The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought [1 ed.] 0520063902, 9780520063907

Table of contents :
The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Abbreviations
Overture
Part I: Classicism
Chapter 1: Winckelmann - The Myth of Aesthetic Hellas
Chapter 2: Wieland, Herder, Goethe - Weimar Aesthetic Humanism
Chapter 3: Schiller - The Theory of the Aesthetic State
Part II: Idealism
Chapter 4: The Early Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling - Dialectics, Revolution, and the “Theocracy of the Beautiful”
Chapter 5: Hölderlin - Dialectic of Tragedy
Chapter 6: Hegel - The Aufhebung of the Aesthetic State
Part III: Realism
Chapter 7: Marx - Communism and the Laws of Beauty
Chapter 8: Wagner - The Communal Artwork
Chapter 9: Nietzsche - Aesthetic Morals
Part IV: Postrealism
Chapter 10: Heidegger - Ontological Anarchy
Chapter 11: Marcuse - Aesthetic Ethos
Chapter 12: Spies - Theatre State
Coda: Eutopia
Index

Citation preview

The Aesthetic State A Quest in Modern German Thought

Josef Chytry

U N IV E R SITY O F C A L IFO R N IA PRESS

Berkeley

·

Los Angeles

·

London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 1989 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chytry, Josef. The aesthetic state. Includes index. 1. Aesthetics, German— History. 2. Authors, German— 18th century— Aesthetics. I. Title. BH 221.G3C48 1989 l ll '.8 5 '0 9 4 3 8 8 -1 4 3 5 4 ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 6 3 9 0 - 2 (alk. paper)

Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

To my mother and my father

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Preface

xi

Abbreviations Overture I. CLASSICISM

1. W inckelm ann: The M yth of Aesthetic Hellas 2. W ieland, Herder, Goethe: Weimar Aesthetic Humanism 3. Schiller: The Theory of the Aesthetic State II. IDEALISM

4. The Early Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling: D ialectics, Revolution, and the “Theocracy of the Beautiful” 5. H ölderlin: D ialectic of Tragedy 6. Hegel: The A u fh eb u n g of the Aesthetic State

xvii x xxi 1

11 38 70 1 07

115 148 178 vii

viii

C on ten ts

III. REALISM

7. M arx: Communism and the Laws of Beauty 8. Wagner: The Communal Artwork 9. Nietzsche: Aesthetic M orals

219 231 274 318

IV. POSTREALISM

359

10. Heidegger: O ntological Anarchy 11. M arcuse: Aesthetic Ethos 12. Spies: Theatre State

371 408 448

Coda: Eutopia

483

Index

499

Acknowledgments

My own quest for an aesthetic state began in 1972—1973 as a result of pertinent criticisms by my Oxford D.Phil. supervisor, the late Dr. H. G. Schenk of Wolfson College, and my D.Phil. examiners, Father F. C. Copleston and the late Professor John Plamenatz, on my doctoral treat­ ment of Rousseau and Nietzsche. The theme grew, and thanks to generous support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 1 was able to lay firm foundations for my project as a Humboldt Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Tubin­ gen between 1973 and 1976. I am indebted to the Philosophy Seminar of that university and to my Humboldt sponsor, Professor Emeritus Dr. Walter Schulz, along with his then assistant Dr. Dieter Wandschneider, for introducing me to the living tradition of German dialectical specula­ tion. An unexpected bonus from the Humboldt Foundation further en­ abled me to embark on an eighteen-month odyssey throughout South and Southeast Asia in search of non-Western clues to my theme, with substantial periods of study spent in Ubud, Bali, and Benares, India; my last chapter is the product of that initial investigation. In addition, 1 am deeply grateful to Professor Martin Jay, who sponsored me on and off between 1977 and 1984 as a Research Associate in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Residency as a Visiting Member of Wolfson College, Oxford, in Michaelmas term 1978 pro­ voked an important turn in my reflections, and 1 thank the Fellows of that College for inviting me. IX

X

A cknow ledgm ents

Help from various quarters has made the individual chapters of my work somewhat more cogent than 1 might have had a right to expect. To the following list of readers who looked over one or more chapters, in many cases without the benefit of knowing the overall structure of the work, 1 should here like to express thanks for their tolerance of my scholarly idiosyncrasies: Stanley Antosik, Norman O. Brown, Father F. C. Copleston, Brian Fay, Martin Jay, Stephen Kalberg, Barry Katz, Douglas Kellner, H. G. Schenk, Charles Taylor, and Kenneth Weisinger. Added thanks are due Barry Katz and Douglas Kellner for generously sharing their material on Herbert Marcuse, Harold Sarf for his editorial help, and Paul Rosenberg for suggestions on translating from the Ger­ man. 1 owe a great deal to the interest and care shown my manuscript by Alain Henon, Jane-Ellen Long, and Rose Vekony of the University of California Press. As a layman in Balinese studies, 1 must especially record appreciation to those specialists who welcomed my interest in Bali: Clifford Geertz, the late Christiaan Hooykaas, and Pak Oka; and to my dear friends in Ubud, Pak and Ibu Masih, who initiated me into both quotidian and ceremonial Balinese reality. Finally, of course, my fervent gratitude goes to my wife Assunta and those “angels,” Gabriel and Sophia, for allowing this centaur to dwell in their midst. In the end, 1 alone am guilty.

Preface δ ε ι μ ε ν ο ν ν ύ π ο τ ί θ ε σ θ ο α κ α τ ' ε ύ χ η ν , μ τη δέν μ έ ν τ ο ι αδύνατον. In fram ing an ideal we may assum e w hat we w ish, but should avoid im possibilities. A r is to tle , Politica 1 2 6 5 a

Starting shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, a number of original thinkers from the German-speaking lands created a paradigm drawn from their impressions of a distant historical reality, ancient Athens, added to it a new mode of thought, modern dialectics, and at times even gave a new obeisance to the£ncient Greek deity Dionysos, to materialize their longings for an ideal. The influence of these forces, ex­ tending over the next two centuries, came to permeate modern German consciousness, deifying the concept and activity of art, reviving the Pla^ tonic (and Sanskrit) vision of the cosmos as play and aesthetic ) in his Sophocles transla­ tions. H ellas und H esperien, 2: 282.

Hölderlin

167

lin’s vision gives way once this capacity is thrown into doubt. Somewhere in the South of France (“in the ruins of the ancient spirit”) Hölderlin undergoes the Apollonian blow of contact: “and as one relates of he­ roes, 1 can well say that Apollo has struck me.” Seized by the “powerful element, the fire of heaven” among a people dwelling like the Athenians in tense proximity to aorgic nature, the Hölderlin who wanders back to Wiirttemberg in June 1802 is headed less toward a future “song” than backward toward the primordial “silence.” 77 Many of Holderlins hymns had warned of the risks, but still reflected the envy of a poet, not yet fully initiated into the lightning of the aorgic, who regarded himself in the epochal intermezzo when “wandering astray / helps like slumber.” 7H With the sudden flash of Empedoclean immediacy (“as one relates of Zeroes”), however, Hölderlin himself sinks into gloom. He begins to insist on the necessity of clinging to tra­ dition and law during the moment of catastrophe and warns that the aorgic is no longer merely approaching but has now arrived.79 Yet its fury is so great that the ensuing poetic “harvest” is no longer seen as uniting the entire previous history of spirit, but as obliterating it. And this is Holderlin’s final outlook as he returns in 1802 to the hard task of creating the Hesperian Trauerspiel. Convinced that the poet must accept “the world in the least measure,” Hölderlin increasingly re­ linquishes all consolations that might mute the stark implications of “vatcrlandischc Umkehr,” finding in a direct confrontation with this “Umkehr” the dark path that weaves its way through dissolution to a tranquil Hesperian age beyond.**0 Fatherlandish Transform ation, 1802 —1804 The final phase of the later Hölderlin reverts back to the goal of creating polis tragedy, but the intervening phases are upheld in the new 77. GSA, 6: 432. Hölderlin is drawing a parallel between the Greeks and the people of the Vendee. 78. GSA, 2: 93 line 115. 79. M. B. Benn notes that the hymns begin to abandon the “austere style*’ of Pindar with their rule of “rising” verses, so essential to the complex tension of Holderlin’s major hymns. This relaxation of tension, he adds, may reflect the author’s own loss of vital en­ ergy after he had perfected the form. M. B. Benn, H ölderlin an d Pindar (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 1 5 3 -5 5 , and 138—39 for Benn’s summary of the Pindaric “austere style.” 80. GSA, S: 272. Hölderlin specifically alludes to the “ religious, political, and moral” aspects of the dissolution of a “Vaterland.” GSA, 5: 271 lines 14—16.

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Idealism

meaning of “vaterlandische Um kehr":81 “vaterlandisch" as the autoch­ thonous foundation indispensable to an Hesperian consciousness aris­ ing from its agon with the Hellenic, and “Umkehr" as the range of “real dissolution" through “highest separation" that, once suffered by Em­ pedocles as the exemplary individual, is now an affliction of society as a whole. The breadth of this meaning sharply distinguishes “Umkehr" from “Aufruhr" or mere sociopolitical revolution. The two only merge when “Aufruhr" becomes a “tragic phenomenon" by including the mo­ ment of immediacy between organic and aorgic and petrifying man’s consciousness; concurrently, “Umkehr" becomes “vaterlandisch" only when it takes in “Aufruhr," actual political revolution. Consuming “the entire shape of things," this dissolution leaves men “at their most open" in their character where they feel themselves “in infinite form." “Vat­ erlandische Umkehr" constitutes nothing less than “the transformation of all modes of representation and form s."8’ Making his way to the Trauerspiel through his personal experience of the aorgic and his vision of a “harvest" of spirit, Hölderlin from the fall of 1802 shows a new concern with “Zorn," the wrath of God and the frenzy of the poet caught in the aorgic.83 Accordingly, his language now turns hard when evoking the moment of contact between men and gods: “Long and heavy is the word of this arrival but / White is the moment [ Weiss ist der A u g en blik]” *4 For a community the meaning of this flash from the divine eye (Augen-blik) lies in the welling of a death wish, of the incapacity by personality and self-consciousness to withstand the impact. Humans long for death as their art, their gift for organizing and welding together, collapses. While “countless" are “fallen," the poet himself retreats from the divine sunshine to seek refuge in cooler realms where he may continue his mission.85 81. The extended discussion on Holderlin’s turn to the “fatherland” has little to do with Holderlin’s own use of the term. Hölderlin is speaking of the “turn” or transforma­ tion of the “Vaterland” itself. To follow the dictionary definition of U m kehr: “Die Wendung, Drehung in die entgegengeserzte Richtung odcr Lage.” J. Grimm and W. Grimm, D eutsches W orterbuch (Leipzig, 1936), 11: 960. On this subject, cf. W. Hof, “Zur Fragc einer spaten ‘Wendung’ oder ‘Umkehr’ Holderlins,” H olderlin-Jahrbuch, 11 (1 9 5 7 1960), 1 2 0 -5 9 ; and Szondi, “Uberwindung des Klassizismus,” Holderlin-Studien, 8 5 -1 0 4 . 82. GSA, 5: 271, 266. Compare GSA, (10 i 1797) 6: 229. 83. Especially useful are Harrison, Hölderlin and G reek Literature, 169; J. Schmidt, “Der Begriff des Zorns in Holderlins Spiitwerk,” H olderlin-Jahrbuch, 15 (1 9 6 7 -1 9 6 8 ), 1 2 8 -5 7 . GSA, 2: 151 line 91; 159 line 62; 210 lines 3 - 4 ; 219 line 84. 84. Emphasis added. Probably written in late 1803. GSA, 2: 603 lines 19—21. 85. Harrison, H ölderlin and G reek Literature, 238 n.28. Also 176—77, 207; GSA, 2: 158. As one possible source for Holderlin’s ideas, Harrison suggests Plutarch’s account of

Hölderlin

169

Nor do Holderlin’s earlier images of a grand harvest survive his new intensity. The greatest challenge to Holderlin’s idea of a harvest of “gods” had been the nature of Christ’s relation to other divinities, and in his earlier hymns the poet had often merged Christ’s image and symbolism with those of Dionysos.86 But already in “Der Einzige” (The Only One), Hölderlin drops this view of Christ as the “gem” of the divine house­ hold by confessing his own excess devotion to him.87 “Patmos” thus comprises Holderlin’s struggle to overcome the discrepancy between preserving the uniqueness of Christ as a mythical power and holding to a unitive approach to past divinities. Invoking for the last time his early credo of εν κ α ί π α ν , Hölderlin raises the image of the Last Supper when Jesus affirmed that “all is good” against “the anger of the world” at the precise moment of the passing away of divine presence from earth. Men are now in possession of the lesson of good and evil which they must sustain throughout the “holy night” descending with Christ’s departure. Through the proper measure between organic and aorgic, through the song that preserves, and through concentration on “holy scriptures” and the “firm letter” of all previous “songs,” they are granted the means to outlast the night. Yet to the extent that “Patmos” retains the worldhistorical impact of Christ, the poem actually accentuates the perma­ nence of the present night. For Christ, summation of all past gods, is irrevocably gone— both to his disciples desperately clinging to his mor­ tal presence and to their heirs who must survive the darkening of the earth. It is this conclusion that Hölderlin himself admits each time in effect that he rewrites the final lines of this poem at the moment when the disciples, loath to accept the loss of the divine presence, are stunned by “the wager of God” that urges them to relinquish their yearning and forge a new world.88 Under these circumstances, Hölderlin can do little more than seek new allies and a refuge. Yet, allies are not forthcoming: although “the most beloved / live near,” they remain “flagging on / the most separated

the siege of the Lycians in Xanthos. Szondi notes the difference between Holdcrlin’s atti­ tude toward the decline of a culture and those of Winckelmann and Herder: whereas the latter used the analogy of maturity and decay in nature, Hölderlin thinks in terms of “der Sieg des Positivcn, des Toten iiber das Leben." Poetik und G eschichtsphilosophie (Frank­ furt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1: 192. “Der Einzige," GSA, 2: 160 line 95. 86. M. Mommsen, “Dionysos in der Dichtung Holderlins," G erm an ische-R om an ische M onatsschrift, 13 (1963), 3 4 5 -7 9 . 87. ‘‘Der Einzige," G5>4, 2: 154 line 34. 88. “Patmos," GSA, 2: 167 lines 8 7 - 8 8 ; 172; “D ieTitanen," GSAt 2: 2 17; 1 8 2 - 8 3 , 1 8 6 -8 7 .

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Idealism

mountains.” S9 Within his immediate environment the poet can see only that “many have died,” while “ 1 . . . am alone.” 90 As for refuge, Höld­ erlin looks first to the laws and traditions of his homeland and sings of its “heroes, knights, and princes” ; and second to the “colony” fash­ ioned through the poet’s appropriation of Hellas and Asia, by which he means all great works of literature recording immediacy of contact with the aorgic and the palpable landscape of the East which presumably re­ tains that contact.91 Indeed, the vision of the “colony” is so alluring that Hölderlin must remind the poet of his mission to return to the home­ land at the appropriate time after the aorgic moment.92 Still, by the time of the final hymns even this refuge is denied Höld­ erlin. Singing all the way “from the Indus” in his pursuit of “the proper,” the poet finds himself unable to get back to “this side.” In fact, he sees that his peers, for begetting “the holidays of the city / and the music of strings and inborn dancing,” have themselves all gone “to Indians,” and Asia now stretches even to the South Sea isles, toward which flow all the yearnings and surviving humanity of man.9' Thus, in his final complete poem, “Mnemosyne,” Hölderlin entreats his hearer to resist the “yearning” for “the unbounded.” “Treue,” faith­ fulness to one’s land and to one’s state as a human, must be upheld. The eyes must resist the direct light, settling for reflections of sunbeams on the dust. But what is the upshot of these admonitions? It is the sight of a distant traveler far up in the Alps, frenzied, “distantly divining” the lu­ minosity beyond those peaks. And what that luminosity— the Hellenic realm— now reveals is: death. Death to all heroes who challenged the aorgic, death to Achilles, Ajax, Patroclus— “ And there died / yet many 89. GSA, 2: 165 lines 11 —12. A later version adds “sehnsuchtsvoll” after “wohncn.” GSA, 2: 184 line 11. 90. “Die Titanen,” GSA, 2: 217 lines 8 - 1 2 . 91. GSA, (12 iii 1804) 6: 438; 2: 159; 608 (1803 version of “ Brod und Wein”); Beissner, Holderlins Ubcrsetzungen aus dent Griechischen, 1 4 7 -8 4 ; Harrison, H ölderlin and G reek Literature, 239. Asia references: GSA, 2: 126, 143, 166, 373; Indus and India: GSA, 2: 150, 189, 190. Hölderlin accepted the general view of the period that the earliest men came from the Indus. “Die Adler,” GSA, 2: 229 lines 9 - 1 2 . 92. Beissner holds that although the Hesperian homeland is “das Morgcnland,” “doch sucht der Dichter keine ncue Vergangenheit.” Holderlins Vbersetzungen aus dent G riechischen, 164. As there is indeed danger in absorbing the Hast too directly, Unger in particular emphasizes the overwhelming presence of Asia for the poet of “ Patmos” : “The Hellenic East is encountered literally as a morning-land (M orgenland) and the poet is compelled to relive its sacred dawn.” H olderlin’s M ajor Poetry, 185. 93. “Der Ister,” GSA, 2: 190 lines 7 - 1 4 ; “Andenken,” GSA, 2: 189 lines 4 7 - 5 0 ; (4 xii 1801) 6: 428 line 88. Kirchner points out that during his second Homburg stay Höl­ derlin had “eine unstillbare Sehnsucht nach femen Meeren und nach dem Zauber der Sudseeinseln.” Der Hochverratsprozcss gegen Sinclair, 55; also “Hölderlin und das Meer,” in Kirchner, Hölderlin, 3 4 -5 6 .

Hölderlin

171

others.” The frenzied poet, on whose visage the hearer is to settle his gaze, sees only catastrophe. The aorgic elements rage if man throttles his impulse toward universality; they rage if he strives heroically. No solution is evident: man is driven to the heights, but in the disaster necessarily awaiting him there, he cannot even hope for the solace of “sorrow.” 94 This uncompromising denouement to Holderlin’s mythology of reason forms the true overture to his polis drama.95 Having shown that the world of the Hesperian poet is one of imminent fusion of aorgic and organic, Hölderlin regards the moment of “Umkehr” as leading either to a “wilderness” or a “new shape” and calls upon the tragedian to per­ form his aesthetic ablutions.9h With this hardened vision Hölderlin now revises his earlier under­ standing of tragic drama. Its aim is to be the fusion of man and god “in fury,” followed by their separation in order that “limitless unification is purified through limitless separation.” To effect this result, dialectical thinking must itself penetrate the poetic language of tragic drama: there must be a “form of reason” ( Vernunftform), speculative thinking in an­ titheses, through which the gods are to be grasped “verständlich” espe­ cially in the tragic moment of “ideal [aesthetic] dissolution.” 97 In this enterprise the Greeks still continue as Holderlin’s foreign ana­ logical content for “Hesperian” drama. It was the Greeks who first rec­ ognized that the tragic moment of drama must mirror “Umkehr,” since “in the outermost limits of suffering nothing more exists than the condi­ tions of time or space,” when man forgets himself and becomes “entire in the moment” while the god presences as pure time (the Kantian tran­ scendental realm of the originary aesthetic). Furthermore, the Greeks took advantage of this blinding manifestation of the aorgic or death in the world of man to form a “new shape” by separating the aorgic and organic once again into their respective spheres. And, finally, the Greeks, 94. “Mnemosyne,” GSA, 2: 197—98. 95. As Adorno remarks, Hölderlin stops short of synthesis and therefore of myth proper. Adorno exaggerates, however, the importance of passages in “Mnemosyne” that seem to recommend the pure passivity of Rousseau's “promeneur solitaire.” In fact, the synthesis Hölderlin stops short of is that of thought rather than of the “actual dissolution” brought about by experiential enlightenment. Adorno, “Parataxis,” 2 0 0 —204. 96. GSA, 5: 271 line 10. This “reissender Zeitgeist” is “schonungslos, als Geist der ewig lebenden ungcschriebcnen Wildniss und der Todtenwelt.” GSA, 5: 266 lines 18 —19. Under these conditions, however, the poet becomes all the more fundamental: “Was bleibct aber, stiften die Dichter.” “Andenken,” GSA, 2: 189 line 59. 97. GSA, 5: 201 lines 2 0 - 2 2 ; 269 lines 1 3 - 1 5 ; 270 lines 26, 31.

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particularly Sophocles, supply the relevant “Vernunftform” for objec­ tifying “human understanding, as wandering among the unthinkable.” 98 Appropriating these Hellenic accomplishments through his agonal relation to them, the Hesperian dramatist thus reaches a more “authen­ tic” grasp of the absolute. Whereas in their proximity to the aorgic the Greeks had merely hoped to be able to “grasp themselves” (sich fassert) through their particular absolute, Zeus, who strode between the human world and the world of the aorgic, the Hesperian in contrast is “with­ out fate.” Accordingly, if he regains fatefulncss through mastering the techne of language, if he achieves “Geschick” in the twofold sense of fatefulness and dexterity, he can bring forth the true absolute as the es­ sence of the aorgic drawn from the realm of death into the world of man. Then not only can he transcend the Greeks by understanding the “spirit of the time,” he can also absorb this spirit inwardly and experi­ ence its essentialities.99 This general objective becomes the purpose behind Holderlin’s Soph­ ocles translations, “the final fruit of his efforts to understand the process by which the reunion of man with the divine and the regeneration of society could take place.” 100 Taking actual models of polis drama by the Greeks, a people who first intuitively discovered its importance for creating an aesthetic state, Hölderlin bends these models to serve the Hesperian task of awakening communal experience within the violently a-polis world of “vaterlandische Umkehr.” 101 Implanting a dialectical bite to Sophoclean language, Holderlin’s dramaturgy calls on such tech­ niques as the unreeling of the poetic word in antitheses, the juxtaposi­ tion and opposition of dialogue and chorus, and the role of the “cae­ sura” in Tiresias’s appearances within the tragedies to break the pace of the drama into equivalent dynamic wholes.102 Through them Hölderlin 98. GSA, 5: 266 lines 2 4 - 2 7 ; also 202, 268, 201. “Nichts war dem Genius dcs damaligen Griechenlands angemessener als das Trauerspiel,” in “Geschichte dcr schonen Kunste unter den Griechen,” GSA, 4: 201. Hölderlin regarded Euripides as “schon weichlicher, empfindsamer” than Sophocles (204). 99. GSA, 5: 269 line 25; 268, 270, 272. 100. Harrison, Hölderlin and G reek Literature, 160. 101. The polis of O edipus Tyrannus is in the midst of a serious plague, while that of Antigone has just resolved a crisis (GSA, 5: 124, 211). Yet both situations yield finally to a dissolution and “Umkehr” resembling the different historical circumstances of Holderlin’s “Vaterland.” Schadewaldt, Hellas und Hesperien, 2: 302. 102. GSA, 5: 201 line 29: “Alles ist Rede gegen Rede, die sich gegenseitig aufhebt.” GSA, 5: 201. Schadewaldt takes Holderlin’s concept of the chorus in terms of “die leidende Organe” whose aim is to see, a view Schadewaldt contrasts to the theories of F. Schlegel and Schiller. Hellas und Hesperien, 2: 295. On the chorus as symbol of com­ munity, cf. “ Friedensfeier” and “Am Quell der Donau.” Also GSA, 5: 197.

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tries to evoke the very rush of consciousness, caught in “infinite enthusi­ asm,” toward the ultimate dialectical moment when consciousness grasps itself in its purity while canceling (au fh eb t) all prior stages in its experience of the wordless shape of death and transfiguration.103 With his new technique Hölderlin then goes on to manipulate the subject matter of the two Sophoclean dramas that he translates in full. In the case of O edipus Tyranrtus, he centers the work on the theme of “the insane [geisteskrank] questioning for a consciousness,” or the plight of modern man in “Umkehr.” 104 Seeking a final “Geschick” of consciousness, Holderlin’s Oedipus is driven to the frenzy that was the original motivation for his search. Although sharing the sensuous uni­ versality of an Empedocles, Oedipus is incapable of enjoying the latter’s ecstatic anticipation of fusion with the aorgic, for in a totally revolu­ tionary age, according to the later Hölderlin, sensuous universality is inseparable from a kind of madness. True, the benefits to this frenzy will follow dissolution, in a “more human” age; but first consciousness must suffer through all prior stages, including the final dissolution of total awareness that is “ideally” or aesthetically enacted on the tragic stage.105 Holderlin’s Antigone, in turn, expands this theme of madness to “ele­ vated scorn, insofar as holy madness [Wahnsinn] [is] the highest appear­ ance, and is here more soul than speech” and dominates a consciousness thundering toward final fusion with “objects that have no conscious­ ness.” 106 Moreover, the theme is now accompanied by Holderlin’s intro­ duction of the explicitly political dimension. Unlike Holderlin’s frenzied Oedipus TyrannuSy Antigone takes place in a world of social and politi­ cal revolution (“Aufruhr”) as Hölderlin makes “Aufruhr” into “Um­ kehr” by revising Sophocles’ theme in terms of class conflict.107 Anti­ gone’s search for self-awareness assumes the figure of an “unformly” frenzy marking the revolutionary individual who is opposed by the 103. GSA, 5: 201, 269. Schadewaldt, Hellas und H espcrien, 2: 331, 277. 104. GSA. 5: 200 lines 1 - 2 . 105. GSA, 5: 270 lines 3 1 - 3 3 . Harrison argues Holdcrlin's uniquely “Hesperian*’ treatment of Sophocles' themes, particularly Holderlin’s introduction of the importance of madness in the tragedies where textual support is lacking. H ölderlin an d G reek Litera­ ture, 160. 106. GSA, 5: 267 lines 1 6 -1 8 , 2 6 - 2 8 . 107. Earlier references to “Aufruhr’* occur in the third version of T he D eath o f Em ­ pedocles, GSA, 4: 137. As there were no obvious political conditions in ancient Athens to which these notions might refer, they must have been directed toward the French Revolu­ tion. Reinhardt, quoted in Harrison, H ölderlin an d G reek Literature, 192 n.41. GSA, 5: 271: 6 - 7 , 1 9 -2 0 , 21. Already in the Empedocles dramas Hölderlin is assuming the forth­ coming end to despotic society. GSA, 4: 62.

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frozen formality of a society in the throes of “Aufruhr.” In Holderlin’s interpretation, this society will be dominated temporarily by “reac­ tion” : individuals will be defined essentially according to their “formal” status as “people of rank” (Standespersonen) and will do battle with one another as the unformly (Antigone) dialectically opposes the formly (Kreon).108 But in the end the two are doomed to a common sundering that is both fatal and liberating. Hence, at the twilight of his creative career Hölderlin sums up his unusual affair with revolutionary politics and the transfigurative power of art with the critical proposition: “the form of reason [die Vernunftfortn ] that is here tragically shaped is political and indeed republi­ can.” 109 Here, finally, lies the core of Holderlin’s later thought. The out­ break of Being upon the tragic stage begets a shared suffering and participation in the union of aorgic and organic that releases the ideal of a post-tragic age of republican harmony and poetic dwelling. Refusing all consolations, the Hesperian appropriator of Antigone offers the final message that the tragic catharsis resulting from representation of the ex­ plicit class conflict characterizing a society and culture in advanced dis­ solution bears the elixir of an Hesperian future.110 ♦

♦

♦

The later Hölderlin remained hidden from the literate German public for the better part of the nineteenth century. Admired by the young Nietzsche, he was really rescued for European thought only through the perspicacious campaigning of Wilhelm Dilthey and the Stefan George Kreis in the early twentieth. Indeed, this reversal has gone so far that a Hegel scholar can now plausibly speculate that the later Holderlin’s way of reconciling freedom and nature “may point a surer way” for contem108. “1st ein solches Phanomen [Aufruhr] tragisch, so gehet cs durch Reaktion, und das unformliche entzundet sich an allzuformlichem.” This means that the characters con­ front one another “als Personen im engeren Sinnc, als Standespersonen gegencinander stehen, dass sie sich formalisieren.” GSA, 5: 271 lines 2 1 -2 9 . 109. GSA, 5: 272 lines 1—2. Thus “Umkehr” has here become both religiospiritual and political: the tragic time is the grounds for the emergence of “democracy as the political form of the new world.” Harrison, Hölderlin and G reek Literature, 192; also Schadewaldt, Hellas und H espericn, 2: 304. In general, compare P. Bertaux, “Hölderlin und die Franzdsische Revolution,” 1 —27, with A. Beck, “Hölderlin als Republikaner,” 2 8 —52, both in Hölderlin-Jahrbu ch, 15 (1 9 6 7 -1 9 6 8 ). 110. Unlike Sophocles, the modern poet must not only understand the Zeitgeist, he must also “feel” it, Holderlin’s way of saying that he must himself undergo the “Umkehr.” GSA, 5: 272 lines 1 5 -1 6 . Antigone herself represents, not the new age, but the aorgic, to which is opposed the organic of Kreon. Their opposition must dissolve in the tragic mo­ ment that gives birth to a new consciousness emerging from the audience, which has undergone the extremes of class conflict on the stage.

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porary thought than Hegel’s philosophy of spirit, and the last philo­ sophical giant in the classic German mold, Martin Heidegger, can leave as his philosophical will a permanent dialogue with Hölderlin, “the poet who points out the future, who awaits the god.” 1,1 It is true that Holderlin’s later work is at fault at several levels, and these can be attributed to a dangerously delicate constitution, highly wrought nerves, and possible overuse of a dialectical jargon common in Jena idealism. Yet the exegetical effort expended in understanding Holderlin’s ideas is repaid if it is joined with a recognition of him as the poet of the aesthetic state during the outbreak of world revolution. Holderlin’s words are not just a matter of thought but of sacrifice. Far more effectively than his contemporaries, he anticipates the suicide of European society and culture in the twentieth century: a century after his death the culture whose “Todeslust” he described decimated some fifty million human beings while providing a model of torture, murder, and genocide that continues to foster a great deal of the ethos guiding contemporary global politics. Hölderlin foresaw some of these ramifications because he is the poet of and for the French Revolution in the larger sense, the recorder of the reverberations, increasingly terrifying for political life, of the unfettered ego that declares imperatives and laws, that posits absolutely. Absorb­ ing its meaning “at its most open” and “in the least measure,” Hölderlin is the messenger of catastrophe: where ego rules without a context beyond its own self-imposed framework, the rejected elements— the aorgic manifested through humans in their impulses, drives, longings— return to society with a vengeance. Consciousness is delivered to mad­ ness, society freezes into the petrified form of reaction, political radi­ calism explodes, and but few survive intact the universal instinct toward “Todeslust.” An extreme vision, it has received at least partial confirma­ tion in the modern inquiries of Freud and Marcuse. At the same time Holderlin’s primary concern was not just to set forth a despairing message. His larger purpose was to transcend the sen­ timentalities of his time in order to find the “Hesperian fruit” within that moment of dialectical sundering. Hölderlin built on Kant’s syn­ thesis of the conceptual (the categories) and the sensuous (pure intui­ tion) in order to find a direct path to a universality which, unlike the predominant thinking of German idealism, would retain the primacy of the sensuous dimension. Instead of regarding the sensuous as the do111. Taylor, H egel, 571 n .l. Heidegger, Spiegel, 2 1 4 - 1 5 .

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main of particularity and passivity, Hölderlin introduced his experien­ tial categories of organic and aorgic as his version of the dialectic of man and nature, and on this foundation he argued the case for a universal sensuousness in the ecstatic experience of unification with the elements. Experiential enlightenment, mantic revelation, thus became an integral part of Holderlin’s resolution of the ontological problem of subject and object as well as of the sociopolitical problem of harmony and freedom. The historical importance of this project rests on the fact that a poet was mainly responsible for the formation of the new ontology and meth­ odological innovation. Hölderlin evolved an approach to the subjectobject dichotomy which, differing from those of Schelling and Hegel, is at least as original in holding that any conceptual language that presup­ poses the notions of subject and object posits a fundamental unity of which these notions represent the sundering, and that such a language already contains the reconciliation of the sundered opposites to the ex­ tent that each term is developed to its extreme expression. In the experi­ ential world, subject and object take the form of organic and aorgic (or human beings and the elements), and the final development of these op­ posites leads necessarily to dissolution of the opposition."2 Moreover, this argument shows that such a moment is a historical event constitut­ ing the age of world revolution that transforms universality into the unique burden— and opportunity— of the modern age. Thus, once for­ mal philosophy has grasped the nature of the problem of subject and object, its dissolution can be lived out and transcended by that most or­ ganic of humans, the post-Fichtcan ego, upon the horizon of the aorgic. For all its merits, however, Holderlin’s vision also contains serious shortcomings. Despite his emphasis on the unique historical moment, Hölderlin offers no extended reflection on the factors that give rise to this moment, and although he contends that the aesthetic church or reli­ gion of poetry will form the heart of the future community, he fails to explain the specific relation of the historical dimension to nature. In his works the everyday relation of humans to nature only appears as a Schillerian idyll without the least suggestion of a laboring self. A poet concerned with extreme emotions in extreme times, Holderlin’s defense of the sensuous and aesthetic dimensions may anticipate the “emancipa­ tion of sensibility” of Marxist and Marcusean thought,"3 but he himself 112. Cf. Holderlin’s emphasis on “Zwist.” CS/\, 3: 160; 4: 149 lines 7 - 8 . 113. Marcuse, CR, 129.

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fails to advance a thorough dialectical approach of humans and society to nature. Nonetheless, it is also worth stressing that Hölderlin acknowledged the validity of an alternate path to his own when he depicted a “rival” who united subject and object in a manner opposed to the sensuous uni­ versality of his own hero Empedocles: “His virtue is the understanding, his goddess necessity. He is fate itself, only with the distinction that the struggling powers are linked within him in a consciousness, in a refer­ ence point which holds itself clearly against them, which fastens them in a (negative) ideality and gives them a direction.” 1,4 Is Hölderlin here ex­ pressing admiration for “the tranquil men of reason” among whom he once specifically included his friend Hegel?115 This approach toward unification, which deploys not the excessive activity of the self to be­ come the object (Empedocles) but an overflowing human “objectivity” and “self-externalization” drawing object to subject through observa­ tion, easily fits the “ (negative) ideality” articulated by the later Schelling to attack the mature Hegelian system. It marks, at any rate, the final turn to the road opened out by Swabian idealism. After his breakdown Hölderlin returned to Homburg, where he spent his days, and nights, hammering furiously on the piano in a curious pre­ cedent to Nietzsche’s fate.116 In 1806 he was removed, as we have seen, to Tubingen, home of earlier dreams of the future polis, there to vegetate to the age of the Young Hegelians. In the meantime the cyclonic campaign of the French emperor swept through Germany, crushing Altwiirttemberg, the Holy Roman Reich, and the Kleinstaaterei of Holderlin’s generation. Even the capital of aesthetic humanism and dialectical thought, Goethe’s Weimar-Jena, was permanently shaken. This was the twilight in which Hegel with his “(negative) ideality” completed his own odyssey of the spirit within a spiritual if not aural proximity to the battle of Jena. It is mainly due to this Jena Hegel that the Swabian idealists’ dream of the aesthetic state was rescued for the next generation, but— as the next chapter recounts— primarily as an elegy encased within the lattices of dialectical remembrance. 114. GSA, 4: 162. 115. GSA, (16 ii 1797) 6: 236: “ Hegels Umgang ist sehr wohltatig fur mich.” 116. Holdcrlin’s obsessive playing on the piano day and night, both in Homburg and later in Tubingen, is recounted in GSAf 7 - 2 : 295, 3 7 7 - 7 9 , 429. After losing enthusiasm after 1817, he regained it again after 1822.

CHAPTER

SIX

Hegel The A u fh e b u n g o f the Aesthetic State

Hölderlin had intended to send a copy of his Sophocles translations to Hegel. Given his lifelong obsession with Antigone and earlier discus­ sions with Hölderlin in Frankfurt on translating the tragedy, it seems plausible that Hegel would have hastened to assure himself of a copy. At any rate, it is reasonably certain that he learned about the translations from Schelling.1 A year after Holderlin’s translations, Hegel formally embarked on his own odyssey, The Phenom enology o f Spirit. Completed in 1806—1807, it unveiled the meaning of the aesthetic state for Hegel’s epoch and the modern condition of “Geist.” Through his analysis of Antigone (“the absolute example of tragedy*’) Hegel absorbed the meaning of “schone Sittlichkeit,” the aesthetic ethos of the classical polis.2 Yet he did so in dialectical terms that, while locating the aesthetic state within the career of spirit, transformed his analysis into an elegy to the aesthetic state— through its Aufhebung. 1. In the left margin of a letter from Wilmans, publisher of his Sophocles translations, Hölderlin wrote the names of potential recipients, including Hegel and Schelling. GSA, 5: 455 lines 1 0 -3 0 . On 14 April 1804 Wilmans sent out twelve copies. GSA, 6 - 2 : 1099; also (2 iv 1804) 6 —1: 439 lines 2 1 -2 3 . K. Rosenkranz, G eorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Leben (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1844), 11, claims that Hegel tried to translate O edipus at Colonus from 1788 on, especially “in Folge seiner Bckanntschaft mit Höl­ derlin.” He also occupied himself with Antigone. Kaufmann, Hegel, 142. H. S. Harris regards it as “axiomatic” that Hegel would have wanted to study Holderlin’s translation as soon as possible (pers. comm., 4 iv 1978). 2. TW, 17: 133; also “das vortrefflichste, befriedigenste Kunstwerk.” A, 2: 5 6 8; liting, 3: 5 3 0 -3 1 .

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Aufhebuttg is a term, principally made topical by Hegel, whose formal philosophical meaning includes cancellation and supersession. HegePs interpretation of the aesthetic state is thus part of speculative philosophy, reflecting his intellectual shift from 1798 to 1806. Until 1801, when he joined Schelling in Jena, Hegel had been preoccupied with immediate societal transformation and had located philosophy beneath religion in his search for the new mythology of reason. The “thinking reflection of the objective God” must unite “with subjectiv­ ity” through “song, bodily movements, a kind of subjective expression which, like spoken language, can become dance through rules objective and beautiful.” ’ But once he was firmly settled in Jena and working on the Critical Journal o f P hilosophy with Schelling, Hegel began to pur­ sue an exclusively philosophical solution to the problem of social and spiritual unification unleashed by the revolutionary age. Turning his back on the Hellenic paradigm of wholeness while agreeing with Höl­ derlin that the modern age had ignited a universal madness, Hegel now looked to reason ( Vernunft) rather than the Hellenic aesthetic state for the power to reheal the sundered psyche.4 Three salient advances were made during HegePs Jena years (1801 — 1806). First, Hegel transferred values he had earlier associated with “life” to reason; second, he analyzed society and state according to his new dialectical method; and, third, on the basis of the first two he tackled the ontological role of labor.5 All three steps reflected HegePs protracted struggle with the central problem of reconciliation. By pro­ posing a synthesis on the level of “Geist,” reason at the stage of human interaction, Hegel lodged the concept of modern society in ontology. Since, in his view, reason had absorbed the attributes of life in his phi­ losophy, reason could now display itself as life: it was instantiated in and as the world of sensuous nature and human material activity. He­ gelian dialectic abandoned the world only to return as itself the pene­ trating and negating power of transformative life. This revaluation, however, undermined the primacy of polis and Phantasiereligion in favor of a final interpretation of the aesthetic state 3. TW, 1: 425. 4. TW, 2: 22; 1: 5 8 0 - 8 1 . G. A. Kelly suggests that HegePs later delineation of the “natural soul” in the Enzyklopddie contains his insights into “ the tragic deterioration of his friend Hölderlin.” TW, 55 (391); “Notes on HegePs 'Lordship and Bondage,1” in A. MacIntyre, ed., Hegel: A Collection o f Critical Essays (London: University of Notre Dame Press, (19721 1976), 203. 5. B. M. G. Reardon, HegePs P hilosophy o f Religion (London: Macmillan, 1977), 22; Marcuse, HO, 2 2 7 —57; RR, 6 2 —90; Lukacs, D er junge H egel, 369.

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as critical but not ultimate to the career of absolute spirit. Hegel thus parted company with Holderlin’s vision while preserving something of Holderlin’s presence in his new synthesis.6 Hegel’s definition of the state as “an organic whole” and his interpretation of it as the “objective” manifestation of the philosophical Idea translated Holderlin’s lesson of spiritual community and dialectical tragic dissolution into his own more accessible idiom.7 At the same time Hegel insisted on disavowing Holderlin’s praise of enthusiasm. While Hegel’s attacks in the Phe­ nom enology on “Begeisterung” are commonly taken as part of his cam­ paign against Jena romanticism, it seems plausible, recalling Holderlin’s effusive devotion to enthusiasm during the Frankfurt years with Hegel, that Hegel would also have had Hölderlin and the poet’s recent fate in mind when he wrote the relevant passages.8 Moreover, Hegel took great pains to disassociate his philosophy from charges of the pantheism that had dominated Holderlin’s language, and however much these charges, which dogged Hegel to his death, contain a strong dose of truth, it seems undeniable that Hegel’s protests were sincere.1* For he clearly had come to the position that dialectical reason refutes the Tubingen credo of εν κ α ί π αν : “ Pan also means ‘all,’ and thus it is that it passes over into thoughtless, bad, unphilosophical representation.” 10 The Jena years, in sum, transformed Hegel’s understanding of the aesthetic state. While he continued to call the Hellenic polis “an art­ work,” he now exposed to serious critique the primacy of art being preached by Schelling and the Jena romantics. Art, Hegel contended, was confined to intuition and unable to advance by itself to the “true representation” accessible to “the shape of thinking” and its realm of the infinite. Insofar as “the beautiful religion” reflected the primacy of the aesthetic, mythical, and play dimensions, it could not transcend the sense of an unknown fate or necessity. Only by transferring value to au­ thentic religion would it acquire awareness of “depth.” Clarifying the meaning of this unknown element as “the ego” or “the concept, the ab6. Robert C. Solomon contends that “the single most powerful influence on Hegel’s vision in the P henom enology” was Hölderlin. In the Spirit o f Hegel, 59. This, however, is considered the very weakness of Hegel’s philosophy, according to W. Brocker. Cited in Szondi, Poetik und G eschichtsphilosophie, 1: 215. 7. VC, 93. 8. PG , 13; also 14, 15, 26, 56. (Shortly after writing the Vorrede to PG, Hegel re­ ceived word from Isaak von Sinclair that Hölderlin was being treated in the Tubingen clinic.) Cf., however, Hegel’s sense of his own mission in PG, 30. 9. In the final edition of the E nzyklopadie the vital last section on philosophy is turned into a critique of the view that the philosophy of absolute spirit is a kind of pan­ theism. TW, 10: 3 7 8 - 9 3 [573]. 10. TW, 15: 380: “alles” in contrast to “das All.’* According to Hegel, the error in pantheism lies in confusing the two.

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solute pure power,” authentic religion could advance to the true mode of being: speculative thought." Between the time of the battle of Jena (1806) and his acceptance of a professorship at the new university of Berlin (1818), Hegel succeeded in mastering and refining the dialectical method in two of the most subver­ sive works in European logic, The Phenom enology o f Spirit (1807) and The Science o f Logic (1812, 1816). During this period Napoleon’s tem­ porary victory and the collapse of the Reich played their part in keeping Hegel’s political reflections to a minimum, although the appearance on horseback of this “Weltgeist” through Jena deeply affected the philoso­ pher and he never ceased to admire Napoleon, despite losing his univer­ sity post on account of the latter’s imperial triumph.12 The collapse of the French empire generated conditions that once more favored a reconsideration of the problematic of aesthetic and modern states. Particularly in Hegel’s homeland, the Napoleonic defeat undermined the relatively new authority of kingship in Wurttemberg that had been set up through the 1805 arrangement with Napoleon and that had destroyed the traditional constitutional pact between prince and estates." We earlier saw that Hölderlin had opposed Duke Fried­ rich’s absolutism; but a decade later Hegel, who in his Jena writings sup­ ported the role of aristocracy in an organic community, was repelled by the shrill calls of European aristocrats for resumption of traditional privileges. Approving the abolition of the traditionalist base of Altwurttemberg and its Altrecht, Hegel now called for an alliance between mon­ arch and populace to keep the aristocracy at bay.14 1 1. GW, 8: 263, 2 7 9 -8 1 . According to Rosenkranz, Hegel as early as 1800 had con­ cluded that the beauty of Hellenic life was forever lost. H egel’s Lebett, 140. 12. Until the battle of Jena Hegel lectured regularly on the philosophy of right. GW, vol. 8; Kaufmann, H egel, 109. Cf. Br, 1: 120. By 1 May 1807 Hegel was claiming that PC had been finished on the midnight preceding the battle, and he repeated the claim around the rime of Napoleons fall. Br, 1: 162; (29 iv 1814) 2: 28. Yet already in 1805 Hegel also felt that the Jena school of philosophy had “zersplittert.” Br, 1: 100. 13. F. Rosenzweig, H egel und der Staat (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1920), 2: 6 5 —66. Hegel regretted Napoleon’s fall as a tragedy; yet he claimed to have predicted it all in PG. Br, (29 iv 1814) 2: 28. For the Napoleonic period in Wurttemberg history: E. Hdlzle, W urttemberg im Zeitalter N apoleon s und der deutschen Erhebung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammcr, 1937). 14. In this new crisis the king himself called for a constitution. For a useful summary of political conditions in the kingdom, see Rosenzweig, H egel und der Staat, 2: 3 0 —62. It has been suggested that Hegel’s essay on the Wurttemberg constitution was motivated by the desire for the chancellorship of Tubingen University. No definite proof exists, al­ though, as Z. A. Pelczynski notes, “the post, which carried with it a seat in the Diet, would have satisfied both the academic and the political ambitions of Hegel.’* “An Intro­ ductory Essay,” in Pelczynski and T. M. Knox, eds., H egel’s Political Writings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 19.

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Hegel went further. The distance between monarch and people, he argued, should be mediated by corporations, associations, and insti­ tutional groups, and the professional class of bureaucrats should be allowed eligibility for membership in the assembly.15 As Hegel’s mature political writings reveal, Hegel’s answer to the polis would be neither a reformed unified Germany nor the traditionalist state system. Wiirttemberg, on the verge for the first time of becoming a genuine state, both through the end of the Reich and through the sort of constitutional ar­ rangement of classes, obligations, and rights being proposed by the king, could realize the preconditions for the rational state of the fu­ ture.1* Though the “smallest kingdom in Europe,” Wiirttemberg no less than such medium-sized states as Prussia and Bavaria could form a ra­ tional order of monarchies simultaneously constitutional and rational.17 With Hegel’s move to Berlin in 1818, conditions were made all the more ripe for the application of his theory to a state, Prussia, that was uniquely congenial to it. Hegel has often been accused of being an apolo­ gist for this Prussian state, but what this means in terms of political sen­ timent requires a more careful look at the evidence. Hegel’s Prussia was not the bearer of the conservative traumas of 1848 —1849 but the postNapoleonic kingdom of Stein and Hardenberg whose Berlin attracted some of the most brilliant and innovative thinkers in Restoration Eu­ rope, almost all of whom were influenced by the humanism of Goethe’s Weimar.18 Throughout the Hegelian 1820s Berlin constituted “the city of absolute reflection,” producing the original figures in modern histori­ cal, legal, anthropological, linguistic, and philological scholarship, and it exuded an “aesthetic life of enjoyment” unusual even in a Europe given to the magic of the arts and “the most refined sensualism.” 15. Generally Hegel disapproved of the aristocracy of his time. Especially after 1814, he was angered by attempts to turn back the political clock. TW, 4: 5 0 5 - 7 . Concerning the public’s nostalgia for the past Hegel was no less critical and sarcastic. Br, (29 iv 1814) 2: 27. Hegel’s support for the professional class of writers certainly indicates his own up­ bringing as a Stiftler; there is a personal tone to his description of German university youth as having “ein hoheres Intercsse” than material survival. TW, 4: 482, 473. 16. TW, 4: 464. 17. H. A. L. Fisher, Studies in N apoleonic Statesmanship jin] G erm any (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903), 107; S. Avineri, H egel’s T heory o f the M odern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 79. Hegel speaks of each state as “cines von den wirklichen dcutschen Reichen” in contrast to a unitary but “empty” Reich. TW, 4: 464. 18. Avineri, H egel’s T heory o f the M odern State, 1 1 6 -1 7 ; Rosenzwcig, H egel und der Staat, 2: 71 - 7 2 ; Taylor, Hegel, 452. 19. According to Rosenkranz, a contemporary. H egel’s Lebcn, 362. Also 320. For a thorough study of the Hegelian school, see John Edward Toews, H egelianism: T he Path tow ard D ialectical Humanism, 1 8 0 5 -1 8 4 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). The historian camp included Ranke, Niebuhr, Boekh, the M onumenta for which Stein was the catalyst, and the Heeren-Uckcrt scries of national histories. G. S. Ford, Stein

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But if this Berlin differed sharply from the capital of the future reac­ tionary Friedrich Wilhelm IV, it was still run by a monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm III, who soon withdrew his promise of a constitution, rid him­ self of Stein and his reform plans, and fought every demand for innova­ tion— all before the events leading to the Carlsbad decrees placed him firmly on the side of reaction.20 Hegel’s theory of the modern state is not a formal version of this Prussia; indeed, by insisting on the primacy of law the Hegelian state is a critique of it.21 But once Hegel had argued the case for a notion of the state as spiritual community, it is hardly surpris­ ing that he ignored the examples of modern England and France for a state organization like the Prussian that furnished a potentially more compatible image of unity. Hegel’s own particular model of a rational state is not itself immune to criticism. Fortunately, his dialectical method furnishes methodologi­ cal weapons to transcend even his own recommendations. Dialectics in political thought is both radical and conciliatory, subverting to the ex­ tent that it submerges itself within the process of historical concreteness. Moreover, although Hegel placed philosophy above art, he in turn made philosophy itself more aesthetic: ultimately, the dissolving and recreating power of Hegelian reason is comparable to the activity of the creative artist, and to this extent it has dramatic consequences for politi­ cal life. Hegel’s Aufhebung of the aesthetic state will accordingly be treated on three levels: first, the nature of that Aufhebung will be explored; sec­ ond, Hegel’s alternative of the modern or rational state will be stated; and, finally, the Hegelian method generating the first two stages will be interpreted as the realization of the Systemprogram that “a philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.” An Elegy to the Aesthetic State Hegelian thought is the clearest and most thoughtful exposition of the concept of an aesthetic state. Uniquely congenial to a sympathetic

and the Era o f R eform in Prussia , 1 8 0 7 -1 8 1 5 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, [1922) 1965), 326. 20. While there are many similarities between Stein’s immediate reform plans and those of Hegel, an important difference is that Stein hoped for some sort of German union, whereas Hegel was content with the sovereign states of Bavaria and Wurttemberg set up by the Congress of Vienna. Ford, Stein and the Era o f R eform , 2 4 —25. 21. Ford notes: “The era of Stein, Hardenberg, Humboldt, Queen Louise and Scharnhorst is one of the great might-have-beens of history.” Stein an d the Era o f R eform , 2.

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understanding of the aesthetic state, Hegel’s concept of reason ( Vernunft) reveals itself first as the aesthetic consciousness of the Hellenic age. It cancels the latter, however, in favor of the claims of absolute spirit: the reason capable of articulating the parameters of Kunstreligion ultimately stands outside the gestalt it grasps. Accordingly, the attitude of a more advanced rationality toward the aesthetic state will be one of elegy.22 The first critical point to record concerning the Hegelian approach is that it culminates the insights of Winckelmann, Schiller, and Hölderlin on the aesthetic state and on three central propositions agrees whole­ heartedly with them. First: the Hellenic aesthetic state (Hegel invariably means Athens) is the most human (m enschlich) of all states, “human” defined in Schiller’s and Kant’s sense of “sensuous-spiritual shape.” Unlike all other reli­ gions, Greek religion is “a religion of humanity,” since the Greeks alone managed to harmonize nature and spirit: “The Greek is therefore the most human people [das m ensebliehste Vo/£].” 2’ Second: the Greeks achieved harmony by occupying a “beautiful middle, which is therefore the middle of beauty.” Hegel does not here mean a situation of perfect balance between nature and spirit— the es­ sence, in fact, of Hindu Phantasiereligion— but one in which spirit con­ trols the natural. Unlike either Hindu Phantasiereligion or the modern triumph of subjectivity, Hellenic harmony constitutes a “free subject which shapes its object to beauty,” or the optimal relation of nature to spirit. It follows, then, that the most human of stages is no less the most artistic or aesthetic for producing the most satisfying kind of art, sculp­ ture, as well as style of art, the classical. Winckelmann’s Hellenism finds its perfect home in the Hegelian gallery.24 And, third: this stage of society, art, and human realization goes with radical participatory democracy: “only a democratic constitution was suited for this spirit and this state [Staat].” Hence this society is neces­ sarily “a beautiful democracy” [eine schone D em okratie]” 2S 22. Judith Shklar, “Hegel’s ‘Phenomenology’: An Elegy for Hellas,’’ in Z. A. Pelczynski, ed., Hegel's Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 73 —89. Also Judith Shklar, Freedom and Independence: A Study o f the Political Ideas in Hegel's P henom enology o f M ind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). 23. TW, 17: 126. Hegel calls Athens the “Culminationspunkt” of the Hellenic spirit. Ilting, 1: 347; TW, 17: 139. 24. TW, 18: 176; 12: 66; A, 1: 85. 25. TW, 12: 311; 306; also 308: “Die demokratischc Verfassung ist hier die einzig moglich.” Ilting, 1: 345. There is also a reference to the “schone Demokratie Athens” in TW, 7: 449 [279].

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It is worth glancing over these claims with the broader course of Western political theory in mind. Among the major contributors to po­ litical theory, Hegel stands alone in arguing the following inner kinship between participatory democracy and the highest stages of artistic en­ deavor and human fulfillment: (1) a certain state of awareness stems from the experience of nature as the sensuous realm; (2) this state of awareness is aesthetic; and (3) a society and a state composed of pri­ marily aesthetic beings is necessarily a radical participatory democracy, with Athens, the paradigm, offering “the spectacle of a state which es­ sentially lived for the purpose of the beautiful.” 26 Hegel’s theory thus reveals the full impact of our theme on the formulations of classical Ger­ man thought and constitutes an unprecedented formal argument on be­ half of the aesthetic state. Yet Hegel only develops a formal vindication of Winckelmann, Schil­ ler, and Hölderlin by offering an ontology that is ultimately incompat­ ible with the primacy of humanism (M enschlichkeit), art, and democ­ racy. Hegel explains and justifies the ideal of an aesthetic state as the result of the primacy of dialectical reason, for which Greek harmony is only a moment (however important) in the evolution of spirit. When the spirit, which has acquired mastery over nature, goes on to learn the ulti­ mate truth that nature is simply spirit’s own self necessarily exter­ nalized, it replaces the moment of the first primacy, or the aesthetic mo­ ment, with a final one belonging to speculative philosophy. Granted that Hegel’s elegy stems from an ontology of dialectical reason, a first step into his conception of the aesthetic state must be to explore that ontology in order to comprehend the process of consciousness from its origins in nature to membership in spiritual community.27 Hegel’s on­ tology begins with the Fichtean notion of the object as the original act (Tun) of consciousness and replaces it with the priority of thinking as the infinite act uniting subject and object.28 In Kantian terms this pure concept is the abstract universal, but equally it forms the defining char­ acteristic of Being. Thinking about thinking is thinking about Being, 26. “ In der Demokratic ist die Hauptsache, dass der Charakter des Burgers plastisch, aus einem Stuck sei.” TW, 12: 312. Hegel thus equates the individual in an authentic de­ mocracy with artwork. TW, 12: 319. 27. The following analysis draws mainly on the format of PG rather than the later works. Philip J. Kain comes up with different dichotomies by giving equal emphasis to Ay although his overall conclusions regarding Hegel’s relation to “the Greek-aesthetic model” in comparison to Schiller and Marx are similar to mine. S chiller H egelt and Marxy 7 3 - 7 4 . 28. TW, 5: 60; PG, 22, 45.

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and the pure concept generates, as Kant held, a criterial relation to the whole of reality: “according to its form always something universal, and which serves as a rule.” 29 In other words, it not only is Being but it posits Being as that whole. Yet the very quality of indeterminateness that makes Being the most fundamental of levels constitutes the inadequacy of that level. Indeterminateness lacks precisely the determinateness that lies at the core of the concept’s demand for reality. Being, in other words, contradicts itself; and this negating is the essence common to both thinking and reality. The steps that Hegel then covers carry the consciousness arising from this reality clement of thinking through a series of confrontations with otherness. A key stage in this progression is the critical Hegelian analy­ sis of the first permanent relationship of consciousness interaction be­ tween master and slave, which generates the original act of labor on the slave’s side and awakens the first bud of the “thought of freedom” in consciousness.'" Further stages generate the importance of the work (Werk) in mediating between individual self-consciousnesses while re­ vealing for the first time the individual being as a nature destined to ar­ ticulate the universal, an articulation that ultimately requires the wider context of spiritual unity among individuals.” This stage of ethical rea­ soning Hegel calls “Geist” or spirit. Thus, only when the universal in humans is conscious of itself through the existence of cooperating indi­ viduals can the Werk that furnished the first proof of individuality tran­ scend conflicts among members and reach the mutual sharing in a whole task that comprises the proper notion of a people (V olk).'1 But even this stage precedes the highest level of absolute spirit. Art, religion, and philosophy constitute different “modes and ways” by 29. KrV A, 106. 30. PC, 1 4 3 -5 0 , 176. G. A. Kelly points out that within himself each individual pos­ sesses these qualities of mastery and slavery which must be brought into harmony. “Notes on Hegel’s ‘Lordship and Bondage,” * 195. 31. Hegel uses Individualitdt, which does not seem to have been in current German usage at the time. I have found no references to it in a dictionary of the period, J. C. Adelung, Gram m atisch-kritischcs W orterbuch der H ochdeutschen Mundart (Vienna: A. Pichler, 1808), or in the D eutsches W orterbuch of 1854. It appears to be of French origin, and as early as 1578 meant “caractere particulier.” The common German syn­ onyms were B esonderes and Einzelnes; both belong to the moment of subjectivity in the L ogik. As Taylor notes, B esonderes is cognate with English “sunder” and thus stands for the sundering of the Hegelian Concept into many, the consequent totality being then called a real particular thing or Einzelnes, which Taylor thinks should be translated as “individual.” H egel, 3 0 2 - 3 , 302 n .l. Thus the working use of Individualitdt seems to have been restricted to consciousness and may have been chosen by Hegel to stand for a characteristic more congenial to French than to German culture. 32. Cf. J. N. Findlay, commentary to A. V. Miller, trans., Hegel’s P henom enology o f Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), xx. PG, 2 5 6 -5 7 , 258, 3 1 1 ,3 1 3 .

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which consciousness grasps the fact that the divine, or spirit in itself, is its true object;'3 all three share the qualitative advance from spirit as spiritual unity of individual self-consciousnesses to spirit as the selfconsciousness of that spiritual unity, a progression that takes place through the activity of the humans who have first brought spirit into being. Acting on the object, sharing in the spirit of work, they fashion their common ethos. The individuality expressed in the Werk of the whole community now becomes the explicit manifestation of the uni­ versal: Werk becomes Kunst-Werk. It is thus Hegel’s view that absolute spirit first emerges as the communal activity of art. Kunstreligion, or art as the “religion of beautiful art,” preserves the fundamental function of shared work molding an ethos or common spirit while lifting it to awareness of absolute spirit, or spirit’s awareness of itself.34 That Hegel should regard artistic activity as the social breakthrough to absolute spirit is an important index of his fundamental attraction to the aesthetic dimension. Hegel sees the artwork as the moment when spirit recognizes itself as the essence of the substance making up con­ sciousness. Mediating between mere work and pure form, art “is the night in which substance was betrayed and turned into subject.” From “instinctive labor” to “absolute art,” spirit is shown to be Kurtstreligion, or the “religion of spiritual individuality.” 35 Art-work is still work or labor in the sense that it works on the other (the “thing”) by acting upon it; it is, however, art-work for accepting the sensuousness in that other and radicalizing the nature of individual consciousness to become a worker or shaper of things. Merely mundane work had been confined to the thing as sensuous object; art-work brings the sensuous to the sur­ face of the object and forms the “shine of the sensuous.” No longer is the worker concerned so much with the “essence” of the thing; he is now directed to its formal qualities, the “shape, appearance, the reso­ nance of things.” Accepting the object, as “Schein,” art manifests the Idea in the world of appearance: “beauty.” Thus “Schein” leads to abso­ lute spirit by manifesting the truth of the ultimate reconciliation of sub­ ject and object: to experience beauty is to intuit the final philosophical truth through the display of the object as something self-directed. The universal emerges, as Schiller had contended, not as a burdensome cate­ gorical law, but as that which is identical with inclination.36 33. PG, 316. TW, 10: 366 (554]. A. 1: 19. 34. TW, 10: 368 [5571. 35. PG, 492. Strictly speaking, the stage of the “ Religion der geistigen Individualitat” includes the Jewish and Roman, as well as Hellenic, religions (TW, 17: 9). But it is clear from the text that its apogee is the Greek “Religion der Schonheit.” Cf. TW, 18: 1 7 6 -7 7 . 36. A%1: 4 6 - 4 8 , 100, 19, 22, 65, 67.

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Hegel’s critical turn from work to artwork, from substance to spirit, en­ tails an even more important proposition: this same turn establishes the universal foundations of community and individuality, of the aesthetic state proper. In the Hegelian system, the formal concept of an aesthetic state spe­ cifically refers to the social and political order of classical Greece. Ori­ ginating in the Hellenic age, this state perishes with its fall. Earlier so­ cieties mistook the object of their worship, thinking of the object as substance— something that lacked their own spirit. Their failure reflects absence of shared communal work within those societies. The Greeks alone developed a consciousness aware of its own self as subject: their “freedom of the individual” generated the “principle of freedom of indi­ viduality” that exhaled “this unique spiritual breath— the spirit of free­ dom and beauty.” 37 Hegel’s detailed explanation of the concrete factors making for the Greek achievement resembles in the main the earlier arguments of Ger­ man classicism.38 He envisages the Greek individual as having worked on nature in order to extract a product reflecting his own creative ca­ pacities, as a result of which this individual came to see the object as accessible to spirit even while he accepted the substantiality of that ob­ ject. This living experience of “Schein” through work suggested to him that reason itself was essentially play and gaiety. Rejoicing in its “con­ crete vitality” and “reasonableness,” he became “the plastic artist who shapes the stone to artwork.” The growing ubiquity of the aesthetic di­ mension then gave rise, in turn, to “beautiful individuality,” to “a culti­ vated naturalness toward spirituality.” 39 Like Winckelmann, Hegel sees the human body as the most concise embodiment of the Greek spirit. As a thing of nature, “the human form” is “the only one truly suited for spirit.” Accordingly, Greek gaiety makes aesthetic display and enjoyment of bodily self its “main business” and comes to regard the absolute as, on the one hand, the multiplicity of divinities bearing the human shape and, on the other, the singularity of pure necessity or Fatum. The subjectivity of the absolute is assigned to the oracle or that blind fate which remains embedded in reason to the degree that the latter continues to recognize, in its aesthetic “moment,” the ontological permanence of nature. Having thus made substance into 37. TW, 38. TW, nesque. TW, 39. TW,

16: 430, 436, 4 40; 18: 138, 140, 174. 12: 107, 278, 288. Hegel’s comments on Ionia are particularly Winckelman12: 106. 12: 293. Also 339, 275, 294; 17: 130, 164, 98.

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a god in human form, the Greeks honored divinity as fit to occupy the shape of the human spirit: their religious vision became “human­ ized.” But the overall importance of this development was not so much the fact of these divinities in themselves as that of the artwork proper: “God as an artwork produced through human hands.” Through that work the truth behind Greek religion arose as “humanity, i.e., the con­ crete man.” 40 For Hegel, as for Winckelmann, the sculpture that deifies human shape is the absolute paradigm of the artwork, beyond which art, inso­ far as it furnishes the primary vehicle for the absolute, cannot advance. In terms of Greek culture itself, however, the statue is only an early, “ab­ stract” stage; while idealizing the human being’s relation to the abso­ lute, it makes explicit the divine nature of humanity itself as communal being. Accordingly, the qualities of the spirit of statuary are transformed into the concrete individual through the vitality of the Dionysiac fes­ tival. This second stage, which Hegel calls “the living artwork,” edu­ cates the people themselves to the spiritual role behind language which extends from cries of nature to mature articulation of conviviality. In turn, therefore, the festival is superseded by the higher assembly of the political gathering, or the third and final stage: “the spiritual artwork.” Standing for the introduction of reason into the festival through all par­ ticipants’ direct sharing in social and political decisions, the political as­ sembly inspires the emergence of the dramatic assembly. This mutuality of political and dramatic assembly (especially tragedy) means that the rationality of right and justice implied by political assembly finds spiri­ tual expression in a self-consciousness experiencing the real but ideal­ ized shape of the human being as actor in the cosmos.41 As the synthesis of the rhetorical art mastered in political assembly and the ideality of labor mastered in sculpture, polis drama presents the human spirit as an actually living form and makes it “more animated and spiritually clearer than any statue and painting.” 42 Hegel then argues that the three most advanced “moments” of modern and abso­ lute spirit— “Sittlichkeit” or morals, the state, and philosophy itself— necessarily derive from its matrix, an accomplishment that is insepa­ rable from the individuality of the Greeks (and in particular Athens, the “realm of individuals”): “In its totality the moments of the Athenian character were independence of the individual and education, animated 40. TW, 16: 436; 17: 122, 126, 99, 113; 12: 296, 305. 41. TW, 12: 66; A. 1: 85; 2: 87. PC, 4 9 3 -5 1 1 . 42. A, 2: 540.

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by the spirit of beauty.” 4' It is primarily the Athenian individual who consciously pursued a morality and ethical life in which he would expe­ rience his own freedom while belonging to a group. Thus, “Sittlichkeit” was in the first instance “schone Sittlichkeit,” the aesthetic ethos of Athens. As a result of this consciousness of freedom through member­ ship in a common ethos, the state itself appeared for the first time in history, as the Athenian polis. Athens surpasses all other historical states for promoting diversity of talents, a success Hegel attributes to the ubiq­ uity of the aesthetic spirit realized in political terms as radical par­ ticipatory democracy.44 “Schone Sittlichkeit” is the foundation for this political structure because it alone can elaborate politically the theme of spirit shaping stone into artwork.45 Trained by Homer, the master of plastic poetry, the Athenians came to regard virtue as “ethical artwork” and turned political virtue into an “artwork of free individuality.” 4'’ While this kind of morality should not be equated with the development of particular wills, it does remain a morality of individuals that dis­ plays the greatest range of character and talent, for the creative labor of that morality is activity on the object by workers who fully trust to the shared benefits of labor and come to know the value of explicitly aes­ thetic labor as the presence of spirit or the subject in the thing as well as in the acting individual. It is, then, inevitable for Hegel that through its promotion of individu­ ality Athens encouraged equality. If each individual is an ethical work of art, a spirit of freedom must prevail in which he has full participation in government and laws: “the political artwork.” Here equality obtains on all levels, from the assembly and participation in the Mysteries to pre­ vention of extreme inequality of property, and it is augmented by culti­ vation of the spirit of envy, the suspicion of the principle of “great men.” But democracy does not simply call for full participation, it also pro­ duces laws and constitutions objectifying the “Volksgeist” into formal, rational structure while ensuring that these formal elements remain the possession of each citizen. The system is effective because the prevailing aesthetic spirit implies full development of the average citizen’s capacity to judge as a thinking and feeling being. A cultivated people will invari­ ably produce leaders like Pericles who cannot resort to dogma in at43. TW, 12: 138, 278, 318. Although Hegel supposedly regards both Athens and Sparta as essential “moments” in the Greek totality, it is clear that his sympathies are with the Athenians. Compare TW, 12: 318, 323. 44. TW, 12: 138, 318; 17: 9 7 - 9 8 ; 18: 177; PC, 490. 45. See Hegel’s reference to “die Athene demokratische Gottin.” Ilting, 1: 209. 46. “Die Kunst ist in der Tat die erste Lehrcrin der Volker geworden.” A, 1: 60; TW, 12: 291, 308, 312, 315, 318, 339.

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tempting to enforce their will, since even the religious or dogmatic realm belongs to the aesthetic dimension (as festival, ritual, drama), and that is ruled by the judgment of the average citizen.47 Finally, because it maintains freedom and individuality, this aesthetic state alone can bring forth freedom of thought itself, that is to say, phi­ losophy. The gaiety that transforms the world into a “home” for the human spirit constitutes the very spirit of philosophy. Since democracy is the necessary political form of an aesthetic ethos, the first philoso­ phers “lived in democratic states and shared in the concern for the gen­ eral state administration and government.” 48 In other words, the same aesthetic sensibility that was shaping the human and natural milieu turned to pure philosophy in the course of justifying and augmenting “the political artwork” : “The wealth of the Greek world consists in an endless multitude of beautiful, lovable, graceful individualities, in this serenity in all existence. The greatest among the Greeks are the in­ dividualities: these virtuosos of art, poesy, song, science, righteousness, virtue.” 4‘' Hegel blends into a coherent and persuasive argument some of the most deeply held views of his predecessors, from Winckelmann’s support of classical sculpture through Schiller’s and Holderlin’s fascination with the polis function of tragic drama to the later Holderlin’s view that living democracy is inseparable from the aesthetic ethos.50 It is therefore worth being clear about the larger implications of his stance. First, Hegel is far from seeing the aesthetic state as a unity of homo­ geneous members. On the contrary, he takes the aesthetic state to en­ courage full development of human individuality, since it is the aesthetic consciousness that primarily sustains individual talent and capacity.51 47. TW, 12: 5 7 ,2 9 5 ,3 1 0 ,3 1 8 ,3 0 7 ,3 1 7 - 1 8 ; PG, 506; TW, 17: 150. 48. TW, 18: 181. Also 174, 175. 49. TW, 18: 1 7 7 -7 8 . “Verhiiltnis von Freien zu Freien, und damit wesentliche Cesetze, Bestimmungen des allgemcinen Willens, rechtliche Verfassung . . . — diese Frcihcir finder wir erst im griechischen Volke. Daher fangt hier die Philosophic an.” TW, 18: 122. Hegel adds: “Es ist den Griechen immer schwer geworden, sich ihrer Individu­ a lis t zu begeben.” TW, 18: 181. Hegel refers to Greek “ Individualitat als Kunstwerk (nicht diese unendliehe Personlichkeit).*’ Ilting, 1: 2 0 7 —8. 50. Hegel in general does not use the term “asthetisch,” preferring “schon” when re­ ferring to the aesthetic state or an aesthetic society. alcr$T)crn? proper he equates with “ Empfindung.” TW, 16: 146. 51. This point, the crucial one in Hegel’s positive contributions to the ideal of an aes­ thetic state, is overlooked even by astute students of Hegel. Marcuse, for example, is wrong to interpret Hegel to be saying that true democracy represents a phase “prior to that in which the individual is emancipated” or that the Greek polis was made up of citi­ zens “not yet conscious of their essential individuality.” RR, 2 4 2 —43. Hegel regarded the Athenian as having achieved awareness of his individuality but as not having yet “as-

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Second, although Hegel calls the aesthetic state a “living” unity which does not include the abstraction of the state, he does nonetheless include within it full understanding of the idea of the state as a formal organiza­ tion; indeed, aesthetic consciousness and participatory democracy are the very causes of the discovery of law and formal government. Third, while Hegel concedes that Hellenic gaiety and “hard labor” are mutu­ ally exclusive, he is far from holding that the polis was committed to idleness. Hegel in fact goes to some trouble to warn against false im­ pressions of Athenian democracy drawn from ancient critics of Athens, and he counters their charges with his own image of the enormous in­ dustry of “beautiful democracy.” 52 What Hegel has in mind is a distinc­ tion between Athenian labor devoted to the whole capacities of the indi­ vidual and the kind of piecemeal labor undermining aesthetic unity of mind and body that was contained in the modern European principle of division of labor. And, finally, although Hegel admits that the aesthetic state can function only within a relatively modest geographic area, his own later ideal of the modern state is fully compatible with the small scale of German states in his time. If Wiirttemberg meets these stan­ dards, then at least from Hegel’s own point of view the small size of the aesthetic state does not automatically eliminate it from consideration as a properly political objective. Yet if Hegel’s method vindicates the earlier contributions to our theme, it also furnishes the most thorough explanation for the eventual fall of the aesthetic state. Hegel exposes the ontological implications be­ hind its fatal dependence on slavery. He does not simply point out that participatory democracy presupposed slavery for “hard labor” ; this charge might be countered by recent philological evidence that shows the material base of classical Athenian society as relegating slavery to a secondary role (at least outside the empire period) and as principally maintained by a citizen body made up of shopkeepers and common la­ borers.53 Hegel’s position would remain untouched because he is prin-

cended” to awareness of the universality underscoring the essence of infinite subjectivity of which he was a part. Avineri is no less incorrect to contend that Hegel criticized the ancient polis for its subsumption of the individual under the totality of “public i/irtus*'; and Avineri’s allusion to Hegel’s attitude toward the Platonic republic is not to the point, since Hegel himself saw Plato as an opponent of the Athenian state. Hegel's T heory o f the M od em State, 172 n.53. 52. TW, 12: 3 1 8 - 1 9 . 53. E.g., the analysis in Jones, Athenian D em ocracy, 10—20. Cf. W. G. Forrest, T he E m ergence o f G reek D em ocracy, 8 0 0 —400 B .C . (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 22, on the myth of an industrial proletariat in fifth-century Attica.

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cipally concerned with the average Athenian’s (let alone the average Greek’s) acceptance of slavery as an institution.54 And this acceptance, Hegel holds, is characteristic of a stage of consciousness that, dwelling in a less than universal ethical unity, identifies rights with its limited uni­ versality and has yet to advance to abstract awareness of humans in gen­ eral as free beings. Indeed, no sooner does this advance take place than the foundations of the aesthetic state are shattered. While the aesthetic state is hardly unique in exploiting some people for the benefit of others, the principles of slavery can only be put to critique and eradication after consciousness confronts the idea of humanity itself and acknowledges the unity of all mankind. The R ational State Despite his objections to the Hellenic aesthetic state, Hegel’s main intention in his account was not so much to condemn the Greeks as to congratulate them for at least achieving “real” freedom. Hegel ex­ presses amazement that the very creation of an aesthetic state succeeded for a span of some sixty years and, consonant with its greatness, re­ vealed its own flaws through a final art genre: tragic and comic drama.55 Put in ontological terms, such flaws result from the continued depen­ dence of the aesthetic stage of spirit on the permanence of the natural element. Depending on an “other” for its content, art cannot itself dwell in infinite form. Spirit must therefore pass beyond the aesthetic con­ sciousness if it is to reach the pure thought in which its own nature as infinite being can be made conscious. While the self in Kunstreligion has been acknowledged as absolute Being, spirit must now approach the realm of appearance proper to the aesthetic consciousness in order to make that realm the object of investigation. The philosophical freedom of thought original to the aesthetic state must enter abstraction.56 Abstraction, however, undermines the aesthetic ethos, society, and 54. As G. A. Kelly remarks regarding Hegel, “the aesthetic state of absolute Sittlichkeit is impossible.” H egel’s Retreat from Eleusis: Studies in Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 86. It is useful, nonetheless, to note that Athens, the most aesthetic Greek polis, seems to have been quite “infamous” for its relatively egalitar­ ian treatment of slaves. Pseudo-Xenophon, Athenaion Politeia, in Xenophon, O pera Omnia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), 5: section 10. 55. “ In Griechenland sehen wir die reale Freiheit aufbluhen, aber zugleich noch in eincr bestimmten Form.” TW, 18: 122. Hegel ascribes the invention of drama proper to the Greek people. 56. TW, 12: 293, 323, 387, 326, 339; 17: 99, 305, 3 0 6 - 7 ; PG, 5 2 1 ; TW, 16: 258.

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state. It draws the individual away from living contact with the human and natural environment. The principle of freedom becomes an object of self-consciousness: from “spiritual individuality” to “infinite sub­ jectivity," the individual withdraws into his own inner being and be­ gins to question the natural ethical bonds on which participatory de­ mocracy rested. Philosophy enters the cul-de-sac of stoicism, freedom in abstractions/7 However regrettable these consequences must later appear, Hegel ar­ gues that the aesthetic synthesis cannot be disentangled from the dis­ crepancy between the inherent universality of thought engendered by Hellenic freedom and the particularity of the ethical unity from which that thought arose. Having surfaced through an accidental set of fac­ tors, freedom must lead in time to awareness of the rights that humans in general possess. The human spirit must approach morality, the gap between pure universality and particular existence, as the rationality in all beings, and it must make that morality its own/ Since the Greeks failed to investigate the abstract grounds of ethics and the state, they were forced to deploy slavery in order to ensure full equality and partici­ pation of all citizens in the democracy; unable to depend on the bonds extended by abstract thought in the form of a system of laws, their re­ liance on daily contact among citizens kept them within the confines of a small state; and lastly, unable to bring themselves to undergo the ab­ straction of work, the often hard and painful labor of Verstand on small but indispensable tasks, they lodged this freedom within slavery as an institution. In fact, even if the classical aesthetic state had abolished slavery (efforts to do so were actually made by Athenian radicals in 403 and 338 b . c .), the Greeks would have relied all the more heavily on colonization to settle the dilemma of ensuring the necessities of life without being obliged to toil.59 Athenian drama manifests all these contradictions in its living total­ ity. Its creations symbolize the Athenian citizen who experiences himself as artist. Projecting the universal inwardness of his character into the pathos of the tragic hero, he learns the nature of universal justice by con57. TW, 17: 128; 12: 138, 387; PC, 155, 491; Ilting, 1: 209, 330. 58. TW, 18: 177; 12: 3 0 9 ,3 2 9 ; 17: 1 2 8 -2 9 . 59. TW, 12: 309, 311, 312, 275; 7: 510 (356]; 18: 177. Granted what wc have noted about Hegel’s acceptance of the small Wiirttemberg state as a valid political size, a more useful distinction between what he regarded as the size appropriate for an aesthetic state and that appropriate for the modern state may rest on the primacy of speech in the former and writing or literacy in the latter. TW, 12: 312. On colonization: TW, 7: 3 9 2 —93 (2481. On attempts to abolish slavery in Athens, cf. Jones, Athenian D em ocracy, 19.

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fronting the ethical absolutes within the polis as adversaries.60 Within this arena the divinity of the public gods collapses, giving way to the seriousness and negative power of the concept. This concept of tragedy for Hegel conveys the new awareness behind the philosophical turn toward subjectivity. Stemming, however, from the particularity of a “living” ethical foundation, it cannot ascend to true infinite subjec­ tivity: the subject suffers guilt while the audience undergoes “unap­ peasable sorrow . . . , in that an individual perishes.” 61 Tragedy is then supplemented by comic drama in which Demos him­ self appears on the stage as the fool who confuses the particularity of his actual existence with universality. The Athenian democratic principle, in other words, is exposed in its inadequacy before freedom of thought and self-conscious subjectivity. Learning that his own self-consciousness is the fate of the gods and the polis, the comic hero reveals the ultimate dependence of Kunstreligion on awareness of the absolute as pure single subject, as oracular Fatum.62 Democracy had mistakenly assumed that it had whittled down this background of necessity, but comedy reveals it again as the individual self bearing the power of negation. The self is now its own nothingness and actuality: “the religion of art has com­ pleted itself in it and has perfectly retreated in itself.” 63 Fatum, the un­ canny presence behind the world of beautiful appearances that makes up the aesthetic state, takes full revenge by manifesting itself as “the pure, abstract thought-determination.” 64 Vaguely suspecting his own true powers, the individual is pervaded by new intimations of selfcertainty; but simultaneously he slips from paradise into the night of alienation. It is for such reasons finally that Hegel’s narrative of the aesthetic state can be called an elegy. Hegel’s conclusion is that we have forever fallen away from its idyll and its beautifully naive attitude toward the object or thing. We can no longer worship an object, we can only praise its beauty and inevitably stand outside the self-sufficiency of the Greek mind: “Thus fate grants us with the works of that art not its world, not the spring and summer of ethical life in which it flowered and ripened, but the veiled memory of this actuality.” 65 Even so, our position (Hegel 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

PC, 5 1 1 ,5 1 6 . TW, 17: 133, 134. PC, 5 1 8 - 1 9 , 520. PC, 520; TW, 12: 308, 310. TW, 17: 16; 48. PC, 524.

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adds) remains superior. Memory is more than experience of actual­ ity: “The spirit of fate that offers us those artworks . . . is the ‘in­ ternalization’ [Er-innerung] of the spirit that is still externalized in them.” *'’ Rationality allows us to rise above even the achievements rep­ resented by the aesthetic state and to fashion the modern, rational state in which absolute spirit finds its authentic home. How this is effected requires a second look at Hegelian reason as his­ torical development. Regarded as a totality, this development contains a critical moment parallel to the pure moments of the logical Idea. When substance comes to know itself as spirit, the historical preconditions are laid for the eventual actualization of universal freedom in history. This moment began when the aesthetic consciousness was created by Hellenic culture. But since that culture was limited by the determinate bounds of the polis, a full recognition of the identity of substance and spirit does not take place until a later historical stage when individual selfconsciousness, undergoing infinite negation of itself, experiences that identity in its universality. Historically, this event may be divided into two parts. According to Hegel, the first, a material manifestation of this diremption, takes the form of Roman society and political order. Abrogating the living free­ dom of the Hellenic aesthetic state, Rome plunges both free men and slaves into a common cauldron; “with the end of freedom slavery neces­ sarily ended.” 67 The final truth of the primacy of universality captured by Athenian tragedy is arrogated by Rome to the abstract universality of all individuals as persons or legal units. Simultaneously, individuals sur­ render their living freedom: “The condition of right is perfect absence of right.” Reduced to despair and misery, the atomized individual aban­ dons the gaiety of creative labor. Still, the “hard and painful labor” with which he is now afflicted teaches each individual that the former free­ dom of aesthetic awareness and labor must be universalized for all selfconscious beings. Slavery is first negated when each person takes on negation within himself, including that of the alienating labor formerly relegated to slaves, and shares freedom with all his fellow beings.68 The second part takes the shape of the Christian religion that first arose during the Roman age. Spirit overcomes the thing through its own experience within a crucified suffering of substance as self, and thus 66. PC, 5 24; TW, 17: 139, 276. On memory, cf. PC, 39. 67. TW, 2: 491. Cf. B. T. Wilkins, Hegel's Philosophy o f H istory (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 91, 133—35, 167. 68. TW, 11: 138, 339, 378, 384, 3 8 7 - 8 8 .

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marks a turning point for consciousness: “For everything that otherwise had value becomes indifferent, unworthy of estimation.” 69 Recognizing the infinite within himself, the individual learns to feel love for all be­ ings. Slavery as a principle dissolves when individuals not only become bound to one another through universal love but also know that same love through inward identification with the infinite as God. Henceforth humanity is endowed with will, aware of its inner worth and of a “rela­ tion of free to free” among all beings.70 Yet, although the Roman and Christian stages ensure that the inner consciousness of each individual actually possesses identity of substance and spirit, it still requires a subsequent act by spirit to penetrate sub­ stance with its subjectivity, with the explicit idea of freedom. For Hegel, this task is distinct to the “Germanic” culture of Western Europe.71 Having imbibed Christian teachings of universal love, these successors of early Germanic tribes also retain the principle of “Gemut,” or “sensa­ tion of natural totality in itself.” 72 Accordingly, the “Gemeinde” or union of the Germanic people reflects the private right contributed by the Roman state to the idea of freedom; but, committed to leaders and groups based on faithfulness (“Treue”), this union advances from the unspiritual private right of Roman abstract universalism to legal ties founded on spiritual community. For this transition to be effected, abstraction of labor, right, and person must become abstraction of thought in and for itself. Inwardness must free itself from Christianity as an institutional body in order to comprehend in thought the recon­ ciliation of subject and object. Once self-consciousness finds its home in pure thought, freedom in abstraction is superseded by thought inves­ tigating all nature or substance as the realm of multiplicity in which the identity of spirit with substance can be enacted.73 Hegel points to the outbreak of the French Revolution as the histori69. TW, 12: 396. 70. TW, 12: 4 0 3 - 4 ; 18: 122. 71. TW, 12: 412. That Hegel meant by “Germanic” also the Romance people of Western Europe— the term covers the boundaries of Charlemagne’s empire— needs no belaboring. See Avineri, Hegel's Theory o f the M odern State, 2 2 8 —29. Nonetheless, while Hegel is hardly a German chauvinist, he does make two central claims in favor of his Ger­ many. First, it is among the heirs of the German Reich that he expects the greatest ad­ vances in terms of realization of a rational state; and, second, it is the German philosophi­ cal tradition— the only “genuine” one, he contends, outside the Greek— that has realized the thought of absolute spirit (and within this latter tradition Hegel aims to “teach” phi­ losophy “to speak German” [deutsch sprechen}). Br, 1: 100. 72. TW, 12: 4 2 2 -2 3 . For the early importance of “Gemut” as a faculty of active en­ ergy and pride on behalf of political reformation, cf. Dickey, H egel, 1 6 3 -6 4 . 73. TW, 12: 4 2 2 - 2 6 , 4 8 8 - 8 9 , 4 9 6 - 9 7 , 5 2 0 - 2 1 .

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cal moment of thought ready to become social and political praxis. The idea of freedom is now poised to construct a state congenial to the real­ ization of freedom at the absolute, philosophical level of reconciliation. The "Germanic” stage of history reaches its goal in a specifically Ger­ man harvest. In the nascent German states of postrevolutionary Europe (Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Prussia), Hegel seeks the appropriate candi­ dates for his political ideal. The French may have begun the political emancipation of humanity, the English may have inaugurated its mate­ rial emancipation, but the German states can fuse both achievements within the controlling idea of the state as spiritual community. This idea is not a summary of Hegels Prussia; it is a standard that Prussia no less than other states must meet in order to qualify as a rational polity.7-4 Although structurally complicated, Hegel’s idea of the rational state is not hard to grasp. Essentially it constitutes a political ideal in which the elements making up the classical polis have been reshuffled to include the subsequent development of abstract right and individualism.7* Within this apparatus property makes up the first (and, ontologically regarded, the lowest) affirmation of freedom; to achieve permanence, it must be then confirmed by a social pact ( Vertrag). Since this agreement presupposes a standard of values reflecting the human will, private right based on property guarantees the individual as not merely a legal person but a genuine spiritual subject. Yet, qua subject, the individual is re­ sponsible both for his or her private inclinations and for the universality implicit in his or her acts as a subject. Since the particular will cannot furnish a final standard, one must realize one’s universality by grasping the universal or general will that one shares with other willing beings. But the standard of the Good is still empty universality, a necessary but not sufficient reason for attaining concrete freedom. Beyond “Moralitat” lies “Sittlichkeit,” a living ethical unity fashioned by individuals to con­ form with the moral will: “the idea of freedom as the living Good.” 76 Without this “Sittlichkeit” there can be no state. Hegel’s position here is thus fully compatible with his earlier praise of the polis. Yet Hegel’s new version considerably reinterprets its earlier appearance in his philosophy. Although Hegelian “Sittlichkeit” retains the foundation 74. TW, 12: 529, 5 3 4 - 3 9 . On the English Reform Bill of 1832: Hegel, in his last published essay, criticized franchise reform unaccompanied by wider change in the rela­ tion of English civil society to the state. TW, 11: 8 3 -1 2 8 . 75. TW, 7: 91 [331,35 [3). 76. TW, 7: 91 [33], [105], 243 [129], 286 [1411, 292 [142].

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of a natural unity felt by members for one another in the experience of love, Hegel formally confines this foundation to the modern unit of the family.77 The last refuge of the ontological category of immediacy, the family prevents any revival of earlier relations of pure domination,78 leaving it up to the modern state to make room for individual autonomy by forbidding love in the body politic itself. Therefore, beyond the immediacy of love, modern “Sittlichkeit” must include space for self-conscious individuals pursuing private aims. Although responsible for the demise of the Hellenic aesthetic state, this self-consciousness belongs to a final reconciliation of finite subject and the infinite. Under the designation of “civil society,” it is the domain re­ sponsible for uniting subject with object through labor on the natural thing.74 To argue this position Hegel offers a somewhat different approach to labor than he used in his analysis of Kunstreligion. Labor for the later Hegel results from individual desire to make a product and satisfy de­ sire through enjoyment of the thing as something “ideal” or a product created by spirit in individual form. Whereas the labor contributing to Kunstreligion engendered universal capacities and spiritual unity, the modern concept of labor is an outcome of the limited aims of Verstand, reflecting Hegel’s new conviction that the individual must limit himself to a single task if he is to learn from his labor.80 Yet while this kind of labor brings individuals into contact with one another, it cannot unite them spiritually.81 Hegel accepts the logic of his position by rejecting the “invisible hand” presuppositions of English 77. TW, 7: 307 1158). 78. JS, “System der Sittlichkeit/’ 461. 79. TW, 7: 106 (44). Yet in the E nzyklopadie (1830 edition) Hegel continued to inter­ pret the artwork in the philosophy of absolute spirit as intimately bound with labor: the artist’s productivity, his Produzieren, “ist zuglcich ein mit technischem Verstande und mcchanischen Ausscrlichkeiten beschaftiges Arbeiten. Das Kunstwerk ist daher ebensosehr ein Wcrk der freien Willkur und der Kunstler der Meistcr des Gottes.” TW, 10: 359 (561J. Thus it seems not unfair to conclude, in light of the superiority of “absolute” over “objective” spirit in Hegel’s system, that the theory of labor in the Crutidlinien is re­ stricted to the level to which it belongs in the self-awareness of consciousness and that the wider treatment of labor found in PC is the more complete approach to the meaning of labor as leading to, and realizing itself as, artwork. Cf. the discussion in Kain, Schiller , H egel , and M arx, 5 6 - 7 4 , drawing also on A. 80. JS, “System der Sittlichkeit,” 437. Especially useful are Hegel’s comments on “Bildung” and “Beruf” in the P hilosophischc Propddeutik, TW, 4: 2 5 8 —64 [41—48]: “wenn der Mensch ctwas werden soli, so muss er sich zu beschranken wissen, d.h. seinen Beruf ganz zu seiner Sache machen” (263). We are reminded of the progress of Goethe’s own thought, whom Hegel cites in this respect. TW, 7: 6 4 - 6 5 [1]. Cf. Taylor, H egelt 409. 81. On this kind of labor of civil society Hegel states: “ Diess ist eine bewusstlose Nothwendigkeit, die dem Menschen nicht genug ist.” llting, 3: 710.

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political economy. In his view, whatever the objective proofs for the claim that an individual engaged in labor somehow works for others, this effect is an unconscious process that ipso facto cannot contain moral value. In point of fact, by stimulating the growth of unequal skills and capital, labor of this sort more generally causes individuals to drift apart from one another. Thus Hegel concedes that even if it is an essen­ tial stage in the actualization of freedom, labor in the formal setting of atomized civil society is politically destabilizing/2 To escape his dilemma, Hegel calls on organizations and associations to lift individuals beyond narrow wants. Hegelian society is accordingly divided into three groups: an agrarian class, a business class, and a bu­ reaucracy, the last presumably serving the universality “naturally” rep­ resented by farmers and challenged by entrepreneurs/1 But even this system of estates (“Stande”) promotes a process leading to the triumph of self-conscious subjectivity as an individualism devouring all other forms. Emancipated from the communal constraints of “Sittlichkeit,” economic individualism creates an expanding economy, encouraging production of goods that cannot be consumed, periodic breakdowns of the economy, and the growth of a pauper class excluded from the spirit of society and state/4 Obviously for Hegel, rampant civil society is an intolerable violation of the spiritual unity of the state. But since he cannot renounce the universalistic capacities contained in its labor, Hegel resolves his quandary by formalizing the economic layers of society through the protection offered by the estates and by hoping for the labor cultivated through corporations to effect an unconscious working for others: ‘in the cor­ poration, activity for a universal is something conscious.” 85 The pro­ liferation of associations, groups, and corporations is to buffer the colli82. On labor as a form of education or Bildung, cf. Avineri, Hegel's T heory o f the M odern State, 89. Hegel recognizes the importance of political economy as the ubiq­ uitously modern science, the triumph of the faculty of Verstand. But to this extent politi­ cal economy fails to reflect on itself and the larger frame of spirit to which it belongs. TW, 7: 3 4 7 - 4 8 [189], 353 [200]. 83. TW, 7: 3 5 4 - 5 7 [2 0 1 -5 ]. On the difference between “Stand” and Indian caste society, cf. TW, 7: 358 [206]. Slavery for Hegel does not stand for an estate but constitutes a formal universal. JS, 491. 84. TW, 7: 3 9 0 - 9 3 [2 4 5 -4 8 ]. Civil society leads to “das Schauspiel eben so der Ausschweifung, des Elends und des beyden gemeinschaftlichen physischen und sittlichen Verderbens.” Ilting, 3: 577. 85. Ilting, 3: 711. Hegel rejects the view that industry and corporations are incom­ patible. In “The Sources and Significance of Hegel’s Corporate Doctrine,” G. Heiman points to TW, 7: [289] as the nub of Hegel’s defense of the corporation and concludes that Hegel’s major innovation was “to see a legal institution as a method of politicizing the individual.” In Pelczynski, Hegel's Political Philosophy, 129, 134.

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sion between individual and social values, replacing the immediacy of the aesthetic state with a complex web of loyalties that encourages the individual to identify with larger social wholes without depriving him of the individualism that remains the necessary foundation for the last­ ing reconciliation of finite and infinite spirit. Even this more complex solution, however, fails to dismantle the dis­ ruptive competitiveness of civil society. Accordingly, final authority must be vested in the formal Hegelian state apparatus and its constitu­ tional powers.8" Protected by corporations, a large dose of press free­ dom and public opinion, recourse to legal redress, and maintenance of proper courts, Hegelian state institutions are to “objectify” these indis­ pensable dialectical moments under the aegis of constitutional monar­ chy. The monarchical power will enact the actual freedom of decision; the executive of civil servants, who are appointed by the king in accor­ dance with merit, will apply the laws; and the legislative power of king, ministers, and estates assembly will represent the social entity of the estates.87 Within this schema universal suffrage is excluded even from the representative body of the assembly, whose two houses, the landed class and the bourgeoisie, are selected by intermediate authority. Thus Hegel’s ideal completely does away with any semblance of the democ­ racy by which the aesthetic state was governed. The complexity of the modern state and the evolution of the modern individual preclude par­ ticipation by all citizens in political decisions. Hegel dismisses the counterexample of the French system, arguing that its preservation of a rigidly centralized bureaucracy merely for­ malizes the atomization of modern society.88 In his view, the atomizing pressures of the modern economic order can be held in check only by a state organization depending on social and political units that mediate between individual and state.89 At the apex of this system the monarch, as a living human being, preserves the moment of the participating indi­ vidual by his act of dotting the /’s of constitutional legislature. Here, fi86. TW, 7: 4 3 5 - 4 0 (173]. Cf. Marcuse’s version of Hegel’s choice of the concept of the monarch in RR , 217, which, however, is less reminiscent of a European monarch than of Rousseau’s Em ile, “I’hommc de la nature eclaire par la raison.” 87. TW, 7: 468 (3 0 0 -3 0 1 ), 435 [273]. 88. TW, 7: 481 [312]; 1: 580; 12: 312. Hegel denies the United States of America the status of a state so long as its frontier is available as a safety valve to prevent socialization and the concurrent development of classes entailed by limited space. TW, 12: 112—13. 89. Thus Marcuse speaks of the Hegelian state as not absolutist but “disciplinary”: “the people must become a material part of state power.” RR, 175. Charles Taylor’s for­ mulation of this contrast between the Hegelian state and absolutism is less precise: Hegel’s “model is not the M achtstaat of Frederick the Great, which he never admired, but the Greek polis.” Hegel, 3 8 7 -8 8 .

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nally, the inequality unleashed by civil society is superseded by equal membership in a spiritual whole. The “absence of an ethical life” under­ mining the democracy of the aesthetic state becomes “itself the principle of ‘Sittlichkcit.’ ” **0 How far does Hegel’s argument on behalf of a modern rational state effectively refute his prior ideal of the aesthetic state? According to Hegel, the classical aesthetic state was vitiated by its lack of specialized labor and abstract inward thought, or the absence of the ontological moment of pure abstraction. The modern state is willing to find a place in its structure for this finite individualism now manifested as civil soci­ ety; accordingly, it undertakes a more comprehensive objectification. Whereas love in the aesthetic state was manifested through aesthetic la­ bor, the modern state reserves it to the family and the labor producing the prodigious wealth of modern life, while going on to weave the fam­ ily and civil society into an ethos that sustains the primacy of law and constitution for all members of the community.'1 Thus by keeping at bay, through partially preserving, the radical consequences of the selfconscious subjectivity which undermined Kunstreligion, the Hegelian modern state transcends the aesthetic state.1,2 To judge the effectiveness of this argument a careful scrutiny of Hegel’s comparison is in order. It will be recalled that in Hegel’s own account colonization and the persistence of slavery were evidence of the failure of the aesthetic state to integrate all individuals within the spiri­ tual community of the state. But the fate of subjectivity in the modern state is no less destructive, according to Hegel’s own narrative. Modern 90. TW, 10: 3 3 4 —35 [5391; Ilting, 1: 330. The third part of the Grundlinien has been taken by certain commentators to represent Hegel’s reversion to the Greek concept of the state based on “Sittlichkeit,” thus as the “precedence of ancient political theory over the modern theory of the state. . . . Hegel’s idea of Sittlichkcit, then, is a pattern of thought borrowed from the model of the ancient city-state.” Ilting, “The Structure of Hegel’s ‘Phi­ losophy of Right,’” 9 8 - 1 0 1 ; for a milder version, see Z. A. Pclczynski, “The Hegelian Conception of the State,” 26; both in Pclczynski, H egel’s Political Philosophy. 91. In his analysis of Hegel’s “Greek ideal,” Bernard Reardon offers a citation from the early Hegel (“ Is there an idea more beautiful than that of a nation (Volk) of men re­ lated to one another by love?” ) without adding that even the early Hegel stressed that a community of love, such as that of original Christianity, should “objectify” its love in the artwork— one reason the early Hegel found Greek culture superior to Christianity. Reardon, H egel’s P hilosophy o f Religion , 16. 92. Taylor professes to find in Hegel’s resurrection of essential motifs in premodern society “an extraordinary tour de force” : “For he rehabilitates the notion of a cosmic order as a cornerstone of political thinking,” albeit on the revolutionary foundation of reason. H egel, 374.

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subjectivity propels an economy producing a surplus of goods, pauper­ ization at least as brutal as that found in classical slavery, and global colonization in search of markets upon which the surplus can be un­ loaded. Not only does Hegel fail to deny these factors, he implicitly ad­ mits the impotence of his own political theory when dealing with them: “The important question of how to remedy poverty is one of the pri­ mary ones affecting and worrying modern societies.” 93 Possibly Hegel is even acknowledging the unprecedented nature of modern industrial so­ ciety when he uses the term Klasse rather than Stand for the emergent working class.44 Yet, surely Hegel should then admit to the unstable so­ lution that his model projects. If the aesthetic state is to be faulted for the irrationality of its acquiescence to the oracle as the moment of abso­ lute subjectivity, Hegel’s modern state is guilty of a greater absurdity with its alternate image of the monarch as a new version of the oracle, superfluous yet somehow, inexplicably, necessary.95 Hegel, we also recall, had further objected to the aesthetic state for its confinement within a particular ethos. Yet his modern alternative also presupposes the continued existence of particular states vying with one another for territory and power. Since the Hegelian concept of the state requires the foundation of “Sittlichkeit” and this ethical union can­ not logically aspire to the condition of a universal world state, evolution from what Hegel calls free subjectivity to infinite subjectivity does not presuppose a similar development from free (or “real”) to infinite “Sitt­ lichkeit.” Whatever the plausibility of Hegel’s concept of ethical union from the perspective of a world state, for him both the aesthetic state and the modern state must dwell in a states system in order to realize the 93. T\V, 7: 390 [244J; also 3 8 7 —93 (241—48). As Avineri correctly remarks, poverty furnishes the rare case of a concept that Hegelian thought fails to mediate. Furthermore, Avineri includes in Hegel’s favor the insight that the problem of poverty is essentially psy­ chological. H egel’s Theory o f the M odern State, 153, 149. 94. Avineri, H egel’s Theory o f the M odern State, 96 n.40. 95. TW, 7: 449 [279], states Hegel’s own understanding of the apparent similarity between the Greek oracle and the modern monarch, as well as the distinction he draws between them: in the modern, the abstraction of subjectivity takes on life in the person of the monarch saying “ I will.” The apparent irrelevance of the monarch in Hegel’s theory of the modern state has led certain commentators to overstatements, e.g., W. Maihofer’s allusion to “Hegel’s Prinzip des Modernen Staates als das welthistorische Prinzip der konstitutionellcn Dcmokratie.” “Hegels Prinzip des modernen Staates,” in M. Riedel, ed., M aterialien zu Hcgels R cchtsphilosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), 2: 3 8 0 —87. K.-H. Ilting meanwhile makes a telling critique of Hegel’s approach to the monarch as a contradiction of the rules of the dialectic, since in this case the thesis (the monarch) is presented last in the exposition. “The Structure of Hegel’s ’Philosophy of Right,*” 106 and n.43.

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potentiality of spirit, and to this extent, the rational state cannot claim priority over the aesthetic state.96 But if this point is correct, very little remains of the vaunted superi­ ority of Hegel’s rational state. Hegel’s final definition of the state as “the spiritual individual’’ continues to retain the earlier “heroic’’ stance that the state presupposes a “Volksgeist’’ and that “the ethical state” formed of genuine individuals must somehow be included within modern paradigms.**7 In short, like Athens the rational state must seek to develop and bring to expression “all human capacities and all individual powers from all sides and directions.” 98 Actually, the aesthetic state can claim the achievement of a certain wholeness and harmony since it constitutes a kind of “artwork,” whereas Hegel explicitly admits that the modern state, struggling with the contingent and accidental elements of the indi­ vidual will in modern civil society, is “no artwork.” Powerless to rectify its own shortcomings, the modern state formalizes rather than resolves the conflict between modern individualism and spiritual community.9V Fortunately, we need not leave the relevance of Hegel’s thought for our theme at this point. For according to that same thought, the main virtue concurrent with the modern state system but lacking in the age of the classical polis is the advanced nature of modern speculative thought. This is the thought that judges the states system and the historical stage to which it belongs in accordance with the evolution of reason. Render­ ing final judgment on all claims, it acknowledges that “world history is world judgment” in the sense that world history and the modern states system furnish the “objective” sphere for the emergence of absolute spirit.100 If this spirit has effected the Aufhebung of the classical aes­ thetic state, its speculative character has hardly found greater satisfac­ tion in the inadequacies of the modern state. It must therefore overcome 96. Cf. Taylor, H egel, 426 n .l, for the most cogent argument that Hegel’s political theory cannot square with the idea of a world state. Avineri’s contrasting position claim­ ing to see rudiments of a vision of “one world” in which sovereignty “withers away” seems unjustified. Hegel's T heory o f the M odern State, 207. 97. VG, 93. According to W. Kaufmann, Hegel sees three important elements making up the state: it is a legal and political organization, it is a spiritual community, and it is an ideal or an aspect of the Idea. Cited in Wilkins, Hegel's Philosophy o f History, 5 4 - 5 5 n.20; Ilting, 3: 566. 98. A, 1: 57. 99. TW, 7: 404 [258). In the Grtmdlinien Hegel holds that the state cannot be a work of art, since it is bound to be contingent and accidental. Yet he continues to retain the distinction between a normative state and a “bad” state (one lacking a unity of universal and particular). Ilting, 3: 727. A, 1: 57. 100. TW, 7: 503 (340).

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the latter with a higher ideal that injects the freedom attained on the speculative level into all objective relationships. Since that freedom has given the aesthetic dimension wider and more radical powers of trans­ formation, such an ideal would seem unattainable without returning the aesthetic state to the agenda of a politics of freedom. In our last part the implications of this prospect are entertained. “The Philosophy o f Spirit Is an Aesthetic P hilosophy” Our argument that the aesthetic consciousness governing the aes­ thetic state ultimately returns to Hegel’s thought at the crown of his sys­ tem will be regarded as an exaggeration of Hegel’s intentions. Still, it contains an important truth for our general theme. More than any other systematic philosophy, Hegel’s ontology captures the importance of the paradigm of art and the aesthetic dimension that has ruled German thought since Kant. His system as a whole, as a “mandala,” amply fulfills the requirement of the Systemprogram that “the philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy.” Commentators have rightly called Hegelian thought “an aesthetic system” and noted the aesthetic bias of his dialectical method.101 Kant’s “architectonic” may have paved the way, but Hegel’s system is a substantially more sustained venture in fulfilling aesthetic standards of balance, proportion, and harmony, both in method and in the content laid forth by that method.102 The presence of these features in Hegel is evident if we consider his method as it is increasingly revealed to spirit itself during the latter’s ascension to selfawareness. As a formal organization culminating the “objectification” of spirit, the state is held together by religion, interpreted as the thought, however inadequate or implicit, of the absolute as object. In this respect the state 101. M andala “means to surround any prominent facet of reality with beauty.*' Η. V. Guenther’s translation of a Tibetan rendering of the Sanskrit word. Buddhist P hilosophy in Theory and Practice (Baltimore: Penguin, (1971) 1972), 198. G. A. Kelly, Idealism , Politics and History: Sources o f Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 309. Rudolph Haym in 1857 furnishes an early version of Hegel's “Darstellung des Universums als eines schonen lebendigen Kosmos." H egel und seine Zeit (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1857), 96. Recent versions are Harris, HegePs D evelopm ent, xxi, xxv, xxxii; and Solomon, In the Spirit o f Hegel, “The P henom enology as Art: The World as Willful Representation,’’ 2 2 0 -2 8 (PC as “conceptual art” 1227)). Against this position one might, however, cite Hegel’s attack on Schelling's identification of the artwork with the Idea. TW, 20: 454. 102. The connection between method and system is elaborated in the V orrede: “ Denn die Methode ist nichts anderes als der Bau des Ganzen in seiner reinen Wesenheit aufge-

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is the realization of freedom “in the world” or “in actuality”; its laws “are nothing other than the appearance of religion in the relations of actuality.” HH But since the actual is still confined to the finite, it must not be allowed to hamper pursuit of ultimate freedom. Although free­ dom first manifests itself in worldly relations, it must transcend them, and “the Aufhebung of this finitude is the religious standpoint.” 104 This transition from the “objective” to the “absolute” dimension of HegePs system is made when consciousness advances from the ethos of a particular “Volksgeist” to pure awareness of absolute spirit through the mediating agency of world history. Every particular “Volksgeist” de­ velops a thought peculiar to its “Sittlichkeit.” But now that it perceives the underlying pattern behind all such particular spirits as partially aware agents in the unfolding idea of freedom, this spirit is ready to en­ tertain the “knowledge of absolute spirit.” Here finally, Hegel holds, the expectations of freedom which make up the meaning of man’s social history can be realized: “In religion each is elevated to this intuition of himself as a universal self— his nature, his rank, sinks like a dream im­ age, like an island that appears on the rim of the horizon as airy cloud­ lets— he is equal to the prince.” 105 The realm of the history of states is revealed to spirit as the “theatre” of world history; before its gaze the activity of the human species takes on the character of shapes (Gestalten), encouraging spirit to a mode of thinking in which form and content are reconciled.106 This final (or latest) stage of the Hegelian spirit supersedes both Hellenic philosophy and Christian religion. The former culminated in a complete “ideal intellectual world” which, lacking particularity, was “inactual”; the latter introduced the experience of the subject as an ab­ solute moment, of human being the finite as absolutely valuable through his kinship with “God.” But “modern” philosophy, the mode of aware­ ness inaugurated by Kant, combines this Christian demand for unity of subject and object with the Hellenic discovery of the identity of being and thinking. Reverting to Hellenic foundations, German philosophy since Kant finalizes the true philosophical tradition by uniting the three stellt.” PC, 40. According to W. Kaufmann, Hegel “sought harmony and integration in a system the like of which no modern philosopher before him had been able to fashion.’’ H egel, 1 3 0 -3 1 . 103. TW, 16: 236, 237; 12: 70, 497. 104. In this sense the state is the “ Erscheinung des göttlichen Lebens.” TW, 16: 1 1 2 -1 3 . 105. TW, 10: 353 [552]. GW, 8: 281. 106. TW, 12: 29; PC, 5 6 3 - 6 4 . Hegel also refers to “eine Galerie von Bildern.’*

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modes of awareness, art, religion, and philosophy, not as separable units but as ways in which the one unity, spirit, seizes its own being through shapes.107 Historically, each mode occupies a certain stage in the Hegelian system, but spirit takes a qualitative leap when it detects in each such mode the wholeness of absolute spirit in and for itself as a “moment” in its own activity. Since this activity remains heir to those earlier stages, it is useful to recapitulate the content that they now offer the unified spirit. Art has pride of place, not only because absolute spirit was first made explicit in the aesthetic consciousness, but also because the transition from “objective” to “absolute” spirit is captured by art as spirit eman­ cipating itself from the particularity of all “Volksgeister.” While its pres­ ence in absolute spirit testifies to a continuing link between spirit and nature which prevents conscious knowledge of the object from arising through art qua art, art itself has acknowledged, through its manifesta­ tion as Kunstreligion, the presence of a higher purpose in spirit than the shaping of the natural other. Art, in other words, overcomes its own limits by becoming religion and generating the “decline of a religion that is still bound to sensuous externality.” Reaching the infinite object, art’s realm of sense-intuition is transcended by the formal object of reli­ gion, “God.” 108 But this Aufhebung of art into religion does not imply the dissolution of art. To be sure, art can no longer focus the attention of spirit. But contrary to frequent interpretations of Hegel’s aesthetics, Hegel never claims that art is “dead.” 109 In his view, not only will art always consti­ tute the moment of necessary mediation of spirit between sensibility and the object of religion, but spirit itself will grant a new importance to art when approaching the object in the shapes of absolute religion.1,0 At the historical stage of the Christian or “absolute” religion when religion, having completed its representations and mythology of the absolute, is 107. TW, 18: 1 2 6 -2 7 , 128, 1 2 9 -3 0 , 131; 17: 190. 108. TW, 10: 3 7 1 - 7 2 [5 6 2 -6 3 ]; GW, 8: 280. 109. On Hegel’s aesthetics proper, several useful studies exist: J. Kaminsky, H egel on Art (New York: State University Press of New York, 1962); A. Horn, Kunst uttd Freiheit: Fine kritischc Interpretation dcr Hegelscheft Asthetik (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1969); G. Lukacs, “Kegels Asthetik,” in Hegel, A, 2: 5 8 7 —624; Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study o f Hegel's Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 110. TW, 12: 69. The crucial passage occurs in A, 1: 22. This passage, while affirming that Kunstreligion can never return, simply remarks that a new “reflecting” relation to art has since developed which seems quite compatible with a purely aesthetic way of evalu­ ating the art object. Thus Taylor’s contention that Hegel has been proved wrong by the increasing importance of art for many people as a substitute for religion misses Hegel’s point. Hegel, 479.

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on the verge of a pure conceptual understanding of such representa­ tions, art again appears as the generative power. Since the purely reli­ gious synthesis of Christian dogma and Christian church failed to pene­ trate all substance, art becomes the vehicle of the “free spirit” (der freie Geist) breaking through dogma to absolute philosophy. The forms of early Renaissance art betray for Hegel a consciousness that is willing to take up sensuous form and proves so penetrating in its investigations of real nature that the Christian church, espying in its putative client a for­ eign and inimical spirit, forces art to reveal itself explicitly as thought and science. This thought develops into the speculative science that sup­ plants religion while realizing its ultimate telos.m Spirit has learned from the formal stage of religion the important truth that “God” is the proper object for spirit. But although religion has correctly understood that the final object for subjectivity must be infinite, it is hampered by its revelation of that object as a representation (Vorstellung). Paradoxically restricted to the realm of ordinary under­ standing, which assumes an object in which the nature of subject is lack­ ing, religion bequeaths to philosophy a panorama of representations— the history, so to speak, of the content “God.” In turn, this history be­ comes in speculative philosophy proper the progression of mankind half-consciously shaping the true object for thought. Absolute art under­ stood the object as image (Bild); religion, treating it as representation, lifts the image to the level of the form of universality. But only when the form of thought in and for itself becomes the content of spirit and the realm in which it dwells does philosophy rule as the nature of spirit. It is philosophy that alone can make explicit this realm: it knows itself as the subject moving its own self, it knows the act of movement, and it knows the substance in which the subject moves: finally, it knows all three as­ pects as spirit.112 This philosophical spirit can be called a kind of mysticism in the sense that the movement of diremption and unification characterizing the essence of spirit is inconceivable for the vulgar understanding, which approaches things and propositions as separate entities.113 Admittedly, 111. TW, 12: 489; A, 1: 22. Obviously Hegel cannot, and does not, hold that the art of the Renaissance was identical to that of the Greek epoch, for then he would be ques­ tioning the notion of an ascension by spirit. Yet he also does not contend that Renaissance art is somehow inferior to Greek art. Hegel's position is, rather, that the role of art in the history of spirit is not exhausted by its dominant status in Kunstreligion. 112. TW, 16: 3 4 - 3 5 , 235, 139, 150; PC, 547. 113. If we are to believe a young theological student writing to Hegel, his old alma mater Tubingen regarded Hegel at the time as “ein Narr” and “ein Mystiker.” Dr, (3 i 1830) 3: 292. Cf. Hegel’s correspondence with his friend Windischmann: Br, (27 iv 1810)

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the understanding was also perplexed by the content of religion, but since religion at least holds to understanding’s assumption of the sole existence of separate entities, understanding is quite satisfied to refute the picture content of religion by invoking against it rules of logic and common sense. In contrast, speculative thought does away with the framework of religion while preserving its content. It thus replaces con­ ventional mysticism with the realm of pure thought, insisting that the world is thoroughly comprehensible to those minds willing to immerse themselves in an activity in which subject both comprehends and consti­ tutes that activity.114 These reflections allow a clearer sense of the nature of Hegelian specu­ lative thought in the realm that is natural to it. For Hegel true “specula­ tion” is “the unity of art and religion” : that is, taking the content of re­ ligion, philosophy applies to it the form of art. Accordingly, the form of philosophy is “external types of intuition . . . , whose subjective producing and splintering of the substantial content into many selfsufficient shapes” is applied to the content “God.” 115 Truly speculative thought is a productive or “intellectual intuition” of the nature of the whole history of mankind summarized in the religious object of individ­ ual stages achieved by spiritual communities. But as intuition of its ob­ ject, this form transforms each instantiation into shapes of thought transcending time by becoming recollection. Grasping the whole of this recollection as pure movement, philosophy secures the resting point of perfect, and “concrete,” reconciliation.116 If this interpretation of Hegel’s concept of philosophy is roughly cor­ rect, then it can be held that at this mature stage the reappropriation of aesthetic capacity becomes fundamental for the infinite content of thought. Hegel himself notes that the form of speculative thought re-

1: 308; (27 v 1810) 314; (23 viii 1823) 3: 27. On Jacob Boehme as the first true German philosopher according to Hegel, cf. Br, (27 vii 1811), 381, and TW, 20: 9 4 —95. 114. TW, 8: 1 7 2 -7 9 [8 1 -8 2 ]; 17: 535. Rosenkranz claims that in an 1806 lecture Hegel referred to the simple Idea as “die Nachte des gottlichen Mysteriums, aus dessen ungetriibter Dichthcit die Natur und der bewusste Geist zum Bestehen fur sich freigelassen wiirden.” Hegel's Lebett, 192. 115. TW, 10: 378 [572]. 116. PG, 39; TW, 10: 378 [572]. Philosophy retains the “Objektivitat” or “Gegenstandlichkeit” of art. A, 1: 111. Cf. Hegel’s comments in the Jena period on “Geist” as “sein ruhendes Kunsrwerk— das seyende Universum, und die Weltgeschichte” ; “Wissen des absoluten Geistes von sich als absolutem Geiste; er selbst ist der Inhalt der Kunst, die nur die Selbstproduction seiner, als in sich reflectirten selbstbewussten Lebens uberhaupt ist.” GW, 8: 280, 287.

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sembles poeisis; thus, unlike its role in Kunstreligion, the aesthetic di­ mension here characterizes the inner nature of the conceptual process itself at its most formal level. For Hegel the pure concept and its essen­ tialities are comparable to “souls.” 117 Like the Aristotelian concept of soul, the concept contains activity and life within itself as “pure selfmovement.” ns A “simple life-impulse” ensouling itself, the concept re­ veals life to be the “inner negativity” lodged in the determinations of thought. This negativity or life stems from the “simple rhythm” of the dialectic of logic previously identified as the moments of the concept dirempted into particulars. It is the mission of philosophy to dwell in this “rhythm of the organic whole” as it pulsates through every level of manifestation, for speculative thought marks “the pure, eternal life of spirit itself, and if it did not guard this movement, it would be the dead.” 11* With some justice Hegelian speculative thought may thus be compared to the core of classical musical language perfected during He­ gel’s lifetime by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven.120 Like German idealism in general, which often deployed the vocabulary of music, Hegel perme­ ates an entire formal mode of thinking with his speculative rhythm. Rhythm, according to this approach, is truly philosophical when it contains purpose. To make his point, Hegel, drawing on the heritage of his early collaboration with Hölderlin and Schelling, calls on Kant’s aes­ thetics.121 In his notion of the artwork as the paradigm for purposiveness without purpose, Kant had held that the artwork makes us conscious of reason, of the artist’s purpose, as the cause of objects.122 Yet Kant’s epis­ temology of the Ding an sich had limited that insight to an analogy be­ tween the artistic process and that of nature. Devising purposive forms 117. TW, 5: 48. 118. PG, 48: “ Denn dicse sind solche reine Sclbstbewegungcn, die man Seelen nennen konnte, wenn nicht ihr Begriff erwas Hohcres bezcichnctc als diese.” 119. TW, 5: 27, 50, 52; 16: 65; PG, 47, 48. 120. Drawing on Charles Rosen’s exemplary analysis: “ I do not want to turn Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven into Hegelians, but the simplest way to summarize classical form is as the symmetrical resolution of opposing forces.” The Classical Style: Haydn, M ozart, B eethoven (New York: Norton, [ 19*71 ] 1972), 83. Compare Hegel’s deployment of rhyth­ mic pattern between meter and accent to explicate the nature of the dialectic method in PG, 5 1. Theodor Adorno has attempted a comparative analysis of the development of the concept in Hegelian logic and compositional development in Beethoven’s music. Susan Buck-Morss, T he Origin o f N egative D ialectics: T heodor W. A dorno, Walter Benjamin, an d the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Free Press, 1977), 133 and n.93. 121. “ Hegel’s ontology has one of its roots in Kant’s aesthetics.” Taylor, Hegel, 470. Taminiaux, L a nostalgic d e la G rece a I’au be dc Pidealisme allcntand, viii, 206. 122. In a letter Hegel refers to Kant’s notion of an intuiting understanding {anschauender Vcrstand), “des Selbstzwecks, der zuglcich auf eine natiirliche Weise— in den organischen Dingen— existiert.” Br, (30 vii 1822) 2: 327.

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of intuition as forms illustrative of a concept, judgment provides us with the spectacle of nature “as art” : “The representation of nature as art is a pure idea, which serves our investigation, consequently purely the sub­ ject, as a principle.” 123 For Hegel this Kantian insight is revolutionary for grasping the Idea in an authentically speculative manner, and it is deepened by Schiller’s view of artistic beauty as the concrete unity of thought and sense.124 Given, however, the finite quality of the art product, Hegel reinterprets the Kantian notion of purposiveness without purpose as “self-purpose.” He thus posits an aesthetic ontology that draws on the experience of the beautiful and organic to explicate the nature of the concept itself, and he reveals the latter as a wholeness containing the unique nature of self­ objectification that embodies itself in a plethora of instantiations.125 Pur­ pose is internal to every such embodiment, giving direction to the rhythm of the dialectic and revealing freedom as its own subject matter. Hence, Hegel unites Kant’s notion of the power of reflective judgment with his own metaphysical identification of being and thinking in order to render on a speculative level the pantheistic aspirations of Hölderlin. The rhythm of his dialectic forms an “expressive pantheism” governing conscious being throughout history.126 By the same token Hegelian spirit turns out to be the authentic on tological heir to Schiller’s concept of the play impulse.127 The rhythm of Hegel’s dialectic is explicitly re­ vealed at the historical stage when the subject is capable of “plastic rep­ resentation,” of a “plastic sense” that grasps the world as shape (G e­ stalt). The Phenom enology o f Spirit and The Science o f Logic form the critical entry into European thought of a preeminently aesthetic and plastic mode of thinking that explores universals as determined by an unrelenting rhythmic energy. Hegel’s speculative method becomes truly 123. Kant, G S, 20: 205, 215, 232. 124. TW, 8: 139 -4 0 (55). In his Jena works Hegel calls Kant’s treatment of reflective judgment “der interessanteste Punkt des Kantischen Systems” but criticizes him for failing to recognize that in discussing the nature of aesthetic judgment he is already in the realm of reason. TW, 2: 323. 125. Applying Karl Popper’s definition of the “whole” as a certain property of the thing in question which gives it an organized structure, Wilkens extends it to Hegel’s no­ tion of history; in turn it may be enlarged to include the entire Hegelian system. Wilkins, H egel's P hilosophy o f H istory, 173. 126. The term is coined by Taylor, who adds that the basis for the absolute Idea col­ lapses as soon as the longing for this “expressive pantheism” wanes. H e g e l , 545; also Robert C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Humanism as a Species of Pantheism,” in In th e S p irit o f H eg el , 630-34. 127. Kaufmann, H e g e l , 57. It has been suggested that Hegel’s visit in 1796 to a water­ fall in Switzerland first gave him a hint of the dialectic as “das Bild eines freien Spieles.” Do*, 224.

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the retort for transforming a “philosophy of spirit” into an “aesthetic philosophy.” 128 This is unquestionably a radical conception of the process and nature of the essence of thought, and Hegel accepted the prospect that his ap­ proach would expose him to accusations of mysticism and charlatanry (Schopenhauer, for one, attacked his Berlin rival as a “Caliban”). But Hegel anticipated some of these prejudices of Verstand when he en­ treated fellow thinkers to hold back criticism until after they had first submitted their own thinking to the “seriousness of the concept” : “To be released from ones own ideas in the immanent rhythm of the con­ cept, not to interfere with it through one’s will or otherwise acquired wisdom: this abstinence is itself an essential moment of attentiveness to the concept.” l2g There, Hegel was confident, he would ultimately be vindicated. ♦

♦

♦

Notwithstanding his role as the major philosophical figure to undertake a methodological Aufhebung of the aesthetic state, Hegel is an impor­ tant contributor to its modern reaffirmation. Hegel’s concept of reason and its primacy in a philosophy of absolute spirit includes an aesthetic character that had been implied, but not worked out, in Holderlin’s dialectic of tragedy and Schiller’s theory of aesthetic awareness. To be sure, this aesthetic character is not unique to Hegel’s thought. Kant’s tripartite system of judgments shows a discern­ ible trend toward the ontological primacy of the aesthetic dimension, and the generation to which Hegel belonged already viewed this aes­ thetic dimension as holding the key to philosophical and social quanda­ ries of an epoch of world revolution. However, among the major on­ tological thinkers of his era Hegel is the most effectively radical critic of the Kantian Ding an sich that limited the claims of the aesthetic dimen­ sion to a symbol of reconciliation between the “ought” and the “is.” His dialectical method reinterprets the very meaning of subject and object and makes them necessary elements of infinite thought, the “moments” of which become forms defined as pure determinability, or potencies in­ separable from embodiment. After Hegel, reason could henceforth be regarded as congenial to aesthetic awareness, while the aesthetic dimen128. TW, 5: 30, 31, 33. This rhythm must produce nature out of itself as an act of spontaneity before drawing it back to itself in the form of spirit. PG, 558; GW, 8: 287. 129. PG, 48.

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sion became criterial for human activity at both the mundane and the spiritual level. Standing as the expression of something without nec­ essarily referring beyond itself, the artwork furnishes the paradigm needed for Hegel’s peculiar ontology to move nimbly between the ab­ stract and the concrete. At the same time, a great deal of the older, static, rationalist view of reason still obtains in Hegel’s approach to the subject. Hegelian dia­ lectics may have freed the concept for poeisis, but this only became an avowed aim after Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” thought and Heidegger’s on­ tological vindication of that thought. Seen in this line of speculative thinkers, Hegel is more of a precursor than an arrival. Still, without He­ gel it is doubtful that an unabashed aesthetic worldview, let alone on­ tology, could have won the level and quality of audience that it in fact drew from later German intellectual life. Furthermore, Hegel furnishes a uniquely thorough demonstration of the identity between the formal idea of the state and the cultivation of spiritual individuality through the aesthetic consciousness and the par­ ticipatory democracy of the aesthetic state. Above all, by supplying evi­ dence of the workings of spirit even in the act of appropriating natural objects, Hegel becomes the first ontologisi to regard labor itself as an ontologically salient event. Hegel thus leads the way to Marx and the radical tradition of Marxist dialectics. Moreover, Hegel’s theory of la­ bor contains an important virtue that the later approaches often lacked. Hegel proposes neither that labor is merely a means toward spirit nor that spirit is only a surplus of labor. In his view, labor is necessary to man’s understanding of both self and object, implicitly containing a striving for the level of being and activity called “spirit.” This striv­ ing becomes conscious whenever labor expands into aesthetic labor. Rather, then, than clinging to the bare fact of material relationships ob­ sessing the first political economists and their heirs, Hegel sets up a cri­ terion for measuring the value of labor without denying its ubiquity in material life. Equally important, the theory of labor enables Hegel to offer il­ luminating notions of individuality and community. Hegel contends that as labor becomes the core of analysis of social relationships, the emphasis on sharing in communal activity takes precedence over any theory of the atomic individual while remaining consonant with the pursuit of individuality motivating each person. This is so because in­ dividuality owes its origins to the fashioning of a work through which a person develops his unique form, capacities, and talents, and this

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activity cannot take place satisfactorily without a prior sharing in the labor that provides the subsistence of a community. Hegel’s point here is quite separate from such factors as economies of scale; its aim is to highlight sharing as the act of introducing the individual to the univer­ sality of dialectical intersubjectivity that overcomes the contradiction inherent in the notion of a single self-consciousness. Hegel is saying that only within this universality, within the reason and spirit which nec­ essarily accompany the unity of social intercourse, can the individual learn universality itself and fashion the work as the spiritual fusion of the universal and individual. Moreover, according to Hegel, once human beings become individu­ als in this sense, the universality within their works will shape their so­ cial unity and give rise to awareness of the explicit realm of spirit or religion itself. The aesthetic elements that were secondary but present in mundane labor, central but not exclusive in the work of each individu­ ality, can eventually become objects for consciousness in their own right. Hegel calls this state Kunstreligion, a religion of art and beauty, and he identifies the political form of this religion with radical par­ ticipatory democracy. The sharing that took place at the level of mun­ dane labor and engendered individuality (each person’s sense of his or her own wholeness) furnishes the unity that makes authentic radical de­ mocracy both functional and criterial. Lastly, by linking the criterion of an aesthetic ontology with the spe­ cific factors giving rise to an aesthetic state, Hegel gives a vectorial di­ rection to history as the unfolding of the Idea of freedom, raising the prospect of a future community to house dialectical ontology and spiri­ tual individuality. As we have seen, Hegel agrees that the modern age has failed to usher in an individuality comparable to that of Kunstreligion and that, in ef­ fect, individuality of this order transcends the capacities of the modern. The triumph of subjectivity, which surpassed the spiritual community of the aesthetic state, may represent the primacy of self-identification by the individual with other individuals, with the universal as such. But by exclusively concentrating on this absolute, the human mind has broken its bonds with the real living community which had brought the absolute to consciousness in the first place. The flaw of Kunstreligion stemmed from the virtue of its tangible synthesis of subject and object as actualized in mundane labor, aesthetic labor, and the artwork itself as religion. Con­ templation of the universal in and for itself entails the progressive step of emancipation from this tangible, contingent character; nevertheless, that

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contemplation lacks the penetration of the finite by the infinite. This task— which, according to Hegel, is unique to modernity— will need to call again upon the aesthetic dimension if the universal, as made explicit in religion, is to know itself in the particularity of nature and society. But such a task belongs no longer to religion. Philosophy— H egelian philosophy— is, rather, the heir to the contingency of religious “images” or “pictures” by superseding religion with the standards of art to find its home in the infinite. Thus Hegelian philosophy proper is committed to securing its place on earth as the religion informing the “Sittlichkeit” of the rational state: the freedom attained in philosophy is to be made the basis of society and state. The inadequacies of Hegel’s particular formulation of a rational state have already been noted. Hegel, it was earlier shown, was guilty of con­ fusing the contingent aspects of civil society with the moments of the dialectical process, according those aspects a permanence they hardly merit from the standpoint of reason. Yet Hegel’s error reflects his gen­ eral ambiguity toward the emergent economic order of revolutionary Europe. Possibly impressed by the Faustian or Promethean features of expanding productivity, he felt he could not dispense with the ramifica­ tions of emancipated individualism, the material analogue to the philo­ sophical individual. To his credit, however, Hegel equally could not deny the destructive effects of material individualism on the kind of rec­ onciliation proclaimed by the philosophical individual. He deployed his ideal political order as a wedge that would defend the philosophical from the material dimensions, and in his formal political thought he partly reintroduced the values of the classical polis to his system through the concept of “Sittlichkeit.” But these rearrangements hardly make for an adequate counterargu­ ment. In them the material individual and the philosophical individual are never reconciled. Were the material individual to become the philo­ sophical, the system of capitalism that Hegel presupposes for civil so­ ciety might well dissolve; and if the two are left segregated from each other, no state or social order consonant with that segregation would be capable of upholding authentic “Sittlichkeit.” To be sure, the prodigious wealth originally generated by capitalism need not be incompatible with the individuality of “Sittlichkeit”; but if that wealth is to be accommo­ dated within the larger vision of the finite individual embodying the spiritual wealth of infinite spirit, capitalism as such must be submitted to a critique.

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Despite his realistic understanding of the contradiction between capi­ talism and his notion of spiritual community, Hegel could not under­ take this critique, because he refused to entertain the prospect that the “people," or the common individual, might be capable of choosing the philosophical Good. Although admiring the people who ran the aes­ thetic state of Athenian democracy, Hegel never wavered in his con­ tempt for the modern people. Ultimately, then, he had to concede to civil society the principle of division of labor as a spiritual advance to a complex material society. But by this concession he isolated the people from direct access to the universality of the state and the philosophical vision and relegated them to isolated circles partly mitigated by the pres­ ence of corporations and organizations mediating between individual and state. Meanwhile, at the other end of his continuum, Hegel also seg­ regated the philosophical individual, as a victim of the principle of di­ vision of labor, to a universality devoid of that living mediation be­ tween subject and object which his dialectics had been at such pains to establish. In the final analysis, then, Hegel’s vaunted spiritual unity of the state is little more than the formal external authority of the state, its laws and bureaucracy, keeping in check not only the destructive impact of eco­ nomic individualism but also the force ultimately capable of replacing civil society and modern state with the ethical unity of the aesthetic state. This force, in Hegel’s own terms, is the universal individual in whom the dialectical moments are embodied in a living human whole, as elements of liberation rather than as reification of temporary his­ torical compartmentalization. In his fear of the absence of mediation, Hegel overlooked how far his own thought had drifted from the human frame of reference and a human society in which organs of mediation might serve, rather than substitute for, the ultimate objective of direct participation. Thanks to his early Hellenism, however, Hegel’s philosophy contains the antidote to the shortcomings of the modern state, Hegelian or other­ wise. Through Hegelian dialectics the classical aesthetic state is can­ celed, only to be revived upon the very different arena which that same dialectics opens out for modern political speculation. If the legacy of classicism for our theme is largely defined by the impact of Schiller’s theory, that of idealism depends on Hegel’s immense influ­ ence upon the succeeding generation. Without any belittling of Holderlin’s importance both for Nietzsche’s “Dionysian” path to an aesthetic

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morals and for the later Heidegger’s affair with poetic communality, it is undeniable that in terms of the history of ideas it was principally the combination of Schiller’s and Hegel’s writings that made possible the third stage of original thought on an aesthetic state, both through their direct impact on Marx and Wagner and as the standard against which Nietzsche’s radicalization of aesthetic ontologizing could inveigh. Real­ ism would never have taken the form it did without Hegel’s transmission of the basic tenets of an aesthetic dialectics and an aesthetic state. Hegel’s immediate contribution to radical thought rested on his dar­ ing speculative method: reason, according to him, directs itself back into the world in order to dissolve the fixity of thought. After his in­ stallation in Berlin, the later Hegel threw his resources behind the for­ mation of thinkers immersed in this method for the realization of the Sym philosophie goal of an “aesthetic church.” Although the Prussian government progressively parted from the standards of the Hegelian idea of the state, Hegel himself continued his fight through the univer­ sity as the true “theodicy” and “our church” and hoped within its walls to found the “third” religion uniting Kunstreligion and Christianity which he had once advocated as a Volkserzieher.,3° Opposed to the at­ mosphere of Restoration Prussia in the 1820s, Hegel sought a body of speculative disciples to become the new “community” (G em ein de)y the “priesthood of truth” which could defy “the power of the state”: “Phi­ losophy is in this relation an isolated sanctuary, and its servants form an isolated priesthood, which ought not to consort with the world, and there has to protect the possession of truth.” 131 In the long turn, this priesthood was meant to be fatal to the restora­ tion state. Ironically, however, it proved no less disruptive to Hegel’s own specific model of the rational state. In 1828 Hegel’s promising fol­ lower, Ludwig Feuerbach, wrote to Hegel that the absolute character of dialectical transformation brooked no limitations. The “realm of ideas” initiated by speculative philosophy must eventually displace all religions for “ideas and reason” : “A new basis of things is now valid, a new his­ tory, a second creation, where . . . reason becomes the universal intui­ tion form of things.” 132 Within a decade Feuerbach’s conception of dia130. “Die Wissenschaft ist allein die Theodizee,” Br, (23 i 1807) 1: 137; and “ Unsere Universitiiten und Schulen sind unsere Kirche,” (12 vii 1816) 2: 89. Rosenkranz, Hegel's L eben , 140-41. 131. Ilting, “Einleitung des Herausgebers: Der exoterische und der esoterische Hegel

(1824-1831),” 4: 60. 132. Br, (22 xi 1828) 3: 246. Toews points out that at the time “to become an authen­ tic Hegelian, a person had to undergo an existential transformation.” H egelianism , 89.

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lectical thought as the power to actualize freedom in the world of man by displacing religious and traditional authority served to introduce the world of the Young Hegelians. Abandoning Hegel’s own caution, the Hegelians helped to recuperate the primacy of the aesthetic state in Ger­ man thought— but in new and different guises: M arx’s aesthetic “Gemeinwesen,” Wagner’s theatrocracy, and Nietzsche’s aesthetic morals form part of their legacy. Hegel himself was hardly directly responsible for these consequences, but he is unquestionably the leading influence behind the “free spirits” who did exercise such a direct impact on them.

PART

III

Realism

fter “Idealism” it is perhaps too pat to follow up with “Realism.” l In fact realism offers our survey neither the kind of broad philo­ sophical disposition we encountered in classicism nor a concerted move­ ment like Swabian idealism. It is more a catchall net to cast over a period of reassessment of the sociocultural projects undertaken by ideal­ ism and European social romanticism when their particular interpreta­ tions of the ideal of an aesthetic state had to take into serious account the new industrializing and centralizing tendencies of modern society.1 The standard view of this period is that realism was an attitude fos­ tered by the ostensible collapse of utopian speculation during the first two decades of modern European capitalism, from the 1820s to the June barricades of 1848. According to this view, M arx’s disenchanted “scientific” approach toward the socioeconomic reality of the 1850s was perfectly symptomatic: the cannonades of June blew away, once and for all, ebullient visions that Fourier, Saint-Simon, and the early Proudhon had entertained of an inexorably smooth artistic-technological transfor­ mation of the modern world, and a new cast of mind took over that gave emphasis to detached and at times cynical scrutiny of the rock-bottom, often base, character of life and the new industrial social reality. Yet, while there is some truth to this perspective, realism remains something more than a mere oscillation away from the imputed pre­ tensions of idealism or social romanticism. Despite the caesura of the failure of the 1848—1849 revolutions and the unquestioned shock of Napoleon Ill’s coup of 1851 inaugurating the Second French Empire, a real continuity of interests and radical purposes bridges the two cultural epochs following the Hegelian synthesis, for the uncertainties released by the 1830 European revolutions had already given birth to the socialutopian phase of European romanticism which was to flow strongly un­ til 1848.2 The later recollections of Karl Gutzkow, a prominent figure in the progressive Young German movement of the 1830s, pinpoints the critical moment. As a student in Berlin, Gutzkow received word of the outbreak and the removal of the king in Paris while he was standing in front of the Aula where Hegel habitually held academic court. Gutzkow immediately interpreted the crisis as emblematic of the shift from sci­ ence to history.3

A

1. It was in the 1830s that the key terms for later social analysis— proletaire, capi­ ta list, socialism e— entered general circulation. Evans, Social R om anticism in France, 9. 2. Evans calls romanticism a school of social and spiritual realism. Social R om an ­ ticism in France, 80. 3. K. Gutzkow, “Vergangcnheit und Gegenwart” (1839), cited in Marcuse, “Der deutsche Kunstlerroman,” D. Phil, diss., University of Freiburg, 1922, 2 4 1 —42.

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For the next two decades European free spirits, armed with an aes­ thetic radicalism drawn from Hegel, relentlessly pressed for the realiza­ tion of a new community in Europe and drew on both the progressive lessons of the original French Revolution and the standard of art for their criteria of the concrete utopia.4 These doctrines even bore some­ thing of the future realist reinvigoration of the sensuous and material dimensions. The reforms of Saint-Simon were deeply committed to “re­ habilitation of the flesh” within a new order of human and social rela­ tions/ while Fourier’s phalanstery system remains perhaps the most calculated cultivation of the sensuous dimension for the achievement of utopia. Such ideals became the influences behind the paintings made during 1848—1851 by Gustave Courbet, which gave birth to the formal concept of realism. Himself a steady admirer of Fourier and his follow­ ers, Courbet was not being merely rhetorical when declaring himself a socialist, democrat, and republican: “in a word, a supporter of the whole Revolution, and, above all, a Realist,” and this copula between revolution and realism would hold, as we shall see, with equal durability for the work of our three realists: Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche.h Long after his dispute and break with Richard Wagner, Nietzsche attempted a serious historical reappraisal of the “Wagner case.” In Nietzsche’s account the key factor in understanding Wagner’s original aims was his membership in the “late French romanticism of the forties” as a product of Paris and the “socialist model” inspiring its bright young men: “For half his life Wagner believed in the revolution as only some Frenchmen have believed in it.” Wagner, according to Nietzsche, was originally less a German “patriot” than the follower of Hegelian idealism and the utopian phase of social romanticism. First and fore­ most “the heir of Hegel,” Wagner conjured up his original ideal of a 4. According to Alexander Herzen, Hegel’s philosophy was “the algebra of revolu­ tion.’* Cited in Martin Malia, A lexander Herzen and the Birth o f Russian Socialism 1 8 2 5 -1 8 5 5 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press (1961), 228. 5. E. M. Butler, T he Saint-Simonian Religion in Germ any: A Study o f the Young G er­ m an M ovem ent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 10. Evans sees some Saint-Simon in Faust, part 2, and points out that Wagner’s close friend Liszt played at receptions of Saint-Simonians in Paris as well as performing for the benefit of Lyon silkworkers in 1837. Social Romanticism in France, 18, 38. 6. Cited in T. J. Clark, Im age o f the People: Gustave C ourbet and the Second French R epublic, 1 8 4 8 -1 8 5 1 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 23. For evi­ dence of Courbet’s affiliation with Fourierists, see Linda Nochlin, Realism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 130. On the need for a total regeneration “the identity of views between Marx and the Romantics is complete.” Evans, Social Romanticism in France, 101; Nochlin, Realism , 236.

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communal artwork in a thoroughly radical spirit. His Siegfried stood for the “typical revolutionary” of the barricades who, with his beloved Briinnhilde, would institute the “socialistic utopia” and free love of the future.7 To be sure, Nietzsche’s analysis was designed to expose “Reichsdeutsch” Wagner’s alleged regression from his earlier “European” ideals. Nonetheless, not only was Nietzsche’s evaluation close to the mark, but it also reflected his own ambition to recapture that new community of artists, political radicals, and subversive thinkers— the European “free spirits,” as he called them, of the nineteenth century— with whom Wag­ ner had originally contracted to transform society through the collective artwork but had abandoned after his own Munich fiasco of 1864—1865. Regarding himself as heir to this “authentic Wagner,” Nietzsche became the publicist of an “aesthetic morals” which he saw as the more realist for dispensing with both clandestinely Christian and “slave moral” influences. The “free spirits” to whom Nietzsche, and Wagner, appealed formed the first modern “Kiinstlertum,” the first artists’ community in Euro­ pean history.8 With the onset of social romanticism in the late 1820s, the term “Bohemia” seems to have gained currency as a sobriquet for those artists, poets, and libertines living on the fringes of the newly in­ dustrializing society.* By the 1840s Bohemia had grown into a full­ blown “artist’s fatherland,” fed by the same phenomenon of expanding industrialization that was giving birth to M arx’s new universal class, the industrial proletariat.10 Yet, whereas the original Bohemia in its Golden Age had numbered among its ranks young artists and writers often sup­ ported by solvent families, Henri Murger’s B ohem e of the 1840s re­ flected the large number of aspiring but penniless youth who, encour­ aged by the new railway systems to leave the provinces for the lights of Paris, ended up in the squalor and poverty romanticized by succeeding 7. J . (256). hail, 30, 1 3 - 1 4 ; J, (11). 8. Although Marcuse is the first among the figures in our inquiry to give technical currency to this term (see Chapter 11), the social reality he meant it to cover makes its first appearance in the 1830s and 1840s. While “artistic reality** is a frequent English transla­ tion, a more accurate if cumbersome translation would be “artistdom** as in “Christen­ dom,’* that is, a social reality defined by the presence of the artist. 9. Evans, Social Romanticism in France. For the origins of the term: Helmut Kreuzer, Die B ohem e: Beitragc zu ihrer Beschreibung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1968). Malcolm Easton, Artists and Writers in Paris: The B ohem ian Id ea , 1803 —1867 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1964), 2 6 - 1 3 3 . Jerrold Seigel, B ohem ian Paris: Culture , Politics , and the Boundaries o f Bourgeois Life, 1830—1930 (New York: Viking, 1986), 5. 10. George Sand, cited in Easton, Artists and Writers in Paris, 133.

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generations.11 Joining les classes dangereuses, many rushed to the barri­ cades of 1848, resisting not only the forces of the defunct regime of Louis Philippe but also the armies of the new industrial establishment in the June class war.12 There were, to be sure, serious shortcomings to these early ventures in a sustained Kiinstlertum. Still, as the first radical artistic community owing its birth to the capitalism it proposed to extirpate, Bohemia at its best was committed to an eternal war against the philistine on behalf of the artistic life.13 Here the romantic cult of the artistic genius and the burgeoning religion of art discovered a first tentative social form, through it wandering some of the major names in European letters at the most impressionable and creative period of their careers.14 Both the young Marx and the young Wagner were acting members of this incho­ ate community during their respective Paris stays in the 1840s; both im­ bibed its strong invectives against the capitalist order as well as its ex­ hilarating dreams of a postcapitalist sensuous-aesthetic humanism. And when for a brief period in Paris during the spring of 1848 the “poet at the barricades” snatched politics from the professionals and reinstated theatre, rhetoric, and play into public human relationships, both thinkers returned to Central Europe to fight at the barricades and eventually to suffer exile for their practical participation among the radical avantgarde.15 When the unity of Bohemia was sundered by the counterrevolu­ tion of the 1850s, Marx and Wagner each continued the struggle. Marx went on to inspire a political movement challenging the ubiquity of capitalism, while Wagner created the base for his “theatrocracy” in Ba­ varia. Nonetheless, both eventually drifted far from their earlier collabo11. Joanna Richardson, The Bohem ians: La Vie de B ohem e in Paris, 1 8 3 0 -1 9 1 4 (London: Macmillan, 1969), 4 2 - 4 4 , 76. 12. Clark, Im age o f the People, 14, 33 —34. Drawing a distinction between “ Bohemia” and “avant-garde,” Clark argues that the former generally supported all insurrections while the latter stood on the side of the forces of order. 13. Richardson cites T. Gautier’s concept of a Bohemia opposed to bourgeois and phi­ listine society: the latter comprised anyone “who is not initiated in the arts or doesn’t understand them.” The B ohem ians, 52. A more sophisticated reflection on the relation­ ships between bourgeois and bohemian is furnished by Seigel, B ohem ian Paris. 14. On the process of art ceasing to be a trade and becoming a vocation, cf. “Artist’s Life,” in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 2 4 5 —75. Also Seigel’s line on Bohemians as those who “lived in an imaginary universe in which all colors were blue.” Bohem ian Paris, 18. 15. F. W. J. Hemmings, Culture and Society in France, 1848—1898: Dissidents and Philistines (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 7 - 4 2 ; also Ellie Nower Schamber, T he Artist as Politician: T he R elationship betw een the Art and Politics o f the French Rom antics (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984).

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ration with European free spirits, and it was this split that Nietzsche in the late 1870s and 1880s sought to bridge. For the moment, however, the setback to these revolutionaries of the June war was taken as merely temporary. The next three years con­ tinued to offer relatively open conditions for rekindling the revolution­ ary flame, and it was during this interregnum that Courbet effectively began realism with his striking renditions of localities placed within the new “Red belt” of eastern France.16 Not until Napoleon’s coup in late 1851 was the blow delivered that shattered the hopes not only of such febrile personalities as Wagner and Baudelaire but even of the more stoic M arx.17 Thus, the concatenation of qualities making up realism, first formally articulated by such sympathetic critics as Champfleury around 1 8 5 4 -1 8 5 6 , reflects the extension, not the rejection, of the revolutionary utopianism of 1848 —1851 in, however, a format that jet­ tisoned both the earlier models that had drawn on the supposedly out­ dated lessons of the past and doctrines that lacked a foothold in mate­ rial contemporaneity.18 Realism saw its mission as the pruning of those formats likely to ob­ fuscate exposure of the new “total social aggregate.” 19 It never meant to offer the sensational expose of low life and humdrum existence in the provinces that its derogators imputed to it. It was not a variant either of the fashionable Comtean positivism of midcentury or of the later Vic­ torian variety against which the generation of the 1890s would vent its apoplectic spleen.20 Instead, realist practice called upon disruptively new aesthetic techniques of contiguity, disjunction, and haphazard im16. Clark, Im age o f the P eople, 86. 17. J. Scigel in M arx’s Fate: T he Shape o f a L ife (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) compares M arx’s and Wagner’s reactions (217); for Baudelaire's confession that the coup had “physically depoliticized" him, see T. J. Clark, T he A bsolute B ourgeois: Artists and Politics in France 1848—1851 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 142. During 1849, when he was in closest contact with Courbet, Baudelaire in a letter to him referred to “notre commune admiration pour Wagner*' (142). 18. Nochlin, Realism , 111; Hemmings, Culture an d Society in France, 105. An im­ portant factor in further isolating the phenomenon of realism is its conformity to the salon period of patronage of the Paris art exhibitions between 1850 and the 1870s; later styles followed independent exhibitions and private showings (90). On the relation of official art to the avant-gardism of the realists, cf. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, R om anticism and Realism (New York: Vintage, 1984). 19. Duranty in the monthly journal R ealism e (1856), cited in Hemmings, Culture an d Society in France, 110. On totality in the realist painting of subject matter cf. Nochlin, Realism , 175. 20. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: T he R eorientation o f E uropean Social Thought , 1890—1930 (New York: Vintage, [1958J 1961), 3 3 —42.

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agery to mediate between the individual and a dynamic totality reflect­ ing, if not subordinate to, the new social and technological conditions.21 If in the process the new capitalist bourgeoisie was often mercilessly pil­ loried, it was more the result of honing the earlier romantic project through the realists’ faith in concrete handling of locale, materiality, and overall spatiality to a degree that unavoidably exposed the vapid life­ style of the new philistinism. Fidelity to the given therefore not only formed a counter to the insubstantial poetic flights of earlier roman­ ticism but also furnished a vehicle for transcending what was not au­ thentic to the irreducibly concrete character of the human being as actor and laborer within his or her natural and social milieu.22 It is in terms of such perspectives that our inclusion of Marx, Wag­ ner, and Nietzsche under the rubric of realism should be viewed. Born in the areas most strongly affected by the new industrialization (Wagner and Nietzsche were Saxons and Marx came from the Rhineland),23 all three thinkers soon committed themselves to both the romantic project of social and political regeneration and the realist insistence on holding to the framework of contemporaneity for the bodily means to realize that regeneration. Yet, while the case for Marx needs no belaboring, that for Wagner and Nietzsche is more controversial: Wagner’s drama­ turgical experiments seem far removed from the precepts of realism, while Nietzsche fits more comfortably with the postrealist attitudes of the 1880s. It is worth noting that at least one prominent intellectual historian has located Wagner’s music within realism: “For like all the men of his spiritual generation— the mid-century Realists— Wagner was reacting against Romantic variety and seeking a Rule.” 24 Wagner’s resort to mythical rather than modern subject matter, an irrevocable decision he took during the 1848 —1851 period, misleads commentators into asso­ ciating his enterprise solely with the swan song of later romanticism. If 21. Nochlin, Realism , 167, 182; Hemmings, Culture and Society in France, 95. 22. For the importance of the new theme of the laborer after 1848, cf. Nochlin, R eal­ ism, 112. 23. For the importance of Saxony and the Rhineland, see T. S. Hamcrow, R estora­ tion, Revolution, R eaction: Econom ics and Politics in Germ any 1 8 1 5 -1 8 7 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 6. 24. Jacques Barzun, Berlioz and the Rom antic Century (3d ed. New York: Columbia University Press, (1949) 1969), 2: 191; also 1: 535 and 2: 192. For Rosen and Zerner, who point out that the nineteenth century saw realism mainly as an avant-garde move­ ment, Wagner’s work was assimilated to realism because of its avant-garde qualities. R o­ m anticism an d Realism , 179.

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our argument for an important degree of continuity holds, the two posi­ tions that he was both the last of the romantics and among the first of the realists need not be mutually exclusive.25 As heir to radical He­ gelianism and utopian romanticism, Wagner in the 1850s took the cru­ cial step of creating a new kind of theatrical realism, not so much in terms of subject matter (although Wagner’s dramaturgical use of myth closely parallels the realist endeavor to spatialize totalities in order to bring out an underlying sensuous concreteness) as of his concrete search for the union of word and music. Opera, or “music drama” (dram m a per m usica), has in any case always been more of a “material” or vis­ cous enterprise than other genres of music, and Wagner’s fanatical ex­ ploration of its sensuous-material qualities simply carried those compo­ nents to unprecedented levels of orchestral-vocal textures and color material to effect the most realistic staging of human emotions and sen­ sibilities.26 Far from trusting to the uncontrolled flight of the imagina­ tion in the tradition of some romantics, Wagner harnessed it to the com­ mon Idea that he wedded to the musical phrase. With good reason, then, his works have been dubbed “the century’s paean of material triumph.” 27 The case for including Nietzsche among the realists faces difficulty from another direction. Nietzsche’s work took place in the 1870s and 1880s, somewhat after realism as a European phenomenon had given ground to the newer currents of impressionism and symbolism; besides, evidence exists of Nietzsche’s own acidity toward the product— and character— of such leading realists as Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola.28 Yet if the naturalism of the later Zola of the 1890s may be said to round out the realist project, it is not so farfetched chronologically to include 25. For a standard “realist*’ statement by Wagner himself in the early 1850s: O D, GS, 4: 5 2 - 5 3 : the artist must no longer lose himself in poetic fantasies but must face the naked realities of modern life: “Er brauchte nur diese Wirklichkeit darzustellen, ohne sich iiber sic beliigcn zu wollen.” 26. Barzun compares Wagner’s technical device of building up crisis by rising scales as one form of realism, namely, the representation of hectic passions. D arwin, M arx, W agner: Critique o f a H eritage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1941), 288. For Wagner’s penchant for realistic presentation in staging, sec Richard David, “Wagner the Dramatist,’’ in Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton, eds., The Wagner C om panion (New York: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1979), 133. On the new theatrical realism of 1830s stagings, cf. Ernest New­ man, The L ife o f Richard Wagner (New York: Knopf, 1 9 3 3 -1 9 4 6 ), 1: 2 6 0 - 6 1 . 27. Paul Roscnfeld, cited in Barzun, Darwin, M arx, Wagner, 274 n.8. According to a conservative music critic, Francois Joseph Fetes, Wagner was in fact “the Courbet of mu­ sic.” Cited in Rosen and Zerner, Rom anticism an d Realism , 179. 28. For Nietzsche on Flaubert: CD , 58; NcW, 424, 429; on Zola: C D , 105.

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Nietzsche among the realists.2* A self-styled proponent of a new “ Reealismus,” his pun on the name and objectives of his erstwhile friend Paul Rec, the philosopher proposed to approach society, culture, and moral values with the glacial eye of a Stendhalian “banker-philosopher.” '0 In­ deed, at the tail end of his meteoric final output he took sides squarely with “sophist” or “realist culture” against Platonizing optimists and idealists who eschewed the body and senses for disembodied utopias.'1 Ultimately, Nietzsche’s allegiance to material contemporaneity went so far as to fashion a philosophical credo for willing the eternal recurrence of the same or the dynamic totality of a constantly sensuous-material present. For all their differences, Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche based their real­ ism on a specific substratum that they shared with late romanticism and the realism of Courbet. The primacy of the sensuous-material dimen­ sion in their thought was predicated on the foundation of the concrete and vital sensuous love between man and woman. The importance of suffering for their eventual dialectical reconciliation of subject and ob­ ject drew originally on the symbolism of preliminary sexual pain ad­ vancing toward orgasm and bodily self-realization. There is no with­ drawal in the “mature” Marxian dialectics of his version of this position in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, while the evidence for Wagners alle­ giance in such works as Tristan und Isolde and Nietzsche’s explication of the “Dionysian” as preeminently a sexual-orgiastic symbol is clear. All three thinkers stressed that willingness to pursue the primacy of the sensuous dimension through human suffering summed up the price of capitalist bourgeois culture and distantly promised its eradication. Thus they fought for a complete leveling of attenuated relationships based on exchange and looked forward to a revolution that would bring about a genuinely aesthetic state of sensuous beings. Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche were Hegelians to the degree that they thought dialectically in terms of a night of the human spirit to precede the new age: the He­ gelian “divinization of becoming” which Nietzsche isolated as central to 29. Realism as the dominant cultural force is often dated to 1 8 7 0 -1 8 8 0 . Nochlin, R ealism , 13, however, pairs Zola with Courbet (“ Realists like Courbet or Zola”) and lists Zola’s naturalism as a subcategory of realism (226, 43). Arnold Hauser, meanwhile, also unites realism and naturalism, but under the heading of the latter. Sozialgcschichte der Kunst und Literatur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1953), 2: 293. 30. For “Reealismus:” £H , 326; Nietzsche nonetheless had serious misgivings about Ree’s moral theory proper. J, (39). 31. C D , 150; also A, (21), CD , 6 8 - 6 9 .

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the modern German mind. This Hegelianism helped them to survive their respective versions of this night through the forms of the Hegelian master-slave dichotomy that they adumbrated: capitalist versus pro­ letariat for Marx, “purely human” being versus “loveless” humanity for Wagner, and “master” versus “slave” morals for Nietzsche. Yet the half-century of conditions for realism was not kindly disposed toward the longevity of any formulaic version of its contradictions and supersession. From the collapse of liberal hopes in 1848 to the onset of the rule of Wilhelm 11 in 1889 over the new German Reich of 1870, German-speaking Central Europe witnessed the apparent superiority of “blood and iron” politics over the old brand of cosmopolitan human­ ism, and this lesson not only left its mark on the later thought and atti­ tudes of Marx and Wagner but infected Nietzsche from the start. As the century came to its end, qualities of intolerance, resentment, and bla­ tant ill will toward the enemy increasingly clouded and marred radical literature. From the humanism of the early Marx and Wagner to the anticapitalist fury of the later Marx, the anti-Semitic diatribes of the later Wagner, and the withering denunciation of modern morals by Nietzsche, the evolution of our theme in Part 111 also reflects a new im­ potence suffered by the modern German intellectual. Before the trans­ formed map of Central Europe and the relatively sudden disintegration of the older social and political certainties, the radical democratic goals of social romanticism and realism gave way to the “aristocratic radi­ calism” of Rangordnung, while militant Marxism began its own affair with the new cult of violence pervading German thought and antiSemitism spread its malignancy throughout the capitals of German high culture. If in our study Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche strike us as some­ how more modern than their predecessors, part of the reason is that their relative failures to reach or retain the older humanistic solutions in their respective ideologies continue to plague our own formulations. Having said this much, it would be a mistake to deny Marx, Wagner, and Nietzsche the signal contributions they did make to the quest for an aesthetic state. Chapter 7 traces how by his intrepid analysis and cri­ tique of capitalist totality, Marx accorded the aesthetic dimension and the standards of art an undisputed primacy in the search for a human or humanized civilization. Radicalizing the Hegelian predictions for the modern age, Marx established a new method of social analysis grounded on the theme of sensuous-aesthetic humanity frustrated in its selfrealization by the ubiquity of a mode of social relations that promoted

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atomization and fragmentation of the total human project. M arx’s for­ mal theory of capitalism and its historical evolution culminates in the vision of an aesthetic “Gemeinwesen” to succeed the conscious seizure of economic and state power by a new universal class bodily committed to mankind’s emancipation: the proletariat. Chapter 8 offers a reappraisal of Wagner’s contribution along two lines. First, it considers Wagner’s music dramas and creation of Bay­ reuth as the most prominent European project of transformative theatre and temple to art. Second, it takes Wagner to have possibly come closest to establishing an aesthetic state, or the preliminaries for one, when he pursued his aesthetic politics in Bavaria around 1864—1865; certainly, after Wagner’s failure, the relation between the theory and the practice of an aesthetic state widens to a permanent breaking point. Thus, in our first section, Wagner’s musicotheatrical theorizing and its connections with his ideal of a new Athens receive a rare sympathetic, if critical, analysis. In the second section their most prominent dramaturgical con­ sequence, Tristan und Isolde, is considered in the context of Wagner’s conscious bid to create an aesthetic state in Ludwig Il’s Bavaria during the 1860s. The final section then considers the failure of Wagner’s cam­ paign and its regressive impact both on his decision in the 1870s to form his Bayreuth temple and on the patrimony of his final work, Parsifal, which was composed specifically for his temple and its “theatrocracy.” Through the Bayreuth enterprise, Nietzsche, whose thought forms the theme of Chapter 9, makes his entry as an astute young interpreter of Wagner’s higher aims, which Nietzsche attaches to his own radical reinterpretation of Winckelmann’s Hellenism. Nietzsche’s The Birth o f Tragedy both culminates some of the staple romantic arguments for an aesthetic state and, through its “Dionysian” revaluation of orthodox Western theodicy, argues an aesthetic solution to which he unerringly sticks after breaking free of Bayreuth and Wagnerianism for the “aes­ thetic morals” of his mature philosophy. The nature of that “aristocratic radicalism,” Nietzsche’s putative exposure of resentment values and positing of new standards of “pathos of distance” and “order of rank,” then receives a rigorous critique in the second section of the chapter. Finally, in the last section we evaluate Nietzsche’s larger contribution to our theme through the aesthetic cosmodicy that he persuasively put for­ ward for individuals and societies willing to live a life of guiltless affir­ mation and beauty.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Marx Communism and the Laws o f Beauty

“Therefore man also forms according to the laws of beauty.” 1 For quite a few commentators this passage sufficiently confirms that Karl Marx (1818—1883), known to his inner circle as the Moor and to the outside world as the Red Doctor, was not lacking in visions— of, to rhapsodize with Marcuse, a “humanized nature,” a realm of “life-enhancing, sen­ suous aesthetic qualities” inherent to nature. But Marx is not very forth­ coming about his views on beauty, let alone its laws; and in his texts “aesthetic” is more a term of opprobrium to be cast into the teeth of ei­ ther his Young Hegelian rivals or the king of Prussia with his “politicalaesthetic gourmanderie.” 2 Nor, for that matter, is Marx particularly known for partisanship on behalf of the state. While the claim that “Marx and Engels seldom talked more nonsense than when they gener­ alized about the state” is exaggerated, certainly no formal theory of so­ cial and political institutions is available from the customarily thorough Marx.* Any such topic, then, as “Marx and the aesthetic state” seems, to put it mildly, beside the point. To be sure, students of Marxist aesthetics profess to be bolstered by other evidence. Marx, so the facts hold, was a man of the Muses. At the university he attended art lectures and wrote plays, poetry, and essays all of which occupy a sturdy volume in the Marxian corpus. The mature writings abound in literary allusions: Marx knows his Homer, Shake1. OPM, 88. 2. Marcuse, CR, 60. Marx, MEGA, 1 —1: 617. 3. John Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy o f Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press), 279.

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speare, Balzac. Capital itself, at least the one volume Marx published, was intended to be a Kunstwerk of sorts; and the dramatic nature of the Marxian narrative of the conflict between man and capital has not been missed by commentators.4 Besides, Marx numbered among his friends the poets Heinrich Heine and Georg Herwegh, no mean indications of his aesthetic, perhaps Bohemian, inclinations. And, lastly, a somewhat more substantive point, Marx apparently attempted a work on aesthet­ ics around 1842. Yet it is difficult to build on such special pleading. The most im­ pressive fact is not that Marx was not unaesthetic (most European intel­ lectuals at midcentury were aesthetically inclined), but that he never completed the aesthetics, that his later, slender comments on art (in the Gruttdrisse) would hardly merit extended analysis if they were not proffered by the critic of political economy, bourgeois society, and the capitalist mode of production, and that, in any case, these comments never find their way into the mature Marx’s published works. Nonetheless, M arx’s thought is a decisive turn for the German quest for an aesthetic state. First, M arx’s radical resurrection of sensuous na­ ture led to a new focusing on the tangibly sensuous realm of human labor and activity as the proper object of theory. Second, M arx’s demo­ tion of religion to a form of fetishism reinterpreted the Greek “religion” of art into an expression of the communality of man. Third, through a new methodology of social totality, Marx fixed human labor defined as human creative activity into the focal point for theory and praxis. Fourth, M arx’s diagnosis of the modern system of capitalism and civil society propounded the classic concept of alienated labor as the primary characteristic of the modern condition, and he vindicated its destruction by his call for labor that would be not alienated but qualitatively human or aesthetic. Fifth, this diagnosis posited the rise of a universal class, the proletariat, dedicated to creating a future community or “Gemeinwesen” in which full development of human capacities, of Schillerian universality, would become the criterion for communal deliberation and action. And, finally, M arx’s emphasis on human labor or creative ac­ tivity argued a view of human history that would advance through revo­ lutionary transformation to conscious cultivation of humanity as poten­ tial creator of the G esam tkunstw erk.5 4. Cf. MEGA, 1 -1 (2 ). After completing KAP, Marx may have considered writing a work on Balzac. H. Arvon, Marxist Aesthetics (Cornell: Cornell University Press, [1970] 1973), trans., 3. On KAP: MEW, 31: (5 viii 1865) 134. Cf. S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and W orld Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). 5. Ernst Kux, Karl M arx: D ie Revolutionare Konfession (Zurich: E. Rentsch, 1967), 14.

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These postulates seem removed from the Marx who is customarily approached through economic or narrowly political categories. They are, however, readily backed by previous scholarly investigations of M arxs thought. M arx’s reinterpretation of the relation of subject and object and of the meaning of the object as praxis both human and social depends on “the analogy between man’s free creative activity and artis­ tic creation.” 6 The kind of intellectual and sensuous response to, and activity upon, the object demanded by Marx most closely approximates “the kind of appropriation involved in aesthetic enjoyment, a kind which is both active and contemplative, self-expressive and appre­ ciative.” 7 If Marx is hostile toward formal aestheticism, if he derides “play,” it is really because he prefers to stress “the earnest, absorbing toil which . . . was typified by that of the artist.” 8 In short, the Aufhebung of capitalism is to usher in an “aesthetic utopia” : “economic activity will turn into artistic activity, with industry as the supreme avenue of creation, and the planet itself will become the new man’s work of art. The alienated world will give way to the aesthetic world,” a vision that, it will be agreed, is “astonishingly modern in a way.” 9 Yet this vision is no less an extension of the Hegelian legacy. At the time that Marx joined the Young Hegelians of Berlin in 1837, Hegel’s aes­ thetics had already spawned a new radicalism, and in the early 1840s when Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia forbade all lecturing on the He­ gelian system outside of his aesthetics, Hegelian aesthetics became indis­ pensable for the articulations of post-1830s radicals.10 Among them, the young Marx had already spoken in 1837 of his 6. S. Avineri, The Social am i Political Thought o f Karl M arx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 228. 7. Plamenatz, Karl Marx's Philosophy o f Man, 76. Plamenatz explicitly contrasts this kind of appropriation to one which is utilitarian (75). Isaiah Berlin draws a parallel be­ tween M arx’s concept o f labor and Dantean cosmic love. Karl M arx: His L ife an d En­ vironment (3d ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 131. 8. Kolakowski, Main Currents o f Marxism, 1: 266. 9. Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (2d ed. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1972), 158, 236, 234; also 134. In “Art and Society in the Thought of M arx,” Eugene Lunn secs in M arx’s writings “an anticipation (or hope) that the character of w ork itself would become increasingly aesthetic in a future society.*’ In his Marxism and M odernism : An H istorical Study o f Lukacs, B recht, Benjam in, and A dorn o (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 17. 10. M. Lifshitz, The P hilosophy o f Art o f Karl M arx (New York: Critics Group, 1938), trans., 14. Malia, A lexander Herzen and the Birth o f Russian Socialism 1 8 2 5 1855, 234. See the young M arx’s poem of 1837 on Hegel and his A sthetik: “Hegel. Epigramme,’’ essentially a commentary on Schiller and Goethe through “Hegel’s” eyes. MEGA, 1—1(2): 42, 4 3 - 4 5 ; and David McLellan, Karl M arx: His L ife a n d T hou ght (London: Macmillan, 1973), 23, who interprets it as an exemplification of M arx as the young romantic.

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goal of a philosophy “somehow” to blend “art and knowledge” by unfolding the notion of divinity from the pure concept to history. A student of European literature, Greek philosophy, and the aesthetics of Winckelmann, Lessing, and A. W. Schlegel, Marx imbibed the ethic of universality from Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters and Schelling’s concept of Vereinigung through aesthetic intuition." But M arx’s peculiar solu­ tion to his relation to Hegel eventually took the form of putting to ques­ tion the Hegelian theory of the state and the Hegelian concept of nature through a critique that drew heavily on the Feuerbach whom the young Marx regarded as heir to “the honest early thought of Schelling.” In two key manuscripts, Critique o f the Hegelian Philosophy o f Right (1843 — 1844) and National Econom y and Philosophy (the Paris Manuscripts of 1844), Marx attacked Hegelian idealism by championing nature as the substantive realm of the individual as a sensuous, passionate, and rejoicing being. This approach, then, did not spare Feuerbach himself; Marx eventually came to hold that although Feuerbach had established the correct ontological foundation for the theory of the individual as a species or communal essence, he had failed to incorporate the political dimension in that thought." Marx himself came to a satisfactory resolu­ tion to his philosophical quandary only when in the fall of 1843 he dis­ covered the Paris working class as the actualization of Feuerbach’s con­ cept of the “purely human.” From that stage on, the “proletariat” became M arx’s answer to the Hegelian problematic of identifying the concrete universal class of historical transformation.1' 11. Marx refers to a dialogue, “ Kleanthes oder vom Ausgangspunkt und nothwendigen Fortgang der Philosophic” (MEGA, 3 —1:[ 1 0 - 11 xi 1837] 16). Alfred Schmidt sees some Schelling in M arx’s critique of Hegel. The Concept o f N ature in Marx (London: New Left Books, (1962) 1971), trans., 20. Marx seems to have been impressed by the young Engels’s critiques of Schelling; he also asked Feuerbach to contribute a critique on Schelling. MEGA, 3 - 1 : (1 0 -1 1 xi 1837) 15. There arc several allusions to Lessing. A. W. Schlegel was M arx’s teacher in Bonn. On Schiller: Marx may well have read about Schiller’s AB through Count Cieszkowski’s Prolegom ena zur H istoriographie (2d ed. Posen: Leitgeber, [1838] 1908), 8 0 —88. Philip Kain reads Cieszkowski’s summary to ar­ gue that “Schiller’s goal is an aesthetic state and an aesthetic culture.” Schiller, Hegel, and Marx, 86 n.34. McLellan, Karl Marx, 22; Seigel, Marx's Fate, 179. Seigel suggests that M arx’s nickname “M oor” refers to Schiller’s Karl Moor in The R obbers (79—83). 12. According to McLellan, Feuerbach switched from “species” to “community” after Das Wesen des Christentums (1841). McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl M arx (New York: Pracger, 1969), 92. Marx to Feuerbach, MEGA, 3 —1: (3 x 1843) 59, 60 ; (5 iii 1842) 22. For M arx’s plan (1 8 3 9 -1 8 4 0 ) of Hegel’s N aturphilosophie, see MEGA, 1 —1(2): 9 9 —103. On Feuerbach: MEGA, 3 —1: (3 x 1843) 59. Ludwig Feuer­ bach, in his Sam tliche W crke, ed. W. Bolin and F. Jodi (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1959), 2: 239. M arx to Arnold Ruge, MEGA, 3 —1: (13 iii 1843) 45. 13. Only the proletariat can be world-historical, “empirisch universelle Individuen.” D/, 2 4 - 2 5 . Cf. Goetz Briefs, T he Proletariat (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), and Timothy McCarthy, M arx an d the Proletariat (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978).

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M arx’s concept of the proletariat forms one of his more striking contri­ butions to modern thought, not least because of its protean character. That this concept materialized at a time when M arx’s aesthetic interests were at their most intense suggests a new angle on understanding the nature of that innovation. Three factors are especially worth noting as Marx went from Berlin to the Paris of his new universal class. The first factor is M arx’s Hellenism.14 Marx had received his docto­ rate in classical philology, and his dissertation on post-Aristotelian con­ cepts of nature and the essay “The Concept of the Sage in Greek Philos­ ophy” (1841) followed the basic arguments of German Hellenism, depicting Greek society as a paradigm of wholeness. But Marx also ad­ vanced a new claim: this paradigm, he held, had been undermined by Socrates.'s Marx saw the pre-Socratic Greeks as a people dwelling in “substance” rather than pure ideality or spirit, a substance that was the common and tangible source for both the sage, “the corporealized es­ sence of substance,” and the people. Its focus— “a power” that tran­ scends itself “half mysteriously proclaims itself in poetic enthusiasm”— lifted natural energies to “ideality” while leaving “the whole in the determinateness of the natural.” It manifested itself as “the plasticpractical” through the utterances of the sages: “the living artworks which the people sec arising out of themselves in plastic greatness” be­ came in the sages’ hands “the actually validating substance, laws” of society. But, so Marx’s argument continued, after Socrates the organic Briefs claims that the term was reintroduced into modern European usage by humanists, classicists, and jurisprudence writers (54). McCarthy stresses M arx’s “invention” of the proletariat (xiv), an interpretation that need not be pejorative if we follow Nicole Loraux’s sense of the word in L*invention d ’Athencs. 14. For a broad presentation of Marx as a Hellene and its ideological implications for the art theory of the period, cf. Margaret A. Rose, Marx's Lost A esthetic: Karl M arx and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), esp. part 1. “Hellene” (following Heinrich Heine) here means “the ‘Hellenistic’ ideals of freedom of expression and sensuous beauty” (16). Rose traces the persistence of this ideal in the Marx of the Grundrisse (91). Kain persuasively demonstrates M arx’s lifelong commitment to “the Greek-aesthetic model,” despite important modifications. Schiller, H egel, and M arx, esp. 1 5 2 -5 8 . 15. S. Morawski regards the Paris Manuscripts as continuing the path set by (among others) Winckelmann, Hölderlin, and Hegel; M arx’s “admiration for Greek culture stems from Winckelmann.” “ Introduction” to L. Baxandall and S. Morawski, eds., D ocum ents on Marxist Aesthetics (New York: International General, 1973), 1: 3 2 —41. This volume in general furnishes a succinct collection of M arx’s direct comments on art and aesthetics. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 1 0 0 -1 0 6 . 16. MEGA, 1—1: 102. There is a Winckelmannesque flavor to such passages as “Diese Weise sind daher ebenso wenig popular wie die Statuen der olympischen Cotter; ihre Bewegung ist die Ruhe in sich selbst.”

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Staatsleben of ancient Greece was undermined by “idealism.” While pre-Socratic Greece had made up a union of thinkers and people who nevertheless remained distinct from one another, the Sophists and Soc­ rates undermined both by calling substance a collection of accidental existences and institutions. Subjectivity henceforth became the ground of substance, engendering the concept of the “ought,” while substance itself was demoted to a “predicate” of the moral self, the Platonic king­ dom of Ideas completing, under the guise of domination over actuality, the isolation of the individual self from its own “actual” life.17 Thus the paradigm of an original Hellenic wholeness called for a social and po­ litical ideal based on substance in which thinkers and masses shared, independently but in harmony, a common task. The second factor is M arx’s turn to the aesthetic dimension proper. In this Marx shared the general predilection among the Young He­ gelians for deploying aesthetics on behalf of radical objectives.1* The­ odor Vischer, David Strauss, and Feuerbach were the most memorable polemicists to substitute aesthetic creation for the Christian idea of sal­ vation, but similar formulations were also available in Max Stirner’s Art and Revolution (1842), congratulating Hegel for putting art before re­ ligion, and in Georg Herwegh’s paeans to the artist as a Christ.,v With­ out sharing Hegel’s commitment to “absolute religion,” these thinkers hoped to build an aesthetic radicalism on the shoulders of the Hegelian notion of Kunstreligion.20 In the winter of 1841 —1842 Marx added his voice to this trend by collaborating with Bruno Bauer on a series of projects aiming to vindi­ cate Hegel’s teachings on art at the expense of religion; M arx’s particu­ lar obligation was to write on religious art and the romantics (“On Reli17. MEGA, 1- 1: 1 0 3 -5 . Yack quotes M arx’s sympathetic reference to Themistocles’ efforts to found “ein neues Athen” on the new element of the sea and holds that the “ele­ ment” Marx himself discovered to found “a new Athens at sea” was political economy. T he Longing fo r Total Revolution, 270. 18. W. J. Brazil), T he Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 273. 19. Cf. Feuerbach’s description of Hegel as “dcr vollendeste philosophische Kiinstler” : Zur Kritik der H egelschen P hilosophic (1839), in Sdmtliche W crke, 2: 174—75. Vischer wrote a full-scale aesthetics reflecting Hegel in 1847 which was used by Marx in 1 8 5 7 1858. Marx to Lassalle, MEW, 19: (22 ii 1858) 550. Lifshitz notes that Schiller is quoted by Vischer on beauty as “simultaneously an object, and a subjective state.” T he P hiloso­ p h y o f Art o f Karl M arx, 76. In his inaugural lecture (1844) as a theology professor at Tubingen, Vischer proclaimed aesthetics as the means to liberate learning from the­ ology. Suspended by the conservative university, he gradually moderated his views af­ ter 1848. Brazill, T he Young Hegelians, 156—73. Vischer’s Vorschlag zu enter O per (1844) may also have inspired Richard Wagner’s quest for an aesthetic state through the G esam tkunstw erk. 20. Brazill, T he Young H egelians, 211, 173. M arx’s extensive and brutal treatment of Stirncr’s thought in D ie D eutsche Ideologic (1 8 4 5 -1 8 4 6 ) was written with specific refer­ ence to D er Einzige und sein Eigenthum (MEGA, 1—5: 9 7 —428).

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gion and Art in Special Relation”).21 Although these pieces were never completed, Bauer’s own two works do offer indications of M arx’s posi­ tion. Utilizing parody, they defend “the religion of beauty, art, freedom, of humanity.” Hegel, according to Bauer, found “humanity, freedom, ethics, and individuality” only in one religion: “in the religion that really is not one, in the religion of art in which man worships himself.” Accordingly, Bauer called for “the dissolution of religion in art.” 22 For his part of the project Marx made ample use of a work by Charles Debrosses, On the Cult o f the Fetish G ods (1760), which argued that religion is predatory toward nature and fetishistic in its worship of the actual matter of things, while art, the more realistic for approaching the object in a disinterested manner, emphasizes humans’ creative ability to shape things through form. In these ideas the basis for M arx’s eventual theory of alienation and commodity fetishism can be detected, and such tendencies were soon reinforced in Paris through M arx’s close friend­ ship with Heine and Herwegh, two poets embodying the Schillerian “all-round, unalienated individual” and the artistic model of human ac­ tivity that informed the humanism of M arx’s 1844 Manuscripts.23 Dis­ tinguishing art from religion, Marx took the substantiality of Greek Kunstreligion (“a religion that is not really a religion”) as something very different from Oriental and modern religions.24 Whereas Hegel had attacked the Greek aesthetic view of spirit for its acceptance of sub21. The details are in D. Hcrtz-Eichenrode, “ Der Junghegelianer Bruno Bauer im Vormarz,” Bh.D. diss., Berlin, 1959, 6 0 - 6 2 . 22. Bauer, Die Posaune cies jungsten G erichts iiber H egel den Atheisten und An­ tichristen: Ein Ultimatum (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1841), 111, and HegePs L ehre von der Religion und Kunst: Vom dem Standpuncte des G laubens aus Beurtheilt (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1842), 107, 222. Bauer calls Hegel “ein grosser Freund der griechischen Reli­ gion, uberhaupt des griechischen Volkes” in the first work (111), and an entire chapter is given over to quotes from Hegel praising the Greeks, often the same passages we have quoted in our interpretation of Hegel (“VIII: Vorliebe fur die Gricchen,” 114— 16, 1 1 2 -1 3 ). 23. Marx used a translation from 1785 of Debrosses’s work. MEGA, 1—1(2): 115. Cf. Rose, M arx’s Lost Aesthetic, chap. 3, csp. 5 9 —62, for greater detail and further sources. While Stirner and Bruno Bauer held that the original act of alienation actually resulted from artistic activity, they added that religion conceals this process by making the created object the master of the creator; in short, they distinguished Lebensausserung from Lebcnsentausserung. M arx’s other excerpts during this period were drawn from works concerned with religion and art. MEGA, 1 —1(2): 114—18. Lifshitz, T he P hiloso­ phy o f Art o f Karl M arx, 2 7 —29; on fetishism: OPM , 133. On Heine and Herwegh: Rose, M arx’s Lost Aesthetic, chap. 4, esp. 72. McLellan, Karl M arx, 121, 122; Walther Victor, Marx und H eine (Berlin: Bruno Henschel, 1952); N. Reeves, “ Heine and the Young M arx,” O x ford Germ an Studies, 7 (1972—1973), 4 4 —97. Nonetheless, M arx held Bohemia in general contempt. MEGA, 1 - 1 0 : 2 8 2 - 8 3 ; MEW, 34: (5 xi 1880) 476. 24. “Das sinnliche Bewusstsein des Fetischdieners ist ein andres wie das dcs Griechen, weil sein sinnliches Dasein noch ein andres ist.” OPM, 133. M arx had earlier regarded fetishism as “die Religion der sinnlichen Begierde” and approached the religion of the an­ cients as the cult of their political state or nation. MEGA, 1—1: 2 3 6 —37.

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stance and looked to the ideal of a modern state founded on “absolute spirit/' Marx accepted precisely this quality in the Greek worldview and deployed it to attack the rationality of an order pretending to dispense with substance.25 Finally, to his Hellenism and interest in aesthetics, Marx then added the third and catalytic factor in his affair with the concept of the pro­ letariat. Arriving in Paris in 1843, he found himself not only among pos­ sibly the most impressive gathering of intellectuals and artists since the Renaissance, but also at the center of the first explicitly working-class radical movements in modern history.2* The Paris circles of German in­ tellectual emigres, German workers, and representatives of European working-class radicalism that made up M arx’s first enduring image of the proletariat contained features unique to the 1840s. Numbering between 85,000 and 100,000, or a size commensurate with that of clas­ sical Athens or Renaissance Florence, the German workers held them­ selves aloof from the cosmopolitan ethos of Paris, consciously cultivat­ ing their German character, language, and concerns in the midst of “civil society.” 27 Far from destitute, these workers supplied the labor force for an industrial capitalism in the making, conditions that encour­ aged new forms of radicalism, self-confidence, self-identity, and organi­ zation without political institutionalization. The young Marx familiarized himself with the cafes and social cen­ ters where this new communal ethos seemed in the process of early de­ velopment, and he soon indulged in uncharacteristically sentimental praise for these first “Third World” laborers of early capitalism. Even­ tually he saw that the new ethos, not solely applicable to German condi­ tions, might well transform the human condition as a whole. Since Ger­ man reality did not permit the middle road of a bourgeois revolution, as Marx saw it, a German proletariat within Germany could put an end to all classes, since its thought and actions embodied a conscious univer­ sality of aims and means to liberate all oppressed peoples.28 25. Since Marx came to regard the religious sphere as an alienated expression of the political, he did not take the primary interest in religion proper we find among other Young Hegelians (particularly Feuerbach). Cf. McLellan, The Young H egelians and Karl M arx, 96. 26. Berlin, Karl M arx, 83. Berlin adds that by 1851 this mood was already dead (85). 27. The figure of 85,000 was relayed by Ruge to Marx, MEGA, 3 —1: (11 viii 1843) 403. A police report of 1837 gives 88,000. E. Schraepler, “Der Bund dcr Gerechten: Seine Tatigkeit in London 1840—1847,*’ Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte (Hannover: Verlag fur Literatur, 1962), 2: 5; David Fernbach, “Introduction” to Karl Marx, T he R evolutions o f 1848 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 26. 28. Cf. OPM, 135; MEGA, 1 —1: 498. In Germany the estates, according to Marx, had not yet become “classes.” D I, 52. Isolated from the basic features of a human life, the

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In sum, M arx’s “proletariat” is a concept owing a great deal to M arx’s Hellenism, his aesthetic leanings, and his commitment to the “freespirited” intelligentsia and industrial working-class movements of 1840s Paris. The contribution to our theme of these elements making up M arx’s vision will become apparent in the following analysis. In the first section M arx’s concept of nature, his substitution of communality for religion, and his concept of labor form the basis for the Aufhebutig of Hegel’s thought that he undertook during the 1840s. The second section then covers the main themes of the 1850s and 1860s, which were com­ mitted to a formal materialist theory of capitalism and its inevitable overthrow through effects internal to the dynamics of capital. The third and last section is directed to Marx’s model of the universal individual and his vision of a postcapitalist “Gemeinwesen.” Marx's Aufhcbung o f Hegel: State, Earth, and Sensuous Humanity If Hegel’s thought marked the Aufhebung of the classical notion of the aesthetic state, the early M arx’s ideas effect an analogous Aufhebung of the Hegelian alternative of the rational state. For this task Marx re­ verts to the lead of Aristotle regarding three central notions: the politi­ cal or polis nature of the human being, the concept of nature or physis, and the importance of the economic dimension.29 Seen through the lenses of a radically sensuous notion of truth, M arx’s reinterpretation marks the discovery of “earth” or sensuous humanity in our theme. Our first part, accordingly, is principally concerned with M arx’s treatment of polis and physis, leaving to the second part his more directly economic or materialist analysis of man and society. Marx begins by restating Aristotle’s claim that the human being is “by nature a political living being” (vcrei t t o K l t l k o v £ 4 > o i / ) .J 0 Marx sees Ar-

German working class alone could find the means for complete transformation of human alienation through a revolution with a “social soul/* D lt 2 2 —23. 29. At Hegel’s funeral the speaker referred to the Alexandrine empire that would have to be shared among his satraps. Cited in Brazill, T he Young H egelians, 9; also 1 0 -1 1 . The Young Hegelians took a special interest in post-Aristotelian philosophy, since they regarded themselves in much the same position. M arx’s decision to write a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus follows this tendency. McLellan, Karl M arxt 3 4 - 3 5 ; and M arx’s later comment to Lassalle in MEW, 29: (21 xii 1857) 547. For M arx’s view of Aristotle as the greatest thinker of antiquity: KAP, 1: 430; MEW, 29: (32 xii 1857) 547. The English socialist H. M. Hyndman called Marx “the Aristotle of the nineteenth cen­ tury.*’ Cited in McLellan, Karl M arx, 446. 30. Politica 1253a.

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istotle as pointing to the civic (stadtisch) essence of the human being as “civic citizen [Stadtbiirger] by nature.'’ According to nature itself, then, humans should not accept the modern condition which segregates them from direct political or social activity. As the animal capable of indi­ viduating himself or herself solely through society (“a social animal”), a human cannot do without the polis. To give emphasis to the process of individuation within this development, Marx chooses the term “Gemeinwesen” to recall both the community and the individual’s commu­ nal essence (as in “a person’s Gemeinwesen”)— the potential unity, then, of community and individual.'1 Marx approves of Hegel’s historical approach to the concept of the modern state, but he insists on the criterial status of the communal es­ sence of human individuation within that development. Thus, Hegel’s claim that political bodies that have survived to the present must con­ tain some human rationality is criticized by Marx as a truism, for in terms of a new historical totality such bodies may turn out to be basi­ cally irrational. Hegel’s mistake, according to Marx, was to impose a logic on a contradictory political reality instead of unfolding the logic, and thus the inner contradictions, of that reality. To peg existing institu­ tions into niches proferred by categories of the Idea is to generate “the worst syncretism.” '2 For his own method Marx turns instead to the critique of the modern state and ethical community (“Sittlichkeit”) that he finds in Hegel. Since for Marx the separation of civil society from the state apparatus is a historical fact rather than an ideal, Hegel’s real achievement must be seen as illumination of a dimension unique to modern political reality: the abstraction of the political state.33 M arx’s specific strictures against Hegel’s resurrection of crown, es­ tates, and bureaucracy need not detain us. Marx points out that the sum of private or corporation interests need not ever add up to the birth of the concrete universal, but may well sustain the abstract universal of the modern state as a “purely” political body controlled by a ruling social class. The constitutional monarchy extolled in Hegel’s theory is actually the realization of the alienation (Entfremdung) of political from private life.34 Yet Marx himself is less interested in the anachronistic monarchy 31. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 586; KAP, 1: 346 and n.13, 496; Kradcr, 196; C, 3 9 5 - 9 6 . Engels thought that “Gemeinwesen”— “ein gutes altes dcutsches Wort”— could replace the French “ Kommunc” as a substitutive term for “state.” MEW, 34: (18—20 iii 1875) 129; MEGA, 1 - 3 : 2; O PM , 117. 32. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 5 1 0 ,4 5 8 ,5 1 5 . 33. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 476, 5 2 9 - 3 0 , 437. 34. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 473, 526, 4 9 5 - 9 7 , 436.

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of “Christian-Germanic” Prussia than in the growing power of bour­ geois society and capitalism in the Rhineland. Against this distinctively modern threat Marx needs to secure a more concrete foundation than Hegel’s concept of “Geist.” Accordingly, Marx replaces the Hegelian idea of the modern state with his own notion of society as founded on the primacy of the “human world,” of “man himself.” 35 At first glance this primacy seems to mirror the bourgeois “principle of individualism.” But Marx points out that in fact the modern individ­ ual is regarded as an accident in a system dependent on the rigid separa­ tion of the political from the social, since bourgeois society cannot ac­ cept the communal essence of the individual. Marx counters Hegel and bourgeois political thought with his own Rousseauist insistence on full participation in the political state by all members comprising a society: a complete radical democracy, since “democracy starts from man and makes the state objectified man.” 36 Democracy is the “truth” or summation of all other institutional forms: it is the actualization of finite individualism on the political level. The republican form of government may be an essential step toward the “Aufhcbung dcs Staates,” the end to a state apparatus separate from di­ rect exercise of executive and legislative power. But democracy proper is the only appropriate institutional expression of the finite individual’s awareness of himself as the true basis of the political structure that de­ mands his loyalty when he consciously engages with others in the cre­ ative activities of the polity as his own work ( W erk) and free product (freies Produkt). The “political artwork” of Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters is thus a key component in the early M arx’s vision of the political libera­ tion of the individual. At the same time Marx regards political emancipation and universal suffrage as themselves early stages in radical change.37 To realize full lib­ eration, radical democracy must be accompanied by a change in social relationships. The formal political thought of Marx demands the tan­ gible presence of a universal social class,38 and by revealing itself to be 35. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 4 3 4 ,5 9 9 . 36. MEGA, 1—1: 498. In his last years, as is evident in his notes and comments on Morgan's treatment of the subject, Marx continued to show deep interest in Athenian de­ mocracy. Krader, 2 0 8 - 1 7 . Marx expressed some excitement that, following Bockh on the population of Attica, one came up with the figure of 90,000 for a free citizenry (209). On Rousseau and Marx, cf. Galvano della Volpe, Rousseau an d M arx (London: Lawrence and Wishart, (1964) 1978), trans. MEGA, 1—1: 541, 434. 37. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 4 3 4 - 3 6 . 38. MEGA, 1 - 1 :5 9 8 - 9 9 , 5 8 5 .

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this class, the proletariat forms the distinctively modern eruption of the “purely human” element in history. Its appearance in Marxian theory thus not only resolves the problems raised by Marx’s formal political thought but also refutes the idealist category of “Geist” through three new theories in M arx’s thought: of the unity of human being and na­ ture, of the “emancipation” of the body, and of the primacy of the aes­ thetic dimension in the new humanism. M arx’s concept of nature sidesteps both the Hegelian and romantic approaches and the limited sensuousness of Feuerbach’s alternative by considering in detail the ramifications of the actually existing individual being as a “natural being” (N aturwesen). His “humanism” is based on a unique conception of concrete “individuality” that embodies the ac­ tual concatenation of sensuous, feeling, and striving qualities that make a single human being both like and unlike other human beings. In turn, it holds that this individual belongs to a realm neither reducible to hu­ mans nor itself transcendent. Both humanity and environment arc con­ stantly self-creating, self-producing, re-producing: “the bcing-throughitself of nature and man.” Nature, in other words, is the individual’s “inorganic body,” sustainer of his preservation and reproduction. It is, in this sense, “earth.” J* At the same time the primacy of individuality prevents the original unity between humanity and nature as earth from becoming simple identity. Unity, for Marx, remains the “vital sensuous concrete activity of subject-object” in which the difference between thought and being is preserved and is grounded on a humanism reflecting the individuality not of the abstract subject but of the concrete individual, whose indi­ viduality is manifested in the immediate activity that makes or creates the object. M arx’s concept of the object thus culminates in a focus on the objectifying, creating activity of human being as individuality.40 This concrete “humanism” leads, then, to what might be called the Marxian emancipation of the body. Marx sees four basic forms in 39. OPM, 160, 114—15, 166, 307, 124. For Marx, nature or earth is self-created: “Die generatio aequivoca ist die einzige praktische Widerlegung der Schopfungstheorie.” On earth: OPM, 8 7 - 8 8 ; G otha, 15; G, 106, 388; KAP, 3: 833, 856; 1: 193, 198, 5 7 —58. Marx is a “primitivist” to the extent that he commends early man for recognizing that the condition of his labor is not the product of labor, but nature as “das lebendige Individuum” (G, 3 8 4 —85). On earth as laboratorium: G, 375, 376, 381, 384, 396. 40. “Denken und Sein sind also zwar unterschieden, aber zugleich in Einheit mit einander.” OPM, 117. This key passage seriously weakens attempts to classify Marxian thought among theories of identity. On this point, cf. M arx’s critiques of Hegelian subjectobject dialectics: 1 6 8 -6 9 . Marx, to be sure, occasionally speaks of an identity between the subject, humanity, and the object, nature, but the stress is on the difference in the unity. OPM, 88, 119, 160, 162; D/, 33.

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which the individual and nature interact: first, a human is a part of earth or of “surrounding” nature; second, he has a body; third, he be­ longs to a species in whose reproduction he takes part; and, lastly, his essence is one of activity as an objectifying being.41 For the reproduction of his species an individual draws sustenance from earth, and the two ways in which he does this— through his relations both with a “be­ loved” and with his fellow laborer or exchanger of products— show that the human “other” is a natural necessity. All action, Marx insists, requires use of the senses, the direct chan­ nels between humans and earth. Against the Young Hegelian contempt for “the trembling of nerves, the glowing stream in the veins,” Marx de­ fends the senses precisely because they define the human body as a pas­ sionate essence awakened by the trembling of real nerves, the palpita­ tion of real veins. Action presupposes the lack of an object for which the body longs and suffers, and attainment of which produces enjoyment. Accordingly, Marx grants priority to suffering and pleasure: “to be sen­ suous is to be suffering,” while “human effectiveness and suffering” form part of the “self-enjoyment of man.” 42 From these premises Marx argues that the most authentic ontologi­ cal relationship for bringing together two suffering and individual hu­ man beings is the sexual love of man and woman. The currents that con­ nect the main scat of sexuality with the brain catalyze an outpouring of vital pleasure that sustains life, love, and re-creation. The beloved is the true sensuous object which fulfills the individual’s most inward reality as well as his communal being. The fact of the body may have been the most concrete argument for the tangible separation of a human from a fellow human, but its highest function is to express through sex­ ual union the unity-in-difference of humanity’s ontological relation to nature.43 It is out of such basic patterns that Marx posits the development of a communal nature that takes the form of relations of exchange in pro41. On Marx's play on w irklich and Moses Hess's use of it in IJber das G eldw esen (read by Marx in 1 8 4 3 -1 8 4 4 ) and the connection with communal action (Zusam m en w irken), see Avineri, The Social and Political Thought o f Karl M arx, 77; Seigel, Marx*s Fate, 1 2 4 -2 5 , 412 n .l. OPM, 8 9 - 9 0 . 42. OPM, 161. Marx uses both “die Passion** and “die Leidenschaft.'* OPM, 118, 161, 191, 193, 236. Marx upbraids the Young Hegelians for their hostility toward every­ thing that is alive and immediate, every sensuous experience, love. See his letter, invoking Fourier, to Feuerbach, in MEGA, 3 - 1 : (11 viii 1844) 6 4 - 6 5 . 43. MEGA, 1 - 1 : 4 4 7 - 4 8 : “Das unmittelbare, naturliche, notwendige Verhältnis des Menschen zum Menschen ist das Verhältnis des Mannes zum Weibe.** OPM, 113. Cf. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxem burg , Women's L iberation, an d Marx's P hilosophy o f Revolution (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), 8 0 —81.

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duction. All authentic production, according to Marx, is ontologically inseparable from the experience of joy and fulfillment. Alienated pro­ duction is, in the strict sense, unhuman, since in the natural course of things, labor is “an individual life-expression”: the personality of the laboring individual is objectified “as an objectively sensuous intuitable . . . power.” Moreover, labor creates a product which brings enjoyment to its recipient while the laborer takes pleasure in fulfilling another’s needs. This act of exchange thus makes the laborer aware of the mediation between the other and the human species as a whole; and to the extent that the other person senses his own essence as a member of the species, he confirms the laborer’s being in his “thought and love.” Finally, the laborer realizes the value of his individual activity by recog­ nizing it as the actualization of his own communal nature.44 This entire dialectical sequence makes plain the young M arx’s inten­ tion. He wishes to reveal the extent to which otherness and communality stem from specific and uniquely individual human activities: labor which is “free life-expression, therefore enjoyment of life,” or “the particu­ larity of my individuality.” 45 An individual and his fellow individual rec­ ognize both one another and their mutual participation in the human species and communal being through this framework of reciprocity, re­ spect, and reverence for, as well as fulfillment of, the other. M arx’s new theory of the relation of the individual to nature and his emancipation of the body provoke the stock objection that such radical unification of humans with nature obliterates the distinction between humanity and animals. M arx’s response is to take the third fundamen­ tal step in his theory: it is the aesthetic dimension that is the component common to both the unity of the individual and nature and the distinc­ tion between humanity and animal. Nature formed the individual’s “in­ organic body,” but that individual’s particular dialogue with this greater “body” takes place in universal terms: he draws on the w hole of nature. Animals confine themselves to immediate activities and responses con­ trolled by limits characteristic of their particular species; only a human acts by taking the whole of nature for his or her field of activity and fashioning it to create an objective world. To be at home for a human means to contemplate himself in a world he or she has created. A human alone is the universal being: the individual makes things not only ac­ cording to the standards of survival for the species but also according to 44. This important passage forms part of M arx’s comments on James Mill’s Elements o f Political E con om y. MEGA, 1 - 3 : 5 4 6 —47. 45. OPM, 115.

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the standards inherent in the object itself, “in accordance,” that is, “with the laws of beauty.” Thus humanity’s universality rests, not merely on sensuous immediacy, but on production or activity that transcends physical need as “positive creating activity.” 46 The source for this universality remains, however, the senses. If the “whole of history is a preparation for man to become the object of sen­ suous consciousness,” then the individual’s totalization forms a mission essential to the historical dimension. Cultivation of all the senses thus becomes the task and joy of a specifically “human” activity, and refine­ ment and aesthetic sensibility are not simply the exclusive properties of a social aristocracy. They are, quite the reverse, characteristically hu­ man traits: in the best tradition of Schiller, Marx contends that “man suits his all-sided essence to an all-sided mode, as a total man.” 47 Marx's originality is not restricted to this refutation of idealism alone. It includes a radically new identification of the universal being with a gen­ eral theory of labor. Marx in fact adapts Hegel’s definition of reason as “purposive doing” (Tun, itself a translation of Aristotle’s definition of physis) to his own definition of labor as “purposive activity” (Tatigkeit) and lays claim to the Hegelian legacy of Vernunft while distinguishing between the static (Fichtean) ramification of “Tun,” or the original deed engendering activity, and “Tatigkeit,” or activity as perpetual doing.48 Genuine labor, according to his transference of reason to purposive tan­ gible activity, is the eternal creativeness of the human being as a “natu­ ral essence.” As a being of activity, the laboring individual transcends other animals through conceiving the w hole or totality of whatever he or she produces in praxis: “At the end of the labor process a result comes forth that was already in the representation of the laborer at the beginning, therefore was already ideally present.” 49 A human being, in other words, transforms real nature by determin­ ing his or her labor through a purpose and a purposeful human will: “outside of the effort of the laboring organs resides the purposive will which manifests itself as attentiveness.” Rather than an act of mere re46. OPM , 88. See also M arx’s reference to all of nature forming partly an object for man’s consciousness as the object of natural science and of art (87). On production: G t 507; OPM, 88. The most pertinent text is KAP, 3: 828, in which Marx stresses that “das Reich der Freiheit” only begins where necessary mundane labor ceases: “es bleibt dies immer ein Reich der Notwendigkeit.” 47. OPM, 123, 118. 48. Hegel, “Vorrede,’’ PG, 22; KAP, 1: 193. In 3: 833, the definition of labor, “ in ihrer cinfachen Bestimmtheit,’’ is “zweekmassige produktive Tatigkeit.” 49. KAP, 1: 193.

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production, this capacity creates new values and creations: “labor is the living, shaping fire.” 50 The moment of German idealism is thus pre­ served in Marxian thought through his inclusion of gestalt in the ac­ tivity of human objectification. Yet, since it is also the activity of the contingent individual producing through earth, the Marxian notion of labor avoids the pitfalls underlying the Fichtean ego. Labor remains a process between self and nature which the individual may control but of which he himself remains a manifestation. The human “sense for na­ ture” argued by Marx unites senses and intellect, body and brain, in order to posit the particular individual as “the ideal totality,” “a totality of human life expression.” 51 Marx’s argument clearly owes a great deal to Hegel’s own analysis of the ontological importance of labor in the philosophy of dialecti­ cal spirit. Yet, whereas Hegel regarded labor as a stage in the selfactualization of spirit as reason, Marx subordinates reason or thought to labor. It is not self-consciousness or absolute spirit but creative labor that points toward the genuine reconciliation with nature that the Hel­ lenic paradigm embodied and Hegel rejected. Avoiding the identity the­ ory to which Hegelianizing philosophy is prone, Marx installs sen­ suousness over pure thought without slipping into irrationalism. In his theory the individual develops his senses in creative labor through asso­ ciation with others: “the senses therefore immediately become theoreti­ cians in their praxis.” Practical human mental and bodily activity, ap­ proaching the object on its own terms (“for the sake of the thing”), transforms the object and its subject into a genuinely human, social product. Reason, in sum, is the predicate of creative labor.52 By the same token, labor turns theory into praxis. As the fulcrum for totalization of the individual’s activities, authentic society for Marx is not an abstraction set up against the individual, but the living product of individuals laboring in communal activity. “Repeated in thought,” this labor engenders formal consciousness by humans of their participa­ tion in a social whole which they then maintain and reproduce through their thought. On this foundation Marx proposes his new method of 50. KAP, 1: 193; G, 2 6 4 - 6 5 , 266. Criticizing Adam Smith for identifying freedom with tranquility (Ruhe), Marx emphasizes the “Uberwindung von Hindernissen” as “Bestatigung der Freiheit.” Meanwhile, Marx attacks Fourier for confusing labor with amusement and overlooking the difficulty and creative activity entailed by labor (G, 505). 51. KAP, 1: 192. OPM, 117, 134. A "natural” relation of body to brain is found in true labor; only with alienated history are they sundered from one another. KAP, 1: 531; also 181. 52. OPM , 156, 117, 123, 119.

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social analysis. The vaunted unity of individual and nature should be approached through exploration of the labor that has formed industry or technology; the history of spirit must be supplanted by the history of industry. In this history neither self nor nature is self-contained; they interpenetrate through labor. Thus, while nature reflects human mold­ ing of the physical environment, human thought for its part is con­ stantly challenged by the practical demands made by outer nature and the nature of human senses.5’ M arxs call for a history of industry and production completes his im­ pressive Aufhebung of the Hegelian system with a new version of his­ tory as the creation of humanity through tangible labor. At the same time the promise contained in that call is progressively weakened by the ramifications of his method of social analysis and critique. As Marx ad­ vances into the areas of human industry and technology, he increasingly tends to shelve the image of the human individual portrayed in his Paris Manuscripts in order to maintain a hardheaded analysis of capitalist totality. Thus the early Marx identifies sensuous activity, “this continually sensuous laboring and creating,” with production as “the foundation of the entire sensuous world.” However, in the course of his explorations he ends up identifying labor, “free life-expression,” with production as the “objectification of the individual.” Production, in the form of the category of mode of production, gradually takes over as the subject of Marxian analysis.54 Having turned the sensuous human being into the social concept of mode of production, Marx inadvertently helps to re­ duce the presence of that being in concrete historical social activity. Moreover, this method contains an unfortunate tendency to dismiss all social modes prior to capitalism for their lack (outside of a parasitic mi­ nority) of the surplus time required for creative labor. True labor and the genuine human being are hoisted into a future era to succeed the 53. OPM, 1 1 6 -1 7 ; and Thesen iiber Feuerbach (8). “Die Gesellschaft ist die vollendete Wescnseinheit des Menschen mit der Natur, die wahre Resurrektion der Natur” (116). On industry: OPM, 122, 1 1 8 -1 9 ; D/, 3 2 - 3 3 . Marx also speaks of industry as “anthropological nature.” Also Karl Korsch, Karl M arx (New York: Russell and Russell, [19381 1963), 1 8 9 -9 7 . 54. Dl, 33, 11. Thus: “ein Produkt (oder Tatigkeit).” G, 61, 137. “ Bestimmte” refers to M arx’s insistence that production always means production at a given stage of social development (G, 6). In his letter to Annenkov (28 xii 1846) M arx speaks of men not freely choosing the productive means; they acquire it as the product of earlier activity, although their social history is “nur die Geschichte ihrer individuellen Entwicklung” (MEW, 27: 4 5 2 -5 3 ). Also MEW, 2 6 - 1 : 257.

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collapse of capitalist relationships, leaving unsettled such residual mat­ ters as the persistent appeal of Hellenic art as a norm for more “ad­ vanced” states of production.ss Finally, this methodological shift is re­ flected in both M arx’s and Engels’s lack of sympathy for all but the largest and technologically most efficient states as the foundation for the socialist transformation they envisage, relegating the rest to minor cor­ ners of “history.” 56 Yet, if all past and present examples of social unity and creative labor that fail to meet M arx’s standards are left out of the concept of techne as the realm of unity between man and nature, the Marxian enterprise is mainly left with the social totality that prevails in the modern epoch. At the critical point where Marxism faces the ac­ tual prospect for transforming society, its methodology, prevented from drawing upon past experiences of creative activity, paradoxically pro­ duces the kind of confused utopian anticipation that Marx himself at­ tributed to his more leftist rivals. From these strictures it does not follow that Marx intended to aban­ don the goals expressed in his Paris Manuscripts. On the contrary, the historical materialism of M arx’s Grundrisse and Capital fought to en­ sure their actualization in a postcapitalistic world. The narrowing of philosophy to analysis and critique of social totality defined as mode and relations of production may miss the deeper springs of creative la­ bor, and the intrepid resolution not to add to social reality may im­ prison philosophical effectiveness in the cage of capitalism.57 But M arx’s vision of sensuous awareness through the united endeavors of the pro­ letariat advancing toward the liberation of human creative potentiality remains inherently revolutionary for its insistence on breaking down all social and natural obstacles to the realization of universal refinement. Holding to the truth of humanity’s original goodness, to the priority of experience, environment, and technology, Marxian materialism justi55. The classic treatment is found in G, 3 0 - 3 1 . Much in this passage is confused or tautological: as Marcuse has remarked, to fall back on the worn metaphor of the Greeks as the childhood of humanity betrays a serious misunderstanding of the problem posed by the persistence of aesthetic norms from an age whose means of production have been sur­ passed. AD, 14—15. 56. The harsh critiques Engels meted out to the smaller minorities during the 1 8 4 8 1849 revolutions have been rightly singled out as symptomatic of the “great-nation chau­ vinism” characteristic of Marx and Engels. Cf. David Fernbach, “Introduction” to Marx, T he Revolutions o f 1848, 4 9 - 5 2 ; and MEW, 5: (18 vi 1848) 8 0 - 8 2 , and 6: (13 i 1849) 1 6 5 -7 6 . 57. Cf. M arx’s early comment to Arnold Ruge that the reform of consciousness would show “dass die Menschheit keine neue Arbeit beginnt, sondern mit Bewusstsein ihre alte Arbeit zu Stande bringt.” MEGA, 3 —1: (ix 1843) 57.

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fies, in the final analysis, enjoyment on earth,58 and the concrete manner in which this development is to take place forms the most influential force behind Marxian theory: the dialectics operating his “materialist” history. It is here that the theory of creative labor is fleshed out in a world drama that identifies the proletariat as both the concrete individ­ ual of the early theory of labor and the ultimate h om o aestheticus of history. Critique o f Capitalist Totality The mature theory of capitalist social totality that Marx evolved dur­ ing the 1850s and 1860s depicts the proletariat as the historical mani­ festation of the system of wage labor on which the surplus value of capitalism feeds. This is a complex statement, and it presupposes an ex­ tended argument that is made all the more difficult by the dialectical character of its methodological dependence on the earlier theory of (creative) labor transposed onto the newer historical or “material” analysis of capitalist totality.59 In order, then, to grasp the active ex­ change between M arx’s “theory” and his “history” as a dynamic point­ ing toward a real and decisive transformation in “history” as human emancipation, a few words of clarification are needed regarding the Marxian method of analysis itself. Marx accepts the “rational core” to Hegelian dialectics. He preserves the clement of consciousness, however, within the notions of material society and social totality which make up the being of that conscious­ ness. M arx’s point of departure, the methodological “subject,” is so­ ciety as the totality of social relationships. But by this phrase the mature Marx means less the composite of individuals argued in his early thought than “the sum of connections, relations . . . , in which these individuals stand to one another.” Accordingly, the concept of society refers to a specific historical society and condition, and any analysis of the modern 58. OPM, 125, 307. Cf. Rose’s summary of M arx’s transformation of Hegel: “Pro­ duction will again be artistic, the object ’human’ (and therefore also ’beautiful’).” Marx's Lost Aesthetic, 72. 59. In Theorien iiber den Mehru/ert, vol. 1, Marx notes: “ Kapitalistische Produktion ist gewissen Produktionszweigen, Z. B., der Kunst und Poesie feindlich.” MEW, 2 6 - 1 : 257. This page offers M arx’s clearest— and most potent— statement of the cor­ rect dialectical perspective on the relation of “material” to “spiritual production” and “civilization.”

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epoch must focus on civil, or bourgeois, society. By the same token— and here the dialectical character of Marxian analysis asserts itself— the Marxian method is itself inconceivable without a society primarily pre­ occupied with a mode of production in which production itself has been “freed” from all prior historical constrictions. Bourgeois society is unique for containing both the richest abstractions and the most ex­ treme contradictions. The undeniable historical fact that Marx, like He­ gel, methodologically argues for the primacy of the abstract shows that society has materially (that is to say, historically) reached the widest gap between humanity and the natural conditions of its reproduction.60 If bourgeois society is its original “subject,” the “object” of Marxian analysis is the object in its historically social form. Again, granted that the society in question is bourgeois society, its proper object must be the “commodity,” the product whose primary value depends on the ex­ change function. Unlike general objects (the environment) which are simply free for human use (“use value”) and unlike objects containing human labor (“value”), the commodity is an object whose value stems primarily from exchange or “social use value.” 61 In a direct barter relationship the “immediate identity” between par­ ticipants prevents mystification from entering economic activity. But with more complex exchanges a third factor, the common medium of exchange, begins to take on a life of its own. M arx’s theory of labor reveals that the “object” being exchanged is really the human labor going into the production of two products, and since human labor (or human power) is common to all commodities, human labor, and not 60. Cf. esp. MEW, 2 6 —1: 257. G, 28, 189. Marx often uses the parallel of the retina’s reversal of perception of objects to stress that the “ Ideal” must be seen as “das im Menschenkopf umgesetzte und iibersetzte Matcrielle” rather than as a “Demiurg des Wirklichcn” (KAP, 1: 27). Also MEGA, 1—5: 1 5 -1 6 . M arx’s comments on the abstract in G, which has influenced Louis Althusser’s interpretation of his thought, resembles in part Kant’s analogies of experience. G, 176. In DI, “social” meant “das Zusammenwirken mehrerer Individuen, gleichviel unter welchen Bedingungen, auf welche Weisc und zu welchem Zweck verstanden wird” (19). G, 2 0 - 2 8 , 3 8 8 - 8 9 ; KAP, 3: 826. Note the distinc­ tion between M arx’s historical materialism and “abstract” materialism in KAP, 1: 393 n.39, 96 n.33. On wealth: G, 438, 439, 494. Examples abound of the Hegelian method applied to production and the commodity: KAP, 1 :1 2 ,1 6 ,1 1 8 ,1 2 7 ,1 6 3 ,5 1 2 ,7 9 1 ; G, 60. 61. MEW, 19: 369. G, 506; KAP, 1: 49, 62; cf. M. Nicolaus, “Foreword” to Marx, Grurtdrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 37. Capitalism is distinctive not so much for producing commodities as for treating the commodity as its characteristic product; this, in turn, implies its second characteristic of producing for the sake of surplus value. KAP, 3: 8 8 6 - 8 7 . Morawski tries to introduce the notion of “aesthetic use-value” to dis­ tinguish the aesthetic pleasure afforded by an object from its exchange value. But “use value” as such should suffice to uphold the necessary distinction. “Introduction” to L. Baxandall and S. Morawski, cds., D ocum ents on Marxist Aesthetics (New York: Inter­ national General, 1973), 1: 16.

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money, creates value.62 From this perspective, all products are commen­ surable, and human labor, being a temporal movement, makes time “the measure of all labor.” When a society is principally concerned with the commodity product, emphasis is laid on growth of an exchange and money economy, and human activity is gradually turned into a homo­ geneous presence reducible to the equivalences set by “labor time” : money and the attendant commodification, by removing all qualitative distinctions, become the “radical leveler” of society and individuals.63 Capitalism, according to Marx, is a social and economic system re­ sulting from actual labor activity, but this reality is masked by the ap­ parent alchemical power of money to expand indefinitely.64 So long as society was narrowly committed to production of use values, values which met tangible needs, only occasional surpluses yielded money (normally in the form of lasting metallic goods), and the power of these surpluses was strictly limited by the absence or paucity of commodity production. It requires the steady growth of the commodity, through lengthy periods of social change engendered by the struggle between classes for control of human and natural resources, to reach the stage of expanded production forces. These yield the kind of surplus value that represents the excess of labor power in the production of a good over the amount needed to ensure literal maintenance and reproduction of the laborer.'’5 In a capitalist society this struggle between exploiting and exploited classes comes to a head through the division of the population into an exploiting capitalist and an exploited wage laborer.66 Here an absolute “alienation” of the human essence as creative laborer obtains: the “lifeexpression” (Leberts-ausserung) of labor has become an “alienation of life” (Lebens-entausserung)S7 In this system of universal equivalences, value reverts to the individual; but this individual lacks the sense for individuality that can come only through work on the object.68 Capital 62. KAP, 1: 8 6 ,8 7 , 119. 63. G, 5 0 6 - 7 ; KAP, 1: 7 2 - 7 4 , 146. 64. G, 173; KAP, 1: 62. “Alle Wissenschaft ware iiberflussig, wenn die Erscheinungsform und das Wesen der Dinge unmittelbar zusammenfielen.” KAP, 3: 825. 65. KAP, 1: 2 3 0 - 3 1 , 249, 250; G, 507, 512, 527, 532, 556. 66. The necessity for, rather than the mere historical fact of, the correlation between “free” or wage laborer and capitalist is given firm analytic support in G. A. Cohen, Karl M arx’s T heory o f H istory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 180. 67. MEGA, 1—3: 117—18. This transformation encourages M arx to apply the lan­ guage of alchemy, sorcery, magic, and occultism to the standard view of capitalistic trans­ formations, e.g., KAP, 1: 126, 145, 169, 170; G, 136; M anifest, MEGA, 1—6: 531. 68. C, 133, 723.

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meanwhile seeks to reduce the cost of labor to a minimum, but depends on it for the value of its commodities. Since, however, the rate of surplus value tends to decrease with the repetition of a given productive process, its productivity cannot find a final stability. The entire system is logi­ cally “doomed,” since its search for surplus value cannot continue in­ definitely as it becomes primarily dependent on technological innova­ tion, which has no obvious limits, rather than on direct labor time. Unable to clear its self-imposed barrier of labor value and the product as commodity, capitalism confronts its own self-contradiction, giving rise to the emancipatory potential seized by Marxian revolutionary thought/9 This emancipatory potential is embodied in the composite product of the victim of capitalism and the carrier of real value behind its system: the “proletariat.” The proletariat is the bearer of creative labor, which is the inner (“dialectical”) essence of the material evolution of society. Its character as the agent or subject of history can be exhaustively re­ vealed only in the very act of transforming capitalism, but we shall see that the specific content of Marxian “history” offers a glimpse of the aesthetic quality that rules the proletariat at the moment of its active assumption of the genuine “history” of the Marxian future. To underscore this aesthetic undercurrent to the Marxian proletariat, we begin with the bare fact of the proletariat as the wage laborer of capitalism. “Wage” labor is a social phenomenon culminating the pro­ cess that Marx calls “the primitive accumulation of capitalism” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, which entailed the reduction of a certain kind of laborer into the wage laborer.70 This pro­ cess itself requires two factors: a laborer must both be free to sell his labor on the market and be forced to do so. The first condition presup­ poses the supplanting of traditionalist, immediate bonds to the land, whether in the social form of a free peasantry, serfdom, or slavery; the second presupposes loss of control over the means of production.71 In M arx’s schematic division of historical social modes prior to capi­ talism proper, the critical mode for primitive accumulation is the medi­ eval.72 Medieval society was made up of peasant agriculture on a small 69. G, 4 3 9 - 4 0 . 70. KAP, 1: 7 4 1 - 9 1 . 71. KAP, 1: 1 8 2 -8 3 . 72. The basic modes are primitive communism, the Classic (Greek and Roman), the Oriental (Slavonic), and the medieval (Germanic). G, 9, 3 9 1 —92, 3 9 5 —96; KAP, 3: 8 9 0 - 9 1 . G, 375, 397; an early version is in D l, 1 2 -1 4 . Marx speaks of the “commu­ nism** of the Incas as a variant of the Oriental form. KAP, 3: 884.

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scale and the pursuit of independent handicrafts. Balanced between primitive ownership of land in common and fully developed slave pro­ duction, it was embodied in workers who were independent of, and apart from, the landed property of primitive communism and who per­ sisted in an objective existence beyond their labor. These, according to Marx, were the artisans or craftsmen: the “semi-artist” (H albkiinstler). For M arxs eventual ideal of an aesthetic postcapitalistic order the vital feature of this mode is that such workers are the true ancestors to the modern proletariat, for they are artisans who relate to themselves and to others as proprietors rather than as mere laborers and who, making up an essential component of the medieval commune, create work that is both artisanly and civic {ban diver km assig und stddtisch).7J Precisely this “semi-artistic” character of artisan labor then becomes a pivotal force in Marx’s ideal of the emancipatory potential in moderti labor.’4 The Marxian artisan is engaged in activities that are closely linked to “art” through his deployment of advanced instruments. Re­ quired to make a complete product, he becomes familiar with every stage of the creative process, since the division of labor under which he operates is confined to the making of a single product rather than of the simple parts making up the product. Such universality familiarizes him with the skill and dexterity involved in shaping a whole, and thinking in terms of the totality of a product awakens aesthetic perception. Further­ more, his work on a single product cultivates self-purpose and special­ ized talent, a distinct advantage over earlier forms of production. Hence the division of labor of guild activity is still favorable to individuality, and since the product is treated as a whole it holds in check the kind of commodity production that is dependent on abstract labor time and mass production. Artisan labor transforms labor by substituting instru­ ments of production for direct possession and cultivation of the earth, yet its “half-artistic” character precludes the kind of expansion of the labor process that machinery and the factory will erect on the backs of the “free” laborer of early capitalism.75 M arx’s admiration for the artisan does not, however, overlook the 73. KAP, 1: 354 n.24: this is the ideal state. G, 375. Land in the medieval mode was originally held by isolated families who occasionally gathered together (Z usam m en kom men) with other residents to pledge mutual support (G, 383). The city was a residue from the system of antiquity. G, 378. 74. Marx frequently remarks on the 44semi-artisticMnature of artisanal labor: G f 397, 399, 4 2 7 - 2 8 n .** *; KAP, 1: 403, 405. In his account, the guild keeps the worker to a sense of the whole. D l, 41. 75. KAP, 1: 403. As Marx notes, a key artisanal activity in history is weaving, the first and main form of manufacture in the medieval mode and one basis for the unity of indus­ try and agriculture found in the Oriental mode. KAP, 3: 3 4 6 ; D I, 45.

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particularism of guild loyalty. Although the artisan is a precursor of the hom o ludens of postcapitalism, the “fully human” being presupposes self-awareness on the part of humanity as a whole and liberation of all the creative abilities of each individual.76 Preceding the possibility of this self-awareness, according to both Marx and Hegel, lies the historical ex­ perience of the “night” of the laborer through the process of primitive accumulation that gradually destroys the artisan world of guild and commune. The origins of the “semi-artist’s” ordeal date from a time when the me­ dieval and Renaissance sovereign city-states began to wane as the small renter accumulated wealth in the unprecedented circumstances of agri­ cultural progress combined with long-order contracts with landlords and laborers.77 By the late sixteenth century, the English renter in par­ ticular had grown into the rich capitalist farmer operating on the fringes of rural and city life; aided by the new world market, he went on to displace both the guild masters and the feudal lords, by buying land from the latter and impoverishing the former.78 A further century of bru­ tal oppression, augmented by the Reformation and theft of church lands, then gave birth to the modern wage laborer when the capitalist and the early modern state, heavily dependent on the wealth of this new capitalism, conspired to institute laws against idleness and vagabondage, forcing humans not only to labor in the deadening conditions of the fac­ tory but also to stand ready in a reserve industrial army for areas of new production.79 For Marx’s notion of the proletariat a key distinction in this process 76. KAP, 1: 161. Marx notes how the contm unio of the medieval mode was as much a term of opprobrium among the feudal class as comm unism is among modern capitalists, for it was the medieval commune that invited the farmer to flee the land and feudalism for the “free” city. MEW, 28: (27 vii 1854) 384. The word capitalia “aufkommt mit dem Aufkommen der Kommunen” (382). 77. K A P 1: 743; C, 397. Marx himself does not go into the possible links between the Florentine commune as perpetuator of the polis tradition and as precursor of the capi­ talist temper. Sombart dates the development of calculation and commercial arithmetic from the time of the Florentine Pisano’s L iber A bbaci (1202), adding that by 1303 simple bookkeeping had been perfected in Florence. W. Sombart, The Quintessence o f C api­ talism (New York: Howard Fertig, [1915] 1967), trans., 1 2 6 -2 7 . 78. KAP, 1: 7 7 1 - 7 2 . Marx mentions the prior discovery of gold and silver in Amer­ ica, the looting of the East Indies, and Africa as the source of slaves (7 7 8 -7 9 )— all accom­ plishments of imperialism. On circumventing the commune and feudal lords, see KAP, 1: 778. 79. KAP, 1: 7 4 2 - 4 3 , 651, 661, 762, 673; D l, 45. Although the capitalist needed more labor, this did not drive up wages, since he secured an increase in variable labor (more labor done by a given individual) rather than in the number of laborers employed (KAP, 1: 664).

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is the one between the medieval cooperative enterprise and the factory world into which the former artisan, peasant, and clergyman are blood­ ily driven. Medieval manufacturing had been a “natural” or spon­ taneous operation in which the craftsman continued to handle tools and was required to display knowledge, judgment, and will. In contrast, manufacture between the mid-seventeenth and the late eighteenth cen­ tury presupposed the “detail” laborer who sacrificed the range of his abilities to the collective production of a single commodity directed by the capitalist. Whereas the precapitalist laborer had preserved the con­ dition of his existence in the natural character of the medieval work­ shop, the capitalist workshop attacked the very roots (Lebensw urzel) of the individual by reducing him to a cog in a set of automated operations.80 From this comparison it is plain that M arx’s attack on division of labor, a radical extension of Schiller’s and the German classicists’ de­ fense of the universal individual, is really aimed at “detail” labor. Draw­ ing on the critique by Adam Ferguson (the “teacher,” Marx notes, of Adam Smith) of the crippling effect of division of labor on the whole being, and on Dugald Stewart’s narrative of manufacture laborers as “living automatons,” Marx quotes Ferguson to the effect that industrial England has been reduced to “a nation of Helots.” 81 Certainly there is little question that the most compelling passages of Capital are those that contain M arx’s exposure of the process by which human beings de­ prived of land or the means of carrying on an independent livelihood are then driven by formal laws into factories, there to lose former skills through assembly work. Eventually unfit for any activity beyond detail labor, their humanity (“the elasticity and verve of the life-energies which find in the change of activity itself their recuperation and stimula­ tion”) is finally crushed by the monotony of the machine.82 Marx’s conclusion is therefore damning. The claims of the Adam Smiths of the capitalist era that diversity of talents results from division of labor and exchange is wide of the mark. Not only does factory work operate against learning potential, it is worse than simple natural igno­ rance since it acts to injure the intellectual and bodily organs of human beings. Meanwhile, by sundering material from intellectual labor, such exploitation isolates human consciousness from the labor that sustains it as a body and encourages the intellectual arm of society to consider itself “emancipated” within the alienating world of “pure” theory. Fi80. KAP, 1: 356, 358, 382, 385, 377, 384. 81. KAP, 1: 373 n.5, 375, 375 n.56, 381 n.63, 382 n.66, 383 nn.68, 70. 82. KAP, 1: 3 5 6 ,3 8 2 ,3 9 0 ,3 6 1 .

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nally, as an ultimate social corruption, mankind is herded into the frag­ mentation of city and country: while peasants flock to the cities and fac­ tories and the great metropoles of capitalism spread over the countryside, the new species of capitalism, the “narrow-minded land animal” and the “narrow-minded city animal,” emerge as the atrophied human products of the division of labor.83 What, then, can be said of the mature capitalism which represents the focal point of the Marxian diagnosis? Characterized, on the one hand, by anarchic relations and, on the other, by despotism, its most clear-cut manifestations, according to Marx, will be found in American society (and, within that society, California). With its governmental arm fully subordinated to civil society, America subjugates nature on an unprece­ dented scale, destroying the soil and robbing both laborer and land of future fertility. Marx, however, is far from condemning America as a whole, since he also sees the “free” American as an early countermodcl of the kind of postcapitalist individual he foresees, one whose capacity to “apply himself” to any task rather than to a class or rank and whose approach to labor as a means to create general wealth embodies the uni­ versalization implicit but repressed in the capitalist stage of history. At its most mature— and therefore critical— stage of development, capi­ talism thus betrays its dialectical character both as “universal objec­ tification as total alienation” and, “turned on its head,” as the fully ma­ terial conditions for “the total, universal development of the productive powers of the individual.” 84 At this stage of Marx’s analysis Marxian revolutionary theory takes over, reintroducing the proletariat as the “gravedigger” of its oppressor. Universal alienation, the condition of the former artisan and “semiartist” consciousness at the climax of capitalist “progress,” breeds the conditions for a self-consciousness of the new “universal class.” For it is only this particular consciousness that recognizes in its own living con83. KAP, 1: 422. D l, 21, 3 9 - 4 0 ; KAPt 1: 373; this theme is found as early as MEGA, 1 - 1 : 497. 84. KAP, 1: 3 7 7 ,5 2 9 - 3 0 ,7 9 5 - 9 6 ; KAP, 3: 888; G, 8 4 4 ,2 5 ; MEGA, 1 - 1 : 581; D l, 52. Marx contrasts America to “barbarians” (Russia), who are simply fit and ready to be used for anything. Marx was particularly impressed by the explosive growth of California after the 1849 discovery of gold, and he came to see the state as the quintessential example of “die Umwalzung durch kapitalistische Zentralisation.” MEW, 34: (5 xi 1880) 478. But he also envisaged the start of a new Pacific era in world trade which would replace the Atlantic era as the latter had the Mediterranean. MEGA, 1 - 1 0 : 2 1 8 —19. M arx’s views on the “free” American refer to an epoch before the onset of full-scale capitalism in Amer­ ica in the 1870s. MEW, 34: (15 xi 1878) 359. C, 387, 415.

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ditions and loss of humanity (defined, let us recall, as socializing cre­ ative labor) the need to seize the production process and put an end to all remaining barriers to its own universal activity and creativeness.85 Marx had already stated the classic argument for this seizure in the Communist M anifesto with its prophecy of the necessary victory by the proletariat over the bourgeoisie and a final end to class conflict. After 1851, however, M arx’s economic explorations yield a more technical understanding of the objective limits to the capitalist mode of produc­ tion, and Marx increasingly sees in “science and technics” the ultimate destroyer of capital and surplus value: as capital becomes more tech­ nological in its search for surplus value, it depends less on direct labor time and more on expansion of fixed capital (the technical machinery of production), thereby driving labor toward the role of supervision of the production process. A first indication of this trend for Marx can be detected in modern factory conditions. Unable in the long run to waste the human contribu­ tion to the production process, capitalism calls upon scientific innova­ tion to promote variation of labor, fluency of function, and mobility. Although the indiscriminate herding of men, women, and children into the harsh conditions of detail labor produces human monstrosities, it also inadvertently creates the preconditions for the future collective working group composed of both sexes and all ages; indeed, under the aegis of enlightened factory owners such as Robert Owen, this potential for training children in both mind and body to a variety of tasks, “the single method for producing many-sided developed human beings,” is already being exploited.87 If, then, revolutionary possibilities for a new society inhere in the unique “technical basis” of advanced capitalism, with its annihilation of all barriers but that of the abstract labor time on which its own exploi­ tative class structure depends, it is pointless, according to Marx, to speak of reformism, or even of better conditions and increased wages for the laboring masses, in any but a tactical way. For the capitalist mode cannot do without exploitation of surplus labor and it is, at all events, doomed through the contradiction between the expansion of technological frontiers it promises and its own constricted social basis. It is equally pointless, “quixotic” in M arx’s language, to call for revolu­ tion where all material conditions required for a classless society have 85. G, 440, 545. 86. KAP, 1: 618, 632; G, 5 8 6 - 8 9 , 5 9 2 - 9 3 . 87. KAP, 1: 511, 524, 508, 512.

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not yet been fulfilled. But to contend that the negation of capitalism must develop gradually (nach und ttach) is not to underplay the violence of its eventual collapse. There can be no serious hopes for a “quiet meta­ morphosis” when the contradictions necessarily culminate in economic crises and the exploiting class is driven to ever more ferocious defense of its control of property, of the sacrosanct “principle” of private property. Force is indeed to be the “midwife” to the transfiguration foreseen by Marx.ss No revolution, then, without a radical proletariat. Yet after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions Marx was forced to pay greater attention to de­ velopment of working-class consciousness through unions and inter­ national solidarity during the extended period of mature capitalism. Granted, however, that there can be no genuine political revolution without prior “full development” of the capitalist forces of production, it is worth asking whether Marx’s analysis has given sufficient indica­ tion of the critical stage at which this condition is met.KV From the 1850s to his death in 1883, Marx betrayed an almost ex­ cessive sensitivity to each economic crisis as a barometer of the final breakdown of capitalism as a system.90 Still, despite two world wars and the appearance of ostensibly Marxist states in world history, at least three instances of the survival of capitalism and its development of new productive capacities can be said to have taken place in the twentieth century.91 More recent Marxist commentators have therefore resorted to new possible turning points in the advance of these capacities. They have argued that capitalism reaches its dialectical totality when it has penetrated all interstices of local economies to make up a world market; or that the maturation of automation, not merely the increase in auto­ matic machines but the automatic production of automatic machines, furnishes the end term of surplus value; or, finally, that (drawing on a previously unpublished chapter from Capital) capitalist society faces 88. D/, 58; KAP, 1: 511, 646. E. Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, (1972J 1975), trans., 575. G, 77, 600, 779, 128. 89. Marx insisted to the end that only the working class could liberate the working class. MEW, 34: (17—18 ix 1879) 4 0 7 —8. Before 1848, Marx saw this class as emerging in the revolution itself. D/f 60. G, 440. 90. Yet this did not mean that he necessarily looked foward to a general war. As he noted, war introduces a period of “nutzlose Erschopfung der Krafte.” MEW, 34: (12 ix 1880) 464. 91. Henri Lefebvre, T he Survival o f Capitalism (London: Allison and Busby, 1976), trans., 50.

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collapse when crisis strikes at the reproduction not only of the means of production but also of the relations of production, the social relations.92 An empirical assessment of the available evidence would be hard put, however, to find support for any of these arguments. Late nineteenthcentury claims regarding colonial penetration of Third World markets as marking the inevitable beginning of the end remind us of the longev­ ity of the first claim. Granted that the process toward a world market might make a critical advance in the near future, it is worth asking whether this longevity partially reflects the absorption of Western com­ merce into local Third World economies without those economies suc­ cumbing to the inner rationale of capital as depicted by Marx; at any rate, the world market has already produced a bourgeoisie in those quarters that is at least as dedicated to the principles and conduct of capitalism as its Western progenitors. Nor need full-scale automation imply more than a new variant of the struggle between exploiters and exploited; as exponents of this view acknowledge, it would still remain possible for fully automated industries to exist in advanced countries, from which they might draw on the needed surplus values through ex­ change for nonautomatically produced commodities from other, Third World countries— even if this state of affairs “would be immeasurably explosive.” 9’ As to the crisis of relations of production, although “their difficulties are mounting” there “is neither an economic nor an ideologi­ cal barrier to stop the more lucid and well informed leaders from com­ ing to grips with them.” 94 In other words, for Marxist theory the limitations of capitalism turn out to be depressingly elastic. It may be conceded that like all historical systems, capitalism contains its limiting principle and M arx’s attack on the unique nature of capitalist exploitation is particularly impressive in showing the character of this principle. But if a less platitudinous claim is being urged than that capitalism is a transient historical phenomenon, Marx and Marxism have failed to present sufficiently objective proof to guarantee in a meaningful way the imminent fall of this system. The ultimate strength of Marxian analysis resides instead in a differ­ ent quarter. It is the subjective zone of self-conscious transformative ac92. The “ unpublished chapter** of Das K apital that inspired Lefebvre’s thesis in T he Survival o f Capitalism apparently shows that the worldwide expansion of the market was a qualitative leap (60). Also 52. Mandel, Late Capitalism , 2 0 6 —7, and “The Specific Na­ ture of the Third Technological Revolution,** 184—222. 93. Mandel, Late Capitalism , 207 n.43. 94. Lefebvre, The Survival o f Capitalism , 118.

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tivity, mental and practical, by the exploited class or proletariat as nega­ tive principle of the capitalist mode of production that offers the most promising and enduring aspect of the Marxian revolutionary legacy. Later orthodox Marxist dogma, refusing to locate M arx’s thought within a more universal movement toward creation of the total being and free society, found itself endorsing acts of arrogance, brutality, and inhumanity that it justified with “scientific” guarantees of the oppressor’s imminent collapse. Yet M arx’s own thought, stemming from a much wider framework than that of his strict followers, owes much of its en­ during power to a more imaginative tradition of human emancipation. Like his idealist predecessors and social romantic rivals, M arx’s ulti­ mate contribution to a human revolution hinges on an image, only partly based on his “science,” of a postcapitalist order of being. This vision of a future “Gemeinwesen,” paradoxically the least systemati­ cally developed and most subjectivist of Marxian themes, brings to the fore Marx’s ultimate contribution to our theme of an aesthetic state. An Aesthetic “G em einw esen” For all his hostility toward the utopian project, Marx has been num­ bered among the followers of the romantic ideal of harmonious social unity. As one commentator remarks: “The origin of this dream is to be found in the idealized image of the Greek city-state popularized by Winckelmann and others in the eighteenth century and subsequently taken up by German philosophers. Marx seems to have imagined that once capitalists were done away with the whole world could become a kind of Athenian a g o r a ” 95 How true is this charge? Any considered judgment will first have to come to terms with M arx’s comments on postcapitalist society. Of these, two strands will be explored below. The first covers M arx’s con­ ception of the political transition to communism, particularly as reflected in his diagnosis of the Paris Commune of 1871. The second evaluates his views on postcapitalist humanity and “human” communism. When confronted with the historical fact of the Paris Commune, Marx deliberately refrained from calling it a state.96 His attitude was in fact 95. Kolakowski, Main Currents o f Marxism, 3: 527. 96. David Fernbach, “Introduction** to Marx, T he First International and After, 38. Attacking the call in the Gotha Programme for a “free state,** Marx pointed out that free­ dom means converting the state to an organ subordinate to society. G oth a, 2 7 - 2 8 .

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common to nineteenth-century radical definitions of the state as a juris­ diction over specific territory controlled by a bureaucratic legal monop­ oly of force and separate from the mass of the members of a society.97 At all events, it was not considered inconsistent to attack this institution while simultaneously promulgating a radical image of social community. Marx, of course, would not have championed the historical polis it­ self with its dependence on slavery, its self-sufficiency, and its contingent ethical outlook (“Sittlichkeit”). Yet the Hegelian legacy in his thought of favoring a universal class to supersede the confined vision of the polis opened up another quandary which Marx seems never to have cared to resolve.9* Marx.generally ignored the problems arising from the distinc­ tion between a universal class and a community restricted to a finite space and membership, for he assumed that a proletariat system of pro­ duction would dispense with difficulties emanating from the politicalstate sphere of bourgeois practice. M arx’s own watchword therefore became the “commune,” and as the “political form of social emancipa­ tion” or “the positive form” of the social republic sought by 1848 radi­ calism, the Commune of 1871 embodied for him the formal institution that could lead to the future “Gemeinwesen” of his eschatology: “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical [s/c] emancipation of Labor.” 99 The key element of the Paris Commune for M arx’s formally political ideal was its character as a working-class government with a “thor­ oughly expansive political form” directed toward the ultimate “expro­ priation of the expropriators.” This aim of transforming the mode of production into “mere instruments of free and associated labor” regu­ lated through cooperative societies to a common plan revealed for the first time the political organs of communism— “ ‘impossible’ Commu­ nism!”— that were now possible. Such organs were the adoption by the commune of “really democratic institutions,” for the commune was the first organization to take seriously the bourgeois pretensions of a repub97. April Carter, T he Political T heory o f Anarchism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 2 9 - 3 0 . 98. MEGA, 1 - 5 : 24. 99. CW, 142; 51, 58, 139. The elected commune consisted of a majority of Blanquists and Jacobins (fifty-seven members) against a minority of Proudhonists (twenty-two mem­ bers) of whom twenty-seven were members of the International; only Leo Frankel was a genuine Marxist. Cf. Seigel, M arx’s Fate, and Avineri, T he Social an d Political T hought o f Karl M arxt 190. The commune was declared on 19 March 1871; by 12 April M arx could claim, “Die Geschichte hat kein ahnliches Beispiel ahnlicher Grosse!” MEW, 33: 205. In this context M arx’s comments on the importance of “accidents” in world history are worth noting (209), as well as his regrets both that the commune had been insufficiently ruthless and that it had failed to follow his strategic recommendations ([12 vi 1871] 229).

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lican form of government and, by adhering strictly to the demands of a democratic polity, even did away with the existing state machinery as the political bulwark of man’s liberation while introducing the “ revolu­ tionary dictatorship of the proletariat,” the political form transitional between capitalism and “Gemeinwescn.” Although Marx did not ex­ pect class struggle to subside during this phase, he saw the commune as furnishing the “rational medium” for carrying out the struggle in “the most rational and human way.” 100 In light of later usage, it is well to recall that M arx’s ideal of a dic­ tatorship of the proletariat meant precisely this commune democracy of the productive class making up a society.101 As “the people acting for itself by itself,” the historical Paris Commune inaugurated a system of municipal counsellors elected by universal suffrage and acting both as legislature and executive while being paid workmen’s wages. In Marx’s vision each individual in the commune would be given slips commensu­ rate with the labor he had done, and he could later exchange these slips for desired goods during a transitional period that still retained “in­ equality” in the principle of equal reward for equal labor.102 Yet the question remains whether Marx adequately faced the unique historical problems of industrial society when he minimized the degree of coercion a commune might need to survive this interregnum. Al­ though a coercive apparatus without a formal state as the organ of class oppression is imaginable, the particular coercion exacted by the com­ mune seems inseparable from the antagonisms brought to bear by the groups comprising M arx’s image of his hypothetical republic of small communes.103 Is Marx’s cheerful view that conflict between rural pro­ ducers and town proletariat will diminish as the former find in the latter “the natural trustees of their interests” especially realistic? 104 100. CW, 59 (first draft). Also 142, 143. In his 1872 “ Preface” to the Comm unist M anifesto Marx states that the main lesson to be learned from the Paris Commune was that the existing state machinery should be destroyed. G otha, 28. For an early use of the phrase, see MEW, 28: (5 iii 1852) 508. 101. For Marx the concept of the class struggle as necessarily leading to the dic­ tatorship of the proletariat was a major theoretical discovery. MEW, 28: (5 iii 1852) 508. 102. G otha, 2 0 - 2 2 . 103. Fiindess and Hirst give the example of the situational and impermanent police organization of the Crow Indians as a case of coercive means without state organization. Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist M odes o f Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 34. It is also worth noting that after 1848 many French radicals proposed a separate city-state for Paris (drawing on the precedents of Swiss cantons and Italian city-republics), hoping that the working populations of other French cities would follow suit. Hemmings, Culture an d Society in France, 179. 104. CW, 141.

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At any rate M arx’s position that the “Aufhebung des Staates” would not abolish administration for nonantagonistic management of produc­ tion significantly divides him from his anarchist rivals.105 For Bakunin the type of concentrated seizure of power and organized apparatus of rule required by Marx would simply have produced another variant of the bureaucratic state.106 While Marx was certainly a more forceful ex­ ponent of basic democracy than his liberal rivals, it must be admitted that Marx never pushed for full exploitation of democratic possibilities and stopped short even of the kind of direct democracy practiced by the classical Athenian assembly (let alone the principle of the lot, which the Athenians regarded as the basis of true democracy), preferring indirect election for the commune and the system he introduced to the League of Communists.107 By opposing forces of the political left that called for mutualism and cooperation, Marx and Engels helped to mute the recep­ tion of Bakunin’s warnings that authoritarian methods deployed for the revolution might themselves become models of action for destroying the free society called for by radical thought. Granted that the Marxian Aufhebung promotes a political community located somewhere between republicanism and anarchism, what can be said of his image of the individuals who might comprise it? M arx’s stan­ dard position that the experience of rampant individualism and atom­ ization is indispensable for forging the alienated personality who will first recognize the universal mission of mankind is a key factor in the question of identifying his postcapitalist universal being. Capitalism be­ comes the dialectical means leading the individual who lives in a state of reciprocal independence only after all possible human and productive relations arc experienced as independent social powers external to him or her. Capitalism itself masks universality as the “alienation of the indi­ vidual from himself and others,” but in postcapitalism this same facet becomes the individual’s “all-sidedness.” If the individual’s work earlier 105. Kolakowski, Main Currents o f M arxism , 1: 360. 106. James Joll, T he Anarchists (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 107—14. 107. Avineri, T he Social and Political Thought o f Karl M arx, 211 n .l. Yet there is evidence that Marx was deeply moved by the spectacle of a large body of citizens exercis­ ing the rights of direct self-government, e.g., his comments on Morgan’s analysis of Athe­ nian democracy (Krader, 209) and his rebuttal to Bakunin’s skepticism over forty million Germans being “Glieder der Regierung” with the comment: “Certainly! Da die Sache mit der Selbstregierung der Gemeine anfangt.’’ MEW, 18: 634. But Marx does not elaborate on the manner in which such self-government might be exercised. For M arx’s relation to anarchist rivals, see Paul Thomas, Karl M arx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), esp. 2 4 9 -3 4 0 .

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represented alien wealth, wealth now reveals itself as full development of human productive forces engendering a many-sided human being. The abstract universality of capitalist activity reified the object; commu­ nism, in contrast, defines wealth no longer in terms even of an object but as the “rich and deep all-sensuous man” who consciously creates objects with his fellow being and recognizes the fluidity inherent in shaping and reshaping objects.108 Marx locates his ideal at the end of a final supersession of the inter­ regnum between the creation of the commune and the final victory of the “Gemeinwesen.” This period itself he calls “crude communism.” Here society proper takes on the role of a “universal capitalist” when labor is increasingly treated not as an activity of labor time (however fairly distributed) but as the full development of activity itself. And here too a new subject or totality can be created. While abandoning the for­ mally metaphysical language of the Young Hegelians, Marx reintroduces their vision of Vereinigutig in his expectation that once communism be­ comes the economic, material base for human development, concrete Vereinigutig can be realized in the totality of all human labor as the con­ scious aim of the individual through “the absolute laboring forth of his creative talents.” 109 Marx accounts for this final development through three main stages. Firstly, the commune political form encourages maturation of a “union of free men” familiar with making economic decisions guided by the principle of human liberation. Driven by the principles that “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” and that each should give according to his ability while receiving ac­ cording to his need, this association breeds “united individuals” living in reciprocal independence and engaged in regulatory and supervisory “social labor.” 110 This world is M arx’s true “Gemeinwesen” : it is com108. KAP, 1: 102; G, 80. Individuals, by this analysis, must first experience rule in the abstract (in contrast to organic situations of mutual dependence) in order to comprehend the overview of relationships that is the presupposition of the “ free individuality” of postcapitalism (G, 82). G, 80, 24, 439. 109. OPM, 112, 118, 121, 126; G, 231, 80; DI, 22, 60. Marx calls the material achievement of communism not a final goal of history but its true foundation. OPM, 126; G, 387. 110. KAP, 1: 92, 102, 94; M anifest, MEGA, 1 - 6 : 546; G, 5 97. G otha, 21. Post­ capitalism “stellt nicht das Privateigentum wieder her, wo hi aber das individuelle Eigenturn auf Grundlage der Errungenschaft der kapitalistischcn Ara: der Kooperation und des Gemeinbesitzes der Erde.” KAP, 1: 791. In the M anifest Marx claims that the aim of com­ munism is “die Abschaffung des biirgerlichen Eigentums” and not the “personliche Aneignung der Arbeitsprodukte zur Widererzeugung des unmittelbaren Lebens.” Capital, as Marx notes, is a collective product and must be controlled collectively. M anifest, MEGA, 1 -6 : 5 3 8 -3 9 .

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munity, communality, but also the individual as a communal being and as a quality of his or her individuality.111 Secondly, a widened “realm of freedom,” the free time made increas­ ingly available by postcapitalist technology, expands time for full devel­ opment of the individual and genuine human creation. Including time for idleness (“play”) no less than for conscious higher activity in the arts and sciences, it stimulates further refinement in human sensibility and passion. Eventually this process forms a new human being capable of entering the production process, “the realm of necessity,” as a con­ stantly becoming, self-creating, and protean personality who inspires (and himself or herself is) experimental science: the superfluous, in Marx’s significant expression, conditions the necessary.112 And, lastly, general control by individuals of their social and eco­ nomic life, cultivating a creative science and technology, realizes “the cultivation of the five senses” in the flowering of a “humane” sen­ sibility.11' The capitalist transformation of the individual capacity to ex­ perience abstract relations and otherness engenders the postcapitalist cultivation of otherness within the sensibility of mutual tolerance. Spon­ taneous relationships embodying understanding for the opposite sex and for individuals of different ages accompany what might be called an ecological attitude toward outer nature: instead of the scarred landscape of town and country in their mutual antagonism, a human environment emerges in which each individual secures the social space for his or her “essential life-expresson” by treating nature as a mediation between the human individual and the inorganic. As each individual consciously grasps his or her own development as a creative process and nature as his or her own body, humanity finally attains to the true universality of the individual’s real and ideal relations.114 Marx’s powerful vision culminates the ideals of German classicism and idealism by anticipating humanity’s ultimate vocation as an aesthetic universality, a creativeness playing with all forms and unifying humans and nature in a free “Gemeinwesen.” 1,5 There is, then, every reason to hold that the Marxian “social individual” embodies the h om o aestheticus of German idealism.116 Of course, Marx approaches this universal 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. Marxist

a . MEGA, 1 - 3 : 2. G, 599, 593. G, 5 9 9 - 6 0 0 ; OPM, 120. MEGA, 1 - 3 : 307, 308; G, 5 9 2 - 9 3 , 440. Avineri, T he Social and Political Thought o f K arl M arx, 91. H om o aestheticus is taken from Morawski, “ Introduction” to D ocum ents in Aesthetics, 1: 24.

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being not through formal aesthetic means but through radical socio­ political change that transforms the condition of the human species. Yet a change of this order, representing the qualitative leap from alienated to creative labor, presupposes a more radical introduction of the aes­ thetic dimension into human society than Schiller and the Swabian idealists had envisaged.117 The romantic chasm between artistic genius and the masses gives way to the universal hom o ludens succeeding hom o faber. There are three principal aspects to M arx’s transformation. First, since it has become the explicit telos of the postcapitalist “Gemeinwesen,” the creative ability of each individual is fully developed. Second, labor itself becomes increasingly aesthetic, through the encouragement of a technological science learning to “play” with nature. And, finally, although Marx himself gives no extended account of this probability, each individual approaches artistic achievement and unification within every domain; he or she bears as it were the seed of the future Gesamtkunstler.u8 Generally, then, Marx lends his support to Fourier’s ideal of strengthening the play element in postcapitalist humanity, and his famous portrayal of the communistic individual engaged in multi­ dimensional tasks during a typical day seems a direct reflection of Fourier’s account of humans in a Flarmonian community.119 While it is true that Marx attacks Fourier for thinking that all labor can become play, his own position differs only to the degree that he questions the standard view of play as an effortless, childlike activity, preferring the struggle and suffering of authentic creativeness, in short, the more dy­ namic notion of play later urged by Nietzsche.120 There are, however, good reasons for the trend of contemporary left­ ist thinkers away from M arx’s materialism toward Fourier himself.121 Reluctant to speculate on utopias and hostile toward experimentation in human sensibility and social reciprocity prior to the revolution, Marx 117. Morawski, “ Introduction,” 47. 118. Morawski thinks that the idea comes from Fourier. The key text is in DI: “ In einer kommunistischen Gcsellschaft gibt es keine Maler, sondern hochstens Menschen, die unter Anderm auch malen” (373) (against Stirner). It is not really taken up in the later writings. 119. Kolakowski, Main Currents in M arxism, 1: 202. Marx refers to Fourier’s Le nouveau m on de industriel et societaire (1848 edition). The closest Marx himself ever ap­ proached to a commune venture was in his early Paris days, when he was briefly involved in Ruge’s plan for a cooperative living arrangement among the Ruges, Marxes, and Herweghs on the phalanstery pattern. McLellan, Karl Marx, 7 9 —80. Seigel, M arx’s Fate, 166. 120. G, 599. 121. Cf., e.g., Marcuse on “passing from Marx to Fourier,” E L, 30; and Henri Lefebvre, “Introduction” to A ctu alitede Fourier (Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1975), 9 - 2 0 .

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gave his support to exclusive concentration on the revolutionary mo­ ment. Denigrating the subjective moment during the transitional epoch itself, Marx only offered a general set of suggestions regarding its nature and encouraged the fatal humanistic and strategic errors that have taught Western Marxists to revive the original “utopian” project of so­ cial romanticism.122 M arx’s “realism” has a great deal to contribute to the larger implications of an aesthetic resolution to the task of human emancipation, but it is a realism that strongly needs the supplement of more subjective contributions that were in fact made during M arx’s own lifetime by other such radical thinkers as Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. ♦

♦

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M arx’s most striking contribution to the theme of an aesthetic state is surely the transformation of the yearnings behind social romanticism into a more realist eschatology: “ [Marx] constitutes as ‘science* that which in Schlegel, Hölderlin, Novalis was only sensed intuitively: that the actualization of their aesthetic ideal is bound to the course of a tem­ poral process, to the ‘fulfillment of time.’ ” I2J This innovation Marx achieves through an unrelentingly “materi­ alist” dialectics of social and economic life. He shows how labor as the alienating activity of commodification can give way to a human activity that is creative, aesthetic labor and brings this dialectics to earth by in­ sisting on retaining the bonds between the “highest” human activities and the material sources of human sustenance. In the final analysis, Marx reminds us both that the aesthetic dimension cannot do without the daily labor reproducing the human as bodily being, and that the aes­ thetic is the sole category that encompasses the mundane life of humans without loss of their spiritual aspirations. Thanks to M arx’s thought, the two aspects of human existence have since found a potentially com­ mon home in the category of daily productive activity. To this basic innovation Marx adds a rigorous revolutionary vector. He argues that the totality of capitalism contains the seed of an aesthetic mode of existence coming into its own when capitalism itself, having made obsolete all previous socioeconomic totalities, comes up against its own barriers. Marx is the first thinker to demonstrate effectively that the history of humanity is the history of the artisanly temperament meta122. Marx himself had warned that “Wer auf historischen Wegen wandelt, darf sich vor Beschmutzung nicht scheuen.” MEW, 34: (4 iv 1876) 178. 123. Kux, Karl M arx: D ie R evolutionare {Confession, 79.

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morphosed into the proletariat, who can become the universal being of Weimar aesthetic humanism. Finally, M arx’s political thought, having shown the incompatibility of this transformation with Hegel’s concept of the modern state, posits the political form of the kind of radical democracy embodied by the Paris Commune. Marcuse’s later call for an epoch of true history, of his­ tory consciously made by “the community of free men who organize their society in accordance with the possibility of a humane existence of all its members,” gives voice to the dramatic image of the new universal being that M arx’s vision of a political partnership of postcapitalist communality first raises.124 It is also true that contemporary explorations into the relationships be­ tween the aesthetic dimension (in ritual, ceremony, and play) and mate­ rial society, as well as a new appreciation of organic societies and cul­ tures of precapitalism that have remained untouched by the alienation of modern society, owe their original stimulation to the political legacy of the Marxian preoccupation with production, work, and the every­ day.125 Yet Marx himself had little to say about the Hegelian realms of art, culture, and religion as social forms themselves. His own contribu­ tion to aesthetics proper is extremely fragmentary, and about all that can be ventured from his brief considerations of a play by Ferdinand Lassalle, his view of Greek art as irreducible to the socioeconomic char­ acter of classical society, and his long-lived admiration for Balzac is that Marx was neither a crude “socialist realist” nor prone to view art as mere ideology. But there is little by way of explicit solutions to the vari­ ous concerns of aesthetics and theory of art that M arx’s materialist the­ ory brings up.126 This shortcoming points to a serious difficulty. Although meant to confirm the primacy of the future “Gemeinwesen,” Marxian totality seems ultimately incapable of coming to grips with the communality that accompanies integral art. While it reveals the contradictory unfold124. Marcuse, SM, 21. 125. M arx’s teacher in Bonn, A. W. Schlegel, had written on the role of rhythm in organic life, “Briefe fiber Poesie, Silbermass und Sprache,” D ie H oren (1795). See also Fredric Jameson’s summary of Ernst Bloch’s project of the E rbe for a future socialism: the uses of the memory of precapitalist societies for Bloch’s Marxist utopianism. “ Reflections in Conclusion,” in Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics and Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), 2 0 9 - 1 1 . 126. Arvon, M arxist Aesthetics, 3, 9 - 1 2 . Yet aesthetics has become the touchstone of the interpretation of Marx for many modern Marxists. As Arvon notes, its relative free­ dom has kept it beyond the reach of Marxist dogmatism (2—3).

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ing of the existing socioeconomic totality, M arx’s insistence upon not adding to the historical given not only fails to appreciate the concrete character of nonindustrial social and cultural life but cannot itself fur­ nish the specifically concrete activity of making history. This lacuna is particularly evident in the evaluation of the social role of religions. Although Marx is to be distinguished from reductionists in his view of religion as a consolation for alienated man, his own ten­ dency was to follow the abstract approach to religious activity spon­ sored by “progressive” circles of the nineteenth century, a tendency stemming from faulty devotion to a “realism” that increasingly reduced human creative activity to a technologically interpreted notion of mode of production. Thus, although the Marxian “mode of production” lo­ cates the element of earth in human life, the materiality of earth in early Marxian thought is displaced by a materialist theory that has little room for natural (as opposed to economic) factors. As one commentator has noted, the body, sex, and geography hardly play a concrete role in the completed Marxian vision, “one of the most characteristic yet most ne­ glected features of his Utopia.” 127 Beyond these shortcomings, a more damning charge has been laid at Marx’s doorstep: that of subordinating philosophy to technicity. Since this topic has drawn extensive comment and touches directly on the role of the aesthetic dimension in M arx’s vision of postcapitalist society, some clarification of terms seems called for before the validity of the charge can be tested. If “technology” is intended to cover a general class of activity, then of course Marx was simply being logical in laying stress on technology, the particular set of human techniques that each society devises for produc­ ing and maintaining its material life; there is technology among ancient Polynesian navigators no less than in the modern industrial factory. If, however, the focus of the term is modern industrial technology, then Marx seems on the right track when he attacks it on behalf of the hu­ manity it crushes and argues for a future technology controlled by a free association of individuals along lines sharing contemporary notions of a “soft” or “artisan” technology, a “neotechnics” sustaining the ecologi­ cal dimension.128 Actually, in his call for a new communality Marx has 127. Kolakowski, Main Currents o f M arxism , 1: 4 1 4 ; also 413. 128. Lefebvre, T he Survival o f Capitalism f 205; Mumford, Technics a n d Civiliza­ tion, 2 1 2 —67.

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more often been taken to task precisely for overlooking the allegedly re­ morseless logic of “advanced” technology.129 The major objection to M arxs affair with technology lies elsewhere. Marx has been accused not merely of having favored a more “human­ ized” technology. He has been censored for believing in technocracy or technocratism, in techne as the essence of the subject-object dialectics he inherited from German idealism.130 This accusation, to be sure, over­ looks the extent to which M arx’s bias has been historically welcome to a tradition of thought that exaggerated the distinction between the ar­ tisanal and the artistic; at the same time it is worth asking whether Marx went too far in the opposite direction with his Aufhebung of modern transcendental subjectivity. It cannot be denied that a theory based on mode of production en­ courages belief in the future primacy of technique, and there is little question that Marx regarded modern technology as a liberating discov­ ery. Indeed, M arx’s critiques of artisanal socialism might sit uneasily with contemporary distrust of technocratism. Yet even here the “mo­ ment” of German idealism is not absent in Marx’s approach to technol­ ogy.131 Although he docs insist on the primacy of the productive ele­ ment, Marx never abandons his early humanist position that the prime goal is control of production and technology by free and common delib­ eration. The later Marx is at one with the authors of The Germ an Ide­ ology in holding that reduction of necessary labor time in communism must serve creative activity, and that earth rather than human produc­ tion is the ultimate frame of reference. It might even be urged that Marxian humanism and technocratism really belong to the projected postmetaphysical and postcapitalist di­ mension of play that has become prominent among recent radical com­ mentators.132 But while this approach forms one of the more fecund readings of the Marxian intellectual venture, it should not blur M arx’s definite bias in favor of the technological. In sum, then, the safest posi­ tion regarding M arx’s own opinions is that, as opposed to the legacy of “Marxism,” Marx never directly confronted the Heideggerian “ques­ tion about technics” in terms of the larger Western drive toward tech129. E.g., Plamenatz, Karl M arx’s Philosophy o f Man, 3 9 4 -9 6 . 130. Kosras Axelos, M arx: penseur d e la technique (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1961), 232. 131. Marcuse, C R , regards that “moment” as including the realm of the imagination and sensuousness (70). 132. Axelos, M arx, 233.

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nique, and his view of technology was still characterized by a nonreflective European faith in technique which Heidegger for one has traced back to Descartes. Even so, if Heidegger is the first modern thinker to take on the problematic nature of techne in its relation to artwork and the modern fixation on technique, Marx remains his predecessor for his prior espousal of the dimension of earth. It is possible that Marx may not have been as oblivious to such objec­ tions as our interpretation so far suggests. The curious role of the Orien­ tal mode of production in his thought forms a fascinating set of argu­ ments which, on the one hand, retain his “Gemeinwesen” ideal while, on the other, introducing factors external to his “scientific” notion of mode of production. Marx sees each economic unit in this world as a self-governing local structure; each village is, “in fact, a separate com­ munity or republic,” while the whole is made up of a collection of “these idyllic republics” fiercely defending their territory against one an­ other.11’ Approvingly quoting an authority on the East, Marx concludes that here “the people practically governed themselves.” m But he also points out the limitations inherent in autarchy. The umbilical cord hold­ ing the individual to his commune prevents a larger political activity and predisposes villages to accept the overall unity of the “Oriental despot.” m Any assessment of M arx’s diagnosis of the Oriental mode cannot fail to note its violation of M arx’s basic theoretical premises. In the Oriental mode Marx accepts the existence of a mode of production that im­ plicitly contradicts the priority he elsewhere accords social production over geography, the logic of historical progress, and uniform human evolution.1'h Whether this contradiction either vindicates a nontechno133. MEW, 28: (14 vi 1853) 2 6 7 —68; the quote in English is from a British parlia­ mentary report. Marx used “Gemeinwesen” to refer to these Indian communities (KAP, 1: 3 5 3 - 5 4 , 378). In KAP, 3: 346, China is included. 134. J. B. Phear, T he Aryan Village, in Krader, 284. During 1880—1882, just before his death in 1883, Marx was occupied with the ethnological writings of Lewis Henry Morgan, John Budd Phear, Henry Sumner Maine, and John Lubbock. 135. KAP, 1: 379; G, 377; MEW, 9: (10 vi 1853) 1 2 7 -3 3 . Cf. Hindess and Hirst, Pre-Capitalist M odes o f Production, for a thorough critique of “The ‘Asiatic* Mode of Production,” 1 7 8 -2 2 0 , esp. 184—98; also Perry Anderson, “The ‘Asiatic* Mode of Production,** in his Lineages o f the Absolutist State (London: Verso, [1974] 1979), 4 6 2 —549. G, 377. Marx does admit to an admiration for the closed or “cellular** struc­ ture of the “kindische Alte Welt,** which is higher than the modern to the extent that one seeks “geschlossene Gestalt, Form und gegebne Begrenzung.” In comparison with this “Befriedigung auf einem bornierten Standpunkt,” the modern, in Marx*s view, appears vulgar. G, 388. 136. Kolakowski, Main Currents o f M arxism, 1: 3 5 0 —51. In any event, M arx never argued the kind of Oriental despotism position that Karl Wittfogel later made popular.

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logical reading of Marx or highlights a basic hiatus in his thought, it forms an important question for future Marxian scholarship. Confirming M arx’s theory of the dynamics of capitalism, the startling growth of productivity and free time in the West has recently revitalized the study of Marxian futurology.” 7 In the 1870s, however, the last de­ cade of M arx’s productive career and the first for the new “PrussianGermanic” Reich, his influence on his own era in Germany remained modest. Marx himself favored the Reich only to the extent that it fur­ ther concentrated capital and swung the political center of gravity to a country whose working-class movements acknowledged his own brand of “scientific” materialism.118 Indeed, while nationalism was sweeping the German regions, a doctrine like M arx’s that gave relatively minor importance to regional or national values clearly lacked extensive popu­ lar appeal. During the 1870s, therefore, the writer and publisher Julius Froebel found himself ignoring revolutionary Marxism as the most dangerous threat to the newly established Reich and the kind of parliamentary politics that he personally espoused, singling out instead the rising star of Richard Wagner. A close member of Young Hegelian circles, Froebel had once almost taken over Ruge’s Deutsche Jahrbucher in Zurich, with Georg Herwegh as its editor.139 Yet, despite his own radical past Froebel For Wittfogel sec Martin Jay, The D ialectical Im agination: A History o f the Vrankfurt S chool and the Institute o f Social Research, 1923—1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 15—16. Clifford Gcertzs account of the kind of landscape used for wet rice cultivation in Java, Bali, and Lombok may be contrasted to the situation in Central Asia and Northeast India, the locus classicus of Wittfogel’s thesis. Agricultural Involution: T he Processes o f E cological Change in Indonesia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 39. For Geertz s serious misgivings about the Wittfogel thesis when applied to Bali, see Peddlars and Princes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 105 n.18. Marx was himself acquainted with Bali as a “noch vollstandig" example of Hindu religion and organization. His source was T. S. Raffles, the former British governor of Sumatra and founder of Singapore. Raffles's History o f Ja v a , 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, [1817] 1965), includes an appendix on Bali as an island of proud and independent indi­ viduals (2: Appendix K). MEW, 28: (14 vi 1853) 2 6 8 -6 9 . 137. Mandel, Late Capitalism, 5 8 2 -8 3 . 138. McLellan, Karl M arx, 4 3 0 —38. The popularity of the Social Democratic Work­ ers' Party was in fact due more to a Lassallean policy of cooperation with the Reich than to M arx, who almost disassociated himself from the Gotha Programme as drawn. Marx was hardly read in the 1870s: fewer than thirty articles on Marxism were available at the rime of his death in 1883. W. Sombart, “Ein Beitrag zur Bibliographic des Marxismus," Archiv fu r Sozialw issenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 20 (1904), 4 1 3 -3 0 . 139. Julius Froebel, D ie G esichtspunkt und Aufgaben der Politik (Aalen: Scientia, [1878] 1971), 340.1 owe this reference to Peter Bergmann, “The Antipolitics of Friedrich Nietzsche," paper delivered at the American Historical Association meeting, 29 Dec. 1978, 3. Marx's opinion of Wagner seems to have been one of amused contempt. MEW,

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came to oppose Wagnerian politics in Bavaria. Having met Wagner in Dresden around 1847, Froebel had been invited in 1864—1865 to help set up a journal in Munich devoted to Wagner’s cause in theatre and politics, but as editor of the Munich Suddeutsche Presse Froebel soon crossed swords with Richard and Cosima. While never questioning Wagner s sincerity, Froebel objected that the composer “saw politics too poetically, 1 might say theatrically or operatically.” 140 Our next chapter tests FroebePs interpretation as it narrates and evaluates the course of Wagner s new politics of art. 34: (19 viii 1876) 23; (21 i 1877) 245; KAP, 1: 183. The decision to publish in Paris rather than Zurich was taken after Herwegh was expelled from the latter city in 1843. Mcl.ellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl M arx, 33. 140. The details on FroebePs relationship to Wagner are in Newman, T he L ife o f Richard Wagner, 2: 3 9 7 - 9 8 ; 3: 4 7 2 - 7 3 , 4 8 4 - 8 5 , 492; 4: 91, 93, 95, 105, 122, and a brief biographical note on 90 n.4. In 1867—1868, Cosima Wagner tried to remove Froebel as head of the Suddeutsche Presse. Instead he bought the paper and ran it as his mouthpiece until 1873, when he entered the German consular service. Froebel claims he was receptive to Wagner’s task of following the Greeks in establishing a theatre on the foundation of a “ freies Volkslebcn” but thought that this must come only after the cre­ ation of a new religion and new social conditions. Ein L eben slau f (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1890), 1: 1 5 6 -5 7 . Froebel, Die G csichtspunktc und Aufgaben der Politik, 341.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

Wagner The Com m unal Artwork

While Marx and Engels were participating in the Rhineland Revolution of 1848, the young kapellmeister for Dresden, Richard Wagner, was en­ gaged in a series of instructive walks with his friend and political men­ tor, August Rockel.1Just back from revolutionary Vienna, where he be­ trayed for the first time a penchant both for radical reorganization of the modern theatre and for a transformation of society at large, Wagner was taking his first incautious steps along the road to the barricades of 1849 Dresden, to political flight, protracted exile, and his transmuta­ tion into the “Red Composer,” the “Marat of music” who would shake and scandalize the dramatic thrones of Europe.2 According to Wagner’s later recollections, Rockel had recently joined the radical camp, Proudhonism, and the project of major social reform of the middle class through the destruction of capital. As he himself was gradually drawn to Rockel’s position, Wagner entertained for the first time “the realization of my ideal of art” through total political recon­ struction. When he asked his friend what would happen to the free spirit and artist if all humans were placed “in an equal rank of labor,” Rockel persuasively answered that equal sharing of the burdens of la­ bor, eventually eliminating the onerous concept of labor itself, would engender activity “that would finally have to take on throughout an ar­ tistic character.” The composer then concluded that Rockel inspired 1. In 1851 Wagner called Rdckel “the one friend/’ MF, 302. 2. The epithets of L e Figaro and L ’Europe Artiste. GS, 16: 28; Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 3 : 4 .

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him for the first time to “visions of a possible, indeed the only shaping of human society corresponding to my highest art-ideals.” 3 Of the major figures in our study, Richard Wagner (1813 —1883) is undeniably one of the more controversial. Composer of music and drama that is unpalatable to many lovers of the art, adored by the Fiihrer of a murderous regime, his life racked by scandal and a some­ times deserved vilification, Wagner’s career includes an ominous turn toward anti-Semitism that is often accepted as conclusive proof of his basically reactionary or protofascist leanings. But, as his recollections of the Rockel discussions intimate, Wagner’s contribution to the quest for an aesthetic state cannot be ignored, for Wagner alone took with abso­ lute seriousness the German mission of realizing the polis through theatre (“theatrocracy” ) and an authentically modern Kunstreligion. Accepting what were still visions for Schiller and Hölderlin, Wagner literally cre­ ated a Theatron, the temple of Bayreuth, achieved at least two works (Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal) uniting music and poeisis to produce the experience of tragedy, catharsis, and ritual for the modern spirit, and furnished an original theory of the relation between music and com­ munity that reflected the Hellenic paradigm of union between public artwork and social harmony. Possibly most important of all, Wagner at­ tempted to found both an aesthetic state in Ludwig II’s Bavaria and a “community” (Gem einde) in Bayreuth, two unique ventures in imple­ menting an aesthetic state.4 Wagner innocently uttered the incriminating word “revolution” in 1847 for the first time,5 yet no one was more surprised by the upheavals that spread the following February from Paris to the major Continental capi­ tals. Hastening to catch up with and surpass this growing swell, Wagner from April 1848 on was a man boldly hurtling across the political spec­ trum to the kind of radicalism that his friend Rockel and the newly ar­ rived anarchist theorist Bakunin espoused.6 Yet, already prior to 1848 in Wagner’s thinking three important leitmotifs had converged, and his 3. ML, 438. 4. “ Like Schiller and Hegel, Hölderlin and Marx, Wagner saw the Greek polis as the historical archetype of community, a lost paradise to be regained.** Carl E. Schorske, “The Quest for the Grail: Wagner and Morris,’* in K. H. Wolff and B. Moore, Jr., eds., T he Critical Spirit: Essays in H on or o f H erbert M arcuse (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 223. 5. “Hier ist ein Damm zu durchbrechen, und das Mittel heisst: Revolution!’* SB, 2: (23 xi 1847) 578. Newman, T he Life o f Richard Wagner, 1: 462. But Wagner’s first true opera, Rienzi, already shows radical leanings towards popular democracy. Ronald Taylor, Richard Wagner: His Life, Art and Thought (New York: Taplinger, 1979), 51. 6. Newman, The L ife o f Richard Wagner, 2: 3 —53.

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later gyrations upon metaphysics, politics, music, and religion all reflect subsequent adjustments to bring them to concrete fruition. These motifs were: the achievement of a “daemonic’' quality to musical language linked with Shakespearean theatre to create a new form of music drama; the unique importance of the German contributions to a synthesis of daemonic music and Shakespearean poetry; and the model of the Athe­ nian polis as the integration of aesthetic and public life. With this last motif, which entered Wagner’s reflections only in the spring of 1847 and vaulted his ambitions from the formal theatre to the political arena, Wagner’s conversion to the ideal of an aesthetic state became complete. The classical style of tonality which Wagner transformed may be briefly described as “the hierarchical arrangement of triads based on the natural harmonics or overtones of a note,” giving pride of place to the fifth and third intervals of the scale.7 The resultant structural arrange­ ment, symmetrical yet unbalanced, enforces an equal distance between all the notes making up the musical octave ( “equal temperament” in place of “just intonation” ) and allows for exploitation of the creative tension between the tonic, or fundamental triad of a major key, and its dominant, the triad based on the cadentially pivotal fifth of that key. In this way classical tonality turns music into a directly dramatic event— the drama is a function of the musical frame proper— thereby heighten­ ing the possibilities for dramatic revelation and resolution.K The anecdote that as a child Wagner had dreamed of the tonic, third, and fifth intervals as virtually tangible figures appositely indicates the measure of Wagner’s commitment to what might be termed the “dae­ monic” undertone to this style. Indeed, the overture to Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz with its “tonic-harmonic thrill” and the opening fifths of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony— “this daemon”— resounding “as if with the power of fate” were no mere musical devices for Wagner; they expressed arcane truths according with the mystical musicology of Renaissance Platonism.9 Wagner’s originality lay in taking this uniquely Western development of a universal language of key modulation to inaugurate a new stage in the experience of the “daemonic.” He dis­ covered a shattering domain of chromatic harmony, a “Kunst des Uberganges,” that musically fulfilled Holderlin’s project of a “Wechsel 7. 8. York: 9. Press,

Rosen, T he Classical Style, 23. Rosen, T he Classical Style, 2 3 - 2 6 ,4 3 , 57; Joseph Kerman, O pera as D ram a (New Vintage, 1956), 7 3 - 7 9 . Curt von Westernhagen, Wagner: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1978), trans., 24, 18. M L, 47.

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der Tone” and generated the Dionysian experience for the modern Eu­ ropean mind. Wagner himself originally experienced the daemonic in the famous choral movement of the Ninth Symphony, a work which raised for him the metaphysical relevance of opera for his own age. Indeed, it was on the very eve of the Dresden insurrection of 1849 (Palm Sunday) that Wagner conducted a performance of that movement with such vigor that even the arch-skeptic in his audience, Bakunin, assured him that the Ninth would be retained after the imminent world conflagration.10 This quality Wagner the dramatist then hoped to locate in the world of theatre. Wagner followed Schiller and Hölderlin in searching for a dramatic expe­ rience capable of transfiguring the contemporary consciousness, and his choice of Shakespeare, partly reflecting Schiller’s and Goethe’s admira­ tion of the Bard s use of tonal language, called for creation of a language approaching the direct effects of Beethovenian music. The result, Wag­ ner was confident, would be a “purely human” artform. Wagner saw this “artform of the future” as particularly the destiny of German culture, not only because both the musical and the poetic stream reflected the discoveries of the German musical line from Bach to Beethoven and the drama of the Weimar playwrights, but also because modern German culture was the unique creation of a chain of poets, thinkers, and composers maligned by the very society to which they brought their productive gifts. This “purely human” artform would be founded, not by an “organic” society as in the other dominant cultures of Western Europe, but by a “purely human” culture formed by “unseasonal” individualities (the term is Nietzsche’s but his inspiration was Wagner) opposed to their time and civilization— models of a universal future untainted by the narrow nationalism and class antagonisms of the present.11 Accordingly, Wagner was the first thinker consciously to point out the legacy of those we have discussed as major contributors to our theme. Beginning with Winckelmann’s pursuit of the Hellenic ideal as evidence of the inner affinity between the German (at least, the “unseasonal” German) and the Hellenic spirit, Wagner went on to con­ gratulate Goethe and Schiller— “my heirloom”— for waging war in its favor against the encroachments of the “modern” French spirit. He 10. Westernhagen, Wagner, 133. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard W agner, 2: 83; H. Muller, Richard Wagner in der M ai-Revolution 1849 (Dresden: O. Laube, 1919). 11. ZM, 92; MF, 270; GS, 9: 165; OD, GS, 3: 267.

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praised Schiller’s “aesthetic religion” in the Aesthetic Letters and even claimed that Goethe’s and Schiller’s writings showed the growing im­ portance of music for this quest.12 Ultimately, of course, Wagner saw himself as the creative force necessary to blend these legacies into the unity of the new music drama: “A future artistic shaping of human so­ ciety . . . an organization of commonly public as well as domestic life. . . , that would necessarily lead from itself to a beautiful shaping of the human species.” n Wagner’s program was rounded out by his discovery of a living model for the future society. In 1847 Wagner read the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen’s account of the Athenian communal world with its 30,000 citizens gathered in the Dionysia for the ritual experi­ ence of tragedy and comedy, and he was especially affected by Droysen’s contention that Athens as the “first political state,” the first democracy, had been dedicated to the flowering of poetry and drama.14 Wagner’s debt to Droysen was complete when the latter argued that the theatre was the true source of education and edification for “the poorest citizen” and that the tragic poet (Droysen meant Aeschylus, the “Heraclitus of Tragedy” ) was the ultimate educator for uniting “Dichten und Denken” and realizing the mission of tragedy through his personal willingness to undergo universal suffering.15 Possessed by this model during the fateful spring of 1848, kapell­ meister Richard Wagner began his descent into the underworld of Euro­ pean radicalism.16 12. On Winckclmann: GS, 8: 36; 10: 41. “Der armc Schustcr-Sohn, in einem Land geboren, der zur Zeit beinahe keinc Sprache hatte, tragt in seineni Geist das gricchische Ideal.” CWTB, 1: (10 ii 1869) 53, 59. On Goethe and Schiller: ML, 4 55; RWMW, (mid—xii 1858) 110. Wagner’s Dresden library contained Schiller’s works, including his correspondence with Goethe; he tended to prefer Schiller’s letters to Goethe’s. RW FL, 2: (10 vii 1857); RWMW, (9 v 1859) 1 3 4 -3 5 . GS, 8: 36, identifies Schiller and Goethe with Winckelmann’s mission. On AB: GS, 10: 1 2 1 -2 2 ; Wagner refers to an article by Glasenapp in the Bayreuthcr Blatter (iii 1879) extensively quoting Schiller’s AB. In 1869 Wagner purchased the four volumes of D ie H oren containing the latter work. CWTB, 1: 59. On music: RWMW, 110; GS, 10: 258. 13. M L, 455; SR, 5. 14. Cf. Wagner’s recollections of 1880. CWTB, 2: 556. J. G. Droysen, Des Aischylos W erke Ubersetzt (2d ed. Berlin: G. Bethge, 1842). Wagner’s copy in his Dresden collec­ tion was the first edition (1832). For a thorough consideration of Wagner’s relation to Aeschylean drama, see Michael Ewans, Wagner and Aeschylus: T he Ring and the O resteia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 15. Significantly, Wagner called it “das grosse Gesammtkunsrwerk der Tragodie.” KR, 12. ZM, 99; SR, 4; RWMW, (24 vii 1859) 164. Droysen, Des Aischylos W erke Obersetzt, 19—20. Ewans points out that Droysen’s account, biased toward political factors, appealed strongly to Wagner’s own “revolutionary politics.” Wagner and Aeschylus, 32. 16. Wagner at this stage felt he was “more Athenian” than modern. ML, 403; RW FL, 1: (4 viii 1849); ZM, 99.

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Practically speaking, Wagner’s participation in the Dresden insurrection of 1849 was certainly a turning point in his professional career. It pre­ vented his works from being allowed performance rights in Germany during the 1850s, turned him into an outlaw during the period of his most prolific and original creations, and drove him across the continent in his search for refuge and community. It is therefore worth asking just what Wagner was doing on the side of Rockel, Bakunin, and a host of lesser zealots along the barricades of 1849. The first point, often overlooked, is that the May insurrection of Dresden was precipitated not by the radicals but by the king of Saxony, who dissolved the chambers on April 30. Indeed, the insurgents were sticklers for legal forms even after the king called in Prussian troops to quell disturbances in his capital. Wagner, in short, chose the barricades on behalf of a cause that (as in the case of Hölderlin and Altwiirttemberg in 1804) supported constitutionality. Much later, Wagner’s Bay­ reuth hagiologists would strenuously deny the validity of his early repu­ tation as “Red Composer.” 17 But Wagner had no reason to be ashamed of his role as a trusted friend of a revolutionary leadership committed to fierce resistance to counterrevolution. Matters do begin to get somewhat out of hand, however, in reports of Wagner’s request to burn the princes’ palace and in his scouting of en­ emy troops from the tower of the Kreuzkirche— all the while, report­ edly, reflecting on the fate of civilizations and on Hegelian master and slave morals.18 Clearly the composer somnambulist wandering among the barricades was ready to jettison the entire past of social, political, and theatrical organization for that “yellow-brown atmosphere” of revolution that he espied on the third of May, a dangerous but exhilarat­ ing sunlight of total psychic and social upheaval.19 Indeed, the quick col­ lapse of the insurrection almost landed Wagner in prison, and it was only through generous help from Liszt in Weimar that he managed to escape to Switzerland where, instead of resting on his laurels, he began writing in his asylum of Zurich the apocalyptical works of his “Red Composer” notoriety. Thus, there are solid grounds for conservative or reactionary Euro­ pean suspicion of Wagner during the ensuing decades. A friend since 1832 of the leader of Young Germany, Heinrich Laube, a former ha17. UFH, (18 ix 1850) 58; but also 6 4 - 6 5 ; Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 2: 76. Cf. Frau Schmole’s recollections, “Wagner as a Politician (Revolutionary!),** BC, 134. She regards Rockel as Wagner’s evil genius. 18. Newman, T he L ife o f Richard Wagner, 2: 7 8 —79. 19. BC, 114; MF, 334; M L, 4 5 0 - 7 1 .

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bitue (like Marx) of the radical German scene in Paris during the eupho­ ric 1840s, a student (after 1849) of Feuerbach and Proudhon, declarer of his “unequivocal sympathy with the movement that came to an erup­ tion [Ausbruch] in Dresden" not simply to intimate friends or the public but even to the king in his later request for a formal pardon, Wagner bore all the bona fide credentials of the aesthetic radical collaborating with the incendiary doctrines of the left during the jittery decade of the 1850s.20 In light of Wagners subsequent flirtations with Bavarian monarchy, Rcichsdeutsch power and the decidedly nonradical patrons of Bayreuth, it is understandable that his radicalism has often been put to question, particularly by critics who follow the line of Nietzsche’s attack on the “Christian" composer of Parsifal. To be sure, Wagner’s idealism of the 1850s was severely tested by the real and unsympathetic politics of both pre- and post-Reich Central Europe. But it is one thing to interpret his subsequent projects as concessions to a wall of resistance; it is quite an­ other to hold that Wagner had gone over to the other side. To counter this impression this chapter explores the development of Wagner’s struggle: first, as the outlaw of European music in the 1850s who not only fashioned most of the massive Ring tetralogy but also provided a first statement of his aesthetic, religious, and political aims; second, as the creator of the tragedy of Eros, Tristan und Isolde, whose message Wagner attempted to impose on Ludwig ll’s Bavaria in the last half of the 1860s; and, finally, as the somewhat chastened but still unbowed seeker of the aesthetic community of Bayreuth, whose last legacy, Par­ sifal, attempted to complete the message of Tristan through a Passion of Agape.21 Music as Community: The Liberation o f Sensuous Humanity Wagner’s writings and dramas during the period of his Swiss exile (1849—1859) owe much of their fervor to what he then saw as the very 20. Wagner also knew Karl Gutzkow, head of the Dresden theatre, but detested him. In Zurich he became friends (1851) with Georg Herwegh and was also acquainted, though not closely, with Friedrich Theodor Vischcr. RW FL, 1: (19 vii 1849) 27; cf. 2: (13 iv 1856) 122. Petition to King Johann of Saxony (15 v 1856). Cited in Newman, T he Life o f R ichard W agner, 2: 128, 132. For Wagner’s later, basically unrepentant reflections, see MF, 3 3 4 ; RW FL, 2: (13 iv 1856) 122; also BC, (30 xii 1851) 257. 21. On Eros and Agape, sec Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Philadelphia: West­ minster, 1953), trans., rev.; and Denis de Rougemont, L'am our et /*O ccident (Paris: Plon, 1956), rev.

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real prospect of a “red” or “social republic” in the France of the Second Republic.22 His libretto for the Ring tetralogy and the important theo­ retical pieces (Art and Revolution [1849], The Artw ork o f the Future [1850] , O pera and Drama [1851], and A C om m unication to My Friends [1851] ) were salvos in the general radical assault on the bastions of midcentury capitalism. It was only after the Second Empire slammed the door on Wagner’s original schedule for the music drama of the fu­ ture that he started to look elsewhere for patrons and allies. Wagner’s original project of 1852 called for the temporary construc­ tion of a wooden theatre in a Swiss meadow and four days of theatrical festivities offering the Ring performed by a freely gathered community of artists to a freely admitted audience, after which stage and libretto would be consigned to the flames. Difficult as it is to assess how seri­ ously Wagner meant his ideas to be taken by a free patriciate class hardly predisposed to revolutionary theatrics (much later, he chided Zurich for missing an easy opportunity to erect his modest theatre proj­ ect), there seems little reason to doubt his own commitment to these ideas. Wagner tried to draw his pet philosophers Feuerbach and Scho­ penhauer to his community of kindred spirits in Zurich and actually succeeded in enticing Gottfried Semper, fellow Dresden revolutionary and architect of the Dresden opera house, to the local polytechnic where the practicalities of the new Theatron were exhaustively discussed, if not to the ultimate benefit of Zurich, certainly in time for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.2' Then when Wagner started on the composition of his Ring cycle in 1853, he abandoned his earlier views that a radical break with society must precede erection of his artwork. Henceforth the work itself would serve as a historical turning point, “one which no reactionary power could hinder.” 24 This shift of perspective has often been invoked to dis­ tinguish between an early “optimistic” and a later, “pessimistic” version of the Ring. 25 But the composer’s decision to emphasize the role of Wotan, leader of the old gods and the dying order, in place of the young and fearless successor Siegfried should be seen not as simply the out22. SR, 6; BC, (4 xii 1849) 269. 23. “Ein Theater in Zurich (1851),” GS, 5: 2 0 - 5 2 ; RWP, (28 iv 1856) 5 2 - 5 3 ; RWMW, (10 x 1859) 184. Westernhagen, Wagner, 1 9 8 -2 0 0 ; UFH, (3 xii 1851) 152. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 2: 165. 24. BC, (18 xii 1851) 784; M L, 4 41; SR, 6. Compare KR, 4 0 ; BC, (12 xi 1851) 257. 25. RWAR, (23 viii 1856) 66. Cf. Jack M. Stein on the two phases in Wagner’s Gesam tkunstw erk theory: Richard Wagner an d the Synthesis o f the Arts (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1960).

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come of despair over political circumstances but as a deepened under­ standing of his own responsibility to forge an authentic tragedy for the modern consciousness. Bringing together two apparently unconnected themes, the appearance of the new man Siegfried and the downfall of Wotan’s gods, Wagner looked to a conclusive theatrical obliteration of all that was not “purely human,” and this commitment was ultimately realized through the composition of Tristan und Isolde in 1859. Tristan, the compositional core of our analysis of Wagner, is there­ fore the culmination of a long affair with revolutionary politics and es­ chatology. Indeed, Tristan was to be the single most important reason for Wagner’s hold over Ludwig II and the politics of Bavaria in the 1860s, when the installation of an aesthetic state on German soil seemed within the realm of serious possibility. Yet the meaning of Wagner’s work and its metapolitical repercussions will remain opaque without some understanding of Wagner’s theoretical goals in shaping the new art form. When Wagner first worked out his ideas, his readings consisted mainly of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history. Although he had heard something of Proudhon from Rockel (and possibly Bakunin), Wagner first came into contact with Feuerbach’s works just before fleeing Dres­ den. Once he was safely in Zurich, he devoured the works of both au­ thors, ultimately dedicating The Artwork o f the Future to Feuerbach and even initiating a friendly correspondence with the philosopher to attract him to Zurich.26 Proudhon gave Wagner a lasting socioeconomic model of the ideal community. Whenever the material base of his ideal came into question, Wagner invariably resorted to the Proudhonist image of a society com­ posed of small farmers and artisans in collective working relationships, and he even adopted a Proudhonist “federalist” solution to state orga­ nization later, when supporting Constantin Frantz’s politics against 26. ML·, 5 0 0 —502; Hegel’s lectures were the only philosophical works in Wagner’s Dresden library. Curt von Westernhagen, Richard Wagners D rcsdener B ibliothek 1842 bis 1849 (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1966), 93. Wagner may have read PG in Paris in 1849, but our account is unreliable. Friedrich Pecht, “Aus Richard Wagners Pariser Zeit,” Allgem eine Zeitung, 22 March 1883, quoted in C. Glasenapp, Das Lcben R ichard Wagner's (3d ed. Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel, 1894—1911), 2: 349. On Proudhon: ML·, 476. Bakunin and Proudhon were good friends from their Paris days. When later recommend­ ing Feuerbach’s works to the imprisoned Rockel, Wagner seems to have assumed that he knew nothing of Feuerbach. RWAR, (8 vi 1853) 12, 15, 16. Wagner knew G edan ke iiber T od und U nsterblichkeit , Das Wesen des Christentums, and Vorlesungen uber das Wesen d er Religion. B C , 117. Also GS, 12: 2 8 2 - 8 4 ; Newman, T he Life o f R ichard Wagner, 2: 431 n.8.

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Bismarck.27 The influence of Feuerbach, meanwhile, is less easy to ac­ count for, if only because it permeates so many of Wagner’s formula­ tions. Wagner’s frequent invocations of Feuerbach’s concept of “das Rein Menschliches” or the “purely human’’ reflect Feuerbach’s seminal influence on several levels: the primacy of human love and feeling; of communality ( “communism” ) over individualism ( “egoism” ); of reli­ gion as reverence not for a transcendent deity but for the cosmic whole; and, finally, of music and the aesthetic-sensuous dimension.28 After Proudhon and Feuerbach came the reading of Schopenhauer in 1853. Since Wagner’s guide to the philosopher’s writings was Georg Herwcgh, M arx’s colleague in Paris and collaborator with the radical Zurich publisher Julius Froebel, it does not follow that Schopenhauer’s impact led to Wagner’s rejection of radical thought. Herwegh had rec­ ommended Schopenhauer to Wagner in the course of a discussion on Antigone because he regarded the Schopenhauerian renunciation of the Kantian world of appearances as the only genuine philosophical basis for tragic drama, and after carefully reading The W orld as Will and Representation in 1854, Wagner agreed that Feuerbach now seemed superficial, although not altogether wrong, compared with Schopen­ hauer’s deeper understanding of art and the Ding an sich.19 In Wagner’s final reading, both Feuerbach and Schopenhauer were important for holding that authentic thought and language were funda­ mentally aesthetic activities. Feuerbach saw “Geist” as “the aesthetic perception of our sense-world,” while Schopenhauer discerned that this “Geist” required abnormal natures whose organ of knowledge, tran­ scending the narrow will to survive, comprised a “will-less, i.e., aes­ thetic intuition of the external world” which these natures alone could articulate to the community. Schopenhauer therefore improved on, but did not contradict, Feuerbach. Indeed, Wagner used Schopenhauer to formulate a quite different “metaphysics of sexual love,” revising his mentor on two fundamental points. First, Wagner chose the real sexual love between man and woman (rather than Schopenhauer’s abstract love of mankind) as the foundation for the experience of unity with all being; and, second, he did not call for disengagement of the intellect from the will but for the expansion of the power of the intellect to the 27. BC, (30 xii 1851) 257. Wagner read Q u est-ce qu e la propriete? in Paris in 1849. 28. GS, 3: 5. Feuerbach, The Essence o f Christianity (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), trans., 3 - 5 , 77, 1 1 2 -1 3 . Wagner was especially impressed by Feuerbach’s ideal of “Allfahigkeit” (K Z , 69) and “communism” (70). 29. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 2: 2 9 1 - 9 3 ; ML, 5 9 1 —93. RW ARt (5 ii 1855) 51. It should be noted that Wagner admired Schopenhauer for the “cold marble” of his reason. RWMW, (22 vii 1860) 239.

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point where the rapture and ecstasy of the state of genius, absorbing the experience of sexual love, would manifest that will. Clearly, far from merely readjusting Schopenhauer’s priorities, these conditions reject them on behalf of Wagner’s more Dionysian temper.10 Wagner thus accepted just those ideas that reinforced his own revolu­ tionary commitment to the liberation of a sensuous-erotic core to hu­ manity that had been suppressed by a history of domination. The end product was a highly aesthetic view of human and communal being based on the primacy of sensuousness, upon which Wagner then erected an argument for the redemptive quality of music or classical musical to­ nality as the most universal and dialectically reconciliatory of lan­ guages.31 This identification of music with human communality is origi­ nal with Wagner. It contains, however, anthropological presuppositions which reflect Wagner’s absorption of the radical thought that we have brought up. For Wagner all mental activity is preeminently aesthetic, plastic, and imagistic. The real power of words rests on expressive, onomatopoetic, and indeed “mantric” capacities, and these are awakened by the poet (Dichter) whose act of verdichten takes a moment of primordial human wonder and condenses it into a single verbal whole. Humanity’s primor­ dial relation to the world of objects was speech which contained “a great similarity with song.” Reacting spontaneously and emotionally to the demands nature made on his naturally sensuous body, the original human being responded quickly to stress or need (Noth) with a com­ pressed, single cry. If the basic dialectic of subject and object, self and nature, is worked back to an original act of self-expression in one breath, the root syllables of human sound will be seen as containing the legacy of the self’s unmediated relation to nature as a moment of highest emotional stress and agitation. By the same token this moment is the most genuine manifestation of human nature, because it contains the self’s naked response to natural necessity, to the constraining power (Wunder) of nature itself.32 30. GS, 3: 3; ML, 502, 5 9 1 - 9 3 ; RW FL, 2: (7 vi 1855) 82. Note Wagner’s ex­ pression of admiration for Feuerbach in 1872 as “ein geistrcicher Schriftsteller.” GS, 3: 3. Also 12: 289. RWMW, (8 xii 1858) 81, (1 xii 1858), 7 9 - 8 0 ; GS, 10: 257, 262; RWAR 59. 31. RW FL, 2: (7 vi 1855) 83; RWMW (3 iii 1860) 217. Cf. Wagner’s search for a “patriotism” without “political implications” based on his reading of Greek culture. MF, 268. 32. KZ, 55. On reason as the highest social force for Wagner, cf. OD, GS, 4: 77. OD,

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Original humanity is therefore naturally “poetic” because of the breathing cycle, which responds to emergency conditions by crystalliz­ ing expression into a single tonal whole. This erotic character, however, holds in addition important political implications.33 Communicating with otherness, the tonal cry encouraged the union both of man and woman in sexual love and of a community or Volk embracing such erotic unions. Wagner’s original concept of the Volk retains the stan­ dards of Weimar Humanitat by emphasizing the legacy of the emotive, compassionate qualities in all archaic languages. These draw human feelings back to a sense of identity with archaic or primordial human being ( “pure humanity” ), beyond the confines of any particular Vaterland to “the creative primordial beauty [Urschonheit] of man” and his underlying unity as a sensuous, loving being.34 From this notion of an authentic Volk Wagner then builds his faith in a modern Kiinstlertum: groups of artists who are driven to create art in a collective work. Wagner’s political radicalism comes out sharply when he claims that the present age of “the religion of egoism” has under­ mined this universal Kunstreligion through a bourgeois class domi­ nation formalized by the mechanical, abstract state. Only through the “genius” does the authentic Volk survive. Despite his flamboyant man­ nerisms, the genius struggles on behalf of the sensuous self against the machine. His eccentricities and his often ludicrous pathos are residues of that sensuous-erotic landscape upon which all humans once sought the freely instituted creative act. This genius seeks peers in the world of modern capitalism in order to form a “communality of genius” akin to the fluid gatherings that Wagner pictured from his reading of 'Wilhelm M eister’s Jourtieymanship. Paraphrasing Napoleon’s dictum of the mod­ ern supremacy of the political dimension, Wagner concludes that the Dichter must enter politics in order to turn it into “metapolitics” and revive the fractured human being.35 GS, 4: 119. The association of vowel and freedom recalls Winckelmann’s on the Greek language as the freest because the most voweled. OD, GS, 4: 90, 83, 30, 111, 119, 127, 137; ZM, 110, 104. 33. The “Volkstiimliches” is identical to the “rein menschlich Charakteristisch.” O D, GS, 3: 270. 34. Wagner in the 1850s and 1860s felt that he had no Vaterland and even looked forward to a German thrashing in the war of 1859. RW FL, 2: (13 ix 1860) 280; RWMW, (3 viii 1863) 319; (30 iv 1859) 1 3 2 -3 3 ; also UFH, (27 xii 1849) 21. G5, 10: 272. 35. KZ, 136, 160; ZM, 109. “Das Kunstwerk ist die lebendig dargestellte Religion.” KZ, 63; RW FL, 1: 83; RK, 224. The struggle from “egoism” to “communism” is called a “Wiedervcrcinigung.” G5, 12: 263; KZ, 70, 169; O D, GS, 4: 6 5 - 6 7 , 5 3 ; MF, 249, 254, 310. Taylor, Richard Wagner, 86.

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Wagner originally held that social revolution must precede any attempt to found the new art groups. Revolution, the eruption of desperate human needs, would come from below and level the oppression of “political-juristic formalism," while theatre would bring up its rear by displaying the new “sensuous shaping" accessible to the liberated “total revolutionary.” Disappointed, however, by the collapse of European po­ litical radicalism, Wagner toned down such “red” gestures, only to re­ double his theatrical radicalism. Wagner now sought for new social unions aspiring to the level of the historical Kunstlertum through a G esam tkunstw erk— a totality of the arts and totality of artists— that would inspire human beings to turn their daily social and economic modes of behavior into increasingly artistic actions.’8 Politically, this stance implied for Wagner the abolition of private property. Throughout his life Wagner wholeheartedly accepted Prou­ dhon’s distinction between property and possession. From his notorious Vaterlandsverein speech of 1848 to the essay “Know Thyself” in 1881, he fiercely attacked property on behalf of his commitment to the artistic transformation of mundane labor. For Wagner, praise of sensuousness necessarily implied support of universal activity as a pleasure thor­ oughly satisfying in and for itself and condemned the laws of property for mutilating universality by confining each person to a specialized ac­ tivity discharged in one narrow craft. Destruction of the laws of prop­ erty would therefore have to precede the “thorough cultivation of class and civic tendencies into a more universal occupation close to all.” 37 Wagner relented neither in defending his ideal of communism as the evolution of the brotherhood of man into a future universal association of free beings nor in lambasting the forces of industry and finance which had dehumanized the proletariat.38 He hoped for a future state of affairs when a free community, maturing from the present experiences of an “artistry of the future,” would itself make up the “artist.” 39 Ultimately Wagner saw modern industry as the handmaiden of art, while individu36. K R , 4 0 - 4 1 , 32; MF, 302, 309; UFH, 58, 64, 65. Wagner’s most radical claims in M F were not included by the publishers. Newman, T he L ife o f Richard Wagner, 2: 245 n.16; Otto Strobel, ed., “ Richard Wagner: ‘Mittcilung an meine Freunde,” ’ Zeitschrift fiir M usik 98 (July 1931), 5 6 4 - 6 5 , in which Wagner declares himself “kiinstlerischcr mensch, und als solcher uberall, wohin mein blick, mein wunsch und mein wille sich erstreckt, durch und durch revolutionär, zerstörer des alien im schaffen des neuen!” (Aug. 1851), 565. K Z , 168, 41. Westernhagen, Wagner, 146. 37. UFH, (22 x 1850) 81. SR, 5. 38. KR, 19; KZ, 165; but see also his criticism of the “practical religion” of the “so­ cial communism” of his day. GS, 9: 119—20. 39. KZ, 169. In his original plan Wagner intended KR and KZ to be completed by “Das Kunstlertum der Zukunft.” UFH, (16 ix 1849) 7; GS, 12: 2 5 2 -6 3 .

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als, realizing that all can be “artists,” advanced “from the deprivatory yoke of slavery of general handwork with its sickly money-soul to free artistic mankind.” In the Wagnerian vision of this aesthetic state, the world itself would become “a source of art delight.” 40 How does this general position then turn into a musicological argument? Classical musical language, it was earlier noted, furnished a privi­ leged set of terms for German dialectics: Holderin and Hegel invoked such musical notions as harmony, melody, modulation, dissonance, and concord to explicate the dialectical subsumption of dichotomies into higher unities. Wagner’s originality within this tradition lies in exploit­ ing the language of classical tonality to show how the true eroticsensuous nature of the individual as a social and loving ( “purely hu­ man” ) being is preserved in the natural and musical tone and how, through this identity of diatonic tonality with the idea of community, music points mankind toward a fully aesthetic mode of being. In this argument Wagner’s Hellenism becomes a key ingredient. Wag­ ner’s admiration for the Greeks stemmed from the belief that theirs re­ mained the single art form that had been dedicated to the “pure bodily appearance of man.” Indeed, Wagner sought to emulate what he saw as their success in retaining through metric the union between dance ges­ ture and tonal-verbal language (Ton-W ortsprache).41 Some of this effort is seen in his use of the Stabreim , alliteration that allows two words op­ posed in meaning to be united through the effect of their common root sounds.42 Yet for Wagner only musical language proper can lift words beyond the limitations inherent also in such kinships to the level of un­ limited universal relationships. Once joined to a musical key, any sound can “ally” itself with any other sound via harmonic modulation, thus allowing the tone poet’s “family” to reach to infinity. Within the kinship of harmony, even opposed feelings can be articulated in music as “generically akin” without effacing their opposition.43 Through recapitula­ tion of the original key the tone poet reconciles words and the feelings 40. ZM, 101; KR, 34, 40, 32, 30. 41. OD, GS, 4: 104. Carl Dahlhaus undermines the conventional view that Wagner was primarily concerned with the question of word versus music. As he notes, Wagner’s standard always remained drama through music. R ichard W agner’s Music D ram as (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, [1971] 1979), trans., 5 4 —55. While writing O D , Wagner assured Liszt that it would offer “die Erlosung und Rechtfertigung des Musikers als Musiker.” RW FL, 1: (8 x 1850) 101. Also O D, C5, 4: 127; UFH, (20 i 1851) 87. 42. OD. GS, 4: 1 3 7 -4 0 , 152; MF, 329. 43. OD, GS, 4: 1 4 0 -4 2 , 151, 153—54. One may similarly distinguish between a “dosed” community of free men (the Greeks) and an “open” community of free men (the future Kiinstlertum).

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they carry in a manner altogether impossible to an art restricted to the Strabreim. From this distinction Wagner comes to his major insight: “commu­ nity" is identical with music because the limited experience of com­ munity made possible by the poetic word can be transcended by the universal community entailed by music. The means for this step are available through Beethoven’s summation of the classical language of diatonic tonality, and Wagner sees in the long history of music which has led to this language a political lesson in enslavement and possible emancipation. The story of the decay of poetic language is the musi­ cal analogue of the social and political collapse of free societies: the decay of aesthetic expression reflects the decline of the sensuous, free human being. The key steps in this dialectic for Wagner are the movement from the “primal mother melody" of Greek culture to “modern melody." Whereas the former covered the movement from “feeling" to “understanding," the latter advances from “understanding" to a more universal melody as the “surface of endlessly developed harmony borne on wings of com­ plex rhythmics borrowed from bodily dance."4·1 Early humanity, ac­ cording to Wagner, generated three art forms out of the primordial cry: dance, music, and poetry, forming a single physiological whole as tone and feeling. Ignited by the sudden moment of “need," this pattern was translated into bodily rhythmic actions and utterances whose shell was the consonant and whose kernel was the voweled outcry. Thus, for Wagner, all “purely human art," all art that is true to this unified image, generates a plastic body movement refined into mimetic gesture that originally expressed “the reciprocal love-making of a couple" in har­ mony with musical and poetic tone.45 Greek “primal mother melody," the first stage of the Wagnerian his­ torical dialectic, realized a universality that resulted from words retain­ ing their musicosensuous roots. Poetic language and body gestures led the Greeks to a unique experience of community through the theatrical gathering of comedy and tragedy.46 The Greeks— primarily the Athe­ nians— were the first to show that the art and religion that are true to humanity’s authentic (sensuous-erotic) relation to nature must be a single “public" event.47 44. O D , GS, 4: 145, 112. 45. KZ, 67, 102, 65, 81, 71, 90; O D, GS, 4: 130, 157; ZM, 128. 46. Note, again, Wagner’s reference to the “grosses Gesammtkunstwerk der Tragodie.” UFH, (12 i 1850), 25. 47. K R , 23, 29.

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As “public art,” Athenian tragic art formed a single totality with the political assemblies of the Athenian citizenry. Its disregard for the mod­ ern distinctions between art, politics, and religion or for the idea of sepa­ rate art genres taught posterity the political lesson of the Gesam tkunstw erk ,48 “Gesamtes” ( “total” ) meant such an “original product of the Hellenic spirit, religion, indeed state” ; its formal political form was “an honest democracy,” inspiring collective decisions, collective clairvoy­ ance, collective ecstasis, and its tragedies were political events that ex­ pressed the “common” (gem einsam) spirit of a people.49 Further, this artwork was a union of all art forms, particularly those promoting di­ rect representation (Darstellung), in contrast to subsequent art that re­ flected different genres and indirect representation. Gesam t-Kunstwerk, in brief, was a “total” artwork that was simultaneously “common” and “collective” : Gerneinsam-Kunstwerk.50 Like Hegel, Wagner attributes the breakdown of Hellenic culture to the contingency of its universality. Insufficiently “allmenschliches,” the polis was inevitably undermined by what Wagner calls the “great hu­ man revolution,” that yearning by all human beings, not just Athenians or Greeks, to regain their pure humanity. Only a truly universal Kunstreligion can engender a “spirit of free mankind” that transcends nation­ ality and the historical polis. Such a transformation hinges on detailed knowledge of musical harmony, which the Greek community with its political exclusiveness had failed to develop.51 Wagner finds traces of this more universal movement of expression in the medieval origins of polyphonic music as the concrete voice of op­ pressed humanity’s longing for freedom. Original Christianity, accord­ ing to Wagner, constituted a movement by ancient slaves, “the fateful angle of all world-destiny,” to achieve Vereinigung.52 While the Roman imperium and the Christian church undermined the force behind this movement, the true aims of the oppressed found their way into multi­ voiced harmony. Polyphony promotes melody through its four-tone 48. KR, 11, 16. ZM, 99; UFH, (12 i 1850) 25; SR, 4; RWMW, (24 vii 1859) 164; KR, 24. 49. GS, 9: 151, 197; KR, 16, 11. To distinguish between the polis and the modern state, Wagner calls the Greek state a “ Naturstaat” versus the later, degenerate “politischer Staat ” KZ, 133. Also 104, 105. 50. UFH, (12 i 1850) 25; KR, 12, 28. “Gemeinsames Kunstwerk” in KZ, 150, 156, 159; “gemeinsames tragisches Kunstwerk” in KZ, 133. 51. KR, 29, 30; KZ, 62, 63. The “ Liebesbedurfnis** of men was confined to a polis. G5, 3: 219. ZM, 105. 52. KR, 2 5 - 2 7 . Their modern heirs are the slaves of industry. Jesus, on whom Wagner once planned a drama, is said to represent the equality and brotherhood of man. KR, 41.

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chords and, eventually, its individual unfolding of each line without undermining the harmonic coherence of the whole. Yet it lacks a genera­ tor for the rhythmic dance that had sustained Greek music and it ulti­ mately degenerates into quasi-mathematical constructs. Meanwhile, operatic art form of the early modern period, which has fully inherited Greek rhythm, remains confined to a facile monody.5’ Wagner claims that the only way out of this impasse lies in the sym­ phony, with its preservation of the spirit of the old dance and folk song rhythms.54 Where harmony gives voice to the early Christian Hutnanitat of the equality and unity of all tones, the symphonic orchestra can now provide a firm direction to its vague universality. Through its ability to become directly dramatic and personal, a veritable echo of the human voice,55 symphonic orchestra (the single authentic innovation of the modern age, according to Wagner) becomes heir to the first “natural” symphony of polyphonic human voices. Transformed by a revolution­ ary “art of transition” to extend its powers of expression to an entirely new domain of “chromatic” communality, it will supplant the Hellenic synthesis of dance, body, and melody with a more universalizing range.s* This art Wagner first realizes with Tristan und Isolde. Tragedy fo r an Aesthetic State: Tristan und Isolde In June 1865, after some five years of frustration, Wagner succeeded in engineering an exemplary performance of Tristan und Isolde in Munich, the critical test for his praxis of the new art form. From that date on, the city of Munich and the state of Bavaria became major ele­ ments in Wagner’s revolutionary plans for an aesthetic state. 53. OD, GS, 4: 161. ZM, 107. The importance of polyphony for human freedom has also been noted by Theodor Adorno, the leading musicologist in the tradition of Western Marxism. According to Martin Jay, Adorno regards polyphony as perhaps the least am­ biguous expression of the positive ‘‘other.’* T he D ialectical Im agination, 182, 334 n.48. KZ, 8 8 - 8 9 ,9 9 . 54. Wagner calls the symphony a “verkörperte Harmonie.” ZM, 130. From this it is an easy step to claim that the orchestra utters the “Will” and is accordingly a “ religiousphilosophical” power. OD, GS, 4: 173—74 n.*. 55. O D , GS, 4: 165. 56. For rhythm the symphonic orchestra takes the four-measure phrase of the (folk) dance and through the sonata form turns it into the periodic phrase of classical dramatic expression; its capacity for infinite modulation permits it to create rhythm through modu­ lation of keys. Melody it draws out of the “sea” of harmonic waves following this articula­ tion of the periodic phrase, while individuality of expression it secures in the instruments of the orchestra, which can now speak and gesture through subtleties of timbre (Wagner emphasizes that key or harmony should never be separate from instrumentation.) UFH, (31 v 1852) 2 3 0 - 3 1 . ZM, 105; GS, 9: 199.

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In order to make sense of this campaign in Bavaria, we must first ex­ plore the theme and technical means that make up Wagner’s tragedy of Eros. It will then be possible to gauge Wagner’s failure on both his later political goals and the art and message originally contained in Tristan.57 Tristan forms Wagner’s moment of truth with the “daemonic” ele­ ment in Western music and drama. It completes his formal revolution in the chromaticism that marks a “turning point” in musical thought.58 Wagner was probably first alerted to chromaticism as the concrete voice of Eros through the roving D chord that opens Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­ phony. It is, however, only in Tristan, described as one interminable “deceptive cadence,” that Wagner succeeds in stretching to the range of a music drama the principle of unsettled tonality. Moving fitfully be­ tween the modes of the opening A, Tristan soars to the broken cadence of a Liebesecstase and suffers through myriad vales of frustration before beatitude and resolution are granted, first temporarily in the E major mode for the “Tristan’s Vision” scene and finally in the flowering B major cadence that culminates Isolde’s Verklarung.60 This achievement 57. With almost each music drama he completed between 1848 and 1859, Wagner would award that drama the trophy of being the ultimate tragedy. MF, 297; RWAR, (26 i 1854) 34; RW FL, 2: (13 ix 1855) 96; and of course his remarkable letters on Tristan to Mathilde Wescndonck (c.g., RWMW, 123). With Tristan Wagner reinforced “the great movement for sexual liberation that began in the sixties.” Barzun, Berlioz an d the R o­ mantic Century, 2: 202 (Wagner was closely acquainted with some of the leading femi­ nists of his time). Calling Wagner “both a political and a sexual revolutionary,” Carl E. Schorske claims that in Tristan “ Eros returns in surging rhythms and chromatics to assert its claims against the established political and moral order of the state expressed in rigid meter and diatonic harmony.” Fin-dc-siecle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1980), 347. E. Zuckerman suggests a distinction between “Tristanism,” a cult resulting from personal infatuation with the music of Tristan, and “Wagnerism,” a history of doctrines only tenu­ ously tied to Wagner’s music proper. Zuckerman, however, overlooks that genuine “Tristanism” was intended by Wagner as a precondition for the new consciousness acting on history. The First H undred Years o f Wagner's ‘Tristan' (New York: Columbia Univer­ sity Press, 1964), 30. 58. In classifying Tristan, commentators agree that it is the closest thing by Wagner to his ideal of the G csam tkunstw crk. Robert W. Gutman, R ichard W agner: T he M an, His Mind, and His Music (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 2 97; Kerman, O pera as Drama, 212, 213; Taylor, Richard Wagner, 139. Robert Bailey holds that the first act culminates Wagner’s idea of the OD theory, while the second and third acts go in a new direction. “The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde,*” Ph.D. diss., Princeton, 1969, 6. On the “turning point” : E. Kurth’s Rom antische H arm onik und ihre Krise in Wagner's ‘Tristan' (Bern: P. Haupt, 1920). In terms of the alleged turn to music, cf. Wagner’s stress that melody in Tristan is constructed “poetically.” ZM, 123. The importance of Mozart is also worth noting: on Mozart’s “shockingly voluptuous” art and “subversive” assault on tonal clarity, see Rosen, The Classical Style, 3 2 4 - 2 5 . Wagner, according to Cosima, con­ sidered Mozart a “grosser Chromatiker.” CWTB, 1: (23 ii 1877) 1034. 59. Gutman, Richard Wagner, 381. 60. Kerman and Bailey agree that Tristan begins in A and ends in B; the key between them, E, appears only once, in “Tristan’s Vision.” Kerman, “Wagner: Thoughts in Sea­ son,” T he Score, 28 (January 1961), 21; Bailey, “The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde,’ ”

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should be seen not only as a major technical innovation but also as an intuitive understanding of a broader connection between chromaticism and suffering. As Claude Levi-Strauss (who was thinking of Tristan) has argued, exploitation of the small intervals in the musical scale with its concurrent chordal harmony covers the entire spectrum of human sen­ sations/1 It is largely due to this relation especially with the rhythms behind sexual orgasm and contentment that Tristan exercised such an impact on sensibilities like that of Nietzsche, who later came to identify Dionysos with sexual energy through the “daemonic territory” he first experienced in Tristan/2 Yet by exploiting chromaticism, does Wagner abandon his allegiance to the universality that he ascribed to diatonic language? Wagner’s own account of the new art was that his technique hoped to touch “the most outer sensuous feelings . . . , which lead me to mediation and fervent binding to one another of all moments of transition of the most external moods.” Accordingly, “1 should now like to call my most subtle and profound art the art of transition [die Kunst des Uberganges], for my entire fabric of art consists of such transitions.” M True, these modula­ tions drive tonality almost to the breaking point, but Wagner embraces neither atonality nor a twelve-tone system/4 Wagnerian chromaticism, serving to bring out every possible nuance in self-sundering subjectivity, applies the wealth of his orchestral palette to a single theme: Tristan, the soul and nerve of unappeasable yearning. Far from being tacked on ar­ bitrarily to the message or content of his drama, chromaticism in Wag­ ner’s conception of the history of sensuous-erotic mankind is the expres­ sion of universality at its moment of sundering— the dialectical Night of negating a false order, society, polity, and feeling. His new order—

239. Despite his admiration for Kurth, Alfred Lorenz insists that Tristan is in E major. Das G eheim nis der Form bet Richard Wagner (Berlin: M. Hesse, 1926), 2: 174. In light of later misconceptions, the reader is reminded that for Wagner L ieb estod refers to the Einleitung or prelude; Vcrklarung, to Isolde’s final solo. Further, Einleitnng suggests that the prelude is not to be taken as a summation of the work but leads directly into the first act. Zuckerman, T he First Fiundred Years o f W agner’s ’Tristan,’ 34. 61. L e cru ct le cuit (Paris: Plon, 1964), 2 8 5 -8 7 . Levi-Strauss, forced to flee France in 1940 as a Jew, continued to worship at the altar of “ce dieu Richard Wagner” (23). My thanks to Laurence Stallings for this reference. 62. Taylor, R ichard Wagner, 140. 63. RWMW, (29 x 1859), 188, 189. The high point o f this art of transition is held to be Act II, Scene 2. 64. Dahlhaus, however, warns that since the chordal association in Tristan is partly based on motives and not on the purely musical reasons on which tonality histori­ cally depended, tonal harmony is “endangered” in the work. Richard W agner’s Music D ram as, 64.

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the order of volupte— therefore owes its birth to a musically induced Aufhebung, the sundering of all prior cautions and sensations. Wagner dialectically carries the communal implications he perceived in diatonic music to the egalitarian and erotic limits of a system of chromatic tones. But the crisis this dialectic precipitates serves to heighten the final Vereitiigung or ecstasis potently stored in the fist of his diatonic cadence: “Reconciliation [in Holderlin’s invocation] is in the midst of conflict and everything that has been separated finds itself again.” 65 To deploy this new language Wagner turns to the East. He calls him­ self a Buddhist and the world of Tristan one of Buddhist density. “You know the Buddhist theory of the origin of the world,” he even writes on one occasion, “a breath clouds the clarity of heaven” ; then immediately sketching in his historic Tristan chord, Wagner adds, “This swells, grows denser until finally the whole world stands before me in impene­ trable vastness.” Wagner’s Tristan chord is the Wagnerian code for a chromatic universe which literally provokes the drama into being, exud­ ing the uncanny coloration of “violet, a hue of deep lilac,” and bringing a tragic world of “pure humanity” into light.66 This landscape of Tristan is the reality of Eros. At the same time Tris­ tan and Isolde “inhabit a real and orderly world” whose generally ac­ cepted values they betray only gradually, in their allegiance to “Frau Minnc, the mistress of universal becoming.” 67 Wagner’s Tristan begins as the prototypical creature of society, a hero who, somewhat patho­ logically, finds self-value in his willed submission to its standards of “honor and reputation,” while Isolde’s hostility toward him stems from conventional societal circumstances of loss of face.68 Wagner sets up his dichotomy of Eros versus society not because he is mainly interested in 65. Hölderlin, H, 160. 66. Wagner, quoted in Taylor, R ichard Wagner, 139. RWMW, (22 ii 1859) 105; also (9 vii 1859) 161, 162; RW FL, 2: (7 vi 1855) 83; BB, 36. Wagner fully accepted the Hindu-Buddhist belief in transmigration. Rebirth is part of the later versions of Siegfried and Gotterddmm erung. Wagner’s familiarity with Hindu-Buddhist culture covers a life­ time; to the end Wagner assiduously collected the latest studies and translations of Indian culture. CWTB, 2: (19 x 1880) 613; 1: 1031. RWMW, (3 iii 1860) 217. 67. Westernhagen, Wagner, 2 3 5 -3 6 . The larger question of the similarity of Wag­ nerian Eros to European heresy, Catharism, and Tantra cannot be enlarged on here. Cf. Zuckerman, The First H undred Years o f W agner’s ‘Tristan,’ 24; and Rougemont, L ’am ou r et I’O ccident, 1 9 2 -9 6 . On the assumption that a kinship exists between Cathar andTantric ideas and Wagner’s art of Eros, I have made use of the vocabulary of European al­ chemy in my treatment of Tristan. Cf. C. G. Jung, Mysterium C onjunctionis. David, “Wagner the Dramatist,*’ 129; Tristan, 3 4 —35. 68. E.g., Tristan’s obsession with his “Ehre” throughout the first act and the immedi­ ate effect of the potion upon that obsession; also Isolde’s persistent needling on this weakness.

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chastising social values.hV Rather, he seeks to crystallize this dichotomy in order to expose the absence in those social values of cataclysmic, transfiguring Eros— the authentic magic to be called up by his art of transition. Unfortunately, this meaning behind Tristan has been clouded by a host of misguided critiques, for which the symbols in Tristan are un­ affected by the progressive revelation of its drama. Act II is commonly regarded as the dramatic pivot; but Wagner not only intended a drama that makes an Act 111 necessary, he specifically pointed to Tristan’s “De­ lirium" scene that inaugurates Act 111 as the critical stage of his work.70 It follows that even the “symbology" of Act II, important as it unques­ tionably is, must be integrated into the more enlightened outlook se­ cured by the dying Tristan in the final act. Indeed, once Wagner’s sym­ bols are granted their inherent fluidity, “Day," the ambiguous sunlight of societal values (of “Ehre"), can no longer be simply juxtaposed to “Night," the stellar realm of a love finding fruition only in “death," but must be supplanted by the primacy of an “uncreated Day," the fecun­ dating source of light which Tristan in his dying thoughts finally recog­ nizes as his true homeland and which is embodied in the image of Isolde as “la blonde,’’ Day as the bride of the Sun Tristan is on the verge of becoming.71 Having originally failed to distinguish between the light borne by the image (Bild) of Isolde (intimations of his own inner light concealed by society) and the deceptive glow or Schein with which so­ cietal values surrounded it,72 Tristan requires a love potion— a drug which, like all hallucinogens, occasions rather than causes premonition of the truths buried under the conscious values of society— to strip him into the “pure fool" of passion who will descend into the light of an underworld, a “wonder realm of night" (Act II), where the torch of all reflected or stored light of the daytime, of externalized consciousness, is extinguished. Only now does he take on the true hero’s quest, and the “wonder realm" become a veritable temple of Kunstreligion in which a strange new teaching, liturgy, and invocation of Eros are effected through the radical medium of Wagner’s chromatic harmony. 69. Thus Wagner corrects Heinrich Porges in his interpretation of Marke’s guilt. In Porges, Tristan und Isolde (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Hartel, 1906), iii. 70. “Tristan bestimmter concipirt: 3 r Akt Ausgangspunkt dcr Stimmung fur das Ganze.” “Annalen (1855),“ BB, 125. 71. Tristan, 43. Rougemont: “le Tristan de Wagner veut sotnbrer, mais pour renaitre en un ciel de Lumiere. La ‘Nuit* qu’il chant, c’est le Jour incree.” L'am our et ^O ccident , 51. J. Weston, T he Legends o f the Wagner D ram a (London: D. Nutt, 1903), 322, for Isolde as “la blonde.” 72. Tristan, 3 9 - 4 0 .

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In this temple Isolde emerges as the priestess offering the hero bap­ tism in the “lofty power” of Frau Minne’s domain. The lovers are flooded with the freedom of forgetfulness; and interlacing their vel­ vety invocations to the goddess, they sink down into the mysteries of the conjunctio: “of one breath / a single union.” It is not death they celebrate; their liturgy calls for transmutation into “the world itself / delight-sublimest woe / love-holiest life.” 73 Precisely here Wagner in­ jects a characteristically German touch to his alchemical op era: from the moment of their invocation to the goddess ( “O sink down . . .” ) to the rhapsodic rush of the Liebesecstase cadence, the lovers are com­ mitted to a dialectical understanding of the meaning of Vereinigung. The discussion they undertake on the meaning of love and death has been regarded by some commentators as a serious lapse in Wagner’s dramatic sense, but if we interpret Act II as a ceremony, liturgy, and wedding, then the meaning of that dialogue becomes more accessible. It is, in effect, the struggle by the discursive mind to break free of an egocentered conception of love to which even lovers succumb, and to recog­ nize that once an authentic union of lovers is attained, the copula bind­ ing their names as one (Tristan und Isolde) survives the mortal death of either; for in that moment they have entered the kingdom of Eros which grounds all life and death.74 Characteristically, Tristan the confused but searching hero must utter this realization, and in so doing he clears the way for the conjunctio: with an unrivaled orchestral weaving of their bridal chamber, Wagner consummates their “chemical wedding” as Liebesecstase. Had his drama ended on this soaring, triumphant tone, Wagner would have bequeathed to his followers a “religious drama” rather than tragedy proper.75 But the interruption to the lovers’ conjunctio reveals that Tristan has only begun the process of liberation from societal chains. He must bind the wounds that Eros has inflicted not only on the other protagonists Marke and Melot, but also on himself as a creature of “honor.” The hero must descend one last time into the “universal Night,” but this time it must be alone, armed solely with Isolde’s image as his 73. Tristan, 45. Death, identical to Night and the realm of dreams in Tristan, is clearly distinguished from common death (42). 74. Tristan, 4 7 —48. 75. Joseph Kerman has denied that Tristan is tragedy, preferring to call it religious drama. Apart from the fact that the two classifications are not mutually exclusive, Ker­ man's actual analysis of the work contradicts his claim. Tristan fails to meet his standard for religious drama of a continuous ascent to redemption; the “Delirium” scene, as Ker­ man himself demonstrates, drops the hero into a nadir of despair before he pulls himself together in “the greatest feat . . . in all of Wagner's work.** O pera as D ram a, 192—216.

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beacon/6 Wagner’s great “Delirium” scene is the testament of Tristan’s personal crucifixion and resurrection on his own and society’s behalf. To enact Tristan’s pilgrimage, Wagner calls on the quintessentially musical device of recollection: the hero must rethread the chain of fac­ tors bringing him to his present agony. Yet twice he collapses in the course of his labors. These blocks are necessary for Tristan to realize, and admit, for the first time that he alone made the decision to imbibe Isolde’s “fatal” brew ( “ 1 myself / I drank it! . . . What I drank / has flowed into me” ) and thus finally to grasp the elixir of the creative un­ conscious granted to true heroes of love.77 He is now able to conjure up Isolde’s image, to will her appearance (in “Tristan’s Vision” ) floating toward the hero on waves of bliss. The orchestral modulation to the brilliant key of E major, unique in the drama, floods this moment with the serenity of a homecoming, Tristan’s true Heitnat as the inner life absorbing and radiating the direct sunlight of the beloved. Isolde’s ar­ rival and Tristan’s final paean to the Sun and Day he had hitherto ma­ ligned apotheosize him as “Tristan the Hero,” conqueror of “the uni­ verse” through self-willing adoration of Eros even in the shades of mortal death.78 Yet Tristan dies in order to accentuate his liberation from society. Be­ fore the corpse of his “faithless most faithful friend,” King Marke for the first time acknowledges society’s obeisance to Eros and to Tristan’s lived worship of Frau Minne, and here only does Isolde’s hymn of trans­ figuration take on the enthusiasmos that springs from the depths of her loss.79 Wagner’s drama thus ultimately supplants Tristan’s vision of Isolde— his “magical” feat in discovering his inner being as union with the beloved— with Isolde’s comprehensive vision of a union celebrating love and friendship as the foundation ( “in the painful All /of the univer­ sal breath” ) of the new realm of Eros.80 The monumental effect of Tristan on Bavarian audience, society, and king alike immediately encouraged the composer to embark on the con­ quest of political Bavaria. This assault constitutes the critical historical 76. Tristan, 5 2 —55, 5 6 —57. Like Tristan in Act III and the later Amfortas, Marke has been dealt a searing wound. Tristan begins his descent befo re Melot’s interruption, identify­ ing that domain with Night and the “ Liebesberg” of his mother’s womb. Tristan, 5 5 - 5 6 . 77. Tristan, 6 7 —68; and Wagner’s sketch of summer 1855, quoted in Bailey, “The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde,” * 29. 78. Tristan, 7 2 - 7 3 . 79. Tristan, 7 8 —79. Isolde recovers from a swoon “mit wachsender Bcgeisterung.” Tristan und Iso ld e (London: Eulenburg, n.d.), 994. 80. As Kerman points out, Isolde’s solo, while closely repeating the interrupted cadence of the Liebesecstase, has been transformed to reflect Verklarung. O pera as Drama, 212.

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moment for our theme. The politically radical and musical sympathizers that Wagner brought to Munich, the special relationship he had estab­ lished with its young king, the power of his theatrical revolution, and the particular conditions of the Bavarian state offered possibly the most propitious conditions ever for implementing an aesthetic state on Ger­ man soil.81 This Bavaria had been a leading candidate for the ideal of a revitalized polis; Hegel, we recall, had included it among his prime can­ didates for the modern rational state. It was second in size only to Prus­ sia among the states of the German confederation, and it possessed a thousand-year-old independent history and dynasty, an ancient and thriving Bavarian culture, and a politically self-conscious population that was adamantly anti-Prussian. Its cities, paced by the prosperous seasons of its peasantry, retained a G em iitlichkeit, a cult of enjoyment, that assuaged distinctions of class and rank affecting the rest of Prus­ sianizing Germany; and its capital, Munich, numbering some 166,000 residents (by 1893 it was 390,000), was a Kunststadt of classical splen­ dor, a replica Renaissance “ideal city” of Greek and Florentine ele­ gance. Now “this Athens on Isar” King Ludwig aimed “to crown with a monument to all the Muses, the temple of the G esam tkunstw erk.” 82 Wagner came to this setting with his mixed bag of old radicals, barricadeurs, and young experimental musicians. Although Herwegh did break with him for making common cause with monarchy, August Röckel, Julius Froebel, Gottfried Semper, and Heinrich Laube hurried to Munich, and through his new connections Wagner began cultivating connections with the political federalist Constantin Frantz and with Ferdinand Lassalle.83 To construct the Theatron proper, Wagner then 81. “ Meine Erinncrungen an Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld,” GS, 8: 177—94; Gut­ man, Richard Wagner, 372. O. Zarek calls the fourth performance “the turning point in Ludwig’s life.” The Tragic Idealist: Ludw ig II o f Bavaria (New York: Harper, 1939), trans., 1 0 0 -1 0 2 . Ludwig I attended the first two performances, only missing the third because of the arrival of King Otto of Greece. Wagner acquired Bavarian citizenship in October 1864. Cf. Newman, The L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 2: 249. Wagner stressed to Ludwig that God had sent him “um meinen Glauben zur Religion werden zu lassen.” KLRW, 1: (5 vii 1865) 119. 82. M. Doeber, Bayern und die B ism arckische Reichsgriindung, quoted in Newman, The Life o f Richard Wagner, 2: 324 n.21; Martin Green, T he Von R ichthofen Sisters (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 8 6 —87. On Ludwig l’s effort to make Munich into an aesthetic model: “Die Stadt als Kunstwerk” (1 6 7 -6 9 ) in M. Dirrigl, Ludw ig I: König von Bayern 1825—1848 (Munich: Hugcndubel, 1980). Ludwig was inspired by Holderlin’s “Theokratie des Schönen” and visited Greece, Rome, and Weimar in his field research on that theocracy. Gutman, Richard Wagner, 237. 83. On the Herwegh break: BB, 231; Wagner’s defense (24 ii 1873) was, “Ja, lieber Herwegh, man wird alt.’* Released from prison, Röckel came to Munich to work with the Progressive party. Wagner had recommended that he seek office “in einem freisinnigen Staatsdienst.*’ RWAR, (6 iii 1862) 75. Semper, based in Zurich, worked on plans for the new theatre between 1865 and 1867. Froebel was brought to Munich to run the Sud-

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secured official musical positions in Munich for Hans von Biilow, Hans Richter, and Peter Cornelius (at one stage even Liszt almost came). Most important of all for the enterprise was Wagner’s friendship with Ludwig. Saturated with the vision of a new Athens, the two men shared the dream of “our sanctuary” on an acropolis to which Ludwig’s Volk would hurry: “all men become brothers,” as Ludwig assured his men­ tor, appropriately citing Beethoven’s O de to Jo y , “under the sway of your gentle wings!” While Ludwig declaimed to Cosima the imminent revival of the age of Pericles, Wagner’s writings evoked a Winckelmannesque vision of Bavaria as the new polis. Indeed, king and composer came to see themselves as none other than the Marquis Posa, Schillerian herald of the aesthetic state.84 In Ludwig, it is certainly true, Wagner had found his perfect Wagnerite. Perhaps no other individual in Europe, including possibly Wag­ ner himself, possessed a comparable knowledge of Wagneriana. The li­ bretti and the major theoretical works were all known to Ludwig, who memorized them, culled them for ethical directives, and planned a temple to house their meaning on a scale dwarfing Wagner’s own pro­ jections.85 While the anti-Wagnerian may see such worship as an infal­ lible indication of Ludwig’s mental instability, it should be recalled that in 1865 Ludwig, while overstrung and sensitive, had not yet suffered the personal and political blows that eventually unhinged him. Seasoned and sober observers such as Bismarck and Peter Cornelius thought him strong, quick, and acute in his political judgments and grasp of minis­ terial activity, his very idealism reflecting “a bold, significant nature” capable of great deeds.86 Nor should too much be made of Ludwig’s aristocratic hauteur. A lifelong admirer of Schiller, himself the author of a failed revolutionary drama modeled on Don Karlos, Ludwig viewed the “democratic” Swiss as the ideal Volk and the stage as a necessary “moral institution.” 87 As for his fault of retaining an operatic view of deutschc Presse. Laube, in Vienna, hoped to procure the post of director of the Munich opera in 1867. Frantz and Wagner met in November 1865. In 1864 Lassallc sought Wag­ ner’s help in his ill-fated courting of Helene von Donniges. Newman, T he L ife o f Richard Wagner, 3: 3 2 5 - 2 6 ; CWTB, 2: (7 x 1882), 1 0 1 7 -1 8 . 84. KLRW , 1: (5 i 1865) 45; (16 ix 1865) 182; (7 x 1865) 192. Jan. 1867, quoted in Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 4: 3 9 - 4 0 ; GS, 8: 36, 76, 5 4 - 5 9 . 85. Ludwig first heard a performance of Tannhduser, followed by Lohengrin, before he met Wagner. He knew KR, KZ, and the important introduction to the Ring poem (1863) calling for a German prince to stage the Ring. Zarek, T he Tragic Idealist, 29. 86. Peter Cornelius, LW, 2: (10 xii 1865) 3 1 0 - 1 1 ; Newman, The L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 3: 2 4 2 - 4 3 . 87. Gutman, R ichard Wagner, 241.

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the relationship between prince and Volk, Ludwig shared this perspec­ tive with Wagner himself, whose ideal prince was to be “beyond” mere politics.88 In sum, the ideal alliance had fallen into Wagner’s lap, and from the start its goals were undeniably political. One of Ludwig’s earliest re­ quests of Wagner was for a summary of his latest views on politics and society, and Wagner quickly foisted Feuerbach’s theory of the state on his royal pupil.89 To be sure, Ludwig soon came to mistrust Wagner’s sense for daily politics; but his faith in Wagner’s instinct for the political mission of the theatre never faltered— a mission which, as Wagner pub­ licly reiterated to a high-ranking official, meant “to bring the theatre and music into intimate union with the political life of the people.” 90 Yet some four years later this great venture had come to ruin. Pos­ sibly the conflicts within Bavaria between Progressive and Old Bavaria and externally with the great powers of Prussia and Austria were intrac­ table even to a Wagnerian solution. Still, the evidence supports the view that Wagner himself was singularly inept in exploiting his favored posi­ tion. Blocked by the Bavarian court officials Pfistermeister and Pfordten (the latter a former Dresden official and resolute opponent of the Red Composer), Wagner had thought that he alone held in his hand, as he confided to a crony, “the fate of a people, of a gloriously, uniquely gifted king.” His call for the removal of the “old men” from the Bavarian cabi­ net proved, however, fatal.91 Peter Cornelius, a generally reliable wit­ ness, who watched Wagner slipping “also in his political relationship to the king . . . into a kind of Marquis Posa,” was certain that such med­ dling in politics would doom their common enterprise of a new theatre, music school, and journal. Yet, even he wondered whether Wagner might succeed in bucking the general trend against an artist ever ruling “the collective life [Gesam tleben] of the state.” 92 The upshot was instead that Ludwig was forced to drop his favored composer: Wagner was asked to leave the capital for a period of time. Once banished, he erected an exile capital in Tribschen, near the site of the original “Reutli” of Wilhelm Tell’s Swiss democracy, where he 88. Taylor, R ichard Wagner» 164—65. 89. Wagner's answer was SR. Ludwig told a Professor Huber that on becoming king he planned to put into practice Feuerbach's theory of the state; and Wagner was said to be his tutor on Feuerbach's theory. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 3: 3 3 2 —33. Wag­ ner kept a diary for Ludwig ( 1 4 - 2 7 Sept. 1865). KLRW , 4: 3 —34. 90. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 4: 1 0 6 - 7 n.30. 91. RWMM, (32 ii 1865) 200; KLR W , 1: (26 xi 1865) 2 2 5 - 2 8 . 92. LW, 2: (15 xi 1865) 2 9 5 - 9 6 ; (8 i 1866) 339.

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decided to enter an even more intransigent phase of his campaign. Having learned the lesson, as he put it in a letter written in the spring of 1866, that there must be concerted action by kindred souls to over­ come the “phalanx of the common sort,” he now hoped to call on his supporters through Röckel in the Progressive party and bypass “Catholic-reactionary” Munich for Protestant Nuremberg as the projected new capital for Ludwig with his residence in Bayreuth.93 Wagner actually showed good sense in warning Ludwig to stay neu­ tral in the forthcoming struggle between Prussia and Austria and to unite the German middle states under his leadership. This time it was the king and parliament who led Bavaria into disaster. For the moment the Bavarian defeat at Kissingen even played into Wagner’s hands, by removing his court opponents and replacing them with his own choice of Prince Hohenlohe. But while “all obstacles to the king’s artistic plans seemed to have been removed” by the cabinet shuffle, Hohenlohe, it turned out, was to pay no attention to Wagner’s plan of late 1867 for a union of Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria under Ludwig’s guidance “to rule this German state and to realize the ideal of the German spirit [D eutschturn).” Instead, his goal remained accommodation with Prus­ sia; he had no intention of forming, as he put it, a “Wagner cabinet” ; and eventually his policy paid off with the king’s confused submission to the terms of the new German Reich. Wagner’s campaign for a Bavarian aesthetic state was over, and the single long-term advantage that Wag­ nerian theatrocracy eventually derived from it was the formation of the Bayreuth project within the state boundaries of his royal patron.94 In 1868 Die Meistersinger celebrated Wagner’s alliance with Ludwig through the primacy of art that the Zeitpolitik of living Bavaria had re­ jected. Yet Wagner never faced the lessons of his failure. The early Wag­ ner had called for collaboration between free spirits in the common cause of the aesthetic state; by 1868 the later Wagner had broken ties with Froebel, Röckel, Semper, and Laube and through his mendacities impaired his friendship with Ludwig. He had been granted a unique op­ portunity to prove his contention that the theatre could transform the polity through a sympathetic prince; Ludwig had been his to make “lu­ cid and clear-sighted through his art.” 95 Yet by the fall of 1868 Ludwig 93. KLRW , 3: (19 iii 1866) 133. Ludwig in 1881 recalled their common struggle against that “phalanx.” KLRW, 3: (26 ii 1881) 199; 2: (24 vii 1866) 7 8 - 7 9 . 94. “Wagners Politisches Programm (Anfang Juni 1866),” KLRW, 4: 147—50. Westernhagen, Wagner, 384. On the basically Frantzean “Trinomium” schema: BB, 1 5 3 -5 4 . Hohenlohe diary (12 iii 1867), quoted in Newman, The L ife o f Richard Wagner, 4: 55. 95. KLRW , 3: (19 iii 1866) 134.

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refused to answer his letters, and the two did not see each other again until the 1876 Bayreuth festival. Wagner, it is clear, sabotaged his own good fortune by submitting to a new— and final— alliance, this time with Liszt’s daughter Cosima.96 Behind almost all of Wagner’s blunders between 1865 and 1868 stands Cosima’s bid for control of the Wagnerian mission. By choosing Cosima against not only his old radical collaborators but also the faithful Lud­ wig, Wagner turned his back on the sort of multilevel campaign without which any pursuit of an aesthetic state is bound to fail. Once again, Peter Cornelius proved prescient in his understanding of Wagner’s fate. Noting that after January 1865 Wagner’s first loyalty was to Cosima, Cornelius pointed out the dangers of a campaign that failed to go “deeply” into the concrete relationships needed to make up an aesthetic state.97 Succumbing “entirely and unconditionally” to Cosima’s influ­ ence, Wagner instead took the road to Bayreuth. It would prove an un­ fortunate legacy for Wagner’s name and historical status. The Idea o f Bayreuth: Temple o f Kunstreligion Julius Froebel once told Liszt that Wagner’s Hellenic dream of unit­ ing art, politics, and religion presupposed the creation of a new reli­ gion.9” Wagner’s Bayreuth period and his last political act, Parsifal, represent Wagner’s final attempt to fulfill Froebel’s stipulation. Wagner had always been tempted by the image of a special temple to art located far from the madding crowd, where he might control the ma­ chinery of performance and a specially selected audience would gather in contemplative leisure. When Munich proved obdurate to his project (as well as to his affair with Cosima), Wagner, characteristically half­ burning his bridges, began scouting about for a likely geographic alter­ native. Since Ludwig shared his contempt for conventional theatregoers, Wagner’s new search need not be read as betrayal of their common cause. But it is certain that after Wagner found his special site in Bay­ reuth, Ludwig was grievously wounded by Wagner’s maneuvers. Lud96. Generally regarded as a “democrat** by his political enemies in Munich (KLRW , ldxxxiv), Wagner came to scorn Bavarian liberalism for its pusillanimity. KLRW , 4: (16 xii 1865) 116. However, Cosima seems to have been behind his breaks with Rockel, Sem­ per, and Froebel, and very possibly wrote the fatal article of Nov. 1865 that forced Lud­ wig to ask Wagner to leave Munich temporarily. 97. LW, 2: (9 xii 1865) 3 1 5 - 1 6 ; (15 xi 1865) 296. 98. Froebel, Eitt Lebenslauf, 2: 486, quoted in Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard W ag­ ner, 4: 9 3 - 9 4 .

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wig’s commitment to Wagnerian Kunstreligion did survive even this test; he alone saved Bayreuth for the first festival, after its costly debut, and ultimately granted Wagner refuge from financial cares for the com­ position of Parsifal. Still, after 1868 and all the more emphatically after 1870, the collaboration of the two friends was carried out at both a geo­ graphical and a temperamental distance, Wagner calling on Ludwig to don the Grail King’s spiritual crown while Ludwig refused on behalf of his own more humanist conception of mankind." Equally 1868 and 1870 were banner years in the story of Wagner’s alleged submission to the new Reich. If 1868 established an association between Wagner’s theatrical star and burgeoning German nationalism highlighted by the premiere of Die Meistersinger, the events of 1870 drove Wagner to identify his assault on the industrial culture of “Paris” with the victorious German legions of the Franco-Prussian War. Rcichsdeutsch Wagner is mostly another chapter in the tale of Wagnerian op­ portunism. Hoping to bank on the expansive sentiment dominating Berlin in that first decade of the Reich, Wagner might be blamed for act­ ing at variance with the anti-Prussian sentiments of Ludwig. He was soon disabused, by the withdrawal of promised sums from Berlin for the construction of his theatre when it became clear that he himself could not be budged from his intention of building it in unknown Bayreuth. By 1872, then, Wagner was expressing early misgivings about the Reich itself, and around 1876 these had swelled to positive repudiations of any inner bond between Reich and Bayreuth, as well as to renewed insistence to Ludwig that the Wagnerian Kunstreligion must not be handed over to the Reich but belonged to Bavaria and its king.100 Hence, at the time that Wagner embarked on the composition of Par­ sifal in 1877, the “German spirit” and its political arm had been rele­ gated to the portly files of Wagner’s enemies.101 In any event, Wagner’s understanding of the “German” had stemmed from a period preceding “blood and iron” politics. His conception of the aesthetic state be­ longed— as does most of the tradition— to an era of polities some of which were hardly larger than the Greek polis. The new political struc­ ture of 1870 had brought to the limelight precisely those anticom­ munitarian forces of concentrated industry, financial capital, and pro99. KLRW , 2: (1 iii 1871) 3 2 0 - 2 2 ; (26 v 1871) 324. Cf. his reference to “der Gedanke der Gemeinde” and “ Ritterschaft des Grales.” CWTB, 2: (5 iv 1882) 925. 100. RWP, (8 ii 1872) 243. KLRW , 3: (22 xii 1872) 11; (13 viii 1876) 85; (21 x 1876) 97. Nietzsche, K G -B , 2 - 4 : (24 x 1872) 103. 101. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 4: 569; GS, 10: 29.

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letarianization of rural and civic domains that Wagner had regarded as the malefic legacy of overcentralized France. Thus, Bayreuth was an idea even eschewing a medium-sized center of the order of Munich; however distorted, it remained a late nineteenth-century emulation of Weimar. In this last decade, Wagner envisioned Bayreuth as the materialization of “Zukunftsmusik,” the new “temple of art” compositely modeled on Greek temples and theatres of Dionysos, a veritable “art-Washington” and “Grail city of art.” Dedicated to the “people,” it would draw to its eminence those remnants of the Volk yet untainted by disintegrating modernity: “the new collectivity” of free spirits dedicated to the Wag­ nerian ideal.102 Unfortunately, Wagner’s radical ideas for the running of his temple gradually had to be shelved. The bold Zurich proposal which had admi­ rably summed up Wagner’s liberatory view of a public art could not sur­ vive the practicalities of an enterprise as costly as Bayreuth. The free gathering of artists, transformed into a free gathering of art patrons, gave way in the end to the conventional means of a paying public.103 The image of a festival of independent artworks joining those by Wagner was canceled in favor of a church of Wagneriana presided over by first priestess Cosima. To the cynic none of this will be surprising. But it re­ mains noteworthy that in seeking to stave off domination by the ex­ change relationship at the portals of his temple, Wagner sacrificed his health and much of his own (and Cosima’s) funds. Instead of accepting the handsome terms of Ludwig for Munich or of city fathers in major cities of the Reich for his festival idea, Wagner continued to make major sacrifices on behalf of his quest for the utopian other.104 At the same time, Wagner’s “Gralsburg der Kunst” marks his most problematic contribution to the idea of an aesthetic state. Wagner’s pro­ posals for Munich had already included not only the “sanctuary” itself but also a supportive journal, societies of patrons, and a music school 102. GS, 9: 331. In 1879 Wagner claimed that Weimar was the community he had envisaged in his original KR and KZ proposals. R ichard Wagner's Lebensbericht (Leip­ zig: E. Schlocmp, 1884), 4 9 - 5 0 . GS, 9: 332. R. Gray, “The German Intellectual Back­ ground,” in Burbidge and Sutton, T he Wagner C om panion, 37; Barzun, Berlioz and the Rom antic Century, 2: 329; Frau Schmole in BC, 133; GS, 9: 322; Bayreuther B rief von Richard Wagner (2d ed. Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1907), (14 vi 1877) 270. GS, 9: 322. 103. KR, 40. Ultimately, Wagner, attacking the whole idea of a Patronat scheme, con­ ceded to a paying public. R ichard Wagner an seine Kunstler, ed. E. KIoss (3d ed. Leipzig: Brcitkopf and Hartel, 1912), (28 ix 1882) 4 0 4 —5. 104. These cities included Bad Reichenhall, Darmstadt, and Berlin.

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developing training in “naturalness” of voice and gesture according to the standards of classical Hellenic tragedy.105 After the Munich debacle he had to begin all over again, and he managed to form a circle of aes­ thetic Young Turks who, disgusted by the philistinism of Reich Ger­ many, might commit themselves to the new community of Bayreuth. Unfortunately, such leading members as Nietzsche were equally put off by the 1876 festival, which promised not so much the beginnings of a new “community” as yet another familiar example of co-optation. It is only fair to add that Wagner himself was deeply disappointed by that festival. Thus, in 1877 Wagner embarked on his Parsifal phase with all the rancor built up over a lifetime’s frustrations.'06 Having put behind him any faith in a German “spirit” or “Reich,” Wagner reconsidered the meaning of the “German,” this “metaphysical idea” that had preoccu­ pied him throughout his career.107 Partly as a result of encountering the ideas of the racial theorist Count Gobineau in 1876, Wagner plunged into the treacherous tides of social Darwinism for some of his answers. His final flurry of theoretical writings, written in conjunction with the composition of Parsifal (from Should We H op e? [1879] to H eroism and Christianity [1881]), represents Wagner’s most notorious and scurrilous incursions into the related topics of race, culture, and society. Here is Wagner at his most abominable, accepting the superiority of the white race while giving full vent to an ineradicable anti-Semitism. Yet the picture is more complicated than his detractors have allowed. Wagner’s claim that by reverting to his radical thoughts of 1848 —1852 he was simply following the path already laid out by Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters furnishes a first enigma.108 A close perusal of Wagner’s last texts yields a confused mind which was not willing to jettison either its ha­ treds or its putative Humanitat. Wagner’s account of human progress from the creation of “history” to its overcoming in compassion fur­ nishes a classic example of his confusion. The first half of the narrative gave full credit, with frequent bows toward Gobineauism, to the white 105. KLRW , 1: (5 i 1865) 45. Nietzsche called it a “Tempe!.” Nietzsche, GB, 4: (19 ii 1883) 135. “Eine ideale Natiirlichkeit.” G5, 9: 215; 12: 331. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 2: 318; “Bericht uber eine in Munchen zu errichtende deutsche Musikschule [1865],” GS, 8: 1 2 5 -7 6 . 106. CW TB, 1: (2 xii 1877) 1091. In the winter of 1 8 7 6 -1 8 7 7 , Wagner (reading Thucydides) drew a parallel between the fall of Periclean Athens and the 1876 Bayreuth Festival. Westernhagen, Wagner, 513. 107. Nietzsche, KG -B, 2 - 4 : (24 x 1872) 103. 108. GS, 10: 1 2 1 -2 2 .

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races and the Brahmanic religion, but then went on to argue their prob­ lematic character after the will had reached the longing for “nature,” or the wholeness of Vereinigung and compassion.109 Brahmanism, as Wag­ ner saw it, had degenerated into “a race religion” so rigidly oppressing society through the metaphysics of caste that not even the Buddha could crack the “opposition of the rigid race-power of the white master” and its “absolutely immoral world order.” But if Wagner’s heroes, the Buddha and the original Jesus, transcended racial politics and history in favor of the ideal of mankind’s bond of union in the aptitude for shared suffering, still the composer had to interject that Jesus must have been “white” rather than “Semitic.” And although Wagner concluded that the antidote to the decline of modern races was a commingling, he quickly restricted his advice to the “symbolic” domain, a literal mixing of races apparently not being conducive to “an aesthetic Weltanschauung.” 1,0 Perhaps the meaning behind Wagner’s final thoughts is deeper than analysis can yield. Still, his tawdry polemics against the Jews discourage more detailed scrutiny."1 Wagner’s viscous hatred for the “Jewish” was a point of serious disagreement with his most loyal friends, Liszt and Ludwig. To the former he could only mumble that “this grudge is as necessary to my nature as bile to blood” ; to the latter’s deeply felt hu­ manist orientation, he no less lamely argued that Ludwig’s royal posi­ tion prevented him from having contact with the intolerable nature of the Jew. There is, then, some justification for sensing in Parsifal the spirit of a ubiquitous Wagnerian paranoia. The Jew, symbol of modern­ ity, is both cause and effect of man’s decay; his image must vanish as cleanly as the castrated magic holding up Klingsor’s castle."2 In the end Parsifal proved the raison d’etre of Bayreuth and its commu­ nity. Having after the disappointment of the 1876 festival lost all inter109. GS, 10: 281; RK, 230, 2 4 5 ,2 5 0 . Wagner identified Day with the history of man­ kind. RK, 249. He claimed that the true German character comes out in “periodische bundesschaftlichen Vereinigungen,” while the idea of the state is 44Assyrian-Jewish.” GS, 10: 23, 29. Also RK, 234, 251, and his earlier contempt for world conquerors and politi­ cal fanatics: OD, GS, 3: 271; RWAR, (26 i 1854) 3 2 - 3 3 ; RWMW, (10 x 1859) 184. 110. GS, 10: 2 8 0 -8 4 . 111. Compare RK, 232, RWAR, 6 0 —61, which hold that authentic Christianity originated in India. 112. RW FL, 1: (18 iv 1851) 1 2 5 -2 6 ; also in LW, 2: (1 xi 1865) 285. KLR W , 2: (11 x 1881) 226; 3: (22 xi 1881) 229. This is the brunt of Gutman’s excessive interpretation of the Grail Knights as proto-SS guards. While there are serious difficulties about accepting Gutman’s version, it at least helps to raise a problem about the message of Parsifal that the more standard hagiological accounts ignore. R ichard Wagner, 4 2 5 - 4 0 .

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est in restaging the Ring in Bayreuth, Wagner put all his resources behind the festival drama of dedication of Parsifal, the single work con­ structed fully with Bayreuth in mind.11’ This work would be his legacy as the “poetic priest” sent to mankind at the moment that art would reveal the hidden truth behind religion, Vereinigung, by means of the ideal representation.114 Since his Beethoven essay of 1870, Wagner had given increasing emphasis to the visual reverberations of theatre, and Parsifal summed up this trend by replacing “music drama” with a form, the festival drama of dedication, enacting the passion of Agape. If Schiller eventually transcended tragedy for Volksstiick, Wagner thus found his final theatrical home in tableau.115 Musically Parsifal takes up where Tristan leaves off: the third act opens with a reversion to the fragmented tonality of Tristan’s H eim at in order to characterize Parsifal’s painful wanderings from the magic castle of Klingsor to the Grail domain. Indeed, the Tristanesque “mystical chord,” with its twilight iridescence, pervades a scene of disintegration caused by the nefarious sexuality of Parsifal.,16 The difference between the two works is that Parsifal's chromatic universe is no longer attached to the divine madness of two lovers seeking sensuous-erotic liberation. Reflecting a quasi-Manichaean universe of feelings evenly split into two absolutely opposing worlds, chromaticism does not “ascend” to di­ atonic resolution, but is enmeshed in fatal conflict with the diatonic.117 Chromatic are the lamentations of the sexually wounded Grail king, Amfortas; diatonic is the spiraling motif of the Grail winding toward redemption through compassion: on the one side, a poisoned com­ munity of brothers (the knights of Monsalvat); on the other, the cas113. G. Skelton points out Wagner’s surprising loss of interest in restaging the Ring in Bayreuth after 1876. “The Idea of Bayreuth,” in Burbidge and Sutton, T he Wagner C om ­ panion, 408. Newman, The L ife o f Richard Wagner, 4: 306. 114. GS, 10: 247. For Wagner, the more degenerate the state of mankind, the greater the need to affirm the power of the artwork. CWTB, 2: (29 v 1881) 743. Cf. Heinrich Porges, “Ueber die Begriindung der Kunst durch die Religion,” Bayreuther Blatter, 3 (March 1878) and 10 (October 1878). 115. Dahlhaus, R ichard Wagner's Music Dramas, 150; also “hagiographic drama” (147); Westernhagen, following Wagner, calls Act III an elegy. Wagner, 546. 116. “Annalen [1855],” BB, 125, links Tristan, Act III, with “ Parzival.” Kerman, “Wagner: Thoughts in Season,” 14; Gutman, Richard Wagner, 374. On Amfortas as the Tristan of the third act of Tristan, cf. RWMW, (30 v 1859) 144. Lorenz, Das Geheim nis der Form bei R ichard Wagner, 4: 44, 30, 32, considers the role of sexuality in Parsifal as even more important than in Tristan. He identifies it with “Verwirrung,” a mental state of confusion; compare Michel Foucault’s allusion to Tristan and madness in M adness and Civilization (New York: Vintage, [1961] 1973), trans., 12. 117. Wagner’s own formulation, KLRW, 3: (15 x 1878) 138.

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trated desire of evil for domination of the good (Klingsor and his magic castle).1,8 The single authentic mediator between these extremes is Wagner’s most interesting, if unclassifiable, dramatic character, Kundry, both ser­ vant and seducer of the brotherhood. When Liszt once pointed to a “wound” in Wagner’s heart that could only be healed by faith, Wagner responded by identifying this wound with “the condition of lovelessness” encircling all modern men. Kundry’s sexuality is meant to embody this suffering in its multifarious forms in Parsifal, Amfortas, and Klingsor.119 Innocent neither in her passion nor in her chasteness, Kundry makes in­ vincible the power of Klingsor’s impotent yearning, the summation of the modern age. But, as she herself is a slave to longing for sexual gratifi­ cation, Kundry must pray for the man capable of resisting her opulent attractions on behalf of his fellow man.120 Thus, when Parsifal experi­ ences the suffering of his “brother” Amfortas at the very moment of Kundry’s most scandalous offer, he actually undergoes a “sufferingwith,” an instant identification with the soul of Amfortas.121 This vic­ tory dissolves Klingsor’s Z auberschloss, essentially a mirage of human egoistic desire. And while it also brings about a further disintegration in the morale sustaining the Grail domain, Parsifal is able to make his way through countless circles of lesser illusions back to Monsalvat.122 His he­ roic compassion for Amfortas proves the cure for the suffering king and his knights and inaugurates the revitalized spirit of Agape presided over by Parsifal as the new Grail king. Much of the stage effectiveness of Parsifal depends on Wagner’s evo­ cation of the sentiment of compassion, particularly at the crucial mo­ ment of Parsifal’s ascension to his kingship. Utilizing a scoring that in its silkiness suggests “cloud-layers that keep separating and combining again,” m Wagner reduces to an absolute minimum all discordant ef­ fects in his art of transition. As the tapestry of sound exudes the glow of 118. Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner's Music D ram as, 151—52. Zuckerman, claiming that two-thirds of Parsifal inherits Tristan's chromaticism, draws on Wagner’s comments to distinguish between the “ascending” chromaticism of Tristan and the “descending” chromaticism of Parsifal (marked by the sinking ninth chords of Amfortas’s suffering). T he First H undred Years o f Wagner's 'Tristan,' 25. 119. RW FLt 1: (8 iv 1853) 233; (13 iv 1853) 237. 120. In his notes Wagner identifies Kundry with “der ewige Jude.” BB, 62. 121. KLRW, 1: (7 ix 1865) 174. 122. Lorenz, Das Geheitnnis der Form b e i R ichard Wagner, 4: 144. 123. Quoted in Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 4: 605. “No less than Tristan, Parsifal is governed by Wagner’s ‘art of transition.’ ” Dahlhaus, R ichard Wagner's M usic D ramas, 152.

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a resurrected Grail, Wagner very possibly accomplishes that optimal moment in modern German art when the experience itself of art has be­ come a religious sensation, when the sense of a moral-ethical resolution stems from a distinctly aesthetic satisfaction. Even critics who cavil at the uncomfortable theme of Parsifal are often disarmed by this final, and compelling, experience of comm unitas through drama.124 Parsifal was primarily meant as Wagners encomium to Agape over Eros, but it is no less about kingship. A Wagnerian //principe, it makes the last entry in a series of manifestos he directed to his princely votary, Ludwig.125 Wagner’s essays during the early period of their collaboration had al­ ready replaced his former view of the king as the first among republi­ cans with the notion of the ideal monarch inaugurating the creation of an aesthetic state, and Ludwig naturally encouraged Wagner in these formulations. He came to be called “Parsifal” in Wagner’s entourage; and the first full prose sketch of Parsifal in August 1865 came from clos­ est collaboration with the young king.126 As a result, however, of Wagner’s disappointment with Ludwig’s active statesmanship of 1865 —1868, Parsifal changed from a vision shared by prince and poet to Wagner’s “final sermon to Ludwig,” 127 ad­ monishing him to fill the role of protector of the Bayreuth “commu­ nity.” Yet Ludwig was reluctant to accept Wagner’s call fully, and one explanation may be the narrow breath of communality that was being exhaled from the Wagner Gralsburg in Bavaria. For after experiencing the shattering impact of the Tristan premiere in 1865, Ludwig had an­ ticipated two works to complete the project he shared with Wagner. Parsifal and The Victors, works first imagined in that productive spring of 1856 when Wagner had initially thought of Tristan, were to round out a trilogy celebrating the triumph of the human love of Tristan in a 124. But cf. T. W. Adorno, Versuch iiber Wagner (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1952), 182—98. 125. Zarek quotes from Ludwig’s later diary: “Magic of lilies. Purity. Kingship” as evidence of Ludwig’s continued preoccupation with the model of Parsifal for kingship. T he Tragic Idealist, 221. Cf. KLRW, 3: (25 i 1874) 29. When Wagner sent Ludwig a copy of the Parsifal poem (1877, although Wagner had started on it again in 1874), Wagner inscribed the last line of the work: “ ‘Erlosung dem Erloser!’ R. W.” Munich archives, quoted in Newman, T he L ife o f Richard Wagncrt 4: 567. 126. “ Parzival (so heissen Sie unter uns, theurer Freund!) als Weltenrichter.” Wagner to Ludwig, KLR W , 1: (25 vi 1865) 110. Wagner and Ludwig were together in a solitary hut in the Hochkopf in August 1865 when Wagner was inspired by the theme of Parsifal and the K arfreitagszauber to write the extensive prose sketch found in BB. Zarek, The Tragic Idealist, 106—7. 127. Gutman, R ichard Wagner, 244.

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“communality” of love: Agape would absorb Eros.128 Wagner himself claimed that the common thread in Parsifal and The Victors was “the redemption of woman,” and this theme was connected with the re­ vitalized “community” on two levels: the ideal community not only must emerge from a campaign waged against loveless mankind, it must absorb and transcend the inclusive union of two lovers.129 If woman in Tristan redeemed man for Eros, man must redeem woman for the Agape of this community. Parsifal comprises the more difficult aspect of this campaign. Here Eros, manipulated by female sexuality in thrall to castrated desire, suc­ ceeds in poisoning man and must be defied by man’s “immediate intui­ tion” of his identity with the suffering of his brother. Ludwig seems to have been ill at ease with Wagner’s presentation of this conflict, particu­ larly with regard to the pivotal moment of “Kundry’s Kiss.” 130 And there are good reasons for finding distasteful a redemption of woman which, to be blunt, first renders her dumb and then liquidates her.131 As Ludwig probably discerned, not only is Eros not reconciled with Agape, but Parsifal gives no reason for regarding them as anything but eter­ nal foes.132 It is of course something of a paradox that this uncompromising ad­ vocate of sensuous-erotic freedom would have left as his will a state­ ment so evidently antierotic. The paradox can be partly explained by accounting for the sexuality of Parsifal as a distinctly unhealthy sub­ jugation to lovelessness: Klingsor, by this explanation, is the culmina­ tion of a series of villains in Wagner’s works representing the cancerous gains made by the immoral will over the “purely human.” With such a figure there can be no compromise; to reactivate a Grail domain in this world means to dissolve his bewitching will to power through the re­ nunciatory heroism of a Parsifal. Yet, while all this is true, it is no less possible, by tracing Wagner’s equivocal treatment of sexuality in Par128. Bailey, “The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde,” ’ 47, 31. Wagner even conflated the characters from the two works (e.g., “Sawitri-Parsifal” in RWMW, [19 i 1859] 98). Cf. RWFL, 2: (20 vii 1856); RWAR, (23 viii 1856) 72. Originally in Tristan the appearance of Parsifal was to have been accompanied by the E major key; as we saw, the modulation to this key in fact marks Isolde’s visionary appearance at the climax of Tristan’s final “De­ lirium.” Bailey, “The Genesis of ‘Tristan und Isolde,*” 30, 31. 129. CWTB, 2: (6 i 1881) 659; also Gutman, R ichard Wagner, 188; BB, 62. 130. KLRW, 1: (5 ix 1865) 170. 131. Lorenz somewhat lamely points out that now “even” woman can enter the temple of the Grail knights. The reader is nonetheless reminded that Kundry’s stay is a brief one. Das G eheim nis der Form bei R ichard Wagner, 4: 190—91. 132. Apparently Wagner at one point thought of including Isolde among the flower maidens in Klingsor’s magic garden. Gutman, R ichard Wagtter, 438.

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sifal back to such early works as Tatmhduser, to detect a severe ambiva­ lence in Wagner’s hopes for the “purification” of the sexual dimension. A final evaluation of Parsifal must acknowledge the incompatibility in the Grail domain between a brotherhood purified by compassion and a sexuality that is only allowed within its precinct as slumber. In order, then, to add the final missing piece, Ludwig all the more insistently appealed to Wagner to complete the project of The Victors.m The main character of The Victors is the Buddha, for Wagner the wisest of beings, embodying the sort of Humanitat Ludwig found compatible with authentic kingship. Furthermore, the theme of the work, in which the Buddha was to be taught by the invincible power of Eros— Sawitri’s love for Ananda, a member of the Buddha’s “community”— to admit woman to “the community of saints,” would have confirmed the com­ patibility of Eros and Agape in the spirit of Tristan. Ludwig fulminated against every hint by the aging Wagner that he was not up to this culmi­ nating project, and his encouragement possibly held Wagner to the topic up to his very deathbed. Wagner’s last written words recount this same “beautiful legend” of the Buddha in an ultimate effort to find the correct reconciliation between the “ideality” of man and the “naturality” of woman. Murmuring that woman’s emancipation must be fulfilled “only under ecstatic convulsions,” the composer of Tristan was struck down in the moment that he scribbled, appositely, “lovetragic.” 134 Wagner left The Victors and Bayreuth in an unsettled state for future assessment. Externally it would seem that Wagner died in triumph through the 1882 premiere of Parsifal in his own Theatron: against all the odds he had erected his temple, he had revolutionized the public ex­ pectations of opera, and political Wagnerians were budding on the cul­ tural landscape from Vienna to London. Yet the unfinished plans for The Victors accentuate the gap remaining between Wagner’s goal and reality. Despite his community of Bayreuth and adulation from his growing number of fans, Wagner during these final years remained an 133. Newman, T he L ife o f R ichard Wagner, 3: 238. In 1870 Ludwig’s fervent plea that Wagner finish Parsifal and D ie Sieger was particularly motivated by Ludwig’s deep admiration for Brahmanism and Buddhism. KLRW, 2: (5 vi 1870) 310. Other references for Wagner’s thoughts on D ie Sieger : RW FL, 2: (20 vii 1856) 137; KLRW, 1: (6 -1 1 i 1865) 4 9 ; BB, (v 1868) 1 7 6 -7 8 . 134. GS, 12: (11 ii 1883) 343. RWMW, (5 x 1858) 5 7 - 5 8 . KLRW, 3: (17 xi 1880) 189; (11 x 1881) 2 2 7 ; (17 vii 1882) 2 4 4 - 4 5 (in response to the implications of Wagner’s letter of 8 July 1882, after the Parsifal festival). Wagner told Cosima that Parsifal was his last word on the “Gemeinde” and that D ie Sieger could only repeat it in a weaker form. CWTB, 2: (6 iv 1882) 925.

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intensely bitter man. Death seems to have caught him and the Bayreuth Idea unawares. Wagner had made no plans for a successor, although there is no evidence whatsoever that he intended Cosima to take con­ trol.1’5 Cosima guided his legacy in accordance with the most literalist interpretations of Wagner’s vision, turned it into a bastion of politically conservative sentiment, and ensured that it would become a welcome oasis for the leaders of the Third Reich. Meanwhile, The Victors re­ mained little more than an encouragement for Wagner’s liberal admirers that the author of Parsifal was no protofascist.136 As for Wagner’s kingly protege, Ludwig not only failed to show up for that last sermon of Par­ sifal in Bayreuth but fully abandoned all participation in Z eitpolitik, preferring his castles and palaces of fantasy. Wagner had not necessarily intended all these consequences. But he had helped to foster them after failing in Munich to collaborate with reformist friends and Ludwig for a new kind of political life. Having preferred Cosima and her brand of submission to an infallible leader, he opted for a personal mausoleum over a house of shared creation (Gem einsam -Kunstwerk). The price was to be costly for his most cher­ ished goals of human emancipation. ♦

♦

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The final verdict on Richard Wagner’s odyssey surely begins with recog­ nition that Wagner “had accomplished the greatest educational feat of the age.” By “entangling philosophy and social theory so thoroughly with music,” Wagner set a standard, the G esam tkunstw erk, that deeply influenced Central European architects, city planners, politicians, and culture critics of the next generation.137 Beginning with a plan for a form of German theatrical experience to emulate the Athenian communal rit­ ual of tragedy, Wagner originally assumed that it would be carried out in conjunction with the midcentury political radicalism of B ohem e, an­ archism, and utopian socialism. Instead Wagner was given his first prac­ tical opportunity by an idealistic king, Ludwig II, who offered him every amenity in return for realizing an aesthetic state in Bavaria. As some fifteen years had passed since Wagner’s first manifestos, the composer 135. Skelton, “The Idea of Bayreuth,’* 409. 136. Even Gutman concedes the “real humanity” behind D ie Sieger. R ichard Wagner, 4 5 1 -5 4 . 137. Barzun, Berlioz an d the R om antic Century, 2: 201. An important connection between Bayreuth and Vienna was Hans Richter, a major Wagnerian conductor. Schorske, Fin-de-sieclc Vienna, 6 8 —71, 254, 269; Wagner even influenced Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, through Tannhäuser, 163.

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was understandably impatient to try out his ideas. Unfortunately, partly as a result of that same impatience, he committed fatal political mis­ calculations in Munich and after this defeat decided to go it alone with his Idea of Bayreuth. In retrospect this step was laden with pitfalls, as Wagner himself had occasion to admit, and although the final result was his model work and theatre, Wagner failed to show exactly how all this might precipitate the political change that he anticipated— beyond, that is, its immediate ramifications on Ludwig. Wagner’s ultimate message, Parsifal, was both radical in its call for Vereinigung and antiliberal in its image of an elite knighthood uncomfortable with Eros. Ultimately, his stance was compatible not with conventional radicalism or with fas­ cism, but with the “politics of cultural despair” that came to exercise a problematic influence on German thought in the twentieth century.13" A first objection to this Wagnerian enterprise is that his dependence on the Athenian model reflected a faulty understanding of Greek his­ torical reality and, by implication, of its significance for a new commu­ nity. Wagner, however, never intended to imitate this model— a hope­ less and in any case anachronistic proposal— but he did hope to emulate it in the terms offered by nineteenth-century high culture. Indeed, mod­ ern scholarship has confirmed a great deal of Wagner’s basic intuition about Athenian drama. It has recognized that tragedy was no mere en­ tertainment “but a great civic and religious occasion for the community as a whole” ; that “references to actors in Greek literature usually read like comments on opera singers” ; that tragic art, originating from the choral song, was a kind of synthetic mime drawing on words, music, and dance; and that its goal of tragic emotion, eAeo