewski 1979: 17–36, and Bonfatti 1993). 131 132

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labels Sinnbilder—that is, symbolizing ‘images’ that work through ‘sensorial’ means.133 But what do such corporeal signs do other than abate, diminish, and restrain? For Lessing, the very recourse to such bodily signs is a mark of desperation: the artist ends up rendering finite the infinite world of the superhuman. Because of art’s incapacity to mediate the divine, poetry alone can serve religious ends. By extension, Lessing argues, religion must limit the proper workings of art. In antiquity, it follows, religious considerations exercised an ‘external restraint’ (äußerlicher Zwang) on the artist. Since ‘superstition overloaded the gods with symbols’ (Der Aberglaube überladete die Götter mit Sinnbildern), the artist’s work was frequently ‘destined for worship and devotion’ (zur Verehrung und Anbetung bestimmt): as a result, his work ‘could not always be as perfect as it would have been if he had had as his sole aim the pleasure of his spectators’.134 This leads Laocoon to a further set of distinctions, namely between ‘free’ images, and those that have been ‘consecrated’ (geheiligt), ‘worshipped’ (verehret), and hence ‘polluted by adoration’ (durch Anbetung verunreinigt).135 As critic, Lessing would seem to condone the iconoclastic ‘wrath of those pious destroyers during the first centuries of Christianity’ (die Wuth der frommen Zerstörer in den ersten Jahrhunderten des Christenthums). For it is only images that are free from such religious constraints that properly deserve the ‘name of artwork’ (den Namen der Kunstwerke):136 therefore I would prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist was able to reveal himself as an artist, and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions (merkliche Spuren gottesdienstlicher Verabredung), deserves this name: for here art was not created for its own sake, but was merely a handmaiden of religion (weil die Kunst hier nicht um ihrer selbst willen gearbeitet, sondern ein bloßes Hülfsmittel der Religion war); it stressed meaning more than beauty in the material subjects it

Cf. Lessing 1984: 60: ‘When the poet personifies abstractions, he characterizes them sufficiently by their names and the actions he has them perform. The artist lacks these means and must therefore add to his personified abstractions symbols by which they may be recognized (er muß also seinen personifirten Abstractis Sinnbilder zugeben, durch welche sie kenntlich werden). But because these symbols are something different and mean something different, they make the figures allegorical.’ 134 135 Lessing 1984: 55. On Lessing’s comments here, cf. Wolf 2013: 285–8. 136 Lessing 1984: 56–7. 133

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allotted to art for execution (die bey den sinnlichen Vorstellungen, die sie ihr aufgab, mehr auf das Bedeutende als auf das Schöne sahe).

The visual arts of classical antiquity might take on an exemplary role within Laocoon, in other words. But the only ‘art’ truly worthy of the name is that which is free from the debased servitude of religion. Lessing’s various efforts to segregate painting and poetry are all staked on a Reformist zeal to pull apart art from religion: Laocoon’s medial distinctions go hand in hand with a quest to free ‘pure’ art from the sullied debaucheries of idolatry.137

Conclusion: Lessing’s Lessening of the Gods My aim in this chapter has been twofold. First, I surveyed Laocoon’s defining recourse to classical painting and poetry: Lessing looks to ancient precedent to offer a prescriptive guide as to the ‘proper’ medial limits of contemporary art. Second, I suggested that this historical retrospection collapses a crucial difference in theological outlook. The hierarchical championing of language’s ‘spirituality’ over the ‘corporeality’ of images is rooted in a deeply Protestant intellectual paradigm. By attempting to excavate an ancient archaeology for that modern thinking, moreover, Lessing exposes the ideological baggage of his own critical distinctions. Needless to say, terms like ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’ run the risk of positing too neat a distinction: any dividing line between a historical ‘then’ and ‘now’ is always in danger of oversimplifying (just as with the seepage between Lessing’s own categories of ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’). I do not mean to deny that some aspects of Lessing’s account were foreshadowed in classical philosophy or literature; indeed, there are some fascinating parallels (as well as fundamental differences) between the arguments of Laocoon and Dio Chrysostom’s twelfth, ‘Olympic’ oration—a text which pitched the Homeric ability to portray Zeus in poetry against the resources 137 On the larger intellectual historical backdrop—the argument that ‘art’ as an autonomous field is an eighteenth-century invention—see in particular Kristeller 1990: 163–227 (first printed in 1951/2), and the retelling of Shiner 2001; for critique, see especially Porter 2009a and 2009b, along with Buchenau 2013: esp. 1–14. To claim that Laocoon stakes a claim for the ‘autonomy’ of art would be too strong, as Beiser 2009: 247 reminds us; for all Lessing’s discussions of art and religion, he nonetheless ascribes to both painting and poetry a distinctly ‘moral’ purpose.

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of the sculptor Pheidias.138 In exploring Laocoon’s construction of the gods, my overriding objective has instead been to demonstrate how Lessing’s dialectic between poetry and painting takes its cue from a particular set of cultural historical concerns and invectives: Laocoon’s view of antiquity is projected through a distorting theological lens. That theological backdrop might perhaps yield an additional potency to the iconic statue-group that gives Laocoon its title. As Lessing knew full well, the narrative context of the sculpture is itself premised around themes of idolatry, iconoclasm, and divinity. In one sense, Laocoon speaks up against images: as priest, he is the prototypical challenger of the ultimate treacherous image (the Trojan Horse). In another, though, the statue-group also shows the heavenly punishment that ensues: the priest who advocates the destruction of an image—warning (with good cause!) of the consequences of fetishizing imagery, foreseeing the damnation that would follow—is revealed receiving his comeuppance from the gods; indeed, in the material form of the statue, Laocoon’s ultimate penance is to be turned into consummate artwork—an embodiment of the exemplary achievement of ancient image-making. None of this plays an explicit or conscious role in Lessing’s discussion. Still, I wonder whether these contradictory and complex ideas lie latent in the background, explaining (at least in part) Lessing’s fascination with the sculpture: the very story of Laocoon, we might think, encapsulates the entangled theological problems with which Lessing himself is wrestling. Throughout this chapter, I have been careful to emphasize that my reading of Laocoon in no way lessens its intellectual historical achievement. One of the things that makes Lessing’s essay so fascinating, I have argued, is precisely the cultural underpinnings of its medial distinctions. In this sense, the very presence of classical materials sheds light on the finite parameters of Laocoon’s own cultural horizons. If antiquity can aid in formulating a historical critique of Lessing’s transhistorical conclusions, the very recourse to ancient materials helps us lay Lessing out on

138 On the oration and its intellectual backdrop, see the commentary of Russell 1992: 14–19, 158–211; cf. also Benediktson 2000: 177–85; Betz 2004; Platt 2009: esp. 149–54 (above all on the relationship with Phil. Vit. Ap. 6.19). To claim that this text amounts to ‘a denigration of the visual arts that is far more scornful and dismissive than the writings of Martin Luther or G. E. Lessing’ (Heslin 2015: 11) would seem to collapse Dio’s playful games.

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the Freudian couch: historical distance showcases the specificities of cultural conditioning. With that ‘Freudian couch’ in mind, allow me to end with one of Laocoon’s most telling attempts to find ‘some truth’ (etwas wahres) in ancient precedent. In the second chapter, Lessing indulges in a revealing digression, one which leads the author (as he tellingly puts it) to ‘stray from his track’ (ich gerathe aus meinem Wege). The backdrop to the discussion lies in the question of whether or not it is right for legal jurisdiction to meddle with human intellectual endeavour. When it comes to the sciences (die Wissenschaften), laws should never interfere, Lessing concludes: because knowledge deals with truth (Wahrheit), and hence with matters of the soul (Seele), any restraint on science amounts to civic tyranny. But the case with the arts (die Künste) is different:139 The end purpose of the arts is pleasure, and this pleasure is not indispensable (Der Endzweck der Künste hingegen ist Vergnügen; und das Vergnügen ist entbehrlich). Hence it may be for the law-maker to determine what kind of pleasure and how much of each kind he will permit.

Lessing here speaks of ‘the arts’ in general. But when he comes to explain which arts should be censored, we find no mention of the poets that Plato famously banned from his Republic. Instead, it is the ‘visual arts in particular’ that call for civic laws (bürgerliche Gesetze):140 The visual arts in particular (die bildenden Künste insbesondere)—aside from the inevitable influence they exert on the character of a nation—have an effect (eine Wirkung) that demands the closer supervision of law. If beautiful people (schöne Menschen) have made beautiful statues appear (schöne Bildsäulen), these statues in turn affected the men, and thus the state had its beautiful statues to thank for beautiful men. With us the highly susceptible imagination of mothers seems to express itself only in producing monsters (Bey uns scheinet sich die zarte Einbildungskraft der Mütter nur in Ungeheuern zu äussern). From this point of view I believe I can find some truth in some of the ancient tales which are generally rejected as outright lies. The mothers of Aristomenes, Aristodamas, Alexander the Great, Scipio, Augustus, and Galerius all dreamed during pregnancy that they had relations with a serpent (als ob sie mit einer

139

Lessing 1984: 14. Lessing 1984: 14–15. On the importance of this passage, see Mitchell 1986: 108–13. Stafford 1991: 211–79 explores the underlying somatic metaphor of the ‘hybrid’ in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual history, with its ‘fearful disdain of mixtures’ (p. 211). 140

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Schlange zu thun hätten). The serpent was a symbol of divinity (ein Zeichen der Gottheit), and the beautiful statues and paintings depicting Bacchus, Apollo, Mercury, or Hercules were seldom without a snake. Those faithful wives had feasted their eyes on the god during the day, and their confused dream aroused the image of the reptile (Die ehrlichen Weiber hatten des Tages ihre Augen an dem Gotte geweidet, und der verwirrende Traum erweckte das Bild des Tieres). Thus I save the dream and abandon the interpretation born of the pride of their sons and the impudence of the flatterer. For there must be some reason why the adulterous fantasy (ehebrecherische Phantasie) was always a serpent.

Addressing his readers here not as a Gesetzgeber, but rather as the Kunstrichter heralded in Laocoon’s preface, Lessing preaches that the visual arts require the closer supervision of law (die nähere Aufsicht des Gesetzes). For images ‘are capable of an effect’ (sind einer Wirkung fähig) that the literary arts are not. But what precisely is that ‘effect’? In proceeding to explain why the visual arts require legal supervision, Lessing ends up unravelling the very logic of his Grenzen. The ‘visual arts’ do not just signify, it seems, but actively do things: quite apart from influencing the ‘character of a nation’, the very presence of images exercises a generative force.141 To support his argument, Lessing adds an extraordinary claim. Just as beautiful men have begotten beautiful statues, so too have beautiful statues affected those men in turn (so wirkten diese hinwiederum auf jene zurück). Although he leaves the ‘beautiful men’ unnamed, Lessing seems to be thinking of ancient Greece: from a historical perspective, Greek art can be said to have physically spurred the upright ethics of Greek philosophy, rendering the ‘beautiful’ Greeks literal ‘pillars’ of society. In stark contrast, the bastardized visual forms of Lessing’s own day are said to have led to freakish monsters. Contemporary women prove no less impressionable in their Einbildungskraft than ancient

141 On the ways in which such an aesthetic ‘effect’ necessarily exceeds the projects of semiotics and hermeneutics, see the now classic study of Gumbrecht 2004. For a related arthistorical polemic, compare e.g. Mitchell 2005, arguing that ‘what pictures want from us, what we have failed to give them, is an idea of visuality adequate to their ontology’ (p. 47). Cf. e.g. Freedberg 1989 (on the ‘presence’ or ‘inherence’ of images); Elkins 1996 (on the psychology of attributing images with a subjectivity of their own); Gell 1998 (an anthropological study of images as actors that mediate social agency); and Maniura and Shepherd (eds.) 2006 (a collection of essays, from a variety of cultural and historical perspectives, responding to Freedberg 1989).

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mothers: nourish that imagination with the wrong stimuli, then, and the results find outward expression in miscarried abominations. What should we make of these comments? The significance of the passage lies not just in Lessing’s concessions about the power of the visual, as some critics have argued.142 Most revealing of all, I think, is the author’s implicit ontological claim: the very presence of images seems to fly in the face of Laocoon’s rational semiotics. As the subsequent story about ‘ancient mothers’ demonstrates, the visual sphere even risks compromising the social orders of the Enlightenment: as with the prototypical serpent in the garden of Eden, the obscene realm of images has enticed even maritally ‘faithful’ wives (ehrlichen Weiber), entangling them in its obscene adulterous fantasy (ehebrecherische Phantasie). There could be no clearer indication, I think, that Laocoon pertains to something more than the systematic ‘boundaries’ of painting and poetry alone. At the same time, Lessing’s curious comments—in particular, his talk of the ‘sign of godhead’ (ein Zeichen der Gottheit)—take us back to issues of theology. The classic paradox of iconoclasm, it has been said, lies in the fact that the image-breakers prove simultaneously to be the image-makers:143 the very attempt to destroy, annihilate, or ‘empty’ the image concedes to it an inherent force. Something similar might be said of Lessing’s Laocoon, which at once champions poetry over the visual arts while it also acknowledges the image’s residual power. However dormant they may seem, the primordial force of images lies latent within Lessing’s text: like the eponymous priest who lends his name to the treatise, Lessing looks to antiquity while wrestling with his own theological demons.144

142 Cf. Heslin 2015: 15, who cites the passage—with its suggestion that ‘statuary is stronger than semen’—to correct ‘the erroneous assumption that Lessing always and automatically privileged writing over painting’. Heslin misreads the passage, in my view: there is no suggestion here that each mother, ‘while having intercourse with her less-thangodlike husband . . . kept an image in her mind not of him but of the god she had been gazing at during the day’. 143 On the relationship between ‘Bilderstürmer’ and ‘Bilderstifter’, see Heimpel 1954: 134, developed in Koerner 2002. 144 Research for this chapter was carried out during the generous tenure of a Philip Leverhulme Prize. For their comments on earlier versions, and additional bibliographic pointers, I am grateful to Jaś Elsner, Constanze Güthenke, Avi Lifschitz, Jim Porter, and the two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press.

4 Lessing’s Laocoon as Analytical Instrument The Perspectives of a Classical Archaeologist Luca Giuliani Translated from the German by Joe O’Donnell

I arrived at Lessing and his Laocoon by way of a somewhat circuitous route. Unlike many other contributors in this volume, my interest was directed neither at Lessing as a person nor at the text as a document of the intellectual history of the eighteenth century. I am neither a scholar of literature nor a philosopher, but an archaeologist. In the case of Lessing, I was looking for an instrument with which to reflect on the relationship between images and texts produced in Greece between the eighth and second centuries BC. However, my critical engagement with Laocoon in this context ultimately proved to be not only useful but in fact indispensable. As lucid as Laocoon may appear, it is marked by paradoxical obscurities. The entire text is based on a theory of the difference between poetry and painting as media that is first outlined in the sixteenth chapter—and thus around halfway through the book. Moreover, even this belated sketch is a conspicuously spare one. Lessing conceals the individual steps in his thought process rather than unfolding them in explicit form. It is almost as if he tired of his own theory while working on the book. Certainly, when now attempting to trace the argumentation in all its rigour, one is well advised to consult the fragments of earlier drafts that Lessing left out of his final version (the so-called

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Table 4.1. Table laying out the main features of Lessing’s theory in the Laocoon (setting the poles of narrative and description against the medium of language and painting) Object: Actions, succeeding each other in time Mode: Narration

Object: Bodies, juxtaposed in space Mode: Description

Medium: Language (arbitrary signs succeeding each other in time)

narrative poetry

descriptive poetry (= prose)

Medium: Painting (natural signs juxtaposed in space)

narrative painting (?)

descriptive painting

Paralipomena)—and which are not included in most editions. The theoretical matrix of Laocoon is thus not immediately evident but requires a certain amount of reconstruction work, a task that was first undertaken astoundingly late, namely in the 1970s and 1980s. Interestingly, the decisive impetus for this endeavour came not from German literary scholarship but from Tzvetan Todorov and David Wellbery,1 whose contributions established a completely new foundation for the discussion of this famous text. Some years ago, I attempted to summarize the main features of Lessing’s theory in the form of a table (Table 4.1).2 Poetry and painting correspond in terms of their overall goal: to imitate objects and create illusion. Both represent ‘absent things as being present and appearance as reality. Both create an illusion, and in both cases the illusion is pleasing.’3 In Lessing’s view, it is precisely the production of illusion that distinguishes art from non-art. Of course, the two media achieve this by quite different means: ‘Painting uses forms and colours in space. Poetry articulates sounds in time. The signs employed by the former are natural, while those employed by the latter are arbitrary.’4 This last sentence refers to a distinction that was familiar to, indeed self-evident 1 Cf. Todorov 1973, 1977; Wellbery 1984. For Wellbery’s own reflections on his 1984 project, see also his chapter in this book. 2 3 Giuliani 1996: esp. 13. Lessing 1984: 3. 4 For the relevant comments in the Paralipomena see Lessing 1990: 209 and 219.

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for, Lessing and his contemporary readers. Natural signs are regarded here as those whose connection to the signified is based on the laws of nature (e.g. visible symptoms as signs of a certain disease) or on a relation of similarity that is comprehended as natural. By contrast, the relationship between arbitrary signs and the signified is based on human convention, a prime example being found in the array of human languages. This distinction has a second aspect: the interconnection between the signs of language (phonemes, syllables, words, and sentences) is based on the fact that they form a temporal succession, whereas the signs of painting (patterns, colours, and figures) are articulated in a spatial juxtaposition. The two media correspond to two sorts of object that can potentially be represented by artists: ‘Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies . . . Objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions.’5 These two categories of object correspond to description and narration, two distinct representational modes that are both antithetical and complementary. Whereas description depicts the juxtaposition of bodies in space, narration traces the succession of actions in time. These are the elements of Lessing’s theory, which outlines both the fundamental aesthetic problem and its solution. Art is distinguished from non-art by the fact that it creates an illusion. The illusion in turn presupposes a similarity relation between the sign and the signified object. Here, painting has an advantage: its signs are natural and the similarity relation is there from the outset. The poet, by contrast, operates with arbitrary signs, which by definition are not based on a similarity relation;6 how can he nevertheless achieve a similarity relation? Lessing’s answer is that the poet does so by making actions rather than bodies his object: by narrating rather than describing. It is only in the narrative mode that a linguistic structure can achieve similarity to its object in that a sequence of words and sentences is made to represent a sequence of actions. In summary, a purely descriptive poetry that forgoes a narrative structure is a contradiction in terms since it fails to produce illusion and thus to achieve the primary goal of art; in Lessing’s terminology, it is not poetry, but prose. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the 5

Lessing 1984: 78. For Lessing’s talk of ‘arbitrary’ and ‘natural’ signs, and his response to Mendelssohn’s critique, see above all the chapters by Beiser and Lifschitz in this volume. 6

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case of painting, which, since its semiotic system is based on spatial juxtaposition rather than temporal succession, is inherently suited to description as a representational form. Actions are something it can at best imply by depicting bodies involved in an action. However, it can only present a single moment of the entire action: this makes it all the more important for the painter to choose the moment that is able to stimulate the imaginative power of the beholder.7 This is the thrust of Lessing’s argument, which was formulated, as we know, with normative intent and directed against a poetry that employed predominantly descriptive rather than narrative representational forms. Lessing saw a classic example of such an approach at the time in a monumental poem by Albrecht von Haller titled The Alps (1729), which he regarded as poetological folly. His own interest in the pictorial art of antiquity was (at best) limited. Although he gave his treatise the title Laocoon, he did not see it as necessary to include an engraving of the Laocoon group in the book. There is no indication that in the course of his preparatory work for the treatise he even bothered to view a plastercast of the group owned by the Berlin Academy of Art, which would have been easily accessible to him.8 Even more notable is Lessing’s behaviour nine years after the publication of Laocoon, when he had the opportunity to visit Italy as a travelling companion of the Prince of Braunschweig. Lessing spent three weeks in Rome, and his travel notes have been preserved.9 On 26 September 1775 he visited St Peter’s Basilica, the mosaic factory (in which he was particularly interested), the garden of the Villa Medici, and the Museo Clementino: an itinerary that would do credit to any hurried tourist today. There is no mention of the Belvedere Courtyard, where the Laocoon group was located and which formed the core of the Museo Clementino. We do not know if Lessing saw the group at all; however, if he did, it does not seem to have made much of an impression on him. Lessing’s intellectual horizon consisted of texts, not images. Yet this does not mean that his theory cannot be fruitful when it comes to phenomena of pictorial art: not as a normative position but as

7

Crucial here is the third chapter of Laocoon: Lessing 1984: 19–22. Although Laocoon was written in Breslau, it was based on preparatory work done during Lessing’s time in Berlin. On Lessing’s lack of visual interest in the sculpture, cf. also Squire’s chapter in this volume. 9 Lessing 1989: esp. 699 (26 September. 1775). 8

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an analytical instrument. In any case, before we move on to this discussion, we need to consider two aspects of Lessing’s theory that were already seen as problematic by some of his contemporaries.10 The first problem concerns the possible objects of artistic mimesis. For Lessing there are two kinds of such mimesis, which he distinguishes in terms of their syntactical relations: objects that are juxtaposed in space (which he calls bodies) and objects that succeed each other in time (which he calls actions). Any phenomenon that is suited to imitative representation must fit into one or the other of these categories—aliud non datur. There is an elegant radicality to this position—but is it also satisfactory? Herder already saw that not everything occurring in succession over time can be meaningfully regarded as action:11 I repudiate the argument . . . that objects succeeding one another can therefore be in general called actions . . . The concept of the successive is only half the idea of action: it must be a succession through force: thus action takes place. I imagine a being active in the succession of time; I imagine changes that follow one another by virtue of the force of a substance: thus action takes place.

Every action presupposes an acting subject that pursues a certain telos. If this teleological tension is absent, then so, too, is precisely what constitutes the essence of an action.12 Everything around us is subject to constant change, but most of these processes occur without the participation of an acting subject: the oscillations of a light-wave and the movements of the tectonic plates on the Earth’s surface are both processes occurring over time, but they are processes that cannot be narrated, only described. The second point concerns a difference that Lessing discerns between the signs of language and those of painting: linguistic signs are perceived successively, whereas pictorial signs are perceived simultaneously. Both of these assertions are open to doubt. On the one hand, it is difficult to reduce the perception of language to pure successiveness. It is really only

10 See the brilliant discussion of Laocoon submitted anonymously by the young, still unknown Herder in 1769 (Herder 1993): for discussion, cf. the introduction to this volume, as well as Grethlein’s chapter. 11 Herder 1993: 196. 12 This is also how Lessing puts it in the Paralipomena to Laocoon: ‘A series of movements that aim for an ultimate goal is called action’ (Lessing 1990: 251).

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the individual phonemes that temporally succeed one another. Their successiveness changes into the simultaneity of the word, and the successiveness of words into the simultaneity of the sentence. To be sure, the sentences making up a text follow one another in linear succession like the links in a chain—and yet the individual links cannot be understood in themselves, but only as part of a synthesis that the listener must construct through the progressive application of memory. Despite the successive nature of speech, any kind of meaning is always constructed on the level of simultaneity. How does this compare with the perception of the image? In this case the process involved has been well understood for around a hundred years. The field in which the human eye can see clearly is relatively small: the angle of optimal visual acuity is around two degrees. This limitation of the angle of sight is compensated for by the fact that the gaze only fixates on any one particular point for a fraction of a second. Although we are unaware of its movement, the eye constantly flits about involuntarily. It is only more extensive movements covering several degrees that are subject to conscious control. Thus, while we think our eyes are immobile when we focus on a particular object, they are actually in permanent, discontinuous motion, searching for conspicuous formal characteristics and instructive information. Hearing and understanding an oral expression is thus based on a complex dialectic of successiveness and simultaneity. Moreover, the act of beholding an image proves to be a process taking place over time. But does this suffice to abandon Lessing’s distinction between text and image?13 In my opinion, we should actually maintain Lessing’s distinction but under somewhat different conditions. When different beholders are confronted with the same image and their optical paths are compared, they exhibit certain similarities but are clearly different.14 The process of reception proceeds differently in each case. This phenomenon was clearly described by Paul Klee: ‘The scanning gaze of the beholder, which is akin to a grazing animal, follows paths that are established in the artwork.’15 Klee credits the artwork with

As does E. H. Gombrich: for Gombrich’s comments on ‘Moment and movement in art’, see Gombrich 1982: 40–63 (first published in 1964). 14 Yarbus 1967: 171–96; for some different reflections, centred around the categories of ‘narrative’ and ‘picture’, cf. Grethlein’s chapter in this volume. 15 Klee 1991: 63. 13

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a certain steering capacity, albeit one that is not strong enough to determine the beholder’s behaviour. The words Klee uses are wonderfully paradoxical. We would normally not expect to find paths in a pasture, or a pasture where there are paths. That aside, it is important to note that the ‘scanning gaze’ is free to move along these paths forwards and backwards and can, if it chooses to, easily depart from them altogether. All this is very different in the case of text. Here, there is a clear boundary between what the recipient has already heard (or read) and what he will subsequently hear. This boundary shifts at a certain speed and in a certain direction, which are not subject to the choice of the recipient but rather are determined by the speaker or the text itself. Summing up: the capacity of an image to steer the process of its own perception, driving the attention of the beholder, determining its direction and focus—this capacity is low. The corresponding capacity of a text, on the contrary, is high. Any text inevitably determines the process of listening from its beginning to the end. In this I see the fundamental difference between poetry and painting, as Lessing used to call them (or between texts and images, as I would prefer to say). The difference is fundamental, because it is this control over the process of reception that gives rise to the possibility of building up suspense. Suspense necessarily presupposes a protracted, stepwise extension of what the audience gets to know, and is linked to an impending conclusion—whether hoped for or feared. It is not difficult for a verbal narrative (insofar as it works even moderately well) to place its recipients in precisely this situation; however, in this respect images face enormous problems. The consequences of a modification of Lessing’s basic theory can again be summarized in tabular form (Table 4.2). The linguistic medium has a relation to the generation of suspense that Lessing would describe as suitable or easy (‘ein bequemes Verhältniß’).16 By contrast the task of generating suspense is far more difficult for images: the relation here is an uneasy one. This of course only applies up until the invention of film: by learning to move, images gained enormously in terms of the possibilities to steer the process of their reception, and film has in fact become the medium in which the generation of suspense is most intensively practised. However, prior to the invention of film the capacity to generate For the thinking behind Lessing’s understanding of ‘ein bequemes Verhältniß’—and its critique—see especially the chapters by Beiser and Trabant in this volume. 16

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Table 4.2. Table laying out a modification of Lessing’s theory in the Laocoon, as adapted from Table 4.1 Mode: Narration focused on acting subjects and their goals

Mode: Description focused on whatever is given, without a teleological tension

Medium: Language (high capacity to steer the reception process)

narrative texts: aim for suspense

descriptive texts: aim for vividness

Medium: Painting (low capacity to steer the reception process)

narrative images (dependent on linguistic narrative)

descriptive images (independent of linguistic narrative)

tension lay primarily in the realm of linguistically mediated narration, and not of images. Among twentieth-century artists it is perhaps René Magritte (1898–1967) who most explicitly focused on the relationship between painting and language. One of his most famous paintings dates from 1929 and is titled La trahison des images (cf. Fig. 0.2).17 It shows a pipe underneath which is written in exemplary school script: ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’. About a year earlier, Magritte produced an image that is less famous but nevertheless more germane to the present context: Lectrice soumise (Fig. 4.1).18 The conventional translation of this title—‘The submissive reader’—is hardly adequate; better would be something like ‘The captivated reader’. The painting shows a woman holding an open book out in front of her; her eyes (and what eyes they are!) are fixed on the text, and her entire facial expression expresses intense excitement. This suspense is set to last: she still has many pages to read. The reader has obviously had no opportunity to find a comfortable place more suited to what she is engaged in; the impulse to read has overcome her abruptly with the result that she leans against a wall in an apparently excited state. Such captivation wrought by suspense can only be achieved 17

Los Angeles, County Museum of Art; Sylvester and Whitfield 1992: 331, no. 303. The title La trahison des images is somewhat more ambiguous than it appears at first glance. Is the possessive to be understood as relating to the subject or object? Are the images guilty of betrayal or are they a victim of it? 18 Private collection; Sylvester and Whitfield 1992: 281, no. 230.

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Fig. 4.1. René Magritte, La lectrice soumise (‘The submissive reader’), 1928. Private collection. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016.

by a text, not by an image. However, such an expression of tension can be depicted only in an image, not in a text. The painting visualizes precisely what it cannot effectuate itself. Thus, Magritte puts the entire antinomy of text and image in a nutshell. In all this the distinction between the two representational modes of narration and description remains fundamental. Yet their fields of

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application have shifted somewhat. The spectrum of narration has become narrower, that of description broader. Narration is inevitably focused on acting and/or afflicted subjects, on what they want to achieve; it has no other option than to follow certain strands and thereby take as given what lies outside the respective strand. Every narrated action (and this applies to the epic of antiquity as much as it does to the novel of modernity) is played out within a horizon that is presumed to be given. This horizon cannot, ipso facto, itself be narrated; it must be described. It follows that the realm of description is by no means restricted to juxtaposition in space but can also include processes over time. The potential object of description is virtually (to borrow from Wittgenstein) ‘everything that is the case’, and thus, in the extreme case, nothing less than the world itself. How useful are these distinctions in concrete terms? Since my own field is classical archaeology, my first example will draw on the Iliad, an obvious choice in the sense that it is a work that Lessing himself dealt with extensively. Here we have a text that seems almost ideally suited for our purpose, because the difference between the two modes of narration and description is signalled by the text itself. On the one hand, the Iliad features a clear narrative strand. We have the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles and the latter’s refusal to take any further part in the Trojan campaign; robbed of their strongest warrior, the Achaeans lose their advantage and the Trojans come close to setting the Achaean ships on fire; at this point Achilles’ friend Patroclus takes the former’s place in battle and is slain by Hector; in order to avenge the death of his most beloved friend, Achilles returns to the campaign and kills Hector; at the end of the poem Hector’s father, Priam, goes to Achilles and beseeches him to hand over Hector’s body so that Priam can bury his son. This is all narrated. However, there are also purely descriptive passages, the most famous of which is the description of the shield Hephaestus fashions for Achilles (in the eighteenth book).19 The shield is richly adorned with images, the thematic horizon of which could hardly be broader. It depicts the sky with the sun, moon, and all the stars; this is followed by scenes of rural life, which portray all the four seasons; finally, urban life is also represented in the form of two cities, one at peace and one at war. The city at war is particularly interesting for us: it is under siege, and the attackers 19

Il.18.478–628. For Lessing’s own discussion of the passage in the eighteenth chapter of the Laocoon, cf. Lessing 1984: 91–7; for further bibliography, cf. Squire 2013 (with references at p. 183, n. 1 and discussion of Lessing’s treatment of the passage at pp. 160–1).

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and defenders are fighting one another. This theme suggests an association with the war between the Trojans and Achaeans, which is the main subject of the narrative. However, there are conspicuous differences between the battles that make up the narrative material of the Iliad and the scenes of war depicted on the shield. First, in the Iliad narrative every person who takes the stage, even very briefly because a few verses later they are killed, is given a name by the poet; by contrast, on the shield all the warriors are nameless. The second difference is of a grammatical nature. In the narrative passages of the Iliad verbs are used almost exclusively in the aorist form. In the shield description, however, the verbs are in the imperfect. The aorist is used in Greek in relation to actions taking place at a particular point in time and tending to completion, whereas the imperfect denotes processes that are incomplete and underway. In the case of the shield description the imperfect reminds us that we are dealing here with images, depictions of actions that are naturally ongoing and cannot be brought to a conclusion. There is also a third difference. The narrative of the Iliad is determined and driven forward by a powerful tension regarding the outcome of the action. Will Achilles continue to refuse to rejoin the battle, even if the Achaeans face defeat? Will Patroclus survive? Will Achilles release Hector’s body? The list goes on. But in the scenes of war on the shield there is no sense of suspense at all. The defenders battle against their besiegers and in the end all the text tells us is that ‘they came to blows . . . and fought, hauling away one another’s dead’.20 Here the passage breaks off and we do not learn whether the city was successfully defended or overrun: we are presented not with the narration of an occurrence but the description of a situation, a process that could happen anywhere and at any time. And it is precisely for this reason that the warriors involved remain anonymous and the outcome of the conflict open. Indeed, it is the passage’s thematic proximity to the Iliad narrative that makes the specific character of the descriptive mode particularly evident. When I say that the entire passage taken up by the shield description is rendered in the descriptive mode, this therefore applies in a dual sense. On one level, this statement is tautological because the shield is described and we call this a description. But on another level (which is more important in the present context and no longer tautological) the entire iconography of

20

Il. 18.539–40.

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Fig. 4.2. Late Geometric Attic cauldron-stand, c.740 BC. Athens, Kerameikos Museum: inv. 407. Photograph: D-DAI-Athen, Neg. Ker. 4830.

the shield that is described has a descriptive relationship to the world: the images on the shield are not narrative but descriptive. Bearing in mind this difference between narrative and descriptive passages, we can now turn to the images. My thesis is that this distinction can also be applied to the iconography. Were more scope available to me here, I would attempt to show that the world of images found on

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Fig. 4.3. Alternative view of the same Late Geometric Attic cauldron-stand. Photograph: D-DAI-Athen, Neg. Ker. 4923.

Geometric vases has a generally descriptive rather than narrative character and that narrative images first emerged around 700 BC. However, I will limit myself to a single example. A Geometric cauldron-stand in Athens is decorated with a frieze of heavily armed warriors marching around its upper part (Figs. 4.2 and 4.3).21 21

Athens, Kerameikos Museum, inv. 407; Giuliani 2013: 27–31.

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Underneath, on each of the four legs, we see a man fighting with a lion. How are we to interpret this? In the first place, the painter of these images had almost certainly never seen a lion. A lion population can at best coexist with nomadic herdsmen but not with sedentary farmers. In the eighth century BC central Greece was densely settled and under cultivation: this was an environment no longer suited to lions. Nevertheless, lions were (as they are now) regarded as real animals. This is evident not least in the Homeric similes, which always deal with real subjects and in which lions play an essential role.22 Thus, although in ancient Greek culture lions do not belong to the horizon of everyday experience, they are indisputably part of the real world. There is no reason to assume that the painter of our stand had a different outlook in this respect. But has he based his images on a story? Or is he describing a situation? Let us take a closer look. All the figures fighting with lions wear helmets, indicating that they are warriors. Two of them hold a calf in their arms, attempting to shield it from the lion’s attack; the other two are engaging with the lions with sword and lance. Can these images be related to a mythological narrative? In Greek mythology there is only one lion-conqueror, and that is Hercules. However, it is difficult to relate the iconography on this stand to this figure and his story. First, Hercules is an excessively violent hero, a first-class killer. Looking after a calf is hardly in keeping with his character. Second, Hercules fights his lion with his bare hands, without using any other weapon at all. The Hercules myth thus does not fit here; and there is no other lion-conqueror available in the Greek heroic sagas. What could the painter’s intention have been? For him (as for the epic poets who composed the Iliad and the Odyssey) the lion is the strongest and most dangerous of all predators: the ultimate adversary of the heroic, lone fighter, the lion tests the combatant’s skill to the extreme and marks the top end of the scale of danger; in this role the lion is indispensable. Its nonoccurrence in the everyday world does not seem to have detracted at all from its status in the world of both the imagination and the imagery. This stand was produced in a culture in which each aristocrat was also a warrior. Thus, the warrior and the cattle-herder were not contrasting roles but

22

Lonsdale 1990.

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complementary aspects of one and the same figure. The lion-fighters on the stand can thus be identified as aristocratic (which is why they are also all wearing helmets) cattle-owners. They belong to the same category as the warriors depicted around the stand’s upper edge; and like them and the figures in the shield description, they are nameless. These images do not aim to narrate occurrences but describe situations; they show us the way of the world. But what do narrative images look like? I would like to turn here to a motif that emerged about 100 years after our stand in the Kerameikos, and that over the following period remained one of the most popular in Greek painting. A neck amphora in Berlin, produced around 550 BC, depicts a fight with a lion, but in this case the form of combat is wrestling (Fig. 4.4).23 This certainly does not correspond to the way of the world: men do not wrestle with lions; wrestling is one thing, lion-hunting quite another. A wrestling-match with a lion is an unprecedented occurrence that raises questions. Why does the wrestler need no weapons? And how will the struggle end? The answers to these questions are provided by a story. The beholder has to know that in Nemea in the Peloponnese there was a lion whose hide was impenetrable—no weapon could wound it. Hercules (whose name is inscribed on the amphora) solved the problem by strangling the lion with his bare hands, without using a weapon and without damaging its hide (which he subsequently used as armour). What is important in the present context is the fact that the narrative image does not itself tell its story but rather needs a story, which the beholder has to know. It is this story that provides the key to understanding the image. Two other examples are provided by a mixing-bowl in London (Fig. 4.5)24 and an amphora in Kassel (Fig. 4.6).25 The image on the bowl depicts a typical situation: we see men reclining on couches in pairs, drinking and making music; under some of the couches there are crouching dogs. This is how an aristocratic symposium is conducted; it is

23

Berlin, Antikensammlungen SMPK, inv. F 1720: Beazley 1956: 143, no. 1. London, The British Museum, inv. B 46: Beazley 1956: 91, no. 5; Schmitt Pantel 2011: 569, no. 17, Pl.17. 25 Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, inv. T 674: Beazley 1971: 56, no. 31 bis. 24

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Fig. 4.4. Attic black-figure neck amphora, c.550 BC. Berlin, Antikensammlung der Staatlichen Museen (Preußischer Kulturbesitz): inv. F 1720. © SMB/ Antikensammlung. Photograph: Johannes Laurentius.

the usual way of the world, and we do not need a story to understand it. Quite different is the image on the amphora. Here we see one man on a couch who is obviously a warrior, as shown by the weapons on display. Most striking, however, is the presence of the corpse of a slain adversary that lies under the couch. From the left an old man approaches, gesturing plaintively towards the dead body. Mourning and death form a sharp contrast with the relaxed enjoyment of a feast: a combination that is certainly not common. Indeed, the scene depicted here is a singular one

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Fig. 4.5. Attic black-figure mixing-bowl, c.550 BC. London, British Museum: inv. 1867,0508.956. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 4.6. Detail of an Attic black-figure amphora, c.540 BC. Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen: inv. T 674. Photograph courtesy of the Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel (Antikensammlung).

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and, according to Greek custom, highly offensive. As such it is also in need of explanation, and this explanation is again found in a story, which is told in the final book of the Iliad. The reclining figure is, of course, Achilles, to whom Priam has come to claim the body of Hector. Because this story is told in the Iliad, it is possible for us to compare the text and the image with one another. In what follows I will try to show how painters deal with the text, where they follow it and where they depart from it. We can begin with Hector’s corpse, which is, of course, the pivot on which the meaning of the image turns. Were there no corpse under the couch and no bereaved old man, this image could be seen as a purely descriptive depiction of a symposium; there would be no reason to look for a narrative meaning. Now, we would expect that the painter took this central element, the presence of the corpse, from the Iliad, but that is not the case. In the Iliad Priam is explicitly prevented from seeing his dead son. The father asks to see the body, but in vain. Achilles orders his waiting-women to wash the body but to ‘take it to a place where Priam should not see it, lest if he did so, he should break out in the bitterness of his grief, and enrage Achilles, who might then kill him and sin against the word of Zeus’.26 Achilles fears that Priam might lose control of himself if he sees the body, which could in turn lead to an escalation of emotions on the part of Achilles himself. In the final book of the Iliad both Priam and Achilles move, as it were, on thin ice, which any additional tremor could cause to break. Achilles thus has good reasons for preventing the father from seeing his son’s body. In this context, the text has no difficulty in speaking of the absent corpse. It is precisely due to his absence that Hector remains the focus of attention. By contrast, the image has no possibility open to it of turning concrete absence into represented presence. Something that is not depicted in the image is not somehow present elsewhere; it is simply non-existent. The corpse thus needs to be made visible, if only because without it the scene would remain incomprehensible. However, in meeting this need the image is able to do something that no text can, namely to present the dead Hector directly and physically. By positioning the corpse under the couch on which Achilles lies, the painter achieves an additional conflation. The victor enjoying his repose and his dead adversary lie extremely close

26

Il. 24.582–6.

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together, not side by side but one on top of the other. This parallelism and immediate proximity creates a direct and strange correspondence between the two figures, and painters, as we shall see, used it to great effect. But first let us look again at the beginning of the scene as narrated in the Iliad. With the aid of Hermes, Priam enters the Achaean camp and ‘walked straight into the hut where Achilles usually sat. He found him inside . . . He had just finished eating and drinking and the table had not yet been removed. Great Priam came in unobserved by them, went up to Achilles, grasped his knees and kissed his hands, those terrible, manslaying hands that had killed so many of his sons.’27 I would like to emphasize two points here. First, in ancient Greece eating and drinking were activities undertaken collectively. This is reflected in the term symposium itself, which is of course made up of the words syn- (meaning ‘with’ or ‘together’), and potaomai (meaning ‘I drink’). Accordingly, the mixing-bowl in London shows the symposium as a collective event. And in the Iliad Achilles has eaten together with comrades. The amphora (and this applies to the entire iconography of this episode) deviates from this by leaving the comrades out. It shows Achilles as someone who drinks and eats entirely alone, outside the community. His repast is a solitary one and, according to Greek standards, this in itself already represents a clear breach of norms. Second, in the Iliad Priam approaches Achilles unnoticed and grasps the latter’s knees (a common gesture of entreaty). However, on the Kassel amphora Priam is shown unequivocally reacting to the sight of his dead son. He stretches out his arms in a vain attempt to embrace him (i.e. what takes place here is precisely what Achilles so painstakingly seeks to avoid in the Iliad). We find a different approach on a (somewhat later) red-figure drinking-cup in Munich (Fig. 4.7).28 Achilles, who lies on his couch, holds a cup in his hand very similar to the one on which the scene is painted: a nice example of mise en abyme. From the left a young man approaches bearing sumptuous gifts, and other gift-bearers follow on the other side of the bowl; they all carry gifts being offered to Achilles in return for the release of the corpse. In the Iliad, Priam undertakes the nocturnal (and foolhardy) trip into the Achaean camp alone, accompanied only by Hermes. The painter dispenses with these details and equips 27 28

Il. 24.171–9. Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen, inv. SH 2618: Beazley 1963: 61, no. 74.

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Fig. 4.7. Attic red-figure drinking-cup, c.520 BC. Munich, Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek: inv. SH 2618. Photograph: Renate Kühling.

Priam with a retinue in order to better display the richness of the gifts. However, what is particularly interesting for us about this image is the temporal aspect of the representation. To the left we see Hermes, who has accompanied Priam to Achilles’ tent, departing with a gesture of farewell. Priam (whose hair and beard have been shorn as a sign of mourning) hurries towards Achilles, about to grasp the latter’s knees. Achilles, however, has turned his face to the right, away from Priam, an aspect that has no parallels in earlier images of this scene. In concrete terms this is motivated by the fact that a woman is placing a wreath in his hair. However, the point is not the presence of the wreath itself but the fact that Achilles has not yet seen Priam. This introduces a moment of surprise to the image, and the painter has amplified it by adding yet another contrasting figure to the far right: the guard, who, unlike Achilles has already seen Priam and is grasping his helmet in readiness. My final example is a skyphos in Vienna (Fig. 4.8).29 Its dimensions are unusual for a drinking-vessel: the vase holds two litres, and it would seem that it was designed more for pictorial ornamentation than for practical use. The structure of the image on the skyphos is similar to that on the Munich bowl. Again we see Achilles turning to the right, where in 29

Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, inv. 3710: Beazley 1963: 380, no. 171.

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Fig. 4.8. Attic red-figure skyphos, c.480 BC. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum: inv. 3710. Photograph reproduced by kind permission of Manuela Laubenberger.

this case a young slave is filling a drinking-bowl. Priam enters the image from the left accompanied by four gift-bearers. The moment of surprise is wrought even more strikingly here. It concerns both Achilles and Priam: the first has not yet noticed his unexpected guest, while the latter has not yet seen his son. The beholder of the image is thus privy to something that the protagonists do not yet see. The beholder is a decisive step ahead them, and it is precisely this aspect that generates tension. How will Achilles react to the arrival of Priam and how will Priam react to the sight of the corpse? The painter reduces the action to a single moment, to the state of not yet, in order to generate suspense. This recalls Lessing’s concept of the single or fruitful moment. He believed that pictorial art was unable to represent anything but a single moment, but this is not true. In Archaic art (and again in fifteenth-century painting) there are numerous examples of images that combine different stages of an action with one another. However, in the early fifth century BC this type of depiction fell out of fashion. It is almost as if the painters had read Lessing. In reality they were primarily concerned not with a certain way

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of representing time, but simply with increasing the degree of drama and generating suspense. Fixation on a single moment is nothing more than a means of reaching this goal. I would like to close with a final observation. In earlier depictions, Achilles is shown as simply reclining or holding a drinking-vessel, but here he holds a long piece of meat in his left hand and, in his right, a large knife. This is highly unusual for symposium iconography. Knives are not a normal utensil in this context. Where we do find knives is in the hands of those who slaughter animals in the context of collective sacrifice and divide its flesh into portions. Achilles’ knife is thus not so much an eating-utensil as a reminder of the preceding slaughter. On the diningtable lie no fewer than six pieces of fillet, painted with additional red stripes: it is fresh, bloody meat. These pieces of flesh hang so far down that they overlap the contours of Hector’s body. We can also see a wound gaping in his chest from which blood is dropping to the ground. In fact, the blood from the slaughtered meat is threatening to mix with the blood of the human corpse. If our reaction is to see this as indecent, this is not unjustified, since it would have also been seen as highly improper by the ancient beholder. This image very deliberately presents the violation of a social norm, for Greek culture also drew a fundamental boundary between the flesh of an animal meant for eating and that of a human body requiring burial. The responsibility for this violation lies with Achilles. It seems that there is something fundamentally not right about this hero. His competence clearly lies in his ability to kill; where he fails is in dealing with the slain in a way that is common among other human beings. Achilles has killed an animal, but is now consuming its flesh alone instead of as part of a community. Likewise, he has killed Hector but is now letting the body bleed out underneath his couch instead of releasing it for burial. We have seen how the iconography deviates from the text of the Iliad in many ways. It positions Hector’s corpse in the centre of the image and places it under Achilles’ couch; it has Achilles enjoy a solitary feast during which he consumes mountains of flesh alone. All this is absent from the Iliad. And yet these elements combine into an image that corresponds in an astounding way to the problematic nature of Achilles as depicted in the Iliad. It is the highly ambivalent image of a hero whose strength and courage are unparalleled, but who places his honour (timê) above the well-being of the community. He brings misfortune upon his

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comrades and transgresses all boundaries in the heat of the moment, to the point of behaving in ways that are no longer human. Is he, then, appropriately described as ‘Achilles the animal’, as Christa Wolf repeatedly does in her novel Cassandra? This is perhaps too simplistic. On the Vienna skyphos we see Achilles as a youthful, radiant, ravishingly beautiful figure, and in a culture in which homoerotic love was a common and completely accepted phenomenon such an image must have exerted an allure that is hard for us to imagine today. Nevertheless, this resplendence by no means outshines the darker aspects. The image presents both in a suspenseful synthesis that is difficult to endure in its ambivalence. I have travelled a considerable distance away from Lessing, and this is no accident. As I wrote at the beginning, I am interested in Laocoon less as a historical text than as a basic theoretical model. Lessing wrote a treatise the aim of which was to assert the superiority of narrative over descriptive poetry and of poetry over pictorial art; it is a text that, in effect, diminishes painting. As many other theoretical attempts to establish aesthetic norms, this has not proven particularly successful. Nevertheless, as an analytic instrument, Lessing’s reflections on the different capacities of texts and images and on the difference between the descriptive and narrative modes remain fundamental. They have opened my eyes—and provided me with a new way into the understanding of Greek iconography.30

30 My thanks to Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire for hosting my chapter in this volume, and to Joe O’Donnell for his translation of it from German into English. For their help in providing photographs and the permission to publish them, I would like to thank Charles Arnold, Astrid Fendt, Joachim Heiden, Ursel Kästner, and Rüdiger Spittler.

5 Sympathy, Tragedy, and the Morality of Sentiment in Lessing’s Laocoon Katherine Harloe

In the course of his discussion of Sophocles’ Philoctetes in the fourth chapter of Laocoon, Lessing takes issue with some comments of Adam Smith concerning the capacity of humans to sympathize with the physical pain of others. Although Lessing disagrees with Smith (‘an Englishman . . . —a man, therefore, not readily suspected of false delicacy’),1 their views have more in common than at first appears. Lessing’s recourse to Smith has not received as much attention within discussions of his ideas about pity (Mitleid) as has his reading of other philosophers in the anglophone sentimentalist tradition, such as Shaftesbury or Hutcheson; nor has the relation of Lessing’s Mitleid to Smith’s ‘sympathy’ attracted as much commentary as, say, its relation to Rousseau.2 My primary purpose

1 Lessing 1984: 28; throughout this chapter, I provide references to Vollhardt’s German edition immediately after those to McCormick’s English Laocoon translation (here Lessing 2012: 37: ‘ein Engländer . . . ; ein Mann also, bey welchem man nicht leicht eine falsche Delicatesse argwohnen darf ’): for the passage, cf. pp. 164–5; on the ‘nationalist’ overtones— whereby Lessing allies ‘Germans’ with the ‘English’ against the ‘French’—cf. the foreword to this volume by Mitchell, along with the introduction and chapters by e.g. Squire and Grethlein. 2 Exceptions are Heidsieck 1983 and Vogl 2004. On Lessing’s reading of Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, see Nisbet 1993. The influence of Rousseau on Lessing’s thoughts about pity is much debated: see in particular Schings 1980 and Michelsen 1990: 107–36. On Lessing’s overall understanding of pity in the context of his dramatic theory, see especially Martinec 2003, 2006; Tucci 2005.

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in this chapter is not to contribute to the intellectual-historical debate over the influence of other European thinkers on Lessing’s psychological and ethical thought. Rather, it is to argue that the intrusion of Adam Smith into Laocoon’s early chapters is revelatory of a twin set of concerns: an interest first in the character of dramatic poetry, and second in its emotional and ethical effects. These two concerns are seldom expressed explicitly in the course of Lessing’s essay, but—as I hope to demonstrate—they nevertheless pervade the treatise. Scholarly commentary on Laocoon has dedicated little attention to Lessing’s thinking about the ethics of drama. Canonically, Lessing’s essay has been received as an argument for autonomy of the arts from moral considerations. It has also been suggested that drama itself plays surprisingly little role in the text of Laocoon as we have it, dedicated to the specific limits of ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’.3 Yet the paratextual material suggests that thoughts about tragedy, and especially about tragic pity, provided both the seed, as well as the intended summation, of Lessing’s essay on the distinction between the arts. It was in all likelihood Moses Mendelssohn who first brought Winckelmann’s moralizing interpretation of Laocoon’s suppressed screams to Lessing’s attention in the context of their mid-1750s debates about whether pity or moral admiration (Bewunderung) is the proper end of tragedy.4 An oft-quoted letter of 1769 to Friedrich Nicolai shows the direction in which Lessing planned to develop Laocoon’s distinction between natural and arbitrary signs, projecting a ‘third part’ which would argue for drama’s superiority on the basis of its ability to convert the arbitrary signs deployed by other poetic genres into ‘natural signs of arbitrary things’.5 The first to fourth chapters are where drama intrudes most obviously into Laocoon as we have it; I shall suggest that the arguments Lessing levies against Smith provide a bridge between Laocoon and Lessing’s earlier and later musings on tragic pity. In doing so, these opening chapters also connect the famous formal and semiotic distinctions Lessing presents at the heart of this text to his

3

Gombrich 1957: 141–2; Nisbet 2013a: 325. See especially Mendelssohn to Lessing, Dec. 1756 (Lessing 2003: 686-93). For more on this correspondence, known to scholarship as the Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel, see n. 17. 5 Lessing to Nicolai, 26 May 1769; in Lessing 1987: 608–11. English translation in Nisbet 1985: 133–4. For discussion, see Beiser 2009: 276–7, along with Beiser’s chapter in this book. 4

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ongoing concern with (tragic) dramaturgy. Reconstructing the tragic framing of Lessing’s arguments about the provinces of painting and poetry has the potential to illuminate those arguments in ways sometimes overlooked by commentators, who have treated them in the manner of a free-floating, philosophical discussion. While it has been noted that the distinctions Lessing draws between the objects (bodies vs. actions) and media (natural vs. arbitrary signs) of painting and poetry are framed by the fundamental principle that illusion is the goal of the arts, it is appreciated less frequently that by the time Lessing came to draft his essay in the early 1760s, illusion had become an established topic of debate in dramatic theory, which itself drew upon a longer tradition of discussion in the visual arts.6 Lessing was fully versed in the writings of francophone authors such as Fénelon and Diderot, who had turned to Greek tragedy in the course of propounding a new and more naturalistic theatrical code. The model of Sophocles in particular was often advanced in these debates as the antithesis to the highly conventionalized, ‘classical’ French tragedies of the siècle de Louis le Grand. Far from constituting the unacknowledged frame of the classical view of representation, the question of illusion was vigorously debated in Lessing’s own generation, precisely in the context of tragic drama. If these debates form the background to Lessing’s invocation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes in Laocoon, his turn to Smith reveals how far his concern to distinguish between the arts is ethically laced. For Lessing’s defence of Sophocles against Smith is not achieved primarily on the grounds of the alleged naturalism of language and character of Sophoclean tragedy, but instead on the basis of its emotional effect: namely, its success at arousing pity in its audience. Pity, moreover, is understood by both Lessing and Smith as a quintessentially moral and social emotion.7 Despite its abstractions and apparent espousal of l’art pour l’art, ethical and social concern still underlies Laocoon. Finally, throughout all these debates and concerns we may detect the crucial ‘classical presence’ of Aristotle, whose poetic categories—albeit transformed—continued to play an authoritative role in the dramatic

6 On the importance of illusion, see Giuliani 2003: 2; see too Wellbery 1984: 9–42 on the Enlightenment ideal of ‘a completely transparent language that is equivalent to divine cognition’ (42)—and cf. Lifschitz’s chapter in this book. 7 Heidsieck 1983.

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theorizing of Lessing’s day. Concerns with ‘illusion’ and ‘sympathy’ trace their genealogies back to the Aristotelian categories of ‘mimesis’ and ‘pity’, and eighteenth-century criticisms of critical categories such as the three unities are disagreements over the interpretation of Aristotle as often as they are attempts to move beyond him.8 Lessing’s desire to found his views about the character and purpose of tragic drama on the Poetics is explicit in the 1756–7 correspondence on tragedy and the 1767–9 Hamburgische Dramaturgie. Although implicit, it is nonetheless present in Laocoon.

Laocoon, Chapters 1–4 and the Turn to Sophocles Let us begin by examining the train of argument that leads Lessing to cite Smith. The discussion comes in the course of the consideration in chapter 4 of the propriety of poetic depictions of bodily pain. Lessing has already defended Virgil’s description of Laocoon’s screams in accordance with his developing theoretical distinctions: qua poet, Virgil is confined neither to depicting beauty nor to representing a single moment; his description of how the Trojan priest ‘raises his horrendous screams to the stars’ (clamores horrendos ad sidera tollit) is therefore immune from censure on these grounds.9 But Lessing goes on to concede that Virgil is ‘purely a narrative poet’. In the case of drama, a genre of poetry destined to be turned by actors into a kind of ‘living painting’, do the restrictions he has identified for the visual arts still apply? It is here that Lessing turns to the Philoctetes of Sophocles:10 In it [drama] we do not merely make believe that we see or hear a screaming Philoctetes, we actually see and hear him. The closer the actor approaches nature the more our eyes and ears must be affronted; for it is an incontrovertible fact that they are affronted in nature itself when we perceive such loud and violent expressions of pain. Besides, we are generally unable to respond with the same degree of sympathy to physical pain as to other suffering. Our imagination can discern too little in such pain to allow the mere sight of it to arouse in us anything 8

Billings 2014: 19–44 provides an overview of French and German debates over tragedy from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century, rightly emphasizing the continuing importance of Aristotle. 9 For discussion, cf. Squire’s chapter in this volume, esp. pp. 102–4. 10 Lessing 1984: 24–5/2012: 30–1.

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of a corresponding feeling. Consequently, Sophocles may easily have violated not a merely conventional sense of propriety, but one that is grounded in the very nature of our feelings, when he made Philoctetes and Hercules moan and weep, scream and howl to such a degree.

Lessing’s choice of the Philoctetes is appropriate, for it is a distinguishing feature of that tragedy that a great part of the hero’s suffering consists in physical torment. Sophocles’ treatment of the myth emphasizes this element: Philoctetes’ groans of agony are first heard offstage, and although Hercules predicts at the end of the play that Philoctetes will be healed, his words suggest that it is the hero’s ‘sufferings’ (ponoi) that will continue to bring him fame.11 The Philoctetes also places onstage a prolonged representation of a man in the throes of violent physical pain. In the play’s second episode (the ‘third act’, in Lessing’s terminology), the principal action consists in the hero’s groans and cries as he struggles with the agony of his divinely inflicted wound (Soph. Phil. 732–50): PHILOCTETES :

Ahh! Ahh! What is it? PHILOCTETES : Nothing much, child, go on. NEOPTOLEMUS : Are you in pain—your old illness? PHILOCTETES : Oh no. I feel better now, I think—Gods! NEOPTOLEMUS : Why are you groaning and calling on the gods? PHILOCTETES : To come gently to me and save me—Ahh ahh! NEOPTOLEMUS : Whatever’s wrong? Speak, don’t keep quiet! You’re clearly suffering terribly. PHILOCTETES : It’s killing me, child, I can’t hide this evil from you, oh ohh! It’s shooting through me, shooting through me—oh, wretched, miserable me! It’s killing me, child, it’s eating me up, oh oh! oh oh oh ohh! oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh! For the gods’ sake, if you have a sword, child, take it and hack at my ankle, cut it off right away, come, child, don’t spare my life. NEOPTOLEMUS :

These inarticulate cries of pain had furnished the starting-point of Lessing’s criticisms of Winckelmann in the first chapter of Laocoon.

See Jebb 1898 on Soph. Phil. 1422 (ἐκ τῶν πόνων τῶνδ᾽ εὐκλεᾶ θέσθαι βίον): ‘ek, not merely “after” (720), but “as a result of ”, “through”.’ 11

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There, Lessing had cited: ‘The laments, the cries, the wild curses with which his anguish filled the camp and interrupted all the sacrifices and sacred rites [and which] resounded no less terribly through the desert island’, in order to launch his refutation of Winckelmann’s statement, illustrated by a carelessly drawn parallel between the marble Laocoon and the Sophoclean hero, that Greek heroism in general was characterized by silent endurance.12 Even before Winckelmann, Sophocles’ presentation of the suffering Philoctetes had already made that hero—along with the Hercules of the Trachiniae and the Oedipus of the Oedipus Tyrannus—into a topos of early modern debates over tragic decorum. The supposedly ‘simple’ and ‘natural’ speech of Sophocles’ suffering heroes was cited by critics who sought to move away from the conventionalized and elegant verbal and gestural expression of high French classical tragedy in the mode of Corneille and Racine. Fénelon, for example, had praised the final scene of the Oedipus in his Lettre sur les occupations de l’Académie of 1714 as presenting ‘Nature’s own cry as she surrenders to pain’, commending ‘the same lively, simple pain’ expressed by Hercules and Philoctetes. Diderot used the same examples in his Entretiens sur le fils naturel of 1757.13 By the time Lessing came to write Laocoon, both French authors had been received into German theoretical discussions: Gottsched had translated Fénelon’s dramatic writings in the first volume of his Deutsche Schaubühne of 1741, and Lessing himself produced a two-volume translation of Diderot’s dramatic writings in 1760 under the title Das Theater des Herrn Diderots.14

12 For the quotation from Winckelmann 1755 (‘Laocoon suffers, but he suffers like the Philoctetes of Sophocles; his anguish pierces our very soul, but at the same time we wish that we were able to endure our suffering as well as this great man does’), see Lessing 1984: 7–8/2012: 11–12. More generally on Lessing’s recourse to Winckelmann, see Décultot’s chapter in this book. 13 ‘C’est ainsi que parle la nature, quand elle succombe à la douleur: jamais rien ne fut plus éloigné des phrases brillantes du bel esprit. Hercule et Philoctète parlent avec la même douleur vive et simple dans Sophocle’ (Fénelon 1845: 60); ‘Je ne laisserai point de crier à nos Français: la Vérité! La Nature! Les Anciens! Sophocle! Philoctete!’ (Diderot 1980: 116). See Burwick 1991: 42–61, Worvill 2005: 53, 82. 14 Diderot’s dramatic theories were particularly attractive to Lessing, who viewed them as providing support and encouragement to the more realistic modes of language and gesture pioneered in the ‘bourgeois’ tragedy Miss Sara Sampson (1755) and developed further in Emilia Galotti (1772). On Diderot’s influence on Lessing’s dramaturgy, see Nisbet 2013a: 270–4 and especially Worvill 2005.

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Aspects of Lessing’s treatment of Sophocles in the opening chapters of Laocoon are reminiscent of the earlier French debates. He declares that Philoctetes’ cries are ‘the natural expression of physical pain’, and compares the natural self-expression of Homeric heroes favourably with the restrained propriety of ‘we more refined Europeans of a wiser, later age’.15 The many contrasts he draws between Sophocles’ treatment and the contemporary Philoctète of Jean-Baptiste Chateaubrun, in which the ancient dramatist always comes off the better, also mark Lessing’s arguments as an intervention in this particular chapter of the Querelle.16 Their concern with questions of convention and decorum in theatrical representation also marks these chapters as a continuation of the theoretical discussions about tragic drama that Lessing had carried on with Mendelssohn and Nicolai in 1756–7. Romira Worvill has explored how complex the different positions advanced by the three correspondents in the so-called Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel are, with each endorsing elements of both ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ (i.e. Neoclassical) points of view.17 While Mendelssohn’s position on the end of tragedy—that it should provide virtuous models for emulation—appears traditional in the face of both Nicolai’s Dubos- and de Piles-inflected claim that tragedy aims to arouse strong emotions and Lessing’s subordination of admiration to pity, his overall understanding of drama as an ensemble which combines language, gesture, and staging to make a ‘living representation’ (lebendige Vorstellung), which aims at ‘illusion’, represents a modernizing advance on Lessing’s more conventional treatment of 15 Cf. Lessing 1984: 8–9/2012: 12–13: ‘High as Homer raises his heroes above human nature in other respects, he still has them remain faithful to it in their sensitiveness to pain and injury and in the expression of this feeling by cries, tears, or invectives. In their deeds they are beings of a higher order, in their feelings true men.’ 16 Lessing 1984: 11, 25–32/2012: 14–15, 32–42. As both Nisbet 2013a: 275–7 and Vollhardt 2013: 188–90 note, these sections derive from Lessing’s earlier and abandoned project to produce a German-language edition of Sophocles’ plays. Nisbet states that Lessing intended to present Sophocles as ‘a theatre reformer who overcame the Schwulst (bombastic or inflated style) of Aeschylus, replacing it with authentic sublimity and tragic fear with no need for exaggerated effects’ (2013: 276). The canonical elements of this portrait, in which Sophocles takes over certain characteristics from the Euripides of Aristophanes’ Frogs, should not obscure its character as a foil for Lessing’s own theatrical priorities. More generally on Lessing’s engagements with ancient drama (including Sophocles), see Korzeniewski 2003. On the underlying Querelle des anciens et des modernes, and its relevance as a backdrop to Lessing’s essay, see the introduction to this volume. 17 Worvill 2005: 145. On the unsystematic character of the Briefwechsel, which was never intended by its authors for publication, see Martinec 2013: 120–1.

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drama as essentially a genre of poetic speech.18 In the fourth chapter of Laocoon, Lessing’s qualification of dramatic poetry as ‘designed for living representation by the actor’ (für die lebendige Mahlerey des Schauspielers bestimmt) echoes Mendelssohn’s formulation from the Briefwechsel; his concerns with the interaction of Philoctetes and the other onstage characters, and with the difficulty any actor would face in ‘carry[ing] his presentation of physical pain to the point of illusion’ (bis zur Illusion) suggest that the terms in which he is considering drama have expanded from the heavily literary perspective of the Briefwechsel.19 In numerous ways, then, the opening of Laocoon shows Lessing’s continuing concern with questions of dramatic language and staging. Yet such questions do not form his primary focus in the fourth chapter. His central question there is whether a hero such as Philoctetes, whose suffering is primarily corporeal, makes a fit subject for tragedy; and in the passage quoted above Lessing suggests that an objection arises because of a theory which holds that, in general, the spectacle of extreme physical pain is unsuited to arousing pity among the spectators. It was from precisely this theoretical position that Smith had criticized Greek tragic heroes in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:20 In some of the Greek tragedies there is an attempt to excite compassion, by the representation of the agonies of bodily pain. Philoctetes cries out and faints from the extremity of his sufferings. Hippolytus and Hercules are both introduced as expiring under the severest tortures, which, it seems, even the fortitude of Hercules was incapable of supporting . . . These attempts to excite compassion by the representation of bodily pain, may be regarded as among the greatest breaches of decorum of which the Greek theatre has set the example.

And it is as the proponent of this view that Lessing quotes directly from Smith shortly afterwards:21 . . . let us turn to those scenes in which Philoctetes no longer appears as the abandoned sick man, but has hopes of leaving the bleak desert island and returning to his kingdom; that is to say, in those scenes where his entire

18

Worvill 2005: 145–56; see too Burwick 1991: 83–94. Lessing 1984: 24/2012: 31; see Worvill 2005: 163–4. 20 Smith 2002: 37 (TMS I.ii.I.11). 21 Lessing 1984: 27–8/2012: 37–8, quoting TMS I.ii.I.5 (Lessing uses the second edition of 1761). 19

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misfortune is restricted to his painful wound. He moans, he shrieks, he falls into the most horrible convulsions. It is against this that the objection of offended decorum is justly raised; it is an Englishman [i.e. Smith] who makes the objection—a man, therefore, not readily suspected of false delicacy. And as indicated, he gives very good reasons for his objection. All feelings and passions, he says, for which others can find but little sympathy become offensive if too violently expressed. ‘For this reason nothing is more indecent and unmanly than weeping and crying out with physical pain however intolerable it may be. But there is, to be sure, a sympathy for physical pain. When we see that someone is about to receive a blow on his arm or shin, we naturally start and draw back our own arm or leg, and if the blow actually falls, we too feel it in some measure and are hurt by it as well as the sufferer. However, our actual pain is very slight, and so when the person who is struck cries out violently we are invariably contemptuous of him since we are not able to cry as violently as he.’

Lessing’s statement that a substantive objection on grounds of decency may be raised here (Hierwider gehet eigentlich der Einwurf des beleidigten Anstandes—emphasis mine) distinguishes the ethical objection of the ‘Englishman’ from the falsche Delicatesse of Neoclassical French critics.22 Rather than the traditional question of the register of tragic language, it is the more specifically Smithian question of the fitness of spectacles of physical suffering to arouse sympathy with which Lessing is concerned. Lessing will, of course, disagree with Smith on the success of the Philoctetes as tragedy: he goes on to claim that Sophocles’ play is one of the ‘masterpieces of the stage’.23 But although Lessing disagrees with Smith overall, it is remarkable how many of Smith’s criticisms he adopts. Lessing’s defence of Sophocles reveals him to have been a careful reader of Smith, and one who was willing to concede many points of Smith’s argument. The next section of my chapter sets out why Smith held that violent expressions of bodily suffering were offensive. It then examines Lessing’s counter-arguments in order to show how many points of Smith’s criticisms are taken over in Lessing’s response.

22 See too Lessing’s distinction between ‘a merely conventional sense of propriety’ and ‘one that is grounded in the very nature of our feelings’, in the first passage from the fourth chapter quoted in this section (1984: 24–5/2012: 31). The distinction between a sense of propriety that is bloß willkührlich and one that is in dem Wesen unsrer Empfindungen selbst gegründet corresponds to the distinction between Neoclassical French critics of Sophocles and Smith. 23 Lessing 1984: 25/2012: 31.

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Smith’s Arguments about Sympathy and Lessing’s Reply It is unsurprising that Lessing should have proved an enthusiastic reader of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The work was first published in 1759, three years after the appearance of Lessing’s translation of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy and the aforementioned correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn (in which Lessing had defended the position that the proper end of tragedy was to increase its audience’s moral sensitivity by exercising their capacity for pity).24 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) would have interested Lessing for at least two reasons. First, it provides an extended and highly insightful exploration of the nature and workings of pity. Smith’s starting-point is ‘pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a lively manner’; once this is extended into an analysis of ‘sympathy’—a term Smith introduces ‘to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’—it is fundamental to his theories of moral approbation and judgment.25 Second, Smith was as interested as Lessing in the question of the contribution of sympathy to harmonious moral and social coexistence. For Smith, ‘to feel much for others and little for ourselves, to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature; and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety’.26 Smith is, however, little concerned with aesthetic questions per se. He brings up the Philoctetes as an illustration within a more general argument 24

Martinec 2008 doubts Lessing’s authorship of the Hutcheson translation. Smith 2002: 11, 13 (TMS I.i.I.1, 5). 26 Smith 2002: 30 (TMS I.i.V.5). There are further reasons why Smith might have proved attractive to Lessing as he continued to develop his thoughts on the nature of pity and its role in aesthetic response. Smith appears usefully indifferent to the debates over nature and culture which had governed discussions of sympathy up to this point. TMS begins in medias res, with the claim that: ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’ Smith thus eschews the question of the origin of sympathy in favour of a close and subtle description of its operations: a pragmatic and inductive mode of proceeding which may have appealed to Lessing the dramatist and critic. Smith also praises moderation in the expression of passions while disapproving of extreme Stoic fortitude: a position which accords to some extent with Lessing’s dramatic theory and practice (see Heidsieck 1983). 25

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about how moral approbation functions. His objection to Philoctetes stems from two aspects of his moral psychology: his claim that sympathy involves an act of simulative imagination, and the distinction he draws between the ‘passions which take their origin from the body’ and those which depend on the imagination. On the first of these topics, it is illuminating to draw a contrast between Smith and his friend and philosophical correspondent, David Hume. In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume had put forward a conception of sympathy as working via the transfer or ‘communication’ of passions from one agent to another.27 Smith, by contrast, holds that insofar as human beings can come to feel the emotions of others, it is by dint of their ability to imagine themselves in the other’s position—what he calls ‘changing places in fancy with the sufferer’.28 Thus, in the extended example of ‘our brother on the rack’, with which Smith opens his discussion in TMS, he insists as follows: ‘as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.’29 This emphasis on the role of imagination and the consequent importance of the ‘vivacity or dullness of the conception’ an agent is able to form of another’s distress aligns Smith’s discussion more easily than Hume’s with the outlook of German rationalist aesthetics, which is similarly concerned with questions of the clarity of mental representations.30 But Smith also argues that it is easier to perform such acts of the imagination in some cases than in others. In instances of physical pain, for example, or hunger, where the ‘passion’ observed is one of those ‘which arise from a certain situation or disposition of the body’, he maintains that observers, ‘not being in the same disposition, cannot be expected to sympathize with them’. The imagination, by contrast, ‘is more ductile, and more readily assumes . . . the shape and configuration

Cf. Hume 1978: 317: ‘A cheerful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden damp upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition.’ The detailed debate over the mechanisms of sympathetic communication according to the Humean psychology of ideas and impressions falls outside the scope of this chapter. 28 29 Smith 2002: 12 (TMS I.i.I.3). Smith 2002: 11 (TMS I.i.I.2). 30 Nisbet 2013a: 316–18; Wellbery 1984: 9–42. 27

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of the imaginations of those with whom I am familiar’. If, therefore, an observer witnesses another’s fear, say, or ‘disappointment in love, or ambition’, sympathy flows more readily.31 We might well question the grounds for this distinction—is it really so much harder to sympathize with another’s hunger than their fear? Smith’s illustrations are indeed hedged with qualifications. In the passage Lessing quotes, Smith’s claim that ‘nothing is more indecent and unmanly than weeping and crying out with physical pain however intolerable it may be’ is followed immediately by a reservation:32 There is, however, a good deal of sympathy even with bodily pain. If, as has already been observed, I see a stroke aimed, and just ready to fall upon the leg, or arm, of another person, I naturally shrink and draw back my own leg, or my own arm: and when it does fall, I feel it in some measure, and am hurt by it as well as the sufferer. My hurt, however, is, no doubt, excessively slight, and, upon that account, if he makes any violent out-cry, as I cannot go along with him, I cannot fail to despise him.

Lessing’s discussion shows him to have a fairly fine grasp of the niceties of Smith’s psychology. Significantly, his ‘defence’ of Sophocles here falls far short of a refutation of Smith’s views. Lessing makes four arguments in defence of the propriety of Sophocles’ handling of his hero’s physical suffering. In three of them he defends the Philoctetes not on the grounds of the suitability of spectacles of extreme physical pain to arouse audience sympathy, but in terms of how Sophocles has managed to overcome this weakness inherent in his chosen theme. Lessing directs our attention first to the skill with which Sophocles has ‘enlarged and extended’ the idea of Philoctetes’ physical pain. He did so by making the subject of his play a hero who had been wounded, rather than afflicted by some less obvious disease, ‘because sickness, no matter how painful, cannot impress us as much as a wound’.33 Far from providing a refutation of Smith, this is almost a quotation, for Smith had maintained that: ‘We conceive in a much more likely and distinct manner, the pain which proceeds from an external cause, than we do that which arises from an internal disorder. I can scarce form an idea of the agonies of my

31

Smith 2002: 35 (TMS I.ii.I.6). Smith 2002: 35 (TMS I.ii.I.5). This is the text of the first edition; Smith’s wording changes slightly in subsequent editions. 33 Lessing 1984: 25/2012: 31–2. 32

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neighbour when he is tortured with the gout, or the stone; but I have the clearest conception of what he must suffer from an incision, a wound, or a fracture.’34 Lessing’s second point is likewise very close to something Smith himself says:35 However great and terrible he made the physical pain of his hero, Sophocles still knew full well that it was in itself not enough to excite any appreciable degree of pity. He therefore combined it with other ills which likewise could not in themselves greatly move us, but which receive from this combination a colouring just as melancholy as that to which they in their turn impart to physical pain. These ills were complete isolation from human society, hunger, and all the hardships of life to which one is exposed in a state of privation and in a raw climate.

Here Lessing emphasizes Sophocles’ brilliance in combining Philoctetes’ physical degradation with other deprivations which, considered together with his wound, render him pitiable. Some of these (‘hunger’) are likewise pains of the body, while others, such as the loneliness attendant upon ‘complete isolation from human society’ are what Smith would have termed pains of the imagination. Yet Smith too had suggested that: ‘It is not the sore foot, but the solitude, of Philoctetes which affects us, and diffuses over that charming tragedy, that romantic wildness, which is so agreeable to the imagination.’ Lessing does place the balance a little more evenly, suggesting that the challenges of isolation alone would create a Robinson Crusoe figure, rather than a spectacle of pity. This does not significantly affect the overall point that, as Smith puts it: ‘In all these cases . . . it is not the pain which interests us, but some other circumstance.’ 36 Even the fourth point of Lessing’s defence does little to take up the argument where it would need to be taken up to counter Smith: the idea that witnessing Philoctetes’ physical suffering would in and of itself prompt a sympathetic reaction from the spectators:37 Sophocles was not content simply to secure his sensitive Philoctetes from all contempt: he has at the same time forestalled all adverse criticism based on the remarks of the Englishman. For though we are not always contemptuous of the man who cries out under physical pain, it is an indisputable fact that we do not feel as much pity for him as his cry would seem to demand. How then should 34 36

Smith 2002: 36–7 (TMS I.ii.I.10). Smith 2002: 37 (TMS I.ii.I.11).

35 37

Lessing 1984: 26/2012: 32–3. Lessing 1984: 30/2012: 40.

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those who are with the screaming Philoctetes conduct themselves? Should they pretend to be deeply moved? That would be contrary to nature. Should they appear cold and embarrassed, as one actually tends to be in such a situation? That would create a most unpleasant dissonance in the mind of the spectator.

Note first the Smithian aspects of the argument: even if the spectators do not utterly despise a hero who gives full expression to his physical suffering, their sympathy is unlikely to be commensurate with his expression of feelings. Their enjoyment of the play will therefore be interrupted by ‘a most unpleasant dissonance’, as they disapprove of the lack of self-control that has led to him rolling and writhing around the stage. Lessing argues that Sophocles averts this possibility by creating other points of interest for his audience: their attention is held by the moral dilemma facing Neoptolemus (who must decide whether or not to take advantage of Philoctetes’ incapacity to make off with his bow) and the reversal to come.38 This again amounts to arguing that the audience is diverted from the problematic spectacle of Philoctetes’ corporeal suffering, rather than defending it as a sight itself suited to arousing pity. It is Lessing’s third argument that is the most interesting, providing his most substantial response to Smith’s censures. Immediately following his long and apparently concessive quotation of Smith, he comments:39 Nothing is more deceptive than the laying down of general laws for our emotions. Their texture is so delicate and intricate that even the most cautious speculation can hardly pick out a single thread and follow it through all its interlacing. But even if such speculation were to succeed, what could we gain by it? In nature there are no single, unmixed emotions; with each one thousands of others spring up at the same time, and the least of these is able to change the original feeling completely, so that one exception after another arises until the supposedly general law itself is finally reduced to a mere personal experience in some individual cases. We despise a man, says the Englishman, whom we hear cry out violently under physical pain. But not always; not the first time; not when we see that the sufferer is making every effort to suppress it; not when we know him to be a man of firmness in other respects; and less when we see him offer proofs of his steadfastness even while suffering; when we see that his pain can force him to cry out but not go one single step further than that; when we see that he would rather submit to a continuation of his pain than change his way of thinking or his resolve in the slightest degree, even though he knows that such a change would end suffering altogether. We find all this in the case of Philoctetes.

38

Lessing 1984: 30–1/2012: 40–1.

39

Lessing 1984: 28–9/2012: 38.

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This passage should be sufficient to temper any interpretation of Lessing in Laocoon as despising endurance and fortitude in the tragic hero. Despite the first chapter’s blunt statement that ‘Stoicism is not dramatic’ (Alles Stoische ist untheatralisch), and the distaste for the cold, Senecan tragedy of admiration displayed in the fourth chapter, Lessing praises Sophocles’ Philoctetes for his ‘steadfastness’ (Standhaftigkeit), and for making the greatest possible effort to stifle his pain.40 Lessing’s claim that no ‘single’ (einzeln) and ‘unadulterated’ (rein) emotions occur in nature recalls the December 1756 letter to Mendelssohn in which he had outlined a view of tragic pity as a hybrid emotion that combines admiration for a hero’s perfections and pain at his misfortunes.41 This section of Lessing’s argument testifies yet again to his continuing concern with the arguments about tragedy’s emotional and ethical effects worked out in the 1756–7 correspondence on tragedy. But it also reveals an element in Lessing’s thinking about the workings of tragic pity which is significant in the light of his direction of argument in the second half of Laocoon. For, although Lessing appears in this passage to insist on the instantaneous (zugleich) occurrence of the varied emotions that go to make up the audience’s overall response, his analysis of how the theatre audience comes to sympathize with Philoctetes’ suffering invokes their appreciation of the characteristic actions and passions of the hero as they have developed across the play’s preceding episodes. The sympathy the spectators feel for Philoctetes as he writhes in agony is a response to the situation he is in at that moment: extreme physical pain, so great that he can no longer stifle its expression. But they respond with sympathy, rather than (as Smith might predict) contempt, because of their enlarged understanding of the character and situation of the man who is suffering such agonies before their very eyes. They react

40

Lessing 1984: 11, 29–30/2012: 15, 38. Lessing to Mendelssohn, 18 December 1756, printed in Lessing 2003: 693–703, 694: ‘Ein großes Mitleiden kann nicht ohne große Vollkommenheiten in dem Gegenstande des Mitleids sein, und große Vollkommenheiten, sinnlich ausgedrückt, nicht ohne Bewunderung. Aber diese großen Vollkommenheiten sollen in dem Trauerspiele nie ohne große Unglücksfälle sein, sollen mit diesen allezeit genau verbunden sein, und sollen also nicht Bewunderung allein, sondern Bewunderung und Schmerz, das ist, Mitleiden erwecken. Und das ist meine Meinung. Die Bewunderung findet also in dem Trauerspiele nicht als ein besonderer Affekt statt, sondern bloß als die Hälfte des Mitleids.’ Lessing would return to the elaboration of tragic pity as a vermischte Empfindung in chapters 74–8 of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie: see Lessing 1999: 378–402, esp. 381–2. 41

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to Philoctetes not simply as a man in the throes of pain, but as this particular hero in his unique predicament, who has endured what Philoctetes has endured and is still subject to a terrible deception. In short, Lessing suggests that the audience’s sympathetic response to Philoctetes’ sufferings is dependent upon the kind of narrative understanding of action over time which, Lessing suggests elsewhere in Laocoon, is the province of the poet rather than the visual artist. Some comments Smith makes about sympathy show the potential for his analysis to be developed in this direction. In the course of his gentle correction of Hume’s discussion of sympathy’s workings, he goes so far as to state that: ‘Sympathy . . . does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it.’42 This ‘view of . . . the situation’ is particularly important in the case of what Smith terms the ‘unsocial passions’, such as anger and hatred, where the immediate sympathy of a spectator who has not been informed of all the facts of the case might flow towards the object, rather than the source, of the negative emotion.43 In the fourth chapter of Laocoon Lessing extends this insight in a manner that implicitly favours poetry over painting. For the extended elaboration of context that Sophocles’ dramatic masterpiece as a whole provides can transform a particular moment or episode of behaviour, which, considered by itself, may seem improper, into one element of a more complex and sympathetic overall response to the suffering hero.

Structure, Not Spectacle: The Continuing Authority of Aristotle The essential elements of Lessing’s response to Smith are therefore already presented in the words he uses to describe the ‘province’ of poetry at the start of the fourth chapter:44 there is nothing to compel the poet to compress his picture into a single moment. He may, if he so chooses, take up each action at its origin and pursue it through all possible variations to its end. Each variation which would cost the artist a separate work costs the poet but a single pen stroke; and if the result of this pen stroke, viewed by itself, should offend the hearer’s imagination, it was either 42 44

Smith 2002: 15 (TMS I.i.I.10). Lessing 1984: 24–5/2012: 29–30.

43

Smith 2002: 42–7 (TMS I.ii.III).

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anticipated by what has preceded or is so softened and compensated by what follows that it loses its individual impression and in combination achieves the best effect in the world.

It is poetry’s ability to present complex actions extending over time that allows the audience to respond to Philoctetes not as a contemptible coward, but as a steadfastly suffering hero. In this manner, the ‘disordered’ musings on tragedy with which Lessing opens Laocoon both anticipate and confirm the analytical-deductive presentation of the essay’s second half. This understanding of poetic action as consisting in a temporally extended but unified complex of individual moments is, however, a more developed notion than the abstract characterization with which Lessing opens his deductive presentation. Several commentators have explored how definition in the sixteenth chapter of actions as ‘Objects or parts of objects which follow one another [in time]’ (Gegenstände, die auf einander, oder deren Theile auf einander folgen) fails to do justice to the causally connected sequences of individual movements (Pandarus’ stringing of his bow, Hebe’s yoking of horses to Hera’s chariot) which Lessing gives as examples of ‘actions’ in the paragraphs that follow, nor even to the distinction between ‘progressive’ and ‘stationary’ actions contemplated and set aside at the end of the preceding chapter.45 As Daniel Fulda discusses in this volume, passages from Lessing’s drafts for Laocoon reveal him at one point to have been working with what Fulda terms a ‘richer’ notion of action than we find in the published version of the sixteenth chapter. At an analogous point of argument in a draft from 1763, Lessing defines an action as ‘a series of movements that aim at a final purpose’ (eine Reihe von Bewegungen, die auf einen Endzweck abzielen, heißet eine Handlung); a later draft talks of ‘the ideal of [poetic] action’ as consisting in ‘(1) the compression of time; (2) the heightening of incitements and the exclusion of chance; and (3) the arousal of passions’.46

45

In addition to Fulda’s chapter in this volume, see Rudowski 1967; Wessell 1984; Nisbet 2013a: 319–20. 46 Lessing 1990: 251, 260 (Drafts 5 and 8 in the standard numbering of the Paralipomena); see Fulda’s chapter in this volume, pp. 235–41. For a concise reconstruction of Laocoon’s genesis, see Nisbet 2013a: 304–6.

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Fulda notes that this conception of an action ‘relies heavily on Aristotle’s requirements for dramatic action’. Lessing’s strictures as to the length, perspicuity of causal connection, and emotional effect of an ideal poetic action indeed echo key features of Aristotle’s stipulations for the construction of tragic plots in chapters 6 to 11 of his Poetics. In Aristotle’s discussion, however, the first two conditions are emphasized for the sake of the third. Tragic plots should be restricted in magnitude and should present a clearly connected sequence of events because by doing so they will provide the clearest possible representation of the kind of transformation ‘from bad fortune to good fortune, or from good to bad’ that Aristotle holds to be optimal for the arousal of the properly tragic emotions of pity and fear:47 To define the matter simply: that magnitude long enough to allow for a transformation from good fortune to bad fortune or bad to good, in a sequence of events that follow on from each other in accordance with probability or necessity, is a sufficient limit of magnitude.

Insofar as Lessing’s adoption of Aristotelian formal restrictions in this draft of Laocoon is sensitive to the reasoning behind Aristotle’s prescriptions, these sections suggest that his enumeration of the ideal formal characteristics of poetic representations of actions is also framed by a concern with how to achieve tragedy’s proper emotional effect. Even if such a concern is detectable in Lessing’s early drafts, this does not exclude the possibility that such questions had ceased to matter to

47 Arist. Poet. 1451a11–15 (chapter 7). Aristotle justifies the preference for a plot that provokes pity and fear through a transformation or variation (metabasis/metabolê/metaballein) which arises from the structure of events, rather than through chance or mere spectacle, in chapters 9 and 13–14. Note Lessing’s similar emphasis on transformation or ‘variation’ in action (Abänderung) in the passage from the beginning of Laocoon (the fourth chapter, quoted at the start of this section). In their respective commentaries on the Paralipomena to Laocoon, neither Barner nor Vollhardt observes how far Lessing’s discussion in this section (section 8) of Draft 8 is reminiscent of the seventh chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics. In that chapter, Aristotle draws on an analogy between the well-constructed plot and the visible beauty of a physical object (animal or artefact) to argue that both manifest appropriate principles of magnitude and order in the arrangements of parts. In the case of the physical object, this magnitude and order are spatial, but in the tragic plot (so Aristotle implies) they are temporal (1450b33–1451a15). In Paralipomena 8.viii Lessing likewise appeals to an analogy between Schönheit as der malerische Wert der Körper and das Ideal der moralischen Vollkommenheit in der Poesie (1990: 260). The mention of moralische Vollkommenheit suggests, moreover, that Lessing’s description of the ideal form of poetic action is (like Aristotle’s) informed by concern with its ethical effects.

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him by the time he published Part 1 of Laocoon. Although the slightly later Hamburgische Dramaturgie attests to Lessing’s continuing concern to erect his defence of a tragedy of pity on Aristotelian foundations, his principal focus there is the contested notion of katharsis rather than the Aristotelian discussion of plot. There is, however, one further piece of evidence to suggest that the Aristotelian understanding of tragic action continued to occupy Lessing’s thoughts. In the May 1769 letter to Nicolai— the letter in which he outlines Laocoon’s intended continuation—Lessing again invokes the authority of the Poetics. Just after naming drama ‘the highest kind of poetry’ because it ‘turns the arbitrary signs wholly into natural signs’, he comments:48 Aristotle already declared that dramatic poetry is the highest, indeed the only poetry, and he puts epic poetry into second place only insofar as it is, or can be, to a large extent dramatic. The reason he gives for this is not mine, it is true; but it can be reduced to mine, and only reducing it to mine ensures it against being applied falsely.

Commentary on this letter has tended to focus upon what Lessing says about the media of dramatic representation (‘natural signs of arbitrary things’), attempting to elucidate his comments by reference to the concept of a ‘suitable relation’ introduced to motivate the move from medium to object of representation in the sixteenth chapter.49 Yet if Lessing’s sole intention in the envisaged continuation were to elaborate a formal semiotics of drama by comparison with other genres of poetry, his reference to Aristotle here would be puzzling. For, although the Poetics does include observations about the media (speech, rhythm, melody) and modes (narration versus dramatic impersonation) employed by various genres of poetry, these are given a lower priority than plot and in any case prove insufficient to distinguish tragedy from Homeric epic.50 It is in relation to the construction of plot—the feature he terms ‘the beginning and soul’ of poetic mimesis—that Aristotle commends epic only insofar as it approximates the character of drama: that is, insofar as 48 Lessing to Nicolai, 26 May 1769, in Lessing 1987: 610/Nisbet 1985: 134. More generally on Lessing’s recalibration of Aristotelian ideas, see also Kottman’s chapter in this volume. 49 See e.g. Wellbery 1984: 226–7; Beiser 2009: 275–7; Nisbet 2013a: 325–6; cf. e.g. Lifschitz’s chapter in this book. 50 Arist. Poet. 1448a18–23 (chapter 3); see too 1448b33–1449a1 (chapter 4); 1460a5–11 (chapter 24).

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it is constructed ‘around a single, whole and complete action, with a beginning, middle and end, so that, like a single, whole living thing, it may produce its proper pleasure’.51 Yet again, apparently formal restrictions concerning the unity and connection of poetic action are framed by the overall question of how forms such as tragedy or epic bring about their emotional effects. It is hardly surprising that Lessing, who wrote from a dramatist’s perspective and was steeped in both ancient and modern poetic theory, should have brought a detailed engagement with Sophocles and Aristotle to bear in responding to Smith’s criticisms. His claim that the poet’s currency of temporally extended action enables him to soften and modify the negative impressions of the moment provides a genuine addition to Smith’s theorizing on sympathy as a moral sentiment. As we have seen, it also provides a bridge between Laocoon’s famous formal distinctions and Lessing’s earlier and later explicit concern with the dynamics of tragic pity. For pity as aroused by dramatic representations of action is reliant upon structure that is progressive in time.52

51 Arist. Poet. 1459a16–20 (chapter 23). On the analogy between a poem and a living thing (zoôn), which refers back to the analogy between poetry and physical objects drawn at 1450b33–1451a15, see n. 47. 52 In addition to benefiting from the discussions during the 2015 Göttingen conference, my thinking for this chapter has been informed by an understanding of historical and philosophical debates about sympathy, as developed over meetings of the Interdisciplinary Network on Sympathy/Empathy and Imagination. Thanks are owed to my INSEI collaborators and to the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust for funding this network. I also thank seminar audiences in London and Oxford who listened to early drafts, and Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire for inviting me to contribute to the original conference project and present volume.

6 Mendelssohn’s Critique of Lessing’s Laocoon Frederick Beiser

Rules and the Rationalist Tradition The intellectual exchanges between Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, which began in 1754 and which lasted until Lessing’s death in 1781, are legendary.1 We now know how much the two philosophers, through conversations and letters, influenced one another, not only in the views they held but also in the interests they had. It was Lessing who first encouraged Mendelssohn’s interest in aesthetics,2 and who had a decisive effect on the revision of his first major work in the field, his 1755 Über die Empfindungen.3 The influence was, of course, mutual: Mendelssohn had no less an effect on Lessing’s aesthetics, and not least on his major work, his 1766 Laocoon.

1 Because of the different materials discussed, I primarily refer in this chapter to the most comprehensive edition of Lessing’s works (Lessing 1985–2003); where possible, though, I add references to McCormick’s English translation of the published 1766 Laocoon (Lessing 1984). 2 On Mendelssohn’s turn to aesthetics, see Altmann 1973: 66. 3 To respond to Lessing’s criticisms was one of Mendelssohn’s motives for writing his Rhapsodie, oder Zusätze zu den Briefen über die Empfindungen, which first appeared in 1761: see Mendelssohn 1761: 381–424.

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Just what Mendelssohn’s effect was on Lessing’s work, and how Lessing responded to it, will be the subject of the present investigation. But before we turn to that business—before we specify the precise differences between Lessing and Mendelssohn—we would do well to consider the broader affinities between them. Although they would often disagree, their disagreements took place on common ground and within a general tradition. Both were loyal to some of the fundamental tenets of the rationalist movement in aesthetics, that glorious tradition beginning with Christian Wolff in the 1720s and ending before Kant in the 1780s, a lineage including such eminent thinkers as Alexander Baumgarten, J. J. Bodmer, J. J. Breitinger, J. C. Gottsched, and J. J. Winckelmann.4 True to that grand tradition, Lessing and Mendelssohn shared some common principles. Among them were the following: that the chief form of aesthetic experience is the intuition of the beautiful (intuitio perfectionis); that the beautiful consists in perfection, which is unity in variety; that the goal of art is to please and instruct; that the means through which this goal is achieved consists in imitation. Not least among their agreements was their faith in the existence of rules of art, that is, that there are basic norms for the criticism and creation of works of art. Although Lessing, as a young man, had rebelled against the rules, he grew to have an increasing appreciation of them, until in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie he defended the necessity of rules against the rising Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) movement.5 Mendelssohn, however, never wavered in his belief in the possibility, and indeed necessity, of aesthetic norms, a faith which he too defended against rising Sturmer und Dränger. Mendelssohn’s critique of Lessing’s Laocoon in 1762 was a dispute about how to define the rules; but it never disputed the need for them. It was only through possessing clear and distinct rules, Lessing and Mendelssohn firmly believed, that the critic could give fair judgments on a work of art, and that the artist could best achieve his ends. For both Lessing and Mendelssohn, aesthetics was to be a science, a

4 On that tradition, see Beiser 2009. For another view of that tradition, see Buchenau 2013. 5 On Lessing’s battle with the Sturm und Drang, see Beiser 2009: 254–9.

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rigorous discipline or Wissenschaft; and the measure of its success came in defining clear and consistent rules, norms for the criticism and creation of works of art. Lessing’s and Mendelssohn’s preoccupation with rules was not a product of their aesthetic taste alone, but an essential aspect of their allegiance to the Enlightenment or Aufklärung. The fundamental principle of the Enlightenment was the sovereignty of reason, that is, the principle that all beliefs should submit to criticism, that neither the state in its majesty nor religion in its holiness should be exempt from the tribunal of critique.6 For every Aufklärer, aesthetics was the most important test case, the decisive proving-ground, for this principle. If the creation and appraisal of works of art is subject to rules, then the realm of aesthetic experience falls within the domain of reason, ensuring that it holds sovereignty over this crucial aspect of earthly life. If, however, it is not subject to such rules, then that realm will transcend and elude reason, confining its competence even within the earthly realm of the senses. That the aesthetic realm transcends the jurisdiction of reason was the contention of the Sturm und Drang, which insisted that art is created by a genius who has the right to break the rules. It was also the thesis of the empiricist tradition in aesthetics (viz., Burke and Dubos), which held that aesthetic experience is accessible to the senses alone, whose qualities are indefinable. If these protests against rationalism were correct, then the aesthetic realm on earth would be as mysterious as the heavenly realm beyond it. The borders of Enlightenment would then be posted not only beyond the natural world but even within it. No wonder, then, that Lessing and Mendelssohn would fight with all their might against the Sturm und Drang; no wonder that they would contest the empiricist tradition. Only in that way could the natural world, the realm of our finite experience, be made safe for the advance of reason. But the Enlightenment is no more. It died in the early nineteenth century. To most contemporary artists and students of aesthetics, the concern with aesthetic rules is bound to seem very antiquated, as dusty

6 To paraphrase Kant’s famous formulation in the preface to the first edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Kant 1781: xii; for a modern edition, see Kant 1956).

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and musty as Gottsched’s wig. Since the Sturm und Drang movement of the 1760s, artists have been in rebellion against the very notion that there are rules of art; and that rebellion has never ceased; the avant-garde movement of the twentieth century is only a modern version of the Sturm und Drang. Since the late eighteenth century, there have been three main objections against rules. First, rules constitute so many fetters on creativity and imagination; second, they make works of art stereotypical and mechanical when they should be individual and original, the expression of the personality of the artist;7 and third, since works of art are not reducible to concepts, to norms of what an object ought to be, there are no rules of art. This last criticism was made famous by Kant in his Kritik der Urteilskraft.8 If the whole debate between Lessing and Mendelssohn is not to appear archaic—a scholastic relic—we do well to remind ourselves what rules meant in the rationalist tradition. A brief examination shows that these objections were beside the point. There were two chief conceptions of a rule in the rationalist tradition. First, the instrumental conception. According to this conception, the rule specifies the necessary, or most effective, means toward the end of the artist. It was assumed that all arts have their characteristic media; and the rule determines how the artist should use his medium so as best to achieve his end. An example of such an instrumental rule, which was much cited by the rationalists, is Aristotle’s prescription in his Poetics that, if a tragedy is to arouse pity in the spectator, then the tragedian should write about a character like ourselves who suffers undeserved misfortune.9 Second, the holistic conception.10 According to this conception, the rule specifies the formal characteristics of the general idea behind a work, that is, that the idea should form an organic whole. The rule states that everything within a work should conform to the idea of the whole, so that there is a sufficient reason for everything within it. The work should therefore 7 This criticism of rules appears most explicitly in the expression theory of art of Croce and Collingwood. See Croce 1978: 35–8; and Collingwood 1938: 15–41. 8 Kant 1987: 57–61, 79–84, 143–4, 147–9, 149–50 (= }}8, 17, 31, 33, 34): this English translation is derived from the second edition (from 1793) of Kant’s Kritik. 9 Arist. Poet. 1453a (chapter 12): cf. also Harloe’s chapter in this volume. 10 This conception appears in Christian Wolff, Ontologia, }520, in Wolff 1965–83: II/3.406. Here Wolff defines a rule as propositio enuncians determinationem rationi conformem, where the determination conforming to reason would specify the general idea of the whole.

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form an organic whole, such that the whole determines each part and each part serves the whole. The rule therefore demands that the work should be beautiful, that is, that it show harmony, perfection, or unity-in-variety. Although closely related, these kinds of rules are still distinct. The instrumental rule is about means: it demands that we choose certain means toward our ends. The holistic rule is about ends: it tells us that the end should fulfil certain formal requirements, namely, that it should have unity and variety, that it should be a harmonious whole. From this brief explanation, it should be clear that both types of rule are indispensable. The instrumental conception is inescapable as long as the artist uses a specific medium. All media have their limitations, and the artist has to choose among a few options which permit him to achieve his ends. The rule, based on the experience of past artists, tells him what is the only, or most effective, means to his end. Since the means are necessary to the end, and since the artist chooses the end, he must also choose the means. The holistic conception is inevitable as long as a work of art should form a coherent whole. This whole consists in unity-invariety: unity, because a work must be comprehensible; and variety, because a theme must be varied to be interesting and capture the attention of the spectator. Now that we have some account of the meaning of rules in the rationalist tradition, it should be clear that the chief objections against them rest on misunderstandings. Rules, as such, pose no danger to the creativity, originality, or self-expression of the artist. Instrumental rules specify only that the artist should choose the most effective means toward his ends, whatever his ends might be. Holistic rules specify only that the artist’s general idea should form an organic whole, whatever his idea might be. Here it is left to the artist to choose his own ends or ideas. There are no commands about what these should be. For the same reason, much of Kant’s polemic against the rationalists misses its mark.11 Although Kant was correct that there are no rules in the sense of definite prescriptions about which ends an artist should choose, holistic rules specify only formal or general features of these ends, whatever their content. The artist is left free to create his own content;

11

Of course, much more could be said on behalf of Kant’s position. For a more detailed criticism of it, see Beiser 2009: 16–20.

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the only question is whether his content meets minimal requirements of formal structure. Granted that these objections are misconceptions, it does not follow that rules are completely unproblematic in aesthetics. Although there is nothing wrong with the conception of a rule, and although there is nothing wrong in applying or following a rule, it is still the case that rules can be, and often are, misconceived or misapplied. There are some rules that have proved arbitrary and artificial because they were not really necessary means toward achieving the artist’s ends, for example, the Aristotelian three unities. Dramatists found that they could write and stage successful works without following Aristotle’s rule that a tragedy should be about a single action occurring in a single place and on a single day. Most rebellions against rules in art history have taken place because artists have found them unnecessary or restrictive. But it is a long step from rebelling against bad rules to throwing out all rules. The beautiful baby of rules should not be thrown out with the dirty bathwater of unduly restrictive or unnecessary rules. The rebel against rules has to recognize that in overthrowing certain rules he is almost certainly following his own rules, prescriptions that he finds better means toward achieving his ends. That rules can be too severe, that they can be misapplied and a fetter on creativity, was a point well recognized by both Lessing and Mendelssohn. They had grave misgivings about Gottsched’s programme of making every artist work according to a list of precisely defined and self-conscious rules. Such a programme, they felt, would squash spontaneity and produce artificial prose. They acknowledged that the poet had to follow his inspiration, to give his impulses and energies free rein, if his work were to excite the feelings of the public. For all their dislike of the Sturm und Drang, Lessing and Mendelssohn never ceased to believe in genius, the creator who trusted more his instinct than the critic’s rules. Still, they insisted that rules are necessary for the critic, if not the genius; and that they are often an aid for those artists who are learning their craft. Even the genius was following rules; it is just that he was not self-conscious of them; they had to be formulated after rather than before his creative act. Such, in sum, was Lessing’s and Mendelssohn’s attitude toward the rules in the late 1750s and early 1760s. Admitting that there is good reason to talk about rules after all, and conceding that the objections against rules are, at the very least, problematic, we can now examine the

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dispute between Lessing and Mendelssohn from a fresh perspective. Might, perhaps, their debate have some contemporary relevance and resonance after all?

Laocoon and the Rationalist Tradition In one respect, Lessing’s Laocoon was a typical product of the rationalist tradition. Like so many tracts in this tradition, it attempts to establish a solid foundation for criticism; it too seeks the basic rules by which the critic should judge works of art. It does not differ in this regard from similar works of Gottsched, Bodmer, Breitinger, and Baumgarten. In another respect, however, there is something new to Lessing’s text, something fresh and novel that carries the discussion forward and into new territory. Its central problem is less to determine the common principles of the arts than the specific differences between them. Whereas his predecessors attempted to discover fundamental principles behind all the arts, Lessing wants to determine how these principles take shape in the individual arts. Lessing takes it for granted that imitation is the chief purpose of the arts; but he wants to know how this principle plays out in different arts. Lessing’s general thesis in Laocoon is that each art has a characteristic purpose and medium, and that it should be judged by them alone. We should not expect one art to do the work of another, but should judge each by what its specific goals and the specific instruments that it has at its disposal allow it to achieve. In an earlier draft of his work, included in the so-called Paralipomena zum Laokoon,12 Lessing summarized his thesis very succinctly:13 I maintain that only that can be the end of an art to which it is singularly and alone fitted, and not that which another art can do just as well or better than it. I find in Plutarch a simile that illustrates this very well. ‘Who’, he says, ‘wants to chop wood with a key and open a door with an axe not only destroys both tools but also deprives himself of their use.’

‘Paralipomena zum Laokoon’, in Lessing 1990: 207–321. Lessing 1990: 318. Cf. Paralipomena 20: ‘The proper end of a fine art can be only that which it is in a position to produce without the aid of another’ (Lessing 1990: 295). 12 13

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Lessing gives criticism a somewhat different task from his rationalist forbears, that is, Gottsched, Bodmer, Breitinger, and Baumgarten. He agrees with them that it is the business of the philosopher to determine the general principles of the arts while it is the task of the critic to apply them to specific cases. However, for Lessing, applying general principles imposes an additional task on the critic. It is the critic’s task to see how the general principles take on a more specific meaning when applied to different arts. The critic’s job is therefore to explicate this specific meaning and to note its consequences. So where the philosopher requires wit, the power of finding the similarities between things, the critic needs acumen, which determines the differences between them.14 Acumen, Lessing stresses, is the rarer capacity. For every fifty critics who show wit, only one has acumen. As its subtitle suggests, Laocoon was not meant to be a general aesthetic to distinguish the specific principles of all the fine arts, but to be only a case study to distinguish between the specific principles of two arts: poetry and painting (where painting was used in a broad sense to refer to all the visual arts, to sculpture and ceramics as well as painting). Even in this modest task, however, Lessing had his work cut out for him. For his central thesis was quite controversial. It was opposed to an old classical tradition that treated poetry and painting as if they were one and the same. According to an old saying attributed to Simonides (in the early fifth century), painting is ‘a silent poem’ and poetry ‘a speaking picture’. Horace’s famous dictum ut pictura poesis was likewise constantly cited and understood in this sense.15 This classical theory had not disappeared in the eighteenth century, but it had been reaffirmed recently by Joseph Spence in his Polymetis (1747) and the Comte de Caylus in his illustrations drawn from the Iliad—the Tableaux tirés de l’Iliade (1757). Both duly became Lessing’s chief targets in Laocoon. But Lessing was taking on an even more entrenched view, one much closer to home. For no one had gone to greater lengths to re-establish the classical theory than the rationalists themselves. This was indeed the essence of the poetics of Bodmer, Breitinger, and Baumgarten, who had

14 Lessing contrasts a witzige with a scharfsinnige critic. Here he employs the Wolffian technical distinction between wit (Witz) and acumen (Scharftsinnigkeit). On that distinction, see }}269, 309, 311 in Wolff 1965–83: I/4. 15 For discussion and further bibliography, cf. the introduction to this volume, pp. 19–22.

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all maintained that good poetry aspires to be good painting. Although it is never explicit in Laocoon, Lessing was, if not by intention then by implication, taking issue with the rationalist tradition itself. Laocoon was first and foremost directed against some abuses of contemporary criticism, what Lessing contemptuously called Afterkritik. The problem with so much current criticism, he complains, is that critics do not judge each art in its own terms, according to its specific ends and the unique qualities of its medium. They expect one art to conform to the rules and ends of another. The results are ruinous: an art’s potential is unnecessarily restricted, its limits wantonly exceeded. Lessing makes it clear, however, that the problem is not only one of criticism but also of creation; not only critics but also artists themselves are misled by misconceptions of the arts. Hence Laocoon also targets some major trends in contemporary poetry and painting. One of these was the rage for descriptive poetry, poetische Gemählde (literally ‘poetic paintings’), which was practised by Haller, Brockes, Kleist, and Geβner. The other was allegorical painting, which had been the fashion among Rococo painters. Lessing referred to these trends as if they were degenerative diseases, calling them (respectively) Schilderungssucht and Allegoristerey. From Lessing’s account of his intentions in the preface to Laocoon, it seems as if he is arguing for the autonomy and integrity of each of the arts. His main critical point seems to be his general thesis that each art should be judged according to its own ends and media and not by those of another art. Such a thesis appears to support what we might call ‘the principle of the natural equality of the arts’,16 the doctrine that each art is valid in its own terms and that none is better than another. This principle seems to be the very spirit of Lessing’s tract, and it has been held to be his chief contribution to aesthetics. It is important to see, however, that though this principle is indeed the implication of Lessing’s thesis, at least when broadly construed, it is completely at odds with his practice and deeper intentions. Far from respecting each art in its own terms, Lessing damns whole genres, viz. landscapes, historical painting, and portraits; and instead of carefully distinguishing between sculpture and painting, he lumps them together as if there were no differences between them. This discrepancy between Lessing’s general thesis and his actual To adapt a phrase of Hume, ‘the principle of the natural equality of tastes’, from ‘Of the Standard of Taste’, in Hume 1985: 231. 16

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performance seems downright puzzling until we recognize that it is only in keeping with his deeper designs. Rather than championing a principle of natural equality, Lessing’s real goal is to vindicate a rationalist hierarchy of the fine arts, a pyramid which grades them according to their intellectual content and imitative power.17 Such a hierarchy places poetry at its top, and dramatic poetry at its very apex, while the visual arts, occupied with mere visual appearances and encumbered with manual practices, compose its base. Nothing could better betray Lessing’s deep rationalist bias.

Lessing’s Deductive Argument The heart of Lessing’s Laocoon, and the chief target of Mendelssohn’s critique, comes in the sixteenth chapter, with its so-called deductive argument. Here Lessing, reasoning from general principles rather than the observation of particular works, attempts to lay down a distinction between poetry and painting. Lessing worked long and hard on this argument, which appears both in the Paralipomena and the final published version of Laocoon. This argument, as first stated in the Paralipomena,18 begins from some general premises about both poetry and painting. Lessing first tells us that poetry and painting are both imitative arts, having as their goal the imitation of nature. They both have the same end: the arousal of lively sensible representations in us. They have all the rules in common that follow from the concept of imitation and this end. However, Lessing reasons, since they use different means for this imitation, different rules must apply to them. Painting uses figures and colours in space; and poetry uses sounds in time. The signs of painting are natural, because they have a real similarity to their objects; the signs of poetry are conventional, because they consist in words which denote their objects not because of a natural similarity but because of a convention that assigns specific words to specific objects. The argument proper then proceeds in quasi-syllogistic form. It consists of the following four premises (as already discussed by numerous 17 On Lessing’s hidden agenda, see Beiser 2009: 277–82. On the inherent hierarchy of the arts in the Laocoon, see also the chapters by Mitchell, Squire, and Trabant in this book. 18 ‘Paralipomena zum Laokoon’: Lessing 1990: 209–10.

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contributors to this book). First, painting and poetry use different signs: painting uses figures and colours that are contiguous in space, whereas poetry uses sounds that succeed one another in time. Second, since signs should have ‘a fitting relation’ (ein bequemes Verhältniß) to the things signified, signs that are contiguous should signify only the contiguous; signs that are successive, moreover, should signify only the successive. Third, contiguous things are bodies, whereas successive things are actions. Therefore, fourth, the subject matter of painting should consist in bodies, whereas the subject matter of poetry should consist in actions. As Lessing later summarized the argument, the sphere of the poet is succession (actions), whereas the sphere of the painter and sculptor is juxtaposition in space (bodies).19 The argument has two important implications, which Lessing spells out in Laocoon’s eighteenth chapter. First, the painter cannot bring distant points in time into the same picture; to do so would be for the painter to invade the space of the poet. Second, the poet cannot make what is simultaneous in space into a successive series of moments; this would be for the poet to invade the realm of the painter. While Lessing’s main concern is to place each art within its proper boundaries (Grenzen), he also acknowledges that he cannot completely separate these spheres. To a limited degree, he allows each art to intrude into the sphere of the other. Since all bodies exist in time as well as space, painting can also imitate actions, though only by way of suggestion (andeutungsweise) through bodies. Since actions are connected to certain bodies, poetry too depicts bodies, though only by way of suggestion through actions.20 The crucial premise of the argument, though terribly vague, is the second. What Lessing seems to have in mind by ‘a fitting relation to the signified’ (ein bequemes Verhältniß zu dem Bezeichneten) is a similarity between the structure of the signs and the structure of their objects. There must be an isomorphism between them, so that what is contiguous in the signs must be contiguous in their objects, and so that what is successive in the signs must be successive in their objects. The demand for such an isomorphism derives from the principle of imitation, which Lessing explicitly endorses in the beginning of his argument.

19

Lessing 1990: 130 (= Lessing 1984: 78).

20

Lessing 1990: 245.

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As stated so far, Lessing’s argument seems to depend on two factors: on the one hand the principle of imitation; and on the other, the technical qualities of the media of poetry and painting. Yet a closer look shows that something else is in play and that the argument is not based entirely on these considerations. After all, Lessing recognizes that painters have it in their technical power to portray actions, although they cannot do it very well, and that poets have it in their technical power to describe bodies, although they too cannot do it very well. So it is not simply a matter of their media. The crucial question for Lessing is how, given the technical powers and the nature of the medium, the artist can achieve most effectively the ends of his art.21 Here the ends of his art have to be specified, and they are crucial in measuring the effectiveness of his media. Hence in the beginning of the twenty-fourth chapter of the published version Lessing makes an important distinction between what an artist can do by virtue of his technical powers, and what he must do to achieve the ends of his fine art.22 Or, as he puts it in the Paralipomena: ‘The critic must keep in mind not only the power but also the end of the art.’23 So Lessing’s arguments are based not only upon the nature of the media, but also upon how each art best achieves its ends. Without argument or explanation, Lessing then makes it a fundamental principle that the chief end of the fine arts is to create pleasure. The arguments about genres are therefore hypothetical in form: if the artist wants to achieve the ends of his art, if he wishes to maximize its pleasant effect on the spectator, then he must use his medium in a certain way and choose a certain subject matter.

Mendelssohn’s Critique Probably some time in late 1762, Lessing sent Mendelssohn and Nicolai a draft of his Laocoon. This draft contains portions of the preface of the final version of Laocoon, as well as early versions of chapters 16 to 25. Nicolai and Mendelssohn both wrote comments on this draft,24 which is 21

Cf. the chapters in this volume by e.g. Squire, Giuliani, and Grethlein. 23 Lessing 1990: 169 (= Lessing 1984: 126). Lessing 1990: 268. 24 The draft and comments appear both in the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag edition of Lessing’s Werke (Lessing 1990) and as ‘Zu einem Laokoon-Entwurf Lessings’, Mendelssohn 1929–: II.231–58. 22

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so riddled with marginalia that it looks like a manuscript after two fussy copy-editors have mauled it. It was this tattered and battered document that was eventually returned to Lessing, probably some time in early 1763. Mendelssohn’s comments focus mainly on Lessing’s first versions of chapters 16 to 25, especially on his so-called ‘deductive argument’ for the distinction between poetry and painting. Some of Mendelssohn’s comments seem to have been ignored by Lessing; others, however, troubled him greatly, so much so that he had to revise his work to take them into account. In making his deductive argument, Lessing probably expected to find Mendelssohn’s approval. After all, he was only building on ground already laid down by his friend. In his 1757 ‘Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften’,25 Mendelssohn had already made a set of distinctions similar to Lessing. There Mendelssohn had distinguished between ‘the fine sciences’ (schöne Wissenschaften) and ‘the fine arts’ (schöne Künste). The fine sciences are poetry and rhetoric. The fine arts are painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance. It is characteristic of the fine sciences, Mendelssohn says, that they use arbitrary signs. An arbitrary sign is one having nothing in common with the thing signified and where the connection between sign and signified rests only on convention. It is characteristic of the fine arts, on the other hand, that they use natural signs. A natural sign is one where there is some connection between sign and signified by virtue of some property they share in common. The best example of an arbitrary sign is a word, because it has no natural similarity to its object: the word Katz in German designates a cat, though the word has no similarity to any feature of a feline. The best examples of natural signs are lines, shapes, and colours on a canvas, which should have a visual similarity to their object. The lines, shapes, and colours on the picture of the cat Jasper should look like the outline, shape, and colour of Jasper himself. Having made this broad distinction between the fine sciences and arts, Mendelssohn then goes on to make a distinction within the fine

Anonymous, ‘Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften’, in Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste, Band I (1757), in Mendelssohn 1929–: I.165–90. This essay was later published under the title ‘Ueber die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften’, in Mendelssohn 1761: I.95–152 (reprinted in Mendelssohn 1929–: I.425–52). 25

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arts. Some fine arts use signs which are contiguous or coexist and others use signs which succeed one another.26 Signs that are contiguous or coexist are lines and figures; and signs that succeed one another are movements or forms. Painting is an example of an art whose signs coexist; and dance is an example of an art whose signs are in movement. Just as Lessing would later do, Mendelssohn stressed how the expressive powers of these arts depend on the qualities of their natural signs. A good artist would be someone who exploits the natural qualities of his medium but who also does not attempt to stretch them beyond their natural limits. A good musician, for example, will not attempt to describe a rose or a poplar tree. Although Mendelssohn’s argument was in some way the precedent for Lessing’s, there was still an important discrepancy between them—one that later became the source of much friction. The chief discrepancy is this: Lessing places poetry within Mendelssohn’s category of the fine arts. Mendelssohn had put poetry in a separate category—it was not a fine art at all but a fine science—because it uses conventional or arbitrary signs and not natural ones. It is striking that, in his draft, Lessing too had distinguished between poetry and painting on just these grounds; he too had regarded the signs of poetry as conventional in contrast to the natural signs of painting. However, that distinction had become less important for him as he focused instead on the natural signs of poetry, on the successive qualities of sounds. In his effort to make a nice and neat distinction between qualities of natural signs, Lessing had neglected or underplayed the important fact that poetry uses conventional signs. It is noteworthy that in the final version of Laocoon Lessing drops Mendelssohn’s original distinction, making the distinction between poetry and painting depend entirely on their different natural signs. Given these differences, it is not surprising to find that Mendelssohn, in his commentary on Lessing’s draft, immediately picks on this feature of Lessing’s distinction between poetry and painting.27 He reminds Lessing that poetry uses conventional or arbitrary signs, and for just this reason it can also express things that are coexistent with one another. To Lessing’s thesis that successive imitative signs can only express actions, Mendelssohn abruptly exclaims ‘Nein!’: ‘No,’ he writes, ‘they 26 27

Mendelssohn 1929–: I.176–7. ‘Zu einem Laokoon Entwurf Lessings’: Mendelssohn 1929–: II.234.

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[i.e. the signs of poetry], if they have an arbitrary meaning, also express coexisting things.’ He then reminds Lessing that if we banish all painting from poetry, we damn many excellent passages from the ancient poets.28

Lessing’s Reply to Mendelssohn’s Critique in the Seventeenth Chapter of Laocoon Of all Mendelssohn’s comments on his draft, it was this one that most troubled Lessing. What was his reply? Nothing less than chapter 17 of the final published version of Laocoon: ‘But the objection will be raised that the symbols of poetry are not only successive but are also arbitrary; and, as arbitrary symbols, they are of course able to represent bodies as they exist in space . . . ’29 Although Lessing does not mention Mendelssohn by name, there can be little doubt that he had him in mind. Here Lessing begins by raising the very objection Mendelssohn once posed: that the signs of poetry are not only natural but also conventional, and that as such they are able to describe bodies in space. Lessing immediately concedes that the signs of poetry are indeed conventional, and that for this reason they can describe bodies in space. But, he insists, this is a property of speech in general and not a quality of speech insofar as it is poetic:30 It is true that since the symbols of speech are arbitrary, the parts of a body may, through speech, be made to follow one another just as readily as they exist side by side in nature. But this is a peculiarity of speech and its signs in general and not as they serve the aims of poetry. The poet does not want merely to be intelligible, nor is he content—as is the prose writer—with simply presenting his image clearly and concisely. He wants rather to make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at that moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce on us. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words.

The poet does not just want to be intelligible—his concern is not just to be clear and distinct: if that were the case, he might as well be just a prose 28

Lessing 1990: 237. Lessing 1990: 123–9 (= Lessing 1984: 85–90; translated quotation here is from the beginning of the chapter, p. 85). For Lessing’s response to Mendelssohn’s critique here, see also Lifschitz’s chapter in this volume. 30 Lessing 1990: 123–4 (translation after Lessing 1984: 85). 29

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writer. As a poet he wants us to feel from the succession of sounds the movement or action of the object itself. To drive home his point that it is not the task of poetry to describe visible objects, Lessing explains that the psychology involved in the comprehension of a visible object is very different from that involved in the comprehension of a poem. When we comprehend a visible object we first grasp the parts and then the whole, a mental operation that takes place instantaneously and spontaneously, as it were, where we are never conscious of any succession. A poet, however, describes a body in a successive way, where he gradually builds up the impression of the whole by progressively adding one word to another.31 What the painter grasps in an instant as a whole, the poet has to gradually and laboriously piece together, so that the instantaneous and spontaneous feeling for the whole, which is captured by the painter, is lost. The eye, Lessing adds, has all the parts right in front of it. The ear, however, has to remember all the sounds that have passed in time, some of which it forgets:32 Once more, then: I do not deny to language altogether the power of depicting the corporeal whole according to its parts. It can do so because its signs, although consecutive, are still arbitrary. But I do deny it to language as the medium of poetry, because the illusion, which is the principal object of poetry, is wanting in such verbal description of bodies. And this illusion, I say, must be wanting because the coexistent nature of a body comes into conflict with the consecutive nature of language, and although dissolving the former into the latter makes the division of the whole into its parts easier for us, the final reasssembling of the parts into a whole is made extremely difficult and often even impossible.

An effective poetic description of an object is impossible, Lessing claims, because there is a collision between the coexistence of the body and the consecutiveness of speech. What are we to make of Lessing’s reply to Mendelssohn in this seventeenth chapter? Although Lessing is surely correct that the poet cannot give us as vivid a portrait of an object as a painter, the question remains whether he has correctly explained this fact. He thinks that it is because the poet’s medium of exposition is temporal or successive. But there is a simpler diagnosis: that the poet’s medium, because it consists of conventional signs, is abstract and so cannot immediately reproduce all 31 32

Lessing 1990: 124 (Lessing 1984: 85–6). Lessing 1990: 127 (translation after Lessing 1984: 88).

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the particularity of an object. That succession is not so important becomes clear from the fact that, after hearing all the words successively for the first time, we can later consider them all at once and as a whole. But even when we do that, the object lacks the vivacity of a painting; arguably, that is because its medium is abstract, not because we comprehend its parts successively. Although the argument of chapter 17 is not convincing, it hardly exhausts Lessing’s attempt to deal with Mendelssohn’s objection. So troubled was Lessing by it that he continued to think about it years after the first part of Laocoon was published in 1766. In 1769 Lessing wrote a long letter to Nicolai where he again raises the problem.33 Now Lessing makes it clear that his argument is more prescriptive than descriptive, that he is talking about poetry and painting not as they are but as they ought to be. The highest form of painting will use only natural signs in space, avoiding all forms of allegory, just as the highest form of poetry will use only natural signs in time, avoiding all conventional meaning. Poetry can approach its ideal, Lessing explains, through various means—that is, through sounds, the position of words, the use of measure, figures, tropes, and images. All these means will make the medium of poetry more natural than conventional. Toward the end of his letter to Nicolai, Lessing adds a further interesting point that shifts the whole focus of his argument. He claims that the perfect form of poetry is dramatic poetry, and that in drama words cease to be conventional signs and become instead natural signs for arbitrary things. Rather than explaining this puzzling point, Lessing recommends that Nicolai ‘chat’ with ‘Herr Moses’ a half an hour about it. He will then devote the third part of his Laocoon to it. Lessing, of course, never wrote the third part of his Laocoon. Still less do we know whether Nicolai ever spoke with Mendelssohn about the point. Doubtless, we too could chat a good half-hour about this topic, just as Lessing recommended. We are, however, in the realm of conjecture and surmise in trying to understand Lessing. What, exactly, did Lessing mean when he wrote that in drama the words of poetry cease to be conventional signs? Part of his meaning seems to be this. Dramatic poetry involves not just what is written, the

33

Lessing to Nicolai, 26 May 1769, in Lessing 1987: 608–11.

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words of a script, but also the acting out on stage of what is written. The playwright’s words are realized through the actor’s speech and actions, which are real sounds and events on stage. These sounds and actions on the stage are intended to represent what some real person would or should say or do under certain circumstances. Speaking and acting consist in movements, expressions, and sounds, which designate real actions, thoughts, and speech. They are therefore natural signs. Hence, sure enough, there is a ‘fitting’ relationship between sign and signified because the order in which the signs succeed one another on stage is the same as the order in which an action or speech would or should take place. Lessing himself makes this very point in Laocoon when he notes in the fourth chapter that drama can follow the laws of material painting better than poetry itself because its signs are natural.34 Whereas poetry gives us a description of the Trojan priest’s cry, drama gives us the cry itself. While all this seems to be true, it still does not eliminate the realm of conventional meaning. This is for the very simple but compelling reason that we understand the meaning of the actor’s words and deeds only from knowing the conventions governing his speech. After all, it is not as if what he says amounts to only so many sounds in motion. If that were the case, there would be no difference between hearing a play in our language from that in a foreign language we do not understand. If I am ignorant of classical Greek, simply hearing the sounds of that language and seeing the actions of the actors on stage will not help me understand Sophocles’ Oedipus. Although we do not know Mendelssohn’s response to Lessing’s point about dramatic poetry becoming a natural language, we do know his own take on Lessing’s views about drama. It is striking that Mendelssohn does not share Lessing’s hierarchy of the arts, which would place dramatic poetry at its very apex. In his comments on Lessing’s draft he argues that the ideas expressed in poetry derive their beauty from the visual arts, from painting and sculpture, because it is only the visual arts that can give us the idea of the whole which we grasp only successively in poetry.35 This point follows naturally enough from Mendelssohn’s appreciation of the fact that the meaning of poetry depends on artificial 34 Lessing 1990: 36 (Lessing 1984: 24); on this turn to drama, cf. again Harloe’s chapter in this volume. 35 ‘Zu einem Laokoon-Entwurf Lessings’: Mendelssohn 1929–: II.254.

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or conventional signs, and that it therefore lacks the immediacy and vivacity of the natural signs of painting and sculpture. Mendelssohn’s point therefore turns Lessing’s hierarchy upside down: now it is the visual, not the dramatic arts, that stand at the apex of the pyramid. For all his respect for Lessing, Mendelssohn could not bring himself to share Lessing’s secret preference for the dramatic arts. It is perhaps significant that, although he tried his hand at verse, Mendelssohn was never tempted to write his own drama. There are many other points in Mendelssohn’s commentary on Lessing’s draft that deserve comment. Mendelssohn added a virtual essay to his commentary, and then wrote another, taking up some of the issues in Lessing’s Laocoon.36 We have, however, no space or time to explore these essays here. I will have to rest content, in my own rethinking of Laocoon in this chapter, with having examined only the most conspicuous effect of Mendelssohn’s commentary on Lessing: a full account of how the two writers influenced one another over the years would make for one very thick volume.

36

‘Gedanken vom Ausdrucke der Leidenschaften’: Mendelssohn 1929–: II.259–65.

7 Naturalizing the Arbitrary Lessing’s Laocoon and Enlightenment Semiotics Avi Lifschitz

The significance of Lessing’s distinction between arbitrary and natural signs has been highlighted by readers of Laocoon ever since its publication—and even beforehand, as manifest in Moses Mendelssohn’s comments on the early drafts Lessing sent him.1 Yet, as Frederick Beiser notes in this book, in the published version of Laocoon, it is only in chapter 17 that Lessing discussed arbitrary and natural signs (willkührliche/natürliche Zeichen), having famously argued in the preceding chapter that the signs of different art forms must merely conform to the temporal-spatial properties of their objects. The problematic and value-laden character of this assertion is enhanced by Lessing’s subsequent elaboration of the ideal of a ‘poetic painting’ (poetisches Gemählde) rapidly depicting a whole phenomenon.2 In this optimal form of poetry, as Lessing argued in the Paralipomena to Laocoon, arbitrary signs were elevated to the ‘dignity and power of the natural’: ‘The impossibility of painting using this means [metaphors and

1

On the dialogue between Mendelssohn and Lessing concerning Laocoon, see Altmann 1973: 70–1; Wilfried Barner’s comments in Lessing 1990: 633–50; Nisbet 2013a: 304–5; and Beiser’s chapter in this book. See also the semiotic focus of Gebauer 1984; Wellbery 1984; and Baxmann, Franz, and Schäffner 2000. 2 For the comments in the seventeenth chapter, see Lessing 1984: 87; 2012: 123. On the theological, geopolitical, and gendered undertones of Lessing’s distinctions in Laocoon, see Mitchell 1986: 95–115; Squire 2009: 104–11, as well as the chapters in this book by Mitchell and Squire.

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other literary devices] endows poetry with a great advantage, in that it has signs with the power of the natural while it must, however, express these signs through the arbitrary.’3 This chapter constitutes an attempt to clarify what Lessing meant in this complicated passage, while setting it against his more dichotomous distinction between the signs of poetry and painting, as well as the background of eighteenth-century discussions of the arbitrariness of the sign. Like David Wellbery, I am treating Laocoon here first and foremost as a treatise about language and signs, applied to the aesthetic field.4 Given the absence of Lessing’s planned yet unwritten essay about language and its origins, Laocoon and its Paralipomena remain his most important contributions to an intellectual debate that, as a young Göttingen scholar observed in 1777, had become ‘the fashionable occupation of philosophical Germany’.5 As suggested in Wellbery’s seminal study, aesthetic theories have been deeply and inevitably rooted in contemporary views of language, its signs, and their role in human perception and reasoning. 6 Furthermore, like Meir Sternberg, I would suggest that by situating Lessing’s Laocoon in its historical context we could use it better for our own purposes.7 However, I am less inclined to closely follow Michel Foucault and David Wellbery in regarding eighteenth-century thought (or the entire âge classique) as predetermined by a single episteme or a particular ‘metasemiotic’, one ‘Enlightenment myth of the sign’ that exhibited a thorough systematic coherence.8

3

Paralipomena 25 in Lessing 1990: 311. Wellbery 1984; cf. also Wellbery’s chapter in this book. I employ here the term ‘aesthetics’ in its current sense of a theory of art, its production, and reception rather in its eighteenth-century meaning of a theory of sensual perception. 5 Michael Hißmann’s preface to De Brosses 1777, n.p. In the Collectanea entry ‘Babel’ (1769), Lessing mentions a planned though never completed treatise on language, possibly intended as a submission to the 1771 contest on the origin of language at the Berlin Academy. (Lessing 1900: 119, 152.) On the wider debate, see Aarsleff 1982; Ricken 1994; Lifschitz 2012a and 2014. 6 Wellbery 1984: 228. 7 Sternberg urged scholars of art history and semiotics to stop approaching Laocoon as an all-too-easy enemy of modern theory and instead to try to access it on its own terms. As he suggested: ‘Understanding Lessing’s masterpiece, with whatever sympathy and admiration, is not yet accepting its premises and procedures, nor rewriting them into the Newest Laocoon’ (Sternberg 1999: 294). 8 Wellbery 1984: 1–8, 228–31, and passim; cf. Foucault 2002 (original 1966): 64–70. 4

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This chapter argues that what we may anachronistically call eighteenthcentury semiotics, the ‘fashionable occupation’ of German—and European—philosophy, was a remarkably diverse field. Terms such as arbitrariness and naturalness were discussed in such a broad range of contexts and disciplines that it is difficult to talk about a single theory or ‘Enlightenment myth’ concerning signs, their function, and their role in human thought. For example, in contrast to Wolff and some of his followers, Leibniz—alongside major later authors—excluded complete freedom or arbitrariness from the human semiotic sphere. In fact, various eighteenth-century authors celebrated the symbolic, historically, and environmentally evolved character of the sign—for in their eyes, precisely this lack of arbitrariness endowed language with peculiar force and a solid link to the primordial energies of the human mind. In this respect—and in order to elucidate what Lessing meant in the above quote from the Paralipomena—I shall discuss Enlightenment views on natural language which differed substantially from the earlier (mostly seventeenth-century) apotheosis of a philosophically crafted, clear and distinct idiom. Condillac’s language of action, Diderot’s hieroglyph, and Rousseau’s language of signs were all complex attempts to emphasize the natural aspects of conventional human language or to redefine it in an anti-arbitrary fashion. By passionately debating the arbitrariness of the sign, Enlightenment authors consciously revived and reconfigured an ancient discussion; yet they harnessed these ancient resources to their own attempts to make language (or poetry, in Lessing’s case) ‘present’ things vividly and naturally rather than ‘represent’ them in an articulate manner.9 Finally, I shall suggest that Lessing’s early encounter with Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and the Mute (1751) exposed him to a cross-European discourse on language and arbitrariness whose traces are clearly discernible in Laocoon.

Lessing and Mendelssohn on Natural and Arbitrary Signs Before discussing natural and arbitrary signification in eighteenthcentury thought, it might be helpful to summarize Lessing’s use of this 9

Coseriu 1968; Neis 2009; Lifschitz 2009, 2012b.

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terminology in Laocoon. In the early draft he sent to Mendelssohn, the classification of the arts according to their signs was conducted in a manner similar to earlier eighteenth-century typologies. At this early stage Lessing not only presented his renowned emphasis on structural similarity between signs (following one another in time or existing next to one another in space) and their objects (actions unfolding temporally or bodies extended spatially); he also linked this distinction between the signs of poetry and painting firmly to their arbitrariness (the former) or naturalness (the latter).10 This distinction assisted him in making the central argument of Laocoon, which was aimed not so much at the ut pictura poesis paradigm in itself as against what Lessing saw as false similarities between poetry and painting that had been derived from it over the ages. As he emphasized in the preface to the published Laocoon, the effect and purpose of different art forms are the same: they must all create an illusion of beauty by making their objects vividly present. However, the means and objects available to these art forms were thoroughly different.11 Interestingly, at the core of the published version—the famous sixteenth chapter—Lessing differentiated between the signs of painting and poetry with no recourse to the distinction between natural and arbitrary signs. In this chapter he concentrated merely on the differences between signs that are ‘figures and colours in space’ (Figuren und Farben in dem Raume) and those that are ‘articulated sounds in time’ (artikulirte Töne in der Zeit), arguing that the signs of each art form must bear a ‘suitable relation (bequemes Verhältniß) to the thing signified’. Spatially contiguous signs can thus depict ‘only objects whose wholes or parts coexist’ (bodies, according to Lessing) while temporally successive signs ‘can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive’ (actions).12 Unlike the equivalent definition in the draft, in the published version of Laocoon the relationship between poetry and successive signs in time is not immediately linked to arbitrariness; neither are the spatial signs of painting firmly connected to naturalness.

10

Paralipomena 2 in Lessing 1990: 219. Preface in Lessing 1984: 4; 2012: 8. 12 Lessing 1984: 78; 2012: 115. See Mitchell 1986: 104 for a useful critique of the blurred lines here between a supposedly objective description (how different forms of art actually function) and normative prescription (how they should always operate). 11

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Why did Lessing change his mind and exclude the distinction between the natural and the arbitrary from his main definition of the signs of poetry and painting, relegating their discussion to the following seventeenth chapter? As recounted in most accounts of the genesis of Laocoon, this change can be traced back to the correspondence between Lessing and Mendelssohn and to Mendelssohn’s criticism of the early draft. A few years earlier Mendelssohn himself had composed a treatise on different art forms, entitled On the Main Principles of the Fine Arts and Sciences.13 Given the centrality of arbitrary and natural signs for both Mendelssohn and Lessing, I am reproducing here a lengthy extract from Mendelssohn’s treatise—where poetry was a ‘fine science’ while painting was classified as a ‘fine art’: The signs by which an object is expressed can be either natural or arbitrary (natürlich oder willkührlich). They are natural if the combination of the sign with the subject matter signified is grounded in the very properties of what is designated. The passions are, by virtue of their nature, connected with certain movements in our limbs as well as with certain sounds and gestures. Hence, anyone who expresses an emotion by means of the sounds, gestures, and movements appropriate to it, makes use of natural signs. Those signs, on the other hand, that by their very nature have nothing in common with the designated subject matter (vermöge ihrer Natur mit der bezeichneten Sache nichts gemein haben), but have nonetheless been arbitrarily assumed as signs for it, are called ‘arbitrary’. . . . All things, possible and actual, can be expressed by arbitrary signs as soon as we have a clear concept of them. Hence, the domain of the fine sciences [including poetry] extends to every purely imaginable object. . . . The object of the fine arts is more limited (eingschränkter). These arts make use of natural signs above all. Expression in painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and dance does not presuppose anything arbitrary in order to be understood. Very rarely does it appeal to the consent of human beings (die Einwilligung der Menschen) in order to designate this or that object in one way rather than another.14

Its first version, published as an article in the Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste 1.2 (1757) was entitled ‘Betrachtungen über die Quellen und die Verbindungen der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften’; the subsequent version in Mendelssohn’s Philosophische Schriften of 1761 appeared under the title ‘Über die Hauptgrundsätze der schönen Künste und Wissenschaften’. See Fritz Bamberger’s introduction in Mendelssohn 1929–: I.xxxiv–xxxvii. 14 Mendelssohn 1997: 177–9 (Mendelssohn 1929–: I.174–6). See also Frederick Beiser’s chapter in this book. 13

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Mendelssohn’s classification is more fluid than it may seem at first glance. Rather like Lessing’s own qualification of his identification of poetry and painting with temporal or spatial signs, Mendelssohn explained that the poet aimed at bringing ‘an array of features to mind all at once so that what is designated is felt by us in a more lively way than the sign’—that is, the arbitrary signs of poetry should approximate (in the best-case scenario) a visible picture.15 And natural, visible signs could not only be arranged alongside one another; they could also follow one another successively, for example in dance. More generally, by virtue of his inclusive discussion of hybrid arts such as music, opera, dance, and ancient declamation, Mendelssohn admitted that the ‘fine arts’ (the plastic and musical ones) did not only use natural signs while the ‘fine sciences’ (poetry and rhetoric) were not purely restricted to arbitrary signs. Indeed, ‘one must acknowledge that these borders often blur into one another’.16 This hybridization occurred in the case of visual allegories, onomatopoeic words, or emotional interjections, as Lessing would later suggest; but it was also to be found wherever various art forms were fused with one another (e.g. dance and theatre), combining the successive and the simultaneous—as in the musical juxtaposition of melody and harmony. On the whole, however, this mixture could find its perfection only in nature, while the human virtuoso ‘must know how to handle this deviation from one domain into the other and treat it with a great deal of circumspection’.17 These complications, combinations, and fusions led Mendelssohn to turn his readers’ attention (in the conclusion) to the forthcoming ‘instruction of a philosopher who is familiar enough with the arts to consider their secrets with philosophical eyes and make them known to the world, as he has promised for some time’.18 Lessing was equally respectful of Mendelssohn’s philosophical acumen, as demonstrated by his serious revision of the Laocoon draft in response to his friend’s criticism. On Lessing’s initial identification of poetry with arbitrary signs (and painting with natural ones), Mendelssohn commented that poetic signs could express spatially approximate objects precisely because

15 17

Mendelssohn 1997: 178. Mendelssohn 1997.

16

18

Mendelssohn 1997: 181. Mendelssohn 1997: 191.

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of their arbitrariness, which accounted for the greater freedom and larger remit of the poet.19 Lessing’s response to this comment is at the centre of chapter 17 of Laocoon, which starts with a theoretical objection very similar to Mendelssohn’s. In reply, Lessing conceded that the arbitrariness of linguistic signs enabled them indeed to represent anything, including contiguous bodies. But he immediately added that this is a feature of language in general which did not serve the specific purpose of poetry: conveying a whole phenomenon rapidly and energetically. In fact, Lessing had recourse here to one of Mendelssohn’s own recommendations: the poet should aim at a ‘poetic painting’, an illusion so powerful that its signs would be momentarily ignored by the readers. The visual imagery runs like a thread through the seventeenth chapter, recapitulating Lessing’s more concise observation in the early draft about the need to raise the arbitrary signs of poetry to the ‘dignity and power of the natural’.20 This point was elaborated in Lessing’s letter of 26 May 1769 to Friedrich Nicolai, where he acknowledged yet again that both painting and poetry could use natural and arbitrary signs. Yet while the perfection of painting decreased the more it employed its natural signs in an arbitrary manner, poetry perfected itself to the extent that its arbitrary signs approached naturalness. ‘Poetry must absolutely seek to elevate its arbitrary signs to natural ones; only this way does it distinguish itself from prose, becoming poetry’, Lessing wrote to Nicolai. But he was fully aware that tropes, figures, and other poetic measures could only approximate the features of natural signs; they still did not render arbitrary signs fully natural. Here Lessing noted that only in drama words ceased to be arbitrary signs and turned instead into ‘natural signs of arbitrary things’.21 This probably happened when performance on the stage was isomorphic with the represented action (especially in the case of speech acts). But Lessing did not elaborate his argument further, assuming—as elsewhere in the letter—that a proper discussion of other forms of arts would follow suit in the (never realized) sequel to Laocoon.

19

See Mendelssohn’s comments in Lessing 1990: 219–21. This is the crux of Lessing’s critique of Breitinger, whose preference for poetry over the plastic arts focused on the greater freedom enabled by the arbitrariness of its signs (Lessing 1984: 86–8; 2012: 124–6; Wellbery 1984: 203–27). 21 Lessing to Nicolai, 26 May 1769, in Lessing 1987: 609–10. 20

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Even before shifting his focus to drama in 1769, we can see Lessing revising in 1766 his early draft so that the comparison between painting and poetry according to their signs would focus on the temporal and the spatial. The distinction between the arbitrary and the natural was confined to a separate and much more problematic discussion in the seventeenth chapter. One of the major reasons for this revision was indeed Lessing’s exchange with Mendelssohn. Another may have been his acquaintance with contemporary criticism of (rather than enthusiasm for) the arbitrariness of the sign, as well as the positive reassessment of symbolic cognition.

Symbolic Cognition and the Classification of Signs Lessing’s wish to render arbitrary signs of poetry more natural in the service of a quasi-pictorial illusion has been interpreted as a critical moment, where he superseded his predecessors in the tradition of rationalist aesthetics (and even his own stricter distinction between poetry and painting in the sixteenth chapter of Laocoon).22 This circumvention of arbitrary signification has also been seen as a strong impulse on Lessing’s part to transcend language as a medium—thereby converting human symbolic cognition into intuitive perception.23 These were key terms of eighteenth-century German aesthetics ever since their definition by Leibniz. Symbolic cognition, in this tradition, referred to a mode of human perception as mediated through signs, while intuitive cognition was regarded as perspicuous and instantaneous. The epistemological distinction was sometimes linked to a distinction between two kinds of ideas: clear and distinct ideas were the objects of intuitive perception, providing direct insight into the full concept of a thing; while symbolic cognition had to do with clear albeit confused ideas. Christian Wolff did express his hopes for the gradual conversion of symbolic cognition into an intuitive knowledge of things, but mostly in

22 I am using here the term ‘quasi-pictorial illusion’ since Lessing was fully aware that poetry could only approximate the pictorial and acquire some of its forceful attributes by other means. 23 Wellbery 1984: 7, 40–1, 227, 230–8.

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the peculiar case of a philosophical calculus.24 In this respect he was not necessarily representative of the Enlightenment—or even of the Leibnizian tradition. Leibniz himself, as well as later Enlightenment authors, did not usually wish to overcome the symbolic nature of human knowledge. Sullied as it was by the contingency and materiality of linguistic signs, symbolic cognition was also the medium of aesthetic beauty. God’s direct and intuitive knowledge of all things did not involve signs or media; his perfect intuition had no use for any sort of illusion, aesthetic or otherwise.25 Leibniz insisted on the positive value and uniqueness of our symbolic cognition; this was one of his main arguments against Spinoza’s claim that we should not believe in religious mysteries we did not completely understand. For Leibniz, our partially confused understanding was not only sufficient for human purposes but rather desirable, since the complete analysis of the mysteries would have diminished their special status.26 Leibniz argued that much of human knowledge never attained an adequate degree of certainty—not even in natural philosophy, where terms such as cause and finality were satisfactorily employed without clear and distinct definitions.27 In his Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas (Meditationes de cognitione, ueritate et ideis) Leibniz referred to aesthetic experience as a positive example of clear but confused perception. Painters, Leibniz suggested, could usually not explain why and how certain things were done properly, referring to ‘an unknown something’ (je ne sais quoi). It is not true, Leibniz concluded, ‘that we cannot say anything about a thing and understand what we say unless we have an idea of it’; our understanding often made use of confused terms, which we could not fully analyse into their constituents.28 See Wolff ’s point about the transformation (in such an artificial idiom) of symbolic cognition ‘quasi in intuitiuam’: }312 in Wolff 1738: 226–7. 25 In his German Metaphysics Wolff argued that God’s instantaneous and distinct perception meant he had neither senses nor imagination (Einbildungs-Kraft); furthermore, he did not have to resort to the chains of successive reasoning characteristic of human symbolic cognition (}}959–60, 963 in Wolff 1751: 593–5). Wolff sometimes used ‘intuitive knowledge’ quite differently from Leibniz—as referring merely to the conscious possession of an idea. This might also explain why he was willing to allow human beings to exercise ‘quasi-intuitive cognition’ in the case of a philosophical idiom. (Ungeheuer 1986: 94–7). 26 Leibniz 1923–: VI.1. 550; 2006: 11. See also Dascal 1987: 93–124; Antognazza 2007: 50–9. 27 Leibniz 1923–: VI.1. 551–2; 2006: 12–13. 28 Leibniz 1989: 24–5; 1923–: VI.4.A. 586–8. See also ‘Discours de métaphysique’ }24, in Leibniz 1923–: VI.4. 1567–9. 24

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While classifying symbolic cognition as theoretically inferior to the instantaneous analysis afforded by intuitive perception, Leibniz did not wish to turn the former into the latter. On the contrary, his theory of the typically human cognitio caeca or cognitio symbolica was conceived as a firm retort to what he saw as the excessive claims made on behalf of human understanding in Descartes’s and Spinoza’s works. Alexander Baumgarten adhered to Leibniz’s classification of sensually based knowledge as inferior to intuitive or fully adequate forms of perception. Nevertheless, he too strove to demonstrate that clear but confused ideas possessed some unique qualities that made pure reason redundant for their understanding. In the case of sense experience, complete structural analysis was not simply impossible but also undesirable. Just as the basic elements of light were irrelevant to the appreciation of a painting, aesthetics had to examine appearances without searching for their ultimate causes. According to Baumgarten, poetry and art should not be fully analysed into their constituents, a stance resembling Leibniz’s argument about the religious mysteries. The logical analysis of sensual perception would only dissolve beauty, while the uniquely human symbolic cognition was conducive to aesthetic richness.29 Unlike the Cartesian view of words as mere coins for communication, Baumgarten’s sense-based knowledge could not operate without signs as its medium. The sensual experience of poetry required clear but confused ideas in the guise of metaphor, synecdoche, and figurative speech—or as Baumgarten called them, ‘improper terms’ referring indirectly to their objects.30 How does this discussion of symbolic cognition relate to the issue of arbitrary and natural signs? It might be tempting to assume that symbolic cognition operates through arbitrary signs while intuitive perception makes use of natural signs only. In this case, Lessing’s wish to naturalize the arbitrary signs of poetry might be regarded as a utopian attempt to transform the human symbolic cognition into an intuitive, quasi-divine perception. Yet the eighteenth-century distinction between natural and arbitrary signs does not map all too easily onto the difference between intuitive and symbolic cognition. Natural signs are, after all, just that—signs or symbols facilitating the human understanding of the 29

Baumgarten 1750: 363; Schweizer 1973: 241–3; Norton 1995: 56–71. Baumgarten 1954: 67–8. For the role of symbolic cognition in contemporary responses to religious radicalism, see Lifschitz 2012a: 40–53. 30

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world. As such, they too—together with arbitrary signs—are the means of symbolic cognition, for divine intuitive perception has no use for any sort of signs in order to acquire its exhaustive insight into things. Indeed, Lessing’s ideal in his call for the naturalization of arbitrary signs was the vividness of pictorial representation. He wished to endow linguistic signs with greater iconicity, or to make them create a forceful illusion that would evoke in our imagination the features of the signified, like a picture. Eventually both sorts of aesthetic experience remained mimetic representations, and were therefore typical of the symbolic cognition of human beings. Right at the outset of Laocoon Lessing insisted on the common features of painting and poetry: they both ‘represent absent things as being present and appearance as reality. Both create an illusion, and in both cases the illusion is pleasing.’31 And Lessing was not at all unique in his attempt to endow language, despite its arbitrariness, with the qualities of natural signification. Several of his contemporaries embarked on a very similar endeavour.

Beyond Wolff: Criticisms of Arbitrariness from Leibniz to Mid-Century France Parallel to rationalist vindications of the arbitrariness of the sign, the struggle against linguistic arbitrariness enjoyed a central position in Enlightenment thought.32 The suspension of our belief in a single eighteenth-century episteme may allow us to trace a decisive shift in contemporary views of linguistic signs: from an early Enlightenment celebration of their arbitrariness to a mid-eighteenth-century emphasis on their natural features. If Pufendorf and Locke endorsed the almost complete freedom of individuals to impose names on things, Condillac and Rousseau stressed the futility of human attempts to invent signs arbitrarily. While seeing all human tongues as artificial or man-made, such authors tended to distance themselves from earlier views on the arbitrariness and conventionality of language. In this respect they shared Leibniz’s critique of Locke’s stance on the arbitrariness of language.

31 Lessing 1984: 3; 2012: 7. On major differences between iconicity and mimesis in regard to Laocoon, see Sternberg 1999: 295–7. See also Gaiger’s chapter here, esp. pp. 291–6. 32 This section develops some of the arguments in Lifschitz 2012b and 2016a.

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In reply to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), Leibniz composed his New Essays on Human Understanding (Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain: 1704, published in 1765). In this work he rejected on several levels the notion of complete human liberty, or freedom of indifference—the idea that we could have no particular reason to prefer one choice to another, and therefore make our decisions arbitrarily. For Leibniz, all our choices were shaped by the confluence of internal dispositions and external impressions; indeed, we remained unaware of many of the actual workings of human understanding.33 As he pointed out, Locke’s argument for the almost complete arbitrariness of language built on a long Aristotelian tradition. In response, Leibniz acknowledged that ‘names are not settled by natural necessity; but they are settled by reasons—sometimes natural ones in which chance plays some part, sometimes moral ones which involve choice’.34 Applying here to language his theory of determined albeit nonnecessitated freedom, Leibniz argued that nothing occurred without reason (nihil sine ratione). Causes for naming could be either natural— as in the way a waterfall or a lion affected our senses—or ‘moral’ and social, depending on commerce and contact with speakers of other idioms. Indeed, despite his earlier fascination with a universal philosophical idiom, Leibniz gradually became acutely aware of the historicity of human language. While we cannot reconstruct the Adamic language, where words perfectly reflected things, Leibniz suggested we may at least note that the origins of actual languages had ‘something primitive about them’ (elles ont neantmoins quelque chose de primitif en elles mêmes), even if over time change occurred ‘by chance but for reasons which are grounded in reality’.35 By ‘something primitive’ Leibniz referred to the natural and non-arbitrary aspect of language: if natural phenomena prompted the first speakers (in different ways) to adopt certain sounds as their names, such words could not be considered completely arbitrary. Even if these natural meanings were later transformed metaphorically into abstract ones, they still included a residue of that ‘something primitive’. The further adoption of foreign words through trade, migrations, and social interaction was indeed contingent but historically motivated, what Leibniz termed ‘chance grounded in reality’. In Leibniz’s 33 35

II.xxi.}48

in Leibniz 1996: 198. III.ii.}1 in Leibniz 1996: 281.

34

III.ii.}1

in Leibniz 1996: 278.

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eyes, the main motor of linguistic change was not the free imposition of meanings on words by self-conscious agents. In relation to the evolution of language, individuals were portrayed as entangled within large-scale social trends and natural contexts. Because the natural residue in all languages stemmed from psychological reactions to the natural world or from historical contact between different nations, the historicity of language contradicted its arbitrariness. Nothing emerging from natural causes and historical change could be completely arbitrary, according to Leibniz; history and nature served as his bulwarks against sheer arbitrariness in language.36 Universal languages could only be considered arbitrary creations, for they were designed according to consciously premeditated plans.37 According to Leibniz, historically evolved (or natural) languages could never have been planned intentionally and arbitrarily. Lessing’s long-lasting interest in Leibniz’s original works may suggest that the context for his own views on aesthetic signs extends beyond Christian Wolff and his peers. Lessing may well have been positively receptive to Leibniz’s thorough critique of arbitrariness. Not only was the Hanoverian philosopher Lessing’s predecessor as ducal librarian at Wolfenbüttel; the posthumous publication of Leibniz’s New Essays in 1765 may have contributed to Lessing’s change of mind in regard to arbitrary signs—his departure from the earlier view that the signs of poetry were essentially temporal and arbitrary, and his eventual wish to naturalize the arbitrariness of poetic signs (in the seventeenth chapter of Laocoon and in the 1769 letter to Nicolai).38 And there were further possible sources for Lessing’s change of mind on arbitrariness and his insistence that the language of poetry can attain the force and dignity of natural signs. One of the most renowned writers on language in mid-century Europe, with whose theories Lessing was 36 ‘De connexione inter res et uerba, seu potius de linguarum origine’, in Leibniz 1903: 151–2 and Dascal 1987: 189. On this issue, see also Gensini 1994. 37 III.ii.}1 in Leibniz 1996: 278. 38 The manuscripts of Leibniz’s New Essays were published by Rudolf Erich Raspe, who competed in 1766 with Lessing for the position of curator of antiquities in Kassel; the introduction was written by Abraham Kästner, one of Lessing’s teachers at the University of Leipzig, with whom Lessing kept in touch and whom he visited several times after Kästner’s move to Göttingen (Nisbet 2013a: 28–9, 332, 511–12). On the impact of the publication of Leibniz’s New Essays, see Tonelli 1974 and Lifschitz 2012a: 168–9; on Raspe, see Hallo 1934 and Linnebach 2005.

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acquainted at least via Diderot’s works, was Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. Like Leibniz, Condillac argued that signs enabled most of the higher mental operations of the human mind. But were these signs completely arbitrary just because they were consciously employed by human beings? Initially, in his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge (Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines, 1746), Condillac defined instituted signs (by contrast to natural and accidental ones) as having ‘an arbitrary relation to our ideas’.39 These first instituted signs were, however, introduced into a primordial ‘language of action’ originating in natural cries and gestures. All languages thus originally exhibited an initial link between signs and things, which was subsequently lost under layers of further refinement. Nevertheless, Condillac was fully aware of the problems involved in such a definition.40 In 1775 he made another attempt to clarify the shift from the natural to the arbitrary in his Grammaire, where he rechristened conventional signs as artificial rather than arbitrary. Here Condillac argued that complete arbitrariness in human language was impossible, since words had to be understood by the primitive users of natural signs. Human intelligence did not allow for pure chance in this domain: any new invention or change had to relate to accumulated layers of vocabulary, grammar, and social norms of speech.41 According to Condillac’s Grammaire, there was no contradiction at all between human artifice and the constraints of nature and historical development. Human beings could introduce novel ways of expression only on the basis of natural circumstances and the state of their given vocabulary. In the same work Condillac went as far as arguing ‘that languages are the work of nature; that they have formed themselves, so to say, without us; and that by working on them we have only slavishly obeyed our manner of seeing and feeling’.42 The same conviction recurred in the posthumously published Langue des calculs, where Condillac declared at the outset that conventional meanings did not entail arbitrary human choice.43 Another contemporary critic of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign was Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. For him, ‘languages are not at all the

39

40 in Condillac 2001: 36. I.2.5.}49 in Condillac 2001: 41–2. 42 ‘Grammaire,’ in Condillac 1947–51: I.429. Condillac 1947–51: I.432–3. 43 ‘La langue des calculs,’ in Condillac 1798: XXIII.1–2. On the differences between Condillac’s critique of arbitrariness and later ones, see Trabant 1986. 41

I.2.4.}35

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work of self-conscious reason’, but rather the products of lively emotions and instinctive gestures.44 For Turgot, nature generated in human beings the first linguistic signs without deliberate design. He and Condillac admitted that individuals could, of course, speak spontaneously and make linguistic innovations, albeit in Leibniz’s ‘free but determined’ manner: on the basis of natural conditions and a gradually evolved social vocabulary. As in Leibniz, we see here a shift of perspective from words in the individual mind to the joint evolution of language and society as a whole. Like Condillac and Turgot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau made extensive use of the figurative, instantaneous, and quasi-pictorial language of action in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (probably written between 1756 and 1761, but published posthumously in 1781). Here Rousseau suggested that human beings were once able to communicate by means of selfmade, artificial yet non-arbitrary signs, flowing directly and naturally from their passions. These signs were motivated, in the sense that they were deliberately and conventionally employed by human agents; but they were not arbitrary because they had a somewhat natural link to their objects and could be easily understood by others. Rousseau called this idiom ‘the language of signs’, as opposed to modern languages of words. Rousseau’s language of signs was a matter of choosing a symbol that spoke a volume, or transmitted the sense of a message more vividly than words. In this sense, his use of the language of signs was not too different from Lessing’s depiction of Homer ‘making the living picture of an action’.45 Rousseau claimed that when the ancients wished to achieve a particularly striking effect, they expressed themselves in signs rather than in words: ‘they did not say it, they showed it.’ He found ancient history ‘filled with such ways of addressing arguments to the eyes’, for visual signs produced more certain effects than words—stimulating the imagination, arousing curiosity, and holding the mind in suspense.46 This argument was repeated almost verbatim in the fourth book of Émile (1762), where Rousseau used the same ancient examples: Tarquinius Superbus cutting off the heads of the highest poppies to signal to his son’s messenger that the strongest families must be executed in order to pacify his land, and the Scythians sending to Darius a message comprising 44 45 46

Turgot 1913–23: I.171; cf. Leibniz 1710: 2. For the comments—in the context of chapter 18—see Lessing 1984: 95; 2012: 134. Rousseau 1997a: 249; 1959–95: V.376.

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a frog, a bird, a mouse, and five arrows, which made the Persian king abandon immediately the battle against them. In the Essay on the Origin of Languages he had also mentioned the Levite of Ephraim who, in order to inspire his fellow Israelites to avenge the rape and murder of his concubine, cut her corpse into pieces which he sent to different tribes. This brutal message achieved the desired effect, as the Israelites decided to wage war on the culprits in the territory of Benjamin (Judges 19–20).47 In the Letter to d’Alembert on the Spectacles (1758) a similar reference was made to the expressive writing on the wall in King Belshazzar’s feast (Daniel 5)— a much more effective means of delivering a strong message than its verbal communication.48 Drawing on travel reports of gestural idioms in Arabia and India, Rousseau even suggested that human beings could have silently established societies and commerce, chosen their chiefs, and instituted laws. All this could have been achieved by means of visual signs before a single word was spoken.49 The language of signs also relied on Rousseau’s observation that the sentiments and the will were fired much more easily by the imagination than by reason, and that the best means of stimulating the imagination were signs rather than articulate words. By suggesting that eighteenth-century Poles draw on the language of signs to revive their patria, Rousseau called on his contemporaries to somehow naturalize the arbitrariness of their means of communication. The aim here was political rather than aesthetic, but Rousseau’s insistence that republican politics had to make use of a non-arbitrary, quasi-pictorial idiom resembles Lessing’s point that arbitrariness was not the central feature of poetic language. As he argued in Laocoon, the poet should not just communicate concepts clearly but ‘make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at that moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce on us’. The aim here is a representational deception in the sense that we should ‘cease to be conscious of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words’.50 As noted above, this was not necessarily a utopian dream of a transparent, divine vision or an absolute negation of discourse. The endowment of arbitrary language with features of natural signification such as 47 48 49

Rousseau, 1979: 322; 1959–95: IV.647 and II.1205–23. Rousseau, 1968: 121; 1959–95: V.110. 50 Rousseau 1997a: 251; 1959–95: V.378. Lessing 1984: 85; 2012: 123.

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gestures, metaphors, and other figures was part and parcel of a wider Enlightenment criticism of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Central to these attempts to naturalize the signs of existing language, especially when it came to poetry, was the recognition that arbitrary signs could achieve motivated representation, or acquire the ‘dignity and power of the natural’ by various social and performative means. The energy of the primordial human signs was presented as a ‘realistic utopia’, providing resources for the enhancement of political or aesthetic effects in the present.51 These were not naive fantasies but rather regulative models for contemporary endeavours to naturalize the arbitrariness of language; Rousseau, for example, was fully aware of the ‘extravagance’ of his own language of signs and the fictive character of his imagined state of nature.52

The Diderot Connection An ideal similar to Condillac’s language of action and Rousseau’s language of signs was entertained in Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and the Mute for the Use of Those Who Hear and Speak (Lettre sur les sourds et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent, 1751), where Condillac is mentioned as an authority on semiotic issues. This was one of the few works Lessing praised unreservedly in an early review (June 1751, only a few months after its publication in France). As has been widely acknowledged, Lessing quoted in his review of Diderot’s Letter the author’s wish that ‘a man of taste and intelligence’ survey the differences between the arts.53 It may be that, at this early stage, a work along the lines of Laocoon was not yet on Lessing’s mind; Wilfried Barner has even argued (after Roland Mortier) that in the early review, the differences between poetry and painting did not interest Lessing.54 It is difficult, however, to see how Lessing could have missed this issue On ‘realistic utopia’ in Judith Shklar’s and John Rawls’s sense, see Spector 2016. Rousseau 1997a: 122–33; 1997b: 179; 1959–95: III.122–33, 955. More generally on Rousseau’s projection of his own ideals onto antiquity, see the essays in Lifschitz 2016b. 53 Diderot 1916: 208; 1978: 182; Lessing’s review in Das Neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes, June 1751, in Lessing 1998: 134. 54 Lessing 1998: 825; Mortier 1954: 345–7; Saada 2003: 98–102. Cf. the references to Diderot’s discussion of the different ‘hieroglyphs’ used by poetry and painting in Lessing 1998: 131–5. 51 52

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(which is indeed present in his review): Diderot’s entire treatise is an analysis of the ways in which signs—including those of the different forms of arts—function in the human mind. One of the main topics of Diderot’s Letter is synaesthesia, or the way different senses collaborate with (or differ from) one another in perceiving the outside world—and especially the products of various forms of art. This discussion inevitably led Diderot to dedicate considerable attention to the means different art forms employ to convey their objects to the mind; poetry and painting were at the centre of his discussion, while drama and music also received their due. As usual, Diderot discussed this topic in a playful and digressive manner: he referred to several imaginary and actual scenarios that could be used to examine how the arts appealed to different senses (or to all of them at once). He recommended, for example, observing the gestural language of an actual deaf and mute or communicating with a ‘theoretical mute’; discussed Abbé Castel’s ocular harpsichord, which was supposed to produce harmonious combinations of colours rather than sounds; and analysed poems (the ancient poets featured in the Letter are mostly Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Lucretius) alongside paintings, music, and drama. One of Diderot’s experiments (enthusiastically recounted by Lessing) consisted in plugging his ears while watching a play whose plot he knew well, the better to assess the effectiveness of non-linguistic, quasi-pictorial communication (facial expression, gestures, etc.). Diderot’s Letter also highlighted the difference between, on the one hand, representation in language and the arts, and on the other, the structure of the mind and human perception. He argued that language as such—mainly due to its temporality and analytic linearity—could not adequately represent mental processes or reproduce cognition itself. (Here ancient and modern languages were assessed according to their proximity to the instantaneity of perception, where Greek and Latin excelled, and to an analytic ‘order of thought’, which was best approximated by French. Yet like Condillac’s earlier and Rousseau’s later arguments, Diderot claimed that by gaining in clarity French had ‘lost in warmth, in eloquence, and in energy’.)55 As in Lessing’s Laocoon, Diderot regarded pictorial wholeness, energy, and vividness as the means by 55

Diderot 1916: 190 (translation modified); 1978: 165; Lessing’s review in Lessing 1998: 131.

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which poetry could transcend the arbitrariness of its signs. His main problem with signs in both time and space was that: Our mind is a moving scene (tableau mouvant), after which we are perpetually painting. We spend a great deal of time in rendering it faithfully; but the original exists as a complete whole and all at once (en entier et tout à la fois), for the mind does not proceed step by step, like expression. The brush takes a long time to represent what the artist’s eye sees in an instant (tout d’un coup).56

Diderot considered here both painting and poetry as temporal forms of art that function successively (from the perspective of their production), while instantaneous wholeness and energetic immediacy were ascribed to mental states: the latter are the genuine Gesamtkunstwerk, a proper tableau mouvant. Yet poets were still able to approach this immediacy by rendering their arbitrary signs as natural as possible. Poetry could and should depart from the prosaic communication of semantic sense by employing what Diderot called a hieroglyph, a symbol, or an emblem: an energetic hiatus of meaning whose force created an illusion of wholeness and immediate presence. A sequence of such hieroglyphs could convey a phenomenon almost fully in both time and space. It might be useful to compare here two passages from Diderot’s Letter and the seventeenth chapter of Lessing’s Laocoon: [Unlike the language of prose and oratory] [t]here is a spirit in the poet’s language that moves and breathes life into each syllable. What is this spirit? I have sometimes felt its presence but all I know is that it is what makes things stated and represented all at once; that at the same time as the understanding grasps these things, the soul is stirred by them, the imagination sees them, and the ear hears them. The discourse is not merely a chain of vigorous terms expressing thought both forcibly and nobly but a web of hieroglyphs, piled on top of each other, which picture the thought to us. I might say in this sense that all poetry is emblematic.57 The poet does not want merely to be intelligible, nor is he content—as is the prose writer—with simply presenting his image clearly and concisely. He wants rather to make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at that moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means which the poet

56

Diderot 1916: 187 (translation modified); 1978: 161–2. Diderot 1916: 194–5; 1978: 169. Cf. Lessing’s citation and discussion of Diderot’s reference to Homer’s epics as employing these ‘poetic hieroglyphs’ with particular force, in Lessing 1998: 132–4. On Diderot’s idea of energetic language, see also Delon 1988: 75–84. 57

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uses for this purpose, that is, his words. This was the substance of the definition of a poetical painting (die Erklärung eines poetischen Gemählde) given above.58

For both Diderot and Lessing, the ideal of poetry is pictorial, and—as Lessing argues in the following sentence—‘the poet is always supposed to paint’ (der Dichter soll immer mahlen) rather than be satisfied, as the prose writer should, with having conveyed ideas ‘clearly and concisely’.59 Diderot’s web of juxtaposed hieroglyphs is not too different from Lessing’s sequence of poetic paintings: both provided a way of conveying wholeness via successive means.60 There are many more suggestive similarities between these otherwise different texts: the digressive style itself (Diderot’s Letter is comprised of unordentliche Collectanea to an even greater extent than Lessing’s treatise), Lessing’s distinction in the preface to Laocoon between common Witz and rare Scharfsinn which echoes Diderot’s insistence on the rarity of taste in comparison to ordinary common sense, and the shared focus on the different symbolic (or ‘emblematic’) means employed by the arts for a single purpose.61 Indeed, Diderot’s call for a more profound inquiry into the differences between forms of art stems from his point that each imitative art makes use of its particular hieroglyph—or its own way of depicting objects pictorially and vividly.62 Furthermore, his focus on the complex semiotics of theatrical action anticipates Lessing’s description of drama as employing ‘natural signs of arbitrary things’ in his 1769 letter to Nicolai.

58

Lessing 1984: 85; 2012: 123. Cf. the attempt to go beyond semantics and hermeneutics towards ‘presence’ in Gumbrecht 2004. 60 See also Michel Delon’s succinct observation concerning Diderot’s Letter: ‘L’opposition entre simple discours et discours poétique passe entre exposer une pensée et la peindre, entre présenter et représenter’ (Delon 1988: 83). 61 Lessing fully approved of Diderot’s digressive style in the Letter: ‘Unser Verfasser ist einer von den Weltweisen, welche sich mehr Mühe geben, Wolken zu machen als sie zu zerstreuen. Überall, wo sie ihre Augen fallen lassen, erzittern die Stützen der bekanntesten Wahrheiten, und was man ganz nahe vor sich zu sehen glaubte, verliert sich in eine ungewisse Ferne’ (Lessing 1998: 135). 62 Diderot’s wish is to see Batteux (or others) work towards ‘rassembler les beautés communes de la poésie, de la peinture et de la musique, en montrer les analogies, expliquer comment le poète, le peintre et le musicien rendent la même image, saisir les emblèmes fugitifs de leur expression, examiner s’il n’y aourait pas quelque similitude entre ces emblèmes, etc.’ (Diderot 1978: 182; 1916: 208). 59

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Diderot’s Letter was not, of course, unique in comparing the means and effects of different art forms. It was addressed to Batteux and conceived to a large extent as a reply to the latter’s Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (Les beaux arts réduits à un même principe, 1746). The eighteenth century abounded in such comparisons; among the renowned works in this genre before Lessing’s Laocoon were Dubos’s Critical Reflections on Painting and Poetry (Réflexions critiques sur la poesie et sur la peinture, 1719) and James Harris’s Three Treatises: The First Concerning Art, the Second Concerning Music, Painting and Poetry, the Third Concerning Happiness (1744). Diderot’s Letter on the Deaf and the Mute is, however, not usually included in this genre, probably because both its title and subtitle (referring to deafness and syntactic inversions) do not betray the richness and nuanced diversity of its contents.63 It is admittedly difficult to gauge the precise ways in which Lessing’s reading of the freshly printed Letter on the Deaf and the Mute in 1751 moulded his later thinking about the interrelations between the arts and their signs. Yet it is likely that in his intensive phase of engagement with Diderot’s works (in the 1760s), Lessing returned to the early treatise which he had singled out as particularly original among many other inconsequential publications. Lessing’s Das Theater des Herrn Diderot (1760), including translations of Diderot’s plays and theoretical treatises, is arguably his closest engagement with a contemporary foreign author. In 1768 he translated a section from an even earlier novel by Diderot, Les Bijoux indiscrets of 1748, as part of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie.64 The translated extract is a discussion of the theatre by the royal favourite Mirzoza, who rails against the very lightly disguised norms of French Neoclassical tragedies. Such plays, Mirzoza argues via Diderot and eventually Lessing, draw attention to the arbitrariness of their own language and to the poet’s skill in manipulating it. By contrast, Mirzoza elaborates 63 Tzvetan Todorov did suggest that only Diderot may have anticipated Lessing’s observation (contra most of his contemporaries) that the signs of both painting and poetry must be motivated (Todorov 1984 (original1973): 12–17; see also Todorov 1982: 134–7). However, as shown above, the naturalization of arbitrary signs was equally (if differently) on Condillac’s and Rousseau’s agendas. Furthermore, Todorov did not explore other similarities between the texts, nor did he relate the Letter to Lessing’s long-lasting engagement with Diderot. 64 Sections 84 and 85 of Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie (19 and 23 February 1768), in Lessing 1985: 599–608. See also Niekerk 2014.

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an ideal of a more transparent, pictorial dramatic language. As argued recently in regard to the shift from Lessing’s early plays to his mature drama, it may well have been in Diderot’s works that he found a theoretical elaboration of the visual aspects of poetry and the holistic function of its signs.65 Diderot’s Letter, engaging with mid-century French views on signs and their role in the mind, was a probable route of acquaintance with this larger cross-European discussion. As Lessing was in any case a voracious reader, the semiotic context of his Laocoon should not be restricted to Christian Wolff and his German followers—nor even to the fruitful exchange with Mendelssohn, who was himself fully immersed in the wider European discourse and well acquainted with the semiotic theories of Rousseau and Condillac.66 Lessing’s critique of the hegemony of French norms in contemporary German theatre was not necessarily a condemnation of French thought per se, as evident in his fascination with Diderot and Rousseau.67 In this respect he resembles Herder, whose critique of the alleged universality of French aesthetic criteria reflected his commitment to cultural pluralism much more than a crude national chauvinism.68

Conclusion Lessing’s problematization, in the final version of Laocoon, of the relationship between the arbitrary and natural signs of different arts may therefore have had a more diverse background than his immediate exchange with Mendelssohn and the Wolffian tradition. He may well have taken up the sharp critique of the arbitrariness of language in ‘Whilst stage speech remains a system of arbitrary signs for the fictional characters communicating with each other [in Lessing’s mature plays], it represents for the audience (and for the dramatist creating it) the “natural signs of arbitrary things” ’ (Worvill 2005: 115). On Lessing’s earlier exchange with Mendelssohn and Nicolai on tragedy, see recently Fick 2004: 135–46; Meyer-Kalkus 2006; Beiser 2009: 206–10. 66 See Ricken 2000; Lifschitz 2013 and 2015. On the ways in which Condillac’s and Diderot’s discussions of metaphor, inversions, and ‘energy’ prefigure Romantic notions, see also Oschmann 2002; cf. Allert 2005. 67 But cf. Mitchell 1986: 105–6, where the emphasis is on Lessing’s confrontational tone against the French. 68 Zammito 2002; Zammito, Menges, and Menze 2010; Lifschitz 2012a: 15, 181–7, 194–5. On Lessing as a European intellectual, Barner 1984 and Nisbet 2013a: 1. For Lessing’s engagement with French authors (beyond Diderot), see Worvill 2013 and Rialland 2014. 65

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Leibniz’s original works—and especially in the Nouveaux Essais, published in 1765 by Lessing’s acquaintances. Furthermore, Lessing was familiar with wider European discussions of signs and arbitrariness at least through his reading of Diderot and his discussion of Rousseau’s works with Mendelssohn, if not via further channels. These wide-ranging contexts can elucidate Lessing’s qualification of what he initially defined as the essential arbitrariness of the poetic sign and the necessary naturalness of the signs employed by the painter. They may also explain why, in the published version of Laocoon and in the 1769 letter to Nicolai, ‘the poet is always supposed to paint’ by rendering arbitrary signs as natural as possible. Finally, it might be useful to adopt Condillac’s corrective to himself (and to his peers) that linguistic signs are mostly artificial rather than arbitrary. The eighteenth-century concept of artificiality entailed the selfconscious employment of such signs rather than freedom of indifference in their usage or the absence of a cause. It also allowed various Enlightenment authors to transcend the dichotomous distinction between arbitrariness and nature in regard to aesthetic signification: natural signs could possess a fixed meaning beyond intentional design, but their deliberate use by human agents (including painters, poets, and playwrights) rendered them artificial. Here we may witness yet another theoretical way of collapsing the dichotomy between the arbitrary and the natural, parallel to the attempts made by Leibniz, Rousseau, Diderot, and Lessing to naturalize the arbitrary signs of language in general—and especially when employed in the service of a vivid poetic illusion.69

69 I am grateful to Carl Niekerk, Andrea Speltz, Michael Squire, and the anonymous readers appointed by Oxford University Press for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

8 Temporalization? Lessing’s Laocoon and the Problem of Narration in Eighteenth-Century Historiography Daniel Fulda Translated from the German by Steven Tester

Division versus Integration of Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Ars Historica Laocoon attempts to cut the Gordian knot of the long-standing ut pictura poesis problem,1 using Lessing’s sharp distinction between the dimensions of space and time: on the one hand, the visual arts necessarily unfold in space because they place ‘figures and colours’ alongside each other; on the other hand, time is the genuine dimension of poetry, since its signs follow one another in time.2 Using this basic discrepancy, Lessing tenders his incisive criticism of literature’s ‘mania for description’,3 as well as his implicit devaluation of pictorial arts, which had hitherto been regarded as more mimetic than literature. The visual arts could represent the progression of events at most ‘only by suggestion’:4 to narrate events, the linguistic arts are necessary, because the situation that is captured only momentarily in the picture is incomprehensible without the accompanying story. As numerous scholars have noted, Lessing had some notable difficulties in consistently maintaining his distinction. Moses Mendelssohn had 1 3

2 Lessing 1984: 77 (translating Lessing 2012: 114). Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115). 4 Lessing 1984: 5 (2012: 9). Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115).

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already remarked critically on an early draft of Laocoon that the object of poetic representation is not only ‘visible and progressive’ ‘action’, whose ‘different parts’ occur ‘one after the other in a sequence of time’.5 Moreover, reports about simultaneous actions are already part of the representation of actions and events in the epics to which Lessing primarily refers, and lyrical poetry cannot really be reduced to the representation of actions or events.6 But Lessing overlooked such objections and problems. Rather than qualify his foundational distinction, he preferred to adopt a narrower conception of poetry (‘it remains that succession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter’).7 This is perhaps because the distinction between space and time stands at the centre of his theory and constitutes its most central argument: the second systematic distinction that Laocoon offers—between the natural signs of the pictorial arts and the artificial signs of poetry—was far less novel and did not play the same foundational role.8 It should also be noted briefly that the difficulties that Lessing had in explicating the space–time distinction are not the result of this approach but of Lessing’s second premise, namely that the signs of painting or poetry ‘must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified’.9 What is problematic for the theory of representation—or, more precisely, what is unsustainable—is Lessing’s inference from the specific signs of pictorial and linguistic arts to the objects that are exclusively possible in the respective arts: ‘then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive.’10 Although Lessing later adds that ‘since the symbols of speech are arbitrary, the parts of a body may, through speech, be made to follow one

5 Lessing 1984: 77 (2012: 114). Cf. Paralipomena 3, with Lessing’s draft and the commentaries from Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai (section III), Lessing 1990: 219–20: for a more detailed discussion, see Beiser’s chapter in this volume. 6 7 Cf. Nisbet 2006: 377–9. Lessing 1984: 91 (2012: 130). 8 As original as Lessing’s space–time distinction in Laocoon may appear—in part because Lessing does not mention his predecessors—it is in fact far from being so. In his Dialogue concerning Art, which was published in 1744 and translated into German in 1756, James Harris had already distinguished between the pictorial arts and the ‘energetic’ arts (such as music and dance): Harris had also already used the term ‘progressive action’ in reference specifically to poetry. Cf. Lessing 1880: 32–4. 9 10 Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115). Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115).

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another just as readily as they exist side by side in nature’,11 this qualification does not change his conclusion about the primacy of time and action in poetry. Lessing’s distinction between the arts on the basis of the categories of space and time was not as obvious as the extraordinary success of Laocoon might suggest. Lessing does not only rely on two unquestionably distinct categories but also argues, regarding the pictorial as well as the verbal arts, that each art is defined by only one of the respective categories. Yet the idea that there could be temporality without spatiality or spatiality without temporality was diametrically opposed both to the tradition of ut pictura poesis and to all empirical evidence in the humanities and the sciences. In what follows, I shall consider one such discipline that, precisely when Lessing wrote his Laocoon, grappled with the integration of the spatial and temporal dimensions: history. Like poetry, history was also committed to the verbal representation of pictorial vividness: theoretical debates in history belonged largely to the same conceptual field of Laocoon. In particular, as my comparison will make clear, Laocoon resonates with eighteenth-century attempts at modernizing the discipline of history (and all its attendant difficulties):12 there are a number of revealing similarities and differences between the theory of representation for language-based arts as outlined in Laocoon and historians’ own concepts of representation. This interdisciplinary constellation also points to a fundamental debate about the specificity of the mode of historical explanation that took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, one might consider Laocoon itself as seminal a work for modern historiography as it has been for media theory—a work with an importance that extends far beyond its probable reception in the ars historica of its time. The proximity between aesthetics and history in Lessing’s own day is not especially surprising, given that the latter was still considered a part of literature—understood as literary culture, employing and enhancing the possibilities of expression in and the enjoyment of language. This is how Lessing understood the concept of literature; it is also how historians

11

Lessing 1984: 85 (2012: 123). For foundational treatments in English of German theories of history in the eighteenth century, see Reill 1975 and Muhlack 2013. 12

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used the concept in the period.13 Although Laocoon does indeed focus on poetry, which according to Lessing is distinguished from prose insofar as it produces an illusion of the presence of the represented,14 Lessing also suggests in his preface that his remarks might be relevant for ‘those other arts in which the method of presentation is progressive in time’.15 What in concrete terms Lessing means here is not something Laocoon elaborates upon. But it nevertheless seems worthwhile to reopen this question some 250 years after the Laocoon’s original publication.

Time and Space, Succession and Coexistence as a Historiographical Problem Theories of history in the 1760s were concerned above all with two ideas regarding the combination of spatial and temporal dimensions. The first was a matter of consensus following the introduction of humanistic methodology in historiography: it maintained that the auxiliary sciences of chronology and geography were equally indispensable for historians; they comprise, or so it was argued, the right and left eye of history.16 Chronology was supposed to secure the temporal structure of events, which is no trivial matter given the need to synchronize the methods that different cultures and historiographical traditions use for measuring time (e.g. since the beginning of the world, the Olympiad calendar, ab urbe condita, before and after Christ, the Chinese imperial dynasties, and so on). Geography, by contrast, was understood as being dedicated to the spatial dimension. The location of historical occurrences and events is indispensable for assessing the respective mechanisms of power, structures of governance, conflicts, alliances, and trade relations. One already sees here that history was concerned with a very expansive relationship between the spatial and temporal dimensions. At stake was nothing less than the history of the world from its inception—even if eighteenth-century historians were strongly Eurocentric and orientated toward the Christian idea that the world was 6,000 years old. Laocoon, by contrast, discusses very brief stories such as two serpents attacking a 13

Cf. Lessing 1973b: 185, along with Fulda 2014a: 237–58. 15 Lessing 1984: 85 (2012: 123). Lessing 1984: 6 (2012: 10). Schmidt 1740: 175. Cf. also Gottsched 1754: 15. Christian Zwink provides earlier evidence from French histories, in Zwink 2006: 320–2. 14 16

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priest and his sons or the fabrication of the shield of Achilles. Spatially, too, the descriptions of landscape that Lessing criticizes do not extend beyond the meadows of the Alps. One might think that in these modest formats a literary approach to both the spatial and temporal dimensions would have appeared comparatively easy, but the fact that Lessing argues to the contrary once again underscores the radicalism of his approach. The second way in which German thinkers debated ideas of space and time—especially in the 1760s—revolved around practical ways of establishing a connection between these two dimensions. In Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten’s 1744 preface to the German translation (and eventual extension) of the most comprehensive compilation of historical knowledge in the period, which had appeared in London beginning in 1733 as the Universal History, we already find the claim that ‘all events occur successively and simultaneously’.17 Events, Baumgarten writes, have ‘according to this dual relationship an undeniable influence on one another’, and their representation constitutes the essence of historical knowledge. But Baumgarten did not explain how ‘this dual relationship can best be observed’, nor did he suggest any concrete ways in which the ‘natural’ order of representation could be established—as he (among others) insists it should. In 1767 Johann Christoph Gatterer points to diachrony and synchrony in historiographical representation as a central problem of writing history. Gatterer, a historian appointed eight years earlier to a position at the University of Göttingen, was at the time the most renowned representative of his discipline in Germany; he likewise inherited the primary editorial duties for the German edition of the Universal History mentioned above (the Allgemeine Welthistorie).18 No less importantly, Gatterer placed his extensive essay Vom historischen Plan, und der darauf sich gründenden Zusammenfügung der Erzählung (‘Concerning the Historical Plan and the Interconnection of Narrative Based upon It’) in the first section of the first edition of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek (‘Universal Historical Library’), a journal he founded during his editorship of the Allgemeine Welthistorie with the same publisher (Gebauer, based in Halle). According to Gatterer, the historian must 17

Baumgarten 1744: 9. Subsequent citations also refer to this work. Cf. Gatterer’s letter to the publisher Johann Justinus Gebauer, 22 Feb. 1767, in the archives of the Gebauer Verlag (Stadtarchiv Halle, A 6.2.6, Nr. 9387, fol. 2.) 18

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plan in particular the ‘order’ in which he presents his material. In the rhetorical schema that still stood in the background, this was understood along the lines of the problem of dispositio or the arrangement of arguments.19 Gatterer defines what counts as good order according to historical objects as well as the audience: good order reveals the causal connection between events from the synchronic as well as diachronic perspectives, just as Baumgarten insisted. And it does so in a way that is ‘wholly comprehensible and suitable for the reader’. The motto was to choose ‘the most natural and comprehensible way’ of ‘situating or arranging the narratives’.

Is Gatterer’s Theory of History Based on Laocoon? According to Gatterer, the attempt to do justice to both the spatial and temporal dimensions of history presents the ‘greatest difficulty’ for the historian.20 On the one hand, this diagnosis rests on long historiographical experience: according to Gatterer, historians followed for the most part the history of individual nations across long periods of time or even ‘from the beginning’, and thus the reciprocal relationships of these partial histories remained underexplored. On the other hand, Gatterer explains the difficulty in a way that corresponds exactly to Lessing’s theory of signs. Lessing demonstrated that poetry cannot provide an adequate representation of simultaneous actions, and Gatterer applies this insight to history:21 Just as he [the historian] cannot present the simultaneous objects in the narrative all at the same time—or like a painter, present them all simultaneously on a single surface—the reader cannot grasp them all at once or survey them with one glance. The one as well as the other proceeds with coexisting nations and events as if they followed one another.

Gatterer, like Lessing, assumes that the succession of representation automatically provides the impression of the consecutiveness of represented actions or events. 19 Gatterer 1767a: 15–89 (esp.), repr. in Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 621–62 (esp. 625). Subsequent citations also refer to this same essay. 20 Gatterer 1767a: 39 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 634). 21 Gatterer 1767a: 40 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 635).

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Was Gatterer aware of Laocoon, which had appeared just one year earlier, and did he adopt his arguments from Lessing?22 One cannot establish any decisive answer to these questions. As far as I can see, Gatterer first explicitly refers to Laocoon in his compendium on universal history in 1792, but he refers here only to Lessing’s dating of the eponymous statue-group.23 Yet in addition to the implicit argument in Vom historischen Plan that relies on a theory of signs, as well as the essay’s aforementioned dismissal of painting, a number of additional points suggest that Gatterer did in fact rely on Lessing. Like Lessing, Gatterer begins the first sentence of his 1767 essay with a reference to Winckelmann, albeit without naming him. Gatterer maintains in this passage ‘that a nation wishing to improve its taste must first study and imitate the good examples of the ancients, and thereafter may first attempt its own with confidence’.24 Gatterer subsequently attributes to the ancients—particularly Herodotus—an authority concerning the formation of historical ‘plans’, which is similar to Lessing’s argument concerning the narrative style of Homer.25 Gatterer’s introductory reverence for German poets, who had already progressed much farther than German historians, might also be understood as a nod to Lessing. At any rate, Gatterer explicitly acknowledges the ‘art of poetry’ as an older ‘sister’ and model, maintaining that history should follow the ‘open path’ poetry had hewn.26 This point may be understood as a reference to poetic works (even though Gatterer does not mention a single one); 22 Lessing’s Laocoon appeared at Easter (i.e. in March) 1766, in the first volume of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek. Cf. Gatterer’s letter to Gebauer, 29 November 1767 (Stadtarchiv Halle, A 6.2.6, Nr. 9037, fol. 1.). 23 Cf. Gatterer 1792: 259. 24 Gatterer 1767a: 15 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 621). Gatterer mentions Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums in his letter to Gebauer of 29 November 1767 as a work that should be reviewed in his journal (Stadtarchiv Halle, A 6.2.6, Nr. 9037, fol. 1). In the sixteen volumes of the journal, however, no such review appears. What was actually discussed is Winckelmann’s 1766 Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst, in the first volume of the Allgemeine historische Bibliothek, at pp. 243–65; note that Gatterer 1767a was published in the same edition of this periodical (as well as Gatterer’s praise for Winckelman in Gatterer 1769: 62–3). Winckelmann famously wrote in his 1755 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst that: ‘The only way for us to be great and, yes, if possible, inimitable, is by imitating the ancients’ (Winckelmann 1969: 4). 25 Cf. Gatterer 1767a: 22, 79 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 625, 655–6). One might also note the extensive analysis in Gatterer 1767b: 46–26. 26 Gatterer 1767a: 16 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 622).

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but it could also be interpreted as a reference to a theoretical text such as Laocoon. While Gatterer may have found the concept of a ‘plan’ in Laocoon, he had already used the notion as early as 1761 in the Handbuch der Universalhistorie (‘Compendium of Universal History’).27 The German word ‘Plan’ first began to be used commonly as a concept for textual organization—that is, for the selection as well as the arrangement of materials—at around this time. In Zedler’s Universal Lexicon, the concept is still explained as a foreign word derived from French.28 Alongside the initial architectonic meaning as a Grund-Riss (‘floor plan’, ‘layout’), the short article also refers to other meanings—without mentioning any poetic uses of the term.29 Lessing often uses the German word Plan as a poetic concept in the Hamburgische Dramaturgie, apparently under the influence of Diderot.30 Seven years later, in Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (‘Universal History of the Fine Arts’), Plan also becomes a central concept: ‘for every work with a definite purpose, the creation of a plan (Plan) is essential.’31 For Lessing, a good ‘plan’ is one in which the poet lets a sequence of images ‘arise and follow one another in some natural order before the eyes’.32 As a historian, Gatterer could have endorsed this quotation from Laocoon without reservation, since he too shares the same ideal of vividness: ‘Universal history must not merely narrate the general connection of notable events in particular histories and the simultaneity of all major changes on Earth, bringing them together in concise images, so much as it must paint them.’33 To sum up succinctly the degree of Gatterer’s reliance on Lessing: the ideal of the ‘natural order’ of the text as corresponding to the connection of represented actions is not in any way borrowed from Lessing for the first time (we already encountered this in Baumgarten). However, Gatterer’s discussion of the central problem of dispositio or ‘plan’ may owe a debt of gratitude to

27

Gatterer 1761: 5. On Gatterer’s use of the word Plan, see also Gierl 2012: 34–8. Zedler 1741: esp. 615. 29 In Chladenius 1985: 361, the word is still used in the sense of ‘purpose’ and not a plan regarding how history should be written. 30 Lessing 1973a: 452. On Lessing and Diderot, see also Lifschitz’s chapter in this volume. 31 32 Sulzer 1771–4: 905. Lessing 1984: 90 (2012: 129). 33 Gatterer: 1767a: 62–3 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 647). 28

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Laocoon—especially to its discussion of the tension between poetry, which follows temporal events, and painting, which depicts spatial situations. Did Gatterer’s theory of history profit from Lessing’s musings on literature and art? Did he borrow from Lessing some of his solutions to historiographical problems? It initially appears that Gatterer did exactly this. The plan for a universal history that he proposes in his essay follows the principle that one should narrate historical processes as much as possible. Practically, this means narrating the history of the great reigns and nations that were more or less the major powers. The events remaining alongside this diachronic process, because they occur simultaneously in different places, should be engaged as ‘episodes’, whenever it is ‘suitable’ or appropriate (bequem), which means at points where the people who are less important come into contact with those who are more significant.34 As a category of discourse theory, the idea of something being ‘suitable’ or ‘appropriate’ does not appear particularly clear, but Lessing also uses it in prominent places such as in a passage where he concludes that poetry ‘can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive’ from the succession of linguistic signs. This conclusion rests on the premise that ‘signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified’.35 In this sense, and also following the same poetics of perfection,36 Gatterer’s plan formulates world history as ‘a whole, well connected, composed of apparently countless parts, and progressing from the inception of the world to our time’, a carmen perpetuum which explicitly refers to the poetic programme described by Ovid in the preface to his Metamorphoses (Met. 1.4).37 Gatterer did not choose this model inappropriately: the episodic structure of the Metamorphoses, with its changing 34

Cf. Gatterer: 1767a: 42 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 636); on the word bequem (‘suitable’, ‘appropriate’), cf. e.g. Gatterer: 1767a: 23, 57, 60 and 69 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 625, 644, 645, 649). For Lessing’s use of the word to describe the bequemes Verhältniß of the signifying medium to the thing signified, see especially Beiser’s chapter in this book. 35 Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115). Gatterer, like Lessing, also qualifies this premise. Cf. Gatterer: 1767a: 40 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 635): the reader may ‘always combine things in thought that coexisted in the world, even when reading, regardless of whether they are presented as following one another immediately’. But Gatterer does not draw any conclusions from this insight—a further parallel with Laocoon. 36 In the mid-eighteenth century it was common in Germany to explain ‘beauty’ as sensually perceived perfection. 37 Cf. Gatterer: 1767a: 60–1 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 645–6).

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protagonists, is more appropriate to universal history than an epic concentrated on a single figure such as the Iliad, which serves as Lessing’s preferred model in Laocoon.

The Primacy of the Optical: Gatterer’s Plea for a Universal Historiography beyond the Successiveness of Language Gatterer was not, however, able to carry out this plan. Between 1761 and 1792 eight different compendia, outlines, or synopses of a universal history appeared, which repeatedly attempted to subdue the unruly material in new ways.38 One work, a tabular overview over six folio pages, extends into the early modern period;39 another extends to the discovery of America;40 further examples reach only up to the barbarian invasions, or else to ancient Persia and Greece. What is even more important for our purposes is the fact that Gatterer was also dissatisfied with the primarily diachronic ordering of such compendia, which in the essay Vom historischen Plan he saw as necessarily following linguistic representation (that is, by way of narration, or Erzählung). Gatterer recommended the use of ‘synchronic tables’ along with his Compendium of Universal History to show the simultaneous activities in space that could not be depicted in the main narrative.41 After Vom historischen Plan, Gatterer’s next publication on universal history was an Einleitung in die synchronistische Universalhistorie zur Erläuterung seiner synchronistischen Tabellen (‘Introduction to the Synchronic Universal History for the Illumination of his [Gatterer’s] Synchronic Tables’)42—a text that Lessing himself possessed.43 This was followed in 1773 by Gatterer’s Abriß der Universalhistorie (‘Summary of Universal History’)—the ‘most complete compendium of universal history that Gatterer produced’44— which also contains foldout tables with synchronic overviews.

38 Gierl 2010: 7–19 presents the ‘ten compendia’ (for multi-volume works, he counts each volume individually), and precisely describes the conceptual advance that occurs in each subsequent work. 39 40 Cf. Gatterer 1766. Cf. Gatterer 1792. 41 42 Gatterer 1767a: 30 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 629). Cf. Gatterer 1771. 43 44 Cf. Raabe and Strutz 2007: 49. Gierl 2010: 14.

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All this suggests that the various principles in Vom historischen Plan which Gatterer draws from Lessing could be faulted for an error or at least one-sidedness. As Gatterer’s collective work shows, language-based historiography alone is not in a position to portray history adequately. Graphic forms of representation are needed—and they are required not only for the didactic reason that ‘overviews’ promise better accessibility and are more memorable. Gatterer’s conception of historical knowledge is so influenced by the visual that he uses visual metaphors for historical knowledge.45 The traditional parallelism between the spatial and temporal dimensions in historical knowledge eventually proves stronger for Gatterer than the assumption he (probably) adopts from Lessing, namely that the successiveness of linguistic signs (the ‘consecutive nature of language’) is exclusively appropriate for an object of representation unfolding in time.46 The fact that Gatterer did not agree with Lessing’s principled division between the verbal and pictorial arts is more clearly evident in a second programmatic essay, one that appeared a few weeks after his Vom historischen Plan, published under the title Von der Evidenz in der Geschichtkunde (‘Concerning Evidence in Historical Knowledge’). Gatterer’s question concerns the kind of probative force historiography can have when the truth of its claims cannot be demonstrated deductively as in philosophy (in the manner of Christian Wolff ). Gatterer insists on two methods of demonstration for history, both of which can be combined with one another: first, the documentation of sources regarding the factuality of historical events; and second, a narration of these events that is so vivid that the reader feels he or she is an ‘observer’ and eyewitness of the events.47 The historian who succeeds in allowing history to be ‘seen with the eyes’ has reached the pinnacle of his or her discipline and stands above the ‘pragmatic’ historian who only shows the causes and effects of historical processes

45

Cf. Gatterer 1767a: 63 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 647): Gatterer instructs, for example, to ‘behold centuries’, and ‘see on through to the end’. One might compare Gierl’s assessment that Gatterer’s ‘verbal’ compendia essentially conformed to the synoptic principle rather than to narrative (Gierl 2012: 219). 46 Lessing 1984: 88 (2012: 126). 47 See Gatterer 1767c: esp. 13 and 26: part of the essay (pp. 12–38) is reprinted in Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 466–78 (the relevant passages here appear at pp. 466 and 477).

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(which had usually been considered as the most important task of the historian).48 What is interesting about this claim is not so much the remarkable way in which historical truth is related to the ‘truth of novels’—the narrative power of illusion that, as Gatterer himself explains, is merely able to demonstrate that some event can plausibly be imagined (‘suitably thought’).49 More conspicuous here in the context of Laocoon is the primacy of the visual in the opening of Vom historischen Plan.50 The eyewitness-like character that the critical historian ideally expects from his or her sources is at the same time also supposed to be transferred to later readers. According to Gatterer, the temporal distance between the reader and historical events should and could be overcome through the illusion of presence. It is notable, however, that as an ideal of historiographical style, this is nothing new; it can already be found in ancient historiography and was endorsed by many historians in the early modern period.51 The demand for vividness is also common in Enlightenment historiography, which actually mentions the similarity with painting as well.52 What is new in Gatterer is the context in which this ideal is presented. Gatterer’s programme for making the discipline of history more scientific is not only concerned with readability but also with the reliability and persuasiveness of historiography and the position it thereby gains among the arts and sciences.

48

Gatterer 1767c: 14 and 36 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 467 and 477); cf. Gatterer 1767a: 80 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 656). 49 Gatterer 1767c: 37 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 477): the italics are in the original text. 50 An important source for Gatterer’s ‘optical history’ is the early modern tradition of ‘seeing history’. On this, see Völkel 2011: 602–12. The situation in Gatterer is, however, new insofar as he develops his theory from premises that aim at rendering history more scientific and at recognizing the primacy of temporality in linguistic representation. 51 By way of example, one might think of Charles Rollin, whose multi-volume histories of antiquity were very popular in the eighteenth century. Cf. Rollin 1732: 281: ‘It is a great pleasure for a sensible and judicious man, who reads a history of this kind, to be led by the hand at the beginning and the end of every action and, instead of a simple reading about what occurs, to become like a witness and spectator of everything that is recounted to him’ (cited in Zwink 2006: 328). On the ancient loci calling for vividness, see Grethlein 2013: esp. 17–19. 52 Cf. Wiggers 1784: esp. 31 (part of the essay is reprinted in Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 429–54—the passage here comes at p. 438); one might also compare August Ludwig Schlözer’s quarrel with Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s ideal of a ‘painter of history’ (Schlözer 1784, repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 590–604).

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Gatterer illustrates the vividness he demands of historiography with an example: ‘Caesar was murdered with twenty-three wounds in the senate. How abhorrent! But I do not want to read this; I want to see it. Bring me to the desecrated senate hall; show me Caesar’s murder, his wounds, his torn and bloody robe.’53 Lessing in no way concludes from his distinction between linguistic and pictorial arts that poetry cannot or should not strive for vividness in its depictions. By contrast, he writes that ‘the poet is always supposed to paint’ and ‘make the ideas he awakes in us so vivid that at the moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce in us’.54 It is precisely this ‘illusion’ that Gatterer insists upon for historiography (whereas Lessing reserves it for poetry as opposed to prose).55 He does not, however, in any way adopt Lessing’s actual innovation regarding the poetic ideal of vividness: the transition of ‘painting’ from what is ‘coexistent’ to ‘consecutive’.56 According to Lessing, the poet should ‘make the living picture of an action out of the tedious painting of an object’:57 Homer does not paint the shield [of Achilles] as finished and complete, but as a shield that is being made . . . We do not see the shield, but the divine master as he is making it. He steps up to the anvil with hammer and tongs, and after he has forged the plates out of the rough, the pictures which he destines for the shield’s ornamentation rise before our eyes out of the bronze, one after the other, beneath

53

Gatterer 1767c: 14–15 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 467). Lessing 1984: 85 (2012: 123). 55 Lessing 1984: 85 (2012: 123). Gatterer uses the concept of ‘illusion’ at Gatterer 1767c: 14–15 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 471). He derives his insistence on ‘poetic’ vividness from Henry Home’s Grundsätze der Critik (originally published in English in 1762 as Elements of Criticism), where a narration that is ‘lively’ and evokes an ‘ideal presence’ is permitted and recommended not only in poetry, but also in historical writing—above all, as a way of being more persuasive (cf. Home 1763–6: I.144–5; for ‘ideal presence’, see p. 127). Gatterer’s ideal of vividness conforms in many respects with the formulation by Johann Jakob Breitinger; however, Breitinger did not apply it to historiography (cf. Breitinger 1740: I.6. Abschnitt: Von den Bey-Wörtern). Breitinger uses the traditional rhetorical concept of euidentia (Breitinger 1740: I. 66–7), which also underlies Gatterer’s insistence on the generation of evidence through detailed descriptions and the illusion of presence. Note too how Lessing’s Laocoon argues, if only once, in favour of using the Greek equivalent enargeia, or ‘Enargie’, for the concept of ‘illusion’ (Lessing 1984: 75, with note at 207; for the German text, see Lessing 2012: 112). Home does not share this same conception, but in the later sections of his work he uses evidence in the sense of ‘proof ’ (Home 1763–6: I. 246–7). Gatterer’s concept of evidence combines both senses. For a more extensive discussion of the poetic context (especially with regards to Breitinger, Home, and Lessing), see Saul 1984: 7–31. 56 57 Lessing 1984: 95 (2012: 134). Lessing 1984: 95 (2012: 134–5). 54

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the finer blows of his hammer. We do not lose sight of him until all is finished. Now the shield is complete, and we marvel at the work. But it is the believing wonder of the eyewitness who has seen it forged.

Lessing, as is well known, associates verbally generated vividness with the narration of an action. This preserves the uniqueness of literature, which is grounded in the distinction between time and space, and nevertheless achieves the more impressive quality of a painting (even if it is only imaginary) in comparison with what both Lessing and Gatterer call the ‘dry’ word.58 Because, according to Lessing, actions constantly progress in time, the descriptions that evoke this vivid quality can never be elaborate but must pick out ‘suggestive details’ while ignoring things that are not relevant to the direction and causes of the actions.59 The vividness that Gatterer insists upon is by contrast static and as detailed as possible.60 Consider his own example of the Ides of March: the situation is supposed to appear vivid shortly after the murder, with Caesar’s ‘wounds’, his ‘torn and bloody robe’, and the lingering ‘murderers’. What Gatterer sketches here is a tableau, not a sequence of images that would explain an event and make it comprehensible—because whatever preceded that moment (Caesar’s dictatorship, the conspiracy against him) is not depicted. To use Lessing’s words, Gatterer does not want to make the event vivid or clear; rather, he aims to show it as something ‘finished and complete’— after the manner of Achilles’ finished shield rather than the process of its creation.61 As one can see here, the comparison with painting did not make it easy to understand historiography according to the processual nature of history. So as to avoid the merely suggestive depiction of consecutive events, historiography more or less needs extensive sequences of images. For the past 100 years or so the appropriate term has been ‘film’—but this idea was, of course, not available to Lessing’s contemporaries. However, August

58 Cf. Lessing 1984: 74 (2012: 111); Gatterer 1767c: 14 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 467). 59 Lessing 1984: 79 (2012: 116). Cf. Willems 1989: 332. 60 Gatterer 1767c: 21 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 470): ‘From what has been said up until now, it becomes completely clear that the more elaborately and distinctly an event is narrated, the more easily the narrative becomes evident.’ 61 Lessing 1984: 95 (2012: 134).

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Ludwig Schlözer, Gatterer’s colleague (from 1770) and rival at Göttingen, already imagined historiography as an infinite painting:62 Individual facts or events are in the study of history what tiny, coloured stones are in mosaics. The artist mixes and orders them through skilful arrangement, painstakingly connects them, and brings before the eye a finished picture on an even and uninterrupted surface (ein fertiges Gemählde auf einer schnurgleichen und ununterbrochnen Fläche).

The comparison here with an uninterrupted surface can be understood as suggesting that the ideal historiographical painting always progresses. Schlözer attempts to capture in this image how the usual insistence on the integration of the diachronic and the synchronic dimensions can be combined with the paradigm of ut pictura historia.63 This is, of course, an idea that could not be realized given the technical possibilities of the eighteenth century, which ultimately demonstrates anew that the theoretical comparison of history with painting created more problems than it solved. To provide a provisional summary: Gatterer resists the epochal temporalization in which one can eventually place Laocoon.64 We see, by contrast, that he is doubly interested in the coexistence of things in space at the micro- as well as macro-levels of history: Gatterer is concerned with the narrated image that ‘persuades’ through quasi-sensible impressions, and with synchronic tables that make it possible to survey with a single glance the simultaneous events occurring in different locations at great distances from one another. In both dimensions he maintains that exclusively linguistic narrative representation is not sufficient.

The Concept of Action: Gatterer’s Omission, Lessing’s Attenuation For historiography—not only Gatterer’s—the rejection of Lessing’s plea for the primacy of temporality in linguistic representation was detrimental. The greatest problem for the discipline of history in Enlightenment Germany was the complaint—voiced often, and not only by Gatterer and 62

Schlözer 1990: 44. Cf. Schlözer 1990: 46: ‘Every sequence of events must be read in a dual way: first longitudinally, forwards and backwards, and then latitudinally, laterally or synchronically.’ 64 Cf. Schulz 2003: 138. 63

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Lessing—that history-writing had to become much more readable.65 The widespread compendia for academic teaching compiled considerable knowledge, but did not make historical processes vivid and comprehensible. The problem was not merely the fact that the compendia were not too reader-friendly and did not concern themselves with accessibility. History books that did not present a causal-analytic ‘connection of events’ were regarded as mere ‘chronicles’ and not proper ‘histories’: Gatterer defined this criterion very clearly in Vom historischen Plan.66 Formulated in a contemporary way, the central question was how history could be represented as a specific coherent structure.67 What was the most appropriate way to depict the connection of historical events and their processual character? Gatterer’s ‘plans’ for a universal history and his plea for tableau-like vividness contributed very little to solving this fundamental problem. Indeed, one might say that it was a diversion from a solution. However, a solution can actually be found in Lessing’s central concept of action, which Gatterer did not appropriate. Series of events can be ordered as actions by distinguishing between plans, their execution, possible resistance, and intended or unintended consequences.68 Different actors are interconnected through the concept of action as allies or adversaries. By narrating actions, one can render comprehensible why events occurred in the manner depicted, not through strict causal explanation but by making things plausible within the author’s and the reader’s horizon of experience. To put it succinctly: the narration of actions may engender the coherence that distinguishes stories and ‘history’ from a mere collection of events in a temporal series.69 Using this paradigm of action, the driving and determining factors of historical processes can be made evident.

65 Cf. Gatterer 1772: 286. Lessing begins the fifty-second letter of the Briefe, die neueste Literatur betreffend with the declaration that ‘within the entire area of German literature, the field of history still looks the most poorly cultivated’ (Lessing 1990: 185). 66 Cf. Gatterer 1767a: 77–8 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 655). 67 I have developed this argument much more extensively in Fulda 1996; for a short excerpt in English, see Fulda 2005: 112–33. 68 On the paradigm of action and its limits in eighteenth-century historiography (decisionist politics and conceptions of history that cannot address systemic processes), see Fulda 2012: 77–113. 69 Gatterer 1767a: 78 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 653).

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Gatterer’s ‘planning’, however, does not capture the specific coherence of history because it attempts broadly to organize what is already presupposed as connected—such as ‘national systems’ and ‘systems of alliance’— while such phenomena should first be connected and given coherence through historiography.70 Likewise, the tableau-like vividness upon which Gatterer insists misses the particular historical coherence of events because it does not present processes but static situations. Gatterer’s ‘plans’ operate at an excessively general macro-level, whereas his ideal of vividness can only be realized at micro-levels. The narration of actions could have effectively been placed between them, but Gatterer does not give any consideration to actions.71 This is because Gatterer’s approach to establishing the interconnection of events that is central for history is causalanalytic, as he explains at the end of Vom historischen Plan: ‘The main concern of the historiographer is to search for the occasions and causes of a noteworthy event and to present in the most developed way the entire system of causes and effects, of means and aims, regardless of how confusedly everything appears at the beginning to be intertwined and concurrent.’72 Within the opposition between Lessing’s concept of action and Gatterer’s causal system lies also a foundational problem for the theory of history which was vigorously debated in the second half of the twentieth century. Whereas Gatterer can be bracketed as a precursor of scientism, considering historical explanation as a variant of the practice of subsuming things under general laws,73 Lessing’s analysis of the Homeric technique of narration, focused on the concept of action, moves in the direction of a narrativist theory of history. Such a theory recognizes the importance of the comprehensibility of narrated stories, as well as the fact that such a narration itself constitutes history. The theoretical

70

Gatterer 1767a: 41 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 635). Cf. Gierl 2012: 356. 72 Gatterer 1767a: 80 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 656). 73 Cf. Gatterer 1767a: 84–5 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 659): ‘If he [the historian] is ultimately a philosopher, and he must by all means be one if he wants to become pragmatic, he must create general maxims about how events occur, study thoroughly and with constant recollection on these maxims the reliable reports from a nation that he wants to describe . . . and venture to derive from this a system of events, the driving machinery, that with pleasure he finds either confirmed by other contemporary writers or justified by the entire context of history.’ The locus classicus of the ‘covering-law-model’ of historiography is Hempel 1942. 71

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dispute in our time has been resolved in favour of narrativism.74 But in Gatterer’s time, scientism was ascendant while the concept of narration remained weak and was often even used pejoratively—for example, when narration, as ‘mere recounting’ in the sense of ‘enumerating’, was contrasted with the exposition of causal relations.75 This was true even for Chladenius, the leading German theoretician of history in the midcentury, who describes in quasi-narrative terms the particular explanation of history (not deductively, and employing a causal-analytic approach only in a limited manner): ‘Therein lies the explanation of history . . . in that one describes and elaborates upon every past event in the narrative to such a degree that the events that follow can be deciphered naturally and comprehensibly with common reason or according to the noted mistakes, malignancies, and vices of man, and even his freedom when it can be helpful.’76 However, ‘narrative’ for Chladenius actually means only ‘report’, in distinction from historical events—he searches for a pithier term for the narrative configuration of events in history and proposes ‘connection’ (Fügung).77 Even in Lessing’s Laocoon, the ‘narrator’ is someone who merely supplies the material, by contrast with the ‘poet’ who gives the material form.78 The readable history-writing to which German historians aspired in the second half of the eighteenth century could not be reached through the path of a detailed and explicit causal analysis. The first person who actually succeeded in narrating history was Friedrich Schiller. His Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (‘History of the Revolt of the United Netherlands against Spanish Rule’) appeared in 1788, and the Geschichte des dreyßigjährigen Kriegs (‘History of the Thirty Years’ War’) was published in 1791–3, a good twenty years after Gatterer’s programmatic essays. It is certainly no accident that Schiller was not a trained historian, but a literary author who thought of ‘planning’ as the construction of a plot rather than the organization of a compendium.79 74 Cf. Roberts 2001; Fulda 2014b: 227–40 (available at www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/ historiographic-narration). 75 This is still the case, to mention a single example, in Blanckenburg’s 1774 Versuch über den Roman: for a facsimile edition, see Blanckenburg 1965: 259–60. 76 Chladenius 1985: 271. 77 78 Chladenius 1985: 274. Lessing 1984: 62 (2012: 94). 79 Cf. Schiller’s letter to Goethe, 25 April 1797.

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One of the most-cited assessments of Lessing’s Laocoon is Goethe’s reference to the flash-like illumination that ‘released’ literature from its false equation with art.80 Laocoon did not have such an immediate effect on the theory of history—although some of its aspects were probably adopted by historians. The reason can primarily be found in contemporary theories of history, which did not wish to subordinate the spatial dimension of history to the temporal dimension as a matter of principle. It should be added, however, that what Laocoon offers for the theory of history was not very clearly formulated and thus lost some of its potential appeal: the concept of action remained underdetermined because Lessing associated it almost exclusively with the ‘sequence of time’.81 The central sixteenth chapter defines ‘actions’ as ‘objects or parts of objects which follow one another’.82 But Lessing overlooks the fact that the phases of an action that follow one another temporally also arise from one another. Because the distinction between ‘following’ (aufeinander) and ‘arising’ (auseinander) was well established in the eighteenth century and had an almost terminological status in the theory of history, Lessing’s focus merely on what follows in time looks like a rejection of the explanatory power of the narration of actions.83 By placing the ‘sequence of time’ at the centre of the specifically poetic representation of action, without making clear that he is (for the most part) thinking of relations and connections between actions that are constituted by the implementation of intentions (as in the production of a shield), Lessing makes the concept unattractive for the historian.84 In the theory of history, representation according to a ‘temporal sequence’ (as Gatterer explicitly calls it) means the mere recounting of events in the manner of a chronicle;85 it is precisely not the explanatory depiction of relations and connections 80

Goethe 1988: 316. On Goethe’s reception of Lessing’s Laocoon, see Ritchie Robertson’s chapter in this book. 81 82 Lessing 1984: 77 (2012: 114). Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115). 83 Cf. Gatterer 1761: 61. 84 An analogous definition can be found in Lessing’s preliminary work, which does not appear in the published text: ‘A series of movements that have final purpose is an action’ (Paralipomena 5: Lessing 1990: 251). In contrast to Nisbet’s claims, I do not consider the definition of action in Lessing’s Abhandlungen über die Fabel synonymous, because the ‘final purpose’ Lessing mentions there is not that of an actor, but rather the ‘moral tenet’ that the author wishes to illustrate in the fable (Lessing 1990: 367). 85 In modern theories of history, the chronicle—as an incomplete form of representation (one that does not represent the coherence of history)—plays an important role, contrasting to ideas of historical narration: cf. White 1973.

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that first integrates historical events into a ‘history’.86 Indeed, some of Lessing’s examples for the ‘progressive actions’ of poetry present merely an enumeration of points without an overarching intention or plot, as in the ‘story’ of the sceptre that passes from Vulcan, through Jupiter, Mercury, Pelops, Atreus, and Thyestes to Agamemnon.87 Ironically, the pragmatic connection between the actions Lessing has in mind becomes clearer where he discusses the kind of representation of action of which pictorial art is capable. Artists must choose the ‘most suggestive’ moment of an action ‘from which the preceding and succeeding actions are most easily comprehensible’, because every moment of an action is ‘the result of a preceding one and can be, as it were, the centre of an action’.88 Richer explications of the concept of action can be found especially in the preliminary work on Laocoon, but they did not find their way into the published text. This is true of Lessing’s remark that opposed interests and the resultant conflicts heighten the excitement of the actions,89 as well as of his short explanation of the ‘ideal of actions’, which relies heavily on Aristotle’s requirements for dramatic action. According to Aristotle, Lessing states, an ideal action requires: ‘(1) the compression of time; (2) the heightening of incitements and the exclusion of chance; and (3) the arousal of passions.’90 The second point of Lessing’s note can be explained in this way: the construction of a plot belongs necessarily to the representation of actions and explains the actions in an immanent way. If we apply this idea to the theory of history, we discover a precursor of a central point of the narrativist theory of history, whether it is formulated along the lines of Hayden White or Paul Ricœur (White 1973; Ricœur 1984–8). This notion did not have an opportunity to affect the theory of history in Gatterer’s time, partly because Lessing never published it. For Gatterer, the ‘incarnation of German Enlightenment history’,91 and the historians of his generation there were two alternatives: merely recounting a ‘temporal sequence’ or providing a systematic causal analysis. Faced with these alternatives, they could only opt for the latter, even if it presented

86

Gatterer 1767a: 79 (repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 655). 88 Lessing 1984: 89 (2012: 119). Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 116, 115). 89 Cf. the Paralipomena 3.ix: ‘The more numerous, different, and conflicting the motives are that are at work within them, the more complete are actions’ (Lessing 1990: 231). 90 91 Lessing 1990: 228. Gierl 2010: 7. 87

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an unattainable goal that only hindered rather than supported the improvement of narrative in German historiography.92 H. B. Nisbet explains Lessing’s failure to explicate his intentionalteleological concept of action (or concept of action that is oriented towards Aristotle’s conception of drama) by suggesting that such an explication ‘would have overly weakened the thesis regarding the crucial effect of successive signs’, and Friedrich Vollhardt follows him in this regard.93 To put the point differently: Lessing emphasizes the temporality of the language-based arts in Laocoon in a way that is more one-sided than appears appropriate given his own theoretical convictions concerning poetry. And this had counterproductive consequences for the impact of Laocoon: the excessively heavy emphasis on the temporality of linguistic arts did not provide an impetus for the temporalization of historiography in Gatterer’s reception of Laocoon. Rather, it narrowed down what poetry could offer to history by moving out of sight the far more effective means of supporting coherence, action, and plot. Both of the important introductions Gatterer wrote in the year following the publication of Laocoon reveal, despite the author’s commitment to Lessing’s distinction between the literary and visual arts, their indebtedness to the primacy of the optical comprehension of spatial situations: for historiography according to a ‘temporal sequence’ (Zeitfolge) ultimately appeared to be nothing more than a chronicle.

92 Gatterer is even aware of this unattainability: towards the end of his essay Vom historischen Plan (Gatterer 1767a: 87, repr. Blanke and Fleischer 1990: 661), he argues that the historiographer should ‘search for everything that contributed anything at all to the emergence of an important event; regardless of his effort, some causes, indeed some series of occasions and causes, will nevertheless remain unknown to him, and he will seldom succeed in elevating the reader to a very high degree of comprehension’. 93 Nisbet 2006: 375; cf. Vollhardt’s ‘Nachwort’ in Lessing 2012: 436–67, esp. 454–5.

9 Criticism as Poetry? Lessing’s Laocoon and the Limits of Critique Élisabeth Décultot Translated from the German by Steven Tester

Lessing’s Laocoon is primarily read as a text that aims to draw out the respective ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of poetry and painting.1 The focus of this chapter is rather different. My aim is not to discuss Lessing’s articulation of medial difference between the visual and verbal arts. Rather, I set out to explore the boundary that runs between Laocoon as a text and the concept of poetry that Lessing attempts to define in and through that text. Can the very words of Laocoon be located within Lessing’s division of the arts, I ask—and if so, where? Other questions follow: what is the relationship between the praxis of writing that is on display in Laocoon and Lessing’s own concept of poetry as theoretically defined in the text? Can these two categories be clearly differentiated from one another? Or are they connected—and if so, how? In tackling these questions, the chapter aims to shed some light on such themes and thereby to illuminate Lessing’s concept of criticism; at the same time, I want to explore how Lessing demonstrates and applies this concept of criticism through the very practice of writing his Laocoon.

1

Among the large bibliography, cf. Wellbery 1984; Barner et al.1998: 235–47, Fick 2004: 216–41—as well as the editors’ introduction to this volume.

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Pope—a Metaphysician!: Comparing Poetry and Metaphysics Before addressing the question of the relationship between poetry and critical writing, I begin by considering an earlier text in which Lessing, together with Mendelssohn, discusses the relationship between poetry and metaphysics.2 We need not go into extensive detail about the history of this text, which appeared in 1755 under the title Pope—ein Metaphysiker! (‘Pope—a Metaphysician!’). What is important to note, however, is that in 1753 the Berlin Academy of Sciences advertised a prize question on ‘an investigation of Pope’s system which is contained in the proposition all is good’. The Academy added the following additional recommendation:3 One should proceed as follows: First, determine the true meaning of the proposition in accord with the hypothesis of its author. Second, precisely compare it with the system of optimism, or the choice of the best. And third, provide the reasons why this system is either to be endorsed or repudiated.

Mendelssohn and Lessing answered this prize question with a provocative text that in the introductory pages explicitly ignores the Academy’s actual question—namely the critical investigation of the ‘system of optimism’ (System des Optimismus), which was understood as Leibnizian theodicy—and shifts the investigation to the distinction between poetry and metaphysics (or philosophy): ‘I have not been able to consider this without first asking myself, rather with astonishment: Who is Pope?— A poet—A poet? What is Saul doing among the prophets? What is a poet doing among metaphysicians?’4 Making reference to Baumgarten’s conception of poetry as ‘perfect sensible speech’ (vollkommene sinnliche Rede), Lessing makes a sharp distinction here between poetry and metaphysics, which primarily rests on their differing uses of words. He writes that the metaphysician must above all ‘explain the words he wishes to use’:5

2 On the close relationship between these two figures—and the haunting presence of Mendelssohn in Lessing’s Laocoon—cf. Beiser’s chapter in this volume. 3 Lessing 2003: 614–15. 4 Lessing 2003: 616: ‘Ich habe nicht darüber nachdenken können, ohne mich vorher mit einem ziemlichen Erstaunen gefragt zu haben: wer ist Pope?—Ein Dichter—Ein Dichter? Was macht Saul unter den Propheten? Was macht ein Dichter unter den Metaphysikern?’ 5 Lessing 2003: 618.

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He must never use them in a sense different from what has been explained; he must never conflate them with others that appear equivalent. Which of these does the poet observe? None. Euphony is already a sufficient reason to choose one expression over another, and the alternation of synonymous words is for him beautiful.

This difference between poetry and metaphysics manifests itself in particular in the use of ‘figures’ or tropes, which—as rhetorical formulations—are permitted for the poet, but remain prohibited for the metaphysician.6 In addition to this principal difference between poetry and philosophy at the level of elocutio, there is also a central difference with respect to dispositio: whereas the metaphysician, in order to be a metaphysician, must always move ‘in consistent inferences from the simple to the complex’, the poet cannot subject himself to this ‘slavish order’: ‘Nothing is more contrary to the spirit of a true poet’ (‘Nichts ist der Begeisterung eines wahren Dichters mehr zuwider’).7 It should also be emphasized that the first pages of Pope—a Metaphysician! not only confidently ignore the theme of the Berlin Academy’s prize question but also the recommended method of addressing that question. According to the wording of the prize announcement, the Academy first wanted a conceptual definition of the true sense of the proposition ‘all is good’—thus an analysis of the conceptual components at the core of the concept—and then a comparison. To use a geometrical image, this form of raisonnement is supposed to proceed from the middle point of the concept and then only in the second step to investigate the outer boundaries of its possible points of contact with neighbouring concepts. In Pope—a Metaphysician! Lessing proceeds in exactly the opposite way. He begins the text with a comparison before setting out to distinguish between metaphysics and poetry by investigating their points of contact or distinguishing attributes. In a sense, he performs a tightrope

6

Lessing 2003: 618. For the full German text, see Lessing 2003: 618: ‘Man füge hierzu den Gebrauch der Figuren—Und worin bestehet das Wesen derselben?—Darin, daß sie nie bei der strengen Wahrheit bleiben; daß sie bald zu viel, und bald zu wenig sagen—Nur einem Metaphysiker, von der Gattung eines Böhmens, kann man sie verzeihen. Und die Ordnung des Metaphysikers?—Er geht, in beständigen Schlüssen, immer von dem leichtern, zu dem schwerern fort; er nimmt sich nichts vorweg; er holet nichts nach. Wenn man die Wahrheiten auf eine sinnliche Art auseinander könnte wachsen sehen: so würde ihr Wachstum eben dieselben Staffeln beobachten, die er uns in der Überzeugung von derselben hinauf gehen läßt. Allein Ordnung! Was hat der Dichter damit zu tun? Und noch dazu eine so sklavische Ordnung. Nichts ist der Begeisterung eines wahren Dichters mehr zuwider.’ 7

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walk between both domains, and eventually lands on the epistemic insight that his method makes possible. He does not provide a conceptual definition, but at most a preliminary stage or possibly only an addendum to a definition (‘definition’ understood here as closely derived from the Latin word finis, or ‘limit’). Lessing was also conscious that one could not in this way arrive at a complete conceptual determination or exhaustive definition of poetry in the sense of a strict conceptual demarcation. Even at the end of Pope—a Metaphysician! Lessing has not provided a straightforward answer to the question of what poetry is. Having read the essay, one can at most list a few of the important attributes of poetry that contribute to its distinction from metaphysics. The same holds true for metaphysics as well. The fact that a proponent of deductive reasoning—a ‘systematician’, to use Lessing’s idiom—could not do anything with such an approach is also evident from the reception of the text: with the exception of Hamann’s positive discussion in a letter to Johann Gotthelf Lindner, the text was either ignored in philosophical circles or else, as a short passage in a letter by Martin Künzli demonstrates, it was met with bewilderment.8 But the distinction between poetry and metaphysics sketched in Pope—a Metaphysician! is interesting in at least two regards. First, Lessing appears to have experimented both with the question as well as with his method of answering it, which became the foundation for the later discussion in Laocoon: having distinguished in the first text between poetry and metaphysics (that is, a neighbouring form of discourse), he later undertook to distinguish between poetry and painting in Laocoon. Second, the method of delimiting poetry, which neither attempted nor was intended to provide an exhaustive definition of the concept of poetry, provided an expansive space for Lessing’s actual discussion of the concept. The idea that poetry, in terms of elocutio as well as dispositio, is distinguished from metaphysics in various ways can indeed be drawn from a reading of Pope—a Metaphysician! Yet what constitutes the core of Lessing’s concept of poetry remains open, as indeed does the question of which texts, genres, and forms of discourse can positively be subsumed under this category: as we shall see, the very openness leaves room for a great deal of creativity, as Laocoon itself demonstrates. 8

Johann Georg Hamann to Johann Gotthelf Lindner, 18 August 1756 (in Lessing 2003: 1.344–6); Martin Künzli to Johann Jakob Bodmer, 19 July 1756 (in Lessing 2003: 1.346).

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Laocoon: An Attempt to Delimit the Concept of Criticism What then is the relationship between poetry and criticism as a form of discourse? It may at first glance appear misguided to search for an answer to this question in Laocoon. After all, the main purpose of this text is not to investigate the relationship between poetry and criticism but to analyse the relationship between poetry and painting—two domains between which Lessing sharply distinguishes, as is well known, through his repeated references to numerous sources in European literature on art. According to Lessing, painting uses ‘figures and colours in space’ and poetry uses ‘articulated sounds in time’.9 The preferred (and indeed the only legitimate) objects of painting are coexisting bodies in space, whereas the preferred object of poetry is ‘visible and progressive’ ‘action’ whose ‘different parts [occur] one after the other in a sequence of time’.10 However, at the boundary of this central distinction between painting and poetry Lessing also makes a variety of further distinctions that tend, among other things, to set Laocoon apart from additional existing, longestablished, and recent genres of text or scholarship. In the preface to Laocoon Lessing makes numerous such distinctions. For example, he emphatically distances himself from philosophical aesthetics by accusing Baumgarten of borrowing a large number of his examples from Johann Mathias Gesner’s Thesaurus: We Germans suffer from no lack of systematic books. We know better than any other nation in the world how to deduce anything we want in the most beautiful order from a few postulated definitions. Baumgarten acknowledged that he owed the greater part of the examples in his Aesthetics to Gesner’s dictionary. Although my reasoning may not be so compelling as Baumgarten’s, my examples will at least smack more of the source.11

Lessing’s trenchant remark on Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) proves part and parcel of his differentiation of metaphysics from other domains of discourse: ‘Nothing is more deceptive than the laying down of general laws for our emotions.’12 At the same time, in the 9

10 11 Lessing 1984: 78. Lessing 1984: 77. Lessing 1984: 5. Lessing 1984: 28; cf. Smith 1759. On Lessing and Smith, see also Katherine Harloe’s chapter in this book. 12

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chapters that follow Lessing also distances himself from other forms of discourse and areas of study, including the tradition of antiquarian scholarship, which he accuses of having a deficient sense for the specific semiotic constitution of artistic media in its dealings with antique works of art: for Lessing, a foremost example comes in the figure of Caylus, who misconstrues the boundaries between painting and poetry. However, these various manoeuvres of differentiation are primarily made by the ‘recent critics’ who have ‘drawn the most ill-digested conclusions imaginable’ from their mistaken supposition of a ‘correspondence between painting and poetry’.13 Lessing is referring in this passage to a range of theorists of art, whom he includes in the preface under the unflattering concept of ‘spurious criticism’ (Afterkritik).14 Laocoon attempts to distinguish this negative model of ‘spurious criticism’ from a positive model of art discourse, which for the sake of convenience we can call ‘criticism’ or ‘art criticism’: Lessing himself does not use such terms in his text, but other prominent readers (including Herder) turned to them immediately after the publication of Laocoon in reference to Lessing’s discussion.15 What does this critical model consist of? In an apparent gesture of humility, Lessing calls his essay ‘unordered notes for a book’ (unordentliche Collectanea zu einem Buche).16 If one takes this assessment seriously (and not as a mere captatio beneuolentiae), two things suggest themselves: first, Lessing seems to draw an essential connection between his essay as a genre and the activity or process of reading it; second, the assessment raises a question about the organization, arrangement, and disarrangement of the fruits of the activity of reading. In the early modern period, collectanea were collections of excerpts or reading notes that were organized according to a fixed taxonomy in notebooks, and which were distinct in this regard from looser forms of miscellanea.17 Friedrich Andreas Hallbauer, a professor of poetry and eloquence at Jena, points this out in his widely read Anweisung zur verbesserten Teutschen Oratorie (‘Instructions for Improving German Oratory’).18 But when Lessing refers to ‘unordered’ collectanea, he appears to overlook 13

14 Lessing 1984: 4. Lessing 1984: 5. Herder 1993: 63–5 (with English translation in Herder 2006: 51–5). 16 Lessing 1984: 5; cf. the introduction to this volume (p. 50), along with Squire’s chapter (pp. 109–10). 17 Décultot 2014b; Zedelmaier 1992. 18 See Hallbauer 1725: esp. 286, 288. Cf. also Weise 1692: esp. 39. 15

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this distinction—an imprecision that became increasingly common in the course of the eighteenth century. The primary aim of the following discussion will be to analyse the structure of Laocoon, that is, its intellectual development and divisions, against the background of the numerous texts or literary works that are mentioned in it.

Narrated Readings: Action and Plot The concept of ‘collectanea’ is rather fitting for the structure of Laocoon insofar as a large part of the text appears at first glance to be a series of commentaries on texts. If one attempts—as Lessing himself invites us to do—to create a list of the most important works and authors that constitute the material of this collectanea, one can trace a path—ignoring Homer, Virgil, and Sophocles, who appear in nearly every chapter— that moves from the reading of Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (‘Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and the Art of Sculpture’; 1755–6) in chapter 1, to Montfaucon in chapters 5–6, Spence in chapters 7–8, and Caylus in chapters 11–13, in order to return eventually to Caylus (chapter 22), and most importantly to Winckelmann (chapters 26–9) by way of Perrault, Terrasson, Dacier, Boivin, and Pope (chapters 17–19). But in his second treatment of Winckelmann, Lessing does not focus on the early Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works, but comments on his great historical work, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (‘History of the Art of Antiquity’), which had already appeared in winter 1763, but is dated to 1764.19 Following Lessing, a number of prominent contemporaries also emphasized the fact that this list of names and titles appears at first glance to be ‘unordered’. Herder, for example, refers to Lessing’s model of a seemingly unsystematic ramble through a thicket of texts in a key passage at the very end of his Erstes kritisches Wäldchen (‘First Critical Grove’) in order to justify the ‘chance’ and ‘unsystematic’ structure of his own Kritische Wälder: I have followed Mr. L.’s path, and if his Laocoon is a collection of ‘unordered notes for a book rather than a book itself ’, then what are my Critical Groves?

19

For Lessing’s readings of Joseph Spence, see Siebert 1971; for his readings of Caylus and Winckelmann, see Barner et al. 1998: 238 and Fick 2004: 218–19. Cf. also the chapters by Harloe and Fulda in this volume.

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They were written as chance dictated and more in keeping with my reading than through any systematic development of general principles.20

Encouraged by Herder, who actually rejected the idea that his Critical Groves were merely collected material ‘without order or system’ (‘ohne Plan und Ordnung’),21 I would like to investigate whether Lessing’s ‘collectanea for a book’, which Herder invokes in the discussion of the structure of his own Critical Groves, is as ‘unordered’ as Lessing suggests. More specifically, I attempt to address this issue with reference to the Laocoon’s particular treatments of Winckelmann.

The Winckelmann Reading Lessing offers two extensive discussions of Winckelmann’s work at two critical points in Laocoon: first, in the opening, introductory chapter; and second, in the final chapters (chapters 26–29), as part of a dispositio that uses the discussion of Winckelmann almost as a framing device, and that thus makes the text appear more ordered than Lessing suggests in his preface. What one might be tempted to call the two ‘panels’ of this Winckelmann diptych refer to two different works, as briefly mentioned above. In the first chapter, Lessing refers exclusively to Winckelmann’s early text, the Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works, which appeared in 1755.22 This text prompted Lessing to develop his criticism of the ‘correspondence between painting and poetry’ presupposed by ‘recent critics’.23 According to Lessing, Winckelmann, an adherent of Horace’s traditional idea of ut pictura poesis, mistakenly conflates the genres of poetry and painting in his Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works; this leads him to compare the sculptural figure of the Laocoon, as it can be seen in the Cortile del Belvedere in Rome, with the poetic figure of Laocoon in the Aeneid (2.222), and with Sophocles’ suffering Philoctetes. In his reflection on the differences in the constitution of different artistic media, Lessing also makes an additional point. The Laocoon of the sculptural group does 20

Herder 2006: 175 (translating Herder 1993: 244–5). Herder 2006: 175 (translating Herder 1993: 245: ‘In mehr als einer Sprache hat das Wort Wälder den Begriff von gesammelten Materien ohne Plan und Ordnung; ich wünschte nur, daß meine Leser die etwas trocknen und verschlossenen Pfade dieses ersten Theils überstehen möchten, um hinter denselben zu freiern Aussichten zu gelangen’). 22 23 Winckelmann 1968: 27–59. Lessing 1984: 4. 21

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not suppress his cry through his ability to overcome the sensation of physical suffering or through the ‘strength of his spirit’ (Stärke seines Geistes), to use Winckelmann’s words. Rather, his cry is suppressed because of the rules of sculpture itself. This cry is, according to Lessing, a natural expression of ‘physical pain’ (der natürliche Ausdruck des körperlichen Schmerzes), and sensitivity to this pain was an exceptional quality possessed by the Greeks.24 The creator of the Laocoon group suppresses Laocoon’s cry only because the pictorial arts were not allowed to represent twisted and distorted figures. What is important in this first critical confrontation with Winckelmann’s work is that it completely ignores Winckelmann’s later History of the Art of Antiquity. Lessing first mentions this latter work in chapter 26, where he celebrates his discovery of it: ‘Herr Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity has appeared, and I shall not venture another step until I have read it.’25 There is an important reason for Lessing’s separation of Winckelmann’s works in his discussion: in the History of the Art of Antiquity Winckelmann adopted his first description of the Laocoon nearly verbatim, but with a slight variation that was very important for Lessing. In this later work, Winckelmann abandoned his comparison of Virgil’s Laocoon and Sophocles’ Philoctetes with the Laocoon statue, which had been the occasion for Lessing’s incisive criticism of Winckelmann’s supposed conflation of poetry and painting. This move by Winckelmann effectively removed the grounds for Lessing’s criticism.26 In order to rescue the foundation of his text, namely the opening depiction of Winckelmann as a consistent representative of the ut pictura poesis principle, Lessing had to pretend that he only later discovered the History of the Art of Antiquity;

Lessing 1984: 8–9: ‘A cry is the natural expression of physical pain. Homer’s wounded warriors not infrequently fall to the ground with a cry. Venus shrieks aloud at a mere scratch, not because she must be made to represent the tender goddess of sensuality, but because suffering nature must have her due. Even iron Mars screams so horribly on feeling the lance of Diomedes that it sounds like the shouting of ten thousand raging warriors and fills both armies with terror.’ 25 Lessing 1984: 138. 26 As Lessing 1984: 138 writes, ‘I am very much pleased to find that he says absolutely nothing of an imitation on the part of the one or the other’. On Winckelmann’s abandonment of the reference to Virgil’s Laocoon or Sophocles’ Philoctetes in the later description of the Laocoon group in his History of the Art of Antiquity, see Winckelmann 2002: 347–9 (page numbers given according to the first edition of 1764); for an English translation, see Winckelmann 2006: 313–14. 24

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he was then required to treat both works independently, and at points as far apart as possible from one another in his essay. The fact that this is only a textual construction that does not correspond to the actual chronology of engagement with Winckelmann’s text is evident from research on the development of the Laocoon manuscript. It is certainly not easy, and perhaps even impossible, precisely to date the writing of most chapters within Lessing’s Laocoon. But thanks to exhaustive historical and critical editions—most notably Karl Lessing’s first 1788 edition, Hempel’s 1869 edition, Hugo Blümner’s 1880 edition, and Muncker’s 1898 edition, as well as Elisabeth Blakert’s more recent investigation27—one can establish that Lessing very likely became aware of the History of the Art of Antiquity shortly after its appearance in December 1763.28 We can be sure that Lessing did most of the actual work on the Laocoon essay in his Breslau years (1760–5)—during the the same period when we can chart his most intensive confrontations with Winckelmann’s texts. A draft of the essay, which Blümner has established as the third of Lessing’s five drafts of Laocoon, is a testament to Lessing’s early attention to the History of the Art of Antiquity.29 Although Lessing does not date this ‘third’ draft, it is highly probable that it derives from early in 1764, thus immediately following the appearance of Winckelmann’s work. However, Lessing appears to have decided not to deal with the insights gained from his close engagement with Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity in the first chapter of Laocoon where he discusses the Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works. Indeed, in this first chapter he opts to ignore the History of the Art of Antiquity altogether, before drafting a fourth version where the discussion of the History of the Art of Antiquity is reserved for the later part of the text.30 One gets the impression from reading the different versions of Laocoon that there are two concurrent but completely distinct and independent chronologies at work: the real chronology of Lessing’s actual engagement

27

28 Lessing 1788; 1869; 1880; 1898; Blakert 1999. Barner et al. 1998: 238. Cf. G. E. Lessing: Entwurf 3, in: Lessing 1880: 389 (with Blümner’s commentary in his introduction: Lessing 1880: 99–100). The impression arises from reading the different drafts of Laocoon that, after the appearance of the History of Ancient Art, Lessing continually delayed the discussion of this text when outlining Laocoon: see Fick 2004: 216. 30 G. E. Lessing: Entwurf 4, in: Lessing 1880: 392. 29

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with Winckelmann on the one hand, and the chronology of this engagement as it is represented in Laocoon on the other.

Fictional Chronology The discrepancy between these two chronologies is the result of a textual construction that I would like to consider more precisely in relation to the question raised at the beginning of my chapter. This construction is interesting not only because it is a masterpiece of scholarly deception, but also because it is a fiction that rests on the representation of a progressive action or activity—namely the activity of scholarly reading and commentary. This places Laocoon as a critical text in immediate proximity with what the text itself calls poetry: the result of this dense and often entangled succession of readings and commentaries on authors, which constitutes the fabric of Laocoon, is a development ‘in a sequence of time’ (in der Folge der Zeit).31 It is a narrative full of events and agonistic moments that constitute a ‘visible and progressive action’ (sichtbare fortschreitende Handlung), not only in the critical discussion of Winckelmann but also in the discussion of Caylus and Spence, which Lessing calls poetry: The difficulty must be this: although both subjects [the council of gods and Pandarus shooting an arrow in Homer], being visible, are equally suitable for actual painting, there is still this essential difference between them: in the one case [Pandarus] the action is visible and progressive, its different parts occurring one after the other in a sequence of time, and in the other [the council of gods] the action is visible and stationary, its different parts developing by co-existence in space. But if painting, by virtue of its symbols or means of imitation, which it can combine in space only, must renounce the element of time entirely, progressive actions, by the very fact that they are progressive, cannot be considered to belong among its subjects. Painting must be content with coexistent actions or with mere bodies which, by their position, permit us to conjecture an action. Poetry, on the other hand . . . 32

I would like to consider the possibility of applying this definition of poetic action to the Laocoon text itself. My hypothesis is that what the Laocoon as a text presents is an action—a particular kind of action that one might call critical action, which is integral to the practice of criticism 31

Lessing 1984: 77.

32

Lessing 1984: 77.

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as Lessing understands it. What is the relationship between this critical action and poetry as it is described in Laocoon? Like poetic action, the critical action of Laocoon can be given a diegetic analysis. Lessing, who appears as both author and first-person narrator, functions as the main protagonist; likewise, the various scholars whom Lessing so prominently discusses—such as Winckelmann, Caylus, and Spence—take on the roles of the text’s additional main characters. It is characteristic of these main characters, who reappear constantly throughout the text, that in different contexts they provide the occasion for novel, lively, and elaborately described disputes. The theme of the main plot of the text proves completely agonistic: it stages a conflict about two domains (poetry and painting) that one party (Lessing) would like to separate clearly and the other parties (Winckelmann, Caylus, Spence) would supposedly like to treat together. We are dealing, in one sense, with a territorial war—in an image that Lessing himself develops in the text: But as two equitable and friendly neighbours do not permit the one to take unbecoming liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, yet on their extreme frontiers practice a mutual forbearance by which both sides make peaceful compensation for those slight aggressions which, in haste and from force of circumstance, the one finds himself compelled to make on the other’s privilege: so also with painting and poetry.33

This main plot is also supplemented by sub-plots, among which, for example, is the question of whether the sculptural work of the Laocoon group was created after the poetic work of the Aeneid (chapters 5–6)— a discussion that brings Lessing into contact with other protagonists (such as Maffei, Montfaucon, and Richardson).

Criticism and Poetry There is thus an obvious proximity between what Lessing calls poetry in Laocoon and the nature of his critical writing itself. Criticism, as Lessing practises it in Laocoon, narrates action in time—outright agonistic action—through the representation of a sequence of readings and discussions: this sequence presents Lessing’s feuds with his allegedly stubborn 33

Lessing 1984: 91. For discussion, cf. the introduction to this volume—alongside the chapters by Trabant, Squire, and Mitchell.

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adversaries. The appearance of a book in the text—such as Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity—can also function as an unexpected twist in the plot. Lessing’s method of distinguishing two domains (metaphysics and poetry in Pope—a Metaphysician! and poetry and painting in the Laocoon) prepared the way for such an expanded conception of poetry. And because the logical operation of distinguishing these domains neither aims at nor delivers an exhaustive definition of the respective domains, as I attempted to show in the first part of my chapter, a great deal of space remains—which Lessing uses to practise a form of criticism that functions like poetry. The idea that Lessing’s critical writings themselves manifest a ‘poetic’ quality is already commonplace in the early reception of Laocoon.34 The notion that Lessing combined erudition with taste, beauty, and poetic effect appears again and again in the 1760s. What interests me, however, is not this somewhat routine connection between criticism and poetry, but rather the idea that criticism itself takes on a poetic hue (and vice versa). Herder famously thematized this link in his First Critical Grove, calling Lessing a ‘critic of poetry who feels himself to be a poet’ (der Poetische Kunstrichter, der sich selbst Dichter fühlt).35 Herder goes on to compare and contrast Lessing’s style with Winckelmann’s, in a famous assessment already discussed in the introduction to this volume:36 Lessing’s style of writing is that of a poet, that is, of a writer, one who has not made but is making, who does not present a finished train of thought, but who thinks out loud; we see his work as it comes into being, like the shield of Achilles in Homer. He seems, as it were, to present us with the occasion of each reflection, to take it apart and put it back together again piece by piece; now the mainspring is released, the wheel turns, one idea, one inference entails another, the conclusion draws near, and there is the product of his cogitation.

Herder, I think, recognized the fundamental connection between criticism and poetry that underlies Lessing’s project: just as Laocoon defined temporal succession as the defining mode of poetry, so too does Herder view development in time as an integral part of Lessing’s critical text.

34 36

35 Fick 2004: 24. Herder 2006: 53. Herder 2006: 54; cf. the introduction to this volume by Lifschitz and Squire, pp. 40–1.

10 Suffering in Art Laocoon between Lessing and Goethe Ritchie Robertson

The aim of this chapter is to consider Lessing’s Laocoon within wider critical debates about the aesthetics of pain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. My concern is not just with Lessing’s Laocoon, or indeed the various ‘classical presences’ at work in the text (although ancient Greek and Roman materials will loom large in the analysis). Rather, I set out to show how Lessing’s essay helped set an agenda for subsequent responses to the ancient statue, mediating ideas about the ideals (and aesthetic conundrums) of the ‘classical’. In what follows, the focus will be on the response of one particular critic: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe’s readings of Lessing at once develop certain aspects of his Laocoon, I suggest, and bring other aspects of Lessing’s thinking into focus. If Goethe’s responses demonstrate how a generation of subsequent critics wrestled with the interpretive stakes of Lessing’s essay, they also illustrate the abiding ‘classical presence’ of the Laocoon statue-group itself: as we shall see, this iconic statue-group continued to shape the direction of late eighteenth-century intellectual history both in Germany and beyond. Goethe’s response to Lessing’s Laocoon is complex, critical, and difficult to reconstruct. The obvious starting-point is the admiring account of Laocoon that Goethe gives in Book 8 of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (‘Poetry and Truth’):1

1

Goethe 1995: IV.238; original in Goethe 1986–2000: XIV.345–6.

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One has to be a young man to visualize what an effect Lessing’s Laocoon had on us, this work that swept us away from the regions of meager contemplation and onto the open terrain of thought. The saying ‘Ut pictura poesis’, so long misunderstood, was now suddenly set aside, and the difference between the pictoral [sic] and verbal arts was now clear. The peaks of both now appeared separate, however closely they touched at the base. The graphic artist was to stay within the bounds of beauty, while the verbal artist, who cannot dispense with significance of whatever kind, might be permitted to roam beyond them. The former aims at an external sense, which beauty alone can satisfy, the latter at the imagination, which is quite able to come to terms with ugliness.

It is worth noting that Goethe wrote this account late in life, in 1812. It does not necessarily correspond to his response when he first read Lessing’s essay in the late 1760s. From 1765 onwards Goethe received art lessons in Leipzig from Adam Friedrich Oeser, director of the Leipzig Academy. Oeser was a friend of Winckelmann, shared his classicist principles, and was an enemy to the over-elaborate art of the Baroque. Goethe and his fellow students read Winckelmann’s writings avidly and hoped, if not to meet, at least to see the great man on his visit to Germany; they were all the more shocked, as Goethe recalls in Book 8 of Dichtung und Wahrheit, by the news of Winckelmann’s murder at Trieste in 1768.2 So, since Lessing in Laocoon takes issue with Winckelmann’s aesthetics, Goethe was predisposed to side with Winckelmann and to receive Laocoon critically. In 1769, as we learn from a letter written in French to his friend Ernst Theodor Langer, Goethe saw a new plaster cast of the Laocoon group at Mannheim, read what Lessing, Herder, and Klotz had to say about it, and wrote some remarks of his own.3 These remarks, however, have since been lost. At most, we can try to reconstruct his response, as Wolfgang Albrecht has done, from some sketchy hints in his private notebooks.4 Among these, the following sentence stands out: ‘The ancients, as I have elsewhere tried to show, avoided not so much the ugly as the false, and succeeded in turning even the most terrible distortions of beautiful faces into beauty.’5 In contrast to his later recollection, the young Goethe evidently did not think that the visual arts should be concerned only with beauty. In the sentence cited above, Goethe seems to be questioning both Winckelmann 2 3

Goethe 1986–2000: XIV.358–9; cf. Gossman 1992. 4 Goethe 1986–2000: XXVIII.174. Albrecht 1983.

5

Goethe 1963–73: I.431.

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and Lessing. Both their accounts of the Laocoon group play down the ugliness of Laocoon’s features. Winckelmann says that in Greek art the sufferer always reveals ‘a great and dignified soul’, and therefore the sculpted Laocoon does not scream, like his counterpart in Virgil, but only sighs or groans: ‘He raises no terrible clamour, as in Virgil’s poetic account of his fate. His mouth is not wide enough open to allow it, and he emits instead an anxious and oppressed sigh.’6 Lessing explains the depiction of Laocoon rather from the principles of aesthetic representation and from the nature of visual as opposed to verbal art. Visual art must obey the law of beauty. It therefore cannot depict Laocoon as screaming, with his mouth wide open and his face contorted. Moreover, the work of visual art necessarily depicts a single moment, and if that moment shows the extreme of any emotion, its impression on the spectator will be short-lived. Thus the portrayal of La Mettrie as the laughing philosopher Democritus may be cheerful at first sight, but the more we come back to it, the more his laughter looks like a grin, and the philosopher looks like a fool. The depiction of extreme pain may shock us initially, but when we contemplate it again our sympathy will be reduced and we will be repelled by the hideous expression of the sufferer. The Laocoon sculptors were therefore wise enough to show Laocoon not screaming but sighing, so that the spectator could imagine how his pain would increase. To the Greeks, beauty was all-important, and the expression of pain must be softened till it is compatible with beauty: Let us consider expression. There are passions and degrees of passion which are expressed by the most hideous contortions of the face and which throw the whole body into such unnatural positions as to lose all the beautiful contours of its natural state. The ancient artists either refrained from depicting such emotions or reduced them to a degree where it is possible to show them with a certain measure of beauty.7

Goethe suggests a different view. The Greek sculptor wanted above all to avoid falsity. Hence it was important to preserve truth to nature—to depict a man as he would look if being attacked by a huge snake. To achieve this purpose, the sculptor could accommodate a certain amount

6 Winckelmann 1985: 42: for discussion, see the introduction to this volume (esp. pp. 15–18, with further references to other chapters). 7 Lessing 1984: 15.

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of ugliness, and was able nevertheless to ensure that the sculpture as a whole was beautiful. This disagreement between Goethe and Lessing turns on major aesthetic and moral problems, focused all the while on the abiding presence of classical exemplary models. How is art to depict emotions, including painful emotions, without infringing the law of beauty, which is after all the raison d’être of art? How, at the same time, is art to remain faithful to human experience? And how is art to depict intense suffering? Is it ethical for the depiction of suffering to be a source of aesthetic pleasure? The Laocoon group is among those works of art which exert a lasting and uncomfortable fascination, resulting from the tension between the appalling suffering which it depicts and the aesthetic control with which this experience is depicted. Another example which has recently become famous is Titian’s late painting The Flaying of Marsyas, which was scarcely known in the West for three centuries until it was exhibited to puzzled and enthralled viewers at the Royal Academy in London in 1984. In both works, the evidence of physical agony is countered by the artist’s technique. Titian distracts us from Marsyas’ sufferings by representing him hanging upside-down, so that empathy with the pain shown in his features becomes more difficult. One way of dealing with these issues is to avoid them altogether. Sir Joshua Reynolds did so when, in a lecture of 1772, he advised artists in search of perfect beauty to refrain from depicting strong emotions: ‘If you mean to preserve the most perfect beauty in its most perfect state, you cannot express the passions, all of which produce distortion and deformity, more or less, in the most beautiful faces.’8 This reads like a blunter restatement of a passage from Winckelmann’s ‘Reflections’ (Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst): ‘The soul becomes more expressive and recognizable in powerful passions; but it is great and noble only in the state of unity, the state of rest.’9 The portrayal of the passions was often denoted by the word ‘expression’ (Ausdruck).10 Later theoreticians, among them Goethe, would replace the term ‘expression’ with ‘character’ or ‘the characteristic’ (das Charakteristische).

8 10

Quoted in Mason 1969: 93. Lessing 1984: 19.

9

Winckelmann 1985: 43.

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Since Goethe’s early essay on Lessing’s Laocoon is lost, his first contribution to the debate that we can discuss with confidence is his essay ‘On Laocoon’, published in the first issue of his journal Die Propyläen in 1798. For now, I will give only a short quotation from this essay, and will later discuss it in more detail. Near the beginning of the essay, Goethe spells out the criteria for the supreme works of art. The first is that they must show detailed and accurate understanding of the human body: ‘Above all things we expect to find a knowledge of the human body in all its parts, dimensions, interior and exterior, in its forms and its movements in general.’11 The second feature is called ‘characters’ and explained as ‘knowledge of the difference of their parts as to form and effect. Qualities are separated and present themselves as isolated; from thence arise characters.’12 My main purpose is to discuss Goethe’s concepts of ‘characters’ and ‘the characteristic’, contrast them with outwardly similar concepts held by other aestheticians of the time, and consider how these concepts helped Goethe to maintain an uneasy balance between what may roughly be called realism and idealism in his aesthetic theory and practice. This should provide a nuanced understanding of the classicism to which Goethe was committed for much of his literary career.

Goethe’s Classicism Goethe’s commitment to classicism in art was lasting, but not entirely straightforward. He attests the importance of Oeser’s teaching in a letter to the publisher Philipp Erasmus Reich in 1770: ‘His teaching will have consequences for my whole life. He taught me that the ideal of beauty was simplicity and calm, which means that no young man can become a master.’13 Although this sounds somewhat discouraging, Goethe’s gratitude to Oeser is undiminished. The letter continues: ‘After him and Shakespeare, Wieland is the only person I can recognize as my true teacher.’14 So Goethe’s enthusiasm for classical art seems compatible with his admiration for the notoriously unclassical Shakespeare. It also accompanies an admiration for the great Enlightenment writer Christoph Martin Wieland, who certainly re-creates ancient Greece in novels such as 11 13

12 Goethe 1980: 78; 1986–2000: XVIII.489. Goethe 1986–2000: XVIII.489. 14 Goethe 1986–2000: XXVIII.183. Goethe 1986–2000: XXVIII.184.

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Agathon, mentioned in this letter, but who does so in a humorous way, evoking an atmosphere which is sensuous rather than simple. In the following year we have Goethe’s panegyric on Shakespeare, ‘For Shakespeare’s Day’, and also in 1772 the essay ‘On German Architecture’ with its praise of Strasbourg Cathedral. Here Goethe uses the word ‘characteristic’ (charakteristisch) to describe Gothic architecture—‘this characteristic art is the only true art’15—and contrasts Erwin von Steinbach’s columns with those of Italian classical buildings. Addressing an imaginary Italian architect, Goethe accuses such a person of failing to understand the principles underlying the classical ruins around him. The Italian architect wants to have columns too, but surrounds St Peter’s with a purposeless colonnade that serves only as a public lavatory:16 You were struck by the splendid effect of columns, you wanted to make use of them, and walled them in. You wanted colonnades, too, and ringed the forecourt of St Peter’s with alleys of marble which lead nowhere, so that mother nature, who despises and hates the inappropriate and unnecessary, drove the rabble to convert your splendour into public cloaca, and men avert their eyes and hold their noses before the wonder of the world.

Here Goethe is not attacking classical architecture, but deriding its modern imitators, and implying that the Gothic style of Strasbourg Cathedral is closer to nature and hence closer to the spirit of classical architecture than modern classicism. Goethe’s eventual classicism did not supersede his fondness for the Northern, realistic art of Rembrandt or Dürer. In 1776 he writes enthusiastically in his essay ‘Commentary on Falconet’: ‘Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens seem to me to be the real saints in their religious pictures, for they feel the presence of God everywhere, in the narrow room or in the open fields.’17 He finds truth to nature both in Rembrandt’s depiction of the Virgin Mary as a Dutch peasant woman and in Raphael’s portrayal of her as a loving mother. Similarly, writing to the painter Friedrich Müller on 21 June 1781, Goethe places Raphael and Dürer on the highest pinnacle of art, because they both show the supreme qualities which he has just defined as ‘truth, life, and strength’.18 Throughout his life he

15 16 17

Goethe 1980: 109; 1986–2000: XVIII.117. Goethe 1980: 105; 1986–2000: XVIII.111. Goethe 1980: XVIII. 1986–2000: XVIII.178.

18

Goethe 1986–2000: XXIX.352.

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remained fond of Dutch realism. One example out of many is a particularly fine essay in appreciation, ‘Ruisdael the Poet’ (1816). Here Goethe praises ‘the wholeness of his inner and outer feelings’: Ruisdael depicts nature faithfully, but with imagination; his landscapes are perfectly real, but also ideal landscapes, ‘where the artist, in the purity of his feeling and the clarity of his thought, shows himself to be a poet, achieves a perfect symbolism’.19 Goethe truly discovered classical art, and developed a commitment to classicism, in Italy. In particular, the buildings by Palladio made an overwhelming impression on him. He had some knowledge of Palladio already, having in 1782 ordered the most recent catalogue of his works for the Weimar library.20 About the same time he was reading the writings of the recently dead Neoclassical artist Anton Raphael Mengs, another friend of Winckelmann’s.21 In Vicenza, in September 1786, he revelled in Palladian architecture.22 In 1795 he confirmed his enthusiasm by writing to the art critic Heinrich Meyer: ‘the more one studies Palladio, the more this man’s genius, mastery, profusion, versatility and grace become incomprehensible.’23 At the same time, it must be noted that in seeing Palladio as the epitome of classical art, Goethe was screening out the actual architecture of the Greeks. He never visited Greece and never saw the Parthenon. But when he saw actual classical temples at Paestum, he initially received an unpleasant shock. Paestum at that time was remote and difficult to access. The temples stood in the middle of a trackless swamp inhabited by huge black water-buffaloes. In the Italian Journey Goethe admits that the temples did not match his conception of classical architecture: ‘Our eyes and, through them, our whole sensibility have become so conditioned to a more slender style of architecture that these crowded masses of stumpy conical columns appear offensive and even terrifying.’24 However, he continues, he pulled himself together, learned to appreciate these massive columns, and, by going to and fro inside the temples—something which present-day visitors are not allowed to do—he managed to enter into the dialogue which was Goethe’s favoured response to works of art: ‘It is only by walking through

19 21 23

20 Goethe 1980: 215; 1986–2000: XIX.636. Boyle 1991: 354. 22 Goethe 1986–2000: XXIX.402. Goethe 1986–2000: XV.658; 1999: 45. 24 Goethe 1986–2000: XV.1197. Goethe 1970: 218; 1986–2000: XV.236–7.

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them and round them that one can attune one’s life to theirs and experience the emotional effect which the architect intended.’25 Alongside his appreciation of classical art, Goethe in Italy was beginning to develop a distinctive aesthetic of classicism. A step towards it is evident in the essay ‘Simple Imitation of Nature, Manner, Style’, published in the Teutsche Merkur in 1789. Goethe distinguishes three approaches to art without condemning any of them. Simple imitation is suitable for depicting natural objects, especially ‘pleasant but also limited subjects’. But many artists are not satisfied with these modest aims and wish to express their individuality; so such an artist cultivates an individual ‘manner’, ‘makes his own language to express what his spirit has grasped in its own way’, and this is suitable for depicting composite objects with many subordinate parts, but not for grand objects such as landscapes.26 This seems to be a version of ‘das Charakteristiche’ from the earlier essay, with the focus now on the artist rather than the object. The highest form of representation, ‘Style’, requires ‘profound and accurate study’ and differs from simple imitation by being ‘based on the profoundest knowledge, on the essence of things insofar as we can recognize it in visible and tangible forms’.27 To understand why this is not realism or naturalism, we need to look at Goethe’s association with the aesthetician, psychologist, and novelist Karl Philipp Moritz, whom he got to know in Rome in autumn 1786. It was in Rome, early in 1788, and no doubt stimulated by conversations with Goethe, that Moritz composed his important treatise, Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (‘On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful’), published later in 1788 in book form. The following year Goethe published in the Teutsche Merkur a summary of Moritz’s argument, with some sympathetic remarks. Moritz’s aesthetic is Neoplatonic. For Moritz, all beauty is a ‘reflection of the highest beauty’.28 The highest beauty is a coherent whole, embracing the whole of reality. Every beautiful thing is a small imitation of the highest beauty: ‘Every beautiful whole that comes from the hand of the artist is thus a reflection on a small scale of the highest beauty in the great totality of nature.’29 A beautiful object is coherent and self-contained: 25 27 29

Goethe 1970: 218; 1986–2000: XV.237. Goethe 1980: 22; 1986–2000: XV.874. Moritz 1981: II.560.

26 28

Goethe 1980: 21; 1986–2000: XV.873. Moritz 1981: II.563.

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Moritz argues ‘that the concept of the beautiful is inextricably linked with the concept of a self-sufficient whole’.30 Moritz’s theory also has a psychological aspect. For the artist who perceives the highest beauty feels compelled to try to reach it, as Socrates says you cannot know the good without desiring it. And the way to reach it is to imitate it. Hence imitation is central to Moritz’s theory; but imitation not of external nature, but of the highest beauty. The artist imitates beauty by means of his formative ability (Bildungskraft). He dimly intuits the beautiful and gradually shapes it. Hence, Goethe quotes from him: ‘The born artist is not satisfied with contemplating nature, he must imitate it, emulate it.’31 An important feature of Moritz’s essay is that, in its Neoplatonism, it moves beyond the traditional theory of how ideal art was produced. Winckelmann adopted the standard French theory that the artist selects the best features from several models and thus approximates the ideal. Thus the artist still imitates nature, but not the nature he sees around him. Instead, the artist imitates an ideal, more perfect nature, constructed not by following a single original (as in Dutch realism), but by collecting and combining the features of several originals into an ideal original:32 The imitation of the beautiful in nature is either directed at a single model, or else it collects the features from several individual models and combines them. The former procedure means making a copy, a portrait; it is the way leading to Dutch forms and figures. The latter, however, is the way leading to the universally beautiful and to ideal images thereof; and that is the way taken by the Greeks.

Moritz implies that the artist can go still further. In constructing an ideal original, he is making contact with nature as a coherent whole, with the order that underlies nature. Later Goethe (in a conversation of 19 August 1829, recorded by his friend Riemer) testified to the importance for him of Moritz’s treatise by saying that it provided ‘the foundation of the outlook that we later developed further’.33

Ideal versus Character in Classical Art Here, however, a problem arises. If all works of art imitate the ultimate ideal, one would expect them to look very much like one another. They 30 32

Moritz 1981: II.558. Winckelmann 1985: 72.

31

Goethe 1986–2000: XVIII.257. 33 Goethe 1986–2000: XXXVIII.150.

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risk becoming bland and uninteresting. Even ideal human forms are going to look very much like the same person. What room is left for individuality, for the depiction of distinctive persons and objects—in short, for ‘the characteristic’? This is the problem to which Schiller seems to be responding when he writes to Goethe on 7 July 1797:34 This is, I think, just the right moment for the Greek works of art to be illuminated and examined in relation to the characteristic, for the conception held by Winckelmann and Lessing is still prevalent, and our latest aestheticians, writing on poetry as well as sculpture, are doing their utmost to free the Greeks’ version of the beautiful from everything characteristic, and to make the latter into the hallmark of the moderns. I think the latest analysts, through their efforts to separate off the concept of the beautiful and to present it in a certain purity, have almost hollowed it out and turned it into a mere empty sound, and that the contrast of the beautiful with what is correct and accurate has been taken much too far.

In other words, by setting up a conception of ideal beauty, free from any distinctive or characteristic features, recent thinkers have evacuated the concept of any substance, and it is time to consider afresh how far the notion of ‘the characteristic’ can be applied to Greek art. In the same letter, Schiller says how anxious he is to read Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon. Goethe was working on the essay at that very time. It was intended as an intervention in a controversy about the place of ‘the characteristic’ in classical art. Before examining the essay itself, we need to look briefly at the two opposed aesthetic positions to which Schiller and Goethe allude in their correspondence. Schiller’s target in the paragraph just quoted is clearly Friedrich Schlegel’s essay Über das Studium der griechischen Poesie (On the Study of Greek Poetry, written in 1795, published in book form in January 1797). Schlegel maintains that the Greeks attained the highest achievement possible in art and in culture generally. Their art was developed in freedom and expressed pure humanity. It was ideal, but avoided the danger of being too general and therefore bland and uninteresting. Art must be universally valid; that does not mean it has to be universal in the sense of being merely general. The Greeks managed to represent the individual and the particular in an aesthetically objective way. But 34

Goethe 1966: 418.

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modern artists no longer know how to do this. Hence modern poetry, without objectivity, is predominantly individual, characteristic, and philosophical (Übergewicht des Individuellen, Charakteristischen und Philosophischen).35 It focuses on the particular; it is ‘characteristic’, by which Schlegel means something like ‘realistic’; and it is philosophical, inasmuch as the great expansion of aesthetic theory means that the artist has to place his work on a theoretical foundation. Schiller, in the letter quoted, clearly thinks that Schlegel has drawn far too sharp a contrast between classical and modern art. Another way of describing ‘the characteristic’, directly opposed to Schlegel’s, was practised by the connoisseur and archaeologist Aloys Hirt (1759–1837). Goethe knew Hirt, who had lived in Rome from 1782 to 1796 and had guided Goethe round Rome’s monuments so well that Goethe recommended him to Wieland as a Rome correspondent for the Teutsche Merkur.36 At the end of June 1797 Hirt visited Goethe in Weimar. Goethe enjoyed his company and found him sensible and well informed. But he has reservations about Hirt’s aesthetic judgment, and a reservation is also detectable when he describes Hirt as ‘an intelligent man who is good at ordering and evaluating his completely empirical observations’.37 Hirt also visited Schiller, who praised his judgment and his powers of observation, but did not know quite what to make of him, suspecting something insincere in the warmth of his descriptions.38 On his visit, Hirt gave Goethe two of his own essays, one on ‘the beautiful in art’ (das Kunstschöne) and the other on Laocoon. Goethe, without asking Hirt’s permission, gave them to Schiller, who published them anonymously in his journal Die Horen. Rather strangely, it would seem that he did so not because he liked Hirt’s articles, but because, like Goethe, he largely disapproved of Hirt’s views and wanted to publish Goethe’s essay ‘On Laocoon’ as a rejoinder.39 Hirt explains his concept of ‘Charakteristik’ in one of the essays which Schiller published. He means by it the expression of individuality which enables the work of art to be a faithful imitation of nature:40 By ‘characteristic’ I understand the distinct individuality through which forms, movement and gesture, features and expression—local colour, light and shade,

35 38

Schlegel 1970: 140. Goethe 1966: 416.

36 39

Boyle 1991: 433. Mason 1969: 103.

37 40

Goethe 1966: 414. Hirt 1797a: 34–5.

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chiaroscuro and posture—are distinguished, as the object depicted may require. Only by observing this individuality can the work of art become a true type, a genuine reproduction of nature. Only in this way does artistic work become interesting, only in this regard can we admire the artist’s talent.

Hirt’s vocabulary here deserves attention. Not only ‘characteristic’ but also ‘interesting’ (interessant) are key words in Friedrich Schlegel’s essay. There, however, they apply to modern art as opposed to classical art. Hirt makes them into qualities that all great art must possess. Thus he seems to wipe away the distinction between classical and modern art, between ideal and realistic art, and to describe classical art in terms more applicable to the modern. Hirt went on to apply his concepts to the Laocoon group in the second essay, which Schiller published later in 1797. Here Hirt agrees that the Laocoon is the supreme masterpiece of art, but argues that both Lessing and Winckelmann misunderstood it. He maintains that Laocoon neither sighs nor screams, but is depicted in such extreme agony that he is unable to produce a sound. Hirt backs this up with a gruesomely detailed anatomical description:41 If it had been the artist’s intention to represent a softer expression, a sigh, on Laocoon’s face, then this softening should have been visible in his movement and in the arrangement of his limbs. However, his entire body from top to toe is pervaded by an exertion which expresses his utmost natural powers at their full stretch, and can only be imagined as occurring after prolonged efforts at resistance have exhausted his strength in the most desperate struggle between life and death. Just look at how his hair and beard stand on end, at his deeply withdrawn eyeballs, at the dreadful contortion of his brow, and the twitching of his nasal muscles and cheeks. No pain, no resistance, no horror could make his expression any more terrible: Laocoon does not scream, because he can scream no longer.

Hirt continues in this minutely descriptive vein for some time. He maintains that in depicting Laocoon thus, the sculptor was following the principal law of ancient art, ‘Karakteristik’ (sic), by which Hirt understands something like realism. He says that every god, hero, or mortal in ancient art is depicted in an individual manner. He gives many examples of ancient art which depict extreme suffering, such as Niobe lamenting the deaths of her children, Paetus witnessing the death of his wife Arria in a sculpture preserved in the Villa Ludovisi, Glauce poisoned 41

Hirt 1797b: 8.

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by Medea’s apples, and numerous others. Among them is the flaying of Marsyas: ‘It is terrible to see how Marsyas is so often depicted as hung up by his arms, with his limbs so strained by the weight of his body that he is suffocating, and tries in vain to open his mouth to scream.’42 Goethe did not like this. Privately, he described Hirt as a pedant.43 Publicly, he satirized Hirt’s aesthetics in his imaginary conversation, ‘The Collector and his Circle’, where a guest is made to say: ‘Only the perfectly characteristic deserves to be called beautiful: without character there is no beauty.’44 The same speaker then repeats more briefly the gruesome description of the Laocoon given in Hirt’s essay. His interlocutor, representing views closer to Goethe’s own, objects that such an account leaves no place for the ‘Anmut’ or grace that many people have found in the Laocoon, and also maintains: ‘Character bears to the beautiful the same relation as the skeleton to the living man. No one will deny that bone-structure is the foundation of all highly organized forms of life. It consolidates and defines the form, but it is not the form itself, and still less is it the cause of that final manifestation, which as both the concept and the outer clothing of an organized unity we call beauty.’45 Goethe’s analogy here seems less than perfectly chosen, since the skeleton which supports the body is not itself visible, whereas it is hard to see how ‘Charakter’ can be invisible. He perhaps means that ‘Charakter’ is just one element subsumed into the work of art and contributing to the overall impression of beauty. We may also ask whether Hirt was right, even though Goethe rejected his interpretation. The Scottish physiologist and surgeon Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) wrote about the Laocoon in similarly anatomical terms in 1806. Bell was also an artist, who made his own drawings and engravings for his anatomical textbooks. He maintains that the sculptor cannot have intended to show Laocoon suffering in silence, or displaying fortitude:46 His design was to represent corporeal exertion, the attitude and struggles of the body and of the arms. The throat is inflated, the chest straining, to give power to the muscles of the arms, while the slightly parted lips shew that no breath escapes; or, at most a low hollow groan. He could not roar like a bull—he had not the power to push his breath out in the very moment of the great exertion of 42 45

43 Hirt 1797b: 14. Geiger 1894: 9. Goethe 1980: 49; 1986–2000: XVIII.702.

44 46

Goethe 1980: 48. Bell 1847: 193–4.

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his arms to untwist the serpent which is coiled around him. It is a mistake to suppose that the suppressed voice, and the consent of the features with the exertion of the frame, proceed from an effort of the mind to sustain his pain in dignified silence; for this condition of the arms, chest, and face, are necessary parts of one action.

Later in the century, Charles Darwin took the Laocoon as evidence that ancient sculptors knew about the ‘grief-muscle’ which furrows the brow, and is seen much more often in children than in adults who have learnt to control themselves. But Darwin thought the sculptors had exaggerated Laocoon’s expression of grief and committed ‘a great anatomical mistake’ by giving him ‘transverse furrows across the whole breadth of the forehead’.47 It seems impossible to reconcile these diverse interpretations of the same work of art. Winckelmann and Lessing think that Laocoon is controlling his pain through fortitude, so that his pain, though acute, cannot be very intense. Hirt thinks his pain is so intense that he cannot utter a sound; Bell agrees, though he ascribes Laocoon’s silence to his extreme muscular exertion; and Darwin thinks that Laocoon is so obviously in extreme pain that the sculptor has departed from nature in order to exaggerate his expression of agony. Winckelmann and Lessing wanted to believe that the sculpture, and Greek art in general, was in some measure idealized; Hirt thought it was naturalistic, and Bell and Darwin started from a similar assumption. It is puzzling that the same work of art can be interpreted in such differing ways. Instead of trying vainly to resolve the dispute, it seems best to agree with H. B. Nisbet, who finds it a ‘paradigmatic case’ of the limits of interpretation.48 Another source of disagreement is the assumption that raw suffering is always and necessarily unattractive as the subject of a work of art. If we approach the Laocoon with this assumption, we may be in danger of mistakenly projecting our modern tender-heartedness back onto the Greeks. Nietzsche, writing in the 1870s against the tradition of German Graecophilia, describes the Greeks as ‘the most humane people of ancient times’, but also stresses their cruelty, their ‘tiger-like pleasure in destruction’.49 The classical archaeologist and art historian Nigel Spivey

47

Darwin 1989: 141.

48

Nisbet 1979: 63.

49

Nietzsche 1967–: III.ii.277.

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argues that, for the Greeks, representations of deserved suffering did not invite pity. Marsyas deserved to be flayed for challenging Apollo. Laocoon, from the Greek point of view, had defied the gods who were intent on destroying Troy; the account in Virgil—which, as Lessing argued, need not have been the sculptors’ model—is favourable to the Trojans, since Aeneas, a refugee from Troy, was the founder of Rome.50 The examples of art depicting pain that Hirt lists are not easily dismissed.

Goethe’s Anti-Naturalist Aesthetic Goethe’s response is part of the campaign that he and Schiller were waging around the turn of the century against what they called ‘naturalism’, meaning the mistaken belief that art copies nature. In the essay ‘On the Use of the Chorus in Tragedy’, written in spring 1803, Schiller expressed the wish to declare war on ‘naturalism’ in art.51 In Goethe’s dialogue ‘On Truth and Probability in Works of Art’, published in the opening issue of Propyläen (1798), a naive naturalist has to admit that the artificiality of opera, where people sing instead of speaking, does not spoil his enjoyment, and his interlocutor concludes: ‘Does it not follow from this that truth of nature and truth of art are two distinct things, and that the artist should in no way attempt to give his work the appearance of nature?’52 Art may imitate nature, but it does so by artificial means, which it does not conceal. Hence the true lover of art will admire both its truth to nature and the ingenuity of the artifice within which this truth is attained: ‘the connoisseur sees not only the truth of the imitation, but also the excellence of the selection and the ingenuity of the composition: the ideality of this little world of art.’53 This argument is developed in ‘On Laocoon’. There Goethe maintains that the ancients did not share our false notion that art must imitate nature; they used symmetry to emphasize their artistic character. Symmetry ensured that a work of art was always beautiful in its basic shape and outline. It made contrasts possible. Hence the Laocoon is a model of symmetry, accommodating both rest and motion, contrasts and gradations,

50 51 52

Spivey 2001: 32–3; cf. Spivey and Squire 2004: 137–9. Schiller 1992–2005: V.285. 53 Goethe 1980: 28; 1986–2000: XVIII.504. Goethe 1980: 30; 1986–2000: XVIII.506.

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which thus alleviate the suffering and passions of the persons depicted through grace and beauty. The Laocoon is a crucial test case for this view of art precisely because it is a depiction of suffering. The ideal is also required: the object must be removed from the limitations of reality and endowed with proportion and dignity; but, as Goethe paradoxically puts it, by being placed in an ideal world the work of art gains its reality. It must also become not just beautiful but also ‘anmutig’, sensuously pleasing, and must also be subjected to the law, not just of sensuous beauty, but also of ‘intellectual beauty’ which results from proportion or measure. The Laocoon group fulfils all these criteria. It is beautiful although it depicts extreme suffering: ‘no one will doubt that we ought to give the epithet of beautiful to this monument, who can conceive how the artist has been able to represent the extreme of physical and intellectual sufferings.’54 Suffering is presented to the viewer but also made bearable, because the sculpture, instead of pretending to be a piece of nature, draws attention to its artistic character. Its artistry is apparent in its symmetry:55 [T]he groupe [sic] of Laocoon, besides its other acknowledged merits, is moreover a model of symmetry and of variety, of repose and of motion, of opposition and of gradation, which present themselves together to him who contemplates it in a sensible or intellectual manner; that these qualities, notwithstanding the great pathetic diffused over the representation, excite an agreeable sensation, and moderate the violence of the passions, and of the sufferings, by grace and beauty.

Discussing the self-contained character (Geschlossenheit) that Goethe requires of a work of art, Simon Richter has argued that in the Laocoon it is provided by the snakes which enclose the human actors, and hence the snakes are ‘the visual representation of Anmut’.56 Besides being paradoxical, however, this interpretation seems to separate self-containedness from the symmetry which Goethe emphasizes, and to make the artistic character of the sculpture too dependent on just one of its components. One might object that in emphasizing the symmetry of the composition, Goethe ignores what is distinctive, individual, or ‘characteristic’ about it. He is inviting us to take a rather abstract view of the sculpture. He strengthens this distanced perspective when he praises the sculptor

54 56

Goethe 1980: 79; 1986–2000: XVIII.490. Richter 1992: 176.

55

Goethe 1980: 80; 1986–2000: XVIII.491.

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for removing all reminders of the original story and presenting simply the basic human situation of a father and his sons assailed by monsters: ‘Laocoon is only a simple name; the artists have taken from him his priesthood, all that is national and Trojan in him, all the poetical and mythological accessories.’57 On the other hand, Goethe goes on to show that the sculptor has given the group many distinctive features. These features, however, are not dictated by the original story. They stem rather from the choice made by the sculptor of the best moment to depict. In order to give the appearance of motion, a sculptor must choose a moment which can only be transient. It is the choice of moment, Goethe says early in the essay, that makes the depiction ideal. The artist must be able ‘to make it exceed the bounds of its limited reality, and give it in an ideal world, measure, limits, reality, and dignity’.58 Goethe has his own theory about the moment that the Laocoon sculptor has chosen to depict. It is the moment when one of the snakes is biting Laocoon in the thigh, just as one son has been encircled only at the extremities of his body, while the other already has several coils round him and is trying to push the snake’s head away. The bite, occurring in a particularly sensitive part of the father’s body (at least in the witnessed reconstruction of the statue),59 generates the positions of all the limbs:60 the body flies towards the opposite side, and retires; the shoulder presses downwards, the chest is thrust forward, and the head inclines on the side which has been touched. As afterwards in the feet, which are enfolded by the serpent, and in the arms which struggle, we yet see the remains of the situation or preceding action, there results combined action of efforts and of flight, of suffering and of activity, of tension and of relaxation, which perhaps would not be possible under any other condition.

Here Goethe describes the posture of Laocoon and the effects of the snake’s bite with a scrupulous attention to detail that might make us think he is describing a work of naturalism or adopting the technique used by Hirt.

57

58 Goethe 1980: 81; 1986–2000: XVIII.492. Goethe 1980: 79; 1986–2000: XVIII.490. For bibliography on the statue’s reconstruction, see the introduction to this volume, pp. 7–12. 60 Goethe 1980: 82; 1986–2000: XVIII.494. 59

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However, Goethe’s interpretation is an implicit reply to Hirt in two respects. First, if Goethe is correct, Laocoon is only now being bitten, so the snake’s poison cannot yet have entered his system and produced the agonies that Hirt claims to discern. Second, a physical description as minute as Hirt’s takes away the ideal character of the sculpture and reduces it to a naturalistic representation, failing to explain how it can be aesthetically pleasing. Certainly Goethe assumes that the artist must have complete technical competence. His technical equipment includes an understanding of anatomy. So it is appropriate to look closely at the position of Laocoon’s limbs. But Goethe’s point is that the sculptor follows nature—the structure of the body, the natural sequence of movements—not only for the sake of accuracy but also in order to achieve an artistic purpose: a balanced pattern of movements which can be described in abstract terms. This abstract pattern in turn is the ideal element in the composition. Thus the sculptor does justice to the sensuous reality of the human body while placing it within an abstract aesthetic design. But the sculpture shows emotional as well as physical pain—fear, terror, paternal love—and does so in the most effective manner, by showing the transition from one state to another. No other moment of the struggle would have been suitable. Not only that, but the sculpture is much more than a mere description of pain. It depicts a range of emotions and asks for a differentiated response. According to Goethe, there are three responses to suffering—fear, terror, and compassion— and the Laocoon invites all three: fear for the elder son who is about to be encircled, compassion for the younger who is entwined, and terror at the suffering of the father. On the emotional plane, the juxtaposition of these different responses achieves another kind of balance: ‘It is thus that the artists give, by variety, a certain equilibrium to their work; that they then diminished or strengthened an effect by other effects, and were enabled to finish an intellectual and sensible whole.’61

61

Goethe 1980: 86, trans. modified; 1986–2000: XVIII.98.

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Suffering and Tragedy The words ‘fear, terror, and compassion’ of course recall Aristotelian theories of tragedy. Nicholas Boyle argues that Goethe’s ‘On Laocoon’, while focused on the statue, is ‘also a disguised theory of tragedy’.62 He finds in it a covert response to Aristotle which implies that tragedy stimulates the passions but brings them into a pattern which, contrary to Aristotle, does not lead to catharsis—‘We are not made better by them, nor do they motivate us to make the world a better place, but rather we enjoy, to use a Kantian phrase, the free play of the powers of our imagination.’ Whether Goethe’s thinking was shaped by Kant’s aesthetics, as Boyle is keen to suggest, must be left undecided; Goethe certainly read the Critique of Judgment attentively, but his own essay on his dealings with modern philosophy does not suggest that Kant’s thought permeated his own.63 Rather, it provides support for Schiller’s claim that in reading philosophy Goethe was wholly subjective and picked out passages that seemed to express what he already thought.64 However, the essay ‘On Laocoon’ does seem relevant, as Boyle maintains, to Goethe’s work on Faust. Boyle writes: ‘In this light Goethe could approach the nordic themes and religious and philosophical passions of his Faust: he needed neither to make them his own nor to show himself repelled by them but could simply seek to make out of them a harmonious whole.’65 If Faust was to become a verbal counterpart to the Laocoon, in which painful passions were arranged in a harmonious pattern, a good deal more had to be done. For it was later in the same year, 1797, that Goethe sent Schiller the extraordinarily interesting letter in which he doubts whether he could write a tragedy. This assertion arises from reflections on the attitude of the ancient Greeks to suffering in art:66 May it have been one of the advantages of the ancients that even the extreme of pathos (das höchste Pathetische) was to them only no more than aesthetic play, whereas for us truth to nature must be involved in producing such a work? I do not know myself well enough to tell whether I could write a true tragedy, but the very undertaking frightens me and I am almost convinced that the mere attempt could destroy me. 62 63 65

Boyle 2000: 510. Goethe 1986–2000: XXIV.442–6; Reed 2002. 66 Boyle 2000: 512. Goethe 1966: 510.

64

Schiller 1992–2005: XI.541.

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Goethe is saying here that the Greeks were able to regard extreme suffering only as an enjoyable aesthetic spectacle which did not speak to their hearts. He seems almost to be anticipating Nietzsche’s understanding of the Greeks as people who inhabited a very different moral world from ourselves and lacked our modern repugnance towards cruelty. He is building on his own interpretation of the Laocoon, which emphasizes suffering as part of an aesthetically pleasing pattern. Such a pattern, he is saying here, is impossible for him. That suggests that Boyle is mistaken in arguing that Goethe regarded the Laocoon as in some sense a model or template for the aesthetic balance to be attained in Faust. The Laocoon may have been exemplary for ancient art; modern art on tragic themes needed not only symmetry but also sympathy. And for the spectator to feel sympathy, instead of being simply shattered by the spectacle of suffering, some aesthetic distancing was required. We need to pause over Goethe’s doubts that he could write a tragedy. He had already written several tragedies. Götz, Clavigo, and Tasso are all tragedies, albeit unconventional specimens of the genre. Werther has a good claim to be called a tragic novel. It must have been a particular kind of tragedy that Goethe thought himself incapable of writing. I suggest that he meant tragedy involving extreme suffering, ‘das höchste Pathetische’, of which the obvious example is the ‘Prison’ scene in Faust I. In the earliest surviving version, the Urfaust, this scene is in prose. Goethe explained to Schiller on 5 May 1798 that he wanted to soften its tragic impact: ‘A few tragic scenes were written in prose; their naturalness and power, compared to the rest, make them quite unbearable. So I am now trying to put them into verse, so that the idea appears as though through a veil, but the immediate effect of the monstrous subject-matter is softened.’67 The scenes to which Goethe is referring are ‘Dark Day: Open Country’ and ‘Prison’. The former, fortunately, remained in its powerful prose form, but ‘Prison’ was turned into verse. Even so, it is a searing, scarcely bearable confrontation between the insane Gretchen and a Faust who is reduced to wishing he had never been born. In the famous film based on the production directed by Gustav Gründgens at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus in 1960, Gretchen, played by Ella Büchi, dressed in rags and

67

Goethe 1966: 624.

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with her head shaved, rolls on the floor of her cell in the last extremity of agonized grief, compulsively reliving her murder of her child. One can well imagine that Goethe, having opened up this space of barely imaginable psychological nightmare, should wish to close it again, or at least distance himself and us from it. By way of conclusion, allow me to summarize my own ‘rethinking’ of Laocoon in this chapter. I have been arguing that Goethe dissented from Lessing’s account of how the Laocoon sculptors softened the expression of pain in the sculpture, and that the Laocoon group was for Goethe, as for many other observers, a supreme example of the depiction of pain in art—even if different observers, from Winckelmann and Lessing down to Darwin, have been unable to agree about the nature or the intensity of the pain represented. In Goethe’s aesthetics, a central issue was the representation of reality, especially painful reality. It could be made not only bearable, but aesthetically pleasing, by being framed in a symmetrical composition, and for this purpose the artifice of the composition had to be apparent. However, the aesthetic symmetry of dramatic form was not enough to achieve this effect; further aesthetic distancing was necessary. In Goethe’s own writing, an extreme example of pain was the agony of Gretchen in the ‘Prison’ scene of Faust I, and to make this bearable he replaced prose with verse. The anti-naturalistic use of verse was a verbal analogue to the visual symmetry of the Laocoon sculpture.

11 Transparency and Imaginative Engagement Material as Medium in Lessing’s Laocoon Jason Gaiger

The 250th anniversary of the publication of Laocoon invites us to reflect on the historical distance that separates us from Lessing’s essay—and in turn from the classical Greek and Roman materials at its core.1 But it also invites us to ask whether and how Lessing’s analysis of the ‘limits of poetry and painting’ might still speak to current concerns in the fields of art history, semiotics, and aesthetics. These concerns provide the disciplinary backdrop of my own ‘rethinking’ of Laocoon in this chapter. More specifically, I take this opportunity of looking back to Lessing in order to tackle contemporary controversies about the mediality of the artwork. In an earlier article, I defended the view that the contemporary relevance of Lessing’s aesthetics lies not in his attempt to demarcate boundaries between the arts, but rather in his examination of the different ways in which works of art engage our imaginative responses.2 Drawing on some ideas put forward by the philosopher Anthony Savile, I argued that Lessing’s account of the role of the imagination in filling out and completing what is given in experience allows for a productive 1 In what follows, I refer to the English translation of Laocoon in Lessing 1984, adding reference to Vollhardt’s 2012 German edition in brackets. 2 Gaiger 2013; one might also compare Wellbery’s chapter in this volume, responding to his earlier work of Wellbery 1984.

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interplay between the ordering of the constituent elements of the artwork and the recipient’s projective capacities. Despite the centrality accorded to works of antique figurative sculpture in Laocoon, Lessing’s contention that the ‘free play’ of the viewer’s imagination is both prompted by and at the same time productively constrained or guided by the artist’s deployment of the resources of the medium can also be used to cast light on subsequent artistic practice, even though this has developed in ways that Lessing could not have anticipated. I remain committed to this view, but I have come to recognize that it rests on certain assumptions that cannot be taken for granted—and that further work needs to be done to establish the viability of approaching the text in this way. In particular, the attribution to Lessing of a positive account of the artist’s use of the resources of the medium is open to challenge in light of the explicit contrast that he draws between the ‘material limits’ of sculpture and painting and the greater freedom afforded to the ‘immaterial’ art of poetry.3 Regarding this central issue, it is possible to distinguish two diametrically opposed interpretations of Laocoon. The first interpretation takes Lessing to have made a significant contribution to the ‘discovery’ of the aesthetic medium, characterized by Karlheinz Stierle as ‘that invisible third thing that lies between the imitation and what is imitated’.4 On this account, Lessing helped to bring about a shift from a narrow preoccupation with the nature of art to a broader concern with the nature of aesthetic experience, and he did so precisely insofar as he focused attention in Laocoon on the specific achievements and effects that can be realized in different artistic media. The opposing line of interpretation, captured in Ernst Gombrich’s pithy observation that Laocoon ‘is not so much a book about as against the visual arts’,5 holds that Lessing’s primary concern is to establish the superiority of poetry over painting 3 Lessing frequently characterizes painting and sculpture as ‘material arts’ (materielle Künste) in contrast to poetry. For his identification of the ‘material limits of art’ (die materiellen Schranken der Kunst), see Lessing 1984: 19 (2012: 25); for the greater freedom of poetry, see e.g. Lessing 1984: 40–1 (2012: 55–6), with discussion in Squire’s chapter in this volume. 4 Stierle 1984: 23. Stierle maintains that Lessing ‘stands resolutely on the ground of the new aesthetic of the medium’ and that Laocoon ‘is the first consistent working out of the aesthetic of the medium, which grounds the nature of art in the nature of the medium’ (Stierle 1984: 38). 5 Gombrich 1984: 37.

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and sculpture, and that he does so by showing that poetry is not encumbered by the same material constraints.6 According to this second mode of interpretation, Lessing identifies the physical materials out of which artworks are made as an impediment that limits the freedom of the viewer’s imaginative responses. The proper locus of aesthetic experience is to be found in the apprehended content, not the sensible features of the work of art. At the heart of this interpretative dispute, or so I shall argue, is the question of whether or not Lessing is committed to the ‘transparency theory’ of art. I shall return to the problem of how this theory should be formulated and to what it actually commits us, but the basic idea is that the medium of representation is ideally ‘transparent’ to what it represents.7 Consider, first, the following remarks by Savile, who I take to be the most sophisticated exponent of the anti-transparency line of interpretation. Savile begins his analysis of Laocoon by noting that Lessing challenges a number of ‘critical assumptions’ associated with the doctrine ut pictura poesis:8 Of these the most notable was that within the representative arts the medium itself is utterly transparent. By this I mean that the artist’s choice of medium—be it visual, as in painting and sculpture, or verbal, as in poetry and narrative prose—imposes no constraints on what he may successfully and happily represent. Anything he can felicitously depict in one representation-permitting medium, he can so depict in another, without it having any negative implications for the aesthetic merit of the resulting work. That position Lessing uncompromisingly rejects.

The task that Savile sets himself in the Lessing section of Aesthetic Reconstructions is to examine ‘the defensibility of the various arguments by which the repudiation of transparency is arrived at’.9 This involves, where necessary, critically reconstructing Lessing’s arguments using the methods of contemporary analytic philosophy. Savile not only assesses 6 For a concise formulation of this line of interpretation, see Frederick Beiser’s observation (Beiser 2009: 268–9) that ‘Lessing’s real goal is to vindicate a rationalist hierarchy of the fine arts, which would grade them according to their intellectual content and imitative power. Such a hierarchy places poetry at its top, and dramatic poetry at its very apex, while the visual arts, occupied with mere visual appearances and encumbered with manual practices, compose its base.’ 7 The metaphor of ‘transparency’ can be traced back to Alberti’s comparison of the picture surface to a window or a pane of glass (Alberti 2004: 54). 8 9 Savile 1987: 3. Savile 1987: 4.

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the persuasiveness of the various arguments Lessing puts forward, he also seeks to identify errors that can be avoided and to provide alternative proposals that can be used to answer potential objections without leading to an ‘unacceptable weakening’ of Lessing’s position.10 Compare, now, the view defended by David Wellbery in his book Lessing’s Laocoon, which I shall take as the counterpart exposition of the most sophisticated version of the opposing line of interpretation. At the start of the book, Wellbery observes that the philosopher Arthur Danto ‘devotes some fine pages to the dismantling of what he calls the “transparency theory” of the arts, among whose advocates he rightly numbers Lessing’.11 Not only does Wellbery agree that Lessing sought to defend the transparency theory, he also accepts that Danto’s objections to this theory are successful. Noting that ‘refutation . . . is itself a form of historical afterlife’, Wellbery goes on to inform the reader:12 I am not arguing for [Laocoon’s] essential truth or contemporaneity. On the contrary, what I am principally after is the otherness of Lessing’s great work in aesthetic criticism, its position outside our own order of words and things . . . I fully accept Danto’s refutation of the transparency theory. The question I want to pursue is why, in the Enlightenment, this theory seemed so absolutely self-evident.

Here, then, we have a contrast not merely between two different interpretations of the text—one based on the claim that Lessing rejects the transparency theory and the other on the claim that he upholds it—we also have a contrast between two different approaches to interpretation itself. Whereas Savile is primarily concerned with the ‘defensibility’ of Lessing’s arguments, that is to say, with their internal coherence and persuasiveness independent of the historical context in which they were put forward, Wellbery seeks to understand how a theory that no longer carries conviction today can have been widely accepted during a historical period that is remote from our own. Given these different interpretative goals, it might seem that the conflict can be resolved by drawing a sharp distinction between two discrete lines of enquiry. Whereas the first addresses the philosophical question: ‘Is the transparency theory defensible?’, the second, which can be characterized as textual or historical, addresses the question: ‘Did

10

Savile 1987: 38.

11

Wellbery 1984: 3.

12

Wellbery 1984: 4.

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Lessing defend the transparency theory?’13 One of my aims in this chapter is to show that the two questions have a bearing on one another and that problems arise if we allow the textual-historical line of enquiry to be separated off from a concern with what Wellbery terms the ‘truth or contemporaneity’ of Lessing’s ideas. The basic thought here is that unless we examine the persuasiveness of the theories and arguments under discussion we risk attributing to past thinkers views that are implausible or unconvincing and which they may not, in fact, have held, or at least, not in the form in which they have been discussed in recent philosophical debates. Lessing himself reminds us that Laocoon is not a systematic treatise.14 As recent studies have shown,15 he employs both deductive and inductive models of reasoning in ways that are seemingly at variance with each other, and the text is characterized by numerous inconsistencies and shifts in position. According to Élisabeth Décultot, ‘the disconcerting structure’ (la structure déroutante) of Laocoon, in which a principle is formulated only to be undermined by the analysis of specific examples, is continuous with Lessing’s rejection of the systematic and deductive mode of presentation employed by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his Aesthetica, and it should therefore be understood as a strategic means of giving priority to criticism over philosophy.16 More generally, it has been observed that throughout his published writings Lessing willingly embraced conflicting positions as a means of stimulating debate.17 Here we might think of his celebrated observation in How the Ancients Represented Death that, ‘although truth is not established through controversy, it gains from it’, and that ‘dispute nourishes the spirit of inquiry’.18 If Lessing writes to makes us think, to promote argument, 13

Since the answer to these questions need not be identical, it allows for the possibility that the transparency theory is incorrect but that Lessing nonetheless defended it. This is the position adopted by Wellbery. 14 In the preface, Lessing notes that the chapters of Laocoon ‘were written as chance dictated and more in keeping with my reading than any systematic development of general principles’ (Lessing 1984: 5; (2012: 9)): for the claim, cf. the chapters by Squire, Décultot, and Kottman in this volume. 15 See especially Barner 2003 and Beiser 2009. 16 Décultot 2003: 200. 17 H. B. Nisbet, for example, contends that what mattered to Lessing ‘was the need to keep the debate going, to keep his options open’, and that ‘it is in this light that we should interpret Lessing’s many inconsistencies and changes of direction’ (Nisbet 2013b: 8–9). 18 Lessing 1985: 717.

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and to draw out differences of opinion, should we not simply accept that Laocoon admits of a plurality of interpretations and leave it at that? In the present instance, I believe this answer is unsatisfactory. There is a substantial matter of disagreement here, and the attribution to Lessing of two radically opposing points of view—one rejecting and the other endorsing the transparency theory—calls for further investigation. Even if it turns out that the differences are more apparent than real, or that Lessing argues for both positions, we need to know why this is the case and to arrive at our own conclusions as to which is to be preferred. As I have already indicated in my opening remarks, claims for the contemporary relevance of Lessing’s aesthetics are particularly controversial in relation to the visual arts. If the project of extending Lessing’s aesthetics to subsequent art practice is to count as a genuine engagement with the legacy of Laocoon rather than an external imposition, the antitransparency line of interpretation has to possess at least a prima facie plausibility. In other words, only if it can be shown that Lessing also accords a positive value to the artist’s use of the medium—and that he is therefore not inseparably wedded to a defence of the transparency theory—can advocates of Laocoon’s continued relevance to the visual arts claim to be thinking with Lessing rather than against him. However, before we can determine whether or not Lessing was committed to the transparency theory we need to be clear about what that theory entails.

The Transparency Theory of Art Since Wellbery takes Danto to have successfully ‘refuted’ the transparency theory, it seems advisable to look at what Danto has to say in the relevant sections of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Danto draws a tight connection between transparency and the achievement of ‘illusion’, which he takes to lie at the heart of the imitation theory of art.19 The first stage of his argument runs as follows:20

Danto notes that ‘illusion occurs when the viewer believes it is the motif he is perceiving when instead it is the image’, and that the issue ‘is not what in reality marks the difference between motif and representation, but how they strike the eye and seduce the mind’ (Danto 1981: 151). 20 Danto 1981: 151. 19

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If illusion is to occur, the viewer cannot be conscious of any properties that really belong to the medium, for to the degree that we perceive that it is medium, illusion is effectively aborted. So the medium must, as it were, be invisible, and this requirement is perfectly symbolized by the pane of glass which is presumed transparent, something we cannot see but only see through . . . I take the logical invisibility of the medium to be the chief feature of imitation theory. The successful imitator does not merely reproduce the motif; he sublates the medium in which the reproduction occurs . . . So conceived, it is the aim of imitation to conceal from the viewer the fact that it is an imitation.

It is important to note that transparency is not the same as invisibility, for it is possible to see through something transparent, such as a coloured pane of glass or a non-opaque sheet of paper, which is itself visible. We might also ask what is meant by the term ‘logical invisibility’. It seems clear that Danto is not using the term to denote a specific kind of invisibility—something that we might encounter in experience and that possesses its own distinctive features—but rather as shorthand for the claim that the invisibility of the medium is a logical consequence of the imitation theory of art. To see why this matters, we need to expand the frame of reference to include what we might term the ‘experiential’ or ‘phenomenological’ dimension of the imitation theory of art as this is presented by Danto. Consider the experience of looking at a highly ‘illusionistic’ painting such as Murillo’s Two Women at a Window (Fig. 11.1). Under the right circumstances, the viewer may have a strongly veridical ‘illusion’ or visual experience of seeing two women looking out of a window, but she nonetheless remains aware that she is looking at a painting. Illusion is not delusion, and the viewer is able to direct her attention both at what is represented and at the means of representation. It is only under exceptional circumstances—for which we reserve the term trompe l’œil—that we are not ‘conscious of any properties that really belong to the medium’. It is a failure of the imitation theory so formulated that it cannot mark the distinction between trompe l’œil and our normal viewing of pictures. This recognition lies at the basis of Richard Wollheim’s account of the phenomenon of ‘twofoldness’.21 Wollheim maintains that looking at pictures involves a distinctive kind of perception, which he terms ‘seeing-in’. We are simultaneously aware both of the design properties of the picture—its shape or format, and the disposition of marks and of

21

Wollheim 1980 and 1987.

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Fig. 11.1. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Two Women at a Window, c.1655–60. Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

light and shade upon the surface—and the represented content or subject matter. According to Wollheim, these two ‘aspects’, though distinguishable, are phenomenologically inseparable: ‘They are two aspects of a single experience, they are not two experiences.’22 Although seeing-in 22

Wollheim 1987: 46.

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is logically prior to representation, since it also takes place when we see a face or the shape of an animal in natural phenomena such as mottled surfaces or cloud formations, it helps us to account for the fact that in looking at representational painting we characteristically respond not only to what is depicted but also to the way in which the artist has represented it.23 Danto’s argument successfully locates its target when it is directed at Ernst Gombrich’s illusion theory of depiction, which rests on the claim that we cannot simultaneously attend both to the marked surface and to what it represents, but must alternate between the two. Gombrich maintains that ‘though we may be intellectually aware of the fact that any given experience must be an illusion, we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion’.24 He therefore concludes that it is impossible to sustain both forms of awareness at the same time: ‘We can train ourselves to switch more rapidly, indeed to oscillate between readings, but we cannot hold conflicting interpretations.’25 Much recent work in the philosophy of depiction has been directed at overcoming the limitations of this theory. Michael Podro, for example, has drawn on Wollheim’s conception of twofoldness to provide a more satisfactory account of the ways in which our awareness of the materiality of the medium connects with our awareness of the depicted subject, showing how these two forms of awareness are capable of ‘interacting and transforming each other within our experience’.26 Other philosophers have put forward alternative ‘experienced resemblance’ theories of depiction that sustain the basic intuitions of the imitation theory of art without being exposed to the sorts of criticisms Danto puts forward.27 It is not obvious which, if any, of these views might plausibly be attributed to Lessing—and indeed to other eighteenth-century art theorists—but I hope to have shown that further argument is needed before it can be established that Lessing was committed to the version of the imitation theory that is the target of Danto’s criticisms. One way of 23 It is important to note that Wollheim’s theory of ‘seeing-in’ is an account of picture perception and so cannot simply be generalized to include other art forms such as sculpture. My restricted aim here is to show that the transparency is not a necessary presupposition of an imitation theory of art. For further discussion of Wollheim’s concept of ‘seeing-in’, see Grethlein’s chapter in this volume, and Gaiger 2008: 38–62. 24 25 Gombrich 1977: 5. Gombrich 1977: 198. 26 27 Podro 1998: 7. Peacocke 1987; Hopkins 1998.

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thinking about this is to ask whether the imitation theory and the transparency theory of art are simply different names for one and the same position or whether it is possible to hold a version of the imitation theory that does not presuppose the transparency of the medium of representation. With these reservations in mind, I now want to turn to the second stage of Danto’s argument. Danto maintains that:28 It is a clear consequence of [the imitation] theory that whatever response an audience has to an artwork must ipso facto be a response to the content of the artwork. Less pragmatically, whatever properties the artwork has are simply the properties of what the artwork shows—media being ideally empty, and having properties of their own only to the extent that they fail in their transparent ambitions.

Danto’s ‘refutation’ of this version of the imitation theory consists in showing that it does not allow for a distinction between properties that belong to the medium and properties that belong to the represented content. In formal terms, the theory relies on the principle that: x is a beautiful artwork if and only if x is of y and y is beautiful: This can be generalized to cover other aesthetic predicates: ðxÞðyÞðobservable φÞðx is a φ representation of y if x represents y as φÞ:29 To see the problems with this principle, one only has to fill in the symbolic notation with some content: The painting is a beautiful representation of the man if and only if the painting represents the man as beautiful. In Only a Promise of Happiness, Alexander Nehamas identifies Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Old Man with a Child (Fig. 11.2) as an example of a painting in which the representation of something ugly contributes to the beauty of the work. As Nehamas notes, the tender exchange of looks between the child and the older man, who suffers from rhinophyma, is moving, at least in part, because it is unimpeded by his physical deformity.30 This is, perhaps, a special case, but it helps us to see that the beauty or ugliness of an artwork cannot simply be identified with the beauty or ugliness of its represented content. 28 29 30

Danto 1981: 153. This is Savile’s formulation of the ‘iconicity principle’ (Savile 1987: 10). Nehamas 2003: 96.

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Fig. 11.2. Domenico Ghirlandaio, An Old Man and his Grandson, c.1490. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

Similar problems arise in the case of other aesthetic predicates. As Danto observes: ‘We cannot proceed from “are powerful drawings of flowers” to “are drawings of powerful flowers”.’31 This would give us: 31

Danto 1981: 157.

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A drawing is a powerful representation of flowers if and only if the drawing represents flowers as powerful. And this statement is clearly false. Danto takes it as given that Lessing is an advocate of the transparency theory, citing as evidence his claim in chapter 2 of Laocoon that the ‘wise Greek’ restricted painting to the imitation of beautiful bodies.32 This attribution, which is made in passing, is not supported by any further consideration of the text or the specific context in which the remark is made. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is unusually replete with historical references, and Danto carefully distinguishes his position from that defended by other philosophers. However, the book is intended as a contribution to constructive philosophy rather than a study in the history of ideas. Danto’s primary concern is with questions concerning the ontology of artworks. In particular, he seeks to show that works of art possess a different ontological status from what he terms ‘mere real things’. It is therefore, perhaps, unsurprising that he emphasizes the ‘philosophical repugnance’ elicited by the transparency theory,33 for the distinction he wishes to make requires that in our experience of artworks we are aware of the difference between properties that can be attributed to the material object before us and the intentional and relational properties that can be attributed to the ‘work’, understood as a distinctive kind of cultural or institutional object that possesses separately specifiable identity and persistence conditions. The recognition that a work of art is underdetermined by its material or physical properties provides the starting-point for a thoughtprovoking analysis of the distinction between ‘works’ and ‘things’ that has been taken up and developed by other philosophers working in the analytic tradition.34 To pursue this line of enquiry would take us too far from Laocoon, and it is clear, in any case, that Danto’s arguments against transparency are directed at a particular conception of artistic representation rather than the views of any specific thinker. We are entitled, of course, to ask who, if anyone, actually held the theory of art

32

Danto 1981: 153.

33

Danto 1981: 157.

34

Lamarque 2010.

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that he rejects, but a properly historical answer to that question is not to be found in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.

The ‘Framework of Enlightenment Semiotics’ Having considered in some detail Danto’s criticisms of the transparency theory, I now want to turn to Wellbery’s contention—in agreement with Danto—that Lessing was an advocate of this theory and that its ‘self-evidence’ in the eighteenth century marks a key difference from our own historical period. One of the great strengths of Wellbery’s approach is that he explicitly thematizes the ‘otherness’ of Enlightenment aesthetics and that he therefore pays careful attention to the intellectual context within which specific arguments and ideas were articulated. His dense and multi-stranded analysis of eighteenthcentury art theory offers multiple points of entry. Here, however, I want to focus on his claim that it is only through reference to the ‘framework of Enlightenment semiotics’ that we can arrive at a correct understanding of the position Lessing defends in Laocoon. While acknowledging that many of the framework’s constituent elements are derived from the work of the rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Wellbery locates its clearest articulation in the theory of language and signs put forward by his follower, Christian Wolff, who not only helped to popularize Leibniz’s philosophy but also extended it to other areas of human knowledge. Wellbery places particular emphasis on Wolff ’s theory of ‘a progressive process of semiosis’, or what he terms more broadly the Enlightenment ‘myth of the sign’.35 The central idea here is that mankind’s emergence from dependency on nature was achieved through the uniquely human capacity for language, characterized as an ability to use arbitrary signs. The realization of ever-greater freedom through semiosis takes the form of a progressive transition from perception to symbolic cognition whose projected telos or endpoint would be ‘a completely transparent language that is equivalent to divine cognition’.36 The ability to use symbols is both what allows us to separate ourselves from nature, marking our difference from animals, and, at the same time, an expression of our finitude. 35

Wellbery 1984: 37.

36

Wellbery 1984: 42.

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Although we cannot ever arrive at divine cognition, understood as direct or unmediated knowledge, the trajectory of the progressive process of semiosis is oriented towards ‘an ideal of cognition which is purely intuitive’.37 As Wellbery notes, on this account: ‘The sign is always a means or a medium . . . something to be passed through.’38 Within this explanatory framework, any residual reliance on the materiality of the sign vehicle is taken to characterize a less developed form of semiosis, a restriction or limitation that needs to be overcome. We can see how this idea structures Wellbery’s reading of Laocoon by considering the following quotations:39 Particularly important is Lessing’s attempt to evaluate the arts in terms of the degree of imaginative freedom they afford both artist and audience. The superiority of poetry over the plastic arts in this regard is derived from the more refined form of semiosis (or process of signification) the poet employs. What Lessing repeatedly urges for art is the transformation of matter into the immateriality of a mental representation, the elimination of every material residue which could burden or limit the movement of the imagination. In poetry the aesthetic object is purely a product of the imagination; it has passed through or been processed by mind. The plastic arts themselves are artistically successful only insofar as they induce an imaginative movement that leaves the material work behind.

Carried over to the domain of art, the theory of a progressive process of semiosis fulfils a normative function: it justifies the hierarchical ordering of painting and sculpture beneath poetry on the grounds that, as ‘material arts’, they are further removed from the ideal of transparency. Although internally consistent, this evaluative schema is purchased at a cost. For it is a consequence of the theory that the perceptual or sensuous features of artworks are to be identified as impediments to the ‘play of the imagination’ and that this is ‘delimited by the imposing presence of the material’.40 We might wonder, in this case, why bother with art at all? Why not simply accept that all art, including poetry, has a constitutive dependency on its sign vehicle, and that if the goal is to achieve unmediated access to the realm of pure thought, we should turn to logic or philosophy rather than to works of art? 37 39 40

38 Wellbery 1984: 40. Wellbery 1984: 37. The following quotations are drawn from Wellbery 1984: 7, 116, 133. Wellbery 1984: 118.

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One way of formulating this objection is to observe that the framework of Enlightenment semiotics, as Wellbery presents it, is unable to accord any positive value to art as art; that is to say, it places the arts in a hierarchical relationship based on their ability to approximate to a nonartistic achievement: the realization of pure or immaterial signification. This objection also holds for Wellbery’s account of literature, for he claims that the voiced sounds of poetry are able to achieve ‘immateriality’ only to the extent that the sounds ‘disappear as soon as they are uttered, giving way to an imaginative experience of the content they are arranged to signify’.41 Any attention to the qualities of the words or sounds themselves as bearers of meaning leaves poetry trapped in the ‘materiality of things’ and thus burdened or limited by the properties of the sign vehicle. Although poetry is placed higher than painting and sculpture, it is able to realize the goal of pure or immaterial signification only insofar as it ceases, in a significant sense, to be poetry. Wellbery’s argument is not, of course, that we should accept the framework of Enlightenment semiotics; as we have seen, he emphasizes its remoteness from our own ‘order of words and things’. Nonetheless, there are at least two ways in which we might go about challenging his interpretation. The first is to question whether the theory of a progressive process of semiosis did in fact play the role that he accords it, both in Lessing’s work and more widely during the Enlightenment period.42 Since the myth of the sign is intended to explain why the transparency theory ‘seemed so absolutely selfevident’, we can place pressure on this view by drawing attention to the range and diversity of alternative ideas and approaches that coexisted alongside Wolffian rationalism and that arguably made an equally important contribution to eighteenth-century art criticism and philosophy. By the time Lessing came to write Laocoon, he was not only fully at home in the alternative, empirical-sensualist tradition of philosophical reflection on art, represented by the work of figures such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hume in Britain and the Abbé Dubos and Denis Diderot in France, he was also familiar with recent, revisionary 41

Wellbery 1984: 123. Compare the approach adopted by Lifschitz (this volume), who situates Laocoon in a wider European discourse on signs that extends beyond Wolff and his followers. 42

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developments internal to the German rationalist tradition. Baumgarten’s call for a new discipline of ‘aesthetics’—first announced in his Reflections on Poetry (Meditationes philosophicae) of 1735 and elaborated in great detail in the two published volumes of his Aesthetica in 1750 and 1758—is explicitly directed against the rationalist distrust of sensory perception as inherently ‘confused’ that remains absolutely central to Wolffian metaphysics. Baumgarten retains the traditional distinction between a higher and a lower faculty of cognition, the first concerned with things that are known by the mind (noêta) and the second with things that are perceived through the senses (aisthêta).43 However, the revisionary aim of the new ‘science of sensible knowledge’ (scientia cognitionis sensitiuae) is to provide a positive re-evaluation of the ‘confused knowledge’ provided by sensory perception.44 Although sensate representations are not ‘distinct’—that is to say, they do not allow us to identify the constituent elements that are held or ‘con-fused’ together in a single representation and thus fail to meet the standard rationalist requirement for trustworthy cognition—they possess compensating virtues such as abundance, liveliness, plenitude, vividness, and complexity, virtues that are revealed in exemplary fashion in our experience of works of art.45 Consider, for example, the following passage from }517 of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, which invites comparison with Lessing’s celebrated discussion of the ‘pregnant moment’ in chapter 3 of Laocoon:46 The more notes a perception embraces, the stronger it is. Hence an obscure perception comprehending more notes than a clear one is stronger than the latter, and a confused perception comprehending more notes than a distinct one is stronger than the latter. Perceptions containing many perceptions in themselves are called PREGNANT PERCEPTIONS. Therefore, pregnant perceptions are stronger.

43 For the distinction between ‘things perceived [αἰσθητά] and things known [νοητά]’, see Baumgarten 1954: 78 (}116). 44 For Baumgarten’s definition of aesthetics as the ‘science of sensible knowledge’, see Baumgarten 1983: 3 (}1). 45 Baumgarten defines ‘sensitive knowledge’ as ‘complex representation below the threshold where the analytical separation of discrete elements of that representation becomes possible’ (Baumgarten 1983: 10–11 (}17)). I have used the translation of this passage in Gross 2002: 410. 46 Baumgarten 2013: 201.

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My point is not that Lessing was indebted to Baumgarten, though he was, of course, familiar with the Aesthetica, with which he contrasts his own approach in the preface to Laocoon.47 I simply wish to emphasize that alternative philosophical resources were available to him—and to other eighteenth-century art theorists—that either cannot be assimilated to or directly challenge the Wolffian framework, and that this cannot therefore be taken to be ‘self-evident’. There are places where Wellbery appears to be aware of this challenge. After rehearsing his view that ‘the progress from immediate sense intuition through conceptualization to philosophical mastery, as Wolff describes it, is accompanied stage for stage by a refinement of sign use’, he observes that: ‘Aesthetic theory sought to halt this progressive semiosis, which it interpreted as a loss of metaphysical repleteness, a disintegration of global representations, and an impoverishment of subjective experience.’48 Elsewhere, however, he tends to emphasize those aspects of the work of Baumgarten, Georg Friedrich Meier, and Moses Mendelssohn that remain consistent with the Wolffian semiotic framework.49 For example, he attributes to Mendelssohn the view that:50 The ideal medium for an effective mimesis would be one which is immaterial, which is free of the existential determinations characteristic of painting and sculpture. The ideal medium for presenting ideas to intuition would be the medium of ideas themselves, for only in such a medium could intuitions be evoked without their being tied to particular existents.

Wellbery acknowledges that ‘Lessing stands very much in the tradition of Baumgarten, Meier, and Mendelssohn’, that is to say, in the tradition of those who sought to undertake a positive re-evaluation of sensate representations, but he contends that Lessing ‘also departs from them . . . insofar as he positively evaluates semiosis as a process which opens up new and wider aesthetic horizons. Central to this revaluation is the notion of freedom.’51 This observation brings us to the second way in which we might go about challenging Wellbery’s interpretation. This requires that we focus

47

48 Lessing 1984: 5 (2012: 9). Wellbery 1984: 129. For alternative accounts of the relation between Mendelssohn’s theory of art and the views Lessing defends in Laocoon, see Stierle 1984 and Vesper 2013—along with the chapters by Beiser and Lifschitz in this volume. 50 51 Wellbery 1984: 68. Wellbery 1984: 129. 49

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more closely on the conception of imaginative freedom that he attributes to Lessing. The guiding idea here, as we have seen, is that the freedom of the imagination is impeded by the materiality of the sign vehicle and that the arts can be placed in a hierarchical relationship based on the extent to which they are able to realize the ideal of transparency. The denial of any positive value to the medium of representation results in the assertion— puzzling to anyone who is familiar with Baumgarten—that ‘the imaginative field of illusory objects is the true locus of aesthetic experience. An experience which abides on the level of sensation, by contrast, is not aesthetic at all.’52 The problem with this conception is not just that it severs any meaningful experiential connection between the material or sensuous form of an artwork and its represented content—since this, after all, is precisely what the theory aims at—but rather that it provides only a negative account of imaginative freedom. If our imaginative engagement with artworks is to be identified as a positive capacity, ‘as the freedom to do something rather than simply as freedom from some constraint’,53 the relationship between the imagination and the materials that stimulate its activity cannot be understood in merely negative terms. As Robert Brandom argued in a now-classic paper, positive freedom ‘does not consist simply in a looseness of fit in the constraining norms’.54 The recognition that freedom is not merely a way of ‘evading or minimizing’ constraint but a productive capacity that actively engages with those constraints offers an alternative way of understanding the relationship between our imaginative responses to artworks and the ‘material limitations’ that are inherent in the properties of the medium. On this account, the materiality of the sign vehicle is not a burden or impediment that inhibits the free play of the imagination. Instead, we are asked to recognize a positive or productive connection between the recipient’s imaginative responses and the possibilities that are afforded by the artist’s deployment of the materials out of which the work is made.

Wellbery 1984: 106. Compare Wellbery’s observation that ‘Art works are two-tiered. They have a sensible stratum, in which the work is materially given, and a non-sensible or immaterial stratum, where the genuine aesthetic object is rendered imaginatively presentto-mind’ (p. 106). 53 54 Brandom 1979: 194. Brandom 1979: 194. 52

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Imagination and ‘Answerability’ to the Work These reflections lead directly into, or rather they already anticipate, the guiding intuition behind the opposing line of interpretation, which holds that Lessing’s aim is to repudiate rather than to uphold the transparency theory. I have identified Savile’s analysis of Laocoon as providing the most sophisticated articulation of this position. The situation is made more complex, however, by Savile’s adoption of an overtly ‘reconstructive’ interpretative strategy. Not only does he acknowledge that throughout Laocoon Lessing ‘speaks of painting in terms of imitation, illusion, and deception (Nachahmung, Illusion, Täuschung)’, he also concedes that Lessing probably did regard what he terms the ‘iconicity principle’ as ‘a constitutive truth about the nature of painterly imitation’.55 Like Danto and Wellbery, Savile maintains that this principle is ‘thoroughly discredited today’.56 However, he urges caution against imputing to Lessing ‘the repugnant view that all visual representation has to be construed in terms of illusion’,57 where this is held to mean that the viewer is unaware that she is looking at a representation, but instead believes that she is actually experiencing the depicted scene. Whereas Wellbery takes Lessing to be unequivocally committed to the transparency theory of art, Savile presents us with a more differentiated picture. Rather than identifying a single, unified theory that structures the argument of Laocoon, he acknowledges the underlying tensions that are operative in the text. His approach is based on identifying an alternative, if not yet fully developed, set of proposals in which Lessing gives priority to the role of the imagination in the experience of works of art. Although he concedes, somewhat dryly, that ‘Lessing is far from expansive about how he thinks imagination is to be put to work’,58 he shows that Laocoon provides valuable resources for understanding the relationship between the distinctive characteristics of the medium, or sign vehicle, and the different forms of imaginative engagement that are proper to different forms of art. He thereby brings us to see ‘how tense the relation is between Lessing’s conception of graphic representation in terms of illusion and his espousal of non-transparency when that is conceived as a claim about the physical medium in which the 55 56

Savile 1987: 10. For Savile’s formulation of the iconicity principle, see above, p. 288. 57 58 Savile 1987: 11. Savile 1987: 36. Savile 1987: 74.

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artist works’.59 On this modified view, it is not necessary to establish that Lessing was consistently opposed to the transparency theory, only that he put forward one or more independent arguments in favour of nontransparency. In short, once we accept that the possibility that Lessing was pursuing potentially conflicting aims, we do not need to decide between disjunctive alternatives. Instead, the interpretative task is to separate out the different strands of thought that are woven together in Laocoon and to examine the persuasiveness of the individual constituents. The task of comparing the two opposing lines of interpretation is further complicated by differences in the way in which the concept of transparency is understood. As we have seen, both Danto and Wellbery identify the transparency theory of art with the claim that the medium of representation should be ‘ideally empty’ or ‘invisible’, since it is the apprehended content—the scene or action that is depicted—that is the proper locus of aesthetic experience, not the material or sensible features of the work of art. By contrast, Savile identifies transparency with the idea that ‘the medium within which the artist works places no constraints on his selection and handling of subject matter’.60 Although this formulation of the transparency theory relies on the same metaphor of looking through or past the medium of representation, emphasis is shifted towards the question of whether the same subject can be represented with equal facility in different artistic media. On this more demanding conception, to establish the inadmissibility of the transparency theory, Lessing needs to show ‘(a) that all arts are constrained in what they represent by their medium, and (b) that different arts are constrained by their media in different ways’.61 That Lessing sought to refute this version of the transparency theory seems relatively uncontroversial. He explicitly presents Laocoon as an attempt to overcome the distortions wrought by the doctrine of ut pictura poesis, and much of the text is given over to an analysis of the salient differences between verbal and visual forms of representation, including his central example of the different ways in which the suffering Laocoon is represented in Virgil’s Aeneid and the antique sculptural group. Nonetheless, it proved far harder than Lessing had anticipated to demonstrate from ‘first principles’ that there is a binding connection

59

Savile 1987: 38.

60

Savile 1987: 28.

61

Savile 1987: 29.

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between the nature of the different ‘media’ (Mittel) or ‘signs’ (Zeichen) that are used by poetry and painting and the different kinds of subject matter that these can be used to represent.62 The basic elements of this argument are already to be found in one of the earliest sketches for Laocoon:63 Both poetry and painting are imitative arts; the purpose of both is to awaken in us the most vivid sensory representations of their subjects. They therefore share in common all the rules that follow from the concept of imitation and from this goal. However, they make use of entirely different means (Mittel) in order to imitate; and from the difference in these means all the rules specific to each can be derived. Painting uses figures and colours in space. Poetry articulates sounds in time. The signs of the former are natural. The signs of the latter are arbitrary.

The difference between narrative and depictive modes of representation is grounded in an analysis not only of the different kinds of sign that are used by literature and the visual arts but also the different ways in which they are ordered or combined. Lessing maintains that ‘signs that are contiguous with one another can only be used to represent objects, or parts of objects, that are contiguously ordered’ and that ‘bodies with their visual properties are therefore the proper objects of painting’. By contrast, ‘signs that are ordered sequentially can only be used to represent objects, or parts of objects, that are sequentially ordered’ and that ‘actions are therefore the proper objects of poetry’.64 In the published version of Laocoon, the deductive argument from the nature of signs with which Lessing had begun the first drafts is held back to chapter 16, where it is qualified by the introduction of a crucial concession. As many readers of Laocoon have noted, the establishment of a strict correlation between specific kinds of sign and specific kinds of representational content is undermined, if not fully abandoned, by Lessing’s admission that signs only need to ‘bear a suitable relation (ein bequemes Verhältniß) to what is signified’,65 and that the full range of

62

63 Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115). Lessing 1990: 219. Barner 1990: 219–20. On Lessing’s problematic distinction between ‘arbitrary’ and ‘natural’ signs, see also the chapters by Beiser and Lifschitz in this volume. 65 Lessing 1984: 78 (2012: 115). 64

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subject matter is therefore available to both poetry and painting, albeit through the use of allusion.66 We do not have to look far to find outstanding examples of verbal and visual works of art that transgress Lessing’s ‘rules’, and it is clear that poetry can be used to describe bodies and other spatially extended objects, just as painting can be used to depict actions and events that unfold over time.67 Lessing’s account of the limits of poetry and painting is, perhaps, best understood as articulating a normative conception of what is fitting or appropriate to different forms of art, informed by the prior commitments of classicism, rather than necessary conditions that are inherent in the different media of art or the nature of the signs they employ. Whether or not this is the case, the requirement that there be a ‘suitable relation’ is simply too weak to secure the claim that the medium of representation imposes binding constraints on what can successfully be represented. Savile patiently explores a number of ways in which this argument might be strengthened, either by limiting its scope or by altering its premises. He also identifies three other, independent arguments in Laocoon, which he terms the argument from beauty, the argument from subject matter, and the argument from the imagination. In each case, he endeavours to reconstruct a valid anti-transparency argument on Lessing’s behalf. Nonetheless, his final conclusion is that none of these arguments is able to achieve the goal of refuting the transparency theory of art. Not only does Lessing’s attempt ‘to establish a difference of substance between art and poetry’ turn out to be unsuccessful, it brings us to see ‘how elusive any theoretically interesting and critically helpful statement of disanalogies between them really is’.68 It might be countered that the requirements Savile lays down are too demanding, and that Lessing succeeds in establishing the more limited thesis that attention to the medium of representation sometimes has a role to play in our appreciation of works of art. This would suffice to reject the alternative formulation of the transparency theory as presented by Danto and Wellbery. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the 66 For a detailed analysis of Lessing’s argument in chapter 16 and his development of a ‘semiotic aesthetics’, see Trabant’s chapter in this volume. 67 See Mitchell 1984a; on Lessing’s slippage of what painting and poetry ‘can’ do to what they ‘should’ do, cf. also Mitchell’s preface to this volume (with further commentary in Squire’s chapter). 68 Savile 1987: 95.

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outcome of Savile’s discussion is wholly negative. The contention that Lessing fails to provide a valid anti-transparency argument is counterbalanced by Savile’s acknowledgment that, in the course of developing his arguments against transparency, Lessing focuses attention on ‘the role of imagination in the proper experience of the visual arts’,69 and that it is his ‘brilliant invocation of imagination’ that ultimately undermines any attempt to establish generic boundaries between the arts: once we come to appreciate ‘how wide the call on the viewer’s imagination may be’, we see ‘how little trammelled’ the artist is by the limitations of the medium.70 To clarify the issues at stake here we need to return to the question of what is meant by ‘imaginative freedom’ and to examine how the two lines of interpretation diverge on this crucial issue. The key passage for Savile’s reconstruction is to be found in chapter 3 of Laocoon, where Lessing introduces the idea of the ‘pregnant’ or ‘fruitful’ moment. Lessing starts out by observing that whereas literature, as a narrative art, can represent a continuous sequence of events, painting and sculpture, as spatial arts, are limited to the representation of a specific moment in time. The visual artist therefore needs to choose the moment that is depicted with great care. In particular, it is important to avoid presenting an action at its height, for this would inhibit what he terms the ‘free play’ of the viewer’s imagination:71 since the works of both the painter and the sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated—contemplated repeatedly and at length— it is evident that the single moment and the point of view from which the whole scene is presented cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which allows the imagination free play (freies Spiel) is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imagination, the more we must think we see. In the full trajectory of an effect, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot soar above the impression made on our senses, to concern itself with weaker images, shunning the visible fullness already presented as a limit beyond which it cannot go.

69

70 Savile 1987: 65. Savile 1987: 95. Lessing 1984: 19–20 (2012: 25–6). I have modified the translation here, drawing on Podro 1994: 341–2. 71

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It is difficult to see how the account of aesthetic experience that Lessing presents in this passage can be accommodated within an interpretative framework that takes the materiality of the artwork to be an impediment to imaginative engagement. Lessing clearly recognizes that our interest in works of visual art is not exhausted once we have apprehended the represented content, and that successfully realized paintings and sculptures typically reward sustained and repeated contemplation. If the viewer were only interested in gaining access to the represented content rather than the way in which the content has been represented through the resources of the medium, it is unclear why such activity should be considered productive or desirable. The very idea of dwelling on an artwork and using it to engage in deeper and further imagining relies on a positive conception of the role of the materials in facilitating the viewer’s imaginative responses. Similarly, when Lessing says that ‘to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot soar above the impression made on our senses (da sie über den sinnlichen Ausdruck nicht hinaus kann)’, his point is not that the artist should find a way to grant the viewer direct access to an abstract idea, thereby permitting the materiality of the artwork to be left behind, but rather that the sensible experience afforded by the artwork should be such that it stimulates rather than restricts the free play of the imagination. To use the terms we have taken up from Brandom, free play is here understood not as freedom from constraint but as the freedom to do something, the freedom vividly to imagine the trajectory of an effect without the content of our imaginings being delimited by a determinate endpoint. Savile takes this argument a step further by showing that Lessing’s appeal to the free play of the imagination is not to be understood in the permissive sense of ‘free association’, or the projection of subjective thoughts and emotions on to the work of art, but as a capacity to respond to cues that are provided by the work itself. This form of imaginative engagement involves a complex interplay of activity and receptivity, and it remains attentive to what can be confirmed or corroborated by identifiable features or properties of the work. Savile draws an informative contrast with an alternative account of imaginative freedom that takes the work of art as a prompt for what he terms ‘Walter Mittyish fantasising’. Someone who responded to the Laocoon sculptural group in this way might think of himself as a ‘heroic Grand Captain’ and imagine

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leading his fellow tourists in the Vatican on a mission to rescue the priest and his sons from the clutches of the two sea-serpents.72 There are three problems with this kind of imaginative response, according to Savile. First, ‘it is all too private’ in the sense that our imaginings are allowed to wander as they please rather than being guided by features of the work: ‘the content of private phantasy is just what we make it and in so far as it plays freely it is hardly answerable to the work that sparks it off.’73 Second, such imagining ‘can only be developed as our concentration detaches itself from the work that provokes it. It is then the phantasy that engages our attention properly speaking and not the work.’74 Finally, since this kind of imagining can go in any direction that the viewer wishes, and is thus not, in any sense, controlled by the work of art or the intentions of the artist, ‘it is not something that speaks in favour of the work qua art’.75 The work functions as a prop or stimulus for fantasizing, but not as something that is able to hold our attention in its own right. Lessing’s brief but highly suggestive account of the sustained attention required by works of art that are ‘created not merely to be given at a glance but to be contemplated—contemplated repeatedly and at length’, makes it clear that he succeeds in avoiding these problems. As Savile points out, Lessing is insistent that ‘the free play of imagination has to coexist with, fortify even, the attention we fix on the work’, and that it is thus ‘of a kind that is resistant to the temptation to private phantasy’.76 Savile concludes that if we are to acknowledge the difference between these two approaches:77 we are required to find a different way of taking Lessing’s talk of imagination’s free play, and one that permits of exercise within the artist’s control, that is in a way that makes it answerable to the work that invites it. Only then will the richness that the imagination brings in its engagement with the artist’s representation be genuinely attributable to the work and properly bear upon its critical evaluation.

The central idea here is that if our imaginative responses are to be answerable to the work rather than becoming detached from it in the manner of private phantasy, we need to be attentive to the way in which

72 75

Savile 1987: 67. Savile 1987: 68.

73 76

Savile 1987: 68. Savile 1987: 68.

74 77

Savile 1987: 68. Savile 1987: 68–9.

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the artist has deployed the materials at her disposal. This, in turn, requires that we acknowledge a distinction between the materials out of which something is made and the use of those materials as a medium over which the artist exercises control. In Michael Podro’s succinct formulation, the medium is ‘material in use’,78 and the attentive viewer responds to the materials with a sense of the purpose to which they have been put. Rather than identifying the perceptual or sensuous properties of the artwork as an impediment, something that we have to pass through or beyond ‘in order to reach the non-sensible stratum where the imagination actualizes the aesthetic object’,79 the task of sustaining recognition involves a complex interplay between the recipient’s imaginative responses and a sense of purpose that is recoverable from features of the work.

Conclusion My aim in this chapter has been to bring out some of the philosophical and interpretative issues that arise when the concept of transparency is used to elucidate Lessing’s aesthetics. The decision to focus on two conflicting approaches to Laocoon has of necessity led to a high level of abstraction from the text. There are undoubtedly passages that can be used to support both lines of interpretation, and I am aware that I have not directly engaged with the various remarks by Lessing that accord with Wellbery’s contention that a ‘fundamental tendency’ of Laocoon is ‘to elide the materiality of the art work’.80 Any discussion of Laocoon has to take into consideration the unusually complex mode of presentation through which Lessing communicates his ideas: the strategic shifts of position and the inventiveness of thought and argument make the text highly resistant to summary or reduction to a single position.81 Rather than reaching a decision as to which is the ‘correct’ interpretation, I have sought to identify the consequences that follow from commitment to the concept of transparency and to invite the reader to consider whether these consequences are desirable. Savile’s identification of alternative philosophical resources in Laocoon that can be used to defend a positive 78

79 80 Podro 1993: 45. Wellbery 1984: 106. Wellbery 1984: 116. On the Laocoon’s own blurring of the boundaries between ‘criticism’ and ‘poetry’, cf. also Décultot’s chapter in this volume. 81

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conception of imaginative freedom merits consideration alongside other, better-known accounts. This, in turn, helps us to resist the apparently straightforward choice between ‘analytic’ and ‘contextualist’ approaches. The issues here are far from resolved, but I hope I have done enough to cast doubt on the idea that transparency is an ideal to which art should approximate, and to question the view that Lessing was so confined within the Enlightenment ‘framework of semiotics’ that he was unable to recognize that there are distinctive achievements that are proper to art—achievements that are realized, at least in part, through the materiality of the medium.

12 Lessing’s Laocoon and the ‘As-If’ of Aesthetic Experience Jonas Grethlein

‘Viel Feind, viel Ehr’ Is the German proverb ‘Viel Feind, viel Ehr’ (‘many critics, much honour’) more than a consolatory topos that comes in handy when our work has failed to convince our peers? If so, then Laocoon ranks high among the texts that prove the truth of the proverb. Lessing’s essay is simultaneously famous—arguably one of the most prominent treatises in the field of aesthetics—and the object of vehement criticism, even outright condemnation. Only three years after Laocoon appeared in print, Herder published his first Kritisches Wäldchen (‘Critical Grove’), a response that, running over more than 250 pages in the original edition, is as disparaging as it is detailed.1 The more recent reception of the text features attacks that prove no less fierce. Critics have, in particular, unveiled the chauvinist agenda underlying Lessing’s comparison of poetry with painting. There are strong nationalistic overtones, as Lessing (enlisting British authors such as Shakespeare and Milton as allies) rants against the ‘decadent’ French who corrupt poetry through their pictorialism: at stake in all this, of course, are ideas about the proper heirs of the classical tradition.2 1

Herder 1993 (first published 1769): 63–245; cf. the introduction to this volume, pp. 40–1. See especially Mitchell 1986: 105–6. On the nationalist agenda of Laocoon, see also Gombrich 1957: 139—along with e.g. Mitchell’s foreword to the present volume, Squire’s chapter, and Harloe’s discussion of Lessing’s response to Adam Smith. 2

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The entanglement of the aesthetic with political issues is palpable in the borderline metaphor for the relation between poetry and painting:3 But as two equitable and friendly neighbours do not permit the one to take unbecoming liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, yet on their extreme frontiers practice a mutual forbearance by which both sides make peaceful compensation for those slight aggressions which, in haste and from force of circumstance, the one finds himself compelled to make on the other’s privilege: so also with painting and poetry.

The imagery used to illustrate the relation between poetry and painting seems to unmask the political programme underlying an aesthetic argument. Further agendas that are equally unpopular in current criticism map onto the political frontier in Laocoon. It has been pointed out that the juxtaposition of painting and poetry is gendered: whereas the passive and beautiful bodies depicted by painting evoke the idea of femininity, the actions represented in poetry exude masculinity.4 The privileging of poetry over painting also bears out the Protestant esteem for the word and seems to reflect an anti-Catholic bias. ‘There is’, as one critic (himself raised a Roman Catholic) puts it, ‘fear in the Laocoon that the visual might excite viewers into Catholicism . . . ’5 Nationalistic, sexist, and Protestant: a stronger captatio maleuolentiae for critics today seems hard to come by. Laocoon’s argument has also proven open to challenge from the perspective of aesthetics. The paradigm of mimesis on which the essay is predicated began to lose its plausibility during Lessing’s lifetime.6 Seen

3

Lessing 1984: 91. For Lessing’s original German text, see Lessing 2012: 130 (with the rather different discussion within Trabant’s chapter in this volume): ‘Doch, so wie zwey billige freundschaftliche Nachbarn zwar nicht verstatten, daß sich einer in des andern innerstem Reiche ungeziemende Freyheiten herausnehme, wohl aber auf den äussersten Grenzen eine wechselseitige Nachsicht herrschen lassen, welche die kleinen Eingriffe, die der eine in des andern Gerechtsame in der Geschwindigkeit sich durch seine Umstände zu thun genöthiget siehet, friedlich von beyden Theilen compensiret: so auch die Mahlerey und Poesie.’ 4 Cf. Mitchell 1986: 108–11; Gustafson 1993; Mattick 2003: 53–60. Further comments on the ‘gendered aesthetics’ of Laocoon can be found in Mitchell’s foreword and Squire’s chapter in this volume. 5 Squire 2009: 107–11 (quotation from 109), with further comments in his chapter in this volume; cf. Mitchell 1986: 106. 6 Note that in emphasizing the imagination of the recipient, Lessing himself moves away from an understanding of mimesis that is defined as the imitation of the world: see e.g. Halliwell 2002: 119.

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less and less as imitation of the world, art was increasingly conceptualized as the expression of a creative subject. In the twentieth century, the linguistic turn and other theoretical approaches further discredited the idea of mimesis understood as a faithful representation of the world. Likewise it has been noted that pictures are by no means confined to representing a single moment, as Lessing assumes.7 Counter-examples are easy to find. Poussin’s painting of The Jews Gathering the Manna in the Desert (from the late 1630s) is a case in point (Fig. 12.1): on the left, we see the starving Israelites, on the right, Israelites picking up the manna. The two phases of the picture are spatially very close and intricately linked—there is a continuous group of Israelites rather than two distinct parties. In the foreground, for example, a young man leaning over an old man gestures to the right where others are busy picking up the manna. Conversely, some of the figures who have already received the manna turn to the left, seemingly to help those still suffering. Poussin’s painting illustrates that even the major Western tradition of painting harbours works which express a sequence through embedding more than one scene in a single frame. However, Lessing’s assumption is not as arbitrary as it may seem; it is part and parcel of his notion of mimesis. For Lessing, pictorial representation hinges on the similarity of spatial relations: it mimics a spatial layout. Paintings that do not do so are like texts which describe objects in space.8 Just as such texts do not capitalize on the mimetic potential encapsulated in their sequential nature, paintings representing more than one moment fail to deploy their mimetic means which are spatial (‘means of imitation, which it can combine in space only’).9 Lessing’s idea of pictures as window-like is thus firmly rooted in his concept of mimesis. That being said, the idea is by no means self-evident, but a normative thesis that narrative and pictorial mimesis is temporal and spatial respectively. If we turn from the content of representation to its reception, further challenges to Lessing’s argument arise.10 We perceive words, sentences, 7

E.g. Wolf 2002; Giuliani 2003: 29–34; cf. also Giuliani’s chapter in this volume. On texts that describe, see e.g. Lessing 2012: 130–8 (translated into English as Lessing 1984: 91–7). 9 Lessing 1984: 77. For Lessing’s original German text, see Lessing 2012: 114: ‘Mittel ihrer Nachahmung, die sie nur im Raume verbinden kann.’ 10 Cf. Torgovnik 1985: 31–6. 8

Fig. 12.1. Nicolas Poussin, The Jews Gathering the Manna in the Desert, c.1637–9. Oil on canvas, 149  200 cm. Paris, Musée du Louvre. © Eric Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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and stories sequentially, but we make sense of them synchronically.11 In order to comprehend a sentence, we have to attend to its entire construction. When we interpret a tragedy, we envisage the plot in its entirety. Our processing of texts thus interweaves diachrony with synchrony. Inversely, neuro-cognitivists have confirmed that we do not process pictures in a single moment.12 The area grasped by our eye is tiny, so the eye constantly jumps from one point to another. How long it takes to view a painting varies and ultimately defies definition, but viewing is not a simultaneous activity. Reception thus tinges pictures with sequence and poetry with simultaneity. Our list of criticisms and counter-arguments could be extended. Still, I wish to make a case that Laocoon merits our attention not only for historical reasons: its shortcomings notwithstanding, Laocoon is a text that can still inspire theoretical discussions today. In this chapter, I would like to show that nothing less than Lessing’s association of poetry with time and painting with space can enhance our understanding of aesthetic experience.13 Of course, the flaws of Lessing’s model will have to be kept in mind and will require some qualifications. Nonetheless,

11 For this observation in the context of a critical engagement with Laocoon, see Stierle 1984: 46. 12 Jarbus 1967 was seminal for explorations of eye-movement. More recently, see Land and Tatler 2009. Lessing 1984: 85–6 is not entirely unaware of the time needed for viewing a painting: ‘We first look at its parts singly, then the combination of parts, and finally the totality’ (Lessing 2012: 123: ‘Erst betrachten wir die Theile desselben einzeln, hierauf die Verbindung dieser Theile, und endlich das Ganze.’). But he adds: ‘Our senses perform these various operations with such astonishing rapidity that they seem to us to be but one single operation, and this rapidity is absolutely necessary if we are to receive an impression of the whole, which is nothing more than the result of the conceptions of the parts and of their combination’ (‘Unsere Sinne verrichten diese verschiedene Operationen mit einer so erstaunlichen Schnelligkeit, daß sie uns nur eine einzige zu seyn bedünken, und diese Schnelligkeit ist unumgänglich nothwendig, wann wir einen Begriff von dem Ganzen, welcher nichts mehr als das Resultat von den Begriffen der Theile und ihrer Verbindung ist, bekommen sollen’). 13 In Grethlein, forthcoming, I tease out the ramifications of this Lessing interpretation for our understanding of aesthetic experience, using ancient narratives and pictures to put this approach to the test. For a different attempt to make Laocoon fruitful for aesthetics today, see Gaiger 2013, who concentrates on the notion of imaginative freedom—an argument further developed in Gaiger’s chapter in this volume. Trabant (this volume) likewise argues that Laocoon juxtaposes Poesie and Mahlerey rather as twins than as hostile neighbours.

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Lessing’s juxtaposition of poetry with painting is more than fodder for the deconstructivist furore of recent scholarship.14 Before I start, a clarifying word on terminology and concepts is called for. A modification of the frame of Lessing’s argument as well as a shift of parameters is necessary for the use I would like to make of Laocoon’s ideas. This may irritate readers whose interest in Laocoon is primarily historical, and yet, while twisting and tweaking Lessing’s argument, such an engagement seems fully in the spirit of a text that establishes systematic claims.15 Beginning with Lessing’s first readers, the terms of poetry and painting faced criticism.16 Herder noted that sequence and representation of action are not features specific to poetry.17 Lessing does not explicitly define ‘Poesie’, but his choice of examples implies that he thinks of metrically bound texts.18 It is, however, narrative, whether in verse or prose, that is most closely tied to time. The doubling of time at the level of representation and the level of represented—something so key to Lessing’s argument—has been conceptualized in terms of a dichotomy between narrative time and narrated time: on the one hand, the action that is narrated takes time; on the other, its narration unfolds in time.19 This is not the place to enter into debates as to whether this distinction provides a satisfying definition of narrative. For my purposes, it suffices that the doubling of time is without a doubt a salient aspect of narrative in a wide range of media such as oral speech, writing, and film. Even more puzzling than the deployment of poetry is the title’s reference to ‘Mahlerey’ in a treatise that derives its name from a sculpture. As Nicolai observed in 1768: ‘In my view, he considers painting not from the right perspective; he fails to distinguish it sufficiently from

14

See especially Mitchell 1986, 1994, and (for a concise summary) 2003. See Gaiger 2011, taking Hegel’s philosophy of art as his test case, and providing a thought-provoking reflection on how historical and systematic inquiries can enrich each other. 16 Lessing himself felt forced to comment on his terms (cf. Lessing 1984: 6 (2012: 10)). 17 Herder 1993: 191–200. 18 See Décultot (this volume) for the fascinating argument that Laocoon itself, despite being a piece of criticism in prose, exhibits crucial features of poetry. 19 Müller 1968. Sternberg 1992 bases his definition of narrativity on the dynamic between narrative time and narrated time. 15

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sculpture from which it is essentially different.’20 Lessing deals not so much with painting as, more generally, with static visual artworks. To avoid confusion, I will speak of pictures. I will focus on pictorial representations that are two-dimensional, but my argument, mutatis mutandis, will also apply to sculpture. I would thus like to replace Lessing’s dichotomy of poetry and painting with that of narrative and picture. While not true to the letter of Laocoon, this shift redefines the objects under discussion to fit Lessing’s argument. The focus on narrative instead of on word or text in particular advances its plausibility. It will also pave the way for my attempt to demonstrate the significance of the time–space dichotomy for aesthetic experience. My starting-point will be one of the most comprehensive approaches in recent aesthetics. In his theory of ‘make-believe’, Kendall Walton shows that our response to representations is predicated on an ‘as-if ’.21 One of the points where Walton’s theory falters is with regard to the differences in the ‘make-believe’ triggered by different forms of representation (see the following section, ‘Walton’s Make-Believe’). Here, I will argue, Lessing’s Laocoon can help if we are willing to change some of its parameters. This use of Laocoon will lead us to an aspect of aesthetic experience where the time–space dichotomy proves fruitful. To make my case, in the final section, ‘Time and Space in and beyond Laocoon’, I will draw on phenomenological theory, notably from Edmund Husserl for narrative and Richard Wollheim for pictures.

Walton’s ‘Make-Believe’ Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe straddles the rigour of analytical philosophy and the breadth of the continental tradition.22 Both the 20 See Nicolai’s letter to Eschenburg, 24 November 1768 (= Lessing 1974: 857): ‘Meines Erachtens betrachtet er die Malerei nicht ganz aus dem rechten Gesichtspunkte, er unterscheidet sie nicht genug von der Bildhauerei, von der sie wesentlich unterschieden ist.’ 21 This use of ‘as-if ’ for the oscillation between immersion and reflection in our reception of representations is distinct from Vaihinger 1911, who deploys the idea of ‘asif ’ to explain the usefulness of scientific, religious, and other models. On ‘as-if ’, see also Saler 2012, who uses the term to explore our relation to the kind of imaginary worlds that started to emerge with Sherlock Holmes at the end of the nineteenth century. 22 Walton 1990. See e.g. the 1991 ‘Book Symposium’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51(2); Sutrop 2000.

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reception and ontology of art are subjected to piercing scrutiny. The representational arts that are the object of Walton’s investigation cover a wide field, including novels and stories as well as visual and performative arts. The clue to Walton’s theory, basic but seminal, is that he understands artistic representation as analogous with children’s games. When children play, they plunge themselves into fictional worlds, adopting the identities of cops and robbers, princes and princesses, and so on. In such games, children often use objects as ‘props’: tree-stumps, for example, are taken as bears, branches become guns, and lawns figure as lakes. The representational arts, Walton proposes, invite us to participate in similar plays of ‘make-believe’. Texts and paintings alike serve as ‘props’, immersing the recipient in fictional worlds. The analogy between children’s games and representational arts admittedly has its limits. ‘Props’ are often marginal in children’s games, which can even do entirely without them. Artworks, on the other hand, are indispensable for the artistic generation of fictional worlds. The quality of representation that is crucial for the depth of an aesthetic experience plays a minor role for the significance of ‘props’ when children play.23 What makes the analogy so fertile, though, is the tension between immersion and distance. Children may scream and run away, but they do not actually believe that they are facing a bear. Similarly, the beholder of a painting sees shoes, but knows that what is in front of her is not a pair of actual shoes. While imagining Madame Bovary and her lover and being engrossed in their dispute, the reader is aware of attending to a story. Even in cinema, endowed with great immersive potential through the combination of picture and narrative and marshalling a vast technical apparatus, the flat screen reminds the viewer of the mediation taking place. It is one of Walton’s major merits to pinpoint the role of the ‘as-if ’ in the reception of a wide range of artworks. Novels, dramas, films, sculptures, and painting are aligned by evoking worlds into which recipients delve without forgetting that what they are attending to is only a representation. Taking some liberty, one could say that Walton reassesses Kant’s notion of disinterestedness. Kant contrasts the free and disinterested pleasure (Wohlgefallen) triggered by beautiful objects with the pleasure

23

Cf. Carroll 1991: 385–7.

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that pleasant (angenehme) and good (gute) objects instill in the subject.24 The latter two interact with the Begehrungsvermögen (‘faculty of desire’) and make the subject take interest in the existence of the object. In the case of beautiful objects, on the other hand, the subject feels pleasure by merely regarding the object without linking it to himself. It is the free and harmonious play of the cognitive faculties that gives the subject pleasure (Lust). Walton’s approach envisages the detachment of the recipient differently. Not confined to beautiful objects, it is defined as the tension between immersion and distance. Artistic representations direct our attention to what they represent and simultaneously bracket this attention with the frame of ‘as-if ’. Walton’s approach is not without problems, however.25 The issue that is most exigent for my purposes is that ‘make-believe’ seems to work differently in texts and pictures. Walton fails to account for this difference. In his argument there is a bewildering asymmetry in that, while ‘pictures are fiction by definition’,26 texts can be either fiction or nonfiction: ‘It is not the function of biographies, textbooks, and newspaper articles, as such, to serve as props in games of make-believe. They are used to claim truth for certain propositions rather than make propositions fictional.’27 A confusion of different concepts of fiction seems to be at work here. Walton introduces fiction as synonymous with representations,28 thus understanding it as ‘things with the function of being props in games of make-believe’.29 In this sense, pictures, even abstract ones as Walton argues, constitute fiction. Now, when he considers biographies as non-fiction and therefore rules them out as props, a different concept of fiction has crept in: fiction is here defined as referring to invented instead of real material.30 The category of representation, however, cuts across this dichotomy: factual as well as fictitious stories are represented. Games of make-believe can immerse us in events that have actually taken place. Walton himself seems to be not entirely comfortable with his exclusion of non-fictional texts; his discomfort becomes apparent when he 24

Kant 1793: 3–16 (translated into English as Kant 1987: 44–53). Besides the critique unfolded above, see e.g. the critical discussion of Walton’s concept of ‘quasi-fears’ by Schaeffer 1999: 193 and Sutrop 2000: 219–20. 26 27 Walton 1990: 351. Walton 1990: 351, 70. See also Ryan 2001: 108–10. 28 29 Walton 1990: 3. Walton 1990: 53–4. 30 For a survey of various ideas of fiction, see Cohn 1999: 1–17. 25

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admits that some histories, ‘written in such a vivid, novelistic style that they almost inevitably induce the reader to imagine what is said, regardless of whether or not he believes it’,31 can be read as fiction and thus serve as props in games of ‘make-believe’. Walton’s qualification, while still stuck in the confusion of different concepts of fiction, highlights that ‘make-believe’ is not confined to fictional (as opposed to factual) stories. Even if we save Walton’s theory from the confusion generated by the Protean concept of fiction, the ‘make-believe’ of texts does not map onto the ‘make-believe’ of pictures. This problem comes to the fore in Walton’s discussion of deictic references to pictures. His example is Stephen pointing at a picture, namely Shore at Scheveningen, and saying: ‘That is a ship.’32 Walton is mostly concerned with the semantics of this sentence, whether it refers to the picture or only to a specific part of it, to a fictitious entity or to the representation. Truly disconcerting, however, is the observation, raised only in passing, that nobody would refer to the description of Pequod in Moby Dick and say: ‘That is a ship’—although ‘Moby Dick is a ship-representation too, to which one can refer by pointing’.33 ‘The difference’, Marie-Laure Ryan points out, ‘resides in the fact that while paintings depict iconically, words signify conventionally.’34 More poignantly, the role of sense perception in textual and pictorial games of ‘make-believe’ varies: whereas the signs of texts that we see trigger our imagination, the pictorial ‘make-believe’ is inherent in our perception of the painting.35 While providing an impressive model that covers a wide range of representational arts, Walton glosses over the fundamental difference between the aesthetic experiences triggered by pictures and narratives. I will now try to show that Laocoon, with some further tweaking, can help us better understand this difference.

Time and Space in and beyond Laocoon As we have seen, Lessing’s definition of poetry as temporal and of painting as spatial is problematic. It hinges on an idea of mimesis that conflicts with the practice of both poets and painters. Moreover, the 31

32 Walton 1990: 71. Walton 1990: 218–20. 34 Walton 1990: 219. Ryan 2001: 107. 35 This is the reason why Wollheim rejects the notion of ‘make-believe’ as a concept for pictures and, despite striking similarities, insists on his idea of ‘seeing-in’: cf. Wollheim 1991. 33

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reception of narrative and pictures disturbs the neat juxtaposition of space with time: the signs of language follow upon one another, and yet our understanding of them is also synchronic. Likewise, we do not view paintings in a single moment, but our eyes dart across the picture. Our response to both narrative and picture is premised on an intricate dialectic of synchronic and diachronic comprehension. That being said, I contend that Laocoon’s juxtaposition of space and time holds good exactly at the point where Walton’s concept of ‘make-believe’ falters. The ‘as-if ’ of our response to narrative is primarily temporal, while the ‘as-if ’ involved in pictorial seeing is primarily spatial. My use of ‘primarily’ here anticipates an important qualification: just as there may also be spatial aspects to the ‘as-if ’ of narrative, pictures are capable of triggering a temporal ‘as-if ’. Before making this point, though, the basic distinction between the narrative and pictorial forms of ‘as-if ’ needs to be argued fully. The temporal nature of the ‘as-if ’ actuated by narrative can be elucidated with Husserl’s analysis of the temporal structure of our consciousness. Leaving aside objective time, Husserl dissects time as it appears to us.36 How, he wonders, is a temporal continuum constituted that consists of various phases? What secures the identity of ‘Zeitobjekte’ ‘that are not only unities in time but that also contain temporal extension themselves’?37 A sound, Husserl’s example of choice, starts, continues, and fades, but nonetheless it appears to us as a single unit. The key to Husserl’s answer is the notion of retention. Impressions make way for new impressions, but instead of simply vanishing, past impressions are retained in the modified form of retention. These retentions coexist with the actual impression that is itself about to be transformed into a retention including the retention of its own retentions:38 The tone-now changes into a tone-having-been; the impressional consciousness, constantly flowing, passes over into ever new retentional consciousness. Going

Husserl 1966 approaches the issue of objective time hesitatingly in }}30–3 on the basis of his phenomenological analysis. 37 Husserl 1966: 23 (translated in Husserl 1991: 24): ‘die nicht nur Einheiten in der Zeit sind, sondern die Zeitextension auch in sich enthalten.’ 38 Husserl 1966: 29 (translated in Husserl 1991: 31): ‘Das Ton-Jetzt wandelt sich in TonGewesen, das impressionale Bewußtsein geht ständig fließend über in immer neues retentionales Bewußtsein. Dem Fluß entlang oder mit ihm gehend, haben wir eine stetige zum Einsatzpunkt gehörige Reihe von Retentionen.’ 36

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along the flow or with it, we have a continuous series of retentions pertaining to the beginning point.

Perception is thus not a mere point incapable of generating a continuum, but contains an ‘Abschattungsreihe’ (series of adumbrations) in which previous ‘nows’ have sedimented. Distinct from this continuously moving chain of retentions is memory or secondary retention. Memory is not the presence of ‘nows’ that have just passed, but the representation of something that is not present any more in the continuum of perception. This representation recalls not only the past moment to which our attention is directed, but also the chain of retentions of that passed moment. Husserl takes pains to set off the reproductive consciousness of memory from primary retention39 as well as from phantasy, which does not relate to a past impression.40 The goal of explaining the notion of continuum lets Husserl focus on retention, both primary and secondary, but he also introduces the concept of protention and expectation, though much more fleetingly. Protentions correspond to primary retentions just as expectations mirror memory. Our impressions have not only a chain of retentions retaining the impressions that have just passed, but also come with protentions, intentions of the consciousness that are directed towards what is to come.41 Likewise, besides recalling past impressions including its field of pro- and retentions, the consciousness can also produce images of the future.42 Husserl introduces the notion of protention only when he discusses the ‘Erwartungsintentionen’ (expectation-intentions) in memory43 and elaborates on expectation only by comparing it with memory,44 and yet for a systematic analysis of the temporal dynamic of consciousness the orientation to the future is as important as the openness to the past. Heidegger, replacing Husserl’s focus on perception with his emphasis on ‘Sorge’ (care), would even privilege the future dimension. Now, the value of Husserl’s Vorlesungen zur Struktur des inneren Zeitbewußtseins (‘Lectures on the Structure of the Inner Sense of Time’) for my argument is that it also describes the process by which we receive stories.45 When we follow narrative, our consciousness directs its series of pro- and retentions to the linguistic signs and the action they 39 40 45

Husserl 1966: }}19–22 (the following section-references are all to this edition). 41 42 43 44 }23. }24: 52–3. }26: 55–7. }24. }26. Cf. Grethlein 2010, 2015, and forthcoming (esp. chapter 2).

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convey. While our memory can evoke parts of the plot that have already faded from the present series of adumbrations, expectations arise as to the further course of the plot. Differently from real-life experiences, however, our attention to the plot is framed by our awareness of attending to a representation. No matter how much the story entices us, our real-life environment remains present as the horizon to our experiencing of the narrative world. The intensity of immersion varies significantly, but there is always a residuum of distance balancing immersion in aesthetic experience. The vicarious nature of our experience of narrated worlds is a point that is fully captured by Walton. But what Walton does not note—and what we find in Laocoon—is the specific character of the ‘as-if ’. Lessing’s juxtaposition of Poesie with Mahlerey encapsulates the crucial point. The association of Poesie with time paves the way for the insight that the narrative ‘as-if ’ is directed to the temporal extension of our consciousness. When we follow a narrative, then it is first and foremost the field of our pro- and retentions that is bracketed. But doesn’t this temporal structure define our consciousness in general, regardless of the object of our attention? If so, doesn’t it therefore also apply to our viewing of a picture? Indeed, the sequence of eyemovements in which we take in a picture, while less defined than the fixed sequence of signs constituting a narrative,46 embraces a series of adumbrations. However—and this is decisive—the ‘as-if ’ of an aesthetic experience generated by a picture is not directed to this set of pro- and retentions. Here, as Lessing’s understanding of Mahlerey suggests, the ‘as-if ’ refers to space. Richard Wollheim’s concept of ‘seeing-in’ can help us grasp its distinct character. Wollheim develops his theory of pictorial seeing in a critique of Gombrich’s illusion theory.47 Gombrich adduces the notorious drawing that can be seen either as a duck or as a rabbit as evidence for his thesis that we see either the canvas or the object represented, but never both simultaneously. The example of the duck-rabbit, however, made famous by its discussion in Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Untersuchungen (‘Philosophical Investigations’), has no bearing on the dichotomy of canvas and object of representation. The choice between rabbit and duck 46 47

Giuliani 2003: 27–9. Wollheim 1980: 213–14; Wollheim 1987: 46, n. 6.

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is mutually exclusive indeed: one can see only either, but it is a choice between two different objects of representation, not between representing object and represented object. In his ‘twofold thesis’, Wollheim argues that it is not only possible but necessary to attend simultaneously to the object of a representation and its material features.48 Seeing pictures is based on ‘a special perceptual capacity, which presupposes, but is something over and above, straightforward perception’.49 This special mode of perception is labelled as ‘seeing-in’: when we see an object in a picture, we are aware of the canvas as well as the represented object. Wollheim subsequently refined his model of ‘seeing-in’. Initially, he introduced seeing a represented object and seeing a representing object as two experiences. Later, he treated them as ‘two aspects of a single experience that I have’.50 ‘Discerning something in the marked surface’, on the one hand, is the ‘recognitional aspect’, ‘our awareness of the marked surface itself ’, on the other, is the ‘configurational aspect’.51 ‘The two aspects are distinguishable but also inseparable.’52 While the two aspects can be described in analogy with the separate single experiences, they are ultimately incommensurable with them. What is crucial for my argument is that the ‘as-if ’ of pictorial seeing hinges on the simultaneous attention to the represented object and the representing object.53 It is thus not temporal, but spatial: the attention that is bracketed by ‘as-if ’ is directed to an object in space. The tableau, for example, lets us see a three-dimensional scene in a two-dimensional surface. For all its differences—while working in a three- rather than two-dimensional space—sculpture is also predicated on a spatial ‘as-if ’. We see in statues not only the surface but the body with its muscles, bones, and veins. While being aware of having a stone in front of us, we apprehend a full-blown body. Richard Neer makes the point nicely in his discussion of Greek statues from the classical period: ‘Seeing a sculpted

48

49 Wollheim 1980: 215–16. Wollheim 1980: 216. Wollheim 1987: 46; cf. Wollheim 2001: 20. 51 52 Wollheim 1987: 73; cf. Wollheim 2001: 20. Wollheim 1987: 46. 53 Note that I only accept Wollheim’s analysis of the reception of pictures. Wollheim’s intentionalist frame—he defines the object of ‘seeing-in’ by the intention of the artist—is as problematic as unnecessary: we can also ‘see in’ objects that are not shaped by human hands; sometimes we see animals and other beings in clouds and on rocks. Cf. Grethlein, forthcoming (esp. chapter 5). 50

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garment, we tend automatically to imagine that it covers a body, even as we know that it does not.’54 As with narrative, Lessing’s paragone leads the way, this time binding up pictures with space. The spatial nature of Mahlerey for which Lessing argues gestures to the distinct character of the aesthetic experience pictures provoke. If we read a novel, we also look at an object, the book in our hands; here, however, the ‘as-if ’ of our aesthetic experience does not qualify our perception of the book, but our imagination of the action narrated. In both cases, our attention is suffused with a residual awareness of the ontological status of its object, but the vicarious character of the experience is different. While narratives let us experience an action when it is not taking place, pictures let us see something where it is not. The reception of pictures and narrative is both synchronic and diachronic, and yet both forms of presentation provoke a distinct form of ‘as-if ’. Laocoon also encapsulates the qualification that we now have to make: our response to pictures can imply a temporal ‘as-if ’ just as narratives can trigger a spatial ‘as-if ’. Lessing emphasizes the significance of the moment chosen to be depicted in painting: ‘But only that which gives free rein to the imagination is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine.’55 It seems to be the before and after in particular of which Lessing is thinking here:56 However, bodies do not exist in space only, but also in time. They persist in time, and in each moment of their duration they may assume a different appearance or stand in a different combination. Each of these momentary appearances and combinations is the result of a preceding one and can be the cause of a subsequent one, which means that it can be, as it were, the center of an action. Consequently, painting too can imitate actions, but only by suggestion through bodies.

54

See Neer 2010: 104–41 (quotation from p. 5). Lessing 1984: 19, translating Lessing 2012: 26: ‘Dasjenige aber nur allein ist fruchtbar, was der Einbildungskraft freyes Spiel läßt. Je mehr wir sehen, desto mehr müssen wir hinzu denken können.’ 56 Lessing 1984: 78, translating Lessing 2012: 115: ‘Doch alle Körper existiren nicht allein in dem Raume, sondern auch in der Zeit. Sie dauern fort, und können in jedem Augenblicke ihrer Dauer anders erscheinen, und in anderer Verbindung stehen. Jede dieser augenblicklichen Erscheinungen und Verbindungen ist die Wirkung einer vorhergehenden, und kann die Ursache einer folgenden, und sonach gleichsam das Centrum einer Handlung seyn. Folglich kann die Mahlerey auch Handlungen nachahmen, aber nur andeutungsweise durch Körper.’ 55

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A ‘pregnant’ moment, in particular, will incite the viewer to conjecture about what has happened before and what is to follow. She will thus in her consciousness form pro- and retentions that refer to the represented scene. Note, however, that this temporal ‘as-if ’ is derivative.57 It depends on the spatial ‘as-if ’. Only after seeing a scene on the canvas can the onlooker speculate about the temporal sequence in which it is embedded. This holds true even for pictures the very point of which seems to be narrative, for example, the works by Hogarth frequently invoked for the purposes of an intermedial narratology.58 The title, well-known motifs, and indexical representation all prompt the onlooker to think about the larger action of which the depicted scene forms part. Before conjecturing about the full action, however, the spectator needs to ‘see in’ the canvas the represented scene. The secondary status of the temporal ‘as-if ’ in the response to pictures is highlighted by the fact that not all pictures trigger pro- and retentions referring to the represented scene. Many still-lifes, for instance, lack a ‘narrative sting’ and present only a setting. Visual studies have drawn our attention to the great variety of modes of viewing. Vision is defined ‘in terms of class, gender, sexual, and racialized identities’.59 While not preceding the culturally specific mode of viewing, ‘seeing-in’, it seems, forms part of all different modes of viewing pictures. The Hindu receiving darshan from the exchange of gazes with a representation of Shiva engages in a different activity from the European who looks at the same picture in an art exhibition. But while interacting with the deity in the picture, the beholder ‘sees’ the divinity ‘in’ the picture. She has to recognize the represented in the representation. The pigments on wood, including two symmetrical dark circles with white circles around them, are not seen as such; rather, they represent the eyes of a divinity from which the blessing emanates. The reverential gaze involves the same process of ‘seeing-in’ as that of a European art connoisseur comparing the eyes of Shiva with the calculating eyes of a merchant portrayed by Jan van

57 Mitchell’s argument against a difference of kind between time and space in picture and word is in many regards different from my argument (Mitchell 1986: 95–115). Mitchell concentrates on reception, medium, and content in general. Moreover, my focus on narrative is different from his focus on word. That being said, Mitchell’s relies on a sleight of hand when he bases his argument on the rejection of the dichotomy of ‘indirect’ vs. ‘direct’ (pp. 101–2). It is indeed unfortunate to use this dichotomy when speaking of representation, but this does not detract from the value of the observation that space and time play different roles in pictures and texts. 58 59 Cf. Grethlein, forthcoming (esp. chapter 5); Wolf 2002. Mirzoeff 1999: 4.

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Eyck. As Whitney Davis points out: ‘Some things are cultural about vision. But not everything.’60 When we turn to narrative, Lessing, his emphasis on the sequential character of narrative notwithstanding, allows for the representation of bodies:61 On the other hand, actions cannot exist independently, but must be joined to certain beings or things. Insofar as these beings or things are bodies, or are treated as such, poetry also depicts bodies, but only by suggestion through actions.

Involving bodies, the narration of action brings the recipient not only to attend to its sequence, but also to imagine spatial settings. And yet, the spatial ‘as-if ’ is only grafted on the temporal ‘as-if ’. This may sound surprising, for there are texts that only describe and therefore primarily or exclusively induce a spatial ‘as-if ’. Here, however, it is important to distinguish the medium of language from narrative as a mode of representation. Language can be used for description as well as narrative, but whereas description, in the canonical definition, is static,62 narrative represents an action in a sequential medium. Since stories seem to require agents, it is hard to imagine narratives without spatial ‘as-if ’. And yet, due to the form of narrative, the temporal ‘as-if ’ is primary. The recipient retains the fading signs and anticipates the coming ones, thereby attending to the action which involves a spatial setting. While in need of qualification, the emphasis on time in Laocoon can serve as a helpful corrective to a trend in current literary studies.63 Cognitive scholars in particular have taken a strong interest in the means by which narrative establishes presence and entices readers. Most of them emphasize mind-reading as essential to the reader’s engagement with narrative, some even contrast presence with plot.64

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Davis 2011: 8. Lessing 1984: 78, translating Lessing 2012: 115: ‘Auf der andern Seite können Handlungen nicht für sich selbst bestehen, sondern müssen gewissen Wesen anhängen. In so fern nun diese Wesen Körper sind, oder als Körper betrachtet werden, schildert die Poesie auch Körper, aber nur andeutungsweise durch Handlungen.’ 62 Genette 1969: 56–61. For a more recent intermedial take on description, see Wolf and Bernhart 2007. 63 Cf. Grethlein 2015b, with the responses by Palmer, Fludernik, and Ryan in the same volume; Grethlein 2015c. 64 Palmer 2004, 2010; and Zunshine 2006 are prominent advocates of ‘fictional minds’. Presence is contrasted with plot, for example, in Kuzmičová 2012: 33. 61

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However, as the Husserlian approach sketched above illustrates, time is crucial to how readers respond to narrative. Besides the portrayal of characters, action has the capacity to absorb readers. Both are in fact tightly interwoven with each other, as the plot features protagonists whose characters are revealed in the course of the action. Lessing’s idea of action in Laocoon, however, is disturbingly weak.65 He defines the action to be represented in poetry merely as a sequence,66 but a comment in the Paralipomena indicates an awareness that more than pure sequence is at stake: ‘A series of movements which aim at a final telos is called an action.’67 Surely one can recount simple sequences, but the immersive narratives of which Lessing thinks have plots. In Vom Wesen der Fabel (‘On the Nature of Fable’), published in 1759, Lessing himself had harked back to Aristotle, arguing that an action is ‘a sequence of changes which together form a whole’.68 Furthermore, narrative time not only mimics narrated time, it may also reconfigure it in order to establish what Sternberg calls the three master tropes of narrative: suspense, curiosity, and surprise.69 Defining action as sequence is insufficient, for most narrative, and especially the kind of narrative Lessing envisages, features a plot. Nonetheless, despite this qualification, Laocoon’s focus on time as a defining feature of poetry highlights an aspect of narrative that the current infatuation with fictional minds is in danger of sidelining. Seen from a different perspective, Lessing’s approach ties in nicely with so-called second-generation cognitive studies in narrative. Drawing on research into the embodied nature of perception, scholars such as Troscianko argue that the reader’s imagination is triggered more strongly by enactive narratives than detailed descriptions.70 An account

65

Cf. Giuliani 1996: 21–3. See Lessing 2012: 115: ‘Gegenstände, die auf einander, oder deren Theile auf einander folgen, heissen überhaupt Handlungen.’ 67 Lessing 1984: 78, translating Lessing 2012: 220: ‘Eine Reihe von Bewegungen, die auf einen Endzweck abzielen, heißet eine Handlung.’ 68 Lessing 1997: 357: ‘eine Folge von Veränderungen, die zusammen Ein Ganzes ausmachen’. 69 Cf. Sternberg 1992; Grethlein, forthcoming (esp. chapter 2). 70 Troscianko 2014. From a phenomenological perspective, see Grünbaum 2007. For a survey of ‘second-generation cognitive approaches to literature’, see the special issue of Style 48 (2014), edited by K. Kukkonen. For an attempt to distil the most important points of enactment theory for literary analysis, see Grethlein and Huitink, forthcoming. 66

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of the movements of the protagonists is more effective in ‘transporting’ the reader to the scene of the action than a minute vignette. The representation of action, it seems, is crucial to the imagination of space. This insight is implied and given a normative twist in Lessing’s idea that narrative should focus on action in order to fire the imagination of the recipient. By no means are narrative and picture necessarily separate from each other. There are representational arts that combine narrative with picture, film being the obvious case. If a sequence of pictures is used to represent a sequential action, then spatial and temporal forms of ‘as-if ’ are interwoven. The spectator follows an action where it is not taking place. On the one hand, the pictures on the screen are premised on a spatial ‘as-if ’, on the other, their sequence triggers a temporal ‘as-if ’. While pictures can graft a temporal ‘as-if ’ on their primary spatial ‘as-if ’ and the temporal ‘as-if ’ of narrative encapsulates a spatial ‘as-if ’, film combines both forms of ‘as-if ’ in a way that makes it hard to give priority to either. Lessing, it seems, envisaged dramatic performance as a medium capable of establishing a particularly strong effect on the audience. Not only do words represent words on stage and thereby become natural signs, but movements and gestures are also represented by movements and gestures themselves. Beside the temporal ‘as-if ’ of the action, there is also the ‘as-if ’ of actors who are not identical with their roles. In both cases, arbitrary signs have become natural signs. It is therefore not surprising that Lessing intended to tackle drama as the ‘highest genre of poetry’ in a third part of Laocoon.71 To be clear, the reflection on the different forms of ‘as-if ’ just sketched cannot be found in Laocoon. Lessing does comment on the effect of art on its audience, but he does not note any differences between the ‘illusions’ created by poets and painters.72 What is more, contrary to the concept of ‘as-if ’ used here, Lessing seems to believe that poetry is able to generate a complete immersion that, at least for a moment, is not

71 Quotation from a letter to Nicolai, 26 May 1769 (Lessing 2012: 271). On drama and the planned third part of Laocoon, see Vollhardt’s discussion in Lessing 2012: 445–6. For the conceptual problems to which this third part would have led, see Nisbet 2008: 431. 72 E.g. Lessing 2012: 7, 123–4.

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balanced any more by distance. Elaborating on what distinguishes the poet from other authors, he asserts that the poet:73 wants rather to make the ideas he awakens in us so vivid that at that moment we believe that we feel the real impressions which the objects of these ideas would produce on us. In this moment of illusion we should cease to be conscious of the means which the poet uses for this purpose, that is, his words.

In Laocoon, the dichotomy of space and time is applied to signs and objects. In order to enter a bequemes Verhältniß (‘suitable relation’) with the representing signs, the object of narrative should be action, a temporal sequence, and the object of pictures should be bodies, that is, figures in space. I have thus transferred the time–space dichotomy from the represented objects and the representing signs to the response of the recipient. This modification notwithstanding, it is Lessing’s intuition that has helped us clarify an important point about aesthetic experience. Both pictures and narrative elicit from us responses that are predicated on an ‘as-if ’. However, the pictorial ‘as-if ’ is primarily spatial, while the narrative ‘as-if ’ is primarily temporal. The dialogue staged here between Lessing and Walton illustrates the undiminished value of Laocoon. Lessing’s argument surely needs to be historically contextualized; its essentialism obviously invites deconstructivist readings. At the same time, if we approach it with the kind of flexibility that its Protean form invites, Laocoon is a fountain of aesthetic reflection that has yet to dry up.

Lessing 1984: 85, translating 2012: 123: ‘ . . . will die Ideen, die er in uns erwecket, so lebhaft machen, daß wir in der Geschwindigkeit die wahren sinnlichen Eindrücke ihrer Gegenstände zu empfinden glauben, und in diesem Augenblicke der Täuschung, uns der Mittel, die er dazu anwendet, seiner Worte bewußt zu seyn aufhören.’ Strube 1971: 112 with n. 1 notes that this idea converges with Mendelssohn’s discussion of aesthetic illusion in Hauptgrundsätze. On Lessing’s concept of imagination, see now van Laak 2013. See also Gaiger (this volume), who approaches Lessing’s idea of aesthetic illusion from the angle of the transparency theory of art. 73

13 Art and Necessity Rethinking Lessing’s Critical Practice Paul A. Kottman

‘ . . . was hat die Kunst mit der Not zu tun?’ Laocoon, chapter 51

In scholarship on Lessing, and in broader discussions of modern aesthetic philosophy (as well as its reconfigurations of ancient ‘classical presences’), Laocoon is commonly invoked as the primary text in which—to borrow from art historian Michael Fried—the ‘invention of the modern concept of an artistic medium’ occurs.2 Where Lessing’s essay continues to be read and discussed today, it is almost always thanks to its treatment of distinct artistic media—its handling of how the visual and poetic arts mean. One issue that often arises in such discussions—thanks to Lessing’s own rhetorical framing—is how to understand the essay’s treatment of the ‘limits’ of painting and poetry. In the most general terms, the question typically concerns whether or how Lessing offers transcendental criteria according to which artistic media can be compared as different forms of meaning. For instance, does a transcendental distinction between visible space and temporal distension, or between natural signs and arbitrary signs, ground the distinction between the visual arts and poetry? Does 1 Lessing 2012: 54–5 (for English translation, see Lessing 1984: 39: ‘what has art to do with necessity?’). 2 See Fried’s ‘Preface’ to the McCormick translation: Lessing 1984: viii.

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Lessing privilege poetry over painting because, like Aristotle, he sees the representation of human actions in time as offering a fuller understanding of human life than the visual depiction of a single moment? In the following chapter I am less interested in contesting the specific answers that interpreters have given to these questions than in reorienting the general mode of discussion, and in three specific ways. First, I want to suggest that Lessing’s own critical practice in Laocoon is intended to show, and not just tell, how the amateur’s ‘felt’ responses to the aesthetic effect of different artworks affect the critic’s judgment concerning both what artworks mean and how they mean. Second, I want to suggest that Lessing’s overall concern in his discussion of medium-specificity is not meant to arrive at any fixed ‘theory’ of different media or their interrelation; rather, his discussion follows upon his broader sense of what art does—namely, through its solicitation of our imagination, art makes intelligible some feature of our world or our shared lives together that would otherwise remain unintelligible.3 Lessing, in other words, deals with what Hegel later called our ‘need’ for different artistic practices—whether Shakespearean tragedy, symphonic music, ancient sculpture, or painting on canvas—as a fundamental mode of understanding ourselves and our worldly conditions. If Lessing’s discussion of artistic media has had staying-power, then this is largely because—rather than regard artworks as instantiations of formal laws or philosophical concepts that might be grasped without art’s help—his deepest concern is with how different artworks and practices themselves help us in understanding ourselves and our conditions. Third and finally, I want to suggest that Lessing’s focus on the ‘limits’ (Grenzen) of painting and poetry does not present transcendentally derived criteria according to which different artistic ‘media’ are graspable. Laocoon, rather, was intended to show how the very view that certain artworks or practice yield a special understanding of human life, unavailable elsewhere, is gained, not through transcendental argumentation, but through the careful consideration of the achievements of specific artworks and practices—what Lessing calls the work of the critic. 3 Here I touch on issues also discussed in Jason Gaiger’s contribution to this volume, as well as in Gaiger 2013. As will become apparent in what follows, my position is closer to what Gaiger treats (in this volume) as the upholding of the ‘transparency’ thesis.

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My three-stage ‘rethinking’ of Laocoon here no doubt has to do with my own critical perspectives, writing 250 years after the publication of Lessing’s essay. Yet the anniversary of Laocoon’s publication, I think, offers an opportunity to reflect on one of Lessing’s uniquely powerful contributions to aesthetic philosophy: the thought that art is not merely a mirror held up to nature or society, but rather a fundamental matrix—a practised way through which social and natural realities are grasped and made intelligible. Moreover, given Lessing’s own role as critic—when it comes to making sense of both classical artworks as well as more modern ones (one might well remember that Lessing was the first European critic to elaborate Shakespeare’s ‘modernity’, for example)—my aim in the following pages will be to illuminate aspects of Lessing’s critical practice that seem to me worthy of further critical discussion.

The Amateur and the Critic ‘ The first person (Der erste) to compare painting with poetry’, writes Lessing in the opening sentence of the essay, ‘was a man of sensitive feeling’ (von feinem Gefühle).4 We go on to discover that this ‘first’ person is the ‘amateur’ or Liebhaber (literally ‘lover’), whose response to art and poetry is distinguished by Lessing from the philosopher and the critic. In the flow of the essay—with its breezy opening Vorrede—it can be tempting to move quickly past the amateur, and to look to either the philosopher or the critic as somehow closer to Lessing’s own voice. However, several features of this opening sentence deserve to be noted. In particular, I want to draw attention to two things: first, to Lessing’s emphasis on the amateur’s ‘fine feeling’ as a kind of proto-critical response, if not yet a critical judgment; and, second, to the content of the amateur’s response—namely, its perception of a unity in the arts, ut pictura poesis, at least at the level of aesthetic effect. At first blush, Lessing’s use of the term Gefühl—followed in the next sentence by the verb empfinden (‘ . . . empfand er . . . ’)—might lead a reader to conclude that the amateur just feels what he feels: that the amateur’s response gives voice merely to an immediate sensibility lacking in conceptual content. Lessing seems to confirm such an interpretation when he 4

Lessing 1984: 3 (all references to Lessing’s text will be to this McCormick translation): on the preface, cf. the editors’ introduction to this volume, pp. 1–5.

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notes, shortly after this passage, that whereas the critic can be wrong in his judgment, the amateur and the philosopher ‘could not easily misuse their feelings (konnten nicht leicht, weder von Ihrem Gefüle, noch von ihren Schlüssen, einen unrechten Gebrauch machen)’.5 In other words, as with the philosopher’s ‘conclusions’, based on first principles and deductions, so too, the amateur’s feelings are immune to questions of rightness or wrongness: he just feels what he feels. Whereas a critical judgment can turn out to be wrong, the idea of either right or wrong ‘feelings’ is theoretically misplaced. Although not wrong, such an interpretation moves too fast. In referring to the first-personal response of the amateur to the artwork (‘Der erste . . . war ein Mann von feinem Gefühle’), Lessing does not mean to identify the amateur’s ‘sensitive feeling’ with brute sensation—pain or pleasure, say—wholly devoid of reason-giving. Rather, Lessing is keen to invoke such ‘feeling’ at the outset, as a kind of felt insight or perception into the nature of artworks. Indeed, Lessing is far from alone amongst his eighteenth-century peers, in trying to say something about the relation of feeling to critical insight and theoretical knowledge. As the editors of the recent Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon have pointed out, in the philosophical German of the second half of the eighteenth-century, and especially in the field of aesthetic philosophy, the differentiation of the ‘pair Gefühl/Empfindung . . . was the object of a long conceptual inquiry set against a background of ambivalence’.6 Appealing to an earlier empirical tradition, Christian Wolff saw Empfindung as a source of knowledge: it relates to ‘thoughts that have their causes in the modifications of the organs of our body, and that are excited by bodily things outside of us, we call Empfindung’, as Wolff wrote in his 1751 Deutsche Metaphysik.7 Following Wolff, J. G. Herder likewise later wrote that ‘no knowledge is possible without Empfindung, that is, without a feeling (Gefühl) of good and evil’.8 And then there is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in the course of which we are told that Wohlgefallen is not absent in the judgment of beauty.9 Against 5

6 Lessing 1984: 3. For the entry (on Gefühl) see Cassin et al. (eds.) 2014: 355. As quoted in Cassin et al. (eds.) 2014: 356. 8 As quoted in Cassin et al. (eds.) 2014: 357. 9 As Kant puts it in }2 of his ‘Analytic of the Beautiful,’ in determining whether or not it is beautiful, what matters is whether or not the ‘mere representation of the object is accompanied in me with satisfaction (Wohlgefallen)’: Kant 1987: 39. 7

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this wide background, the ‘fine feeling’ of Lessing’s amateur should start to appear somewhat closer to theoretical knowledge and the critic’s judgment—or rather, at least, the distinctions between these categories begin to look rather less rigid. Lessing seems to be invoking the distinction between the amateur, the philosopher, and the critic in order to say something about the importance of amateur ‘feeling’ for both philosophy and critical judgment—rather than to draw any hard-and-fast distinctions. By emphasizing the place of Wohlgefallen in the judgment of beauty, Kant, too, seemed to be suggesting that critical judgment (the installation of a space of reasons, entailing exposure to ‘getting it wrong’) is somehow continuous with—‘distinct from’ but not wholly separable from—the moment of feeling. As I read Lessing’s essay, then, the importance of the amateur’s ‘fine feeling’ for both the critic and the philosopher lies in the way that Lessing seems to leave open the value of that first amateur’s ‘felt perception’ of a likeness of painting to poetry. Indeed, Lessing ultimately judges the amateur to have been ‘right’ in perceiving a unity in the arts, at the level of aesthetic effect. For Lessing’s ‘critic’, the amateur’s feeling is not to be discounted a priori, cordoned off as mere thoughtless feeling, any more than the amateur’s feeling is to be held up as the last arbiter of any critical judgment or philosophical discourse. One might develop the point further. Whether or not an amateur’s first-personal feelings will ultimately count as reasons—as reasons ‘for’ or ‘against’ a critical judgment about an artwork—cannot be determined in advance by any inherent status of the feeling as feeling, by its inherent reasonless or infallibility. Hence, critical judgment would earn little by distinguishing itself from the reasonless-ness of the amateur’s feeling. Put differently, the distinction between the ‘fallibility’ of the critic’s judgment (‘he can get it wrong’) and the ‘infallibility’ of the amateur’s feeling (‘he just feels what he feels’)—a distinction to which Lessing draws attention in the opening passage of the essay—is not put forward by Lessing as an a priori distinction to which the critic can then point in order to justify the special reason-giving status of his judgment. Rather, the specialness of the critic’s judgment—its real or earned difference from amateur ‘feeling’—is something that Lessing’s critic achieves in his work, in the elaboration of a critical judgment, in part by not simply accepting the amateur’s feelings as reasonless or mere brute sensation but by attending to its potential worth. If the critic’s judgment is

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distinctly valuable precisely because of its fallibility, then this is in part because critical judgment subjects itself over time to other ‘feelings’ that might contradict it. The amateur’s response, on the other hand, submits itself to no such contradiction—and that is what makes it amateurish. Lessing’s essay, then, is an attempt to earn its status as a work of criticism or critical judgment. In this way, the essay would show as much as tell what such critical work looks like—and thereby ‘bring about’ its own standing as something other than amateur feeling (or ‘philosophical deduction from first principles’)—precisely by submitting itself to the amateur’s felt response from the outset, and then by supplying reasons for taking seriously the amateur’s feeling (reasons that the amateur’s feeling ‘on its own’ could not provide). Admitting feelings as reasons—as proto-rational, or discriminatingly evaluative—is, so to speak, something criticism might thus allow for or accomplish. The point can help us to see better how Lessing aimed to distinguish his ‘criticism’ not only from the amateur, but also from the aesthetic ‘philosophies’ and deductive methods of Baumgarten or Meier.10 Rather than derive concepts from other concepts, like the ‘systematic books’ (systematische Bücher) in which earlier German aesthetic philosophers are said to excel,11 Lessing wanted to show how getting something right or wrong about artworks—the fallible discrimination and evaluation of the critic—is the source of any theoretical knowledge about the arts. And because (I am suggesting) such evaluation includes determining how and when amateur feelings count, the work of the critic also entails registering and tarrying with the ‘felt’ response of the amateur. By the same token, because theoretical knowledge about the arts is a plausible and worthy aim, the philosophical implications of the critic’s work also deserve our note.

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See in particular David Wellbery’s magisterial account of Lessing’s emergence out of the aesthetic philosophies of Baumgarten, Meier, and Mendelssohn in Wellbery 1984. Wellbery shared with me an early draft of his contribution to the present volume, and my remarks on the importance of ‘amateur feeling’ in this chapter were composed (in part) in response to Wellbery’s treatment of the amateur and the critic. 11 For Lessing’s caustic assessment in the preface, see Lessing 1984: 5—with further discussion in the introduction to this volume, as well as in the chapters by e.g. Squire, Décultot, and Lifschitz.

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Staging the Imagination All of this is worth saying, I think, because it also shows us something about how Lessing’s essay proceeds, not only in its presentation of the work of the ‘critic’, but also with respect to the way Lessing sees artworks and practices. Namely: Lessing sees distinctions between the arts as distinctions that are earned or brought about in the practice, over time—not merely asserted or demonstrated according to a priori standards for reflection that can be articulated categorically. With this in mind, let us now consider the content of the amateur’s response. Crucial here is his perception of a unity in the arts, ut pictura poesis, at least at the level of aesthetic effect:12 The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him. Both, he felt, represent absent things as being present and appearance as reality. Both create an illusion, and in both cases the illusion is pleasing.

For Lessing, all artworks supply a ‘felt’ apprehension of an imagined object—something which is not ‘really’ there but is rather imitated or represented—and thereby made ‘present to the mind’ of a receiver as distinctly pleasurable and intrinsically valuable. On this point, Lessing’s amateur is saying something close to Aristotle’s claim in the fourth chapter of the Poetics, to the effect that the pleasure we take in imitative works is intellectual and lies in grasping the artwork as mimetic—as standing for this or that—not just in the pleasure taken in the sensuous features (such as colour) alone.13 All arts are fundamentally ‘imitative’ in this way, for Lessing, just as they all produce this distinctly aesthetic effect—namely, the pleasure taken in the exercise and expansion of our overall understanding of the world and ourselves through the presentation of some feature of the world or human life. In order to function mimetically, then, both poetry and the visual arts must work on the imagination. This thought was familiar to artists and critics alike, long before Lessing. It is enough to think of Shakespeare, whom Lessing venerated like no other European critic before him (later

12 13

Lessing 1984: 3. For the Aristotelian context, see the discussion in Halliwell 2002: 178–81.

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comparing him, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, to Sophocles).14 Here is the famous Chorus from Henry V, in which both poetry and the visual arts are at play (Prologue, 17–28): . . . let us, ciphers to this great accompt, On your imaginary forces work. Suppose within the girdle of these walls Are now confined two mighty monarchies, Whose high upreared and abutting fronts The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder: Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts; Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance; Think when we talk of horses, that you see them Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth; For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings . . .

As in Lessing’s own view, the artwork is here presented as both a material reality—‘within the girdle of these walls’, ‘this wooden O’—and as the non-sensible impression made upon the ‘imaginary forces’, the aesthetic effect produced in the mind of the one who apprehends the sensible material. Without our ‘imaginary forces’, the material reality of the drama (‘the wooden O’) would be nothing more than a collection of bodies, objects, and props in the world; there would be neither mimetic artwork (no ‘play’), nor aesthetic effect (we would not have the pleasure of imaginatively ‘seeing’ the horses’ hooves printing the earth). The pleasure we take in the work of art, then, is not a pleasure taken just in the material stratum—in whatever stuff the theatre might use as props—but in the way those materials conduct an aesthetic effect to the imagination.15 Put in the terms of Shakespeare’s Chorus: without the 14 Lessing’s intense involvement with the theatre, his own dramaturgical work, the discussion of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, and his engagement with Mendelssohn’s dramaturgical remarks in the context of Laocoon should be enough to sponsor this Shakespearean invocation: in the ninth chapter of Laocoon, Lessing cites Mendelssohn’s review of Johann Adolf Schlegel’s translation of Batteux and commentary on Sophocles’ Philoctetes, in which Mendelssohn reflects upon the importance of actor’s gestures and material constraints in the dramatic arts. More generally on Lessing’s reflections on ancient drama, and his engagement with the work of Adam Smith in Laocoon’s fourth chapter, cf. Harloe’s contribution to this volume; all of these themes, of course, provide the backdrop to Lessing’s later Hamburgische Dramaturgie (translated as Lessing 1962). For an excellent discussion of Lessing and Shakespeare, see Gjesdal 2004. 15 See the discussion in Kottman 2014.

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effect produced by the audience’s ‘imaginary forces’ in response to the sights and sounds in the ‘wooden O’ there could be no ‘play’.16 The Chorus of Henry V is not merely asking the audience to supply ‘imaginary forces’ that would ‘aid’ the play or enhance its reception; rather, an essential condition for the play’s very existence is being articulated. One crucial implication of this is that the imagination allows us, as it were, to see more than we actually see. This ‘more’—this excess or ‘imaginary puissance’—is the essential core of aesthetic experience for Lessing. Without the free use of the imagination, there would be no artwork. Likewise, what is imagined—for instance, those Shakespearean hooves imprinting the earth—must retain a kind of autonomy, or intrinsic value, as rendered to the ‘thoughts’ of the receiver: namely, the understanding of the world or of human life that the imagined object affords or solicits. In Shakespeare’s play, for instance, the receiver ‘imagines’ Henry’s adventures in the fields of France, not for reasons extraneous to art’s own aims (for the sake of propaganda, as a ‘history lesson,’ or for moral instruction), but as a worthy imaginative end in itself, one that contributes to our overall understanding of ourselves and our shared lives. By the same token, as the chorus in Henry V is well aware, the artwork must prove itself capable of producing precisely this kind of independently worthwhile aesthetic effect. Shakespeare’s play is one such attempted demonstration (Prologue, 11–14): . . . can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?

All of this, I realize, is familiar fare. Nevertheless, as we turn now to the issue of what Lessing makes of medium-specificity, it will be useful to bear in mind the way in which art is here explicitly presented as taking up the challenge of producing aesthetic affects within and through medium-specific limits.

16 In his Antiquarische Briefe, Lessing makes the point in the following way (as cited in Wellbery 1984: 106): ‘what we find beautiful in a work of art is not found beautiful by the eye, but by the imagination through the eye.’ Within the context of Laocoon, cf. Lessing 1984: 41: ‘the thing which we find beautiful in a work of art is beautiful not to our eyes but to the imagination (Einbildungskraft) through our eyes’ (with discussion in Squire’s chapter in this volume).

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In his own preface to Laocoon, Lessing invokes the ‘brilliant antithesis’ of Simonides of Ceos: ‘painting is silent poetry and poetry is talking painting.’17 And he immediately goes on to clarify that, contrary to ‘many recent critics’, he himself does not understand Simonides’ antithesis to mean that the ancients saw no difference between poetry and painting. Although Lessing is here relying on the familiar category of imitation (Nachahmung), he nevertheless attributes to Simonides’ ancient contemporaries a wisdom that he denies to more ‘recent critics’: the ancients wisely ‘restricted Simonides’ statement to the effect achieved by the two arts’, while recognizing that, ‘despite the complete similarity of effect, the two arts differed both in the objects imitated as well as in the manner of imitation’.18 Lessing’s aim, then, is to show how both poetry (or the ‘temporally progressive arts’) and the visual arts are unified in their shared imitative aim—the imitative understanding they afford— but distinguished by their means or techniques (Wege). It is on this point of unity and divergence that the invention of the modern notion of the medium in Lessing’s Laocoon can be said to rest. This means that Lessing’s account of the divergence among the arts—his ‘medium-specificity’ thesis—attempts to explain how the different arts, visual and poetic, produce the aesthetic autonomy of the imagined object. It follows that an artwork’s efficacy is ultimately determined or decided by the understanding that it affords—in the aesthetic effect solicited by that imagined object (whether horses’ hooves or Philoctetes’ cry), above all as elaborated by the critic who makes this explicit. Lessing never wavers in his insistence that the independence of the imagined object, the properly aesthetic effect upon the receiver, is fundamental to the unity of all the arts. All art forms and art practices—all specific artistic media—are means through which independent aesthetic-imagined objects are rendered present to the mind of the receiver. Thus, what unifies the arts for Lessing is the aesthetic autonomy of the imagined object—the kind of contribution made to human understanding and self-understanding by artworks. What accounts for any divergence or ‘medium-specificity’ is the necessity of independently developing artistic techniques for the achievement of that understanding. The exercise of our imagination—the solicitation of ‘aesthetic effects,’ and the 17

Lessing 1984: 4: for discussion, cf. the introduction to this volume. Lessing 1984: 4. On this score, Wellbery suggests that Lessing remains close to Mendelssohn: see Wellbery 1984: 104–5. 18

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increased understanding that such effects induce—springs not merely from some isolated mental faculty (the ‘imagination’) but is rather cultivated in the concrete realization of independent artistic practices, in space and over time. By the same token, all of this is also cultivated in our critical response to artworks—insofar as these responses manage to make explicit both what artworks help us to understand about ourselves and our world (what they ‘mean’) and how artworks help us understand (how they ‘mean’). In this way, Lessing weds the question of artistic form or ‘media’ (‘painting’ and ‘poetry’) to the ‘content’ of artworks: what the artworks help us to understand, and how they do this.19 To avoid confusion, Lessing’s argument here does not mean that the task for artists, philosophers, and critics is just to articulate the aptness of ‘form to content’ in the arts by figuring out—through trial and error, or through subsequent philosophical reflection—which art forms (painting or poetry) or which artistic media (sound, colour, and so on) might best, or most adequately, render this or that imagined object present to the mind of the receiver. The point is not to determine, say, whether a horse’s hoof imprinting the earth or Laocoon’s anguish are more properly presented to the receiver by the visual arts or by poetry (let alone by further distinguishing among these, by considering painting as distinct from sculpture).20 Instead, Lessing is interested in how the imagined object—its capacity to excite our imagination and expand our understanding—determines the independent development of specific art forms: to what a particular art form can produce ‘on its own’, without the aid of another art form. ‘The proper definition of an art form can only be that which it is capable of producing without the aid of another art form.’21

Approaching Lessing’s ‘Limits’ Contrary to a common interpretation of Lessing, then, and in contrast to many discussions of ‘medium-specificity’ in the arts which claim Lessing 19 This is not to suggest that ‘art form’ and ‘artistic media’ are the same. Of course, the ‘art form’ of sculpture can work with different ‘media’—stone, wood, clay, and so on. 20 Herder, of course, was among the first to criticize Lessing for his conflation of painting and sculpture, in his Kritische Wälder of 1769: cf. the introduction to this volume, along with the chapters by Squire and Grethlein. 21 Lessing 1880: 441, cited in Wellbery 1984: 109.

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as a forerunner, Lessing is not simply concerned to show how, as Jay Bernstein puts it, ‘medium is syntax’ or how the medium ‘constrains the semantic contents that are possible’.22 Whatever is aesthetically achievable by a particular art form, such as sculpture, is what sculptors work out by sculpting—by developing a medium-specific practice in ways that are not logically deduced from, or physically determined by, features of its ‘natural-perceptual’ conditions (hardness, texture, sound), but which are instead realized in the artwork’s concrete rendering, in its specific features. What an art form teaches us—what it can teach us, what its ‘limits’ are—can only be learned by making artworks, and by responding to them as a ‘critic’ in Lessing’s sense (which, as I have tried to show, is continuous with something of the amateur’s claims). Consider the comparison drawn by Lessing in the fifth chapter between Virgil’s poetic representation of Laocoon and his sons and the sculptor’s depiction. ‘The idea of having the father and his two sons connected in one entanglement by means of the deadly serpents is undeniably an inspired one,’ writes Lessing, ‘and it gives evidence of a highly artistic imagination.’23 In Virgil, the serpents wind ‘twice round his body and twice round his throat, their heads and necks high above him’. The poet, notes Lessing, ‘is careful to leave Laocoon’s arms free from the coils which have encircled his body, and thus his hands hold perfect freedom’ while he emits shrieks like those of a bull wounded at the sacrificial altar.24 Lessing is thinking of the following lines of Virgil, describing Laocoon’s struggle with the snakes (Aen. 2.220–4): Ille simul manibus tendit diuellere nodos perfusus sanie uittas atroque ueneno, clamores simul horrendos ad sidera tollit qualis mugitus, fugit cum saucius aram taurus et incertam excussit ceruice securim. [Laocoon] struggled to prise open their coils with his hands, his priestly ribbons befouled by gore and black venom, and all the time he was raising horrible cries to heaven like the bellowing of a wounded bull shaking the ineffectual axe out of its neck as it flees from the altar.

The situation makes for a poignant contrast with the statue. There, Laocoon is naked (there is no blood-soaked fillet), and the serpents are

22

Bernstein 2003: xii.

23

Lessing 1984: 35.

24

Lessing 1984: 37.

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not coiled around him. Instead, one snake is shown attacking Laocoon’s waist while another is in his hand. This allows the sculpture to leave Laocoon’s neck free, so that his grimacing face can be raised in a beautiful expression of anguish.25 Now, with respect to the blood-soaked garment, Lessing appears to suggest that the sculptor’s hand was forced by the inherent demands of visual representation. ‘Had [the sculptor] left Laocoon so much as the fillet he would have greatly weakened the expression,’ writes Lessing, ‘for the brow, the seat of expression, would have been partly covered.’26 The laws of physics, Lessing seems to suggest, dictate that gore-soaked fabric conceals a human body. Or, better, the fabric’s naturally concealing features detract from the visible depiction of the imaginary object: the anguished entanglement as revealed by the brow’s expression. But while the blood-soaked garment itself (that material) instantiates natural laws and material constraints which cannot be flouted, must it follow that the artistic medium of sculpture is syntactically determined by these same laws and constraints? After all, if artistic effects are fully determined by material constraints as such, then Lessing’s insistence on the autonomy of aesthetic effects—the way in which we imaginatively grasp ‘more’ than we see—would be unjustified. But, as we just saw, Lessing thought that his discussion entitled him to that insistence. On the one hand, the physical constraints—for example, of Shakespeare’s ‘wooden O’—do not govern the aesthetic effect produced (the fields of France, for instance). On the other, these very material constraints are also put to artistic use. The material props and the actor’s speech are a means for their own self-overcoming in the artwork. Must the art of sculpture—as visual-tactile-plastic form—remain bound by the material constraints that adhere in the way that pieces of fabric obey the laws of physics? Consider one affirmative answer to this question: ‘If in the real world a cloak hides a body, then it also must do so in the plastic arts’, writes Bernstein in his commentary on this passage:27

25 Lessing refers to Winckelmann’s characterization of Laocoon’s ‘anxious and subdued sigh described by Sadolet’ (Lessing 1984: 7). 26 Lessing 1984: 39. 27 Bernstein 2003: xii. Bernstein goes on to argue, rightly, that Lessing’s ultimate aim is to ‘resist the claim that mediums provide the normative intelligibility of the practices dependent on them’ (Bernstein 2003: xiv).

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Medium is syntax. Minimally and palpably in the case of sculpture, it constrains the semantic contents that are possible. The choice, say, between priestly garb or naked body, is determined by the ends of beauty, but that one must choose is determined by the medium itself. Now, it is of course true that if one sets out to sculpt a human being in stone or marble, then one must choose between depicting that human form as clothed or naked. Wherever drapery is rendered in a stone sculpture, the human form is necessarily thereby concealed. And this necessity—the sculptor’s having to choose between rendering the naked human form or rendering the drapery—is connected to the ‘real world’ choice that attends the routine act of getting dressed in the morning. Just by virtue of being the kinds of bodies we are—shaped in three dimensions—we must choose whether to step out naked, or in some way covered.28

But does the general necessity of choosing between the ‘poles’ of nakedness and concealment-by-draping, in any ‘real life’ presentation of the human form (artistic or not), fundamentally constrain the expressive possibilities (the ‘semantic content’, the ‘imagined object’) of the art form? Are the plastic arts, as conceived by Lessing, fully determined—both in their practical creation and in the effects they produce in the viewer—by the constraints that adhere in being clothed or being naked? Is a sculpture really no less free in its production of aesthetic effects than the rest of us are, under the material compulsion to be either clothed or naked? ‘Necessity’, writes Lessing, ‘was the inventor of clothing, and what has art to do with necessity?’29 In the relevant passages, Lessing is sceptical of

28 That we typically cover ourselves with fabric or garments of varying degrees of transparency, and not cardboard boxes, would be an important issue to consider—both in general (as concerns the human act of ‘dressing’), and with respect to the art of sculpture. Indeed, the interpretation of the status of ‘clothing’ in classical sculpture has itself been of intense interest, to Winckelmann, Lessing, Hegel, and many others (as in Lessing’s discussion in the fifth chapter of Laocoon; cf. more recently e.g. Donohue 2005; Neer 2010). Likewise, discourses on the relative transparency of different fabrics were connected, already in ancient times, to the apprehension of sculptures. And then there is Kant, discussing ‘ornaments’ (Zieraten/Parerga)—‘i.e. those things which do not belong to the complete presentation of the object internally as a constituent, but only externally as a complement (was nicht in die ganze Vorstellung des Gegenstandes als Bestandstück innerlich, sondern nur äußerlich als Zutat gehört)’: alongside the frames of pictures or the colonnades around palaces, Kant mentions the Gewänder an Statuen, ‘draperies of statues’ (Kant 1987: 72, }14; cf. the famous response by Derrida 1987, with more detailed discussion in Platt and Squire 2017: 38–59). Here I want only to focus on a narrower issue raised by Bernstein’s treatment: the thought that the laws of physics which determine the revealing or concealing of the human form in general also determine the artistic medium of sculpture. 29 Lessing 1984: 39.

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the appropriateness of what he calls ‘conventional’ considerations regarding garments (Bernstein’s ‘real-life’ constraints) to any discussion of art. Even if ‘real world’ material constraints (materielle Schranken) may compel one to choose—both in making a sculpture, and in deciding what to wear—between clothing and nakedness, Lessing’s point is not that the sculptor of the Laocoon group was similarly compelled to make such a choice. The ‘obligation’ to choose between nakedness and priestly garb may be an obligation in the general sense of being a material constraint of that which adheres in the real world (one cannot be naked and draped)—but, for Lessing, that obligation is not what distinguishes sculpture (or the visual arts) from poetry. Indeed, Lessing wants to draw our attention to the invalidity of the inference connecting the art of sculpture to the physical laws that adhere in ‘choosing’ between nakedness and clothing—in order to show what both the Aeneid and the Laocoon group are doing with these physical constraints. After all, Lessing wants to show, as well as tell, what he is doing when he considers Laocoon’s sigh.30 He wants us to consider: what has the artist done or ‘realized’ in the work in question? Why has the artist emphasized one feature, rather than another? Here, Lessing introduces his doctrine of the pregnant moment. Lessing presents this less as a ‘rule’ that all plastic arts must follow for all time than as a critical insight offered in response to some particular artistic works—Virgil’s Aeneid compared with the Laocoon sculpture. As is well known, in his doctrine of the pregnant moment Lessing discovers that visual artists necessarily confine their presentation to a single moment of time, given the constrictions of representing the visible in a visual medium. And the climax of an action is the least suitable moment to present visually, since the scope of the viewer’s gaze is thereby restricted to that moment at which past and future matter the least: the climactic moment is too overwhelming. More effective, therefore, are those visual presentations that are ‘pregnant’ with past and future—for example, where Laocoon is seen to sigh, then ‘the imagination can hear him shriek’.31 The pregnant moment is full of narrative horizons that are made available to the viewer’s imagination in the course of his contemplation of the work. 30 As Wellbery puts it in his contribution to this volume, it is as if Lessing is telling the reader: ‘ “Watch! This is how criticism is done”.’ 31 Lessing 1984: 20; for discussion, cf. Squire’s chapter in this volume, pp. 101–2.

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Of course, one well-known implication of this—the one that led E. H. Gombrich famously to conclude that Lessing’s essay amounts to an attack on painting (or the visual arts)—is that the visual arts are most effective only when they manage to overcome the limits that constrain them to representing a single moment in time.32 The more that a temporal narrative can be invoked by the depiction of a single moment, the more the imagination is ‘freed’ to contemplate the implications and dimensions of human beings over time—and thus, the greater the selfunderstanding that the artwork affords. Put this way, it can sound as if Lessing values poetry over painting for merely formal reasons—by virtue of a transcendental distinction between a static visual horizon in which one moment is depicted, and a dynamic horizon of poetic ‘signs in time’.33 Like Aristotle, Lessing also concludes that the fullest or most ‘human’ way to understand human life over time is by considering human beings in action—or, better, in those extended sequences of actions that we call plots or narratives. This Aristotelian dimension matters because it is the narrative aspect—the consideration of the human being as active, over time—which distinguishes poetic representation as not merely ‘temporal’ (rather than visual-plastic), but also as that medium in which the kind of selfunderstanding afforded by a consideration of human beings in action most fully comes to the fore. After all, in the normal temporal distension of life, human beings ‘do’ and ‘suffer’ things without necessarily (just by being temporally distended) understanding any of that doing and suffering as part of any intelligible unity or whole. Perceiving actions over time as part of a narrative whole, or plot—and not merely as temporally distended—allows us to understand ourselves, to become intelligible to ourselves, in ways otherwise impossible. And it is that kind of understanding which poetry turns out to afford more fully than painting, in Lessing’s account, as in Aristotle’s.34 32 Gombrich 1957; cf. the discussions by e.g. Giuliani, Squire, and Trabant this volume. A similar argument had been advanced by Sigmund Freud, with respect to Michelangelo’s Moses (Freud 1997: 122–50). 33 This is Bernstein’s reading—when, for instance, he declares that ‘the rule of the pregnant moment is the sublation of painting by poetry, a poeticizing of painting where the material object becomes the source for revealing, for bringing to mind its imaginary counterpart: the complete, temporally extended action’ (Bernstein 2003: xv). 34 I am here assuming what I take to be a familiar aspect of the reception of Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy, namely that, as Stephen Halliwell puts it: ‘For Aristotle as for Plato,

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That Lessing arrives at a privileging of poetry over the visual arts seems beyond doubt.35 As Wellbery puts it, ‘the differences between poetry and the plastic arts are not merely classified, but are related to one another in terms of a teleology. Poetry approaches more closely than does painting or sculpture the end of autonomous imaginative activity.’36 But this is not the point I wish to emphasize by way of conclusion. Instead, I want to suggest that Lessing differs in important respects from Aristotle in the way he reaches his conclusions about artistic media and the understanding or ‘aesthetic effect’ they yield. For Aristotle, the privileging of poetry and mythos is rooted in a metaphysical privileging of action as the primary dimension of human self-realization. Aristotle’s argument for the primacy of praxis does not rely on insights gleaned from his analysis of Sophocles, or from any consideration of a comparison between painting and poetry. Aristotle’s is a transcendental argument about what it is to be human. And my suggestion is that Lessing’s essay—in spite of its strong Aristotelianism—does not offer conclusions rooted in a transcendental argument about what it is to be human, or in an ontological account of human action: his essay offers earned critical insights about the importance of artistic presentation of human actions, as a form of human self-understanding. After all, any privileging of poetry over painting on the grounds that human action—or ‘plots’, temporally distended sequences of unified actions—afford the greatest human self-realization or human selfunderstanding leaves open the question of how that understanding of action’s primacy (action’s ‘meaningfulness’) was ever achieved, refined, refocused. If Aristotle’s argument for action’s primacy is rooted in a transcendental ontology—a philosophical account of virtuous action, of the ‘good life’—then, I want to suggest, Lessing’s account (while certainly not at odds with those commitments) sees artworks and practices as fundamental to the historical achievement of the insight that actions matter so deeply to our overall self-conception. For Lessing, insight into the deepest, most significant and philosophically interesting of all mimetic artforms was tragic poetry’ (Halliwell 2002: 207). 35

Bernstein’s contradiction of this is worth considering, however; and it is true (as Wellbery also notes) that Lessing also turns poetry back toward sensuous worldliness, to ‘the immediacy which language left behind’ (what Bernstein calls poetry’s need for ‘the idea of painting’): see Wellbery 1984: esp. 130, with Bernstein 2003: xvi–xviii. 36 Wellbery 1984: 133; cf. also Squire’s chapter in this volume.

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the significance of human actions is an artistic achievement, historically realized (and correctable); it is not a philosophical insight. Artworks and practices are not only—as in Aristotle—evaluable or intelligible in terms of a transcendental account of praxis. For Lessing, artworks and practices are a way in which we come to grasp what it is to act, and how human actions function as modes of our overall self-understanding. The deliverances of narrative renderings are brought to our awareness, for Lessing, not by virtue of a metaphysical account of human action that is available independent of the contemplation or creation of artworks. Rather, the unfolding of artistic practices that grapple with or work through particular actions—Laocoon’s cry, say—are essential to the understanding, not just of a particular action, but to a fuller understanding of what human actions are, what they can teach us. Lessing’s focus on the limits of painting and poetry, then, is not intended to present transcendental criteria according to which the different arts can be evaluated in medial terms. Rather, in my view, it is intended to show how the criteria according to which certain artworks or practices yield a deeper understanding of human life are themselves graspable in and as the achievements of specific artworks and practices.

14 Image and Text in Lessing’s Laocoon From Friendly Semiotic Neighbours to Articulatory Twins Jürgen Trabant

Laocoon, there can be no doubt, is one of the most interpreted and analysed texts of world literature. With that in mind, this chapter will not attempt an ‘interpretation’ pure and simple. Rather, on the occasion of the essay’s 250th anniversary, and rethinking Lessing’s essay from my own academic perspective (as a scholar interested in the historical anthropology of language), I approach Laocoon as a pre-text for some broader remarks on its main subject: the duality of image and language (or more precisely, text). Yet this statement is already an interpretation and a transgression. Is Laocoon about image and language? It is, of course, about Mahlerey und Poesie—about the visual arts (first and foremost, but not only, about painting), and about poetry (that is, about literature and the verbal arts). But as such, or so I argue in this chapter, the essay can also be considered as a contribution to a general theory of language and image. Laocoon is often read—including by many in the present edited volume—as a text that advances and defends the priority of poetry. I consider the following sentence as conveying a different message:1

Lessing 1984: 91. For the German, see Lessing 2012: 130: ‘Doch, so wie zwey billige freundschaftliche Nachbarn zwar nicht verstatten, daß sich einer in des andern innerstem 1

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But as two equitable and friendly neighbours do not permit the one to take unbecoming liberties in the heart of the other’s domain, yet on their extreme frontiers practice a mutual forbearance . . . so also with painting and poetry.

‘Two equitable and friendly neighbours (zwei billige freundschaftliche Nachbarn)’: this is the principal lesson I would like to take from Lessing. Mahlerey and Poesie, or image and word, are fair and friendly neighbours. The remarks that follow are an attempt to tease out that relationship. In my research group in Berlin, we call the basis of this friendly neighbourliness ‘symbolic articulation’.2 We attempt to figure out what precisely this is: to ask what—as Lessing puts it—‘the intimate domain (das innerste Reich)’ is, as indeed to ask what the ‘extreme frontiers (die äussersten Grenzen)’ of image and language might be. Our view is that, contrary to Lessing’s topographical metaphor, the neighbours share to a great extent one and the same intimate domain, and that the two domains are not so well delimited by borders.3 Actually, we would change the topographical metaphor: text and image are neighbours in superimposed floors of a shared house rather than denizens of separate castles in contiguous territories.

Historical Prelude I consider Laocoon to be one chapter in a discussion of the duality of image and language that in fact reaches back much longer than 250 years. The novelty of Lessing’s essay is not so much the discovery of new characteristics of image and word but rather a new positioning of these two semiotic modes, or semioses. After Winckelmann’s iconolatric appraisal of Greek culture—following the celebration of the image—the word is reintroduced into the discussion, while image and language are

Reiche ungeziemende Freyheiten herausnehme, wohl aber auf den äussersten Grenzen eine wechselseitige Nachsicht herrschen lassen . . . : so auch die Mahlerey und Poesie.’ The page numbers throughout the chapter refer to McCormick’s translation and to Vollhardt’s German edition. On Laocoon as an ideological defence of poetry, see Mitchell 1986 and more recently (from a different perspective) Beiser 2009; cf. also the chapters by e.g. Mitchell, Squire, Giuliani, Beiser, and Grethlein in this book. 2 Cf. http://www.kunstgeschichte.hu-berlin.de/forschung/laufende-forschungsprojekte/ symbolic-articulation/. 3 And, as Mitchell would say, there is no border police: cf. Mitchell 2003: 52.

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not opposed to one another as rivals struggling for hegemony but rather juxtaposed as ‘friendly neighbours’. The comparison of image and word is situated here in the realm of the arts, as paragone of Mahlerey and Poesie. However, I take the message of Laocoon to be of a more general importance for human cognition and communication—for semiosis, as indeed for a theory of the human. The paragone of image and language is as old as our cultural tradition. Words and images have always been treated together, mostly as enemies or rivals. Yet language and image are old companions, for they have the same fundamental function or, better, the same double function: communication and cognition. There is no theory of language without reference to the image and, as far as I can see, no theory of images without reference to language.4 However, the positions of these semioses differ considerably in our two ancient traditions—that is, the theologico-religious and the philosophico-scientific traditions, namely the biblical and the Greek. In order to understand the broader intellectual backdrop of Laocoon, it is therefore necessary to say something about each in turn—albeit, of course, painting in deliberately broad brushstrokes. The Bible clearly sides with language against the image. The divine ‘Word’ creates the world and Adam accomplishes that creation by the invention of names for God’s creatures. The second commandment is very clear: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness.’ The New Testament too praises the Word, the logos: ‘In the beginning was the Word’, as the opening of St John’s Gospel puts it (ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος). The tradition of ancient Israel prioritizes the word and the ear, while the Greek tradition proves generally more in favour of the image and the eye. As perhaps the most important ‘classical presence’, one might begin here with Plato. For Plato, words are understood to have a double function: if they are didactic and communicative (didaskalikon), they are also cognitive (ousias diakritikon, that is, ‘discriminating being’). Plato discusses the cognitive function of words in the Cratylus by asking whether they are images (eikones), and thus depict their meaning by nature (physis) or whether they do so by human imposition (synthêkê). The thinking derives from a long discussion that words are not appropriate

4

Cf. Bredekamp 2010.

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images of the world (ta pragmata, ta onta) and that, therefore, it would be better to have direct knowledge of the world without words. From here, by the way, results Europe’s deep longing for a language-free way to knowledge, and the language-critical attitude of philosophy and science. Plato treats the problem of the cognitive impact of words in terms of visual semiosis, and he explicitly compares the making of words with painting and drawing. Aristotle has a solution for Plato’s problem about the word being a poor eikôn: for Aristotle, the word simply does not have to depict the world, it does not have to be an image; it is merely a sign (of an image). Aristotle clearly separates the image and the word by attributing different functions to them: cognition and communication. In Aristotle’s famous pages on language in De interpretatione (which would be the linguistic credo of Europe for millennia), language and image are related, but they are linked to two different functions.5 The cognitive function is fulfilled by images, for the mind makes (mental) images of the world (pathêmata tês psychês), mental inner representations that are pictures: homoiômata, ‘likenesses’. Thought is an image that is homologous with the world and its actions (ta pragmata). And—even as a mental image—thought is visual; the likeness is based on vision. It is also haptic: the likeness is impressed on the mind like an impression on wax (it is stamped: typos).6 Haptic or visual, thought is image. Words, on the other hand, have nothing to do with cognition, their function is communication. They amount only to communicative sound or voice (ta en têi phônêi), and this sound is not similar to the thought it transports. The word is sign (sêmeion) not image, and as such, it is ‘arbitrary’ (kata synthêkên) and not very important. The Aristotelian term kata synthêkên (‘according to tradition’, ‘according to convention’) is the source for the extremely ambiguous modern term ‘arbitrary’ which we will also find to be an important term in Laocoon: willkührlich.7 And, again, one might note that calling the word a sign (sêmeion) is clearly a visualization of that phonetic production. This pagan Greek preference of the image and the eye will be thoroughly demolished by medieval theology, especially by St Augustine’s 5

6 Arist. Int. 16a. For the thinking, cf. especially Platt 2006. On the arbitrariness of signs in Lessing’s Laocoon and beyond, see Beiser’s and Lifschitz’s contributions to the present book. 7

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polemical stance against the body. The body is evil, the flesh is sin: concupiscentia carnis. Worse than anything else is the concupiscence of the eyes (concupiscentia oculorum). It follows that images are evil. The only source of truth is sacred words (uerba diuina, eloquia diuina); thus the ear seems to be preferable to the eye, and words are better than images. But even these sacred sounds are still carnal, flesh, caro; therefore they will be completely immaterialized.8 Finally, the Renaissance witnesses a liberation from the Christian repression of the body, and first of all, of the eye. The concupiscence of the eye comes back after a thousand years of suppression: the image returns. Leonardo celebrates its triumphant superiority. And, in the wake of the image, the word too retrieves its body—and its soul. The word, from Aristotle onwards only a secondary device for communication, regains its rhetorical splendour and its philosophical dignity.9 The humanistic appraisal of the specific qualities of Latin precedes the discovery of the aesthetic, poetic, and cognitive nature of language in all its manifestations. It is against this intellectual historical backdrop that Lessing found himself. The Enlightenment still celebrated the return of the body, while the German Enlightenment in particular celebrated Greece. Winckelmann overemphasizes the image; German hellenophilia is, in general, a celebration of the image or iconolatry. By contrast, Lessing’s Laocoon challenges this exclusive concentration on the image by reintroducing the word into the paragone.

Lessing’s Laocoon Returning now to 1766, and to Lessing, we find the structural difference between poetry and visual art sketched in chapters 15 to 17 of Laocoon. Lessing, in the sixteenth chapter, takes a semiotic stance. He develops an aesthetic semiotics or a semiotic aesthetics.10 The passage I must quote is known by heart by all serious readers of Laocoon:11 Cf. Trabant 2003 (especially the first chapter). 10 Cf. Mack 2011 and Waswo 1987. Cf. Wellbery 1984. 11 Lessing 1984: 78. For the German, see Lessing 2012: 115: ‘Wenn es wahr ist, daß die Mahlerey zu ihren Nachahmungen ganz andere Mittel, oder Zeichen gebrauchet, als die Poesie; jene nehmlich Figuren und Farben in dem Raume, diese aber artikulirte Töne in der Zeit; wenn unstreitig die Zeichen ein bequemes Verhältniß zu dem Bezeichneten haben 8 9

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If it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colours in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive. Objects or parts of objects which exist in space are called bodies. Accordingly, bodies with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting. Objects or parts of objects which follow one another are called actions. Accordingly, actions are the true subjects of poetry.

To my mind, there are at least six points that need emphasizing in Lessing’s famous words here. Allow me to run through each of those six points in turn: 1. Lessing discusses the ‘signs’ or Zeichen of Mahlerey and Poesie. Their opposition is based on the opposition of the senses—between the eye on the one hand, and the ear on the other. 2. The signs (or, more exactly, the signifiers) differ materially: a. Mahlerey uses figures and colours in space: neben einander, das Coexistirende. b. Poesie uses articulate sounds in time: auf einander folgend, das Consecutive. 3. The materiality of the signs determines the content, because there has to be a ‘suitable relation to the thing signified’ (bequemes Verhältniß zu dem Bezeichneten).12 Lessing establishes an iconic relationship between signifier and signified in Poesie as well as in Mahlerey. This means that both Mahlerey and Poesie are structurally ‘images’ with a ‘similarity’ between the two levels.13

müssen: So können neben einander geordnete Zeichen, auch nur Gegenstände, die neben einander, oder deren Theile neben einander existiren, auf einander folgende Zeichen aber, auch nur Gegenstände ausdrücken, die auf einander, oder deren Theile auf einander folgen. Gegenstände, die neben einander oder deren Theile neben einander existiren, heissen Körper. Folglich sind Körper mit ihren sichtbaren Eigenschaften, die eigentlichen Gegenstände der Mahlerey. Gegenstände, die auf einander, oder deren Theile auf einander folgen, heissen überhaupt Handlungen. Folglich sind Handlungen der eigentliche Gegenstand der Poesie.’ 12 On the importance of the phrase, see the contributions in this book by e.g. Squire, Giuliani, Beiser, and Lifschitz. 13 Cf. Stierle 1984, Giuliani 2003: 22.

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4. From this third point stems a semantic opposition between different sorts of signs: a. Spatial, neben einander geordnet: signs designating juxtaposed objects such as bodies. b. Temporal, auf einander folgend: signs designating successive objects such as actions. These material and semantic oppositions (signifiers + signifieds) clearly define the ‘inner territories’ of the neighbours: figures, colours, and bodies, versus articulated sounds and actions. 5. At this point, it is worth noting that there is some overlapping at the ‘outer borders’. Since bodies also exist in time and actions also cling to bodies (space), both cross the borders but behave in a very cautious way in the realm of the other: painting shows only one temporal moment of bodies, while poetry relates to only one spatial property of actions. This delicate overlapping is tolerated with ‘mutual forbearance’ (wechselseitige Nachsicht) by the neighbours. 6. Finally, in chapter 17, Lessing adds a further criterion of delimitation: the temporal signs of poetry (words) are not only successive, but also arbitrary (willkührlich). The old Aristotelian tradition of the word as an arbitrary sign (kata synthêkên) enhances the opposition between word and image. Lessing does not argue to this effect explicitly, but we have to assume that spatial signs—colours and figures—are not arbitrary. Lessing does not say so because it would have been utterly superfluous: images are iconic, of course, since colore e disegno imitate the object. But, notwithstanding that difference (arbitrary versus iconic), poetic texts as a whole are images/icons made of arbitrary signs.14 As temporal-successive entities they designate temporal objects, i.e. actions, their temporality depicting the successiveness of the actions. But the articulirte Töne do not themselves depict anything. This is perhaps one of the most profound insights of Lessing’s semiotic aesthetics: the literary text is an image made of arbitrary signs (and Mahlerey is an image made of iconic signs).15

14

Cf. Vollhardt’s discussion in Lessing 2012: 453. Cf. Wittgenstein 1963, pointing out that any utterance is an image: ‘Der Satz ist ein Bild der Wirklichkeit’ (para. 4.01). On the tension between the arbitrariness and iconicity of literary texts in Lessing’s Laocoon, see also the chapters by Beiser and Lifschitz in this book. 15

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Language and Image Lessing’s comparison is the model for the following sketch: in Laocoon, the friendly neighbours Mahlerey and Poesie mutually shed light on each other’s structural properties. The concept of articulation will allow us to contemplate the commonalities and the differences between image and language in a somewhat deeper way.16 Articulation is mostly understood phonetically, as the fact that the vocal organs produce distinguishable (and connected) movements, such as Lessing’s articulirte Töne. And, of course, these sounds constitute the specificity of language. But language is not only phonetic articulation. It has a second—or rather first—level of articulation: it articulates thought, and thus introduces distinctions into the chaos of our perceptions. The word is an organon diakritikon tês ousias, as Plato argued in Cratylus (388b–c)—an instrument that discriminates the being. Yet this articulation of the world is not specific to language but rather also shared by the image. It is the fundamental movement of any cognitive activity, introducing distinctions into the indeterminate chaos of the world. Gottfried Boehm calls the first step of the creation of an image ‘contrast’.17 This insight can be generalized for human cognition: introducing contrast is the first moment in the articulation of human thought—and hence of human signs. But language has the specific structural feature of a second articulation, the phonetic articulation. As in Lessing, image theory and language theory may benefit from one another. To make this point, I start (i) with some considerations concerning images, before (ii) approaching the same points from a linguistic perspective.

(i) Defining the Image Before proceeding, it is first necessary to say something about how images have been defined. Everyday intuitions about images might include such statements as the following: a. An image is something made by human beings, an artefact. b. A prototypical picture is flat, often square. c. An image does not move. 16

Cf. Trabant 1998 (especially the fourth chapter).

17

Boehm 1994: 332.

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d. An image is something to look at. e. An image represents something. f. An image is ‘similar’ to what it represents. Now, recent theories of the image as well as the development of the arts have shattered these common opinions. Against such idées reçues, the following arguments have been made: a. Pictures are not necessarily manufactured artefacts. Lucretian cloud formations, bizarre stones or roots—formations of nature— also amount to images. b. A picture is not necessarily a surface, nor is it square. This view was due mainly to the dominance of painting. But since antiquity an imago or a simulacrum has been a three-dimensional object, a statue rather than a flat object. The biblical ‘image’ of the second commandment was a plastic artefact. Even flat pictures are not completely flat.18 c. Pictures do move: the tableau vivant already manifested the tendency towards movement. Pictures ‘wanted’ to have life and time. They have become very much temporal and ‘consecutive’, nacheinander, ever since Lessing’s time. And pictures have certainly moved all the more since the invention of cinema. Pictures are cinemato-graphy, ‘the writing of movement’, and today the prototypical picture is a movie. Movement, that is, time and life, has been introduced into the image. Lessing’s immobility of images— atemporal spatiality—today concerns only a specific kind of picture. d. Visuality: new theories of the image have cast doubt on the visuality of images. As John Krois famously wrote, ‘you do not need eyes for pictures’.19 The blind draw cats and tables without ever having seen them. Their drawings render their spatial and haptic experiences, not their visual experiences. The sensory basis of the image is considerably enlarged—from the eyes at least to the sense of touch. e. It is now questionable whether pictures always represent something. What is represented in an abstract painting or in a monochrome picture? Modern art has emancipated the picture

18 19

Cf. Krämer 2012: 79. ‘Für Bilder braucht man keine Augen’: Krois 2011: 132–60.

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from objects, from das Bezeichnete, and from the task of representation, Darstellung. f. The most frequently discussed quality of images is certainly their very ‘iconicity’, namely the ‘similarity’ with what they represent. It has been called their ‘naturalness’ (Plato’s physis). This similarity has traditionally been considered the essential quality of the image, and one of its main differences as compared with language, the latter being considered as ‘arbitrary’ (with only very few iconic qualities).20 The term ‘iconicity’—the essence of being an icon, an image—means just this: similarity with the object represented. Now if images no longer represent anything, there cannot be any similarity with a represented object. Even where pictures still refer to an object and seem to be similar to it, this similarity has been questioned. The image has at the very least been bereft of its ‘naturalness’. Umberto Eco, for example, has insisted on the ‘arbitrariness’ or ‘conventionality’ of images:21 he shifted the iconicity from the objects and the material images to the subjective perception processes which are the same for objects as for images. These deconstructions of some essential features of the image render it much more similar to language. W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that the image is ‘contaminated’ by language: images are, like language, at least temporal and moving, and they are not similar to the object (if there is any object).22 In the following remarks I proceed still further in the direction of this argument, in order to explain how the ‘contamination’ of the image by language is something still starker.

(ii) Image and Language After summarizing some of the radical ways in which traditional definitions of the image have been challenged, I here want to introduce language back into the equation. More specifically, I return to the six definitions of images introduced earlier, rethinking them in light of a comparison with language. 20

This, at least, is the trivial understanding of Saussure’s arbitraire du signe (Saussure 1916); it was fiercely criticized by Roman Jakobson in 1965 (see Jakobson 1971), who insisted on the essential presence of naturalness (which is to say, iconicity) in language. 21 Eco 1972 (esp. chapter B.1.ii). 22 Mitchell 1984b: 529.

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a. Are natural forms images? Calling natural forms images is comparable to saying that natural forms are words—that, for instance, the roaring thunder is a word. Both statements are animistic statements. No word is made by nature; language is human action. Hence words are artefacts and language is the formative organ of thought, ‘das bildende Organ des Gedanken’, as Humboldt put it.23 Words are human formations of the world. This fact confirms the intuition that no image is made by nature, and that images too are human actions or artefacts: they are intrusions of the human into the natural world, Ein-Griffe, or human additions to the natural world. It is true that the formations of nature— for example the apparent shapes that clouds seem to comprise in the sky (cf. e.g. Lucr. 4.129–42 and Phil. VA 2.22)—have sometimes been said to approach the beautiful figurative shapes of humans. However, it is the human glance that renders such formations ‘images’: our creative act of looking turns clouds into recognizable figures. Likewise, the beautiful stone or the bizarre root is elevated into ‘imageness’ or iconicity through a human action. By this human action the natural object becomes an artefact, even if no additional material formation has taken place. b. and c. Space and time: Just as temporality was introduced into the image, spatiality has become an essential trait of words. Nothing is more spatial than sound. Leibniz already knew that sound is ‘environment’, covering 360 degrees of the space.24 Don Ihde has likewise shown the ‘globality’ or roundness of sound.25 This surrounding spatial quality of sound is one of the major evolutionary advantages of language. Hence it is not possible to limit words to time: image and word exist together in space and time. d. Visuality: Krois is right, for tactility or manualness has to be added to the visuality of the image: the image is visual and tactile. Language, on the contrary, is not visual or tactile, but audible and vocal. From this perspective, Lessing’s traditional opposition between the eye and the ear can be maintained. The price of this statement, however, is to disregard— for the sake of the argument—the massive presence of written language in our culture that seems to undermine the eye–ear opposition. But let us

23 24 25

Humboldt 1999: 54. For Leibniz’s thoughts here (first published in 1765), see Leibniz 1966: 39. Ihde 1976.

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assume that even the most visual representation of language is still based on its vocal characteristics. This very important addition to the image, its ‘manualness’, discloses at the same time a profound structural parallelism between the two forms of semiosis. The image, like language, is situated in a proactive, reflexive, and reciprocal bodily movement. The complicated motricity of language was first described by Wilhelm von Humboldt. As Humboldt noted, the word is a vocal production that must be perceived by the ear of the producer of the vocal sound him- or herself (otherwise articulation does not function). It is then heard by the ear of the other: my voice—my ear—your ear:26 For in that the mental striving breaks out through the lips in language, the product of that striving returns back to the speaker’s ear. . . . In appearance, however, language develops only socially, and man understands himself only once he has tested the intelligibility of his words by trial upon others.

In an analogous way, the image is made by the ‘hand’ with the reflexive guidance of the eye (and/or the sense of touch) of the maker and then perceived by the eye (or the hand) of the other: my hand—my eye (and hand)—your eye (and hand). In other words: beneath the distinction hand/eye versus voice/ear, we have a structural parallelism between exteriorization (voice, hand), self-perception (ear, eye, or touch), and reception (ear, eye, or touch)—finally accompanied by a corresponding parsing in the other. Theories of language and image do not often consider this parallelism, because they approach their objects from different angles: images are mostly approached and reflected upon from the standpoint of the beholder (your eye), not from the perspective of the producer (my hand and eye).27 Words, by contrast, are mostly reflected upon from the standpoint of the producer (my voice), not from that of the receiver (your ear). Grammars, dictionaries, and rhetoric are originally instructions

26 Humboldt 1999: 56, translating Humboldt 1903–36: VII.55: ‘Denn indem in ihr das geistige Streben sich Bahn durch die Lippen bricht, kehrt das Erzeugniß desselben zum eignen Ohre zurück. . . . In der Erscheinung entwickelt sich jedoch die Sprache nur gesellschaftlich, und der Mensch versteht sich selbst nur, indem er die Verstehbarkeit seiner Worte an Andren versuchend geprüft hat.’ 27 Thus also Bredekamp 2010: 52.

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for the production of sentences and texts. Is this so because everyone is a producer of words (‘an animal that has logos’: zôon logon echon), but not necessarily—which is to say, biologically—a producer of images? I think we are necessarily also animals that have images (zôa eikones echonta, as it were): humans gesticulate and thereby create visual signs, images. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of geste seems to be appropriate to mediate between the phonetic-acoustic and the muscular-visual embodiments of human thought.28 The so-called philosophy of embodiment provides precious insights in this respect and is now moving toward a comprehensive theory of image and language.29 e. Representation: Words always represent something: they have meaning, that is, an objective intellectual content. They are not mere cries: an expression (Ausdruck) of the self or an appeal (Appell) to the other.30 The image, on the other hand—as modern art teaches us—no longer ‘represents’ or ‘depicts’ anything. This ‘non-representativeness’ of the image would be a rather astonishing difference to language, given that ‘representing something’ is certainly the most deep-rooted traditional semantic feature of the term ‘image’. However, the comparative view of language and image rather confirms that images too essentially ‘represent’. But at this point we have to look a little closer at the term ‘representation’. Three points strike me as significant here: 1. Representation, Darstellung, is, according to Bühler, the specific semiotic function of language.31Darstellung is the establishment of a relationship to the world. According to Tomasello’s semiogenetic account, pointing to the world is specifically human.32 Animals do not point to the world but rather express their emotions and appeal to others; they do not show something in the world to others. Pointing to the world, deixis for the sake of the other, Darstellung—this is the fundamental gesture of human semiosis, not only of language.

28 29 30 31

Cf. Merleau-Ponty 1945 (especially the first, third, and fifth chapters). Cf. Noë 2015. Ausdruck, Appell, Darstellung in the sense of Bühler 1934 (translated as Bühler 1990). 32 Bühler 1934. Tomasello 2008.

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2. Likewise Darstellung is connected to the ocular-manual system as well as to the vocal-auditory system. With these pointing gestures, humans show something in the world to one another, they ‘articulate’ the world: they ‘grasp’ something in the world, contrasting it to something else (Boehm). This action is ‘cognitive articulation’. Plato called the word an organon diakritikon tês ousias, an instrument to make differences in the existing world. Already in Plato this articulation of the world was the common task of images and words. Hence Darstellung cannot be confined to words alone. 3. With regard to those images that seemingly do not represent any object in the world, the ‘grasping’ of the world (Bühler’s Darstellung, representation) has to be seen in a new way. Representationarticulation is not primarily a ‘mental stamp’ the mind receives from without, a ‘representation’ in the mind (Vorstellung) linked to a material thing (sign). It is rather first and foremost a creation: it is ‘making something visible’ (Krois 2011: 69). Therefore, the image does not have to ‘represent’ something outside it; by making something visible it points to that making, to the hand and to its creation, to its own creativity, in the image itself. This is how Merleau-Ponty describes the word: as a gesture that contains and creates its meaning in itself.33 We can extend this description to the image: the image is a gesture, and its meaning a world. f. Similarity: What about the traditional view of similarity as the very core of the image? Does ‘iconicity’ mean similarity with the thing represented? Humans point to something in the world for the other. In the absence of the object, humans ‘dance’ the object, they mimic the object with their bodies. They may draw the object, sing the object, reproduce the object in clay, wood, or other materials. Mimesis follows deixis-Darstellung. Mimesis reacts to the absence of the object by recreating the object; it makes the object visible, hence the similarity. Similarity creates the presence of the object in its absence. Mimesis enables pointing to the absent: the simulacrum contains deixis. Pointing and pantomiming are two aspects of the same phenomenon. The way from deixis to mimesis seems specific to the eye–hand system. But this duality of deixis and mimesis is just a universal feature of human 33

Merleau-Ponty 1945: 214: ‘La parole est un geste et sa signification un monde.’

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semioses. The phonetico-auricular system of language also points to the world while imitating it, making the world audible. Iconicity (pantomiming, mimicking) is not specific to the visual. The simulacrum can also be vocal-auditive. Cratylus in Plato’s dialogue conceived of words as phonetic eikones (and Socrates rather sides with Cratylus against the radical conventionalist Hermogenes). Roman Jakobson (1971)—and linguistic research on ‘naturalness’—insisted on the presence of icastic procedures in language, against Saussure’s rather shortsighted refusal of any linguistic mimesis.

Sound Articulation Language, however, makes an additional step towards an (incomplete) emancipation from mimesis through its very specific material structure. That is a decisive move in the cognitive technique as well as in the evolution of mankind: humans invent the articulation of the voice. Humans choose, for the production of words, from the unlimited possibilities of the movements of the vocal organs, certain types of those movements in a limited number (between 10 and 140) and they establish regularities to combine these vocal movements. The number and the phonetic qualities of the so-called ‘phonemes’, as well as the possibilities of their combination, differ from language to language. Language does not only articulate the world, it has a ‘second articulation’. The functional parallelism of language and image we have so far demonstrated (artificiality, dual corporeal system in the form eye–hand and ear–voice, pointing–articulating, deixis–mimesis) ends here. Not articulation as such but rather double articulation is the structural feature that differentiates image from language. There is no such thing as phonemic articulation in the manual-ocular system. Only the vocal-auditory system allows the production and combination of a limited number of movements of the vocal organs to produce words and utterances. Lessing mentions colours and figures as the basic material elements of Mahlerey and ‘articulated sounds’ as the basic material elements of Poesie. They are, however, incomparable since there is no second articulation of colours or figures in the visual-chirotic realm. There are no typified gestural elements in a limited number and with certain rules of combination for the construction of semantic units in the visual medium (only alphabetic writing will be such a system, but it is only the structural

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image of phonetic language, not a semiotic system of its own). From antiquity onwards, language is called ‘articulated’ since it is one of the fundamental linguistic insights that speech is made up of parts that are jointed, that it is not just an undifferentiated, continuous melisma or cry. Lessing does not yet have a more elaborate knowledge of the implications of his expression ‘articulated sounds’. Actually, it is only Humboldt who, in his article on alphabetic script of 1824, will develop an encompassing theory of articulation based upon a clear phonological conception of linguistic sounds.34 Phonetic articulation is the basis of ‘arbitrariness’ since it allows an infinite production of words, of semantic units that are not pictures, through the endless combination of a small number of elements. Phonetic articulation enables the explosion of human culture because this specific structure allows humans to think and communicate everything.

Evolutionary Conjectures: Twin Birth The friendly cohabitation of Mahlerey and Poesie in Lessing’s Laocoon was based on the common iconicity of texts and images, on the ‘suitable relation to the thing signified’ (bequemes Verhältniß zu dem Bezeichneten).35 In my story the neighbours become even friendlier. Some of Lessing’s differences tend to disappear: space and time, Körper and Handlung, das Coexistirende and das Consecutive vanish as profound differences. Therefore, the articulirte Töne, the specific linguistic articulation, becomes the very centre of the difference. Lessing’s friendly cohabitation might also be explained by the evolutionary account of a neighbouring evolution of words and images. While Lessing does not refer to such a genetic relationship of image and word, he could have found it in works by his contemporaries Vico or Condillac. In Vico’s Scienza nuova (1744), image and language ‘nacquero gemelle’, they are born as twins and develop in a parallel manner, ‘caminarono del pari’ (‘walked side by side’).36 Vico was a professor of rhetoric and hence knew that actio and vox, gesture and voice, always go 34 Cf. ‘Die Gliederung ist aber gerade das Wesen der Sprache; es ist nichts in ihr, das nicht Theil und Ganzes seyn könnte’ (‘Ueber die Buchstabenschrift und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau’ (1824): Humboldt 1903–36: V.107–33, at 122). 35 36 Lessing 1984: 78 (= 2012: 115). Vico 1986: para. 33.

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together. In the beginning, the visual-gestural twin is stronger than the vocal one, but later the vocal aspect becomes increasingly important until, in modern times, vocal language is the dominant semiosis. And only in modern times is language ‘conventional’ (‘voci convenute da’ popoli’, par. 32), and thereby seemingly ‘arbitrary’ (‘a placito’, par. 444). Underneath this superficial arbitrariness, however, language always stays ‘natural’, that is, iconic. In Vico, the question of the paragone of image or language is resolved in the most peaceful way: visual and vocal semioses are iconic twins. In Condillac’s Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746), the ‘cry of passion’ and the deictic movements of the body (action) are the origins of human semiosis. Condillac imagines a primordial semiogenetic scene in which the vocal and the gestural collude: a speechless proto-human cannot reach an object he desires. He produces a movement—action—towards the object, accompanied by a vocal production, a cry of passion. This complex behaviour is visual-objective (deixis, ‘representation’) and phonetic-subjective (‘expression’ and ‘appeal’ in Bühler’s terms) at one and the same time. An observer with an innate instinct for pity comes to help. This intersubjective success of the semiotic behaviour slowly transforms it into an intentional activity. The complex sign becomes vocal, the vocal sound switches from passion (appeal and expression) to representation, and the primordial cry becomes increasingly articulated sound. Action and sound are brothers, but with rather different functions, contrary to Vico’s scenario, and they develop, as in Vico, into separate but parallel semiotic systems. Michael Tomasello offers a related, modern semiogenetic story: only humans point to the world with communicative intentions, he argues, and only humans imitate the world (apes do not ape!)37 By this semantic or cognitive orientation—Darstellung—their semiosis differs profoundly from that of any other primate that is exclusively ‘pragmatic’: ‘expression’ and ‘appeal’ in Bühlerian terms. According to Tomasello, deictic and mimetic gestures—the eye–hand system—are the first and fundamental movements of human symbolization and communication. There are no semiogenetic twins. The phonetico-vocal system takes over later. Semiosis moves from the hand to the mouth, or from the hand to the

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Tomasello 2008.

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‘face’ in the terms of Leroi-Gourhan (1964–5). Leroi-Gourhan suggests that the phonetic and the gestural systems are even ‘friendlier neighbours’ than Tomasello allows. They are closer since they are not semioses that follow one another in evolution but rather semioses that develop at the same time: ‘nacquero esse gemelle e caminarono del pari’, as Vico says. They are born as twins and develop in parallel. In Tomasello it is not very clear why, after the establishment of the visual-manual system, the phonetico-auditive apparatus takes over the functions of pointing and pantomiming, or why sound becomes semantic after the gesture. The phonetico-auditive system is, according to Tomasello, first specialized for expression and appeal; it points, as it were, to emotions, to the inner world, and only later does it follow the visual gestural system in pointing and pantomiming the external world. Yet why does the vocal system pass from the expression of emotions to the representation of the outer world? My proposed solution to this puzzling transition from the gesturalvisual to the phonetico-auditive consists in stating that no such transition actually takes place.38 The two systems are not specialized in the sense that the visual refers to the outside world while the auditive concerns emotions and the inner world. I would suggest that both systems have the same functions from the outset. They deal with the objective world as well as with emotions and appeals. Visual gestures, or movements of the body, are not specialized for reference to objects but rather also express emotions and appeal. And the phonetico-auditive apparatus does not merely express emotions or appeal to others but refers to the world too. When humans point to the world and pantomime it, they do so also with their voice and mouth—la face—not only with their hands. The whole body participates in Darstellung. We must not forget that the mouth—before the human upright position—was the main organ of apprehension and was hence directed towards the world. It is true that with the erect position the hand becomes the main organ of material apprehension and that the mouth is liberated from that function so that it can switch to symbolization. Yet there is no reason why the mouth should not maintain its chief direction towards the world. Mouth and hand seize the world, both form the Be-Griff (con-cept).

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Cf. Trabant 2013.

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Therefore, there is no radical transition from the gestural-visual to the phonetico-auditory and no dramatic turn of the latter from emotion to cognition, from interiority to exteriority. Since the ‘hand’ shifts from locomotion to prehension, both systems now grasp the world. The human being becomes—as a whole—more semantic; both systems point to the world while ‘dancing’ it. In a further evolutionary step, however, the phonetico-auditory system becomes more important for symbolization. First because the face is liberated from the task of material prehension, and second, since it develops the new miraculous system of symbolization: the mouth—the face—develops the most sophisticated means for the prehension of the world, phonetic articulation. This allows the specifically human articulation: an articulation of everything, the infinite appropriation of the world through words.

Conclusion I conclude my reflections on image and word with a further glance back at Laocoon. Lessing has shown the way towards friendship between the visual-manual and the vocal-auditory semiosis. He has liberated the old paragone from the sterile enmity of image and word. His comparison between poetry and painting is situated within a reflection on the arts: the common ground of that comparison is the iconicity of both. I have tried to demonstrate that this common ground is much greater than often assumed, and that it is not restricted to art: it consists in an anthropological parallelism of human cognitive activity and of the embodiment of thought. Drawing further on Lessing’s ideas, we can find more substantial analogies of these two semioses and also delve more deeply into the decisive structural difference that is due to the second articulation. Hence, once again: image and the word occupy two floors in a shared house rather than two different houses with gardens that overlap at their margins. Aby Warburg’s intuition may have been right when he assigned the ground floor of his library to the image while locating the word on the first floor (on top of the image). This seems to me the correct topographical situation of the friendly neighbours who are ultimately twins: ‘nacquero esse gemelle.’

15 Envoi The Twofold Liminality of Lessing’s Laocoon Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Volumes of collected essays that take their cue from monumental commemorative anniversaries have a habit of being monumentally tedious—as academics know only too well, although we hardly ever mention it. For me, the sheer intellectual liveliness of this book, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Lessing’s Laocoon, therefore came as a genuine surprise. Not only is it the result of a centrifugal energy—of many authors engaging with each other in erudite ways and across academic camps, uniting in their shared exploration of this canonical text. No less importantly, it is also the product of a more straightforwardly confrontational energy that derives from an engagement across time, with numerous contributors invested in engaging with Laocoon’s premises and conclusions—as if Lessing were a contemporary colleague, interlocutor, or rival across the departmental corridor.1 In all this, more seems to be at stake than the usual type of a long and continuous reception history that progressively unfolds—or for that matter sometimes exhausts—the hermeneutic potential of a canonized text. In the paradoxical convergence between the book’s disparate essays, something beyond what the editors could have possibly foreseen comes to the fore. The book in its totality is its symptom.

1 The point already surfaces in W. J. T. Mitchell’s foreword (p. xxvii): ‘As should be evident, I am arguing with Lessing as if he were my contemporary, not a canonized classic of world literature. And that is because he is my contemporary in a very real sense . . . ’.

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With that ‘symptom’ in mind, my envoi returns to some of the introduction’s opening themes, and in particular the idea of ‘presence’ that underscores the volume’s Classical Presences remit. For what interests me, as a conceptual configuration, is the specific and complex interplay between classical antiquity, the age of Enlightenment, and our own present—the interplay, emblazoned in the book’s title, that at once conditions and animates our own reading of Lessing’s treatise today. In other words and more precisely: I want to point to a situation made up by two different moments of ‘liminality’—the one lying between two historical thresholds in the eighteenth century, the other specific to our own time 250 years after Laocoon’s first publication. This double liminality does not, of course, have the status of a fact whose existence one could empirically prove. As a hypothesis, it is both abstract and speculative: an attempt to explain the particularly intense intellectual reactions that Lessing’s Laocoon has been capable of provoking since its first publication. There are two overriding interests that underscore the hypothesis that follows: on the one hand, my envoi sets out to describe Laocoon’s historical place in 1766 (as seen from our own perspective today); on the other, it aims to provoke self-reflection among Laocoon’s contemporary readers on the occasion of the essay’s 2016 anniversary. *** The earlier of the two thresholds that make up a first liminal situation is staked on a profound and elementary idea of what we now call ‘early modernity’—something that Lessing and his contemporary antagonists (not least Winckelmann) shared, but something of which they were also unaware. I refer here to the unquestioned and absolute dominance of consciousness over the body—a sentiment of human self-reference at once emblematized, condensed, and institutionalized in Descartes’s motto of ‘I think therefore I am’. Now, we might think that humans always and inevitably live in a double relationship to intentional objects (that is, to perceptions that become objects in our consciousness): first, there is a relation of interpretation—of attributing meaning to those objects; second, there is a spatial relation of presence, which conceives of those objects in terms of tangibility or non-tangibility. Yet the Cartesian marginalization of the presence relationship appears to have been the precondition for the emergence of a new awareness—an awareness of what we have ever since come to refer to as ‘aesthetic experience’. Only

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since early modern times have those situations become exceptional—and subsequently, in Baumgarten’s wake, labelled ‘aesthetic’—in which the material and spatial (the palpable and three-dimensional) dimensions of intentional objects were able to retain their living force. Despite all the differences between the two authors, this sentiment forms a joint and tacit precondition for the ways in which both Winckelmann and Lessing approached ancient sculpture. No less importantly, it is also the reason why Lessing so decidedly resisted the interpretative transformation of the visual arts into actions and narrative. Underpinning Lessing’s Grenzen between ‘painting’ and ‘poetry’, we might say, is a preliminary hypothesis about the basic forms of representation: for Lessing, space and corporeality need to be actively preserved under the early modern dominance of consciousness and time (as the form of consciousness) and of action and narrative. The other—and chronologically later—side of the first liminal situation is the emergence of what Western culture has come to call ‘historical consciousness’. Our very rhetoric of ‘historical consciousness’ here is a relatively recent phenomenon: it is something that the West has talked about over the past 200 years or so; and it is a phenomenon that Western intellectuals have only begun to historicize recently (during the last fifty years, most visibly in the works of Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck). So where did such historical consciousness come from? I think it can be shown that the absolute dominance of consciousness and interpretation in everyday life was also the precondition (however remote) for the formation of historical consciousness. When selfobservation in the act of observing and interpreting the world first became habitual among intellectuals during the third quarter of the eighteenth century—that is, among ‘philosophes’, in the language of the time—it reconfigured contemporary world-views: it produced multiple, ‘polyperspective’ experiences, and with them a mood of uncertainty (in the German sense of Kontingenz). Because those world-views turned out to be existentially challenging, they were soon absorbed by a shift from a mirror-like principle of world observation (one canonical representation for each object of reference) to attempted patterns of narrativizing world observation—that is, to histories or evolutions that identified each object of reference in relation to others. This shift, I suggest, proved fundamental in reconfiguring Enlightenment views of the classical past: it engendered a new view of history, grounded in a conviction that time itself acts as an inevitable agent of

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change. Foucault referred to this shift as ‘historicité des êtres’, and Koselleck showed its triple temporal underpinnings (its relationship first to a future that appeared as an open horizon of possibilities, second to a past that would recede behind the present, and third to a present contracted into imperceptibly short moments of transition).2 Yet if time was now lived as a necessary agent of change (and as something that constantly left its past behind it), then all ‘historical’ pasts and their artefacts were bound to appear and gain their specific fascination under a premise of alterity. Numerous groundbreaking works could be cited, each looking to antiquity as historically ‘other’: among the most innovative for his contemporaries was the approach of Friedrich August Wolf, whose Prolegomena ad Homerum was published in 1795, and whose lectures on ancient Greek culture proved so influential among students at the University of Halle.3 What has all this to do with Lessing’s Laocoon? The observations about ‘early modernity’ and ‘historical consciousness’ seem to me crucial for understanding the liminality of Lessing’s own essay. In their different engagements with Laocoon’s ‘classical presences’, many of the chapters in this volume have confirmed my impression that Lessing’s relation to the past in general—and to classical sculpture in particular—was not yet ‘historicist’ in the later sense; as such, his view of antiquity was quite different from that of Wolf. Instead of feeling first and foremost removed from the classical past (treating it as ‘other’), and rather than use the concept of the ‘classical’ in the specifically historicist way of his successors (that is, referring to rare exceptions from the historicist rule of time as being a necessary agent of change and otherness), Lessing assumed its essential presence. There is ample evidence to suggest that, like so many other eighteenth-century thinkers, he mostly used his understanding of antiquity to intervene in modern-day disputes and controversies. In Lessing’s hands, Greek and Roman authors, texts, and artworks were likewise thought to have the potential to intervene—as positive counterpoints and paradigms of reference—in issues pertinent to his own times. Laocoon’s insistence on the medial difference between painting and poetry is itself symptomatic of this assumption: it was meant to preserve a possibility of experience that Lessing believed to have been self-understood 2 3

See, in particular, Foucault 2002; Koselleck 1988 and 2004. The most accessible English edition is Wolf 1985.

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in classical times; in this sense, the fundamental premises of his argumentative mode prove no different from those of other Enlightenment authors in other contexts (not least arguments about returning to ancient forms of government as a positive and indeed normative contrast to their own political present). As Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire explain in their introduction—and as several contributors likewise show in their chapters—this eighteenthcentury tradition has an earlier prehistory. It had been inaugurated and substantiated by debates known as the Querelle des anciens et des modernes, conducted at the French Academy around 1700; indeed, during the final stages of these debates the friends and admirers of ancient culture were embracing positions with a greater affinity to what was to become ‘Enlightenment’ than those who had opted for the equality or even superiority of contemporary French culture. In his analysis of the Querelle, Hans Robert Jauss has demonstrated how this first ‘critical’ moment of Enlightenment enthusiasm for antiquity had to wait until around 1800 for its subsequent elaboration into what we now know as the historical world-view; the two main representatives of this historical perspective were Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel.4 Lessing’s Laocoon belongs to the liminal time and space between the Querelle and the later emergence of a historical world-view. On the one hand, it seems to have presupposed a new awareness of aesthetic experience as a specific relationship to space and objects in their three-dimensional form; no less importantly, it is premised on an Enlightenment enthusiasm for classical antiquity. On the other hand—and this point is crucial— Laocoon’s relationship to the past was not yet ‘historicist’. Lessing thus participated in what we may call, in a deliberately paradoxical formula, ‘a century-long liminality’. His work is premised on a relationship with the past that was profoundly different from the early ‘modernity’ of the seventeenth century. Yet it also sits on the verge of a later historicist view of a removed, historical classical past. *** My comments about Lessing’s own liminality lead me to a second liminal situation: namely, the liminality of our own relationship with Laocoon,

For the discussion of ‘Schlegels und Schillers Replik auf die “Querelle des anciens et des modernes” ’, see Jauss 1970: 67–106 (with translation in Jauss 1982). 4

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and indeed of our own outlook today. Reading this book, I have the distinct impression that some contributors have hesitated in not identifying Lessing and his treatise with what became the new dominant ‘historical’ temporality around 1800. For as long as many of us continue to understand historicism as the ultimate position concerning the past (and time in general)—that is, as the one ‘true’ insight with which we have been able to live during the past 200 years—keeping Lessing at a distance from this paradigm implies that we can only appreciate his arguments and positions as part of our prehistory. As a result, we are loath to admit Lessing’s remove from us and to enter into a systematically challenging conversation with him: this, I believe, is the reason for the tendency to avoid drawing the obvious conceptual conclusions from the textual evidence of Laocoon’s relation to the past in general and to classical antiquity in particular. We do not want to ‘disqualify’ Lessing as a potentially ‘contemporary’ interlocutor. But at the same time, as I have already mentioned, there are quite a few essays in this volume that engage with Lessing’s systematic positions as if they were contemporary: they seem to deny the very premise of ‘otherness’ that historicism would mandate for a text that is now 250 years old. Why should this be? Contemplating the book as a whole, I wonder whether this phenomenon does not relate to a dimension in our present that looks to shake off the historicist. Our own contemporary readings of Laocoon, I want to suggest, are in and of themselves liminal—‘on the verge’ of leaving a historicist world-view behind us. This is a large claim, and one that calls for a little further contextualization. Since the 1970s— since the first excitement about concepts such as ‘postmodern’ and ‘posthistorical’—there have been mounting challenges to the supposed linearity of historical time. Those were also the years when pledges for the conservation of nature and natural resources (‘conservative’ claims, we might say) were first used to establish new ‘progressive’ movements in politics. They too have fed into a complexification of temporal dynamics, challenging a one-dimensional sense of linearity. Closer to our own activities within schools of arts and humanities, we can observe how academic pressures have likewise changed, shaping a new temporality. The avantgarde pressure of superseding each intellectual innovation with the next has increasingly succumbed to a different relationship with the past (and above all with its ‘classics’). This relationship allows for a non-dramatic presence of everything past within our present—for a situation where we

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no longer feel the impulse or obligation to leave the past behind. Dealing with Lessing’s Laocoon as if it were a contemporary text is part and parcel of this temporal mode. Under post-historical conditions, we again allow this text to be part of our own intellectual matrix: Laocoon’s non-historical relation to the art and literature of classical antiquity replicates and confirms our own transformed rapport with the past at large. Despite that new emerging relationship with the past, however, historicism continues to flourish. Indeed, this book itself pays tribute to the continuing resilience of attempts to contextualize texts and artefacts from the past in their own cultural environments. Emphasizing that these environments are no longer our own—and thereby stressing a sense of remove—the contextualizing trend thrives as though the historical world-view has never been challenged. This is a symptom of the second liminal situation that characterizes the present volume, a situation where the two sides ‘between’ which we find ourselves—that is, a ‘historical’ and a ‘post-historical’ world-view—cannot be separated by chronological distance. Short of a better intuition, I have called this temporality ‘our broad present’.5 On the one hand, it facilitates a nonhistoricist relationship of immediacy with all material and purely semantic remnants from the past. Since no remnant from the past ever gets eliminated from the ‘broad present’, however, this modality also has to include our previous (‘historicist’) relation to the past, which means that historicism remains a legitimate and readily available option in our time. Lessing’s eighteenth-century liminality thus prefigures our own, 250 years after Laocoon’s first publication: we find ourselves at a second—albeit different—threshold where, as I said, the two sides of the ‘in-between’ are not chronologically separated; a situation, moreover, where each side is perpetually on the verge of turning into the other. Under these particular—and still largely unfamiliar—conditions, Lessing’s (and his time’s) non-historical relation to the past is both converging with and diverging from our own. For our present, early twenty-first-century temporality allows both for a relationship of (‘broad present’) immediacy to the past and for a relationship of (‘historicist’) otherness. Besides encouraging us to live in the immediate and palpable presence of ancient sculpture and texts, besides inviting us to dive into

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the eighteenth-century’s cultural world, besides engaging us in a stillvivid debate about the aesthetic potential of different medial forms, reading Lessing’s Laocoon can thus also trigger a paradigmatic reflection about the complex historical and post-historical relationship to the past which is ours—in its full, easily confusing ambiguity and complexity. I am by no means claiming any ‘detached’ or even ‘culminating’ status for this level of self-reflection. But it is an undeniable part of what Laocoon is capable of offering us today: something important—not to mention present—enough to provoke this envoi at the end of so multilayered, erudite, and stimulating a collection of essays.

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Index Achilles 150–5 shield of Achilles 19, 40 n. 90, 41, 75, 103 n. 55, 105 n. 62, 142–3, 225, 233–4, 255; see also ekphrasis actions 6, 35, 43, 46–7, 59–85, 105–6, 108, 133–55, 172–6, 187–8, 200, 211, 213, 221–3, 233–41, 249–55, 273, 298–9, 307–26, 327–44, 349–51; see also narrative (medium of representation) Adam xxxi, 347 Aeneid, see Virgil Aeschylus 163 n. 16 Agamemnon 98–100, 124, 142, 240 Ajax 68–71, 74, 100 n. 44, 124 Alexander the Great 129 allegory xxvii, xxx–xxxi, 20, 22, 25, 72, 118, 125–6, 185, 193, 202; see also symbols Altertumswissenschaft 3, 28, 88 Apelles of Kos 5, 19 n. 36, 92 n. 19 Apollo 124, 130, 271 arbitrariness 22, 35, 43, 45, 48, 53–4, 56, 97–8, 109 n. 74, 134–5, 158–9, 175, 178, 189–95, 197–219, 222, 291, 299, 325, 327, 348, 351, 354, 360, 361 Aristomenes of Messenia 129 Aristophanes 163 n. 16 Aristotle xxiv, xxv, 5, 63, 71, 74, 92 n. 19, 97 n. 36, 114, 159–60, 172, 208, 275, 324, 328, 348, 349, 351 Poetics 30 n. 69, 174–6, 180, 182, 240–1, 333, 342–4 Arnheim, Rudolf 59 Athanadorus of Rhodes 13 Aufklärung, see Enlightenment Augustine, St 348–9 Augustus 129 Babbitt, Irving xxv, xxviii, 39, 87, 88 n. 6, 112; see also New Humanism Bacchus 130 Bal, Mieke 48–9

Barasch, Moshe 113 Batteux, Charles 59, 216 n. 62, 217, 334 n. 14 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 2 n. 2, 61, 62, 90 n. 14, 98, 178, 183, 184, 206, 244, 247, 283, 294–6, 332 n. 10, 367 Baumgarten, Siegmund Jakob 225–6, 228 Bell, Charles 269–70 Belting, Hans 117–19 bequemes Verhältniß (‘suitable relationship’) 43, 105–6, 108, 139–40, 187–95, 199–202, 299–300, 326, 349, 350, 360 Berlin Academy of Art 136 Berlin Academy of Sciences and BellesLettres 29, 31, 198 n. 5, 244–5 Bernstein, Jay 338, 339–41, 342 n. 33, 343 n. 35 Bervic, Charles Clement 93 Bible xxxi, 115 n. 102, 347, 353 Blake, William xxx–xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii Blakert, Elisabeth 252 Blümner, Hugo 252 bodies (Körper) xxiv, xxix, 6, 43, 91, 105–6, 134–7, 159, 187–8, 191–2, 200, 299–300, 321–3, 349–51 Bodmer, Johann Jakob 90 n. 14, 178, 183, 184, 246 n. 8 Boivin (de Villeneuve), Jean 249 Boyle, Nicholas 275–6 Brandom, Robert 296, 302 Breitinger, Johann Jakob 90 n. 14, 178, 183, 184, 203 n. 20, 233 n. 55 Bryson, Norman 48 Burke, Edmund 179 Caesar, Gaius Julius 233–4 Calvin, Jean (John) 117 Camille, Michael 48 Castel, Louis Bertrand (Abbé) 214 Catholicism 36, 114–19, 308



INDEX

Caylus, A. C. P. de Thubières, Comte de 25, 35, 105, 113, 120, 123, 184, 248, 249, 253–4 Chateaubrun, Jean-Baptiste 163 Chladenius, Johann Martin 28 n. 58, 228 n. 29, 238 Christ, see Jesus Christ Cicero xxiv, 5, 92 n. 19 classical studies, see Altertumswissenschaft classicism/Neoclassicism (artistic style) xxxi, 22, 23, 114, 261–5, 300 clothing 103–4, 269, 338–41 colour xxv–xxvi, 42–3, 134–5, 186–7, 189, 200, 221, 247, 299, 333, 351–2, 359 compassion, see sympathy (Mitleid) Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de 53, 199, 210–11, 213, 214, 218, 219, 360, 361 Corneille, Pierre 162 criticism/critic (theory and role of) xxviii–xxix, 1, 4, 54, 61–8, 83–5, 96, 178–84, 185, 188, 243–55, 282–3, 327–44 Dacier, Anne Le Fèvre 249 Danto, Arthur 55, 282, 284–91, 297, 298, 300 Darwin, Charles 270, 277 David, Jacques-Louis 22 Davis, Whitney 323 Democritus 259 Dente, Marco xi, 9 Derrida, Jacques 44–5, 48, 104 n. 57, 340 n. 28 Descartes, René 23–4, 206, 366 description (Schilderungssucht) xxvii, 6, 19–22, 133–55, 185, 191–2, 221–41, 307–27; see also ekphrasis; narrative (medium of representation) Diderot, Denis 31, 53, 159, 162, 199, 210, 213–19, 228, 293 Dio Chrysostom 127 drama (genre; theory of) 30–2, 34–5, 37, 51, 52, 64, 80–2, 111 n. 85, 157–76, 186, 193–5, 203–4, 214, 216, 240–1, 277, 281 n. 6, 325, 333–5, 343–4; see also Aristotle: Poetics; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Hamburgische Dramaturgie

Dubos, Jean-Baptiste (Abbé) 59, 97 n. 34, 163, 179, 217, 293 Dürer, Albrecht 262 Edelstein, Dan 26–7 Einbildungskraft, see imagination (Einbildungskraft) ekphrasis 47, 75; see also Achilles: shield of Achilles; description (Schilderungssucht) Elkins, James 48 Engel, Johann Jakob 59 Enlightenment 23–38, 179 attitudes towards antiquity 5–22, 91–106; see also Querelle des anciens et des modernes modes of history-writing 27, 29, 54, 221–41 theories of language 197–219, 291–6; see also semiotics Falconet, Étienne Maurice 262 Fénelon, François de Salignac de La Mothe 159, 162 Ferguson, Adam 27 Foucault, Michel xxxi–xxxii, 44, 47, 48, 198, 367–8 France, attitudes towards xxvi–xxvii, 24–5, 30, 31, 91–2, 110–12, 157 n. 1, 159, 162–3, 165, 214, 217–18, 307 Frank, Joseph 47, 60 Frederick II of Prussia 29 Fried, Michael xxv, xxix, 88 n. 6, 327 Garve, Christian 109 Gatterer, Johann Christoph 28 n. 58, 225–41 Gay, Peter 25–6, 27 gender xxviii–xxxiii, 101–2, 111–12, 197 n. 2, 307–8; see also masculinity genius 120, 179, 182, 263 Gesner, Johann Mathias 28, 247 Gheeraerts, Marcus (the Elder) 117–18 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 288–9 Gibbon, Edward 27 gods, ancient attitudes towards 106–31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 41–2, 55, 64, 239, 257–77 Gombrich, Ernst xxvii, 22 n. 44, 39 n. 84, 72–3, 111, 113, 138 n. 13, 280, 287, 319, 342

INDEX

Göttingen, University of 28, 209 n. 38, 225, 235 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 30, 162, 178, 182, 183, 184 Grand Tour 7, 30 Grenzen (‘limits’, ‘borders’) xxvi–xxviii, 2–3, 111, 254, 307–8, 345–7; see also nationalism Greenberg, Clement xxv, xxviii, xxix, 39, 60 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 22 Habermas, Jürgen 28 Hagesander of Rhodes 13 Hallbauer, Friedrich Andreas 248 Halle, University of 368 Haller, Albrecht von 136, 185 Hamann, Johann Georg 246 Harris, James 59, 217, 222 n. 8 Hebe 173 Hector 142–3, 150, 154 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 42, 121–2, 312 n. 15, 328, 340 n. 28 Heidegger, Martin 318 Heine, Heinrich 87 Hephaestus (Vulcan) 142, 240 Hercules 30 n. 69, 130, 146–7, 161, 164 Herder, Johann Gottfried 27, 36, 40–1, 90 n. 14, 119 n. 113, 137, 218, 248, 249–50, 255, 258, 307, 312, 330, 337 n. 20 Herodotus 227 hieroglyphs 53, 199, 213 n. 54, 215–16 Hirt, Aloys 267–71, 273, 274 history-writing 27, 29, 54, 221–41 Hobbes, Thomas 24 Hogarth, William xi, 11, 322 Home, Henry, see Kames, Lord Homer xxv, 7, 41, 66, 73–5, 103, 105 n. 62, 106 n. 65, 119, 123–5, 127, 163, 175, 211, 214, 227, 233, 237, 249, 251 n. 24, 253, 255 Iliad 19, 52, 142–55, 230; see also Achilles: shield of Achilles Odyssey 146 Hopkins, Keith 123 Horace xxiv, 5, 30 n. 69, 92 n. 19, 184 ut pictura poesis 19, 24–5, 41, 111, 184, 200, 221, 223, 250, 251, 258, 281, 298, 329, 333 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 355–6, 360



Hume, David 77, 167, 172, 185 n. 16, 293 Husserl, Edmund 69 n. 25, 313, 317–19, 324 Hutcheson, Francis 77, 157, 166, 293 iconoclasm 118, 128, 131 idolatry 128 Iliad, see Homer illusion (aesthetic) 1, 5–6, 31, 32, 34–5, 53, 96, 102, 104, 109 n. 72, 112–13, 134–5, 159–60, 163–4, 191–2, 200, 203, 204–5, 207, 215, 219, 224, 232–3, 284–5, 287, 297, 319, 325–6, 333; see also imitation; mimesis imagination (Einbildungskraft) 22, 38, 56, 59, 67, 70, 76, 79–80, 97–8, 100, 101–5, 114, 119–20, 122–3, 124 n. 127, 129–31, 146, 160, 167–9, 172, 180, 205 n. 25, 207, 211–12, 215, 258, 275, 279–80, 292, 296–304, 308 n. 6, 316, 321 n. 55, 324–5, 328, 333–8, 341–2 imitation xxv, xxix, 5–6, 20, 45–6, 99, 104 n. 58, 105, 121, 178, 183, 186–8, 253, 264–5, 267, 271–4, 280, 284–5, 287–90, 297, 299, 309, 336, 350; see also illusion; mimesis; Horace, ut pictura poesis Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 22 Iphigeneia 98–9 Jakobson, Roman 354 n. 20, 359 Jauss, Hans Robert 24 n. 46, 369 Jesus Christ 116–17, 119–22 Jupiter (Zeus) 124, 127, 150, 240 Kames, Lord (Henry Home) 59, 233 n. 55 Kant, Immanuel xxv, 42, 62, 83, 90 n. 14, 98, 104 n. 57, 107 n. 67, 178, 179 n. 6, 180, 181, 275, 314–15, 330, 331, 340 n. 28, Karlstadt, Andreas Bodenstein von 116–17 Kästner, Abraham 209 n. 38 Klee, Paul 138–9 Klotz, Christian Adolph 35–6, 258 Koerner, Joseph 115–16 Koselleck, Reinhart 28, 367–8 Künzli, Martin 246



INDEX

Lacan, Jacques xxxii–xxxiii La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 259 Langer, Ernst Theodor 258 language 42–9, 108–9, 117–19, 134–5, 140, 192, 197–219, 230–5, 291–2, 316–17, 345–63 historical anthropology of 45 n. 102, 56–7, 345–63 theory of, see semiotics Laocoon statue-group (Rome) 8–17, 88–9, 92–4, 101–5, 128, 136, 227, 250–1, 254, 257–60, 268, 272–3, 277, 298, 302, 341 discovery of 11 restoration of 8, 12 n. 20 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 24, 29, 32, 97, 119 n. 112, 199, 204–9, 210, 211, 219, 244, 291, 355 Leipzig, University of 30, 209 n. 38 Leonardo da Vinci 349 Leroi-Gourhan, André 362 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (works beyond Laocoon) Abhandlungen zur Fabel 239 n. 84, 324 Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts 35, 335 n. 16 Emilia Galotti 32, 34, 162 n. 14 Ernst und Falk 32 Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts 32, 107 n. 66 Der Freigeist 30 Hamburgische Dramaturgie xxvii n. 11, 32, 34, 52, 63, 77, 160, 171 n. 41, 175, 177–8, 217–18, 228, 333–4 Die Juden 30 Der junge Gelehrte 30 letter to F. Nicolai, 26 May 1769 35, 109, 158, 175, 193–5, 203, 209, 216, 219, 325 Minna von Barnhelm xxvii n. 11, 32, 34 Der Misogyn 30 Miß Sara Sampson 30–1 Nathan der Weise 32–4, 115 n. 102 Paralipomena zum Laokoon 36–7, 94 n. 25, 98 n. 39, 110, 122 n. 118, 133–4, 137 n. 12, 173 n. 46, 174 n. 47, 183, 186, 188, 197–8, 199, 222 n. 5, 239–40, 324

Philotas 31 Pope—ein Metaphysiker! 31, 54, 244–6, 255 Das Theater des Herrn Diderot 31, 162, 217 translation of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy 166 Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet 35–6, 124 n. 127, 283 Lessing, Karl 252 Lindner, Johann Gotthelf 246 Lisiewska, Barbara Anna Rosina xii, 32, 33 Locke, John 24, 207–8 Longinus (Pseudo-Longinus) 35 n. 74, 97 n. 36 Lucian 19 Luther, Martin xxviii, 87, 115–19, 128 n. 138 Lutheranism, see Protestantism Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de 232 n. 52 Magritte, René 31–2, 140–1 Maron, Anton von 14 Mars (Ares) 124, 251 n. 24 Marsyas 260, 269, 271 masculinity xxviii, xxxiii, 87, 111–12, 308; see also gender materielle Schranken (‘material limits’) 106–27, 201, 280, 337–41 Mattick, Paul 49 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de 29 Medea 69–70, 100 n. 44, 269 media studies 47–9, 51, 107, 279–80 Meier, Georg Friedrich 61, 62, 90 n. 14, 295, 332 Melanchthon, Philip 117 Mendelssohn, Moses 29, 31, 32, 34, 36–7, 53, 54, 62, 75, 97 n. 34, 108 n. 70, 115 n. 103, 135 n. 6, 158, 163–4, 166, 171, 177–95, 197, 199–200, 201–4, 218–19, 221–2, 244–6, 295, 326 n. 73, 332 n. 10, 334 n. 14, 336 n. 18 Mengs, Anton Raphael 263 Mercury (Hermes) 130, 151–2, 240 Metrodorus 15 Meyer, Heinrich 263 Meyer, Theodor 59

INDEX

Milton, John 119–20, 307 mimesis xxv, 5 n. 7, 20, 22, 98 n. 38, 137, 160, 175, 207 n. 31, 295, 308–9, 313, 316, 358–9; see also illusion (aesthetic); imitation Mitleid, see sympathy (Mitleid) Mitchell, W. J. T. 48, 57, 91, 107–8, 111, 112, 322 n. 57, 354 Montfaucon, Bernard de xxiv, 249, 254 Moritz, Karl Philipp 90 n. 14, 119 n. 113, 264–5 Müller, Friedrich 262 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban xiii, 285–6 music 25, 37, 189–90, 201–2, 214, 328; see also sounds Mylius, Christlob 31, 39, 40 Napoleon 12 narrative (medium of representation) 18, 39, 56, 69–72, 133–55, 221–41, 249, 253–4, 281, 299, 301, 309, 312–26, 342, 344, 367; see also actions; description (Schilderungssucht) nationalism (nationalist metaphors for the ‘boundaries’ between painting and poetry) xxvi–xxviii, 111, 157 n. 1, 254, 307–8, 345–7, 350–1 Neer, Richard 320–1 Nehamas, Alexander 288 Neoclassicism, see classicism/ Neoclassicism (artistic style) Neoplatonism 100–1 n. 45, 114 n. 100, 264–5; see also Platonism Neoptolemus 161, 170 New Humanism 39, 112; see also Babbitt, Irving Newton, Isaac xxv, 107 Nicolai, Friedrich 29, 31, 32, 36–7, 109, 158, 163, 166, 175, 188, 193, 203, 209, 216, 219, 222, 312–13 Nietzsche, Friedrich 270, 276 Nisbet, H. B. 29 n. 66, 30 n. 68, 163 n. 16, 241, 270, 283 n. 17 nudity 103–4, 269, 338–41 Odysseus 81 Odyssey, see Homer Oeser, Adam Friedrich 258, 261 Ovid 214, 229



pain, representation of xxiv, 15–16, 37, 41 n. 92, 46 n. 108, 55, 65–8, 71, 76–8, 80–2, 95–6, 101, 103, 157–72, 251, 257–77; see also sympathy (Mitleid) Palladio, Andrea 263 Pandarus 173, 253 Panini, Giovanni Paolo 10 Parthenon (Athens) 263 Patroclus 142–3 Perrault, Charles 249 Petronius (Gaius Petronius Arbiter) 19 Peirce, Charles Sanders 43; see also semiotics Philoctetes, see Sophocles: Philoctetes Piles, Roger de 97, 163 Plato 114, 129, 342 n. 34, 347–8, 352, 354, 358–9 Platonism 22, 65, 95, 101 n. 45, 114, 264–5 Pliny the Elder 13, 94 n. 25, 98 Plutarch 20, 89 n. 8, 96 n. 32, 97 n. 36, 183 Pocock, J. G. A. 27 Podro, Michael 287, 304 poetische Gemählde (‘poetic pictures’) 34–5, 97 n. 36, 197–8; see also imagination Pollock, Jackson 39 Polydorus of Rhodes 13 Pope, Alexander 61–2, 244–6, 249 Porter, Jim 114 poststructuralism 44–8, 107 Poussin, Nicolas xiii, 309–10 Priam 142, 150–3 Protestantism 52, 90–1, 107, 114–27, 308 Protogenes 5, 92 n. 19 Querelle des anciens et des modernes 7 n. 13, 24–7, 92 n. 19, 163, 369 Quintilian xxiv, 5, 92 n. 19 Quintus of Smyrna 19 Racine, Jean-Baptiste 162 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 262 Raspe, Rudolf Erich 209 n. 38 rationalist aesthetics 50, 98, 109 n. 77, 113 n. 94, 115 n. 103, 119, 167, 177–86, 204, 207, 281 n. 6, 293–4



INDEX

Reformation 114–27; see also Protestantism Reich, Philipp Erasmus 261 religion 13 n. 24, 30, 32–4, 87–131, 179, 205–6, 308; see also Catholicism; gods, ancient attitudes towards; Protestantism Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 262 Renaissance 7 n. 15, 11, 12, 13, 24, 44, 88 n. 7, 349 Reynolds, Joshua 260 Richardson, Jonathan 121 n. 116, 122 Richter, Simon 272 Ricoeur, Paul 240 Riley, Patrick 24–5 Robert, Hubert 12 Rollin, Charles 30 n. 69, 232 n. 51 Roman Catholicism, see Catholicism Romanticism xxv, 27 n. 56, 38–40, 42, 45, 98 n. 38, 100 n. 45, 112, 114 n. 100, 121–2, 218 n. 66 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 31 n. 70, 53, 112, 157, 199, 207, 211–13, 214, 217 n. 63, 218–19 Rubens, Peter Paul 262 Ruisdael, Jacob Isaackszoon van 263 Ryan, Marie-Laure 316 Sadolet, Jacques (Jacopo Sadoleto) 13, 15, 16, 94 n. 25, 339 n. 25 Saussure, Ferdinand de xxiv, xxxii–xxxiii, 43, 44, 354 n. 20, 359 Satan xxxi; see also Catholicism Savile, Anthony 55, 279–82, 288 n. 29, 297–304 Schilderungssucht, see description Schiller, Friedrich 31, 55, 238, 266–8, 271, 275, 276, 369 Schlegel, Friedrich 85, 266–7, 268, 369 Schlözer, August Ludwig 28 n. 58, 232 n. 52, 234–5 semiotics xxiii, xxv, xxxi, 2 n. 3, 4, 42–6, 48 n. 118, 51, 54, 55, 57, 60–1, 75, 82, 84–5, 97, 115, 119, 130 n. 141, 131, 136, 158, 197–219, 231, 248, 279, 291–6, 300 n. 66, 305, 345–63 serpents xxx–xxxi, 13, 104 n. 58, 117, 129–31, 224, 259, 270, 272–4, 303, 338–9 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Third Earl of 157

Shakespeare, William 65 n. 17, 261–2, 307, 328, 329, 333–5, 339 shield of Achilles, see Achilles shield of Aeneas 103 n. 55 signs, theories of, see semiotics Simonides of Ceos 19, 20, 96, 184, 336 Sinnbilder (‘symbols’) 92, 125–6; see also semiotics; symbols Smith, Adam xxvii, 53, 75, 77, 80–2, 157–60, 164–72, 176, 247, 307 n. 2, 334 n. 14 snakes, see serpents Sophocles 16, 30 n. 69, 66, 88 n. 5, 159, 176, 249, 334, 343 Oedipus Tyrannus 162, 194 Philoctetes 15, 53, 80–2, 95, 157, 160–5, 168–72, 250–1, 334 n. 14, 336 Trachiniae 162 sounds 105–6, 118–19, 134, 186–7, 192–5, 200–2, 208, 247, 266, 268, 299, 317, 345–63; see also music Spence, Joseph xxiv, 97, 105, 184, 249, 253, 254 Spinoza, Baruch 26 n. 53, 31, 107 n. 66, 205, 206 Spivey, Nigel 270–1 Stoicism xxiv, 66, 97 n. 36, 166 n. 26, 171 Steinbach, Erwin von 262 Steiner, Wendy 48 Sternberg, Meir 198, 324 Stierle, Karlheinz 280 structuralism 42–5 Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) 178–80, 182 suffering, see pain (Mitleid); sympathy (Mitleid) Sulzer, Johann Georg 228 ‘symbolic articulation’ 346 symbols 36, 43, 45, 125–6, 129–30, 191, 204–7, 215–16, 222–3, 253, 262–3, 284–5; see also semiotics; Sinnbilder (‘symbols’) symmetry 112, 271–2, 276, 277 sympathy (Mitleid) 31, 35, 52–3, 77–82, 84, 157–76, 259, 276 symposium 147–8, 150–1, 154 Tauentzien, Friedrich Bogislav von 31 Terrasson, Jean 249 Thanatos 36

INDEX

theatre, see drama Timanthes of Cythnus 19 n. 36, 98 n. 40, 99–101 Timomachus of Byzantium 19 n. 36, 68, 69, 70, 100 n. 44 Titian (Tiziano Vecelli) 260 Todorov, Tzvetan 45–6, 134, 217 n. 63 Tomasello, Michael 357, 361–2 Trabant, Jürgen 45 transparency (aesthetic theory of) 55, 159 n. 6, 279–305, 328 n. 3; see also Horace: ut pictura poesis Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 210–11 ugliness (Häßlichkeit) 75, 77, 100–2, 109–10, 114, 120–1, 257–60, 288 ut pictura poesis, see Horace Venturi, Franco 25–6 Venus 125, 251 n. 24 Verlaine, Paul 112 Vico, Giambattista 24, 27, 360–1, 362 Virgil Aeneid 15, 16, 18, 71, 75, 79, 95, 103–5, 160, 214, 249, 250–1, 254, 259, 271, 298, 338, 341 virility, see masculinity Vollhardt, Friedrich 241 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 20, 96 Walton, Kendall 56, 313–16, 317, 319, 326 Warburg, Aby 363



Wellbery, David E. 45–6, 51, 96, 114, 134, 198, 282–3, 284, 291–6, 297, 298, 300, 304, 343 White, Hayden 240 Wieland, Christoph Martin 261, 267 Wilde, Oscar 112 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim xxiv, 3 n. 4, 13–16, 40–1, 64–6, 68, 74, 88, 104, 122 n. 118, 158, 161–2, 178, 258–60, 263, 265, 266, 268, 270, 277, 339 n. 25, 340 n. 28, 346, 349, 366, 367 Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst 15, 94–6, 227 n. 24, 249–55, 260 Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums 15, 37, 92, 94 n. 23, 104 n. 58, 120, 227 n. 24, 249 Versuch einer Allegorie, besonders für die Kunst 125 n. 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 142, 319 Wolf, Christa 155 Wolf, Friedrich August 368 Wolfenbüttel, ducal library at vii, 32, 209 Wolff, Christian 54, 97, 178, 180 n. 10, 184 n. 14, 199, 204–5, 209, 218, 231, 291, 293–5, 330 Wollheim, Richard 285–6, 287, 313, 316 n. 35, 319–20 Worvill, Romira 163 Zeichen (‘signs’), see semiotics Zwingli, Ulrich 116 n. 105, 117