The Specificity of the Aesthetic, Volume 1 9004526064, 9789004526068

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The Specificity of the Aesthetic

Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Loren Balhorn (Berlin) David Broder (Rome) Sebastian Budgen (Paris) Steve Edwards (London) Juan Grigera (London) Marcel van der Linden (Amsterdam) Peter Thomas (London) Gavin Walker (Montréal)

volume 76

Luká cs Library Edited by Erik M. Bachman Tyrus Miller

volume 2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ll

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022062015

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill‑typeface. issn 1570-1522 isbn 9789004526068 (hardback) isbn 9789004526075 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Estate of György Lukács. Copyright to the Editor’s Introduction Erik M. Bachmann. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Editor’s Introduction: Art in Its Eigenart Erik M. Bachman Acknowledgements xliii Note on the Translation xliv

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The Specificity of the Aesthetic Preface 5 1

Issues of Reflection in Everyday Life 22

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The Disanthropomorphisation of Reflection in Science 116

3

Preliminary Issues of the Disentanglement of Art from Everyday Life as a Matter of Principle 174

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The Abstract Forms of the Aesthetic Reflection of Reality 214

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Issues of Mimesis i: The Coming into Being of Aesthetic Reflection 302

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Issues of Mimesis ii: The Path to the Worldedness of Art 381

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Issues of Mimesis iii: The Path of the Subject to Aesthetic Reflection 462

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Issues of Mimesis iv: The World Proper to Works of Art 538

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Issues of Mimesis v: The Defetishising Mission of Art

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Issues of Mimesis vi: Universal Features of the Subject-Object Relationship in Aesthetics 680 References Index

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editor’s introduction

Art in Its Eigenart Erik M. Bachman

For those apt to take note of such a thing, the publication here of the first English-language translation of the first volume of Georg Lukács’s The Specificity of the Aesthetic (Die Eigenart des Ästhetischen, published 1963) may call forth a certain bemusement and scepticism.1 Bemusement because the very endeavour undertaken in The Specificity of the Aesthetic does not appear at first glance to be of its – much less our – time. After all, Lukács’s ambition in these two volumes is to offer a systematic and consistent account of Marxist aesthetics that relates art, its creation, and its reception to all other significant areas of human life (especially to science and the everyday) as well as to the behaviours that have promoted or impeded the genesis of art as such throughout the history of the human race in different parts of the world. This entails addressing many areas that otherwise might seem extraneous to aesthetics. For instance, Lukács elaborates at length the principles by which and the anthropological conditions under which art and science have respectively detached themselves from everyday life, labour, magic, and religion as modally differentiated ways of reflecting a shared reality over the course of millennia (Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 5). The first volume of The Specificity of the Aesthetic does, however, devote a great deal of attention to more familiar aesthetic topics, such as the long-drawn-out development of some notable abstract components of form (rhythm, symmetry, proportion, ornamentation) that have long since been incorporated into works and performances now legible to us as art (Chapter 4). Lukács develops the implicit claim that mimesis is not merely receptive behaviour but rather an active form of appropriating reality that extends to all higher organised forms of life, including but not limited to art (Chapters 5, 6, and 7). Furthermore, he itemises and expansively describes the mimetic qualities of art objects that inform, and are shaped by, the properly aesthetic comportments to be adopted by creators and receivers alike (Chapters 5 through 10).2

1 The insights, reservations, criticisms, and questions of Tyrus Miller, H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., Nicholas Gaskill, and James Bachman regarding earlier drafts have been immensely helpful to me in preparing this introduction. 2 For more on mimesis as activity and receptivity in Lukács, see Göcht 2012, pp. 80–1. Darío Villanueva has helpfully pointed out that, in articulating a theory of mimesis that extends

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In this view the aesthetic sphere is a hard-won zone of highly mediated human activity that is characterised by pluralism in terms of the genres, works, and forms of art it encompasses, though these are all nevertheless ultimately linked together by a shared defetishising mission that we as their users and makers can fail to live up to (Chapters 8 and 9). The cost of such a failure is that in the end we do not see the art object or performance for what it truly is nor do we act upon the opportunity it provides for us to reshape our own subjectivities by means of the variety of catharsis-like experiences called forth by such objects and performances (Chapter 10). Lukács undertakes all of this while moreover venturing a grand unified theory of social action whereby the autonomous forms of disanthropomorphising reflection (science) and of anthropomorphising reflection (art) each in their own way help to cultivate a deeper engagement with the vita activa of a group or people in their everyday lives.3 Whereas the disanthropomorphisation performed by science leads to an ever greater conscious awareness of human activity and the surrounding world that exists both in relation to and independent of that activity, the anthropomorphisation commenced by art is said to eventuate in nothing less than the self-consciousness of the human race as such (Chapters 2, 5, and 7). This means that, when used by creator and receiver alike in the ways set forth in the two volumes of The Specificity of the Aesthetic, art allows us to meaningfully experience the identity of the individual with the human (of the singular with the universal) and – just as importantly – to contest, transform, and progressively expand the very definition of what it is to be human by means of the new orientations towards action disclosed by such an experience (Chapter 8). On its face, Lukács’s ambition to synthesise these disparate aspects and histories into a coherent, unitary whole would thus seem to be more of a piece with nineteenth-century German monoliths like Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered 1818–1829, published 1835) or Friedrich Theodor Vischer’s Aesthetics, or The Science of the Beautiful (Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen, published 1846–1857) than it is with those twentieth-century works on art and aesthetics that remain touchstones in much English-language scholarship. To be sure, its scope and systematicity are not out of step with the major aesthetic works of twentieth-century analytic philosophy – Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (1953), Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (1960), Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of beyond art into other parts of life, Lukács draws on Plato as much as he does on Aristotle. See Villanueva 1997, pp. 26–7. 3 For more on the vita activa and Lukács, see Miller 2013, pp. xvi–xvii and xx.

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Symbols (1968), Richard Wollheim’s Art and Its Objects (1968) – but its reliance on dialectical materialism to define that scope and to realise that systematicity certainly sets it apart. The contrast is even more striking when the major aesthetic theories of twentieth-century continental philosophy and American pragmatism are considered. Next to the esoteric essays of Martin Heidegger on art and poetry, the down-to-earth re-positing of aesthetics in terms of everyday experiences in John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), or the prickly paratactic shards of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970), The Specificity of the Aesthetic looks like a mouldering Victorian triple-decker: a loose, baggy monster redolent of foundlings, hansom cabs, poor houses, and unlikely turns of event. Moreover, when one considers the specific claims and theories that are relied upon the most in The Specificity of the Aesthetic, any number of familiar questions arise. For instance, what are we to do with Lukács’s expectation that works of art do indeed constitute organic wholes? Isn’t it altogether out of step with the methods of collage and montage fruitfully explored by many of the historical avant-gardes and very much still with us in the age of digital sampling and piracy?4 Likewise, didn’t the historical avant-gardes aim to destroy the autonomy of art (that is to say, such things as organic totalities and works of art as such) and to thereby reintegrate art into life itself?5 Or to transform the very nature of aesthetic judgement from a contemplation of beauty into a question of what counts as art in the first place?6 What are we to do with a theory of the creation and reception of art that does not even consider such ways of making art except as examples that are best not followed? Moreover, hasn’t the conception of realism at the foundation of The Specificity of the Aesthetic been repeatedly discredited? In terms of theory, didn’t Roman Jakobson and Roland Barthes convincingly show realism to be more a matter of linguistic conventions than of the faithful reflection of reality?7 In terms of practice, what does the partisan, but nonetheless approximately accurate, reflection of reality ascribed by Lukács to art worthy of the name have to do with the crisis of representation influentially registered, expressed, and worked through by artists around the world over the past century?8 Simply put, what of value can The Specificity of the Aesthetic tell us about art made after modernism? 4 5 6 7 8

See, for instance, Lethem 2012. Bürger 1984. de Duve 1998. Jakobson 1987; Barthes 1986. The scholarship on modernism’s relation to a crisis of representation is too vast to adequately account for in a single footnote. I adduce merely three notable instances of it that increasingly shift the location of this crisis from imperial nation-states to the colonies: Benjamin 2006; Jameson 2007; and Hanscom 2013.

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Countless more questions in this vein could be raised, but they would just more finely individuate the varieties of scepticism that are likely to accompany perplexity. For one thing, Lukács’s vision of art’s progressive role in the history and future of the human race bespeaks a belief in the two master-narratives (of the emancipation of mankind and the speculative unity of all knowledge) that were famously said to have become obsolete in the period of postmodernism.9 On every page, the postmodernist’s incredulity will thus clash with what she perceives to be Lukács’s naïve faith in liberation, totality, and narrative itself. Moreover, if an Anglophone reader’s frame of reference is not postmodernism but Marxist literary and cultural criticism, then The Specificity of the Aesthetic will very likely be subject to the same sorts of dismissive judgements that have tended to cling to most of Lukács’s post-1930s writings on art: though certainly estimable in many respects, it will nonetheless be seen to have serious blindspots requiring a Brecht or a Benjamin or an Adorno to supplement and redress.10 Emblematic of such a response remains Terry Eagleton’s blunt assessment of Lukácsian aesthetics: It belongs to Lukács’s critique of both Stalinism and leftist avant-gardism to invoke the wealth of the bourgeois humanist legacy, overvaluing the undoubted continuity between that heritage and a socialist future; and the Romantic roots of his own brand of Marxism lead him often enough to ignore the more progressive dimensions of capitalism, including the need for an aesthetics which has learnt from the commodity form rather than lapsed back into some nostalgic totality before it ever was. To say this is not to deny the admirable force and fertility of the Lukácsian theory of realism, which represents an invaluable contribution to the canon of Marxist criticism, and which a modernist Marxism has unjustly demeaned; but Lukacs’s failure to take Marx’s point that history progresses by its bad side nevertheless constitutes a serious limitation to his thought.11 Too beholden to the humanism of the past and not dialectical enough to see that the only way forward is through the evils of capitalism – and, correlatively, through the unsightly forms given to these evils in modernist, avant-garde, and postmodernist works of art – Lukács merely repeats the mistakes made by almost all other major contributors to the discourse of aesthetics since 9 10 11

Lyotard 1984. Cf. the key documents of the realism-modernism debate collected in Bloch et al. 1980. Eagleton 1990, p. 325.

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Baumgarten, insofar as his own late aesthetics also ends up being merely ‘a sublimation and displacement of politics’.12 Yet it is precisely the speculative quality of the humanism espoused in The Specificity of the Aesthetic and its far-reaching recasting of aesthetics in terms of comportment that make this work an occasion for reconsidering Lukács’s stature in Marxist aesthetic theories.13 It also encourages us to reconceive what we understand the creation and reception of art to require of us at a time when it often seems that all that art asks is that we be credulous enough to view almost anything as a possible instance of it worthy of our diffuse attention, spare time, or passive engagement. Neither a sublimation nor a displacement of politics exactly, art in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is ultimately a field of human activity in which emergent political orientations get mediated for and absorbed into the ongoing formation of human personalities out of competing passions and behaviours. Art, for Lukács, requires of both its makers and receivers the creation of self-conscious subjects who could act, which refashions aesthetics into an account of what art has become since getting separated from magical and religious mimesis: a training ground for praxis (political and otherwise) rather than a compensatory source of pleasure to which we regretfully turn in the absence of all possibilities for meaningful action.

1

The Speculative Turn

These two claims (the speculative nature of Lukacs’s humanism and his reformulation of aesthetics as principally a matter of comportment) need to be tarried with in order for them to be recognised for the provocations they indeed are. Let us begin with the former: though Lukács certainly essentialises what it is to be human throughout both volumes of this work, his essentialism nevertheless remains emphatically processual: the ‘essence’ of man (of the speciesbeing [Gattungswesen] of the human race) is almost always presented in terms of its competing discursive articulations, which is to say that it is subject to its historical (often strife-filled) conditions of unfolding emergence, vulnerable to misrepresentations, and available for momentous reformulations that can enduringly broaden the meaning of what it is to be human. In short, the humanism being elaborated in this text builds upon the influential anthropo12 13

Gandesha and Hartle 2017, p. xxviii. It is worth noting here that Cornel West is one of the few English-language critics to emphasise the speculative quality of Lukács’s later writings, though West’s focus is on ontological (not aesthetic or humanist) matters. See West 2009, pp. 128–47.

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logical conjectures offered by Marx in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and works through wide-ranging historical material and sublime timescales that are more or less congruent with those explored by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge in History and Obstinacy (1981), a fragmented work that in terms of its experimental form has almost nothing in common with The Specificity of the Aesthetic, though its focus on the role of labour in the evolution of human physiology and society makes it a suggestive intertext with Lukács’s own project and ambitions in this work. Accordingly, the humanism on display here is as precarious as it is open to further development, much like art itself is said to be. In any case, Lukács treats both humanism and art as the historical categories and objects that they indeed are, and adequately comprehending them depends primarily on understanding the ways in which they have developed (progressed, stagnated, regressed) over vast spans of time. The comprehensive account of the unfolding qualities of the ‘human’ rendered in and modeled by means of art over the millennia thus makes The Specificity of the Aesthetic not only a significant (but thoroughly overlooked) interlocutor in contemporary animal studies and critical life studies more generally, but also more of an ally to performative theories of gender than a contemporary Anglophone scholar might otherwise expect. It is worth briefly comparing Judith Butler with Lukács in this latter regard. According to Butler’s influential theory of the performative, To claim that the universal has not yet been articulated is to insist that the ‘not yet’ is proper to an understanding of the universal itself: that which remains ‘unrealized’ by the universal constitutes it essentially. The universal begins to become articulated precisely through challenges to its existing formulation, and this challenge emerges from those who are not covered by it, who have no entitlement to occupy the place of the ‘who’, but who, nevertheless, demand that the universal as such ought to be inclusive of them.14 When approached as a political project, the universal (in the case being examined by Butler here, that group which counts as an enfranchised people or citizenry) does not involve the mere acceptance or rejection of the conventions and consensus that have formed around a given established universality; rather, the proper bearing called for by the universal is to look beyond such conventions or consensus and to formulate a broader, less straitened universal

14

Butler 1997, p. 90.

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that can only be realised and given substance by way of weakening and opening up a given established universality’s own limits. The boundaries and scope of this new universal are not determined in advance but are to be looked for and found in the historical struggle around what constitutes this universality itself.15 The Specificity of the Aesthetic stages and presents the relationship between art and humanism in comparable ways. On the one hand, Lukács underscores art’s ability to articulate (and, in articulating, define) the borders of what the universal is at a given point in time: Only in the aesthetic does the fundamental object (society in metabolism with nature) involve in relation to a subject – one that is working its way towards self-consciousness – the inseparable simultaneity of reproduction and the position taken, of objectivity and partisanship. The simultaneous positedness of these two aspects constitutes the indissoluble historicity of any work of art. It does not simply fix the facts existing-inthemselves in place as science does but rather immortalises a moment of the historical development of the human race. The survival of individuality in the typical, of partisanship in objective facts, etc. presents aspects of this historicity. As truth, artistic truth is thus a historical truth; its proper genesis converges with its true validity, since this is nothing more than revealing, making manifest and experienceable, a moment of human development that deserves to be held on to both in terms of its content and its form. The approach to universality (in this case, ‘society in metabolism with nature’) called for by genuine works of art is to be held accountable to two concurrently

15

The emphasis on the historical nature of this struggle in Lukács implies a parting of the ways between The Specificity of the Aesthetic and Butler’s more recent work on how mourning can expand our sense of who is worthy of our ethical consideration. See, for instance, Butler 2010. For a sceptical account that is critical of the ethical turn in Butler’s work (and in poststructuralism more generally) and that is prospectively more in line with Lukács’s own ethical speculations in The Specificity of the Aesthetic, see Danewid 2017, p. 1684: ‘By focusing on abstract – as opposed to historical – humanity, [critics like Butler and Stephen White] contribute to an ideological formation that erases history and undoes the “umbilical cord” that links Europe and the migrants who are trying to enter the continent. This replaces questions of responsibility, guilt, restitution, repentance, and structural reform with matters of empathy, generosity, and hospitality – a move that transforms the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander, confirming its status as “ethical”, “good”, and “humane” ’.

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invoked sets of criteria, one of which attests to its truth or objectivity (a truth or objectivity that is not absolute and transcendent but rather in force within a given historical situation or context) and the other of which concerns the exigency of the stance one is to adopt towards that truth or objectivity. Genuine art presents us with reproductions of universality that, among other things, model bearings towards a surrounding world and towards a given universal that we believe should be kept hold of as defining features of what it is to be human. Importantly, however, Lukács insists that these features are not given in advance: If we have determined art to be the self-consciousness of mankind’s development, then the aspect of continuity has thereby become the focal point. On the one hand, because only in this way can the static, idealist presumption of the ‘universally human’ be avoided: it is not a question of the actualisation of a humanity that is given a priori (in the idea) nor is it the dialectical unfolding of such an ‘idea’, in which, as in the Hegelian system, the end contains within itself as concrete fulfilment everything that already existed in abstract form at the beginning. The continuity intended here has no teleological character of this sort. It is – precisely in the literal sense – a real development that has actually taken place in its real ups and downs, with its real branches, attempts, regressions, etc. Even what counts as the human in the present in its relationship to the past is subject to contestations and border skirmishes that do not hold the promise of unimpeded further advance. Our precarious hold on what has been gained in our humanisation as a species and the possibility for additional progress remain ineluctably linked. Both are thus subject to historical conditions that variably promote, obstruct, or otherwise confound momentous changes in what it is to be human, as this is encountered in meaningful everyday experiences and as such experiences get reflected in art. On the other hand, however, this emphasis on the historical nature of art’s revelation of the self-consciousness of mankind carries with it two striking implications. First, it suggests that a work of art which ceases to disclose to us aspects of human development that are worth holding on to is no longer, properly speaking, art. In order to remain art, a work or performance must thus carry with it the vivid sense that it continues to have a bearing on us: ‘the aesthetic evocation of the past is the lived experience of this continuity, not the lived experience of something that is supposedly “universally human” for all time. We remain conscious of a temporo-historical remoteness, and yet we are immediately faced with a nostra causa agitur in fates, people, etc. that

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have long since vanished: this tension betokens this temporo-historical side of the aesthetic as the self-consciousness of mankind; […] it is the memory of mankind at the same time. However, whereas memory performs all sorts of functions in everyday life (among other things, merely registering and keeping ready to hand facts that can perhaps be of practical importance for the person concerned), the central function that is exclusively operative here is that of bringing up to date’. Lukács does not tarry with or expound upon the implication that it is therefore possible for specific works of art to cease to make their cause our own and thus to be worth our efforts to make them contemporary, but it remains in play whenever he emphasises the continuity of art and its ability to perform its role as the self-consciousness of the human race. When read between the lines, The Specificity of the Aesthetic implicitly offers its own qualified version of the death (or end) of art argument that has attracted a great deal of attention – critical, revisionary, or otherwise – since Hegel’s formulation of it in his introduction to Lectures on Aesthetics. For Hegel, the death of art means simply that the highest vocation available to spirit is no longer to be found in the realm of art: ‘For us art counts no longer as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself. […] We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection, but the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit. No matter how excellent we find the statues the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ, and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help, we bow the knee no longer [before these artistic portrayals]’.16 The death of art thus does not mean that genuine works of art have ceased to be made or that they necessarily fail to improve upon the art of the past. Hegel cannot be refuted by adducing the works of Dickinson, Gauguin, Schoenberg, or Le Corbusier. Instead, his death of art thesis entails that ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. […] The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is’.17 From here on out, philosophy and aesthetics lead the way, and new art either does or does not follow (if it even matters whether art does so or not).18 16 17 18

Hegel 1988, p. 103. Hegel 1988, p. 11. Cf. Heidegger 2001, p. 78: ‘the question remains: is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer

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More recently, Arthur C. Danto has returned to and revised this Hegelian view to argue instead that philosophical concerns have indeed increasingly become the focus in art (Danto’s periodisation is ‘circa 1900’, but it stretches as far back as the Nazarene movement in the early 1800s and goes all the way to the present), but they are being worked out in art itself by artists themselves. Works of art have become a way of philosophising, and the root of many of their concerns has to do with ‘the problem of what makes something art when something phenomenally indistinguishable from it is not art’.19 In short, what makes Warhol’s Brillo boxes legible as works of art that are distinct from Brillo boxes for sale at a grocery store? According to Danto, the answer to this question for the time being cannot come from what we see of the two sets of boxes but rather from how well or poorly the Brillo boxes made by Warhol fit our particular understanding of what the essence of art is or might be. What Warhol makes conspicuous, however, is the necessary failure of any such understanding to ‘be compatible with all possible sets of manifest properties’ of everything designated as art.20 That is to say, art made ‘circa 1900’ marks the end of one way of telling the story of what art is, and ours is a period of confusion (masked by pluralism) until the next chapter of the story or a new way of telling all of the chapters up to this point presents itself: ‘But once art makers are freed from the task of finding the essence of art, which had been thrust upon art at the inception of Modernism, they too have been liberated from history, and have entered the era of freedom. Art does not end with the end of art history. What happens only is that one set of imperatives has been lifted from its practice as it enters what I think of as its posthistorical phase’.21 Lukács would accede to neither Hegel’s nor Danto’s arguments. In the case of Hegel, the death of art argument is clearly an artifact of subjective idealism, which Lukács repeatedly criticises and contrasts with his own dialectical and historical materialism. He certainly does not understand all modes of reflecting reality to be equal, but the hierarchy structuring those modes articulated by Lukács in The Specificity of the Aesthetic does not, for instance, place art above

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of this character? If, however, it is such no longer, then there remains the question why this is so. The truth of Hegel’s judgement has not yet been decided; for behind this verdict there stands Western thought since the Greeks, which thought corresponds to the truth of beings that has already happened. Decision upon the judgement will be made, when it is made, from and about this truth of what is. Until then the judgement remains in force. But for that very reason the question is necessary whether the truth that the judgement declares is final and conclusive and what follows if it is’. Danto 1990, p. 334. Danto 1990, p. 345. Danto 1990, p. 344.

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science or science above art; instead, he sees both as significant achievements in the reflection of a shared reality, and passing judgements as to which better serves man’s highest vocation at this moment in time is not a problem we are being asked to solve, either by history or by its bearing upon our contemporary everyday needs. More specifically, as to the relationship of art to philosophy, Lukács insists that it is art, not aesthetics, which has always called the tune: ‘Even in the case of great figures such as Aristotle, [the philosophy of art] always only cropped up post festum, and its most significant results were, just as in the works of Aristotle, the conceptual fixing in place of a level of artistic development that had already been achieved. This is not an accident’. That is to say, Hegel’s ‘truth and life’ still happen in genuine art, and while we may need a philosophy of art and of the human senses (in a word, an aesthetics) to conceptualise their co-occurrence, this ‘truth and life’ cannot make self-conscious subjects or persons of us by means of our thinking alone; instead, the happening of art’s ‘truth and life’ can only come to pass in the total effect of works of art on their creators and receivers. Aesthetics gives us the means of theorising the stakes of this encounter and the norms by which it has been ensured over time, but it is no substitute for the meaningful experiences that such an encounter calls forth in us – mentally, bodily, and spiritually. Aesthetics thus follows art, not the other way around. Yet this does not mean that Danto’s end of art argument must be swallowed whole either. Lukács insists that the continuity of art and the human over thousands and thousands of years calls for philosophy to specify the customary expectations, forms, and experiences by which that continuity has been evoked, which means that genuine works of art are never free of the essence of art or of the need to relate to the history of art. Such ‘liberated’ works may be called art by us today, but Lukács would insist that they will not survive the test of time or the demands for continuity. Or if they were to persist as art, then that would be because their liberation from essence and history was ultimately an occulted expression of a momentous transformation of that essence and history that has since been incorporated into the ongoing formation of art. The version of the death or end of art argument tacitly expressed by The Specificity of the Aesthetic never ceases to posit that art will endure as an autonomous sphere of human activity so long as there exist people receptive to works and performance that do indeed evocatively carry out the humanising and memorialising tasks he describes. While Lukács does not address a prospective coming world in which art as such will have ceased to perform these tasks, individual works of art (irrespective of their age, familiarity, or venerability) are by no means guaranteed to continue to fulfil them into the future. On the one hand, works of art possess an ‘aesthetic existence [that] remains in force com-

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pletely independent of this subject’. Once a work of art, always a work of art. Yet, ‘this – aesthetic – existence it possesses is completely anthropomorphic in character. It is a construct, created by means of the humanly sensuous […] reflection of reality. Its aesthetic existence is based exclusively on its power to evoke a world in receptive subjects’. The efficacy of works of art can thus obsolesce. For Lukács, however, the end of art prompting the speculations of Danto would merely be the inadvertent acknowledgment that the ludic provocations of the avant-garde and postmodernism will always never have been art.

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Comportment and Catharsis as the Man-Made-Whole

This leads to the second implication of the historical nature of art’s revelation of the self-consciousness of mankind: The Specificity of the Aesthetic does not bind art and humanism exclusively to the past and the present. To be sure, the human history covered in these two volumes relies on a wide range of (now rather dated) anthropological sources – Arnold Gehlen, Sir James George Frazer, Erich Rothacker, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Ralph Linton, and Edward Burnett Tylor are notable touchstones for Lukács here – and on a time-scale that encompasses millennia rather than decades or centuries; nevertheless, the mode of address adopted is to a present that is ultimately oriented towards the emergent future. In some cases, this involves accounting for those evocative details in works of art that run ahead of current sociohistorical development and make experienceable a facet of what it is to be human that will not in actual fact be a widespread human feature for many years or even centuries: ‘Thus, in the figure of Phaedra in Euripides and in that of Dido in Virgil, which elevated the individual passion of love into the species-like, into the possession of the selfconsciousness of mankind, long before it would have turned into a general social appearance’. In other cases, this address made by art to the present in terms of the future is simply the reaffirmation of the continuity of the ‘human’: ‘Even consciousness about objective reality must of course hold on to facts, personalities, times, local conditionalities, etc. in their concrete specificity, though they are starting-points, springboards – the more strongly consciousness has developed, the more this is the case – for comprehending the general laws at work in them or at least for approximating them so as to be able to control even the singular as singular where it is possible to do so. Only in the aesthetic does this personal quality have an intrinsic value (in two regards in fact: as personal quality of the presented object and as the quality of the mode of presenta-

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tion); it is the bearer of self-consciousness, the awakener of self-consciousness: as memory, as “inwardising” of the path that the human species has gone and will go, of the persons and situations, of the virtues and vices, of man’s inner and outer world, from the dynamic unfolding and dialectical contradictoriness of which the human species has raised itself into what it is today and will be tomorrow’. In sum, the ‘human’ in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is a personal value that we have yet to make into a social fact. Those reflections of reality that truly rise to the level of art (still subject to changing circumstances and adverse conditions) are essential in at least two ways. First, they maintain the continuity between our present conceptions of the human with those of the past. Second, they model comportments (ways in which we could yet act in a world that has not yet completely foreclosed the possibilities for such action) that force one to meaningfully experience the taking of sides in the momentous reassessment of this value and its prospective transformation into what is or will be the case. Lukács expresses this most expansively in his account of how art transforms the whole man (der ganze Mensch) of everyday life into the man-made-whole (der Mensch ganz). The former ‘faces reality with the entire surface of his existence’. That is to say, it is an essential feature of the everyday that all human capacities collaborate in any given human activity. This collaboration may be characterised by real contradictions, but The Specificity of the Aesthetic insists that these contradictions do not entail that the man of everyday life is always only ever fragmented into this or that ‘faculty of the soul’, each of which is cut off from the others. To be sure, Lukács grants that such a sense of fragmentation and alienation is a salient attribute of capitalist everyday life, but to stop at this nascently critical observation is to get oneself stuck at the level of immediacy. Dialectical materialism demands instead that we move beyond a direct everyday lived experience of fragmentation and alienation under capitalism to an understanding of how the unity of the intellect and the senses is nonetheless already achieved because of (rather than in spite of) the immediate appearance of fragmentation and alienation: ‘only the complete elucidation of the social bases can make man comprehensible as a wholeness, can make the inseparability of his physical and psychological powers comprehensible’. The comprehensibility of the wholeness of people in the capitalist everyday may require a great deal of intellectual labour to disclose for a given moment or conjuncture, but Lukács maintains that this wholeness is still really there to be disclosed. To aver otherwise, as do those who defend modernist fragmentation or avant-garde collage and montage as compositional methods of rupture that fend off closure, is to hypostasise what is ultimately only an appearance.

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Yet the whole man of everyday life (even of everyday life subject to modes of socio-economic organisation other than capitalism) necessarily remains in thrall to limitations that are insurmountable from within the everyday itself. One reason for this is that, although it is one of the three primary modes of reflecting reality addressed by Lukács throughout The Specificity of the Aesthetic, the everyday does not offer the sorts of enduring objectivations, like those characterising science and art, that make possible ways of behaving which are removed from the immediate mundane doings of life: ‘human modes of comportment essentially depend upon the degree to which their activity is objectivated. Where these objectivations attain the highest level, as in science and art, the objective laws of science and art determine the human comportment towards these constructs that man himself has made. That is to say, all human abilities come by an orientation (partly instinctively, partly consciously acquired) towards satisfying these objective lawful regularities’. According to Lukács, the fluid and mutable objectivations of the everyday (tradition, habit, etc.) fail to provide the degree of abstraction and mediation necessary to orient action beyond the immediate union of theory and praxis. This does not mean that the objects that make up modern everyday life (among others, Lukács points to taxis, buses, and trolleys) possess an inherently immediate character. To be sure, these objects ‘exist only as a result of a widely ramified, multifaceted, and complicated system of mediation that is becoming ever more complicated and ever more widely ramified in the course of social development. However, insofar as it is a question of the objects of everyday life, they stand there finished, and the system of mediation producing them appears completely effaced in their immediate, bare existence and thusness’. The results of science and art responsively stream into everyday life, but everyday life does not become more scientific or artistic as a result. The autonomy and continuous interrelationship of these modes of reflection in modern times is constantly adverted to throughout The Specificity of the Aesthetic: The everyday behaviour of man is at once the start and endpoint of all human activity. That is to say, if one conceives of the everyday as a great river, then science and art branch off from it into the loftier forms of reality’s reception and reproduction. They differentiate themselves from each other and correspondingly develop their own specific aims, and they arrive at their pure form in this specificity – a specificity rising from the needs of social life – in order to then flow back into the river of everyday life as a result of their effects, their impacts on human life. This river of everyday life thus continually enriches itself with the greatest achieve-

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ments of the human spirit and assimilates them to its practical daily needs, from which new branches of the loftier forms of objectivation then arise again as questions and demands. Science and art constitutively respond to needs and problems presented by an everyday life that is in turn broadened and deepened by them. This amplified everyday life then poses new problems that cannot be solved from within the scope of its immediacy but that can be with the aims and methods of science and art. The focus for Lukács in all of these relationships is on the flowing transitions between these three modes of reflecting reality and on the processes by which they mutually shape each other continuously. On its own, however, the more solid nature of the objectivations produced by science and art does not account for the ability of either to lead the whole man (again, the integral combination of intellect and body, psychology and sensorium) of everyday life beyond himself and the everyday. To begin with, a given work of art or performance is encountered as a suspension of everyday practical objectives or interests. In other words, we do not read The Magic Mountain (1924) in order to learn how to run a sanitarium (or if we did, then our use of it would not be aesthetic). Thomas Mann’s novel does not present us with isolated facts that we can immediately act on once we perceive them, as we might when hearing the doorbell ring or when seeing the car in front of us brake unexpectedly. Unlike everyday life, art is not comprised of seemingly contingent people, facts, and objects but rather of meaningful relationships between those people, facts, and objects. It is a given work or performance’s homogeneous medium (visibility, audibility, language, gesture, etc.) which presents an artist with a constructively limited range of sensory appeals (primarily to the eyes and ears) with which to evoke a likeness of objective reality and to guide the reproduction of this likeness in the lived experiences of those receiving the work or performance. For Lukács, the homogeneous medium’s constriction of what is given to be seen or heard to a finite set of essential relationships is an important part of how an in-itself becomes a for-us in the aesthetic reflection of reality carried out by art. The world of the work of art requires drastic reductions, omissions, and rearrangements of the real world. As a result, art fights against the ‘dispersals of attention’ that confront the whole man of the everyday, and the homogeneous medium of a particular work ‘produces, creatively and receptively, such a focus so that all the objective possibilities and determinations dormant in a concrete phenomenon at the time are able to become current in a manifest way’. This homogeneous medium provides ‘the particular principle for the formation of objectivities and their linkages that were specifically brought forth by human praxis’, and these formal qualities of the work

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of art give a shape to the contents of life that those contents necessarily cannot receive in the everyday. Everyday life always carries with it the possible need to take immediate action; by contrast, the work of art’s very form calls not only for a ‘temporary suspension of the direct relationship to life itself’, which permits the possibility of new perspectives on long-held attitudes and beliefs, but also for a concentration of events, people, and/or objects into a self-contained space and time in which ‘that which is essential in the world of appearance is more strongly emphasised everywhere than is possible in the immediate sequence of happenings in everyday life’. What this all permits are opportunities for perspectival shifts that make available new ways of comporting oneself: the person receiving the work of art confronts it ‘not only as a closed system, but also as something immutably given, as something that exists independent of his consciousness that he certainly – as a whole or in singular details – can refuse to accept yet with whose course of action he cannot interfere. […] It is precisely this focusing of a person entirely on the totality of the work that creates the mental conditions to ensure that the whole man who stands in life again turns the new meaningful experiences acquired here to account there, that the shocks triggered in him by the work essentially alter and deepen his personal bearing in life’. On the one hand, we lose ourselves in the performance or art work so as to gain a heightened sense of ourselves as personalities. On the other, we thereby obtain a mediated relationship to the object world that appears immediate. This second immediacy achieved in art as an intensive this-worldly transcendence is in striking contrast to religion, where second immediacy is founded on an otherworldly transcendence, and to reification, where there is second immediacy but no transcendence.22 The this-worldly transcendence of art’s second immediacy is the meaningful experience of the aesthetic subject’s being at one with the human race, of being the man-made-whole by and in art. This otherwise purely intellectual sense of identification necessarily takes on an intensively lived, felt, and undergone quality in art that only happens by way of exception (if ever) in the everyday. The whole man of the everyday is always an integral unity of body, mind, sensory impressions, and personal memory, but only by means of art is he made to experience himself as being in total continuity (affectively and cognitively) with the species of which he and all other humans are a constitutive part. Our being a part of the human race is not something that subsumes us but rather is experienced as inhering within us by means of the work of art.

22

For more on reification and second immediacy, see Lukács 1971, pp. 150–85 and 194–7.

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The measuring stick for aesthetic subjectivity is thus necessarily relational (the creator and/or receiver of art in terms of the human species), which Lukács insists prevents it from lapsing into mere subjectivism and accords to art an idiosyncratic objectivity that nevertheless possesses an essentially subjective character. The anthropomorphising subjectivity of art does not cut it off from objectivity, but it does demand that objectivity in art always be related back to the human, that the intensive totality of the work of art reflect a social totality. The corollary of this claim is that aesthetics is ultimately a matter of comportment, of a way of behaving, which contrasts strikingly with the way in which most other aesthetic theories have tended to pose it in the West, where aesthetics has primarily been a matter of judgement, taste, representation, expression, or experience. Lukács does not do away with any of these facets of the aesthetic, though he does repurpose them to serve and inform that conduct which he understands to be proper to art. The creation and reception of art are first and foremost a doing, and this doing not only is socially grounded, but also has the effect of humanising us, of evocatively expanding, deepening, and consolidating our sense of ourselves as members of the human race. This man-made-whole of art, however, is not, upon returning to just being a whole man, better equipped to deal with the practical tasks and obligations of everyday life. The effect of art on us is not to prompt direct action but rather to implicate us in the world as it relates to people and to awaken us to the possibilities for action disclosed by such an implication. The world is something with which we all have to do, and the man-made-whole of art is the creator or receiver of art in whom art has taken root not as an indifferent cultural heritage to which we are heir but rather as generator of the desire to intervene: ‘the specificity of [the] effect’ of works of art is that ‘they call forth passions in people and give these passions determinate contents, determinate directions, etc. whereby people then become capable of intervening practically into social life, of struggling for or against certain social facts’. Art produces civic passions in us, and it is these passions which then motivate the possibility for us to participate meaningfully in the changing of society, even when it comes to what does or does not count as ‘human’. For instance, Lukács notes that ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not call for help for the slaves portrayed there, slaves who in such a being-just-so indeed probably did not exist at all and in any case were not approachable at all in a practical way for the reader moved by the evocation of the work; instead, it awakens feelings and passions to fight for the emancipation of all slaves (of all who are oppressed in terms of class). What thus comes into being is a human willingness that must discover concrete means, etc. in life itself (perhaps even in science) if it is to be realised in practice, if it is actually to turn into deed’. Art thus evokes not just a sense of ourselves as members

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of the human race but, more importantly, a sense of ourselves as members of the human race with skin in the game. Lukács’s concept for this is catharsis, and it provides the means of linking the lived experience of the man-made-whole with the work of art to the aftereffects of this experience on the whole man of the everyday: ‘The essential common feature [of all types of catharsis], however, is the fact that this kind of aesthetic effect belongs to the afterwards of what is actually artistic’. That is to say, catharsis names both what happens in an encounter with a work of art and its socio-ethical impact on the person having the encounter. Aesthetic experience thus encompasses more than what takes place while viewing a painting, walking in and around a building, listening to a song, or reciting a lyric poem. It necessarily links together the everyday influences and habits leading up to such encounters and the transformations of those influences and habits that are made possible following them. This effect is not immediate or direct (reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not provide the practical means by which to achieve the abolition of slavery, either through civil disobedience or civil war); rather, it is one that ‘acts to promote or inhibit the formation of certain types of people’ (reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin helps to inculcate the formation of the sorts of civic passions that will make the abolition of slavery the kind of problem that the reader will hereafter seek to address and solve – in a word, the personality of the type of person who becomes an abolitionist). Lukács traces this ethical efficacy of art back to Greek antiquity, from which he derives his own theorisations of both catharsis and mimesis, though he attributes a scope to catharsis that extends far beyond the pity and terror described in Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Reproach of the beforehand and advancement on behalf of the afterwards – and both may even appear almost effaced in the immediacy of lived experience – constitute an essential content of what we early referred to as the single most universal form of catharsis: such a jarring of the subjectivity of the receptive person that his passions which are active in life receive new contents and a new orientation, that they are purged to such an extent that they turn into a mental foundation of “virtuous habits”’. The work of art thus calls for its receiver to suspend her immediate relationship to everyday practical concerns and to distance herself with respect to them, but in undergoing cathartic shock she does not sequester herself or her lived experience off from all that led up to that moment, and in carrying out what catharsis requires of her into her everyday life she is forced to reckon with momentous changes that need to be undertaken both in herself and in her everyday life. Alternatively, catharsis forces us not merely to acknowledge the ethical implications of art but to live them out.23 If mimesis provides the means by which the creator of the work of 23

Cf. the account of Lukácsian catharsis given in Jameson 2015, p. 27: ‘The work of art in its

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art builds the bridge between art and the world reflected by it, then catharsis is how that bridge gets embodied by the receiver of art to ensure that art and the everyday do not remain cut off from or indifferent to each other.

3

The World of the Work of Art

The condition for this, however, remains the autonomous work of art, understood as a world. For Lukács, ‘world’ does not mean the totality of things but rather their measure as represented in and by the self-contained depiction offered of this totality in a given performance, poem, sonata, still life, building, film, etc. In his critical analysis of current conceptions of ‘world literature’, Eric Hayot has identified how in contemporary literary scholarship the word ‘world’ tends ‘to pivot between an ontological reference to any self-enclosing whole (what are, after all, periods, regions, or parts of wholes but wholes themselves?) and a material reference to the largest possible versions of such wholes (history; the planet Earth; the universe)’.24 For Lukács, the world of the work of art invokes both references all at once: it refers both to the work of art as a self-enclosing whole and to the whole of the universe of things (at least as far as these things bear upon people) that is perforce outside that self-enclosing whole but which is nevertheless intensively evoked by it. According to Hayot, however, such a double reference may be implied by theories of world literature or of world-systems, but ultimately such theories end up omitting ‘the largest possible versions of such wholes (human time; the planet Earth; the universe)’ in order to focus instead on the part of the whole about which they can insightfully speak: ‘If I had to guess, I would say that the problem is that no one has a very good theory of the world, and that in the absence of good theories “world” comes to mean whatever one does have a good theory of (a system, a method, a social or cultural whole)’.25 To resolve this, Hayot offers his own speculative account about that for which he too has a good theory: literary worlds, or ‘the diagetic totality constituted by the sum of all aspects of a single text or workpart, constellated into a structure or system that amounts to a whole’ and that is ‘always a relation to and theory of the lived world, whether as a largely preconscious normative construct, a rearticulation, or even an active refusal of the

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Utopian fulfilment does not enrich us with a matchless variety of new experiences; rather, its Erlebnis strips us of the private property of our own self and allows us to glimpse the possibility of a subjectivity without privilege and without hierarchy’. Hayot 2012, p. 39. Hayot 2012, p. 40.

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world-norms of their age. In this sense they are also always social and conceptual constructs, as well as formal and affective ones’.26 In short, the world of the work of art necessarily expresses ‘worldedness’, or ‘the form of the relation a work establishes between the world inside and the world outside the work. The history of aesthetic worldedness is thus always, simultaneously, a history of the idea of the world as such’.27 In line with some of Hayot’s polemical speculations here, The Specificity of the Aesthetic offers a thick historico-anthropological account of how the intensive totality that makes up the world of the work of art connects to some of the most extensive possible totalities in the human world (species-being, the earth, the entire history of the human race, etc.). Likewise, Lukács’s focus on aesthetic worlds, worldedness, and worldliness means that his theories and analyses here do not rely exclusively on genre, medium, or close reading, nor do they take language, period, or nation-state as their sole (or even ultimate) frames of reference.28 For instance, much attention is paid to the conditions of possibility for the creation and reception of the worldedness of works of art in the first place, which makes legible not only the possibility for paradoxes like the worldless realism of Paleolithic cave paintings (realistic because of the high degree of fidelity in the depiction of each individual creature, worldless because no attention is paid at all to the relations between and among these depicted creatures as an ensemble), but also the constitutive roles played by underexplored categories like inherence or indeterminate objectivity in the creation of aesthetic worlds. Such features of the world of the work of art provide useful criteria that cut against familiar ways of undertaking comparative studies. However, unlike Hayot’s speculations, which tacitly adopt a constructivist viewpoint akin to that offered by Nelson Goodman, Lukács’s account of the world of the work of art here is more expressly reflective.29 That is to say, for 26 27 28 29

Hayot 2012, pp. 44–5. Hayot 2012, p. 45. Cf. Hayot 2012, p. 86. Hayot is a bit squirrely on this point. In a number of places, he seems to refer to a real or actual world beyond literary worlds while nevertheless putting ‘real’ or ‘actual’ in scare quotes at times. He likewise often equates ‘world’ and ‘worldedness’ with ideas or constructions of the world rather than with the real world itself. For an exemplary instance in which he manages to do both of these things in the same sentence, see Hayot 2012, p. 45: ‘An evaluation of [the] social and conceptual weight [of aesthetic worlds] begins by measuring a work’s degree of orientedness toward the world, the degree, that is, to which it responds or corresponds to the basic philosophical or social world-imperatives of its age, the normative sense of a “real” or “actual” world that bears some noncontinuous (and possibly oppositional) relation to the aesthetic’. This suggests that Hayot treats what he calls the ‘real’ or ‘actual’ world as (to use Goodman’s terms) a stipulative given or entrenched

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Hayot and Goodman, there is no ‘real’ world at which the buck can stop; there is no world that can be taken as aboriginal or definitive. Yet this is precisely what the dialectical materialism of The Specificity of the Aesthetic insists is the case: there is in fact a real world that exists independent of any given work of art’s world and worldedness, and this real world is more or less closely approximated by that work of art’s world and worldedness. As Darío Villanueva persuasively showed some years ago, Lukács’s theory of mimetic reflection is thus triadic, insofar as worldview intervenes and mediates between the real world and the world of the work of art.30 In the case of Hayot and Goodman, however, what we end up with are just more and more recursively symbolised ideas about the world. This distinction here between materialism (Lukács) and constructivism (Hayot and Goodman) has notable implications for what we understand art to be doing and what aesthetic debates are ultimately about. Simply put, Hayot’s intervention into conceptions of aesthetic or literary worlds takes aim at scholars and the universities that support them, primarily in order to shake them up and make them innovatively diversify the disciplinary customs and practices that they adopt, reward, and institutionalise.31 He is ultimately for pluralism (for many different world-versions), as is Goodman, who does not see much of value to be gained in reducing all worlds to a single ‘correct’ world: ‘While we may speak of determining what versions are right as “learning about the world”, “the world” supposedly being that which all right versions describe, all we learn about the world is contained in right versions of it; and while the underlying world, bereft of these, need not be denied to those who love it, it

30

31

predicate rather than something that is really to be found beneath all versions that have been constructed of it in works of art. For the canonical expression of Goodman’s constructivist theory of art, see Goodman 1968. It is worth noting that Goodman’s theory is not restricted to art but aspires to offer a unified account of the worlds created by art, science, and the everyday. As such, its affinities with and differences from Lukács’s endeavour in The Specificity of the Aesthetic merit a much more sustained consideration than has been pursued by scholars up to now and more attention than I myself am able to offer here. See Villanueva 1997, pp. 28–31. Cf. Nadal-Melsió 2004, p. 77: ‘since without mediation there is no possible apprehension of the real, reality has first to be mediated through art – that is, the realist novel – in a utopian reflection of the Marxist narrativisation of history in order to enter the totality of the real, and the “real” is always expressed as a narrative discourse. Realism, as a unique expression of totality, becomes then more essential than has ever been acknowledged. Realism does not reflect but intervenes in reality, a mediated reality that is, in any case, the only one we can apprehend. Real in Lukács always means realized’. For example, see the lengthy polemic against the triumph of periodisation in Hayot 2012, pp. 147–70.

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is perhaps on the whole a world well lost’.32 Conversely, for Lukács there are not many real worlds; there is only one real world. To be sure, he is a pluralist when it comes to the modes of reflecting reality – science in general and physics in particular, for instance, do not give us a reflection of reality to which all other modes ought to be reduced – but he does not countenance such pluralism when it comes to the ground upon which these modes are built: there is indeed a bedrock reality that science, art, and the everyday are all reflecting, each in its own way; moreover, pluralism reigns when it comes to the arts themselves. The stakes of art and its theorisation in aesthetics thus go far beyond the mere reinvigoration of pluralism and defence of diversity in the creation of worlds. If there is indeed only one foundational reality that science, art, and the everyday approximate in their respective reflections of it, then it becomes exigent to get it more or less right. And not so that we can merely advance our understanding or liven up our hoary old intellectual pursuits but rather so that we can make the more accurate, truthful ways of reflecting reality into more permanent aspects of meaningful human experience and actuators of human behaviour everywhere. In Lukács’s account of it, the world of the work of art is accordingly a selfcontained microclimate, one that is distinct within (yet interdependent with) the real world and that can foster passions, commitments, and orientations that otherwise might not survive, much less thrive. The view of art, its creation, and its reception in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is thus ecological: aesthetics requires that we treat works of art as environments that call for those humans who encounter them to adopt certain ways of relating to them and to carry the results of these relations over into the other parts of their lives so that they become durable aspects of their personalities. The world of the work of art comprises an intensive human-centred totality that selectively reflects a common shared reality and uses integrated parts of this reflection to evoke a sense of oneself as a member of the human race by means of a variety of cathartic effects that do not subsume the creator or receiver of art within species-being but rather make this species-being into an essential component of that creator or receiver. Art does not make us subjects in the human race; it makes us subjects of the human race. It allows species-being to be that which inheres within us, and such inherence likewise entails that our ways of behaving or

32

Goodman 1978, p. 4. The question of by what measure we can judge a version of the world to be ‘right’ is dealt with at length here by Goodman, who strenuously attempts to distinguish his account of worlds and worldmaking from radical relativism. For a sceptical (but respectful) account of this attempt and the irresolvable ambiguities it gives rise to, see Bruner 1986, pp. 93–105.

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comporting ourselves as the whole men of the everyday change in accordance with this effect of subjectification as well. Likewise, to claim that the view of art in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is ecological is also to note that it is conservationist: insofar as their efficacy on their human makers and receivers are an integral part of their existence, works of art are not just there, they do not just simply exist. As the long historical view taken by Lukács suggests, the creation of such works as an autonomous sphere of human activity has taken millennia to realise, and it requires persistent action on our part (a mode of comportment or way of behaving) to continue to effectively be the case. Again, as noted earlier, Lukács’s speculations in his late aesthetics do not foreclose the possibility that specific works of art might cease to make the claims on us that he attributes to art worthy of the name. Art is a real human achievement, but that does not mean that it is an eternal achievement. In this sense, The Specificity of the Aesthetic makes the case for the protection of art against its biggest threats, whether they be found outside art itself, as in the case of the distortive effects wrought by Stalinism in socialist countries or by capitalism in Western ones, or within it, as in the case of the different assaults made on art by avant-gardistes, modernists, and postmodernists. The latter make claims for disruptive innovation, negation, and radical discontinuity, and The Specificity of the Aesthetic provides some challenging speculations for all three (starting with the question: by what criteria can we presently see all art from all periods as being of a piece with each other, and if we cannot adduce such criteria, then on what grounds can we credibly give the name of ‘art’ to any such works?) and a plea for the protection of art and the behaviours it demands of us against the lures of radical relativism, which would leave us in the cul-de-sac ruefully described by Danto and thus with the end of the story of art as such instead of just the obsolescence of a few works of art here and there.

4

Provocations

There are at least two further timely and provocative consequences that follow from this. First of all, Lukács argues that when it comes to art, not all affects are created equal. This is likely to be taken as a provocation because affect theory has received a lot of attention in English-language literary criticism and cultural studies since the 1990s, and most of this attention has prioritised its openness and virtuality: affect as an immediate force or intensity of perpetual potentiality that is resistant to meaning, exists outside or before language, and tends towards the excessive and the instinctive. Eugenie Brinkema has pithily described the way in which it has usually been approached as of late:

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‘Affect’, as turned to, is said to: disrupt, interrupt, reinsert, demand, provoke, insist on, remind of, agitate for: the body, sensation, movement, flesh and skin and nerves, the visceral, stressing pains, feral frenzies, always rubbing against: what undoes, what unsettles, that thing I cannot name, what remains resistant, far away (haunting, and ever so beautiful); indefinable, it is said to be what cannot be written, what thaws the critical cold, messing all systems and subjects up. Thus, turning to affect has allowed the humanities to constantly possibly introject any seemingly absent or forgotten dimension of inquiry, to insist that play, the unexpected, and the unthought can always be brought back into the field.33 This widely used understanding of affect is due in no small part to the pioneering efforts of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Brian Massumi to build upon, respectively, the works of Silvan Tomkins and Gilles Deleuze.34 In their wake, much influential work has been done to historicise and politicise affect while also accounting for the role it can play in generating novel aesthetic categories.35 Whatever their aims, subsequent critiques and genealogies of affect have likewise further entrenched its centrality to contemporary literary, artistic, and cultural criticism.36 In such a setting, the handling of affect in The Specificity of the Aesthetic will likely seem out of place insofar as only those affects (that is, those forces or intensities that relate the work of art to the bodies of its receivers) which are cathartic (again, those which evocatively engage and meaningfully reorient the passional commitments of the receiver of art in light of the sense of being of the human race that is made experienceable in the encounter with the work of art) are deemed specific to art; thus, attention paid to other possible affects is a frittering away of one’s time on things that are inessential to aesthetics.37 Moreover, while these cathartic effects necessarily perform an ethical function, this function does not make art a branch of ethics. The world of the work of art is distinct from the discourse of ethics in that it addresses the whole man of the everyday. The view that the work of art provides of one’s being of the human species is not just cognitive or intellectual but also corporeal and affective. As 33 34 35

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Brinkema 2014, p. xii. Sedgwick 2003; Massumi 2002. For the historicisation of affect, see Thrailkill 2007. For its politicisation, see Ahmed 2010; Berlant 2011. For the use of affect in the generation of new aesthetic categories, see Ngai 2005. For instance, see Leys 2017. This is where Lukács, Leys, and Walter Benn Michaels overlap in ways that would be worth exploring further. Cf. Leys 2017; Michaels 2004.

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Reiner Ruffing sums up Lukács’s reflections in this regard, ‘Without works of art we would have inadequate notions of human possibilities, both as a species and as individuals. Art bursts the everyday’s habituated patterns of perception and sensitises you to new perspectives’.38 These perspectives aren’t limitless or undefined, however; to count as cathartic affects, they must carry with them the effect of humanising us, of making new conceptions of what it is to be human not just known but experienceable. All other affects that fail to move us towards this end or that act to thwart such a movement thus drop out of view or are treated as beside the point. This would render the bulk of contemporary affect theory – much of it characterised by openly or covertly anti-humanist aspects – irrelevant to aesthetics as such. Yet this need not be as proscriptive as it seems, for as we have seen, the meaning of what it is to be human is precisely what is left open and processual in The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Lukács’s proscriptions here about affectivity thus serve a goal whose scope is subject to historical change and is therefore ultimately indeterminate. In many respects, this is in line with the influential description of species-being offered in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, where Marx contrasts animal and human production: But [animals] produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce one-sidedly, while man produces universally; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need; they produce only themselves, while man reproduces the whole of nature; their products belong immediately to their physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals produce only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man is capable of producing according to the standards of every species and of applying to each object its inherent standard.39 According to Simon Skempton, this means that species-being refers to ‘the negative universality that constitutes consciousness, a universality stemming from the lack of any specific determination, an insubstantial intrinsic relationality. To say that a human is a Gattungswesen [species-being] is simply to say that a human is a conscious being, having the indeterminacy productive of univer-

38 39

Ruffing 1992, p. 27. Marx 1992a, p. 329.

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sal awareness. It is not to say that a human is a being who has an identification with its biological “species”, with humanity. […] The point is that Gattungswesen involves freedom from specific determination’.40 Skempton goes on to criticise those who confuse species-being with an essence or differentia specifica that distinguishes humans from all other species.41 Lukács’s remarks on speciesbeing in The Specificity of the Aesthetic do not make this mistake, but they do insist that art is where this consciousness of universality and indeterminacy gets essentialised. What would be a vice in Marxist anthropology becomes a virtue in Lukácsian aesthetics, where art is tasked with perennially making anew the openness of species-being into a meaningfully experienced essence and a truly living (because it is an embodied, not just a theorised) universality. This brings us to the second provocation made by the world of the work of art here, which has to do with Lukács’s commitment to totality, a concept that continues to be divisive, carrying with itself undertones of totalitarianism. This is not the place to replay the debates around this concept or how it evolved in Marxist scholarship over the course of the twentieth century.42 All that is to be done here is to stave off some likely confusions by summing up what ‘totality’ means for Lukács here, which is simply ‘the problem of the part and the whole’. As Gail Day pithily puts it, ‘Despite its considerable weightiness in Lukács’s writing, the concept [of totality] is surprisingly modest in what it performs; it simply demands that we consider the interrelations and interactions between different phenomena, that we relate the parts to the whole – and that we conceive these parts – the whole and all their relations – as mutable, as both materially constraining and subject to human actions’.43 Likewise, Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes Lukács’s understanding of totality as ultimately being a matter of labour: The totality of which Lukacs speaks is, in his own terms, ‘the totality of observed facts’, not of all possible and actual beings but of our coherent arrangement of all the known facts. When the subject recognizes himself in history and history in himself, he does not dominate the whole, as the Hegelian philosopher does, but at least he is engaged in a work of totalization. He knows that no historical fact will ever have its whole meaning for us unless it has been linked to all the facts we are able to know, unless it has been referred to as a particular moment in a single enterprise which 40 41 42 43

Skempton 2010, p. 102. Skempton 2010, pp. 102–03. A valuable starting place for interested English-language readers remains Jay 1984. Day 2011, p. 209.

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unites them, unless it has been placed in a vertical history which is the record of attempts which had a meaning, of their implications and of their conceivable continuations. If one takes on the responsibility of deciphering fundamental choices in history, there is no reason to limit oneself to partial and discontinuous intuitions.44 Totality names the demand that we conceive of parts and wholes in ways that hang together, but never in a way that is closed for once and for all. For Lukács, ‘open-ended totalizations predominat[e] over closed totalities’.45 This means that The Specificity of the Aesthetic is to be taken as a whole, not as a collection of fragmentary parts that we are free to pick through and salvage as we would the choice bits of an abandoned building or sunken ship. We are instead compelled to confront the disparate anthropological, historical, philosophical, economic, and aesthetic aspects of this massive project in terms of their constitutive interrelationships. Arguably, this demand to totalise is made all the more exigent by the fact that The Specificity of the Aesthetic is, notwithstanding its size and scale, incomplete. What we have here is a Pantagruelian sliver of a system that is not fully worked out, which does not make of it a philosophical fragment in which modernism inadvertently triumphs but rather underscores the degree to which Lukács would have the readers of this and all of his late works approach these texts as living, open constructs in need of extension, revision, deletion, and supplementation. Its incompleteness means it is not yet whole, but the demand to totalise necessitates that the interlocutors of Lukács’s aesthetics make it so. The demand for totality – for expressing a presently coherent whole out of both the continuous and discontinuous aspects that make up a person or a society or the human race – extends to Lukács’s life itself, which is apparent in his late attempt at autobiography (as is the case with so much of his later work, it was never completed): ‘In my case everything is a continuation of something else. I do not think that there are any non-organic elements in my development’.46 His life, he insisted to the end, was all of a piece, and in this vein there has been much compelling work to link together into a cogent and shapely whole all of the stages in his intellectual biography, from Developmental History of Modern Drama (Entwicklungsgeschichte des modernen Dramas, published in 1909) to On the Ontology of Social Being (Zur Ontologie des gesellschaftlichen Seins, published in 1971). For Werner Jung, for instance, the narrative of Lukács’s 44 45 46

Merleau-Ponty 1973, pp. 31–32 Jay 1984, p. 349. Lukács 1983b, p. 81.

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life as an intellectual charts a path ‘from utopia to ontology, from a historicophilosophical hope for a new human community – the “society of love” as he calls it in an essay from 1919 – to a sober-minded materialist stocktaking of this same supposedly new socialist society’.47 Alternatively, the problems posed to philosophy by language, science, and irrationalism are what instead provide János Kelemen with the means of unifying Lukács’s work into a whole.48 Even more recently, Fredric Jameson has shown the ways in which a commitment to working out a more robustly dialectical conception of form links together not only the political and aesthetic works of Lukács, but also his early and late writings.49 In this light, clarifying the ways in which The Specificity of the Aesthetic relates to earlier works by Lukács becomes all the more urgent, though a full accounting of such relationships is necessarily beyond the scope of this introduction. It is worth pointing out, however, the manner in which Lukács’s late aesthetics bears on History and Class Consciousness (1923), a text that remains a touchstone for much English-language cultural, historical, and political criticism. The most eloquent expositor of the kinship between these two works remains Ágnes Heller, who has long contended that The Specificity of the Aesthetic marks both a return to the problems explored in History and Class Consciousness and a momentous correction to the flawed answer it provides. In both works, Lukács seeks the means by which correct consciousness is to be attained in the face of reification.50 In History and Class Consciousness, this means is found in the class consciousness of the proletariat, who as the identical subject-object of history are not only the collective agents of revolution, but also the resolvers of the epistemological crisis posed by reification. To Heller’s mind, this confusion of categories (praxis with epistemology, empirical consciousness with class consciousness) entailed that Lukács’s solution could not help but be a mystification: ‘The concept of class consciousness used by Lukács postulated not only the collective class that takes action but also an epistemological character. The working class was thus the guardian of absolute, scientific truth. The Marxist conception changed from the ground up and gained a much wider meaning. The working class turned into the instrument for solving a set of epistemological problems, and it thereby turned into mythos’.51 In part, Heller traces this mystification of the agent of social change

47 48 49 50 51

Jung 2001, p. 13. Kelemen 2014, pp. 2–83. Jameson 2015. Heller 1983, p. 184. Cf. Fehér, et al. 1983, p. 130. Heller 1981, p. 56.

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back to the tendency of History and Class Consciousness to be an idealised expression of Leninism, which she sees as the sustained, but not consciously recognised, target of criticism in Lukács’s late works. In The Specificity of the Aesthetic this criticism is said to be most salient in the substitution of the concept of the human species for that of class, which leads Lukács away from using class affiliation as a measuring stick for artistic truth and towards the theory of reflection.52 Thus, the identical subject-object of history in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is not the collectivity formed by the proletariat, as it was in History and Class Consciousness, but rather the collectivity of individual creators and receivers who comport themselves in the ways called for by works of art. The work of art ‘embodies the social universal’ and is the occasion for the aesthetic subject (the man-made-whole) to individually undertake ‘the reception of the social totality’.53 It thus falls to the work of art, not to class consciousness, to call forth from its creators and receivers ‘the deepest truth of Marxism: the humanization of man as the content of the process of history which realizes itself – in a myriad of varieties – in each individual human life. It follows that each individual – regardless of whether he is conscious of this or not – is an active factor in the overall process whose product he also is. Progress towards species being in individual life represents the true convergence of two real but inseparable paths of development’.54 In locating the social agency for progress in the comportment towards art it sets forth, The Specificity of the Aesthetic likewise marks a corrective to the pointedly undemocratic qualities of Lukács’s earlier Leninism.55 This change in course follows from the two major events of 1956: Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ regarding Stalinism in February and the failed Hungarian Uprising of late October and early November. The effects of the former are visible throughout The Specificity of the Aesthetic, in which the Stalinist period is described as having the tendency ‘to vulgarise Marxism’ and to cut it off ‘from the great heritage of human thought’. Criticisms of Lukács’s ceaseless efforts to uncover continuities between this heritage and real existing socialism therefore need to remain mindful of this context if they want to fairly assess them and to form a judgement as whether or not they were sufficient to allow Lukács’s literary

52 53 54 55

Heller 1981, pp. 55–57. Heller 1981, p. 58. Lukács 1983b, p. 169. This late focus on democracy and processes of democratisation usually gets disregarded by many critics of Lukács, even German-speaking ones. For example, see the cavalier dismissal of Lukács’s vanguardism (as if it were a lifelong feature of his intellectual profile and political activities) in Schulte-Sasse 1984, p. xxxiv.

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criticism of the 1930s and 1940s to do more than just promulgate the Stalinist party line. Expressing deep and abiding reservations in this regard, David Pike has insisted, ‘In no way did Lukács’ outlook and the basic editorial policy of Literaturnyj Kritik, least of all the notion of a “triumph of realism” and all the ideas that went with it, contradict conventional Stalinist policy. Rather, the application of the triumph of realism to past writers was a by-product of the new-found Soviet appreciation of the cultural heritage institutionalized and instrumentalized during the popular front era’.56 In this view, the question of socialism’s relationship to the bourgeois humanist tradition was not foreclosed by Stalinism but was instead opportunistically promoted at times, which would make Lukács’s criticism of Stalin in The Specificity of the Aesthetic yet another instance of special pleading. Less peremptory, but still critical, assessments can be found in the work of Ferenc Fehér and Rodney Livingstone. For Fehér, Lukács’s incessant attempts ‘to reveal the “ideal type” of the system as he opposed its empirical reality, a procedure barely tolerated by the system itself […], also entailed the acceptance of the final principles of the regime. This critical distance was necessary, and at the same time sufficient, for Lukács to elaborate his classicism, to build up his personal Weimar, an island of culture in a world of power relations that were unambiguously hostile toward the outspokenness of any democratic culture’.57 Alternatively, in the words of Rodney Livingstone, ‘We may conclude that if the authoritarian features in Lukács himself were powerful enough to induce him to submit to Stalinism, they were also strong enough to enable him to stand up for his own – bourgeois-democratic – version of Stalinism’.58 Thus, in the opinions of these two tough-minded readers, Lukács ought not to be spit out by us, precisely because he managed the singularly tricky feat of somehow being neither cold nor hot in a situation in which no one could have possibly been lukewarm. The question of what to make of Lukács’s writings and activities under Stalinism will continue to be a live issue, even more so as works like Moscow Writings: Towards a Theory and Politics of Literature, 1934–1940 (Moskauer Schriften: Zur Literaturtheorie und Literaturpolitik 1934–1940, published 1981) get translated into English and published in the years to come. What is at issue here, however, is how we ought to approach Lukács’s defence of democracy and criticism of Stalinism in the 1950s and 1960s, and on this point his actions do bear the impress of sincerity. For one thing, Lukács accepted a cabinet post in Imre 56 57 58

Pike 1985, p. 130. Fehér 1983, p. 77. Livingstone 1980, p. 11.

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Nagy’s government during the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, for which he was arrested and detained in Romania following the arrival of Soviet military forces. Upon his return to Hungary in April 1957, he was forced to retire from his chair in aesthetics at the University of Budapest and to forfeit his membership in the Hungarian Communist Party, of which he had been a founding member.59 Lukács’s stated grounds at the time for putting himself at risk of execution (a fate which indeed befell Nagy, who was hanged along with other members of his government) were in line with the commitments openly expressed in his final works. As he wrote during the uprising in an article published in Szabad Nép (Free People), the central newspaper for the Hungarian Communist Party, ‘The terrible lessons of the last few days must be learnt by everyone. The most pressing of these lessons is the reshaping of our national, social, economic, and cultural life in the spirit of a genuine democracy. Such a democracy is able to do away with all the remnants of Stalinism. The development of democratic freedom, of the power of self-determination of the people in every direction, is the real foundation for finding the Hungarian path of socialism and successfully actualising the Hungarian path to socialism everywhere’.60 Not vanguardism, then, but democracy; not the proletariat, but rather the man-made-whole by, in, and through the work of art. For Lukács in the 1960s, art thus had a formative role to play in the process of democratisation insofar as it educates us to have a lived understanding of what social action might mean in history while also habituating us to become the subjects of the human race and society: ‘A person is therefore neither causally influenced nor completely determined by his “milieu” as an external power; rather, his essential individual existence takes part in such a higher social order (or in several), and this taking part constitutes an essential (often absolutely decisive) aspect of the kernel (of the substance) of his personality’. Again, by becoming the man-made-whole by art, I do not recognise myself as participating in society or the human race; instead, I recognise society and species-being as being of a piece with my own very being. In short, The Specificity of the Aesthetic argues that the adoption of the proper comportment towards art not only makes possible the meaningful experience of totality, but also discloses possibilities for doing and taking part, which would make the lives of the people-made-whole by art resemble a Bildungsroman, where, as Mikhail Bakhtin has described it, human emergence ‘is no longer man’s own private affair. He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within

59 60

Kadarkay 1991, pp. 426–43. Lukács 1973b, p. 641.

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an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. This transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future’.61 In his final years, Lukács began to articulate a new Marxist theory of politics that would, among other things, reconceive historicity (the basis for the relationship between past and future in the present) and its bearing on everyday socialist life. In The Process of Democratization (never completed but written in late 1968 and published posthumously in 1985), this involves, among other things, a shift in focus from the dramatic overturnings that characterise the event and revolution to the slower, but more enduring, temporalities of habit and habituation. In that work he observes, ‘Concerning the relationship between past and future, we can and must state that the reconstruction of socialist production is not merely an economic endeavour. It should be looked upon as laying the basis for the transformation of man, for his habituation to a dignified human existence in everyday life and the permeation of this dignity to all his manifestations of life’.62 In particular, Lukács notes that this ‘practice of habituation can only become effective if men become accustomed to putting aside forms of behavior that fall below the dignity of species being, that often incorporate self-destructive and counter-human drives. Habituation must create a social being that discards any aggressive attitudes towards fellow human beings or their own lives (both are inherently inseparable). The creation of a being that is social in content is the end result of the gradual process of habituation. Such an inner transformation of man cannot be carried out without a restructuring of the external world of everyday life. Regardless of whether material production have [sic] developed itself to a high level, a communist society can never arise unless everyday life becomes not only an arena of political decision making but also the basis of social being’.63 Such a material restructuring of everyday life is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the emergence of the process of democratisation insofar as the new measuring sticks (‘dignified human existence’, ‘the dignity of species being’, ‘a social being that discards any aggressive attitudes toward fellow human beings or their own lives’) by which it is to be gauged in the everyday lives of people are what works of art are uniquely capable of disclosing to their creators and receivers in ways 61 62 63

Bakhtin 1986, p. 23. Lukács 1991, p. 165. Lukács 1991, p. 163.

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that are likely to become habit-forming. That is to say, it is art which acclimatises us to be the democratic subjects of the communist-society-to-be. This has at least two important consequences. First, the talk of habit and habituation in The Specificity of the Aesthetic is not to be reduced to the frameworks in which Lenin famously presents them in State and Revolution (1917), even though Lukács himself draws parallels between the two throughout The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Norman Levine has pithily summed up the parting of the ways between the Leninist version of habituation and the one developed, both implicitly and explicitly, by Lukács in his final works: ‘In State and Revolution, Lenin uses the idea of habituation as a substitute for political procedures, and as a synonym for the most extreme form of democracy. […] When Lukács evaluates the idea of habituation as an extreme form of democracy, he praises it highly. One aspect of State and Revolution is its democratic plebeianism, and the actual processes of society would be vested in the people in general. When Lukács evaluates the idea of habituation as a substitute for political procedures, he only has negative comments. Lenin wants to show that learned responses, behaviouralism, could perform the same tasks that social protocols do: behaviouralism would ensure that people perform social functions without political compulsion. Lukács replaces behaviouralism with democracy: he replaces psychology with politics. He recognizes the need of protocols to enable society to reach its collective decisions’.64 This directly bears on the second consequence, which is that Lukács’s late aesthetics does not present art, its creation, or its reception as a substitute for politics. When read alongside The Process of Democratization, The Specificity of the Aesthetic makes it clear that works of art and the adoption of proper comportments towards them have key roles to play in the formation of subjects with political agency, of personalities who understand themselves to be more doing than done-to. Art, in this view, is not so much a ‘sublimation and displacement of politics’ as it is the incubator of political passions, commitments, and activity.65 This is a claim that provokes new speculations as to the contemporary relevance of The Specificity of the Aesthetic. For Ágnes Heller, it is nothing less 64

65

Levine 1991, p. 53. It should be noted that Levine incorrectly discounts the importance of behaviourism for Lukács, who openly adopts and extensively revises Pavlovian theories throughout both volumes of The Specificity of the Aesthetic. Much as he meaningfully changes the Leninist significance of habit and habit-formation, Lukács likewise transforms what Lenin understood by behaviourism. Given that the more substantive engagement with behaviourism occurs in the second volume of The Specificity of the Aesthetic, the relationship between Lukács and Pavlov is addressed in the introduction to that volume rather than here. Gandesha and Hartle 2017, p. xxviii.

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than ‘the climax of Lukacs’s work’: it ‘is a historico-philosophical confession of faith. The problem that Lukács wanted to solve was whether it was possible to reconstruct history so as to grasp the relation between continuity and discontinuity and to prove the validity of the historicity of our time’.66 This is a problem that scholars of literature, art, and culture are indeed still grappling with, whether it be by way of conceptualisations of longue durée, deep time, contemporaneity, world-systems analysis, or planetarity.67 Likewise, The Specificity of the Aesthetic contrasts strikingly with the recent turn towards negativity, finitude, and nihilism in critical theory and continental philosophy, and one hopes that it becomes an irritant to thought for English-language scholars pursuing those lines of research.68 The prioritisation of certain kinds of experience in the encounter with the work of art, the effort to relate these experiences to everyday life, and the focus on the educative functions performed by art cumulatively make Lukács’s late aesthetics altogether more Deweyean than English-language readers might otherwise be led to expect.69 The situating of art as the place where political subjectivity gestates is exactly the opposite of what was claimed to be the case by the late aesthetics of Theodor Adorno, for whom art was the tenuous (perhaps already no longer existent) site of hibernation for people who no longer have a viable political agency to which they could reasonably turn or a tenable political subject into which they could credibly transform themselves.70 Finally, for Lukács one of the conditions of possibility for the creation and reception of art is ‘the lived experience of the world as home to man’, by which he refers both to a high level of human control over our lived environment and ‘the consciousness of a certain assuredness

66 67 68 69

70

Heller 1981, p. 57. See, respectively, Braudel 1995; Dimock 2006; Ruda and Voelker 2015; Wallerstein 2004; and Friedman 2015. These strains of thought include (but are not limited to) Afrofuturism, Afro-pessimism, non-philosophy in the vein of François Laruelle, and certain facets of speculative realism. Cf. Dewey 1934. I should also note that Lukács himself would likely have objected to this association: Dewey gets exactly one mention in the entirety of the first volume of The Specificity of the Aesthetic, and it occurs in a brief quote from Arnold Gehlen, who casually dismisses Dewey’s entire theory of consciousness. That is to say, Lukács does not even bother to do Dewey in with his own words. Cf. Adorno 1997. It is also worth noting that the second chapter of the present volume of The Specificity of the Aesthetic is a fairly direct rejoinder to Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944, revised 1947), insofar as Lukács spends a lot of time there disaggregating the progressive elements of the Enlightenment from its violence and gloomy consequences. Emblematic here is the treatment of Francis Bacon, who gets sympathetically reclaimed by Lukács in pointed contrast to the drubbing he receives at the hands of Adorno and Horkheimer. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 1–34.

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of life, secureness as the objective and subjective form of normal existence’. Indeed, ‘the fact of an objective “security” of normal human life, no matter how narrowly its compass may be limited at first, signifies a revolution in the human mode of sensibility, which today has already turned into such a matter of course that its actual, categorical antithesis can hardly be re-experienced anymore’. Yet we are entering a period of human existence on this planet in which such control, security, assuredness, and at-homeness are precisely the sorts of things that will no longer be the norms of our shared experience.71 Accordingly, Lukács’s speculations here provide much for those Humanities scholars working on the Anthropocene and climate change, especially insofar as the cascading tenuousness of our existence on this planet would seem to betoken the end of the creation of art (and perhaps even of existing art’s civic and political functions as well) long before the impending end of the human race as such. More such examples (not all of them this gloomy) could be adduced at much greater length. I would like to close instead, however, with a more praxisoriented claim for the timeliness of The Specificity of the Aesthetic. In a period in which precarity is the name of the game for most people holding doctorates from departments in the Humanities and the Arts, this is sure to appeal to the harried and casualised many who persist, despite sky-is-falling reports from the Modern Language Association, in their efforts to be educators at institutes of higher learning. According to Lukács, art educates us to be political subjects, to lead a vita activa, but only so long as we resist the omnipresent sociocultural forces that act to destroy art or to reduce it to an object of consumption or to translate it into a rarefied realm cut off from everyday life. That is to say, we need educators and researchers who account for art to a wider public and safeguard it for that same public. The exploitation of adjunct labour does not just harm those who are foolhardy enough to get doctorates in the Humanities and the Arts despite the odds against them; ultimately, The Specificity of the Aesthetic makes the case anew as to how such exploitation harms society as a whole. Likewise, in a period in which English, Literature, and Art departments are having to defend their access to needed resources and, in some cases, even their very existence, this is sure to appeal to the tenured few in the Humanities and the Arts who, if they ‘want their work to have some impact – political or other-

71

The scholarship on what to expect from climate change in the coming decades and centuries is vast, intractable, and dauntlessly self-inculpatory. For an emblematic range of such anticipations, see Mann and Wainwright 2018; Romm 2016; Scranton 2015; and Kolbert 2014.

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wise – must ask themselves, What do I know that people in other fields don’t?’72 According to Lukács, what a philosopher or critic of art knows is not formalism or close reading or shallow reading or distant reading or weak theory; nor does she know how to disruptively deconstruct a text or how to properly periodise it. Instead, the philosopher or critic of art should know what art does and how it does it. She is responsible for knowing and conveying the ways in which art over the course of human existence has capacitated us not only to experience history (as the man-made-whole) but also to become its actors (as the whole man of the everyday). But only so long as the actions we take are organised around exigent ethical and political commitments that are ultimately not to be actualised inside the sentences of a short story or within the cornices of a building or the notes of a musical composition but rather in the often messy immediacy of theory and praxis in everyday life and how the history of the human race bears on it now, in this moment, today, right here. The philosopher or critic of art knows art is not the beginning of something or the end of something. It is instead the means of defining that something and orienting one’s bearing as a whole towards it. What do we know that people in other fields don’t? We know what it means to do, or so the lure of The Specificity of the Aesthetic would have us believe. As a proposition, this is sure to be met with understandable incredulity and confusion in many quarters, but few scholars of art and literature today – both tenured and adjunct – are likely to be at a loss as to why now is the time to take it seriously. 72

Clune 2017, p. 1194.

Acknowledgements Early drafts of the first five chapters of this volume benefited immensely from the notes and suggestions of Gabriela Frank, who gave my initial translations a much-needed close reading when I was still finding my footing. This volume would never have been finished without the support of a variety of research appointments with Tyrus Miller at the University of California at Santa Cruz and (for the last round of edits) at Irvine between 2012 and 2019. For that as well his continuing intellectual and affective (but no less essential) support, I owe more thanks than I can credibly express here.

Note on the Translation The extant German-language version of The Specificity of the Aesthetic is rife with typographical and citational errors. When the former impact the meaning of the text, I have compared the German original to the Hungarian and Spanish translations of it in order to address and resolve any uncertainties. As for Lukács’s footnotes, any corrections made to them are noted in a brief Editors’ note following each affected entry. Likewise, any citations that Lukács omitted but that have been included here are indicated with Editors’ notes. Whenever a source cited by Lukács has proven to be available in an Englishlanguage edition, I have cited the English-language edition. Accordingly, all foreign-language sources cited are the editions adduced by Lukács himself. In those places where Lukács has cited an English-language source, I have used that source here and mentioned this fact in an accompanying Editors’ note. Finally, brief biographical footnotes have been added for the people mentioned in the text who are likely to be unfamiliar to an English-language audience.

The Specificity of the Aesthetic

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The works in which I am seeking to sum up the most essential results of my development – my ethics and my aesthetics, the first independent part of which is presented here – are to be taken as modest attempts at expressing gratitude for more than forty years of companionship in living and thinking, in labour and struggle. Dedicated to Gertrud Bortstieber Lukács, who died on 28 April 1963. All I can do now is dedicate these works to her memory.

∵

They do not know it, but they are doing it. marx

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Preface The book being handed over to the public here is the first part of an aesthetics in which the philosophical justification of the aesthetic mode of positing, the derivation of the specific category of aesthetics, and its distinction from other fields are the centre of attention. As the expositions focus on this set of problems and respond to the concrete problems of aesthetics only to the extent that is necessary to shed light on these issues, this part constitutes a self-contained whole and is also entirely comprehensible in itself without the parts following it. It is imperative that we take stock of the place of aesthetic behaviour in the totality of human activities and human responses to the external world, of the relation of the aesthetic constructs growing from these and of their categorical composition (their formal structure, etc.) to other ways of responding to objective reality. In rough outline, an unbiased observation of these relationships yields the following picture. The primary thing is the behaviour of man in everyday life, a field that is still largely unexplored despite its pivotal significance for understanding loftier and more complex ways of responding to reality. Without wishing to anticipate things that are expounded at length in the work itself, we must nevertheless briefly mention the fundamental ideas of its construction. The everyday behaviour of man is at once the start and endpoint of all human activity. That is to say, if one conceives of the everyday as a great river, then science and art branch off from it into the loftier forms of reality’s reception and reproduction. They differentiate themselves from each other and correspondingly develop their own specific aims, and they arrive at their pure form in this specificity – a specificity rising from the needs of social life – in order to then flow back into the river of everyday life as a result of their effects, their impacts on human life. This river of everyday life thus continually enriches itself with the greatest achievements of the human spirit and assimilates them to its practical daily needs, from which new branches of the loftier forms of objectivation then arise again as questions and demands. What must be thoroughly investigated are the intricate interrelationships between the immanent completion of works in science and art and the social needs that are their inspiration, the occasions for their emergence. Only from this dynamic of genesis, of unfolding, of law-like autonomy, of roots in the life of mankind can the particular categories and structures of the scientific and artistic responses of man to reality be derived. This work’s observations are of course aimed at the knowledge of the specificity of the aesthetic. But since men live in a unitary reality and interact with it, the only way that the essence of the aesthetic can be even remotely

©

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comprehended is by constantly comparing it with other ways of responding to reality. Although the relation to science is the most important, it is imperative that we disclose the relation to ethics and religion as well. In fact, the psychological problems emerging here likewise come about as the necessary result of posing questions leveled at that which is specific to aesthetic positing. To be sure, no aesthetics can stand still at this stage. Kant was yet able to be content with answering the universal methodological question of the claim that aesthetic judgements make to validity. Apart from the fact that this question, in our opinion, is not primary but rather something supremely derivative for the construction of aesthetics, no philosopher since Hegelian aesthetics who seriously seeks to clarify the essence of the aesthetic can be content with such a narrowly circumscribed framework and a way of posing the problem that is so one-sidedly oriented towards epistemology. There will be a lot of talk in the text of the dubiousness of Hegelian aesthetics, both in its fundamental principles and in individual statements. In the long run, however, the philosophical universalism of its conception, its historico-systematic way of synthesising, remains exemplary for the design of any aesthetics. Only all three parts of this aesthetics together can approach – just in parts – this lofty exemplar. For entirely apart from the knowledge and aptitude of the person undertaking such an attempt today, the criteria of all-encompassingness laid down by Hegelian aesthetics can, as a matter of fact, be put into practice in the present day only with much greater difficulty than in Hegel’s time. Thus, the theory of the arts dealt with at length by Hegel – in a historico-systematic way as well – still remains beyond the scope circumscribed by the plan of this work as a whole. Its second part – with the provisional title ‘The Work of Art and Aesthetic Behaviour’ – is to concretise, above all else, the specific structure of the work of art that is derived and outlined only in the utmost generality in the first part; the categories that are acquired only at the level of generalities in the first part can then obtain their true and determinate physiognomy for the first time. In the first part, problems like content and form, worldview and the cultivation of form, technique and form, etc. can surface only with utmost generality, only as horizonal questions; their truly concrete essence can only come to light in a philosophical way in the course of the exhaustive analysis of the structure of the work. Things are similarly arranged when it comes to the problems of creative and receptive behaviour. The first part is only able to advance as far as their general outlines, depicting as it were the current methodological ‘place’ of their possibility for determination. The real relations between the everyday on the one hand and scientific, ethical, etc. behaviour and aesthetic production and reproduction on the other – the categorical nature of their proportions, interactions, mutual influences, etc. – also necessitate analyses that are focused on

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the most concrete cases, and such analyses are in principle not possible within the framework of the first part, which is committed instead to establishing a philosophical foundation. The situation is similar with the third part. (Its provisional title is ‘Art as Socio-Historical Appearance’.) It is indeed unavoidable that the first part not only already contains individual historical digressions but above all also points constantly towards the originary historical essence of each aesthetic phenomenon. As previously mentioned, the historico-systematic character of art gained its first distinctive shape in Hegel’s aesthetics. The rigidities of Hegelian systematisation attributable to objective idealism have been corrected by Marxism. As such, the intricate interrelationship between dialectical and historical materialism is already a momentous sign that Marxism does not want to deduce phases of historical development from the inner development of the idea; on the contrary, it is intent on grasping the actual process in its convoluted historico-systematic determinations. The unity of theoretical (here: aesthetic) and historical determinations is ultimately realised in an extremely contradictory manner, and therefore both as a matter of principle and in individual concrete cases, it can only be fathomed by means of continuous collaboration between dialectical and historical materialism.1 The viewpoints of dialectical materialism are dominant in the first and second parts of this work since it is a matter of conceptually expressing the objective essence of the aesthetic. At the same time, however, there is almost no problem that would be solvable without at least allusively elucidating its historical aspects, which are indivisibly united with aesthetic theory. The method of historical materialism dominates in the third part since therein the historical determinations and quirks of the genesis of the arts (their unfolding, their crises, their leading or servient roles, etc.) come to the fore. What is to be primarily explored in the course of this is the problem of uneven development in the genesis of the arts, in the aesthetic being and works of the arts, and in the effect of the arts. At the same time, however, this amounts to a break with any ‘sociological’ vulgarisation concerning the origin and effects of the arts. Such a socio-historical analysis that is not unacceptably reductive would be impossible, however, if we did not continuously utilise the results of dialectical materialist research into the categorical construction, structure, and specific constitution of each art in order to grasp its historical character. The permanent and lively interaction of dialectical and 1 The tendencies of the Stalinist period to vulgarise Marxism also become apparent in the fact that dialectical materialism and historical materialism were intermittently treated as sciences that were independent of each other. There were even ‘specialists’ trained for each of these two branches.

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historical materialism therefore becomes apparent here from another side, but not less so than in both of the first parts. As the reader sees, the construction of these aesthetic investigations differs a great deal from those to which we are generally accustomed. This does not mean, however, that they could lay claim to the originality of their method. On the contrary, they signify nothing more than one of the most accurate applications of Marxism possible to the problems of aesthetics. If such a definition of the project is not to be misunderstood from the outset, then the position and relation of this aesthetics to that of Marxism must be clarified, even if only in a few words. At the time that I wrote my first contribution to the aesthetics of Marxism about thirty years ago, I advocated the thesis that Marxism has its own aesthetics, and in doing so I came up against a great deal of resistance.2 The reason for this was the fact that Marxism before Lenin, even in its best theoretical representatives like Plekhanov or Mehring, confined itself almost exclusively to the problems of historical materialism.3 Not until Lenin did dialectical materialism move back into the centre of interest. That is why Mehring, who incidentally based his aesthetics on Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement, could only see a clash of subjective judgements of taste in the divergences between Marx-Engels and Lassalle. This controversy has of course long since been settled. Since the brilliant study by Mikhail Lifshitz on the development of Marx’s aesthetic views, since his meticulous collection and systematisation of scattered remarks by Marx, Engels, and Lenin on aesthetic issues, there can no longer be any doubt as to the relationship and coherence of these lines of thought.4 But pointing out and proving this systematic relationship is not the same thing as definitively answering the question about a Marxist aesthetics. For if an aesthetics, or at the very least its perfect skeleton, were already explicitly contained in the collected and systematically arranged remarks of the classics of Marxism, then nothing else would be necessary except a good text linking them all together in order for a Marxist aesthetics to be standing there ready before us. This is out of the question! As meaningful experiences have shown in many ways, not even a direct monographic application of this material to all the individual questions of aesthetics can convey that which is scientifically crucial for the construction of the whole. One is therefore faced with a paradoxical situ-

2 Lukács 1948. 3 Mehring 1929–1933; Mehring 1960–1967; Mehring 1953; Plekhanov 1955. 4 Lifshitz 1932, pp. 143 ff.; Lifshitz 1933, pp. 127ff.; Lifshitz and Schiller 1933; Marx and Engels 1949; Lifshitz 1938; Lifshitz 1960. [Eds.: Lukács cites the English-language edition of Lifshitz 1938.]

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ation: simultaneously, there both is and is not a Marxist aesthetics; it must be seized (indeed, created) by means of independent research, and at the same time the outcome of this research nevertheless only conceptually expounds and secures something of the idea of what lies already at hand. The paradox clears away by itself, however, when the whole problem is regarded in light of the method of dialectical materialism. That is to say, the age-old literal meaning of ‘method’, which is indissolubly linked to the path to knowledge, contains the demand that thinking take certain paths in order to achieve certain results. The direction of these paths is contained with unequivocal evidence in the totality of the world-image that the classics of Marxism have drawn up, particularly in the fact that the existing outcomes stand clearly before us as the endpoints of such paths. Therefore, even if this is not apparent directly or at first glance, the method of dialectical materialism clearly predetermines the paths and manner of traversing them if one wants to conceptualise objective reality in its true objectivity and fathom the essence of an individual field in accordance with its truth. Only when this method, this wayfinding, is independently realised and sustained by means of one’s own research does it become possible to hit upon what one seeks: a proper construction of Marxist aesthetics or at the very least an approximation of its true essence. Whoever harbors the illusion of intellectually reproducing reality and with it Marx’s conception of reality at the same time merely by means of an interpretation of Marx must fail in both tasks. Only an unbiased observation of reality and its reworking by means of the method discovered by Marx can achieve fidelity both to reality and to Marxism. In this sense this work, in all of its components and in its entirety, is indeed the result of independent research but still raises no claim to originality. For it owes its whole method, its means of approaching the truth, to the study of the whole body of work that the classics of Marxism have willed to us. At the same time, however, fidelity to Marxism means adherence to the great traditions of previous attempts to come to terms with reality in thought. What was highlighted in the Stalinist period, to the exclusion of everything else, particularly on the part of Zhdanov, was that which separates Marxism from the great heritage of human thought. This could have been relatively warranted if all that had been emphasised in the process were that which was qualitatively new in Marxism, namely the leap separating its dialectic from that of its most developed precursors, for instance Aristotle or Hegel. Such a viewpoint could even be evaluated as necessary and useful had it not – in a deeply undialectical manner – highlighted that which is radically new in Marxism in a one-sided, isolating, and therefore metaphysical way – if it had not thereby disregarded the aspect of continuity in the development of human thought. However, reality – and hence its intellectual reflection and reproduction as well – is a dia-

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lectical unity of continuity and discontinuity, of tradition and revolution, of gradual transitions and leaps. Scientific socialism is itself something that is completely new in history and yet brings to fulfilment at the same time a vital human longing that has endured for millennia, a fulfilment for which the best minds have sorely striven. It is the same with the conceptual grasp of the world by means of the classics of Marxism as well. The deep truth of Marxism – a truth that cannot be unsettled by any attacks, by any silencing – is, not least of all, that with its help otherwise hidden, but fundamental facts of reality and human life can come to light, can turn into the content of human consciousness. That which is new thus obtains a double meaning: not only as a result of the reality of socialism does human life obtain a new import (a new meaning) that did not previously exist, but also at the same time through the defetishisation carried out by means of the Marxist method, Marxist research, and their outcomes, the present and the past we thought we knew – all of human existence – appear in a new light. All past efforts to apprehend human life in its truth thus become understandable in an entirely new sense. Prospects for the future, knowledge of the present, and insight into the tendencies that have intellectually and practically brought these things about are thus interrelated to each other in an indissoluble way. The one-sided emphasis on the disjunctive and the new conjures the risk of letting everything in the truly new that is concrete and rich in determinations narrow down into an abstract otherness and become impoverished therein. Setting the attributes of the dialectic in the works of Lenin against those in the works of Stalin quite clearly shows the consequences of such a methodological difference, and the multiple irrational positions taken on the legacy of Hegelian philosophy led to an often alarming poverty of content in logical studies of the Stalinist period. No trace of such a metaphysical contrasting of old and new is to be found in the classics of Marxism themselves. In fact, their relationship appears in those proportions that socio-historical development itself has produced as a result of the way that this development has let truth emerge. If anything, abiding by this exclusively correct method is possibly even more important for aesthetics than it is for other fields. For a close analysis of the facts here will show in a particularly clear manner that conscious intellectual awareness has always lagged behind those things that have been achieved in the field of the aesthetic in practice. For that very reason, those few thinkers who arrived at a level of clarity about the genuine problems of the aesthetic relatively early attain such an extraordinary significance. On the other hand – as our analyses will show – lines of thought that often seem to be quite remote, philosophically or ethically perhaps, are very important for understanding aesthetic phenomena. So as not to anticipate too much of what rightfully belongs in detailed

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explanations, all that needs to be noted here is that the whole construction and all the explanations of detail in this work are – precisely because it owes its existence to Marxist method – determined at the deepest-rooted level by the outcomes that Aristotle, Goethe, and Hegel achieved in their various writings, and not only in those directly relating to aesthetics. If in addition I express my gratitude to Epicurus, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Vico, Diderot, Lessing, and the Russian revolutionary democratic thinkers, I have of course only enumerated those names that are the single most important ones to me; for this reason, the list of authors to whom I feel indebted for this work in whole and in detail is far from being exhausted. The variety of quotations is in line with this conviction. A treatment of problems in the history of art and aesthetics is not intended. Rather it simply is a question of elucidating the facts or lines of development that are germane to the general theory. That is why, in keeping with the particular theoretical constellation, either those authors or those works are quoted that have expressed something – correctly or, in a way that is significant, falsely – for the first time, or whose opinion appears especially characteristic for a particular situation. To strive after exhaustive literary evidence was, of necessity, far from my intentions in this work. It follows from what has already been expounded so far that the polemical sting of this whole work is directed against philosophical idealism. The epistemological struggle against it naturally drops out of view in the process. It comes down to the specific questions in which philosophical idealism proves to be an impediment to the adequate apprehension of intrinsically aesthetic states of affair. As for the confusions that ensue when aesthetic interest focuses on beauty (and possibly on its so-called aspects), we will talk about them mostly in the second part; here, this complex is only touched upon episodically. It appears all the more important to us to point out the necessarily hierarchical character of all idealist aesthetics. That is to say, when different forms of consciousness figure as the ultimate principles of determination for the objectivity of all objects being examined, for their place in the system, etc.; when they are not – as in materialism – construed as ways of responding to that which objectively exists independent of consciousness and is already concretely formed, then these forms of consciousness must inevitably set themselves up as sovereign judges of intellectual order and construct its system in a hierarchical way. The ranks that such a hierarchy includes at any one time are extraordinarily diverse throughout history. But that is not to be discussed here since for us it is solely a matter of how any such hierarchy falsifies the essential nature of all objects and relationships. It is a quite prevalent misunderstanding that the world-image of materialism – the priority of being vis-à-vis consciousness, of social being vis-à-vis

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social consciousness – would be hierarchical in character as well. For materialism, the priority of being is above all a statement of fact: there is being without consciousness, but there is no consciousness without being. From this, however, there in no way follows the hierarchical subordination of consciousness to being. On the contrary, it is this priority and its concrete theoretical and practical recognition by means of consciousness that first creates the possibility that consciousness really comes to master being. The simple fact of labour strikingly illustrates this. And when historical materialism declares the priority of social being vis-à-vis social consciousness, this too is only a matter of recognising a facticity. Social praxis is also bent on mastering social being, and the fact that its goals could only be realised to a very relative degree in the course of history up to now likewise does not create any hierarchical relationship between the two but instead merely determines those concrete conditions under which an effective praxis becomes objectively possible (in fact, thereby determining its concrete limits at the same time), that room for manoeuvre that a particular social being presents for the development of consciousness. What thus comes into view in this relationship is a historical dialectic but by no means a hierarchical structure. If a small sailboat proves to be helpless against a storm that a powerful motorboat easily gets the better of, then what is in the offing is the real superiority or limit of a particular consciousness vis-à-vis being but not a hierarchical relationship between people and natural forces. Even the less so insofar as historical development – and with it the growing knowledge of consciousness about the true disposition of being – brings forth a steady growth of the possibility of consciousness mastering being. Philosophical idealism has to devise its world-image in a radically different way. There are no real and changeful relations of force that create a temporary preponderance or subordination in life; instead, what is certain in advance is a hierarchy of those potentialities relative to consciousness that not only bring forth and order the forms of objectivity and the relations between objects, but also are situated under each other in hierarchical rungs. To shed some light on the situation of our problem: when, for example, Hegel ascribes intuition to art, representation to religion, and concept to philosophy and construes them as governed by these forms of consciousness, what has thus come into being is a strict, ‘eternal’, and incontrovertible hierarchy that, as every Hegel expert knows, even determines the historical fate of art. (For this reason, nothing in the principles has changed when, for instance, the young Schelling integrates art into his hierarchical order in an antithetical way.) It is evident that from this there emerges a whole bundle of pseudo-problems that have methodologically confused all aesthetics since Plato. For regardless of whether idealist philosophy establishes a super- or subordination of art with regard to other forms of

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consciousness in certain respects, thinking is distracted from the investigation of the specific quirks of objects, which are reduced to a common denominator – in a way that is entirely illegitimate in most cases – so that one can compare them to each other within a hierarchical order and integrate them into the desired hierarchical rank. However much problems concerning the relation of art to nature, religion, science, etc. may be at issue, what must arise from these pseudo-problems are ubiquitous distortions of the forms of objectivity and of categories. The significance of the break that is thus carried out with any philosophical idealism becomes much more clearly apparent in its consequences when we further concretise our materialist starting point: that is to say, when we construe art as an idiosyncratic mode of appearance of the reflection of reality which is only a subspecies of those relations of man to reality that reflect it universally. One of the crucial fundamental ideas of this work is that all modes of reflection – we primarily analyse these through everyday life, science, and art – invariably depict the same objective reality. However, this starting-point, which appears so self-evident (indeed even trivial), has far-reaching consequences. Since materialist philosophy does not look upon all forms of objectivity or all the categories associated with objects and their relations as products of a creative consciousness, as idealism does, but instead beholds in them an objective reality existing independently of consciousness, all the divergences (indeed, all that is antithetical) in the individual modes of reflection simply take place within this reality which is unitary in substance and form. In order to be able to grasp the intricate dialectic in this unity of unity and difference, what must be broken with first of all is the widely held notion of a mechanical, photographic reflection. Were such a thing to be the foundation out of which differences grow, then all the specific forms would have to be subjective deformations of this reproduction of reality which alone is ‘authentic’, or the differentiation would have to have a purely post hoc, completely unspontaneous, and solely conscious-intellectual character. However, the extensive and intensive infinity of the objective world imposes upon all living things (humans first and foremost) adaptation and unconscious selection in the reflection. Notwithstanding its basic objective character, any reflection therefore has an indissoluble subjective component as well that is likewise conditioned in a purely physiological way at the animal level and, beyond that, in a social way in the case of human beings. (The influence of labour on the enrichment, propagation, consolidation, etc. of human capacities to reflect reality.) Differentiation is thus – in the fields of science and art first and foremost – a product of social being, of the needs that have arisen on its basis, of human adaptation to our environment, of the growth of our capacities in interaction with the compulsion to

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be a match for entirely new kinds of tasks. Physiologically and psychologically, these interactions, these adaptations to the new must indeed be directly realised in individuals, but from the outset they acquire a social universality since the newly set tasks, the new conditions and their modifying effects are constituted in a way that is (socially) universal and only permit individual subjective variants within the social room for manoeuvre. A qualitatively and quantitatively crucial part of this work is to elaborate the specific characteristic traits of the aesthetic reflection of reality. These investigations are, in keeping with this work’s basic aim, philosophical. That is to say, they focus on the question: what specific forms, relations, proportions, etc. does the world of categories common to all reflection receive in aesthetic positing? At the same time, it is of course inevitable that we respond to psychological questions as well; a specific chapter (the eleventh) is devoted to these issues. In addition, it must be emphasised here that the basic philosophical aim necessitates that we above all work out the common aesthetic traits of reflection in all of the arts, even though, in keeping with the pluralistic structure of the aesthetic sphere, the particularity of individual arts is still taken into account as much as possible during the discussion of issues having to do with categories. The entirely idiosyncratic mode of appearance of the reflection of reality in arts like music or architecture makes it inevitable that we devote a specific chapter (the fourteenth) to these special cases, aiming to elucidate their intrinsic differences so that the universal aesthetic principles in them likewise retain validity. This universality of the reflection of reality as basis for all of the interrelationships between man and his surrounding world has, when carried through, very far-reaching ideological consequences for the conception of the aesthetic. That is to say, for any genuinely consistent idealism, a form of consciousness that is meaningful for everyone in human existence – thus, in our case, the aesthetic form of consciousness – must be of a ‘supratemporal’ and ‘eternal’ nature, since its origin is hierarchically founded in the context of a world of ideas. Insofar as it can be discussed in terms of history, this takes place within a meta-historical framework of ‘timeless’ being or validity. However, this seemingly formal and methodological position must necessarily overturn into something content-related, into something ideological. For it necessarily follows from this that the aesthetic, both on the side of production and reception, belongs to the ‘essence’ of man, if one may anthropologically or ontologically determine this from the standpoint of the world of ideas or the world-spirit. Our materialist way of looking at things must yield a completely opposite image. Not only is the objective reality that appears in the various modes of reflection subject to a continuous transformation, but also this transformation

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displays quite determinate orientations and lines of development. By its objective nature, therefore, reality itself is historical; accordingly, the content- and form-related historical determinations appearing in the various reflections are only more or less accurate approximations to this facet of objective reality. But a genuine historicity can never consist in a mere change of contents within forms that remain completely unvarying or with completely unchanged categories. Indeed, it is precisely this alteration of contents that must also necessarily act to modify form as well, that must at first carry with it certain shifts in function within the categorical system, from a matter of degrees all the way to pronounced transformations: the emergence of new categories and the disappearance of old ones. The historicity of objective reality entails a certain historicity of the doctrine of categories. Of course, we must be very mindful of the extent to which such changes are objective or subjective in constitution. For although we suppose that nature too ultimately would have to be understood in terms of history, the individual stages of this development are of such a temporal expansiveness that its changes hardly come into consideration for science. Certainly even more important is the subjective history of the discoveries of objectivities, relationships, and categorical relationalities. Only in biology could a turning point in the emergence of the objective categories of life be established – at least in the part of the universe known to us – and thereby an objective genesis as well. The issue is qualitatively different when we talk of people and human society. Here undoubtedly the talk is always of the genesis of individual categories and categorical relationalities that cannot possibly be ‘deduced’ from the mere continuity of development proceeding up until then. The genesis of these categories and categorical relationalities therefore places special demands on knowledge. However, a distortion of genuine facts would result if one wanted methodologically to separate historical research into genesis from the philosophical analysis of the phenomenon that thereby came into being. The true categorical structure of any phenomenon of this sort is profoundly related to its genesis. It is only possible to demonstrate the categorical structure fully and in proper proportionality if objective analysis is organically linked to the elucidation of its genesis; the deduction of value at the beginning of Marx’s Capital is the paragon of such a historico-systematic method. Such unification is attempted here in this work’s concrete expositions of the fundamental phenomenon of the aesthetic and in all of its forking paths into questions of detail. This methodology now overturns into the ideological insofar as it involves a radical break with all of those views that glimpse in art and artistic behaviour something suprahistorically ideational or at the very least something ontologically or anthropologically belonging to the ‘idea’ of man. Like labour, science,

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and all the social activities of man, art too is a product of social development, a product of man making himself into man by means of his own labour. Beyond this, however, the objective historicity of being and its specifically incisive mode of appearance in human society also have important consequences for grasping the essential specificity of the aesthetic. Our concrete explications must show that the scientific reflection of reality attempts to disengage itself from all anthropological, sensuous, and mental determinations, that it strives to render objects and their relations as they are in themselves, independent of consciousness. In contrast, aesthetic reflection proceeds from and is directed at the human world. As shall be expounded later, this does not amount to simple subjectivism. On the contrary, the objectivity of objects is preserved, albeit such that all of the typical relatedness to human life is included in it such that it appears in keeping with the current state of mankind’s inner and outer development, which is a social development. This means that any aesthetic formation intrinsically includes and itself arranges the historical hic et nunc of its genesis as an essential aspect of its decisive objectivity. Of course, all reflection is materially determined by the specific position from which it is carried out. Even in the case of the discovery of mathematical or purely natural scientific verities, the point in time at which such discoveries occur is never accidental; to be sure, this is of material significance more for the history of the sciences than for knowledge itself, for which one can perhaps regard it as a matter of complete indifference when and under which – necessary – historical conditions the Pythagorean theorem, for instance, was formulated for the first time. Without being able to go into the even more convoluted situation in the social sciences here, we must nevertheless notice that for them as well the impacts of the situation at the time may, in its most various forms, effectively hinder the elaboration of actual objectivity in the reproduction of a socio-historical state of affairs. Things are completely reversed in the aesthetic reflection of reality: without a creative vivification of the current historical hic et nunc in the aspect being depicted, a significant work of art can never come into being. Regardless of whether the artists in question are conscious of this or create with the belief that they are bringing forth something supratemporal, continuing an earlier style, or actualising an ‘eternal’ ideal drawn from the past, so long as their works are genuinely artistic, they grow out of the most profound aspirations of the time of their emergence. The content and form of veritable artistic formations cannot be separated – especially aesthetically – from this ground of their genesis. It is precisely in works of art that the historicity of objective reality obtains its subjective and objective shape. This historical essence of reality leads to another important set of problems, which is primarily of a methodological sort as well, though as with any

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genuine problem of a properly – and not just formally – construed methodology, it necessarily overturns into the ideological. We allude to the problem of this-worldliness. Looked at in a purely methodological way, this-worldliness is an indispensable requirement of scientific knowledge as well as of artistic formation. Only when a set of phenomena appears completely understood purely from their immanent properties and the immanent lawfulness that likewise acts on them can one regard it as scientifically known. In practice, of course, such completeness is only ever approximate. The extensive and intensive limitlessness of objects, their static and dynamic relations, etc. do not allow someone ever to be able to construe knowledge in its given form in each case as absolutely final, to be able to regard corrections, limitations, enhancements, etc. in it as ruled out. From magic to modern positivism, this ‘not yet’ in scientifically coming to terms with reality was interpreted in various ways as transcendence, heedless of how many things about which one had formerly proclaimed an ignorabimus have already long since become a solvable problem (even if it has perhaps not yet been solved in practice) in proper science. The emergence of capitalism, the new relations between science and production, combined with the great crises of religious worldviews, have put a more elaborate and subtle transcendence in the place of the naïve one. The new dualism already came into being at the time of the attempts on the part of the defenders of Christianity to ideologically resist the Copernican theory: a methodological outlook that linked immanence on behalf of the given world of appearance to a denial of that world’s ultimate reality and controverted the competency of science to be able to state something valid about this. Superficially, the impression may arise that this invalidation of the reality of the world amounts to nothing since in practice people certainly can carry out their immediate tasks in production, regardless of whether they think the object, medium, etc. of their activity is something that exists in itself or is merely appearance. However, such an outlook is sophistic in two ways. First of all, in his real praxis every active person is always convinced that he has to do with reality itself; even the positivist physicist himself is when, for instance, he performs an experiment. Secondly, when it is – for social reasons – deeply rooted and quite widespread, such an outlook undermines the more mediated intellectualmoral relationships of people to reality. Existentialist philosophy, in which the person ‘thrown’ into the world is faced with nothingness, is – when looked at in socio-historical terms – the necessarily complementary counterpole to that philosophical development which leads from Berkeley on to Mach or Carnap. The actual battlefield between this-worldliness and otherworldliness is undoubtedly ethics. The decisive determinations of this controversy can therefore only be touched upon (but not completely expounded) in the frame of this

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work; within the foreseeable future, the author also hopes to be able to present his views on this issue in a systematic form.5 All that needs to be noted here is the fact that the old materialism – from Democritus to Feuerbach – was only capable of explaining the immanence of the structure of the world in a mechanistic way, which is why the world could still be construed, on the one hand, as clockwork that requires a – transcendent – agency in order to be set in motion; on the other hand, in such a world-image, man could only appear as the necessary product and object of immanent, this-worldly lawfulness, which leaves his subjectivity and praxis unaccounted for. Only the Hegelian-Marxist theory of man’s self-creation by means of his own labour, which Gordon Childe has felicitously phrased as ‘man makes himself’, completes the this-worldliness of the world-image and creates the ideological basis for a this-worldly ethics, the spirit of which was already alive in the ingenious conceptions of Aristotle and Epicurus, of Spinoza and Goethe.6 (In this context, of course, the theory of evolution – the constantly closer approximation to the emergence of life out of the interaction of physical and chemical regularities – plays an important role in the organic world.) This issue is of supreme importance to aesthetics and is accordingly discussed at length in the present work’s concrete expositions. It would be useless to anticipate the results of these investigations in abbreviated form here, results which can possess the power to persuade only in the course of unfolding all of the determinations that thereby come into consideration. Only so as not to conceal the standpoint of the author as well in this preface, let it be said that, in accord with the import of the matter, the immanent cohesion, the autotelism of any genuine work of art – a mode of reflection that has no analogy in the other fields of human responses to the outside world – always expresses a commitment to this-worldliness, whether it be by intention or not. That is why the antithesis between allegory and symbol, as Goethe ingeniously saw, is a question of being or non-being for art. At the same time, that is why art’s struggle for liberation from paternalism on the part of religion is a fundamental fact of its emerging and unfolding, which is something that is demonstrated in a separate chapter (the sixteenth). The genesis has to demonstrate just how, from the natural and consciously aware attachment of primitive man to transcendence, without which the initial stages in every field would have been inconceivable, art gradually brought itself to autonomy in the reflection of reality, to its own 5 Never completed, Lukács’s Versuche zu einer Ethik [‘Attempts at an Ethics’] appeared posthumously in 1994 and is comprised of loosely organised notes rather than drafts of chapters. [Eds.] 6 Cf. Childe 1942.

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idiosyncratic handling. In the process, of course, it comes down to the development of objective aesthetic facts, not to what its executors have thought about their own actions. It is precisely in artistic praxis that the divergence between deed and consciousness of deed is particularly great. The Marx epigraph for this work as a whole (‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’) comes to the fore here in a particularly incisive way. Therefore, it is the objective categorical structure of the work of art that every movement of consciousness into transcendence – which is naturally quite common in the history of the human race – transforms back into this-worldliness by appearing as that which it is, as a component of human this-worldly life, as the symptoms of its currently being-just-so. There is nothing accidental about the frequent condemnation of art and the aesthetic principle from Tertullian to Kierkegaard; rather, such condemnations are a recognition of art’s actual essence from among its born enemies. This work too does not simply register these necessary struggles but rather takes up a resolute stand with respect to them: for art and against religion in the sense of a great tradition that stretches from Epicurus through Goethe and on to Marx and Lenin. The dialectical unfolding, analysis, and reunification of such diverse, contradictory, convergent, and divergent determinations of objectivities and their relations also requires a method of its own for the presentation. If its fundamental principles are to be explained briefly, then in no way can we talk of wanting to give an apologia for this work’s own mode of presentation in the preface. No one can see its limits and flaws as clearly as can the author. All he wants to do here is be answerable for his intentions. No judgement is due to him in those places where he has adequately realised these intentions or where he has faultily done so. In what follows, therefore, we are to talk merely of principles. These are rooted in the materialist dialectic, the consistent implementation of which in a field encompassing such vast things that lie so far apart from each other first of all requires a break with the formal means of presentation based on definitions and mechanical boundaries, on ‘pure’ distinctions into subdivisions. So as to put ourselves in the centre of things in one fell swoop, if we proceed from the method of determinations rather than from that of definitions, then we return to the foundational reality of dialectics, to the extensive and intensive limitlessness of objects and their relations. Every attempt to apprehend this limitlessness intellectually must be afflicted with shortcomings. However, the definition fastens its own partiality in place as something ultimate and hence must violate the basic character of phenomena. From the outset, determination regards itself as something provisional, as something in need of supplementation, as something in the very essence of which exists the need to be carried on, further developed, concretised. That

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is to say, if in this work an object, a relationship of objectivities, or a category is made comprehensible and conceptualisable by means of its determination, then two things are always meant and intended: to designate the current object so that it is recognised as distinctive, though without raising the claim that this becoming-recognised would have to bring us into contact with the object in its totality at this stage and that one would therefore be allowed to stay put here. One can only approach the object gradually, incrementally, as the same object is regarded in various contexts, in various relationships to various other objects, and as the initial determination is indeed not abolished in such ways – then it would have been false – but on the contrary is continuously enriched and is, one could say, creeping closer and closer to the limitlessness of the object towards which it is directed. This process takes place in all kinds of dimensions in the intellectual reproduction of reality and can therefore, in principle, only ever be said to be relatively concluded. If this dialectic is properly carried through, however, then there thus comes into being a constantly mounting advance in the clarity and abundance of the determination in question and its systematic relationality. One must therefore accurately distinguish this recurrence of the same determination in different constellations and dimensions from any simple repetition. The advance that is thus achieved, however, not only is a passage forward, an ever-deeper penetration into the essence of the objects to be apprehended; rather, when this advance is carried out in a way that is actually correct and actually dialectical, it also sheds new light at the same time on the preceding path, the one already traveled, now making it passable for the first time in a deeper sense. In his day, Max Weber wrote to me about my first, very unsatisfactory attempts oriented along these lines. He said these attempts worked like Ibsen’s dramas, the beginnings of which one only understood from their endings. I saw in this a sensitive comprehension of my intentions at a time in which the work I had produced by no means merited such praise. I thus hope that perhaps this work can be better regarded as the actualisation of such a way of thinking. Finally, the reader may permit me to allude quite briefly to the history of the origins of my aesthetics. I began as a literary critic and essayist who looked for theoretical support in the aesthetics of Kant and later that of Hegel. The result in Florence in the winter of 1911–12 was the first plan of an autonomous systematic aesthetics, the working out of which I set about undertaking in Heidelberg between 1912 and 1914. I still think with gratitude of the generous critical interest that Ernst Bloch, Emil Lask,7 and above all Max Weber showed 7 Emil Lask (1875–1915), a German Neo-Kantian philosopher and student of Heinrich Rickert. [Eds.]

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towards my attempt. It failed completely. And when I passionately speak out against philosophical idealism here, this criticism is always directed against the tendencies of my own youth as well. Viewed externally, the outbreak of the war interrupted this work. The Theory of the Novel, which originated in the first year of the war, is already directed more towards historico-philosophical problems for which aesthetic problems should only be symptoms or signals.8 Then ethics, history, and economics more and more became the centre of my interests. I became a Marxist, and the decade of my active political work is likewise the period of an internal conflict with Marxism and of its actual acquisition. As I – around 1930 – turned again to the intensive engagement with artistic problems, a systematic aesthetics was just a very distant perspective on my horizon. Only two decades later, at the beginning of the 1950s, was I able to think about this, to approach the realisation of the dream of my youth with a completely different worldview and method, and to carry it through with entirely different contents and radically opposed methods. I would not like to hand this book over to the public without expressing my thanks to Professor Bence Szabolcsi,9 who with indefatigable patience helped me to broaden and deepen my paltry musical culture; to Ágnes Heller, who read my manuscript during its development and whose perspicacious criticism greatly benefited the final text; and to Dr. Frank Benseler10 for his initiative in the development of this task and for his devoted labour on the manuscript and in its correction. Budapest December 1962 8 9 10

Lukács 1973a. Bence Szabolcsi (1899–1973), an eminent Hungarian scholar of musical history and a key founder of musicology in Hungary. [Eds.] Frank Benseler (1929–2021), a German sociologist and tireless editor of Lukács’s work. [Eds.]

chapter 1

Issues of Reflection in Everyday Life 1

General Characteristics of Everyday Thinking

The expositions that follow here do not for a moment lay claim to giving a detailed and exhaustive philosophical – in particular an epistemological – analysis of everyday thinking. Nor are they intent on offering a history – even if only a philosophical one – of the separation of the artistic and scientific reflection of reality that grows out of this common ground. The chief difficulty is the absence of preliminary work. Until now epistemology has cared very little for everyday thinking. It is inherent to the attitude of any bourgeois, especially any idealist, epistemology to push all questions of the genesis of cognition over onto the field of anthropology on the one hand and only to look into the issues raised by the most developed and purest form of scientific knowledge on the other. So much so that even the non-natural sciences, the not ‘exact’ forms of science (for example, the historical sciences) were subjected to an epistemological analysis only much later; in most cases, this came about in a way that, owing to its irrationalistic tendency, did more to confuse their relationships than to illuminate them. Also, in those rare cases when the aesthetic reflection of reality was discussed, investigations into the specificity of the aesthetic usually just resulted in emphasising the abstract otherness of the aesthetic with respect to life and science. It is precisely in such sets of questions that metaphysical thinking about knowledge places insurmountable obstacles in the way. For its Yes or No disavows knowledge of flowing transitions, which we encounter as problems to be solved both in life and above all in the periods of the socio-historical genesis of art. The metaphysical character of the likewise rigid contrast of questions pertaining to genesis and validity constitutes another barrier in this respect. Only dialectical and historical materialism will be able to cultivate a historicosystematic method for the exploration of such issues. The general methodological definition of the problem on this basis is, of course, not entirely clear. In what follows, I attempt to expound how much it can be clarified. But for now, I will briefly emphasise, in anticipation, the single most general aspect: in the course of historical development, ever more finely differentiated forms of reflection that find their basis as well as their ultimate fulfilment in life itself have evolved into the scientific and aesthetic reflection of objective reality. Their specificity is constituted precisely in that direction which demands, as far as possible, an ever more accurate and ever more

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complete performance of their social function. Therefore, in their comparatively late-developed purity, on which their scientific or aesthetic universality is based, they constitute the two poles of the general reflection of objective reality, of which the reflection of everyday life constitutes the fruitful midpoint. This tripartition of the relationship of man to the outside world indicated here and to be discussed in detail later was very clearly recognised by Pavlov. In a study on the types of higher nervous activities, he writes: Until the time when homo sapiens appeared animals were connected with the environment so that the direct impressions fell upon the different receptors and were conducted to the corresponding cells of the central nervous system. These impressions were the several signals of the external object. However there arises in the developing human an extraordinary perfection, the signals of the second order, the signals of the primary signals in the form of words – the spoken, the heard, the seen word. Finally it came about that through these new signals everything was designated that the human being perceived both from the environment and from his inner world, and these signals commenced to serve him not only in communicating with other men, but also when he was alone. The chief significance attached to the word was the predominance of these new signals – yet it remained a word, only a second signal of reality …. Thanks to the second signal of signals and to its constant effects in various aspects of life, all of the human race can be separated into several types: artists, thinkers, and a middle type. The latter unite in proper proportions and activity both signals. These two divisions can be seen among individuals as well as among nations.1 Thus, on the one hand, the purity of scientific and aesthetic reflection sharply distances itself from the convoluted hybrid forms of the everyday; on the other, these boundaries continuously grow indistinct at the same time, as both differentiated forms of reflection arise out of the needs of everyday life and are called upon to respond to its problems, and as many results of both meld again with the manifestations of everyday life, which makes these manifestations more comprehensive, more differentiated, richer, more profound, etc. so that they continually develop to higher and higher levels. A truly historicosystematic genesis of scientific as well as aesthetic reflection is simply unthinkable without the elucidation of these interrelationships. It is therefore indis-

1 Pavlov 1941, pp. 162–63.

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pensable for the philosophical apprehension of the issues emerging here that we not lose sight either of this double interaction with everyday thinking or of the evolving intrinsic specificity of both differentiated forms of reflection. However, the philosophical investigation of reflection has an indispensable precondition, which at the very least needs to be clarified according to its most general basic principles before an engagement with its specific issues can be introduced. That is to say, when we want to examine reflection in everyday life, science, and art for its differences, we always need to be aware that all three forms depict the same reality. Only in subjective idealism does the notion come into being that the different modes of humanly arranging reflection concern different, autonomous realities created by the subject that have no contact with each other. Simmel expresses this most definitively and consistently; for example, about religion he says, ‘The religious life creates the world over again; it interprets the whole of existence in a peculiar key, so that, in keeping with its pure idea, it will not interfere with or contradict world-views built according to other categories’.2 In contrast, dialectical materialism considers the material unity of the world to be an incontrovertible fact. Every reflection is hence the reflection of this single and unitary reality. It is only for mechanical materialism, however, that from this it follows that every depiction of this reality would have to be a simple photographic copy. (This question will be dealt with at length later. Suffice it here to remark that real reflections come into being in the interaction between man and the outside world, without the resulting selection, arrangement, etc. necessarily being a subjective illusion or distortion, which it certainly is in some cases.) For example, if a person in everyday life closes his eyes in order to better perceive certain audible nuances of his surrounding world, then such an elimination of a part of the reality to be reflected can be conducive to the more accurate, more complete, and closer apprehension of that phenomenon with which he is momentarily interested in coming to terms than would have been possible without this disregarding of the visual world. A very intricate path leads from such almost instinctively accomplished manipulations to reflection in labour, experiment, etc. and onward to science and art. We will later discuss in detail the differences – indeed the antitheses – that thus come into being in the reflection of reality. Here, just like at the beginning, it must be resolutely asserted that it is always a matter of the reflection of the same objective reality and that this unity of the ultimate object is of crucial significance for the formation of differences and antitheses out of content and form.

2 Simmel 1959, p. 5.

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If we now on this basis keep in view the interactions of the everyday with science and art, we thus see that even a quite clear knowledge of the problems to be solved here does not at all mean that these can be concretely answered today. This holds especially true for the history of the gradual, uneven, and contradictory differentiation of these three varieties of reflection. We can no doubt intellectually grasp their original, chaotic intertwining in the primitive beginning stages of mankind familiar to us. In the written history of mankind, we have before us a highly developed and ever more highly developing – albeit, as we shall later see, contradictory – differentiation. Unquestionably, the historical continuity between these two endpoints must also be objectively present. However, our present knowledge about this process does not even remotely suffice for us to recognise it in practice. This deficiency is not only based on ignorance of historical facts, but also very deeply associated with the unclarity of basic philosophical questions and matters of principle. Thus, if we want to burst open this magic ring drawn around us by the various states of notknowing, we must – ever conscious of our extremely fragmentary knowledge – boldly approach the philosophical clarification of both the basic types and the decisive developmental stages of differentiation. As philosophical as this method of ours may be, it also contains principles of a social vision within itself. Marx clearly described and determined the method of such an approach to bygone, often forgotten epochs in relation to the history of economic formations and categories. He says, Bourgeois society is the most developed and many-faceted historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, an understanding of its structure, therefore, provide, at the same time, an insight into the structure and relations of production of all previous forms of society, the ruins and components of which were used in the creation of bourgeois society. Some of these remains are still dragged along within bourgeois society unassimilated, while elements which previously were barely indicated have developed and attained their full significance, etc. The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. On the other hand, indications of higher forms in the lower species of animals can only be understood when the higher forms themselves are already known. Bourgeois economy thus provides a key to that of antiquity, etc. But by no means in the manner of those economists who obliterate all historical differences and see in all forms of society the bourgeois forms.3

3 Marx 1986, p. 42, translation modified.

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Even for our field, human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of the ape. Of course, in the case of the contemporary developmental level of our insights and knowledge this will be no more accessible than the approximate elucidation of the most important tendencies and most decisive nodal points. But more is unnecessary for the goals of our present investigations. These investigations hopefully assume that they will serve as incitements to further research, which is sure to correct many of the things expounded here. As to the general method, all that need be noted here is that our investigations are restricted to human beings. The importance of the Pavlovian second signal system (language) already requires an explicit methodological demarcation from the animal world, in which such signals are not found. Of course, exhaustive study of the emergence and unfolding of the conditioned reflexes in the evolution of the animal world will remain an important task. Because as early as here, a certain processing of immediately reflected objective reality begins, already attaining a relatively high level of differentiation among the higher animals. However, an exhaustive engagement with this set of issues lies beyond the scope of our work. We will only occasionally come back to it in order to make demarcations in certain concrete cases or to elucidate transitions. True, Pavlov’s findings must always be understood and interpreted in the sense of dialectical materialism. For however fundamental his second signal system of language may be for this demarcation between man and animal, it only obtains its actual meaning and ample fruitfulness if, as in the work of Engels, the necessary weight is placed on the simultaneous emergence and material indivisibility of labour and language.4 That man has ‘something to say’ that lies beyond the realm of the animalistic is something that comes directly from labour and unfolds – directly or indirectly, later often through a great many mediations – in connection with the development of labour. We hence make few references, not even polemical ones, to Darwin’s attempts to locate the categories of art already in the lives of animals and to derive their human expressions from this. We believe that labour (and with it, language and its world of concepts) creates so broad and deep a gulf here that even the animal legacy which is conceivably available is, considered by itself, of no critical consequence; it quite certainly cannot be utilised to explain entirely new phenomena. With that said, as we will later see from time to time, the fact that there is such a legacy will certainly not ever be denied. On the contrary, it appears to us that those tendencies of recent biology and anthropology which lay down an absolute alterity between animals and people carelessly pass by

4 Engels 1987c, pp. 454–55.

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several important facts. But we are using certain findings from anthropology for closely circumscribed purposes here; for these purposes, adequate knowledge of the inseparability of labour and speech (thus that which separates people from animals) is precisely of decisive importance. If we turn now to a cursory analysis of everyday thinking, we must, in addition to the lack of preliminary work already mentioned, bring up the following material difficulties, which certainly are the cause (at least partially) of the neglect of the everyday – this important area encompassing the largest part of human life – in philosophical study. Perhaps the chief difficulty lies in the fact that everyday life does not know of any self-contained objectivations of the sort that characterise science and art. I wish in no way to suggest that objectivations are altogether absent in everyday life. The life of a person, his thinking and feeling, his praxis and his reflection are wholly inconceivable without objectivation. Apart from the fact that all actual objectivations play an important role in the everyday life of people, the basic forms of the specifically human way of life that we have already established (labour and speech) in many respects already also essentially possess the character of objectivations. Labour can only come about as a teleological act. About the specifically human character of labour, Marx says, We presuppose labour in a form in which it is an exclusively human characteristic. A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideationally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.5 On this basis we thus investigate those aspects of labour that determine it as the fundamental factor of everyday life, everyday thinking, and the reflection of objective reality in the everyday. First of all, it was Marx who pointed out that this is a matter of a historical process in which – objectively and subjectively –

5 Marx 1990, pp. 283–84, translation modified.

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qualitative changes take place. Later we will have many occasions to come to speak of their concrete significance in more detailed terms. For the time being, all that is important to us is the fact that Marx suggestively discerns three essential periods. The first is characterised by ‘those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level’ as the precursor to that formation which has already exceeded the still undeveloped level of the simple trade in goods as such.6 The third is labour’s nature as developed by capitalism, which we must thoroughly investigate later and in which the infiltration of science that has been applied to labour calls forth pivotal changes. Here labour ceases to be determined primarily by the labourers’ own bodily and mental powers. (Period of machine work and the escalating determination of labour by the sciences.) In between lies the formation of labour at a less developed level, one deeply connected to the personal capacities of people (period of handicraft and the proximity of handicraft to art), which historically creates the preconditions for the third period. Common to all three periods, however, is the essential characteristic of specifically human labour and its teleological principle: the fact that the result of the labour process ‘had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideationally’. The possibility of such a mode of action presupposes a certain degree of the correct reflection of objective reality in the consciousness of man. However, according to Hegel, who clearly recognised this structure of labour and on whom Marx also relies in these observations, its essence consists in the fact that it ‘lets nature wear itself down, sedately looks on and so governs the whole process with little effort’.7 It is clear that such a governing of natural processes – even at the most primitive level – presupposes their approximately correct reflection, even if the generalising claims that are drawn from this are false. In the main, Pareto has aptly described the relationship between the phantasmagoric and correctness at the level of detail when he says, ‘We might guess that actually effective combinations, such as striking a flint to get fire, may have led people to believe in the efficacy of imaginary combinations’.8 Such outcomes of the reflection of reality belong to everyday life and its way of thinking, however, so it is clear that the question of objectivations or their inadequate formation in this sphere of life can only be understood in a very flexible, dialectical manner if we do not want to violate the underlying

6 Marx 1990, p. 283. [Eds.] 7 Hegel 1931, pp. 198 ff. 8 Pareto 1980, p. 117.

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structural and developmental tendencies. Undoubtedly, a kind of objectivation comes into being in labour (as well as in language, which likewise constitutes a fundamental aspect of everyday life). In fact, not just in the product of labour, about which no dispute is possible, but in the labour process as well. Routine, habit, the accumulation of meaningful daily experiences, etc. lead to the repeating of certain movements and the further developing of their quantitatively and qualitatively determined sequencing, interleaving, mutual complementation, enhancement, etc. in every labour process; thus, this process necessarily receives the character of a certain objectivation for those who carry it out. However, in contrast to the much stronger fixity of the constructs created by art or science, this objectivation has a more mutable and fluid nature. For however strong the effect of conserving or stabilising principles may be in the labour process of everyday life (especially in the early stages) – keep in mind the power of traditions in rural agriculture or in pre-capitalist handicraft – in each individual labour process there still exists the at least abstract possibility of deviating from existing customs, of trying something new, or conceivably even harking back to still older ways of doing things in a transformative way. Viewed in a completely general light, there is no essential difference here from the praxis of scientists. To begin with, scientists also live their own everyday life within the everyday life of people. Thus, their individual comportment towards the objectivation of their activity must not differ in principle or in quality from their other activities, particularly in the case of a still undeveloped social division of labour. However, when we consider the facts arising here not merely from the point of view of the acting subject but also from that of the object, important qualitative differences already start to arise. These lie not just in the transmutability of the outcomes, because the results of science vary with enrichments and consolidations in the process of the reflection of reality as much as do those of labour. Instead, what is decisive is the degree of abstraction, the distance from the immediate praxis of everyday life, to which science and labour certainly remain connected – both in their presuppositions and in their consequences. For science, however, the relationship is mediated in a more or less comprehensive and sophisticated way, whereas for labour, even when it involves the utilisation of supremely sophisticated scientific knowledge, the relationship possesses a predominantly immediate character. Now the more immediate these relationships are – and this is tantamount to saying that the intention of the action is directed at an individual case in life (something that is naturally always the case when it comes to labour) – the weaker, more mutable, and less fixed the objectivation is. To be exact: the stronger the possibilities are that their fixation – perhaps even their extremely rigid fixation – does not derive from the essence of impar-

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tial objectivity but instead has a subjective, often socio-psychological basis (tradition, habit, etc.). This means that the results of science are structurally more strongly fixed as constructs independent of people than the outcomes of labour. Scientific development manifests itself in the fact that one construct is replaced by another rectified construct without losing its fixed objectivity. This is even generally underscored in scientific praxis by the emphatic highlighting of changes that have taken place. In contrast, such changes can occur in the products of labour as individual variations; when they are explicitly announced on a frequent basis – as in capitalism – this mostly has to do with market-based reasons. On the whole, capitalism brings labour and the products of labour closer to the structure of science. Needless to say, we are just analysing both poles here without taking into account the host of transitional forms that come into being as a result of the interactions that we have already indicated and will discuss in detail later. If one considers the totality of human activities – all objectivations, thus taking into account not only science and art but also social institutions as the precipitate of these activities – naturally what forcefully stand out are these transitions. However, since our present study does not have such ambitious aims but instead only wants to work out some of the important essential characteristics of everyday life – in its antithesis to science and art – we must and can content ourselves with the establishment of such contrasts. All the more so since labour, as the steady source of development in science (a field that is continuously enriched by it), probably attains the highest possible degree of objectivation in everyday life. At the same time, we must point out the historical development of labour itself, something we indicated at the outset. Since the interaction with science plays an ongoing role that is becoming both extensively and intensively more pronounced, it is clear that scientific categories have much greater significance in contemporary labour than previously. This does not abolish the underlying specificity of everyday thinking that is at work then and there; the increasing absorption of scientific elements does not transform everyday thinking into actually scientific behaviour. One can observe this most clearly in the interrelationship of science and modern industry. At a historical scale, it certainly is correct that the main line of development has been towards industry, i.e. towards the scientific saturation of the labour process. Objectively and historically, one can notice in the course of this – as Bernal9 has shown in detail – that in many cases the

9 John Desmond Bernal (1901–1971), Irish-born scientist, communist, and historian of science. [Eds.]

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separateness of certain research methods from life on the one hand and the narrow-mindedness, the conservatism, etc. of industrialists on the other made the utilisation of already achieved scientific results impossible for a longer time. This phenomenon interests us here not from the viewpoint of the history of industry, technology, or science, which undoubtedly ‘recognises that the ostensible and also the actually operating motives of men who act in history are by no means the ultimate causes of historical events’, but rather from the viewpoint of the everyday, in which it is just the ‘ostensible’ motives that come to the fore; and these motives show the – relatively – low level of objectivations in the resolution of people to take action, the fluid character that many highly objectivated constructs have in themselves here, and finally the often pivotal role of habit, tradition, etc. in these resolutions.10 What is characteristic here is that in the subjective life of the everyday there is a constant oscillation between decisions based on motives of a momentary and fluid character and decisions that rest upon rigid, though rarely intellectually fixed, foundations (tradition, habit). Labour, however, is the part of everyday reality that stands closest to scientific objectivation. The infinitely diverse relationships between individuals (marriage, love, family, friendship, etc.), to say nothing of countless fleeting relationships, the relationships of individuals to state and social institutions, the various forms of avocation, entertainment, etc. (for example, sports), and everyday phenomena like fashion, bear out the accuracy of such an analysis. It is a question everywhere of the swift, often sudden changeover between conservative torpor in routine or convention and actions, resolutions, etc. whose motives – at least subjectively, which is precisely what is very important for these studies – have a predominantly personal character. The fact that a great uniformity becomes objectively and statistically apparent in the everyday of capitalist society in particular, where the motives for action predominate at the individual surface level, only confirms this statement. In pre-capitalist, more traditional-bound societies, this polarisation appears qualitatively different without, however, abolishing this essential structural similarity. Behind everything explained so far is another essential characteristic of everyday being and thinking: the immediate relationship between theory and practice. To be correctly understood, this statement needs some explanation. That is to say, it would be utterly false to suppose that the objects of everyday activity would be objectively, in themselves, of an immediate character. On the contrary. They exist only as a result of a widely ramified, multifaceted, and com-

10

Engels 1976, p. 388.

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plicated system of mediation that is becoming ever more complicated and ever more widely ramified in the course of social development. However, insofar as it is a question of the objects of everyday life, they stand there finished, and the system of mediation producing them appears completely effaced in their immediate, bare existence and thusness. To thereby see this immediacy clearly before you, one needs to think about not only technico-scientific phenomena, but also economically very complicated ones, like taxis, buses, trolleys, etc., of their use in everyday life, of the way they figure in everyday life. It belongs to the necessary life-economy of the everyday that on average one absorbs and evaluates his entire environment – so long as its functioning – only on the basis of its practical functioning (and not on the basis of its objective essence). And in very many cases even its non-functioning calls forth similar reactions as well. Naturally, this is – in its pure culture – a product of the capitalist division of labour. At more primitive levels of development, where the majority of the equipment, etc. of everyday life was made by the users themselves or where its method of production was common knowledge, it is precisely this kind of immediacy which was far less developed and conspicuous. Only a highly developed social division of labour, which makes a sharply defined specialty out of each branch of production and its partial aspects, imposes this immediacy on the ordinary agents of everyday life. The more universal, though admittedly far less developed, structure of this mode of comportment reaches back to primitive times. For the immediate union of theory (that is to say, cogitation, the mode of reflecting an object) and practice is surely its single oldest form: circumstances very often, even in the majority of cases, compel people to undelayed action. True, the social role of culture (above all that of science) consists in its discovering and then slotting in mediations between a foreseeable situation and the optimal form of acting. However, once these mediations are available and have entered into common use, they lose their mediated character for people taking action in the everyday, and the immediacy portrayed by us enters into force once more. One can clearly see here – about which we will speak in detail later – how intimate the interaction between science and everyday life is: the problems of science that are to be solved rise directly or mediately from everyday life, and this everyday life continuously enriches itself out of the results and methods made use of in it that science has worked out. But it does not suffice for an understanding of this relationship to remark such continuous interactions. Even now we have to point out – and our analysis of everyday thinking is taking place precisely with this intention – that qualitative differences also exist between the reflection of reality or its intellectual processing in science and in the everyday. These differences do not lay down a stark, irrevocable duality, however, as bourgeois

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epistemology is accustomed to deal with such issues; rather, differentiation to the point of qualitative difference is the product of the social development of humanity. Differentiation, and with it the – relative – independence of scientific methods from the immediate needs of the everyday (their break with the mental habits of the everyday), comes into being precisely so as to better serve these everyday habits and needs than would be possible in the case of direct methodological unity. The difference between art and everyday life – in accordance with the most universal structure, the interaction between them is similar to that between science and everyday life – is likewise at the service of such social needs. To deal with this in concrete terms now, however, would still presuppose too many things and necessitate too much digression in our presentation. That these issues can only be dealt with later, however, does not mean that they emerge later in history. The polarisation of everyday life and thinking into the two more strongly objectivising and objectively less immediate spheres of art and science is likewise a simultaneous process, as are the interactions portrayed so far. The specific character of the immediacy of everyday life and thinking portrayed here incisively manifests itself in the kind of spontaneous materialism that characterises this sphere. Any reasonably unbiased and rigorous analysis must show that the person of everyday life always responds in a spontaneously materialistic way to the objects of his surrounding world, no matter how these reactions are subsequently interpreted by the subject who takes action. This already follows from the essence of labour. All labour presupposes a set of objects and laws that determine this set of objects in their own way, in the necessary movements, activities, etc. of those objects, and these are spontaneously dealt with as existing and functioning independently of human consciousness. The essence of labour consists precisely in observing, fathoming, and making the most of this being and becoming that exists in itself. Even at the stage where prehistoric man still does not produce tools but only picks up stones of a certain form and discards these after using them, he must already have made certain observations as to which stones, according to their hardness, form, etc., are appropriate for certain activities. This manner of choosing, the fact that from among many stones prehistoric man chooses one that appears to be suitable, already shows that man is more or less conscious, that he is forced to act in an outside world that exists independently of him, that he hence must try to fathom as far as possible this environment existing independently of him and intellectually come to terms with it through observation in order to be able to exist, in order to escape the dangers threatening him. As a category of human inner life, danger also shows that the subject is more or less conscious of facing an outside world independent of his consciousness.

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However, this materialism has a purely spontaneous character, one that is directed at and limited to the immediate objects of praxis. That is why, during its blossoming under imperialism, subjective idealism turned away from it superciliously and totally ignored it philosophically. Rickert11 thus says that he has no objections to ‘naïve’ realism: ‘Naïve realism knows neither a transcendental real nor the epistemological subject or the supra-individual consciousness. It is not at all a scientific theory that needs to be fought against scientifically, but rather a complex of ill-conceived and indeterminate opinions, which are adequate for life and which one who only wants to live can leave in peace’.12 In the period of crisis after the First World War, as subjective idealism sees itself compelled more and more to reinforce its positions with anthropological arguments, the issues of everyday life – among them the issues of ‘naïve realism’ (by which bourgeois idealists understand spontaneous realism most of the time) – gain an ever greater significance for it as well. Rothacker13 already explains, But the whole world in which we practically live and act, including of course political, economic, religious, and artistic activities, heads towards ‘categories of life’, the epitome of which requires urgent explicit handling as ‘prescientific world-image’ and presents one of the numerous hardly broached subject matters of ‘philosophical anthropology’. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! It cannot be emphasised enough that this fact that all of our great life decisions fall within a ‘naïvely realistic world’, that the entire history of the world and with it the subject matter of all historical sciences and philological studies take place in this naïvely realistic world, presents an argument of the greatest weightiness for the handling of epistemological questions as well.14 Of course, this recognition of the problem in the work of Rothacker only serves to build up subjective idealism in an even more consistently solipsistic way than happened earlier, as his subjectivist epistemology thinks to find a biological support in Uexküll’s15 theory of the surrounding world. In this context, the spontaneous materialism of everyday life turns into a mode of appearance –

11 12 13 14 15

Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), German philosopher and head of the Baden school of NeoKantianism. [Eds.] Rickert 1928, p. 116. Erich Rothacker (1888–1965), German philosophical anthropologist. [Eds.] Rothacker 1948, p. 166. Jacob von Uexküll (1864–1944), Estonian-German biologist who made major contributions to biosemiotics. [Eds.]

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admittedly a complicated one – of the surrounding world as determined by organs. We will grapple with this theory in detail when it comes time to handle the issue of the in-itself. From another aspect, the strength and weakness of this spontaneity clearly circumscribe the specificity of everyday thinking. The strength manifests itself in the fact that no matter how idealist (or indeed solipsistic) a worldview is, this cannot impede its spontaneous functioning in everyday life and thinking. Regardless of how fanatically convinced he may be, no Berkeleyan has the sensation when he dodges an automobile at a street intersection or when he waits for one to pass by that he merely has to do with his own ideas rather than with a reality independent of his consciousness. Esse est percipi vanishes without a trace in the everyday life of a person taking immediate action. The weakness of this spontaneous materialism manifests itself in the fact that it has very slight ideological ramifications – indeed one could say none at all. As a matter of fact, it can comfortably coexist – even without the contradiction subjectively dawning upon one in the slightest – with idealist, religious, superstitious, etc. representations in a person’s consciousness. To adduce examples of this, one need not hark back to the primitive times of mankind’s development, in which the first meaningful labour experiences and the great inventions that came into being out of these experiences were inextricably linked to magical representations. Even a modern person will oftentimes couple together entirely real facts – facts that are, accordingly, apprehended in a spontaneously materialistic way – with superstitious representations, frequently without being even the least bit conscious of what is grotesque about this linkage. True, in addition to this similarity between modern and prehistoric man, the difference should not be overlooked here. The spontaneous materialism of primitive man also extends to phenomena that are, by their very essence, consciousness-like in nature. It suffices if we refer to the evaluation of dreams. But even in those places where ‘spiritual’ grounds of explanation draw near to the observation of material appearances, at a primitive level these are experienced as objective reality itself in a likewise spontaneously materialistic way. Cassirer16 rightly points out that primitive thinking draws no boundary line between truth and appearance, nor between ‘mere “representation” and “real” perception, between wish and fulfilment, between image and thing’.17 (The philosophical reaction of our day wants to find in the primitive relationship of image and thing a foundation for a

16 17

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), prominent German Neo-Kantian philosopher of the natural and social sciences. [Eds.] Cassirer 1955, p. 36.

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new kind of conception of the world; for instance, Klages.18) And just as we did earlier, Cassirer points to the way in which dreams partake of the objective at a primitive level. How deeply rooted this (delusory) dream-‘objectivity’ is in the everyday life of people can be seen from the fact that this distinction still plays a certain role in the epistemological considerations of Descartes.19 This homogeneity, this false unification gradually abates in the more developed stages. For example, the superstitions of modern man, which can be subjectively deeply enrooted at times, very often are a part of an intellectually bad conscience, that is to say they are often a part of the awareness that one merely has to do with a product of subjective consciousness when it comes to these superstitions and not with an objective reality existing independently of this subjective consciousness, in accordance with the spontaneous materialism of the everyday. Again, we cannot go into the many transitions here. This situation can even be found in science too. Idealist epistemologists often speak with ironic regret of the ‘naïve realism’ (i.e., materialism) of preeminent natural scientists, and on the other hand Lenin repeatedly notices that even those scholars who pay homage to subjective idealism in their epistemology are spontaneous materialists in their scientific praxis.20 As a result of the theoretical neglect of this primary factor of everyday life and thought, important facts of human thought remain unexplained. Thus, different researchers of prehistoric times have noticed a certain affinity of primeval magic with the spontaneous materialism that we gave an account of just now. However, it is a qualitative, historically determined distinction whether the idealist (religious, magical, superstitious) supplement of spontaneous materialism appears as it were just on the fringes of the practical worldimage or whether it intellectually and emotionally overruns the facts that are ascertained by this spontaneous materialism. The path from the latter case to the former is the essential, indeed often zigzag line of the development of culture. However, this development only thereby becomes possible because human thinking overcomes the immediacy of the everyday in the sense indic18 19

20

Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), German psychologist and vitalist philosopher. [Eds.] Descartes 2000, pp. 232–33. [Eds.: Lukács’s original footnote is mistaken. He cites page 434 of Les Principes de la philosophie in the Bibliothèque de la pléiade edition of Descartes. In this edition, however, the Principles of Philosophy does not actually start until page 549 (page 434 is from the section of the Meditations in which Descartes responds to objections – in this case, ‘The Fourth Set of Objections’ raised by Antoine Arnauld regarding God – and there is no reference to dreams or dreaming on that page). The passage he appears to intend to cite is on page 574. We have accordingly corrected the citation for the corresponding English-language translation of Descartes here.] Lenin 1972a, pp. 277 ff.

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ated here – that is to say, because the immediate linkage between the reflection of reality, its intellectual interpretation, and praxis is overcome, because an increasing number of mediations are thus consciously interpolated between praxis and thinking that has only turned into a proper theory as a result of the interpolation of these mediations. Only in this way can a path be opened from the merely spontaneous materialism of everyday life to philosophical materialism. As we will see later, this development is clearly expressed for the first time in Greek antiquity. The beginning of a definite separation between philosophical idealism and materialism first takes place here with real decisiveness. Cassirer is right when he dates the break with ‘mythical thinking’ from Leucippus and Democritus.21 Just how arduous this process is becomes apparent in the fact that the initial attempts to go beyond the spontaneity of everyday thinking bear the essential characteristics of idealism in most cases. It is interesting that, based on the primitive identification of image and thing, Cassirer comes to the conclusion that ‘mythical thinking lacks the category of the “ideal” ’.22 For this reason the nature and limits of primitive, spontaneous materialism already stand out more clearly: it is effective in a period that does not yet know the antinomic opposition of idealism and materialism. Materialism develops in the struggle against the philosophical idealism that came into being earlier. In fact, the spontaneous materialism of everyday life retains some vestiges of primitive conditions, though it comes into effect in a milieu in which this differentiation has already taken place. Even to present in brief outline the complicated process of such developments is completely beyond the scope of this work. All that follows here are just a few remarks about the social causes of this emergence of idealism. It has multiples grounds. First, ignorance of nature and society. That is why, as soon as he endeavours to go beyond the immediate relationships of the world of objects directly given to him, primitive man is forced to reach for analogies that are not based on the facts themselves at all or at the very least are insufficiently based on these facts, wherefore he naturally and spontaneously is accustomed to choosing the starting point in his own subjectivity. Second, the incipient social division of labour creates that stratum which now obtains the leisure necessary for ‘professionally’ deliberating on such problems. So, on the one hand, with the release from the compulsion to always be responding immediately to the outside world, the necessary distance with which one can begin to overcome the immediacy of the everyday and its deficient generalisa-

21 22

Cassirer 1955, p. 47. Cassirer 1955, p. 38.

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tion is indeed created for this stratum. On the other hand, however, this division of labour increasingly removes from labour itself that stratum privileged with the leisure needed to deliberate more deeply upon things. But this division of labour is the most important basis for the spontaneous materialism of everyday life and certainly for the idealist ideological tendencies that come into being at the same time as well. One is reminded of Marx’s remarks that the result of the labour process was already ideationally present earlier. It is understandable that, with the predominance of analogy over causality and lawfulness in primitive thinking, analogising generalisation takes its point of departure from here. If previous not immediately explicable complexes of things and movements get idealistically, religiously, etc. projected onto a ‘creator’, in most cases this involves such an analogising generalisation of the subjective side of the labour process. (Keep in mind, to cite one obvious example, the demiurgic artisan in Greek concepts of god.) Philosophical materialism only comes into being at a higher level in the struggle against such conceptions: the attempt to apprehend all appearances from the laws of motion of a reality independent of consciousness. Of course, this is not the place to give an account of its struggle with idealist worldviews. We thereby only have to refer to a single consideration, namely to the relationship of idealist (religious) representations to the everyday way of thinking. Each step forward that materialism makes as a worldview involves a removal from the immediate everyday way of looking at things, an incipiently scientific insight into the ‘not ostensible’ causes of phenomena and their motion. At the bounds of this scientific reflection of reality, which, as we will see, means a removal from and an elevation over everyday forms of thought, a return to these forms of thought necessarily comes about. Such thinking may be very highly developed in terms of form, and it may utilise all of the forms and contents of the scientific reflection of reality, but its basic structure is nevertheless always closely associated with that of the everyday. When, for example, Engels criticises mechanical materialism’s conception of history and discovers in it a backslide into idealism, his line of reasoning thus moves in the direction described by us. He reproaches this materialism for ‘tak[ing] the ideational driving forces which operate there as ultimate causes, instead of investigating what is behind them, what are the driving forces of these driving forces. This inconsistency does not lie in the fact that ideational driving forces are recognized, but in the investigation not being carried further back behind these into their motive causes’.23 It is clear that even here, where it is a question of a philo-

23

Engels 1976, p. 388.

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sophical school of thought that is highly developed in other areas, the essence of the methodological deficiency consists in the fact that the standpoint of immediate everyday thinking has not been abandoned radically enough and the transformation of the reflection underlying it into a scientific one has not been sufficiently carried through. Such examples also show the continuous interactions of both spheres (here the coming into play of everyday thinking in scientific thinking), while other cases can manifest the inverse influence. However, the correct analysis of such examples would also show that, on the one hand, the pure formation of scientific reflection is indispensable for the higher development of the culture of everyday life and that, on the other, in everyday practice the results of science are incorporated back into the fabric of everyday thinking. We have already pointed out that one of the most important of the original and dominant forms both in early and primordial everyday thinking is the analogy, the predominant mode for the conjunction and transformation of the immediate reflection of objective reality. We do not have to do here with the logical problem of analogy and inference by analogy; some remarks of Hegel’s are cited only to elucidate our problem better. To be sure, Hegel does not consider this issue genetically; even so, he does provide a few suggestions that show that he discerns in analogy and inference by analogy something associated with the beginnings of thinking. Incorporating the expositions of Phenomenology of Spirit, he speaks here of the ‘instinct of reason’ (thus not of developed reason in its pure form), ‘which surmises that this or that empirically discovered determination is grounded in an object’s inner nature or kind, and which proceeds on that basis’.24 Even the term ‘surmises’ underscores this incipient character of analogy. True, Hegel remarks in the same place that, on the one hand, the utilisation of analogical procedures led to important results in the empirical sciences, and on the other, from the standpoint of developed science, he clearly points out that analogy came into being and use out of the lack of induction, out of the impossibility of exhausting all singularities. So as to safeguard scientificity against these dangers, Hegel points to the necessity of properly distinguishing between ‘superficial and well-grounded’ analogies.25 Only when science very precisely outlines and separates out the determinations brought into an analogy can analogy become fruitful for praxis; the Schellingian philosophy of nature is in Hegel’s eyes the textbook example of ‘futile play with empty and external analogies’.26 24 25 26

Hegel 1991, p. 266. Ibid. [Eds.] Ibid. [Eds.]

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The elemental specificity of analogy and its difficult-to-disentangle ties to everyday thinking is clearly evident from all of this. Hegel’s suggestions about its superficial use indicate not only a general possibility – because any form of inference can be handled superficially or in a well-founded way, in a formal and sophistic way or an objective one – but also a deeply rooted spontaneous possibility for such a use. Without being able to go into the historical issues of analogical thinking more closely, it may nevertheless be stated that this is precisely the place where such thinking is very close to the merely verbal application of concepts. Relying on Plato’s accounts in Euthydemus, Prantl27 refers to the sophistic ‘precept’ that ‘linguistic expression had to be applied to all conditions everywhere evenly’, in which he rightly finds that ‘the motive of all inference by analogy is simply based on linguistic expression’.28 However, what appears here in rhetorical or sophistic degeneracy certainly plays – very often without a trace of such tendencies – a great role in everyday thinking, and in fact this role is the greater, the less developed science and the critical treatment of the meanings of words are. Naturally, analogy is quite crucial in primitive times, in which it (above all in the magical period) acquires an absolutely commanding significance in all manifestations of life, forms of communication, etc. It is clear that the mystified weightiness of names, for example, must greatly abet these tendencies in primitive thinking. All of this even has an effect, albeit to a lesser degree, on everyday thinking in more developed cultures, however; even in these cultures, analogising remains a vital factor in the everyday life of people. The more powerful the effect of the immediate connection of theory and praxis highlighted by us and the more closely theory and praxis move together in the consciousness of people, the more vital analogising becomes in everyday life. For in such cases, the immediate reflection of reality provides a series of features, characteristics, etc. in objects that, for lack of an accurate fathoming, display certain similarities. What is more natural than intellectually linking these things even more closely – even more tightly, using the power of verbal generalisation – and then drawing immediate conclusions from them? Yet Goethe, who as we will see regards thinking-by-means-of-analogising in a very critical spirit, also repeatedly emphasises its inevitability for everyday praxis and spots the danger of ‘proximity’ indicated above in everyday praxis even in those places where people begin to go beyond mere analogising and to think causally: ‘A great mistake which we make is that we always think of cause as being close to effect, as the bowstring is to the arrow which it speeds on its

27 28

Carl Prantl (1820–1888), German philosopher, philologist, and historian of logic. [Eds.] Prantl 1955, p. 23.

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way; and yet we cannot avoid this mistake because cause and effect are always thought of together and are thus proximate in our thinking’.29 This is precisely the typical behaviour of everyday man. That the penetration of science into everyday life concretely removes a great and an increasingly ever-greater number of such ‘short-circuits’ from praxis (an increasingly greater quantity of scientifically correct propositions lay the foundations for everyday praxis and turn into habit in it) does not change its basic structure as highlighted by us. On the fringes of such habituations taken from science, analogy and inference by analogy continue to thrive for subjectively unsettled phenomena and determine everyday behaving and thinking. If this is correct for the everyday theoretical and practical engagement with reality, then it is even more so for the dealings of people with each other. In the majority of cases, what we call knowledge of human nature in practical life (an indispensable aspect of all cooperation) is based – especially to the extent that it is made conscious – on a spontaneous application of analogies. (We will concern ourselves with the psychology of the knowledge of human nature in detail in a later chapter.) Among other things, Goethe, who is one of the few thinkers who has also looked into such manifestations of life in relation to their categories, says about this role of analogy, ‘I reckon that communication by analogies is as useful as it is pleasing: the analogous case doesn’t want to force itself on another, or prove anything; it positions itself on the other side without making a connection. A number of analogous cases do not unite to form serried ranks; they are like good company, which always stimulates rather than gives’.30 Or at another place: ‘We mustn’t scorn thinking that proceeds by way of analogies: analogy has the advantage of not closing doors or in fact aiming at any ultimate solution …’.31 In all of this, of course, only the extreme poles of the efficacy of analogy in the thinking of everyday life are defined. We do not regard the filling-in of the broad and varied space between these poles to be our task here. However, even this much is evident from these suggestions: analogy and the inference by analogy that arises out of it belong to those categories that arise in everyday life, are ingrained in it, and adequately express its relation to reality, the manner of its reflection, and the immediate implementation of this reflection into spontaneous praxis that often extends beyond these needs. That is why they necessarily possess – just as they are in themselves, so too have they grown on this basis – a shimmeringly ambiguous character: a certain elasticity, a lack of apodicticity, in which Goethe already sees their positive significance in everyday life; at the 29 30 31

Goethe 1998, p. 156. Goethe 1998, p. 158. Goethe 1998, p. 70.

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same time, on the other hand, they possess a nebulousness that can be cleared up conceptually, experimentally, etc. and then led in the direction of scientific thinking, but this nebulousness tends to stay put, to be arbitrarily fixed in place, to end in sophism or empty fantasy. Goethe calls attention to a new side of the position of analogy in the reflection of reality when he says, ‘Everything that exists is an analogue of all existing things; that is why existence always and at the same time looks to us both separate and interlocked. If you pursue this analogy too closely, everything coincides identically; if you avoid it, all is scattered into infinity. In both cases contemplation stagnates, either as hyperactive, or else as done to death’.32 The main path to errors lies directly in recklessly overstraining similarities, but we see here that the antithetical case (a pedantic rejection of all similarities that are not already well-grounded) can likewise lead to distortions. This is significant both for the auspicious efficacy of analogies in everyday life and for the formation of scientific thinking. However, these remarks of Goethe also hint at how grasping the world in the form of analogies can lead in the direction of aesthetic reflection. It is still premature to speak about the real issue given the current state of our insights. All that can be pointed out now is that this very laxity and elasticity of analogies emphasised by Goethe constitute an auspicious basis for artistic comparison. Since the similarity in artistic comparison never loses its relatedness to the subject, since the analogy here does not arise at all with the claim of determining in even an approximately complete way two objects or groups of objects with its help, much that would be scientifically objectionable can turn into a virtue here, although of course here too an accurate reflection of reality constitutes the prerequisite, yet of a qualitatively different nature. We will discuss this entire question later. The importance of thinking based on analogical processes for the everyday has already forced us now to touch lightly upon an issue that will be called upon to play a major role in our later remarks; the exact determinations of this issue, however, cannot yet be expounded at this stage. We have already spoken generally about how everyday thinking, science, and art reflect the same objective reality on the one hand and how – depending on the concrete types of goals arising out of the social life of people – the content and form of the rendering can and must turn out differently on the other. This statement is now to be concretised a bit further in that the reflection of the same reality carries with it the necessity of working with the same categories everywhere. For in contrast to subjective idealism, dialectical materialism does not regard categories as the

32

Goethe 1998, pp. 73–4.

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outcomes of some sort of enigmatic productivity of the subject but rather as the constant, universal forms of objective reality itself. The reflection of objective reality can therefore only be adequate if the likeness in consciousness also jointly contains these forms as the shaping principles of the reflected content. The objectivity of these categorical forms also reveals itself in the fact that they can be used to reflect reality for an infinitely long time without there occurring the slightest conscious awareness about their character as categories. This situation entails that – universally – everyday thinking, science, and art not only necessarily reflect the same contents but also recognise these contents as being shaped by the same categories. Yet our handling of the issue of analogy already shows, as we have noted from the outset, that depending on the kind of social praxis and depending on its goals and the methods conditioned by these goals, the use of categories can exhibit different, indeed oftentimes opposed aspects. Something in the analogising process that may yield significant results for poetry can be adverse to the development of science, etc. We will dwell at length on this problem as we concretise the aesthetic depicting of reality, and we will discuss in detail all of those places – above all in science and art – where both the commonality and the discrepancy between the individual categories turn up. To be noted here is only the fact that the categories have not only an objective significance but also an objective and subjective history. An objective history, as certain categories presuppose a certain level of development in the movement of matter. Thus, those specific categories that biological science makes use of only objectively first come into being with the coming into being of life; thus, the specific categories of capitalism first come into being in the genesis of this formation, in which, as Marx has shown, their functions in the formation process are not completely identical with those of mature development. (Certain categories, such as average rate of profit, actually presuppose a relatively advanced capitalism.) The subjective history of the categories is the history of their discovery by means of human consciousness. For instance, the lawful regularities of statistics were always and everywhere operative in nature and society where and when a sufficient number of phenomena were present so that they could rise to prominence. However, a thousand-year-long development of meaningful human experiences and their intellectual processing were necessary in order to recognise and consciously utilise them. Objectively, there have always been – at least in earth’s atmosphere – value differences in terms of optics (and therefore objectively in neurophysiological sensitivity as well). However, a long artistic development was also necessary here in order to perceive and aesthetically evaluate important forms of visually appearing objective reality in them and of human relations to them. That such achieve-

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ments of the scientific and artistic reflection of reality turn up at first as barely conscious questions, needs, etc. in everyday life and flow back into everyday life after their adequate response by means of art and science is a process to which we have already referred and will still continue to refer a great many times in what follows. Perhaps the specificity of everyday thinking would be expressed most vividly if one were to subject the language of this particular standpoint to a thorough analysis. First of all, the language of the everyday exhibits the feature (already emphasised by us) of being an intrinsically complicated system of mediations in which each subject who uses it immediately comports himself. This immediacy received its physiological explanation in our day when Pavlov discovered in language the second signal system, which differentiates people from animals. That each word, and not to mention each sentence, goes beyond immediacy is obvious without further discussion. Even the most ordinary word, such as ‘hatchet’, ‘stone’, ‘go’, etc., is already a complicated synthesis of immediate phenomena that are different from each other, is already their abstracting summarisation. The history of language reveals the extent to which a lengthy process of mediation and generalisation – that is, of distance from immediacy and sensory perception – is involved here. Anyone considering the language of one primitive folk or another sees that their word formation is incomparably closer to perception and farther from concepts than ours is. Herder33 already saw that certain features of objects were fixed in place in the word so that ‘this object is this and not another’.34 However, a protracted historical path of many thousands of years is necessary in order to strip away the concretely sensuous and immediately given characteristics and to hold on to the – often widely mediated – concept of an object, of a complex, of an action, etc. in a word. Thus, the inhabitants of the Bismarck Archipelago (Gazelle Peninsula) do not know the word or concept for black: ‘Black is named after the various things from which this colour is obtained, or else a black object is named’.35 The crow, the charred Aleurites nut, black dung in the marshes, the colour of burned resin, charred foliage, betel nuts, etc. provide such objects. It is readily evident that such expressions stand much closer to immediate perception than does our simple word ‘black’, but it also apparent that even this word already moves beyond the varieties of individual perceptions in an abstractive way and analogically in the direction of more remote syntheses. 33 34 35

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), German philosopher who deeply influenced a variety of disciplines within modern philosophy and classical scholarship. [Eds.] Herder 1966, p. 116. Lévy-Bruhl 1926, pp. 170–1.

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However language may have evolved, it is certain that at any given stage in this evolution the language (word, sentence, syntax, etc.) existing at that time was used directly by people. Yet the arising of language out of the needs of labour is so epoch-making precisely because what gets summarised by the naming of objects and activities are situations or procedures that in themselves are complicated; what gets eliminated are their nonrecurring differences; what gets emphasised and fixed in place is that which is common and essential to them; and what gets extraordinarily promoted as a result are the practical continuation of an accomplishment, habituation to it, its becoming a tradition. On the other hand, this fixing-in-place differentiates itself from that of animals (in which it occurs exclusively by means of unconditioned and conditioned reflexes) in that it does not congeal into a physiological property that is unchangeable or at the very least difficult to change; instead it always preserves its moving and moved social character as a matter of principle. This is because the most primitive fixation of objects and relationships by means of words also raises intuitions and representations to a conceptual level. In this way there gradually comes into being a coming-to-consciousness of the dialectic of appearance and essence. Initially and for a long time thereafter, of course, this happens in an unconscious way, but the never completely rigid meaning of the word (the change of the meaning of the word depending on how it is used) clearly indicates that the intellectual synthesis and generalisation of sensuous properties in words must necessarily have a flowing character – one determined by social development. That people can orient and adapt themselves under new conditions much more rapidly than can even the most highly developed animals is largely based on such a practically accomplished, albeit often unconscious handling of the dialectic of appearance and essence through the medium of solid, but nevertheless changing word meanings. We indeed know how tenaciously people are oftentimes tied to the familiar, to the traditional; however, since these tendencies towards conservation are of a social and not a physiological character, they can and also will be overcome socially. Where such tendencies are extraordinarily strong, it always becomes apparent that certain socio-economic remnants of an outdated formation have survived into the new one after all. Thus, for instance, certain elements of feudal agriculture in all countries that have taken the ‘Prussian’ and not the ‘American’ road towards capitalist development (Lenin). Of course, this is merely the general social substrate for the conservative, tradition-preserving forces in language. They have such a strong effect on people because people necessarily comport themselves immediately with respect to language – even though language by its nature is a system of increasingly complicated mediations. The unprecedented simplification that language

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produces in human relations to the world and to each other, its propulsive culture-promoting function, is intimately connected to this immediate comportment of the individual subject with respect to it. Pavlov astutely expressed this situation, with all the hazards existing in it, in the observations cited by us. But thus stated, an age-old meaningful experience receives its scientific formulation. Goethe’s Mephistopheles already says in the student scene, Make it a principle to give words your allegiance! You then will enter by the one safe gate into the temple of certitude. … Words are perfect for waging controversies, with words you can construe entire systems, in words you can place perfect faith, and from a word no jot or tittle may be taken.36 The French playwright François de Curel finds this state of affairs to be humorous and ironic. In one of his plays, a lady complains that she does not understand her husband and that is why she has flirted with a psychologist. Her friend to whom she confesses this says, ‘He will give your suffering a Greek name’.37 Language in everyday life thus displays a dialectical contradiction: it opens up an incomparably greater and richer outer- and inner-world for people than would be conceivable without it; that is to say, it makes the actual human surrounding and inner-world accessible; at the same time, however, it oftentimes makes the impartial reception of the inner- and outer-world impossible or, at the very least, difficult. This dialectic complicates itself even further by the fact that it involves the simultaneity of this just portrayed rigidification with language’s indeterminacy and confusion. Scientific terminology primarily aims at overcoming the latter tendency. It would be one-sided and false, however, not to see that efforts to get beyond the limits of the rigidification of language also prevail in it. True, the history of science shows just how strong the forces of conservation in it can be as well. This is related to the development of the forces of production in the first place and to the ability to scientifically explore objective reality in the wake of the development of such forces. The boundaries of knowledge that thereby come into being can often lead to centuries of rigidification in scientific concept-formation and therefore in scientific language as well. For example, consider the fetish-like axiom, which remained petrified for

36 37

Goethe 1984, pp. 50–1. [Eds.] Curel 1903, p. 12. [Eds.]

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a long time, of the ‘horror vacui’ of nature. However, such barriers can also be ‘artificially’ fixed in place by means of the social structure (the rule of the priest caste in the East). What again becomes apparent in all of this is the interrelationship between the everyday and science. Only this time not from the positive side, from that of the differentiation of the scientific attitude, language, etc. which is fruitful for the overall development of mankind, from that of the progress-promoting influence of scientific methods and outcomes on everyday thinking and praxis. Rather, the double barrier of everyday thinking, the polar reproduction of haziness and rigidification, can also negatively penetrate into the scientific reflection of reality and its linguistic expression. Since even in the life of the most conscious and determined scholar scientific activity remains embedded in his own everyday, since even for him the fundamental forces of his social formation have an effect on him, such impacts of everyday thinking and its expression on the language of science are fully understandable. And although we cannot yet concern ourselves here with the specificity of aesthetic reflection and its forms of expression, it may nevertheless already be noted now that literary language – in its own way, radically different from scientific language – likewise has the tendency to overcome the two poles of everyday life: haziness and rigidification. This duality of tendencies to overcome everyday life must be underscored for both science and literature. For the separation of ‘faculties’ in bourgeois ideology and aesthetics can very easily lead to a false ‘division of labour’ here if only precision is attributed to science and merely the sublation of rigidification to literature. In reality science cannot overcome the haziness of everyday thinking and its language without dissolving rigidification through an appeal to reality; nor is literature successfully able to make the rigid fixity of language flow again if it does not undertake to shape accurately and clearly (in a literary sense) its featureless obscurities – again, by going back to that which is real. In all of this, not only is the break with the Kantian ‘faculties of the soul’ and their precise ‘division of labour’ important but so too is the harking back to reality itself. The remark of Pavlov’s cited by us points precisely towards this loosening of the relation to reality as a frequently occurring phenomenon of everyday life, one that inevitably reproduces itself again and again. Without an enormous number of habits, traditions, convention, etc., this life could not be smoothly carried out, and everyday thinking could not respond to the outside world as promptly as is often unconditionally necessary. Thus, the positive, lifesustaining element must not be overlooked in both extreme tendencies, even though these two tendencies ultimately inhibit the relation to reality. In the long run, however – and this is a part of the essential dialectic of everyday living and thinking – critique and correction by means of science and art, which

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grow out of this living and thinking and thus interact with them, are indispensable for essential progress, even if they can never bring about a final liquidation of rigidification and flux. That general nature of social development and human praxis to which we alluded in our epigraph to this volume is expressed in this dynamic structure of everyday language. By generally acting responsively to immediate situations with immediate objectives in everyday life and above all in the primitive stages of the development of everyday life, people create material and intellectual instruments that contain more in themselves than people have immediately and consciously put into them. Hence, these material and intellectual instruments are actuated by the immediate actions of people in such a way that what is merely implicitly present in them gradually becomes explicit and the actions lead beyond that which was directly intended. This stems from the interrelationship of objective and subjective dialectics. Objective dialectics, the reflection of which is subjective, must hence always be richer and more comprehensive. Its own not yet subjectively apprehended aspects are very often effective in leading to a higher level and pointing beyond immediate subjective goals; admittedly, this often occurs in a crisis-laden form. However, the relationship between objective dialectics and its subjective reflection is far from being thus circumscribed. Objective reality would obtain a mystical character if its effect were always and only directed at progress-promoting aspects. The negative tendencies portrayed above are likewise associated with this interrelationship of objective and subjective dialectics. The immediate connection of praxis in reality with the reflected image of objective reality present at the instant of taking action must often have an inhibitory effect in the manner portrayed by us. The inner logic of these circumstances ensures that – in the trend line of an entire epoch – the knowledge-promoting tendencies predominate; where this does not take place, the formation in question is condemned to decline or ruin. More clearly than others, Leibniz grasped the after-effects for human thought arising from this interaction. Among other things, behind his conception of ‘confused ideas’ is also the issue highlighted by us concerning the richer, unconsciously self-created instrumentation of human forms of activity. In a polemic against Bayle,38 he works out both the relativity or passing over of distinct and confused thoughts into each other as well as the important point of view – breaking with the doctrine of the ‘faculties of the soul’ – that both are a

38

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), Huguenot philosopher and historian whose views greatly influenced the Enlightenment. [Eds.]

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product of the whole man. (That Leibniz rejects the ‘division of labour’ of body and soul here does not change the significance of his achievement; on the contrary.) Leibniz says, it has been thought that confused thoughts are toto genere different from distinct thoughts, whereas they are only less well distinguished and less developed because of their multiplicity. This has meant that certain movements, which are rightly called involuntary, have been attributed to the body to such an extent that they have been believed to have nothing corresponding to them in the soul: and conversely it has been thought that certain abstract thoughts were not represented in the body. But both of these are mistaken, as often happens with this sort of distinction, for we have taken note only of what is most obvious. The most abstract thoughts need some imagination: and when we consider what confused thoughts (which invariably accompany the most distinct that we can have, such as those of colours, smells, tastes, of heat, of cold, etc.) are, we realize that they always involve the infinite, and not only what happens in our body, but also, by means of it, what happens elsewhere.39 For our present issue of language, the recognition of generalisation in all linguistic expression follows from this, as well as the dialectical relativisation of the degrees of this generalisation in practical use. ‘General terms’, Leibniz says, do not merely improve languages but are required for their essential structure. If by “particular things” you mean individual ones, then if we only had words which applied to them – only proper names and no appellatives – we would not be able to say anything. This is because new ones are being encountered at every moment – new individuals and accidents and (what we talk about most) actions. But if by “particular things” you mean the lowest species (species infimae), then, apart from the fact that it is often difficult to determine them, it is obvious that they are themselves universals, founded on similarity. And then, since it is just a matter of more or less widespread similarity, depending on whether one is speaking of genera or of species, it is natural to mark all sorts of similarities or agreements, and thus to employ terms having every degree of generality ….40

39 40

Leibniz 1997, p. 117. Leibniz 1996, p. 275.

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These expositions by Leibniz not only throw light on the issue of thought and language, but also point towards another important essential trait of everyday life: namely, that the whole man is always involved in it. This again brings us into conflict with the doctrine of the so-called ‘faculties of the soul’ that has been extremely influential in the history of aesthetics. Hegelian philosophy and aesthetics already led a fierce struggle against such a fragmentation of man, against the ‘soul-sack’ as Hegel himself said. However, this struggle could not be carried through to the end because the hierarchy that is unavoidable in idealism likewise led – at a different, higher level – to a fragmentation of the dialectical unity of man and his activities. Consider the coordination of intuition and art, representation and religion, concept and philosophy, and their metaphysico-hierarchical consequences in Hegel’s system. Only dialectical materialism lays down the methodological basis for a unitary and dialectical view of the whole man in his actions and reactions to the outside world by means of the priority given to being over consciousnesses. The mechanical way of reflecting reality adopted by metaphysical materialism is thereby overcome at the same time. The great significance of Pavlovian theory consists precisely in the fact that it opens the way to comprehending both the material unity of all manifestations of life and the real material connection of the natural, physiological being of man with his social being (the second signal system as connection of language and labour). Much earlier, however, dialectical materialism already recognised the organic collaboration of all human capacities (‘faculties of the soul’) in each human activity. Though not in the form of problem-free mutual support, of a harmonia praestabilita, but in their real contradictoriness, where social praxis determines whether and to what extent such a reciprocal facilitating of each other arises or whether a good deed becomes a scourge. Thus Lenin says about the cognitive process, The approach of the (human) mind to a particular thing, the taking of a copy (= a concept) of it is not a simple, immediate act, a dead mirroring, but one which is complex, split into two, zigzag-like, which includes in it the possibility of the flight of imagination from life; more than that: the possibility of the transformation (moreover, an unnoticeable transformation, of which man is unaware) of the abstract concept, idea, into imagination (in letzter Instanz = God). For even in the simplest generalisation, in the most elementary general idea (“table” in general), there is a certain bit of imagination. (Vice versa: it would be stupid to deny the role of imagination, even in the strictest science: cf. Pisarev on useful dreaming, as an impulse to work, and on empty daydreaming.)41 41

Lenin 1972b, pp. 370–1, translation modified.

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The fact that the doctrine of the metaphysical dissociation of the ‘faculties of the soul’ was not a simple error of science or the fault of individual thinkers but rather the reflection of certain sides of reality or stages of its development – in fact, a reflection that has been distorted in an idealist or vulgar materialist way – can change nothing in our judgement of it. It is certainly true that the capitalist division of labour destroys this immediate wholeness of man, that the fundamental tendency of labour in capitalism estranges man from himself and his activity. This is in fact intellectually concealed by capitalist economy, indeed, as Marx very subtly noted particularly in relation to our present problem, ‘by ignoring the direct relationship between the worker (labour) and production’.42 There thus comes into being the polar antithesis between the objective product of labour and its intellectual-moral ramifications in the labourer alienated from himself. However, it would be a mistake to believe that through this alienation the doctrine of the ‘faculties of the soul’ would be confirmed. The – apparent – independence of the ‘faculties of the soul’ from each other, indeed their blatantly pronounced contradictoriness with respect to each other, is certainly an important fact of the capitalist everyday. It is its immediate form of appearance in the mind of people of this period. The metaphysical character of the philosophical, psychological, anthropological, etc. theories coming into being on this basis rests upon the fact that they uncritically absolutise in their immediacy facts that are undoubtedly immediately present. ‘Uncritically’ does not necessarily mean a simple acquiescence, which of course frequently happens. The dialectic of the mode of appearance can be perceptively criticised, and in this manner even important cultural relationships can be uncovered, as happens in Schiller’s philosophy of art, for instance. Of course, this case does not lack at least an inkling of insight into the socio-historically caused conditionality of such an autonomisation and contradictoriness of the ‘faculties of the soul’, and with that a longing – albeit backward-looking and utopian – for the unitary and whole man. However, only the complete elucidation of the social bases can make man comprehensible as a wholeness, can make the inseparability of his physical and psychological powers comprehensible. In an extraordinarily sweeping way, Marx expresses the perversion that comes about in alienation: ‘It is true that eating, drinking and procreating, etc., are also genuine human functions. However, when abstracted from other aspects of human activity and turned into final and exclusive ends, they are animal’.43 Here, the young Marx has established these effects of the cap-

42 43

Marx 1992a, p. 325. Marx 1992a, p. 327.

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italist division of labour only in relation to the working class. Very soon afterwards, as early as The Holy Family, he extends the application of these effects to all of bourgeois society and catches a glimpse of a critical ideological antithesis between the bourgeoisie and proletariat precisely in how they contrarily respond – affirmatively or negatively – to the same tendencies of alienation.44 Later, Engels generalised these facts to all manifestations of life in bourgeois society.45 However, the classics of Marxism were always clear that this effect of the capitalist substructure encompasses only one side of the totality of its powerful impacts. As the final society based on exploitation, as that society which not only creates the materio-economic preconditions for socialism, but also begets its own gravedigger, it must produce within the forces disfiguring and distorting people other forces as well – indeed ever more consciously turned against themselves – directed at the future. As shown above, already in The Holy Family Marx sees this antithesis in the contented or outraged response to capitalism’s alienation of man from himself. Later, he also outlines the contours of those economic determinations that objectively underlie this outrage, that form it, that indeed necessitate that it does not remain subjectively unfruitful but actually leads to social revolution. In his assessment of Ricardo, Marx says, Ricardo, rightly for his time, regards the capitalist mode of production as the most advantageous for production in general, as the most advantageous for the creation of wealth. He wants production for the sake of production and this with good reason. To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself …. [T]hey reveal a failure to understand the fact that, although at first the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals and even classes, in the end it breaks through this contradiction and coincides with the development of the individual; the higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed, for the interests of the species in the human kingdom.46

44 45 46

Marx and Engels 1975, p. 36. Engels 1987b, p. 278. Marx 1989, pp. 347–8.

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One further reason becomes visible here for why we do not possess any philosophically grounded analysis of everyday life and thinking. Directly or indirectly, such an analysis would have to take a position in some way on the contradictory duality of everyday life in capitalism outlined by Marx. In which it is readily apparent that the contradictoriness of the everyday, which arrives at a point of culmination here, is also to be found in greatly varied forms in some earlier formations and certainly does not instantly and automatically cease to exist with the expropriation and socialisation of the means of production. The sublation launched by socialism of the antagonistic character of the contradictions cropping up here and their metamorphosis into something no longer antagonistic is likewise a protracted, uneven process that in no way precludes residues of or even relapses into these contradictions. Since even the most abstract epistemological or phenomenological investigation of everyday thinking cannot possibly disregard such historical transformations of structure if it does not want to falsify – by becoming anti-historical absolutes – the content and structure of the very object to be recognised, it must somehow or other take a position on the fundamental historical phenomena indicated here. However, every position taken involves a historical consideration of the modes of appearance of the capitalist everyday occurring here and, on the other hand, a certain insight into the actual direction of the overall historical development. Otherwise, the past or the present (or both) will be idealised or made into an absolute, which can take on an equally falsely positive or falsely negative value-accent. Marx sees in this an inevitable and insurmountable dilemma of the bourgeois assessment of these circumstances because it lets either the progressive or the alienating and alienated aspect of the contradiction identified above petrify into one-sidedness. He says, ‘During earlier stages of development, the single individual seems more fully developed because he has not yet worked out the fullness of his relations and has not yet set them over against himself as independent social powers and relations. It is as ridiculous to long for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that the present complete emptiness must be permanent’.47 In the early days of the development of bourgeois thought, the affirmation of progress allowed its contradictoriness to be overlooked. Already before Marx, a Romantic countermovement appeared that connected the criticism of alienation to an idealisation of primitive stages of development. Today, this latter view dominates – overtly or covertly – philosophical preoccupations (scanty as they are) with the everyday and everyday thinking.

47

Marx 1986, p. 99, translation modified.

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If we give a brief overview here of how the issues of everyday behaviour and thinking appear in an impoverished and distorted form in the work of Martin Heidegger, then perhaps some will object to his being ranked among the Romantic critics of capitalist culture. He resolutely distinguishes everydayness from primitivity: ‘Everydayness does not coincide with primitivity, but is rather a mode of Dasein’s Being, even when that Dasein is active in a highly developed and differentiated culture – and precisely then’.48 And also absent in his specific analyses is an affirmative appeal to any specific past period (such as to the ‘pre-magical’ in the works of Gehlen). Heidegger’s Romantic anti-capitalism vilifies the everyday of the present and its thinking ‘merely’ in a phenomenoontological way. However, the criterion for this judgement is not embedded in the structure of a determinate period of the past, but rather in the ontologicohierarchical distance of beings from Being. The intellectual basis of this rejection is thus not Romantico-historical, but rather theological; it is founded on the atheistic turn given to Kierkegaard’s irrational theory of god. Heidegger’s position on the everyday is already apparent in his terminology. When he calls the things coming before us here, ‘equipment’; the ‘who?’ of this sphere, ‘the they’; the most common and typical modes of comportment, ‘idle talk’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘falling’, etc., he may even harbour the illusion that he is simply offering an objective description, free of any emotive value judgements. For him, however, it is objectively a question of a world of inauthenticity, of fallenness, of falling away from authenticity. Heidegger himself calls this ‘movement’ of Dasein in its own Being the ‘downward plunge’: ‘Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness. But this plunge remains hidden from Dasein by the way things have been publicly interpreted, so much so, indeed, that it gets interpreted as a way of “ascending” and “living concretely”’.49 And this interpretation continues: ‘The phenomenon of falling does not give us something like a “night view” of Dasein, a property which occurs ontically and may serve to round out the innocuous aspects of this entity. Falling reveals an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself. Far from determining its nocturnal side, it constitutes all Dasein’s days in their everydayness’.50 This profound pessimism, which transforms the everyday into a sphere of hopeless fallenness, of thrownness ‘into the publicness of the “they” ’,51 of ‘the

48 49 50 51

Heidegger 1962, p. 76. Heidegger 1962, p. 223. Heidegger 1962, p. 224. Heidegger 1962, p. 210.

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groundlessness of idle talk’,52 must impoverish and distort its essence and structure at the same time. If everyday praxis loses – phenomeno-ontologically – its dynamic connectedness to knowledge and science; if these do not alight from the questions posed by everyday practice; if this very praxis is not continuously enriched, broadened, and deepened by the results that knowledge and science bring forth, then the everyday thus loses precisely its genuine nature, that which makes it into a source and outlet of knowledge in human action. By being emptied of these interrelationships, the everyday appears in the works Heidegger as dominated solely by the powers of alienation that are distorting man. The other, forward-striving aspect within and despite alienation vanishes from the ontological ‘purification’ of the phenomena. For there undoubtedly exists a relationship between methodology and worldview here as well. Heidegger’s method, like that of the phenomenology and the ontological tendencies growing out it, focuses on reducing all objectivity and all comportment towards it to the most basic and universal ‘archetypes’ in order to work out – independent of any socio-historical variety – their deepest essence in an unequivocal way. However, because the instinctive ‘intuition of essences’ likewise constitutes a foundation of this methodology, the subjective value judgement of each respective philosopher must – consciously or unconsciously – deeply influence the determination of the content and form of phenomenologically or ontologically ‘purified’ objectivity and confound the relation between appearance and essence. Thus, the phenomena of the capitalist everyday appear here as the ontologically essential determinations of beings in general. So too in Heidegger’s description of everyday life. Nobody will deny that what arose here was an impassioned attempt to work out certain critical facets of everyday life and thinking in a more concrete way than hitherto; in this regard, Heidegger goes well beyond the state of this issue in the work of the neo-Kantians. He thus makes a very interesting advance in the direction of comprehending the specific connectedness between theory and praxis in everyday life: ‘In dealings such as this, where something is put to use, our concern subordinates itself to the “in-order-to” which is constitutive for the equipment we are employing at the time; the less we just stare at the hammerThing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly it is encountered as that which it is – as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the specific “manipulability” of the hammer … If we look at Things just “theoretically”, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them

52

Heidegger 1962, p. 213.

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by using them and manipulating them, the activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character’.53 Unquestionably, something of the basic structure of everyday life and thinking (of the immediate connection between theory and praxis) is comprehended here. However, the convergence of a formal methodological simplification and a subjective (anti-capitalist) value judgement in the ‘intuition of essences’ establishes an overly brusque metaphysical contrast between proper theoretical behaviour and ‘theory’ in everyday praxis in place of the real contradictory transitions and interactions between them. The abstractive isolation of the everyday carried out in this manner, its reduction to those aspects that seem to exclusively belong to it in such an artificial intellectual distinction, impoverishes and distorts this entire sphere. It impoverishes by overlooking – in a consciously methodological way – how deeply all modes of everyday comportment relate to the entire culture and cultural development of mankind; it distorts by thus intellectually eliminating the role of the everyday in propagating progress and implementing its results. This intimation of the theoretical impasse that comes into view in the works of Heidegger serves us only to concretise our path in comparison with other methodological approaches; as in other similar cases, no confrontation with Heidegger’s theory is intended. If we were forced here to make a polemical digression, we have nevertheless not set ourselves the task of analysing in detail the set of facts at hand here. They were mentioned here so that the issue of the whole man in the everyday (even in bourgeois society, indeed above all in bourgeois society) could be truthfully portrayed. It also primarily comes down here to provisionally clarifying the relationship of the everyday and its thinking to the behaviour of man in scientific and artistic activity. Only provisionally, because we will shortly attend to the separation of science from everyday life in a separate chapter; however, the artistic productivity and receptivity that will engage us later can really only be adequately comprehended in the second part, after uncovering the structure of the work of art. By way of anticipating what comes later, all that can be said here is that human modes of comportment essentially depend upon the degree to which their activity is objectivated. Where these objectivations attain the highest level, as in science and art, the objective laws of science and art determine the human comportment towards these constructs that man himself has made. That is to say, all human abilities come by an orientation (partly instinctively, partly consciously acquired)

53

Heidegger 1962, p. 98.

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towards satisfying these objective lawful regularities. If one wants to understand such modes of comportment correctly and to describe them correctly both in their relationship to the everyday and in their difference from and antithesis to everyday behaviour, then one must never lose sight of the fact that in both cases it is a question of the relation of the whole man – however alienated from himself and distorted – to objective reality or to the social and human objectivations reflecting and mediating this reality. One sees the effects of developed and improved objectivations like science and art above all in the far more precisely defined and determined criteria for the selection, grouping, intensity, etc. of subjective activities brought into action than in other manifestations of life. Of course, there are very gradual transitions here, most notably in labour, which in the course of history also objectively displays many transitions into science and into art. Such objectivations have not only their inner lawful regularity – admittedly one that we are made aware of only by degrees – but also a determinate medium, solely through which the objectivation concerned can be productively and receptively realised. (Consider the role of mathematics in the exact sciences, visuality in the fine arts, etc.) Whoever does not pursue through this medium the path towards objectivation must pass by precisely its most decisive problems. This fact has often been observed, but false conclusions have been drawn from it almost as often. While the medium was identified with the objectivation (as in the case of Konrad Fiedler54 in his handling of visuality, to which we will return in detail later in lines of thought that will have become more concrete), an isolated ‘faculty of soul’ was still assigned to a group of objectivations – despite modernised variations – and the affected dynamic of the totality of human inner life was disregarded or completely eliminated. However, the actual facts of the case show that, because the role of the medium in objectivation consists precisely in being the bearer of a totality of sensations, thoughts, material relationships, etc., the adaptation of subjective comportment to it must likewise be a synthesis of such elements. Time and again it is thus the whole man who is expressed in such utmost specialisation, only with this very important dynamic structural change (in contrast to the average case of the everyday): to some extent his uniformly mobilised characteristics are focused on that point at which the objectivation intended by him is directed. Therefore, when the talk in what follows is of this comportment, we will speak of the ‘man-made-whole’ (in relation to

54

Konrad Fiedler (1841–1895), major nineteenth-century German art historian and theorist of formalism. [Eds.]

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a certain objectivation) in contrast to the whole man of the everyday, who, figuratively speaking, faces reality with the entire surface of his existence. Naturally, for us, aesthetic comportment is above all important. That is why in later contexts we will concern ourselves in detail with the aesthetic distinction between the whole man and the ‘man-made-whole’. Since scientific comportment interests us above all as a contrasting determination with respect to aesthetic comportment, we can thereby content ourselves with entirely general findings. This antithesis had to be sharply worked out in its extremes. At the same time, however, one must not disregard the obviously obscured transitions. It suffices simply to bear in mind labour, in which, the more complete it is, the more a certain tendency towards the just analysed intensification into the ‘man-made-whole’ likewise comes about. The non-total essence of most labour tasks brings into being their transitional character. Where labour draws near to art, as in ancient artisanry, the objective comportment in it also draws near to the artistic and, where the maximum rationalisation is highly developed, sometimes to the scientific. In this regard, many kinds of labour are thus transitional phenomena; as fundamental as they even are for human life as a whole, however, they nevertheless comprise only one part of everyday life. And what must naturally predominate in the remaining parts is a different, broader, more casual, less purposeful principle for regrouping people. Of course, there are transitional forms here as well; play, sport (as its practicing turns into systematised training), conversation (as it passes over into matter-of-fact discussion), etc. can all easily draw near to labour’s type of comportment abidingly or temporarily. However, this great range of nuances that lead over into each other still does not eliminate the contrariety of the extremes. On the contrary. We believe that precisely what is cleared up in this way is not only the necessity of the whole man’s mode of comportment growing over into that of the ‘man-madewhole’, but also the grounding of the one in the other, their mutual fertilisation and higher development. At the same time, however, the distinction, indeed the antithesis, between the two persists. It is based, on the one hand, on the more or less total character of the objectivation striven for (from its almost complete absence to its predominance over subjective comportment) and, on the other closely related hand, on the more or less immediate relation of thinking and praxis. Think all at once of sports as simple physical exercise – in which this relation can have a purely immediate character, as in a stroll – and the complicated, often very widely stretched mediations that emerge in systematic training. This antithesis stands forth even more clearly when we think of the sociopolitical activity of people. Lenin brilliantly revealed this activity in his work,

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What Is to Be Done? His analyses are all the more valuable for us because they are focused on socio-political forms and contents, and only incidentally, almost inadvertently, do they touch upon the issues discussed here. With regard to the spontaneity of the economic movements of the working class, Lenin shows that what they lack is precisely the consciousness of broader relationships in society, objectives that point beyond immediacy; the spontaneously striking Russian labourers of the early twentieth century were not – could not be, Lenin says – ‘conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system’.55 That is to say, they lacked insight into the further necessary consequences of their own actions. We believe that no further detailed discussion is required in order to realise that the overwhelming majority of actions in everyday life, regardless of whether they are individual or collective actions, have a similar structure, in which the immediate connection between thought and praxis established by us earlier rises to prominence. Now by carrying on his socio-political critique of spontaneity to the effect that proper consciousness ‘can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers’56 (thus outside of the immediately surrounding world and the immediate objectives of workers), Lenin expresses a realisation that is doubly important for the issue that is currently occupying us. First, for the overcoming of everyday life, mental powers and intellectual modes of comportment are required that qualitatively exceed the horizon of everyday thinking. Second – when, as is the case here, we are talking of a correct orientation for practical action – Lenin’s ‘from the outside’ denotes the world of science. The hereby-won insight into everyday thinking appears to demonstrate that its correct higher development, its becoming suitable for the knowledge of objective reality, is possible only because of science, only by means of leaving behind everyday thinking. Looked at in a world-historical trendline, this is also the case. However, it would be a vulgarising abstraction that falsifies important facts of development to want to make out of this a law operating everywhere and without exception. To be sure, scientific and everyday thinking are often – and in very important cases – pitted against each other in this way. Keep in mind the Copernican theory and the (immediately, subjectively) insurmountable meaningful daily ‘experience’ that the sun ‘sets’, etc.; we deliberately use the term ‘insurmountable’ because this must be the spontaneous

55 56

Lenin 1961, p. 375. Lenin 1961, p. 422.

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response of the most well-educated astronomers as well as everyday people to this phenomenon. With that said, however, the whole abundance of reality and the relation of everyday thinking and science (and art) to it are by no means circumscribed. Not uncommonly cases do occur in which everyday thinking – justifiably – protests against certain modes of objectivation in science (and art) and, with its protest, ultimately informs them. The dialectic of such a contradictoriness between the everyday on the one hand and science or art on the other is always a socio-historical one. There are always concretely, historically, and socially conditioned situations in which everyday thinking is proven right with respect to the higher objectivations, or vice versa. However, the situation outlined just now must not be made into a metaphysical absolute. At the end of the day, the triumphant resistance of everyday thinking to a certain science (or art) can only possess the spontaneity and immediacy of everyday life. All that is achievable with these given means, however, is a negation or a rejection. If the science (or art) that no longer agrees with the needs of life is to be really overcome, then what must arise out of such a spontaneous negation is a new type of science (or art); that is to say, the ground of everyday life must be left behind again. Any analysis of such facts thus shows that both the cohesiveness and the disparity of these spheres can only be apprehended by taking into account the uninterrupted interactions between them. As far as consequences of this sort are important for art, they can be only dealt with in the historical materialist part of the aesthetics, on account of their socio-historical concreteness. All we can do here is point to those – necessarily still abstract – determinations in which the most general character of the reflection of reality is expressed in the everyday. Briefly put, it is a question of the phenomenon of so-called common sense. In and for itself, common sense is just a generalisation of meaningful experiences from everyday life, one that remains abstract in most cases. Since, as we have already shown and will show in detail later, the results of science and art continually stream into and enrich everyday life and thinking, these results are very often jointly contained within everyday life and thinking; in fact, this is mostly the case only insofar as they have turned into ever more effective elements of everyday praxis. In most cases, with respect to their form, such generalisations have an apodictic character. The quite laconic proverbial wisdom of peoples is expressed in this manner. These generalisations are not based on evidence, since they are just summaries of often age-old meaningful experiences, habits, traditions, customs, etc. And even this form they have tends to transform these generalisations into an immediate precept for action; thus, their form already reflects the immediate relationship between theory and praxis that is typical of everyday thinking.

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Now what is expressed in this is precisely the contradictoriness specified above: namely, whether or not this apodictic and laconic wisdom is valid with respect to the more complicated objectivation of science and art. Although this is not the place for us to go into concrete problems of a socio-historical character, it is readily apparent that the positive or negative function of common sense and folk wisdom is closely linked to the struggle of the old and the new. Wherever the moribund defends itself against that which is emergent and does so by means of artificially mediated structures of thought, conventions of feeling, etc. that are estranged from life, common sense frequently acquires the function of the ragamuffin in Andersen’s fairytale who exclaims, ‘The emperor has no clothes’. Chernyshevsky’s aesthetics has the great merit of expressing the genuine needs of the people against the artificially exaggerated claims of the educated class.57 Molière’s maidservant is the supreme critic of the great comedian, and the aesthetics and philosophy of art of the late Tolstoy establish simple peasants as the supreme judges in evaluating the correctness or falsity of the products of art and science. There is no doubt that such verdicts are confirmed by history in many cases. It is just as certain, however, that they not uncommonly represent only a philistine grumbling vis-à-vis great innovations. As correct as the peasant mockery of the spiritualist vogue in Tolstoy’s The Fruits of Enlightenment is, his judgements – on behalf of simple peasants – must go awry in the cases of the Renaissance or Shakespeare. Schiller already pointed out the limits of the competency of Molière’s maidservant to judge, and I myself in connection with Tolstoy have tried to disclose this entire set of problems in his late assessment of culture.58 This socio-historical character of the explanation of such individual cases does not at all change the fact that even more general regularities find expression here. On the one hand, there is an antithesis between an abstract idealist generalisation and the spontaneous materialism of everyday thinking, which comes out on top vis-à-vis this generalisation. On the other hand, an antithesis between dialectical and mechanistic reflection may be present. In fact, both the spontaneous dialectic of the everyday is proven right against metaphysical theories and the traditional metaphysical ‘wisdom’ of the everyday are refuted by new dialectical explanations. It is already apparent here that these responses of everyday thinking to science and art are by no means clear; one can neither classify them simply as progressive or retrograde, nor always attribute the tendencies of the one to the new and those of the other to the old. For example,

57 58

Chernyshevsky 1953, pp. 317 ff. Lukács 1952b, pp. 257 ff.

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as Lenin persuasively showed, voices find expression in the works of Tolstoy that both allow to be heard the being of a primitive peasantry condemned to ruin and herald – of course at the level of the everyday – the imminent peasant revolt against feudal remnants.59 The actual role of common sense and folk wisdom is therefore fathomed only by means of the investigation, with the help of historical materialism, of the particular concrete socio-historical situation. All that we can briefly allude to here are the epistemological foundations, the objective and subjective universal dialectical foundations, of this indissoluble ambiguity of everyday thinking and the reflection of reality in it. The source of this indissoluble ambiguity is again the immediate relation of theory to praxis previously highlighted by us. Because, on the one hand, theory and praxis must always proceed from the immediate relation to reality; they can never bypass it or stop appealing to it. As soon as the higher, more complicated (because more mediated) objectivations of reality lapse into intellectual inbreeding, the same danger threatens them as that to which the emperor succumbs in Andersen. On the other hand, the real fruitfulness of the correct reflection of reality and the praxis arising from it is only assured if this immediacy is sublated (in the Hegelian threefold sense of negated, preserved, and raised to a higher level). It thereby suffices to point to the Leninist analysis of political praxis along with – as a counterexample – the consequences of the spontaneity of capitalist profit, which, as Bernal has investigated, frequently inhibit the development of science and industry. That this contradictoriness can only be resolved concretely and socio-historically exactly expresses in an abstractly general form the fact that the higher objectivations were brought forth by mankind’s development in the interest of coming to terms in a richer and deeper way with the specific problems of everyday life. It expresses that their independence, autonomy, and their standing qualitatively apart from the forms of reflection in everyday life are in the service of this same everyday and that they thus lose their reason for existing if this connection is lost – indeed not for the day but rather by historical standards – and if they relinquish their mediatedness and uncritically adapt to the immediate unity of theory and praxis in the everyday. This contradictoriness thus underscores the inevitability of the uninterrupted torrent flowing upwards from the everyday to science and art and back downwards from science and art to the everyday, a condition of the functioning and moving forward of all three spheres of life. Second, what also finds expression in this contradictoriness is the fact that the criteria of the accuracy of the reflection are above all content-related; that is to say, the accuracy, the depth, the abundance, etc.

59

Lenin 1973, pp. 202–9.

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consist in accordance with that which is original, with objective reality itself. At the same time, formal aspects (tradition, etc. in the everyday and immanent methodological completion in science and art) can play only a secondary role; uncoupled from real criteria, an irresolvable set of problems affixes to them. This does not mean any underestimation or nullification of problems of form; however, these can only be correctly posed and resolved by maintaining the priority of content within their interaction.

2

Principles and Beginnings of Differentiation

When we sum up from the point of view of development the still very general results our analysis has achieved up to now, we thus see that in everyday life and thinking more and more mediations appear, which are ever more abundant, complicated, and far-reaching, yet remain in the form of their characteristic immediacy. We have also certainly noticed that the progress of society gradually develops systems of objectivation that indeed possess an emphatic independence from everyday life yet are uninterruptedly and ever more abundantly interrelated with it, so that we could in no way conceive of our own everyday life without such objectivations. (In keeping with the purpose of these studies, we have concerned ourselves only with science and art and have consciously disregarded objectivations of an institutional character, such as the state, judiciary, party, social organisations, etc. Taking them into account would have overly complicated our analyses but would have changed nothing in the end result specified above.) We are now one step further in approaching our actual goals, which have to do with the principled aspects of separating those objectivations that interest us from the common ground of everyday reality and with the process of becoming autonomous. However, we face – in terms of the factual material – insurmountable difficulties. It is not just that the original state of mankind, in which there would yet be no objectivations, is unknown. For this question, such a state must also remain eternally unknown in the sense of scientific knowledge that can be explored in a manner supported with documentary evidence. All the data that ethnography, archaeology, etc. can present bear on incomparably more developed conditions. And precisely the character of the most primitive condition makes it as good as impossible that a sufficient amount of material from this stage of development will be found in the future. Even in the case of considerably higher stages, we must be without primary data; we cannot concretely retrace either the emergence of language or that of dance, music, magico-religious lore, and social customs and traditions further than to the

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most primitive peoples known to us, who, as already said, have grown far beyond the beginnings of mankind. Under such circumstances, science must make do and help itself out with reconstructive hypotheses. Likewise, no other method remains for philosophy, which confines itself to the most universal principles of the course of development. We have already outlined the method to be followed here: the anatomy of man is, as Marx says, the key to the anatomy of the ape; the lower state of society must be reconstructively inferred from the higher, which in reality came into being out of the lower. For its part, the method of reconstruction is determined by those developmental tendencies that have come to the fore in the history actually known to us. We already accentuated such tendencies in our previous observations, with hints as to what, for instance, the difference is between the everyday of capitalist life and that of earlier formations, etc. Needless to say, a new difficulty thereby comes up: as often as not, bourgeois science partly stops at the mere collecting of sparsely organised data; partly makes these ‘orderly’ through rashly mystical, Romantic anti-capitalist hypotheses (for instance, ‘prelogical thinking’ in Lévy-Bruhl60); and, in connection with idealist philosophy, partly does not want to admit that even the higher forms of objectivations, like science, art, or religion, have not only a history but also a history of genesis, meaning that there were thus stages of mankind in which they had not yet detached themselves from the general ground of everyday life and acquired their own form of objectivation. If, for instance, religion or art is construed as a blessing innate to man and inseparable from his essence, then naturally the question of its genesis cannot be posed at all. We believe, however, that this is inseparable from knowledge of its essence. The essence of art cannot be uncoupled from its functioning in society and can only be dealt with in close connection to its genesis, to the presuppositions and conditions of its genesis. The goal of our efforts at reconstruction is thus a state of society without objectivations. Admittedly, this expression instantly needs to be qualified; it should read: a state of society with a minimum of objectivations. For speech and labour, which are chiefly mankind’s most important distinguishing characteristics with respect to animals, are the single most primitive social manifestations of human life and already possess, as shown, certain features of objectivation. The actual genesis of objectivations would thus have to include the anthropogenesis of man, the gradual coming into being of language and labour. Leaving aside the fact that this is precisely the area where our know-

60

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939), French anthropologist, philosopher, and sociologist. [Eds.]

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ledge is hopelessly minimal, its study is also not decisive for our purposes. For this work does not raise the – in itself extremely important philosophical – question as to what objectivations mean in general for the anthropogenesis and humanity of man. Instead, it confines itself to the problem of how the higher forms of objectivations, first and foremost science and art, have detached themselves from that common ground of human activities, relations, expressions, etc. into a relative degree of autonomy and how their form of objectivation has obtained that qualitative specificity, the existence and functioning of which has become a self-evident fact of life for us today. That this can take place only in a two-sided interdependency with everyday reality has already been shown. That is why we are looking for our starting point not in the genesis of objectivations in general but merely in a stage of development with a minimum of objectivations. (We have already emphasised that we will not be concerning ourselves here with objectivations that are institutional in character; it is clear, however, that this stage of development has likewise not yet even created constructs like the state, law, etc. At this stage, therefore, forms of everyday life – custom, habit, etc. – still exclusively fulfilled these functions yet to appear.) To pose the question in this somewhat more specified way means the issues of anthropogenesis are not being considered by us. It is a universally known fact that the original man, understood in terms of his becoming himself, was less endowed by nature to defend himself or to attack than most animals are. As he created for himself a culture of labour and tools, even these few endowments regressed. Gordon Childe says of this, ‘Some very early “men” indeed had projecting canine teeth set in very massive jaws that would be quite dangerous weapons, but these have disappeared in modern man, whose dentures will not inflict mortal wounds’.61 For us, such facts mean that, at the level that interests us, the biological and anthropological career of man is already completed. The lines of development that henceforth come into consideration are essentially of a social character. Of course, these leave behind traces in the bodily and mental constitution of man as well. At the same time, however, this concerns the higher development of the central nervous system considerably more than it does an alteration of physical constitution in the proper sense. We will need to return often to the questions that arise in this connection. All that needs to be briefly pointed out here is that labour and language develop the human senses so that these senses become far more suitable for human purposes than they originally were, without a physiological change or improvement and without overcoming their existing inferiority as such to certain species of animal. Engels

61

Childe 1942, p. 2.

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already noted that the ‘eagle sees much farther than man, but the human eye discerns considerably more in things than does the eye of the eagle. The dog has a far keener sense of smell than man, but it does not distinguish a hundredth part of the odours that for man are definite signs denoting different things. And the sense of touch, which the ape hardly possesses in its crudest initial form, has been developed only side by side with the development of the human hand itself, through the medium of labour’.62 Engels thereby indicates one of the most important issues of the theory of reflection: its non-mechanical character. That is to say, whether and to what degree the reflection is in fact physiologically a photocopy, a mechanical copy of the outside world, does not need to occupy us here. However, it must not be inferred from the fact that the accuracy of reflection is a condition of existence for any living thing, and that the incapacity to do this would necessarily have to lead towards ruin, that any reflection must or indeed can inevitably halt at the level of a mere photocopy. Nor, equally, that differentiation and the exceeding of such an immediate mirroring of reality could be exclusively due to thinking, such that the interpretation, analysis, etc. of what is perceived in a photocopy-like way would on its own be equipped to work out the essential relationships, determinations, etc. In reality, this process is far more complicated. When Engels says that man perceives more in things than does the eagle, what he means is that man’s eyes have grown accustomed to immediately and visually comprehending certain characteristics of objects, their relationships, etc. from the extensively and intensively infinite world of appearance. Hence, there already takes place in the perception of a face a sifting of the reflected outside world, a selection: an intensified significance for certain characteristics and a more or less peremptory disregard for others, up to the point that they are not even immediately perceived at all. The kind, degree, etc. of such a selection is socio-historically conditioned. The formation of new perceptual capacities is often connected to the regression of others. Indeed, man’s senses virtually ask questions of the outside world; consider acts like looking for, listening to, etc. True, if we have rejected a mechanical ‘division of labour’ here between sensuousness and understanding, then it should not be denied that such a constitution of the human senses can only come about through the accumulating and ordering of meaningful experiences (thus also through thinking). But this changes nothing in the result, in the capacity of the senses portrayed by Engels, in the capacity for their more abundant and – as regards that which is essential – more accurate receptivity. Concretising this issue will repeatedly be of

62

Engels 1987c, p. 456.

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concern to us later on. (The fact that the animal evolution prepares the way for this development appears quite certain to us. However, our problems have little to do with a consideration of this.) The concrete role of labour in this process consists precisely in the fact that what comes about is a division of labour among the human senses. The eye takes over all kinds of perceptive functions from the sense of touch, from the hands, whereby these are freed up for actual work and for their part can now develop higher and differentiate themselves further. Thus, Gehlen states: ‘The most important result of the highly complex cooperation between tactile and visual perception is that visual perception assumes control of experiences formerly obtained through tactile perception. This occurs in the following way: first, our hands are relieved of the task of experiencing objects and thus become free to undertake actual work and to utilize developed experiences; second, visual perception assumes primary control of the world and of our actions and regulates these’.63 The eye can only take over this function by learning to perceive – in Engels’s sense – such characteristics in visually accessible objective reality that immediately and commonly lie beyond the realm of ‘natural’ sight. Gehlen rightly asserts that qualities like hardness or softness, like weight, etc. are thereby visually perceived, that one no longer needs to appeal to the sense of touch in order to gauge them. And it fares similarly in the context of the amassing of meaningful labour experiences and in the course of the fixation of these experiences and their habituation in the form of conditioned reflexes in the case of other senses.64 As little as we can concretely pursue the individual steps of this development in the relation of the most primitive man to his tools, there nevertheless appear three distinct stages. First of all, stones of a particular constitution are selected for certain tasks, and sometime after their use they are thrown away again. Later, such stones that are suitable for use (hand-axe) are already being saved up after their discovery. A long development is still required until such stone tools are being fabricated, at first as imitations of their suitable discovered originals; slowly and gradually this leads to the differentiation of tools.65 This process, which is simultaneously that of the cooperation of people in labour and that of the coming into being of collective labour, demonstrates first and foremost the growth of mediations. Of course, interpolating a mediation between need and the satisfaction of need is already present at the most 63 64 65

Gehlen 1988, p. 174. Gehlen 1988, pp. 55 ff. The fact that Gehlen speaks at the same time of symbols, etc. does not change the correctness of his observations at all. Childe 1942, pp. 27 ff.

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primitive level of labour. This mediation, however, is still pretty much of a contingent character. In fact, the retreat of contingency already begins here, for the mere selection of suitable tools, even if this selection is provisional and the tools abandoned again, already exhibits a very primitive and limited overcoming of contingency – subject to the chance of finding suitable tools – for its objective, though still largely unconscious, basis. Of course, the objective contingency of natural relationships is in no way abolished, any more than it is at the most highly developed stages. Rather, it becomes apparent that human knowledge, through labour, step by step sees through the important stock of facts, slowly penetrating to apprehension of objective lawfulness and necessity. The natural limits of unknown lawfulness, which for the subject are manifested as the impenetrable thicket of indiscernibility between necessity and contingency, begin – very slowly – to emerge from darkness. Of course, only in the selfproduced tool and the differentiation of tools according to the aims of labour does there clearly emerge for the first time in the history of mankind the tendency to overcome contingency, and only then does freedom become apparent as necessity that has been apprehended.66 However, even here only at the level of everyday thinking. That is to say, the tendency towards the real overcoming of contingency in praxis is realised but – owing precisely to the immediate interconnectedness of thinking and praxis in the everyday – without this relationality having to become conscious as such. For this to occur, a higher level of the generalisation of meaningful experiences, an elevation over everyday thinking, is indispensable. Yet all the same, at least the seeds of such generalisations are present. One could say that generalisation in itself exists as a need that remains unconscious; it must ‘only’ still be transformed into a recognised forus. But this ‘only’ often designates developments that take centuries, millennia even. Later we will deal with the more complicated ideological consequences that such developments of contingency into necessity reveal, even when they are repeated at a higher level. We must, first, emphasise here the relationship of mediations to this process of coming to know objective reality. For only in this way does that particular immediacy of human everyday life emerge, an immediacy whose basis even in the most primitive stage of human development represents the system of mediations discovered and reproduced by men themselves. Ernst Fischer67 has quite rightly pointed out that such an important, such an elementary-seeming correlation as the subject-object relation came into being in this process of the 66 67

Engels 1987b, pp. 105 ff.; Hegel 1991, pp. 218–19. Ernst Fischer (1899–1972), Austrian journalist, cultural critic, and member of the Communist Party of Austria from 1934 to 1969. [Eds.]

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development of labour. His remarks appear so important to us that we must quote them at length here: Through the use of tools and the collective labour process, a living thing separated itself from nature in the full sense of the words worked out; for the first time a living thing, man, confronts the whole of nature as an active subject. Before man turns himself into a subject, nature turns into an object for him. An object of nature turns into an object only as a result of its turning into an object or into a means of labour; only by means of labour does a subject-object relation come into being. One can hardly speak of such a relation in any immediate, sudden metabolism; in no way are oxygen and carbon the objects of plants in the process of assimilation and disassimilation, and even in the association of the animal with its prey, with the part of the world that it eats, one can discern at best a first ephemeral dawning of a subject-object relation; in essence this metabolism does not distinguish itself from any other. Only in mediated metabolism, in the labour process, does a genuine subject-object relation come into being, which is the precondition of all consciousness. The disentanglement from nature, the alienation and subjectivation of man, takes place gradually in a protracted contradictory development. Nascent man and even still primitive man are close to nature to a great extent. The boundary between subject and object, between man and surrounding world, is fluid, indeterminate, and unmarked for a long time; and the strict distinction between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ is an extraordinarily late form of human consciousness.68 All of this is reflected in linguistic development, in which, of course, it should likewise be noted that in no way is it a question of the passivity of that which is merely being reflected. In fact, linguistic development plays an active role in this process. This activity is based on the inseparability of language and thinking. The linguistic fixation of generalisations drawn from meaningful experiences in the labour process is an important vehicle not only for their retention but also – precisely on account of our clearly keeping hold of them – for their higher development and further unfolding. The most important step in this direction is that from representation to concept. For without question the higher animals already have determinate, more or less distinct representations of their

68

Fischer 1949, pp. 119–20.

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surrounding world. Only with linguistic expression, however, is the expressed and fixed likeness of objects, processes, etc. of the outside world set apart from its immediately triggering objective occasion and made generally applicable. An abstraction is already embedded in the simplest and most concrete word; it expresses a feature of the object, whereby a whole set of appearances is synthesised into unity and actually subsumed into a higher unity (which always requires an earlier process of analysis). The simplest, most concrete word has thereby distanced itself from immediate objectivity in an entirely different way than is possible for the most highly developed representation among the higher animals. For only by means of this elevation of representation to the level of the concept can thinking (language) soar above the immediate response to the outside world, above mere recognition through mental images of associated objects or sets of objects. The – admittedly relative – freedom of action, more precisely the rational choice between different possibilities, adds up to a constantly enriched mastering of objectively existing mediations. Through the creation of the concept in thinking and language, the response to the outside world forfeits more and more of its original, occasion-bound, purely spontaneous immediacy. Moreover, the processes in the inner life of the subject who is thus responding to the surrounding world can be recognised and made conscious for the subject in their specificity, in their particularity and sophistication, only by means of the concept, whereby the subject-object relation portrayed above first comes into being. The genesis of self-consciousness already presupposes a certain level of consciousness about objective reality and can only develop in the process of interacting with this reality. However, if we want to grasp this process in its true nature, we must never forget that everyday life, training and habit in labour, and tradition and custom in the coexistence and cooperation of people act all at the same time to fix these meaningful experiences in language so as to transform the conquered world of mediations into a new world of immediacy. On the one hand, this tendency opens paths for the further conquest of reality. As that which has been gained so far turns into a self-evident possession of man, and as those endeavours that were necessary to this end obtain this character of immediacy through habituation, etc., there come into being new, even higher-level encounters with parts of objective reality that have not yet been illuminated and with the subjective intuitions, representations, and concepts of people. These encounters stimulate the discovery of relationships and regularities that hitherto remained unknown. Accomplishments occur here that inspire new needs for greater breadth and extension, but also consolidation and generalisation. However, on the other hand – and language plays a crucial role in this just as it does in the aforementioned complex – any fixing

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in place of meaningful experiences to the point of their becoming habitual can function conservatively and inhibit further progress. Once again, we recall Pavlov’s observation about how the second signal system of language can also create a harmful removal of people from objective reality, not merely in the indispensable dissociation from the triggering occasion but also by getting stuck in the new immediacy of the world of language that has become relatively detached from its relations to objects. This dialectic underlies any conflict between old and new, both in science and art as well as in the everyday. Language is thus simultaneously the mirror-image and vehicle of such complex, contradictory, and uneven developmental tendencies in the human control over objective reality. Despite the zigzag-like character of these lines of development, however, the ones that undoubtedly point the way forward are of course only those that prevail on a world-historical scale. For what the control of the second signal system in labour and language makes of the mere adaptation to a given natural milieu in the case of animals is an uninterrupted, socially determined transformation of this surrounding world as well as of the structure of the change-occasioning society and its members. The principle of the tendency towards higher development is implicitly contained in this movement itself and in the reproduction – conditioned by this movement – of society and its structure on a higher scale (in contrast to the reproduction of animal species, which is essentially steady). Of course, all we are talking about here is a tendency. In historical reality, there are repeated cases of congealment, decline, or even ruin. The consequence of this, however, is merely variedness and unevenness of socio-historical development; by no means does it eliminate the tendency towards higher development, even towards that which is qualitatively higher than the conditions of the current approach. Without being able to go into the details of linguistic development here even allusively, it must nevertheless be briefly noted that the development of language closely expresses the double movement portrayed above: the overcoming of the limits of current immediacy by generalising and the turning back of all that is thus achieved into a new immediacy of higher potentiality, of a more comprehensive and differentiated character. We have already pointed out that, on the one hand, primitive languages do not possess any generic terms, and, on the other, they have at the same time distinct expressions for every difference in objects and processes. Lévy-Bruhl provides numerous examples of this; we give only one: The North American Indians ‘have even many expressions, which may be almost called scientific, for frequently recurring forms of the clouds, [sic] and the characteristic features of the sky physiognomy[,] which are

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quite untranslatable, and for which it is hopeless to seek an equivalent in European languages. Thus, the Ojibbeways, for instance, have a peculiar fixed name for the appearance of the sunshine between two clouds. In the same way they have a distinct appellation for the small blue oases which at times are seen in the sky between dark clouds’. The Klamath Indians have no generic term for fox, squirrel, butterfly or frog; but each species has its own name. There is an almost countless number of substantives in the language.69 Thus, dual, trial, and quadrial forms have gradually died out in the more developed languages; thus, the Papuas of Kiwai Island – again according to LévyBruhl – have a whole series of suffixes for effect in order to express the differences between whether two have this effect on many in the present or the past, two on three, three on two, etc.70 What is striking to us in this development is the fact that such speech forms reflecting concreteness fade away more and more from language in order to cede to far more general generic words. However, must the capacity of language to concretely designate each concrete object and make it unmistakably recognisable thereby be lost? We believe that such often romantically expressed ideas are essentially false. True, each word loses sensuously proximate, immediate concreteness the more it draws near to a generic term. But one must not forget that in our linguistic relation to reality the sentence obtains an ever greater significance. The complex syntactical connections of words more and more determine their meaning in the context of their concrete use, and increasingly sophisticated linguistic devices are developed in order to make concrete relations to objects manifest through the relationship of words to each other in sentences. What is thus reflected in this linguistic development is the process, which we philosophically analysed earlier, of exceeding a more primitive immediacy and fixing the outcomes in a new, more complicated immediacy at the same time. In the course of this, increasing generalisation in individual words and the complexity of the connections and relations in sentence construction also clearly include a tendency – howsoever unconscious – to soar above the immediacy of everyday thinking. This latter tendency also becomes apparent in the fact that, when portrayed in its most universal features, linguistic development is unconscious. Under present circumstances the word ‘unconscious’ needs terminological clarific-

69 70

Lévy-Bruhl 1926, p. 173. [Eds.: The quoted passage is from Kohl 1985, p. 229.] Lévy-Bruhl 1926, pp. 142–3.

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ation. It cannot be the aim of these observations to get into a polemic with the desolate mystifications of so-called ‘depth psychology’. This ‘depth psychology’ obfuscates the essence of the unconscious even in those places where it is actually present and effective. For it is certain that a great number of thought processes, developments in sensation, etc. do not take place in people’s waking consciousness, and remarkably often only the outcomes of movements that are not conscious more or less suddenly enter into consciousness. It suffices to point to phenomena such as fancies, inspirations, etc. in order to have the immediate facts clearly before us. Many modern psychologists and philosophers even strive, for example, to draw illegitimately sweeping conclusions from so-called intuition, above all through a rigid opposition between intuition and conscious thinking, whereby the former always – epistemologically – predominates. What is thereby disregarded, however, is the intimate relationship between the two. According to its content, intuition tends to conclude a thought process that was consciously begun. For the person concerned, the intermediate links of his own thinking are not conscious; to be sure, with regard to the import of what is thought, they can always be made conscious later. These and similar mental appearances clearly suggest that the course of mental life is comprised of a continuous interaction of conscious and not-conscious processes. In fact, when we say that there is something that has been stored up in memory, this does not involve the mechanical conserving of some earlier thoughts. Rather, on the one hand, these thoughts are subject to continuous transformations, displacements, recolourings, etc.; on the other, they very often do not stand at the disposal of people automatically or at will. At times one forgets things that one acquired a long time ago precisely when they would be most needed; sometimes recollections that have fallen into oblivion pop up unintentionally, even when their doing so disrupts the present moment; etc. All of this clearly shows that in the brain of man and accordingly in his thinking, sensing, etc. there are processes taking place in which conscious and not-conscious elements and tendencies continuously merge into each other; only their animated unity accounts for the totality of mental life. The lawful regularity of these processes is still largely unexplored because, first of all, the psychological facts underlying them have only been revealed in the most partial way. The myths that arise from the fact that partial aspects that are perhaps important, such as sexuality, are fetishised as the forces moving everything and are brought into a metaphysical antithesis to conscious life cannot interest us here since they touch on our observations very little. (The aesthetic conclusions that are drawn, for instance, from Freud’s or Jung’s psychology are eccentric, unfounded, and erroneous to such an extent that a discussion of them would remain completely unfruitful.) We have touched on this set of problems only

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because its material importance for psychology in general is quite great. Later, we will indeed have to go into certain specifically psychological foundations of aesthetic comportment more closely, but these have little to do with the conscious/unconscious antithesis. If we now regard this antithesis in somewhat greater detail from the standpoint of our problems, then it becomes apparent that the concept of the unconscious has little to do with the one previously envisaged: for us it primarily concerns a social category, not a psychological one in the proper sense. By ‘conscious production’, we primarily understand a content-related issue: whether and to what extent the current content of consciousness (and accordingly its form as well) accords with objective reality, whether and to what extent the object and comportment towards it have been adequately reproduced by consciousness. The proper antithesis is thus less that between conscious and unconscious but rather the relationship of correct consciousness to false consciousness. (In which, of course, as Hegel recognised in his Phenomenology, this antithesis is a relative one and is in fact relativised in a socio-historical way.) Engels specified this very accurately in a letter to Franz Mehring: ‘Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him … Hence he imagines false or apparent motives’.71 Precisely when it is considered psychologically, what one quite often – and often quite ‘profoundly’ – refers to today as ‘unconscious’ takes place consciously in most cases, though with a false consciousness. That is to say, an objectively false consciousness about the actual facts, about the true consequences of what was accomplished in immediate and practical terms, corresponds to subjective conscious awareness of the immediate process. In line with this, the unconscious awareness of thinking is a socio-historical phenomenon for us. There are socio-historical motives that decide whether and to what extent a correct or false consciousness – that is to say, a conscious or unconscious social activity – comes into being. With that said, the processual character of this phenomenon is likewise indicated. As a matter of principle, the tendency towards a consciousness that is merely not yet correct can be contained in any false consciousness when it is regarded in a socio-historical way; of course, there are also cases in which false consciousness necessarily leads to a dead end. Time and time again, the development of mankind transmutes falsehoods into veracities in the course of the conquest of reality. True, even that which is correct sometimes is changed back into that which is false – and what is expressed in this is uneven development, which is

71

Marx and Engels 1934, p. 511.

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not evolutionarily linear but rather contradictory – though in the majority of cases this occurs not in the sense of a simple restitution of the old falsehood but rather in such a way that irregular progress brings forth new errors in the reflection of reality (early Middle Ages and antiquity). Running parallel with this process (the essential secular sign of which is the not-yet quality of the correctness of consciousness and in which the – relatively – correct is meant and intended, even if it is never actually achieved) is the already often emphasised fixation of meaningful experiences, which for its part continuously makes conscious acts into spontaneously unconscious ones. That which is incipiently conscious, precisely as a result of the fact that it turns into a component of everyday social praxis, turns into the no-longerconscious (the second real meaning of ‘unconscious’). Here too, it is a question of real, ascertainable facts of socio-historical development and not at all of a ‘special opinion’ of Marxists. Modern bourgeois psychology certainly has the tendency of depreciating the role of conscious awareness in human praxis and populating the vacuum that thereby comes into being with a mystified ‘unconscious’. That modern anthropology, however, which is supported by genuine facts and their unbiased analysis protests against this. Thus Gehlen, for example. He criticises Dewey’s ‘theory of the episodic character of consciousness’ and correctly describes the actual state of affairs: ‘I believe, in contrast, that in the human being, there is no unconscious existence but rather only one that has become unconscious – habits that have been gradually brought forth out of resistances now enter into the decisive new function of becoming the basis for an unburdened, higher, but again conscious behaviour’.72 On that point, it must still be noted that the kind of unconsciousness we are accustomed to labeling with the term ‘habituation’ is in no way something innate, but is rather the product of a long, often systematic social praxis. For instance, exercise (training) is nothing more than a way of practicing certain movements, modes of comportment, etc. so intensely that, in the event that objective reality calls for such a response, they can be put into effect without any conscious adjustment or effort. The games of the higher animals, like the flight lessons and exercises of young birds, already demonstrate such a character. The play of children distinguishes itself from that of young animals by the fact that it is attuned to such an increased variation of movements, modes of comportment, etc. that a qualitative difference already emerges as a result. Just think about all the variegated modes of responding that have turned into

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Gehlen 1988, p. 132, translation modified.

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habits and constitute the set of so-called good manners, though their goal too is to function in social life in an ‘unconscious’ habit-like way. The prerequisite for such a practice is that its subject be situated in ‘a secure position in life’.73 Among animals, this is the case only in earliest youth. What most notably distinguishes the early development of the child from that of the young animal is the greater sophistication and flexibility of habituation, its potential adaptation to diverse and unexpectedly changing new situations. That said, however, the ability to learn new things is also formed in the central nervous system. The habits that come into being later are created by the labour process, the different forms of human coexistence, school, etc. A part of these merely fix habits in place as the no-longer-conscious foundations of action in types of response that have already become the common property of the human race. (This is the rule in the case of animals living in freedom; there is no need to discuss further the difference in level.) But this is also partly a matter of making a habit out of new, at least heightened human abilities. The labour process not only makes a habit out of an already achieved level but also creates at the same time in the labouring person the conditions for raising his level; training in sports and practicing in the various arts have a tendency of this kind. (These latter points have no analogy among animals. Only under special circumstances can something even remotely similar come into being among higher domestic animals, but such clear limits are drawn even for the dispositions indicated here that the difference must remain more decisive than any convergence.) Without being able to dwell upon the issue of this form of the ‘unconscious’ here, we should briefly note that as a general rule a mode of comportment becomes unconscious through habituation, exercise, etc. so as to give more latitude to consciousness when it comes to decisive sets of questions. Thus, habituation in training serves to allow the person in question to focus in competition his consciousness exclusively on the correct tactic for success, etc. The latitude for conscious awareness is thus not constrained by what has become unconscious but is instead augmented by it. (It is self-evident that also operative here is that general dialectical contradictoriness according to which habituation – which, for instance, has turned into a rigid routine – obstructs and does not facilitate further conscious development.) Now in order to also come back to the issue of correct and false consciousness in the case of this second type of the ‘unconscious’ as well, it must be said that the dialectic of the correct and the false indicated above also of course bears upon this second process. Viewed abstractly, the conventionalism of that which was once con-

73

Gehlen 1988, p. 192.

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sciously conquered through practice, habituation, tradition, etc. can fix false assessments and reasons in place just as well as it can correct ones. At the same time, the relativity of individual processes and the main line of the progressiveness of the whole must always be kept in view. If a human community had exclusively false ideas about reality, they would quickly perish without fail. All false consciousness must therefore also contain certain elements of correctness. At the most primitive level these elements are to be found more in the reflection of objects, processes, and linkages themselves than in the attempt to explain these things, to conceptualise them, or to grasp their lawfulness. All of this elucidates the fact that the factor of unconsciousness has a pronounced tendency to be stronger in everyday life than in science, for instance. (Although – looked at in an ideological way – no developed scientific labour is possible without ‘making unconscious’ a whole array of supporting technical measures.) As such, the spontaneously immediate ‘unconsciousness’ of everyday life – the unconsciousness that dominates in the second process described here – is thus a social phenomenon. In countless cases, individual acts that are clearly conscious psychologically may constitute the triggering cause, yet as these acts turn into a general social possession they become unconscious in the social sense specified above – not only, in fact, from the point of view of general social praxis but also from that of the discrete individuals who henceforth perform these acts. These findings refer in a succinct way to language precisely in connection with its overall social character. The unconsciousness (in both of the meanings suggested here) of linguistic development becomes most clearly apparent when colloquial language, speech in the proper sense, is compared to specific kinds of linguistic use, for instance to scientific terminology. Strictly speaking, of course, such a terminology does not constitute a language of its own. It is founded on the common syntax and general lexicon, and, borne by these, conscious neologism relates to a narrow intermundia within actual language. However, the developmental type of such a partial section of language is also suitable for illuminating the immediacy and spontaneity of actual linguistic development. For example, its fertilisation by means of an individual writer proves nothing against it; for so far as a general acquisition occurs, it does not differ in any way from normal and everyday acquisition. It merely makes apparent what we have already indicated in other areas: that, even in their manner of formation and effect, the spheres of the pronounced objectivations set themselves apart from those of the everyday and overcome its spontaneity. At the same time, the relationship and antithesis of correct and false consciousness remains – with certain modifications – in force here as well. As we have likewise attempted to show, however, the common ground between science, art, and the everyday is in no way thereby nullified. We can

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clearly see this once again in the major function of language: the naming of external and internal objects. Again, needs and their fulfilment originally accrue from the labour process. When Engels rightly says about the emergence of language, ‘In short, men in the making arrived at the point where they had something to say to each other’, this content that is to be said to other men in the making unquestionably grew out of the labour process primarily.74 For the first time here, both for the object as well as for the mode of action, a concept evolves out of a mere mental representation, and this concept can only then be fixed in consciousness if it receives a name. As a result of it giving names to perceptions and representations as well, language also raises these things to a higher level of determinacy and definiteness than their occurrence among the higher animals can achieve. In constant dialectical relationship to the concept, in continuous ascension towards and descent from it, perception and representation must be somewhat qualitatively different from what they originally were without this movement. Hence one cannot appreciate the significance of naming for the mental life of people highly enough: it vehemently tears the new out of that which has been hitherto obscure in conscious awareness. And even when the appellative word is fixed in place by means of habituation, even when its use thus loses the shock of becoming conscious, even when the gradual conquest of reality by means of social awareness – ‘social’ here in our sense of that which has become unconsciously effective – is far advanced, something of this initial shock of naming is preserved, of course with a greatly altered and diminished emotional accent. Later on, in more concrete relationships, we will return at length to poetry, which works perpetually with the convulsion of proper naming. All that need be pointed out here is that the more developed the conditions are, the less likely it simply involves naming unfamiliar objects or objective relationships; instead, in most cases it involves the fact that human relations to objects, etc. in their surrounding world that have become self-evident by means of habituation, thus consciously imperceptible, appear ‘suddenly’ in a new light and in a new objective relation to man by means of poetry. Naming grows around and often imperceptibly turns over into determination. In itself, this structure is already implicitly contained in primitive acts of naming, although it attains qualitatively new nuances with the ever greater conquest of reality in terms of consciousness. Through poetic language, such ‘suddenness’ contains an often shocking effect, although nine times out of ten what is behind this is a struggle of the old with the new, the unexpected becoming-conscious of new, minutely developing relationships of people to their socio-historically

74

Engels 1987c, p. 455.

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altered surrounding world. A change in content thus stands behind every such formal effect, as its decisive substance. For this reason, such effects must also naturally crop up in everyday life; they constitute the content-related foundation for such poetic modes of expression. Tolstoy describes one such case very beautifully in Anna Karenina. In conversation Konstantin Levin gives a definition of new French painting that surprises Anna, who laughs and says, ‘I’m laughing … as one laughs seeing a very faithful portrait’.75 Both the continuing importance of naming and the practical (hence also emotional) attenuation of its effect are apparent here at the same time. This relationship was even more strongly present for the Greeks (recall Plato’s Cratylus). For primitive peoples, where this act of naming not only accompanies and expresses the first conquest of reality but also immediately includes it, the emotional accents must be qualitatively more powerful. And even beyond that – since the more primitive a society is, the less that objectivations can be developed in it – the new knowledge of reality gained by naming cannot organically fit into an already long-developed and proven system of objectivation. Even at very early stages, certain systems of objectivation must have come about to fulfil the function of vital social necessity, and thus rather than remaining at the naming of individual complexes, bringing them into relation to one another. Negatively, these systems are characterised by internal meagerness and an extremely insufficient soundness in their reflection of reality. Positively, they must internalise, with all of the spiritual consequences that ensue, the emotional accent of those shocks occasioned by the act of naming. Hence the emphatic role that the giving of names plays at the magical stage of human development. Gordon Childe describes this role as follows: It is an accepted principle of magic among modern barbarians as among the literate peoples of antiquity that the name of a thing is mystically equivalent to the thing itself; in Sumerian mythology the gods ‘create’ a thing when they pronounce its name. Hence to the magician to know a thing’s name is to have power over it, is – in other words – ‘to know its nature’ … The Sumerian lists of names may then have not only served a useful and necessary function as dictionaries, but also have been regarded as constituting in themselves instruments for mastering their contents. The fuller a list was, the more of nature could be mastered by its knowledge and use.76

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Tolstoy 2000, p. 698. [Eds.] Childe 1942, pp. 109–10.

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Gordon Childe shows here the survival of such representations even in relatively more civilised, more developed formations. Originally, the giving of names was, as the various creation stories, magical traditions, etc. show, inextricably connected to the representation of the controlling (bringing forth, destroying, transforming, etc.) of the object. This also had a great influence on the personal life of people. Frazer says, ‘Unable to discriminate clearly between words and things, the savage commonly fancies that the link between a name and the person or thing denominated by it is not a mere arbitrary and ideal association, but a real and substantial bond which unites the two in such a way that magic may be wrought on a man just as easily through his name as through his hair, his nails, or any other material part of his person. In fact, primitive man regards his name as a vital portion of himself and takes care of it accordingly’.77 From this follows the giving of double names described by Frazer, Lévy-Bruhl, and others in the case of the concealment of the actual name, the change of name in old age, etc.78 As outlandish as such representations may even be, they are very suitable for illuminating the structure of everyday thinking and the emergence of everyday consciousness, for they arose and took effect in a milieu that knew almost no objectivations in our sense of the word, a milieu in which the complicated interactions of everyday thinking with these objectivations, which make the ‘pure form’ of such thinking so difficult to work out, were thus not yet present. True, at the same time the terms must hardly be emphasised because the word (the naming of something) already has an embryonic objectivising character. Certainly, even the most developed language can never stand for objectivation in the same sense as perhaps science, art, or religion; it never becomes its own ‘sphere’ of human behaviour as these do. It is precisely the inseparability of language and thinking that entails its encompassing and laying the foundations for all human modes of comportment and action and its extension of universality to the whole of life while not constituting a particular ‘sphere’ therein. Certainly, one can also say that the ‘systems’ of magic, its intuitions, rites, etc. fused far more with everyday life than, for instance, those of later religions did, that these ‘systems’ of magic ‘encompass’ everyday life far more than they set themselves apart from it in order to interact with it as an autonomous objectivation. The powerful emotionalism of naming is indeed one of the means for the consolidation of the magician’s power, for the formation of magical doctrine and mode of comportment as an aspect of the incipient social division of

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Frazer 1955c, p. 318. Frazer 1955c, pp. 319 ff.; Lévy-Bruhl 1926, pp. 346–7.

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labour. However, its suitability for such a use is also based on this completely rudimentary and irresistible representation that primitive man has, according to which name and thing (person) provide an inextricable unity and the most fortunate and calamitous consequences can be the result of this unity for the individual. It is again the Marxist method of the explanation of the anatomy of the ape from that of man that helps us to historically grasp the phenomenon of magic in an approximately correct way, just through the knowledge of paths that have led from it to us. Correct knowledge also has to overcome two false extremes here. On the one hand, it is still quite fashionable today to idealise the ‘origin’ and to preach for a return to it (as an escape from the problems of the present that otherwise seem irresolvable). Whether this happens in the form of a brutal demagogy, as with Hitler and Rosenberg, or in the form of ‘sagacious’ philosophical lines of thought, as with Klages or Heidegger, is quite immaterial from our point of view here since in all of these cases equally the actual historical development is intellectually nullified. (We will see later that such constructions of unity even in the works of brilliant and progressive authors create much mischief; thus, in the convergence of lyric with magic in the works of Caudwell.79) On the other hand, to this day there are numerous positivists who interpret the facts of past times by simply foisting contemporary thoughts and feelings onto them. Thus the otherwise very knowledgeable and sagacious ethnologist Boas, who, for example, wants to construe magic in this manner: ‘And magic? I believe if a boy should observe someone spitting on his photograph and cutting it to pieces he would feel duly outraged. I know if this should have happened to me when I was a student, the result would have been a duel …’.80 Boas ‘merely’ overlooks the fact that no contemporary person believes that his personal fate depends upon such an action. He may in fact feel offended but not threatened or endangered in his physical existence as did the person of the magical period. On this question the older researchers of primitive times were far more historical and realistic. Frazer and Tylor81 consider the personification of natural forces by dint of analogies to be a relatively late stage. As we have already emphasised, even the subject-object relation that is held on to in lived experience is a product of labour, of the meaningful experiences of the labour process, for it presupposes both the conception of the surrounding world as a – 79 80 81

Christopher Caudwell, pseudonym of Christopher St. John Sprigg (1907–1937), English Marxist writer and critic. [Eds.] Boas 1951, p. 3. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), English anthropologist and founder of cultural anthropology. [Eds.]

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relatively controlled – field of human activity and the person who is – to a certain degree – conscious of his capabilities and limits in action, adjustment, etc. That is why meaningful labour experiences must have turned into habits to a considerable degree for the development of personifying inferences by analogy. Needless to say, the single most universal part of such lived experiences is common to all relatively low stages of development, namely the experience of coming upon an obstacle that cannot be overcome with existing powers and knowledge. In the case of the immediacy of the feelings and thought forms of such stages, an unknown power is suspected to be behind it, and what comes into being is the attempt to subject this power to human activity or at the very least to influence it in a way that is favourable to human activity. (The various forms of superstition that also nestle in the intermundia of our everyday also unquestionably emerge out of such an incapacity to cope with the outside world: admittedly it is a qualitative difference whether an episodic intermundia is involved or the breadth and depth of an entire life.) With regard to the phases of the fantasy-imbued, emotionally spontaneous analogies or inference by analogies coming into being here, the crucial motif is their immediacy. Frazer correctly emphasises ‘that the primitive magician knows magic only on its practical side’. From this follows a further characteristic: ‘He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful deity’.82 It simply and solely comes down to strictly and correctly applying the ‘rules’ that the primitive magician’s praxis mobilises with respect to an unknown power; the slightest non-observance would conjure up not only failure but also the utmost danger. The magician thus deals with these ‘powers’ as ‘inanimate things’, to a certain extent technologically (ritualisticomagically), not religiously. Certain ethnologists (like Read83) behold in this a kind of materialism in opposition to the idealism of animism. This is of course grossly exaggerated since, as has been shown, what is involved here is the period before the clear separation and contraposition of materialism and idealism. One could rather say that, in opposition to religion, the specificity of magic is a lesser degree of generalisation and a greater dominance of immediacy. The discernible boundaries of external and internal world are more indistinct and flow over into each other more than in the religio-animistic period. In magic the lack of an ethico-religious relation to the outside world is therefore no seed of the later materialist conception of the world but merely a primitive expression of the spontaneous materialism of everyday life familiar to us; however, Read

82 83

Frazer 1955a, pp. 220–1. Herbert Read (1893–1968), English art historian, poet, literary critic, and anarchist. [Eds.]

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correctly beholds in animism the incipient ideological approaches of idealism. The later antithetical tendencies have not yet differentiated themselves in magic. All elements of the conception of the world are focused on immediate – everyday-like, not objectivated – magical praxis. If Frazer thus calls magic a ‘spurious system of natural law’ and ‘a false science as well as an abortive art’, then these negatively evaluative expressions likewise include a certain modernisation because the quality of setting itself apart from everyday reality and the tendency towards its own (scientific or artistic) objectivity must still be missing in the magical stage of development. The terms are therefore only relatively permissible when it comes to illuminating the actual state of affairs because at this stage uncertain and unconscious approaches become apparent that move towards science or art in their later unfolding. To the extent that they have already received a certain objectivation here, it is – due precisely to the eminently practical character of magic – more akin to that tendential minimum of everyday reality than to that of autonomised science or art. So far as elements of later, higher objectivations are contained therein, which is unquestionably the case, they are completely subordinate to the main magicopractical tendency, particularly at the outset, and their specificity can only rise to prominence sporadically, episodically, and always unconsciously – although not accidentally. We say ‘not accidentally’ because the intention towards a correct reflection and knowledge of objective reality existing-in-itself is already contained – unconsciously, of course – in the most primitive act of labour, indeed in the act of gathering, since a total ignorance of reality or a total disregarding of its objective relationships would have to lead instantly to ruin. Labour signifies a qualitative leap here in the direction of emergent tendencies towards knowledge. However, a relatively high level of generalisations and meaningful experiences must be attained in order to be able to take the first step in the direction of breaking free from the prevailing magical tendencies, the foundation of which is precisely an ignorance of objective reality. Despite this immediately inseparable unity, we must hold on to the objective divergence of generalisation in meaningful labour experiences and in those experiences of magical praxis. The former lead later to science, while in most cases the latter will inhibit this development, as Gordon Childe has rightly pointed out. True, this antithesis is – correct as it is for the trend line of development – not absolute. Interactions occur time and again so that Pareto, as we showed earlier, can with some justification discern interactions here too. (Later we will speak at length about similar tendencies in art.) Present in all of this is the most general similarity with the structure of everyday thinking. True, the fundamental difference must not thereby be forgotten: consciously or unconsciously, the everyday of

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civilisation always has at its disposal the results of a developed science and art. The subordination of their specificity to its own, often momentary, practical interests can indeed call forth serious deformations of their specific essence, yet the degree to which objective reality is being mastered exists at an incomparably higher, qualitatively different level. Therefore, the structural similarity now being emphasised should only be understood in the very most general sense, and one should not apply it, by way of analogy, to details. This primitive nature of the magical period entails that any further development of its chaotically mixed and immediately practical mode of comportment towards objective reality moves in an idealist direction. G. Thomson84 gives a more exact characterisation of the magical condition than Frazer or Tylor does. He says, ‘Primitive magic is founded on the notion that, by creating the illusion that you control reality, you can actually control it. It is an illusory technique complementary to the deficiencies of the real technique. Owing to the low level of production, the subject is as yet imperfectly conscious of the objectivity of the external world, and consequently the performance of the preliminary rite appears as the cause of success in the real task; but at the same time, as a guide to action, magic embodies the valuable truth that the external world can in fact be changed by man’s subjective attitude towards it’.85 It is obvious that in such a slight and little more than sketchy knowledge of reality – a knowledge that in its objectively valuable parts, however, is based upon meaningful labour experiences – the subjective side of the labour process, the temporal priority of goal-setting as cause, and the objective results as effect were generalised and systemised earlier than the ever so fragmentarily known elements of objective reality itself. And since, as has already been highlighted, at this stage analogy is the chief intellectual vehicle for generalisation and systematisation, it appears natural that the step across magic towards idealism takes place in the direction of the personification of unknown powers according to the model of the labour process: in the direction of animism and religion. The acceptance of the existence of ‘spirits’ is not decisive. As Frazer shows, such an acceptance can already be present in magic, which is readily understood since it involves a rudimentary generalisation of the subjective side of the labour process. In magic, however, this analogising moves on the same level as all other observations. Not until personification is endowed with all the features of self-conception do new relations to spirits come into being; there are, of course, countless transitions here that we do not have to go into. Frazer cor-

84 85

George Derwent Thomson (1903–1987), English classicist and Marxist scholar. [Eds.] Thomson 1946, pp. 13–14. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.]

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rectly indicates the decisive difference: ‘It is true that magic often deals with spirits, which are personal agents of the kind assumed by religion; but wherever it does so in its proper form, it treats them exactly in the same fashion as it treats inanimate agents, that is, it constrains or coerces instead of conciliating or propitiating them as religion would do’.86 Hence the lack of ethico-religious relationships to the outside world does not signify a higher ‘materialist’ stage compared to idealist representations that have become ethical in the course of development, but rather it is the essential sign of the primitive stage. Similarly, idealism must be construed here as progress, just as slavery must be construed to be a higher development in comparison to cannibalism. It is a real merit of Frazer’s analysis of magical theory and praxis that he accentuates the great importance of imitation as fundamental to the relationship of people to objective reality. In fact, he expressly links imitation to what he calls ‘the Law of Similarity’ in the magical sphere of representation, namely the fact that the same always brings forth the same. However, a more exact consideration of the other kind of magic adopted by him, according to which ‘things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after physical contact has been severed’, also exhibits the crucial role of imitation here.87 This is understandable. For the primitive, immediately practical response to the – relatively – immediate reflection of reality is expressed only in imitation. A relatively long development must take place, a rather far-reaching removal from immediacy must be accomplished – in which analogising must pass over into a consideration of causes, even if this consideration is still undeveloped – for people to arrive at an understanding of how to achieve their desired effects on nature with methods that no longer have an outward, immediate similarity with the reflected phenomenon (though they surely resemble its essence and lawfulness). Keep in mind that the single most primitive tools were simple imitations of stones that earlier had been accidentally found and later were intentionally gathered. In the case of findings from these early stages, it is not all that easy to distinguish the original from the imitation. Only much later do tools come into being that accomplish what is essential (the useful effect of labour) in such a way that their form arises out of the knowledge of the relationship of end to means. The more differentiated labour becomes, the more tools receive an autonomous – technologically determined – form and the more the imitation of immediately discovered objects disappears in this field. Imitation from the subjective side

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Frazer 1955a, p. 225. Frazer 1955a, p. 52.

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is something that is essentially different: the imitation of movements proven in labour practices, etc. Here, imitation remains – with many variations, with increasing rationalisation – a permanent principle of labour, of the continuity of meaningful labour experiences. Therefore, the more imitation is based on the human, the more productively it can remain operative at higher stages as well. Imitation as the immediate conversion of reflection into praxis is such a basic fact of more evolved life that it can even be found in widely recognised ways among the higher animals. Wallace88 has observed, for instance, that birds that have never heard the singing of their own species adopt the ways of singing of those species with which they coexist. However, many bourgeois researchers are sensible of the danger here of accepting a fundamental fact in the relationship of living things to their environment; it could even lead, they rightly fear, to the recognition of reflection as the basis of science and art. That is why Groos,89 who cites the aforementioned observation made by Wallace, denies that the games of animals have anything to do with imitation; on the contrary, he says these games are ‘the ways of reacting arisen from the innate nature of the organism’.90 With this declaration of the innateness of play among animals, the problem of genesis is meant to be dogmatically neutralised. Basic facts are thus mystified, and knowledge of the development of the complicated out of the simple is blocked. Polemicising with another author, Gehlen correctly remarks that the ‘claim that a “drive to play” exists is, of course, merely an expression that does not really explain anything’.91 Of course, the most primitive man already stands at a qualitatively higher level than the most evolved animals because the content of reflection and imitation is borne by the medium of language and labour, even when the latter consists only of the act of gathering. Imitation is thus also no longer completely spontaneous in the case of primitive man but is often consciously directed towards a goal, thereby going beyond immediacy in certain ways. In its human form, imitation already presupposes a comparatively developed subject-object relation because this imitation is already clearly directed towards a certain object as a part or aspect of man’s surrounding world. There thus exists therein a certain conscious awareness that this object confronts the subject and exists

88 89 90 91

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), British naturalist and formative early contributor to the theory of evolution. [Eds.] Karl Groos (1861–1946), German philosopher, psychologist, and theorist of the evolutionary significance of play. [Eds.] Groos 1898, p. 12, translation modified. Gehlen 1988, p. 193.

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independently from him but can be modified by the activity of the subject under certain circumstances. This independence is admittedly present more in an emotional or an experiential sense, for instance as anxiety, etc. It is the archetype of what we have called the spontaneous materialism of everyday life. The more indeterminate and characterised by fleeting sensation the notion of the objectivity of the outside world appears to be here, the more exact and ‘prescribed’ its imitative magical reproduction becomes. Naturally, this reproduction only grasps the exterior, appearance-like features of the object, of the ‘lawful regularity’ of its changes (spring after winter). Owing to the haziness of the arrangement and the scantiness of knowledge, however, these modes of appearances and features are fixed in place as intrinsic, and what is beheld in their exact adherence is the magical means, conjuring forth the desired effect (for instance, the return of spring, good harvest, etc.) through imitation. The more these imitations require the cooperation of many (communal dances, etc.), the more attention is paid to ritualistic precision. This situation beguiles Frazer into beholding a ‘pseudo-science’ in the ‘theory of magic’ and a ‘pseudoart’ in its praxis (and thus in imitation).92 Because of this, the immediate unity of theory and praxis is loosened on the one hand, and the entire situation is modernised by applying a later standard on the other. Those modes of comportment towards reality that subsequently achieve autonomous methods as science and art are still contained here, along with the seeds of later religion, in an indissoluble mixture, both in theory and practice. Their separation and juxtaposition is all the more misleading considering, for instance, that the elements of praxis (dance, singing, etc.) indeed constitute a starting point for art and help to form its own tendencies. At the same time, however, these elements also tend to inhibit – indeed, to suppress – art’s autonomisation, the establishment of its true specificity, as we will see. Of course, this does not alter the situation at all: the seeds of the aesthetic reflection of reality – inextricably, we repeat, mixed with other modes of comportment – are objectively present in the concrete reflection of reality, in the attempt to hold on to that which is reflected through imitation. As important as this finding is as a basis for understanding the later differentiations, the image become very confused when one wants to interpret science and art (even in distorted forms) into this early stage that is anterior to their later differentiation. Not only is this early stage thereby modernised in an illegitimate way, but also the specificity of the scientific and artistic reflection is likewise distorted. In some foundational (but not all) aspects, artistic reflection indeed proceeds from imitatively adhering

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Frazer 1955a, p. 113.

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to that which is reflected, but it must continue and transform qualitatively in order to be able to get its own autonomy. And, as has already been suggested and as will be explained later, scientific reflection must go beyond the scope of the entirely immediate imitative ‘method’. It must seek new ways of analysing and synthesising according to objective standards in order to be able to find its own method in the processing of that which is reflected. In both cases, it is the growing conquest of objective reality and the control (acquired and enhanced in its course) of one’s own subjectivity, of the bodily and intellectual powers of people, that make it possible and necessary to leave immediate imitation behind. Only when, by means of a thought-experiment, one eliminates all of these achievements and abilities of a millennia-long development can one obtain a reconstructive insight into the structure of the magical period and into the forms and contents of its manner of reflecting reality. What creates the greatest difficulty are those modernisations that project some ‘profound’ desire of modern man as ‘ideology’ into the initial periods of human development and from there now pretend to understand the present by way of contrast. Against this, one must hold on to the fact that it is precisely the ‘ideological’ side that was naturally the most undeveloped component of the primitive world-image, that even individual perceptions which are correct in themselves receive a phantasmagoric, chaotic character in these interpretations. That is why there is much that is legitimate in the boisterous turn of phrase offered by Engels, who called the ‘ideology’ of this condition and its partial survival at a higher level ‘primitive nonsense’, and he is absolutely right when he rejects as pedantic the attempt to find economic causes for all of its individual forms, etc., although he realises that of course at that time as well ‘economic necessity was the main driving force of the progressive knowledge of nature’.93 For us it is only important to realise that these primitive insights, as ‘nonsensical’ as their generalising rationales and summaries were, as such encompass a far greater field than one would imagine from a purely theoretical point of view. Without transforming its basis, these are particularly great opportunities to expand knowledge that is no doubt very meager. For instance, Max Schmidt94 points to the surprisingly vast knowledge of plants among entirely primitive peoples who have admittedly long outgrown primal states, a knowledge which becomes distinctly apparent in the differentiation of their nomenclature for plants.95 One can of course find something similar in all sorts of fields whose praxis is immediately 93 94 95

Marx and Engels 1934, p. 482. Max Schmidt (1874–1950), German curator and anthropologist of Latin America. [Eds.] Schmidt 1923, p. 33.

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necessary to life, in a constantly rising, albeit uneven, form, as the activity of gathering passes over with many transitions into a handling of the soil and into a cultivation of plants, as the hunter and fisherman make ever better and more complicated instruments (projectiles, bow and arrow, harpoon, etc.). However, all of this takes place without the essential, manifest alteration of ‘ideology’, of the generalisation of insights into and meaningful experiences of the outside world and man himself. Our motto proves to be true here once again: people ‘do not know it, but they are doing it’. However, for all the recognition of this universal validity of the unconscious actions of people (in the sense indicated by us), which also has a structurally determinative impact as a main tendency in our examples, the qualitative difference, indeed antithesis, must not be overlooked: the unconsciousness of action is only a formal and structural similarity. Real knowledge of the outside world and the formation of human abilities, above all through the emergence and development of the great systems of objectivation (science and art), create such qualitative differences that comparison is possible at all only with the help of the most extreme generalisations. The most primitive magical stage of development is thus characterised by this connection of individual insights into the outside world that are ever more accurate (of the constant growth of human ability in the control of the outside world) to these ‘nonsensical’ attempts at explanation that are objectively founded on nothing. This discrepancy must be further aggravated when magicians, medicine men, shamans, etc. turn into particular ‘occupations’ through the social division of labour. This social differentiation is carried out, at least initially, on the basis of the selection of the most knowledgeable and experienced, and as much as the emergence of a caste frequently tends to lead to congealment and the inhibition of the further formation of knowledge, it is nevertheless a basic concern of this social stratum to defend and secure its privileged existence by performing well. This being-privileged, expressed above all in liberation from bodily labour, serves to intensify idealist tendencies in the observation of nature, which proceed from the subjective setting of goals for labour and explain natural phenomena according to the ‘model’ of labour so conceived; this is all the more the case insofar as the cessation of immediate material control of meaningful work experiences necessarily strengthens these tendencies. In social development, such tendencies are operative for a very long time, even when all kinds of objectivations have developed for quite a while. The discrepancy between ever-increasing individual insights and their unreal ideological generalisation therefore necessarily grows from time to time, even after this has long since passed the stage of ‘primitive nonsense’, even after thinking has gone from mere immediate analogising to a more or less developed causal analysis, by means of which a real achievement of insights

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into the outside world and into people already becomes more and more visible behind the idealist and hypostasisingly anthropomorphic coverings. Hence, Vico justifiably characterises this thinking as one working with ‘imaginative universals’ or basic concepts.96 Human knowledge must thus arrive at a relatively high degree of breadth and depth so that a materialist critique of myths, ‘imaginative universals’, etc. can begin. Regarding this development and the difficulty of overcoming the idealist inversion of cognitively achieved facts and relationships, Engels gives an incisive summary that indeed relates primarily to already highly developed conditions, though at the same time it clearly illuminates precisely that line of development which is important for us. He says, ‘In the face of all these constructs, which appeared in the first place to be products of the mind and seemed to dominate human societies, the more modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background, the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able, at a very early stage in the development of society (for example, already in the primitive family), to have it carried out by other hands than its own. All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the development and activity of the brain. Men became accustomed to explaining their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealist world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognise the part that has been played therein by labour’.97 Here, the role of the subjective aspect of labour in the emergence and fixation of idealist ideology is conspicuous. The initial stages of this development are still keenly contested among scientists today. For our purposes, however, it is not decisive when and how the ‘animistic’ world-images further developed themselves into myths and religions out of the chaos of magic and the sphere of representation related to ‘faculties’ (to employ an overly determined word for the designation of these very indistinct thoughts and feelings). It suffices for us to see clearly that those forms of the mental division of labour of mankind that appear self-evident to civilised man such that he is hardly able to envision these forms as something that emerged historically, forms which the most important philosophies reckoned

96 97

Vico 1999, pp. 158–9. Engels 1987c, p. 459, translation modified.

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among the supratemporal modes of comportment and objectivations ontologically belonging to human nature (it suffices to point to Kant here), have gradually acquired this essence in the course of a protracted historical development. From this point of view, it is striking how little the earlier developmental stages knew of the ethical and properly religious modes of human comportment towards the world (towards the hereafter) and towards themselves. We have already referred to one such finding made by Frazer. Linton and Wingert98 say of the Polyniesian conception of the world, ‘The whole concept [of tapu and mana in Polynesian religion] was mechanistic and impersonal, involving no idea of sin or of deliberate punishment’; the gods were ‘manipulated’ by such concepts, and priests were the ‘skilled craftsmen’ of such a technique.99 Tylor also thinks that ceremony and ritual ‘are the means of intercourse with and influence on spiritual beings, and as such, their intention is as directly practical as any chemical or mechanical process …’.100 And in relation to ethics: ‘Savage animism is almost devoid of that ethical element’ which later plays such a great role in religions. Ethical laws come into being ‘on their own ground of tradition and public opinion, comparatively independent of the animistic beliefs and rites which exist beside them’. He does not call this state of affairs ‘immoral’ but rather ‘unmoral’.101 Tylor not only confirms here the lines of development traced by us but also points towards another extremely important issue. Namely, the fact that those forms of the reflection of reality and of the human responses to them that we tend to label with the term ‘ethics’ are likewise products of a long historical development (and likewise are not innate or ontological attributes of being human) that have developed independently of magical, animistic, and religious representations and only grew into that – extremely contradictory – union with religion relatively late; to address this topic would go far beyond the scope of this work. All that has to be noted here as well – whereas Tylor, like most bourgeois researchers of primitive communism and its dissolution, ignores it – is that the necessity of an ethics, albeit still very primitive, first emerges with the development of classes. That is to say, only out of this ground do social obligations grow that no longer immediately coincide with the immediate needs and interests of each individual; indeed, these social obligations

98 99 100 101

Ralph Linton (1893–1953) and Paul Stover Wingert (1900–1974), American cultural anthropologists. [Eds.] Linton and Wingert 1946, pp. 12–13. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] Tylor 1877, p. 362. Tylor 1877, p. 360.

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are downright opposed to these immediate needs and interests. Duty, both in the legal and the ethical sense, thus comes into being only with the dissolution of primitive communism and the coming into being of classes. Engels gives a very incisive image of this former condition precisely in relation to our problem: ‘Within the tribe there is as yet no difference between rights and duties; the question whether participation in public affairs, in blood revenge or atonement, is a right or a duty, does not exist for the Indian; it would seem to him just as absurd as the question whether it was a right or a duty to sleep, eat, or hunt’.102 This is not the place to determine in which concrete forms this development took place. What must be established here is merely that the Viconian ‘imaginative universals’, in which for a long time is expressed the relationship of the world for people, are no longer merely reflections of nature but also – and even to an increasing extent – the reflections of society. The cooperation and coexistence of people have ceased to be taken as a ‘natural’ matter of course, for the regulation of which everyday-like active tradition, habit, and spontaneous public opinion suffice, even in individual cases of possible conflict. They have turned into a problem for which people had to develop new objectivations and modes of comportment, including even ethics, in order to solve it, in order to conserve and reproduce in a contradictory way a society that is in itself contradictory. The contradictoriness of this development becomes apparent at all points. Frazer refers to something very interesting by beholding in the growth of man’s knowledge a basis for the transition from the magical mode of representation to the religious one; in fact, not directly but, on the contrary, in such a way that with ‘the growth of his knowledge man learns to realise more clearly the vastness of nature and his own littleness and feebleness in presence of it’. Parallel with this grows man’s belief in the power of those forces that, according to his ideas, control nature, which, as we saw, received an increasingly anthropomorphic and personified shape. For this reason, ‘he resigns at the same time the hope of directing the course of nature by his own unaided resources, that is, by magic, and looks more and more to the gods as the sole repositories of those supernatural powers which he once claimed to share with them. With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic, which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art’.103 Frazer rightly accentuates here the antithesis of magic and religion. In

102 103

Engels 2007, p. 217. Frazer 1955a, pp. 373–4.

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addition to this, however, it should be noted – about which both he and others have amassed a great deal of material – that in most cases religions assimilate and preserve magic as a sublated aspect. For instance, as soon as there are ceremonies that have to be followed exactly, as soon as exactly prescribed words, gestures, etc. are engaged as mediators so as to favourably influence the divinity and make it inclined to pleas, it is clear that magical tendencies thereby appear as organic components of religion. The more developed a religion is, the more deeply it encroaches upon ethical problems, and the more inwardly the behaviour determined by rites is supposed to be, then the more conspicuously does it become apparent that religion is deeply immersed in magical representations. Of course, these two intrinsically antithetical tendencies cannot always live peacefully with each other; often – increasingly in the course of history – there come into being extremely fierce struggles between the exponents of magical representations and those of ‘purely’ religious ones. Attempts to completely release a religion from its magical lore often portend profound crises in the religion itself. We have not examined here the extraordinarily diverse historical forms of these crises, some of which concern things like iconoclasm and the magical foundations of the relationship between religion and art. All that is of importance to us is that – despite contradictions that can change into crises – a historical continuity exists between magic, animism, and religion in which, as the main line of development, the constant increase and further formation of subjectivism in ideology, the increasing anthropomorphisation of the active forces in nature and society, and the tendency to apply this intuition and the precepts following from it to the whole of life become predominant. In addition, of course, the elemental materialism of labour (only as such, not conscious of itself as a worldview) likewise perfects itself constantly. It is still precisely this period which is one of the greatest in the expansion of human control over nature. (It suffices to keep in mind the role of the use of bronze and iron.) The more both directions develop, the more inevitable their collision and conflict appears to become. But this is only an appearance; in historical reality, the conflict blunts itself most of the time and is seldom staged in an earnest and consequential way. Again, it is not our task here to examine details. It is only to accentuate thereby a trait that is of great significance for our study; its consequences will only become explicitly apparent later. It involves the character of the intellectuo-emotional processing of the reflection of reality in religion that comes quite directly and powerfully close to everyday thinking. We have already highlighted this structural similarity with the everyday in the discussion of magic, and this thereby adds to and amplifies the fact that the primitive antecedent stages of religiosity, magic, and animism are overcome

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by religion not as annihilation but rather in the sense of the Hegelian sublation (namely, preservation). Of course, this is not meant as a simple structural identification of the everyday and religion. First and foremost, religion already creates particular institutional objectivations at a very early stage; it extends from the fixed functions of the medicine man all the way to the universalistic churches. What also forms in some religions with time is a precisely determined objective coherence of dogmas rationalised and systematised further by theology. There thus come into being here objectivations that exhibit features related formally in part to social organisations and in part to science. Here, however, it comes down to briefly indicating the intrinsic specificity of religious objectivations, at least in their main features, to demonstrate their structural proximity to the everyday. Again, the immediate connection between theory and praxis constitutes the decisive aspect. It is precisely the essential characteristic of any religious ‘truth’. The truths of science certainly have extraordinarily practical consequences; in fact, an overwhelmingly great number of them arose out of practical needs. However, the becoming-practical of a scientific truth is always a very complicated process of mediations. The more highly the scientific means develop and the more acute their impact on the praxis of everyday life thus becomes, the more widely ramified and complicated this system of mediation becomes. The fact that distinct technical sciences arise with the formation of the modern natural sciences in order to make purely scientific findings theoretically concrete and practically usable is clear proof of this state of affairs. Of course, in the final practical use (for instance, in the case of workers themselves), an immediate comportment can again come into being with respect to these – objectively very broadly mediated – results of science. This is most certainly the case with consumers of the results of science; in most cases, the average man who takes medicine, travels by plane, etc. has no clue as to the actual relationships between the things he makes use of. He uses them entirely simplemindedly, based on the ‘belief’ in the statements of experts and meaningful empirical experiences about the immediate reliability of each respective concrete device. Of course, an incomparably greater knowledge of these relationships exists in the case of an active operator (pilot, etc.). However, it is in the nature of things that even this operator must not always resort to scientific foundations as a matter of principle, and only in the rarest of cases does this operator actually have recourse to such foundations. For ordinary praxis, empiricism in the gathering of meaningful experiences based on ‘belief’ in authorities completely suffices. It is clearly apparent here that the increasing dominance of science over more and more realms of life by no means abrogates everyday thinking, which is not replaced by scientific thinking; on the contrary, it even repro-

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duces itself in those areas in which earlier a far less immediate relationship to the objects, etc. of everyday life existed. In comparison to earlier periods, for instance, a far smaller percentage of people today have a well-founded understanding of how the means of transportation used by them are constituted. This certainly does not preclude a hitherto undreamt-of mass dissemination of scientific knowledge. On the contrary: it is precisely the lively dialectic of these mutually contradictory tendencies that composes the basis for the continuous reproduction of everyday thinking. We did not use the term ‘belief’ by accident. For most of the time – and this is true of the overwhelming majority of actions in everyday life – when immediate practical conclusions can and must be drawn out of some theoretical finding, belief necessarily takes the place of scientific proof. For example, with much humour Thomas Mann recounts how in the Chicago clinic where he was operated on it was considered indiscreet to inquire about the medicine one received, even when it was a well-known household remedy like bicarbonate of soda.104 ‘Belief’ is thereby virtually cultivated. Not to mention certain trends in psychiatry where quasi-religious relationships are deliberately called forth. And it does not need to be specifically proven that all of modern advertising aims to cultivate such a ‘belief’. That science so often figures here as the awakener of such a ‘belief’ makes the relationship indicated above even more evident. True, the word ‘belief’ is not really accurate for the situation just described. It indeed includes the antithesis towards knowledge and cognition, but primarily it contains the lack of will, the concrete possibility, etc. to verify. With that said, however, such acts come close to what one is accustomed to label in the terminology of logic as opinion as opposed to knowledge. In the distinction between opinion and belief Kant greatly stresses precisely this aspect of the further development towards knowledge and verification: ‘if something is considered true on objective grounds which are nevertheless consciously regarded as inadequate, and is therefore no more than an opinion, this opinion can nevertheless eventually become knowledge if it is gradually corroborated by further grounds of the same kind’. In contrast, according to Kant belief comes to being in those places where such a further step is factually impossible: ‘Now all belief is a conviction of truth which is subjectively adequate but consciously regarded as objectively inadequate; it is therefore treated as the opposite of knowledge’.105 Such a brusque opposition of belief

104 105

Mann 1961, p. 170. [Eds.] Kant 1991, p. 244.

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and opinion is quite understandable from the viewpoint of the axiomatics of his philosophical system; the relationship and systematic fitting into each other of knowledge, ethics, and religion can only be thus constructed for this system. In everyday thinking, however, not only does the objective possibility of opinion progressing into knowledge play an important role, but so too at the same time does the will for such a progression. Regardless of which social causes are operative here – we have already enumerated several – their becoming-effective transforms the thought-construct of opinion, which objectively represents a possible preliminary stage of knowledge but subjectively, and indeed socio-psychologically, a variety of belief. For instance, with the help of probability calculus it is ascertainable today that in lotto games any arbitrary combination of five numbers has the same chance of winning, though on the basis of a dream, etc. the individual gambler will ‘believe’ that his numbers have got to be drawn without fail. The objective possibility of opinion leading on to knowledge has no influence on such ‘belief’ whatsoever. This example is admittedly an extreme one. It would certainly be possible, however, to demonstrate a similar structure in a plethora of facts drawn from everyday life, and this is, despite the epistemological concerns just discussed, nevertheless designated most accurately, according to the nature of the subjective act, with the term ‘belief’. Without question, what thereby clearly comes to the fore is the already discussed structural affinity between the magical period and the everyday. Especially if we remember that magicians treated the transcendent powers ‘technologically’, as it were, so that the everyday’s mixture of an unfamiliar nature (one that is subjectively experienced as transcendent) and habituated unconscious comportment finds its structural model in a concrete case here. The merely structural kind of affinity between magic and the everyday cannot be accentuated sharply enough, for any convergence between the two in terms of content is a mystification, an illegitimate analogy. Even when a person today observes superstitious ‘rituals’ (treading first with the right foot, etc.), the contents of his feelings, representations, etc. have nothing in common with the contents of the magical period. Even with a much more accurate knowledge of all the circumstances that are of course not present in everyday life, we could not possibly reproduce their world of sensation and thought. Only the most general forms of superstition can survive by tradition, but the present always provides the actualisation of superstition with lived content. However, the real problem of belief comes into being only with the overcoming of the magical period through animism, later through religion. The problem becomes apparent at once in a certain emotionalism of subjective comportment. In the case of religious belief, the emotional emphasis is hardly comparable with that which

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we have designated by this term in everyday life. When I ‘believe’ that my plane will reach its destination without crashing and when I ‘believe’ that Christ rose from the dead, I am thus carrying out two very widely separated acts of thinking and sensing. Indeed, the emphasis in religious belief even gives the intellectual element an accent that otherwise only crops up by way of exception in everyday praxis. Both the content of religious belief as well as its practical ramifications concern the whole man, and the manner in which this content is taken up as well as the response to it determine his entire fate. Therefore – in contrast to particular actions of everyday life based on ‘belief’ – it is a question of something universal both in the subjective and objective sense of intention. This universality and the circle of obligation contained within it result in that emphatic accent of religious belief which sharply distinguishes it from similar acts of everyday thinking. Finding this emphasis and its underlying relatedness to the essential fate of the whole man appears to tear open an abyss between the everyday and religion. As we have seen, however, the essential structural affinity between these two spheres of life is not thereby destroyed. We refer here again briefly to the affinity between magical praxis and everyday praxis if only because in that kinship the most important features of everyday life (the immediate interconnectedness of theory and praxis) are clearly expressed. If we keep in mind the magical conception of powers or forces represented as transcendent, ‘transcendence’ here means simply something unknown. Its ‘profundity’ is simply a modernisation that occurs when one projects onto the early days of man thoughts and feelings that came into being much later, which roughly constitute the basis of the concept of belief in the proper sense (in contrast to opinion) as determined by Kant, by means of which what is actually unknown is transformed into something that is unknowable as a matter of principle without any historical warrant. Even after animistic anthropomorphisations come into being much later and even after the relationship of people to their vital powers receive ethical accents, the notion of transcendence – and the feeling foundational to and concomitant with it – develops only very gradually. (Bear in mind the representations of deities in Homeric poetry.) Only then can the emphatic character of religious comportment come into being and flourish, when it encompasses the whole man in a way that at the very least has an ethical component, an ethical undertone. For even in the magical period (and not uncommonly in later everyday life) actions, decisions, etc. are involved that decide on weal and woe, indeed on the existence as such of man. In such cases a powerful emotionalism naturally comes into being; however, while success or failure hinges upon the application of extrinsic practical rules, that inward turn and that reflection on the inner foundations of one’s own personality lack

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the emotions that constitute an essential aspect of religious emphasis. (So as not to complicate our observations far too much, we ignore on the one hand those incidents of everyday life in which an ethical component contributes and on the other those incidents in religious comportment in which magical remnants still dominate.) Religious emphasis is thus directed towards something that is transcendent as a matter of principle, towards a beyond vis-à-vis real mundane life. Even when death and the preservation and fate of the self after death do not constitute the concrete theme, even when the starting point and goal of a particular religious act is immediately this-worldly, a principled transcendence noses its way between the concrete whole man and the object of his religious intention: not a simple unknown, but that which is – with the normal means of life – unknowable in principle, although it can become the most intimate possession of man through a properly religious comportment. The tension that thus comes into being (the extremely diverse types of which we of course cannot even adumbrate here) forms the basis of the emphatic character of religious belief. For as much as adherence to rituals, ceremonies, etc. is construed as unavoidable in many religions for the achievement of such goals (thus the determinate – admittedly often modified and often rigidly spiritualised – structural form of magic is preserved), this subjective relatedness to the subject and to the whole man remains in force unsublated. For instance, confession has a ritualistic framework, though subjective sincerity is regarded as the indispensable condition of its transcendent effect, which was obviously not the case in magic. Despite this clear remoteness from magic and the everyday, there remains the basic structure, which nevertheless retains the immediate union of theory and praxis. True, the concept of theory as the import and object of belief must be further concretised in the process. Earlier we dissected the role of ‘belief’ in everyday life and thinking a bit and there arrived at the conclusion that it is a question of a modification of opinion, as all kinds of social reasons and the thereby conditioned subjective modes of comportment, in the closest connection to the immediate relationship of theory and praxis, prevent further development in the direction of verifiable knowledge. This possibility is objectively present in many cases; however, for the reasons described it very often tends to actualise itself in such a way that a continuation of opinion into knowledge does not yet take place. For instance, someone no longer ‘believes’ in his doctor and now transfers this ‘belief’ to another doctor. In everyday life there likewise are certainly many cases that have an opposite effect, particularly in the field of labour. The two tendencies differ from each other, however, in that in the second case something is captured from the mass of the unknown and made into knowledge, whereas in the first, the world of the unknown is construed as

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essentially unchanged. The immediate interrelatedness of theory and praxis in everyday life is the most important basis for the fact that the theoretical obtains such a formulation. At the same time, however, it is necessary to note that it is precisely in this way – from below, up out of the labour process – that tendencies become operative which point in the direction of knowledge, learning, and science and that even in those places where various social forces relegate this opinion to ‘belief’, only very rarely do they completely spirit away a certain verification of representations, the original intention of opinion, because of a vital inevitability. Even religious comportment is based on the immediate relation of theory and praxis. This is readily apparent wherever magical remnants prevail. However, even in those places where genuine lived religious experiences already come into being, this structure is sustained. For what is concerned here is indeed the salvation or perdition of the whole man or that in which the centre of his ultimate existence is beheld. This single most general formulation encompasses both heaven and hell as well as nirvana and samsara. With a positing of this sort, there come into being those important modifications both in the conception of transcendence and in the formulation of the concept of theory for this sphere. We begin by clarifying the concept of transcendence. We have seen that science – so long as it remains real science and does not come to be a philosophically idealist or religio-theological reflection on the results and limits of science, on its place in the lives of man, on its meaning for the entirety of human existence – is compelled to handle the unknown merely as something that is unknown up until now. This is most clearly seen in Kant. As an idealist philosopher, he regarded the world of things in themselves as absolutely transcendent; the concrete conquest of that which is as yet unknown also had no boundary for him as a theorist of scientific doctrine. (For these observations, it is not important that Kant – metaphysically – assesses this field as the world of appearances, since his methodology aims precisely at philosophically establishing the undeniable objectivity of the knowledge obtainable here.) However, the issue itself is not nearly as formal as the Critique of Pure Reason presents it to be. Genuine belief – not Kant’s belief distilled by pure ethics – allows no such bifurcation of the world; where such a bifurcation is carried out (and it is in many religions), it does not keep to an unemotional juxtaposition of appearance and thing in itself, which are both objects of knowledge, but emphatically escalates into the antithesis of creature and divinity, samsara and nirvana, etc. Appearance and essence are immediately related to the subject who is seeking his salvation, and only by means of this relatedness do they receive their proper religious objectivity. This primacy of subjective needs in the emergence of a specific objectivity connects reli-

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gion to magic, albeit with the significant difference that the triggering subjective affects in magic, such as fear, hope, etc., are determined by the needs of everyday man, hunger, physical danger, etc., whereas in the case of religion the basic tendency is such that an ethically coloured sublimation takes place that can more generally be paraphrased as the salvation of the soul. For the first time, this particular way in which appearance and essence are posited as objective provides the basis for that which is specific both to the transcendent aspects and to that theory which also stands in immediate relation to praxis here. From the moment that an anthropomorphising generalisation posits a demiurge of the world, the absolutising of transcendence is also carried out. May the world be somehow or other knowable to this or that degree and unknowable beyond that, the creator is posited as transcendent in the general sense. Between creator and creation there gradually develops a hierarchy in which the former is awarded an absolute and qualitative superiority over the latter. This is thoroughly understandable from the lofty generalisation of the labour process made by the subject. Even in Greek philosophy, notably in the works of Plato and Plotinus, this was how this relationship was evaluated: the creator stands unconditionally higher than what is created by him. A millennialong process involving a tremendous development of tools, devices, and certainly machines is necessary in order for idealist philosophy (as in the Hegelian dialectic) to bring about a realistic reversal of these conditions, which are incorrectly construed in every respect.106 This rectification of proportions naturally recoils from the religious conception of the world because any definitive break with the merely worldly creatureliness of real people means a renunciation of the religious worldview. Hegelian philosophy is also extremely ambiguous in relation to this issue. For it is clear that the Hegelian dialectical conception of the relations of the subject of labour to the objective process of labour would have to deprive that anthropomorphisation of subjective comportment, on which all conceptions of the demiurge are founded, of both its theoretical and emotional basis. The religious separation of appearance and essence as the antithesis of the creaturely and the divine cannot be achieved without assuming a demiurge, not even when the religious conception aspires beyond an omnipotent god of creation (as in particular Gnostic sects or in Buddhism). Even this worldview, indeed, is not possibly compatible with the conception of a world that, uncreated and indestructible, is moved in nature and society purely by their immanent laws.

106

Hegel 2010, p. 663.

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The religious concept of transcendence that thus comes into being has a Janus face. On the one hand, transcendence is absolutely unknowable as a matter of principle for ‘mundane understanding’, above all for science with its immanent self-development. On the other hand, however, there is in most religions a ‘royal road’ (or several of them) that can, without abolishing its character, make transcendence the familiar possession of a human subject. The objective basis for religious tensions is to be sought in this coexistence of both extremes, which have occurred in the course of history in a wide variety of ways: the trigger of that emphasis, important for religious comportment, already discussed. It is a subjective tension that, remaining subjective, posits corresponding objects for subjective affects (fear, hope, etc.), in fact precisely in this relationship of indissoluble transcendence and the dearest emotional closeness and gratification. But this tension can then only actualise its specific intensity when both aspects merge to the point of becoming inseparable from each other. The essential contradictions of human life thus coalesce in these affects (and in the objects posited by them). Above all a feeling in which the nullity of man and human beings in the face of the endlessness of the human and extra-human cosmos is allied with the indestructible uniqueness of his essence, yet while preserving the contradictoriness. And the antithetical unity of impotence and omnipotence, of contrition and exultation concretises itself in the most diverse variations in view of problems of life such as death and love, loneliness and confraternity, entanglement in guilt and the inner purity of the soul, etc. In all of this, the immediate interrelatedness of belief with its practical consequences (everyday theory and praxis emphatically intensified) is clearly visible: the content of belief and the feelings, thoughts, actions, etc. that follow from this have – according to the religious conception – immense consequences for the person making up his mind here: for the salvation of his soul. And thereby the objectivity and compass of transcendence is quite clearly circumscribed at the same time: out of something that was more or less unknown, the transcendent has become something that is unknowable in principle; transcendence is consequently an absolute. It belongs to the constitutive essence of the religious sphere even to demand, for itself and for its own conduct (the diversity of which we cannot now explore), the possibility of a more or less total triumph over transcendence and yet also an immediate and profound link – indeed from time to time, a unity – between the whole man and religious transcendence. Belief thereby first receives its concisely singular character. It disentangles itself from that shimmery kinship with aborted opinion which characterises everyday life. It turns into the central determining mode of comportment by radically breaking with every desire that is in accordance with

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objective verifiability, which ultimately underlies any opinion. And, in keeping with the anthropomorphising essence of the religious sphere, in which the subject creates objects, it transfers its fulfilment decidedly into the subjective or into a subjectively and anthropomorphisingly created pseudo-object field. Thus, whereas opinion, even in its everyday mode where it is distorted into ‘belief’, must still remain the antecedent of knowledge, belief raises in its genuine religious sense the demand to keep cognition and knowledge under control and to be a higher form of the mastery of fundamental reality. That is why Anselm of Canterbury’s set phrase ‘credo ut intelligam’ is the classic form of this situation. For these observations it is of course impossible to take into account the so extraordinarily varied modes of appearance of the relationships between belief and knowledge. In any case, it is evident that historically the classic form can be more likely an exceptional case than the expression of a rule. For the advance of science often makes it extraordinarily difficult both to interpret known reality in the sense of belief (in the sense of its concrete contents and its implicit axioms) and to allot the contents and boundaries of religiously determined transcendence as such to the realms of that which is only unknowable for the time being. Indeed, a religion that has been constituted into a church frequently establishes its own science (theology) so as to systematise its belief-based world-image in a formally scientific manner and to parry the universalistic claims of science and scientific philosophy. Here too it cannot be our task to even adumbrate the plethora of issues that thereby arise. All that must be pointed out is that, in contrast to science, where the starting points and conclusions must always be verifiable, theology necessarily and uncritically makes those objects and relationships that are posited by belief in an anthropomorphising way into its foundations. Intellectually generalising from these objects and relationalities, and without the will and capability to abolish their anthropomorphising character, it thereby fixes them in place as dogmas. No matter how much the formal (as it were, the technicointellectual) treatment in theology may be formally oriented towards logic and scientific methodology, the decisive self-evidence of dogmas is based on belief, appeals to belief, and must break down without belief also coming into operation as a structure of thought. This shows that theology does not represent an idiosyncratic science but merely constitutes a component of religious life that stands and falls with this life and cannot at all lay claim to a validity independent of it. Having grown out of magic, preserving magical remnants, and above all being akin to the everyday (and not to science and art) are characteristics of the religious sphere’s structure that are left untouched by theology.

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N. Hartmann107 has correctly described the indissoluble set of problems arising here. The fact that he has not limited these problems to theology but incorporates a number of philosophies up to pragmatism therefore does not yet have any critical bearing here for us, because even our observations repeatedly refer to the crypto-theological character of many philosophies. In doing so, Hartmann quite radically takes as his starting point the distinction between animal and human consciousness and regards – in refreshing contrast to many modern glorifiers of the ‘primeval’ – the immediate and indivisible apperception of the world centred on the ‘subject’ as ‘spiritless consciousness’, the ‘profundity’ of which remains fettered in the ‘pits’. And he rightly points out that disentanglement from ‘spiritless consciousness’ takes place least of all in these most lofty of spiritual domains. ‘In mythical thinking’, Hartmann explains, ‘the representation of man as the goal of creation predominates. In the religious and philosophical worldview, the anthropocentric conception of the world – usually associated with the devaluation of the real world – recurs again and again’.108 The purpose of his expositions entails that they are not pointed at theology. Our remarks show that it is precisely in theology that the supreme culmination of anthropomorphising (of ‘spiritless consciousness’) is to be found. Since no philosophy or critique of religion is intended here but merely the working out of the relationship of religion to everyday life, hanging on to this primacy of belief over authentication or over proof of its objects (this primacy of subjectivity over any – factual, scientific, or artistic – objectivity) suffices for our purposes. Religion thereby comprises a component of the everyday life of people with great socio-historical variability, from being in control of all or most cognitions by means of theologically dogmatised belief, all the way to its withdrawal to a pure, completely voided interiority by relinquishing all objective knowledge to science. The most essential thing about religion – the immediate conjunction of the goal (the salvation of the soul) with a ‘theory’ determined by belief and its immediate practical consequences – remains unchanged by all such transformations. Despite this inner constancy, these changes are very important for the concrete influence of belief on science and art. In the next chapter, in which we will analyse the unfolding of the disanthropomorphising view of the world in science, only a passing reference to concrete structural transformation needs to be made, since the mutually exclusive antithesis of anthropomorphising and disanthropomorphising is evident. However, thorough consideration requires us to separate in principle and prac107 108

Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950), major early twentieth-century German philosopher whose work was influenced by late nineteenth century Neo-Kantianism. [Eds.] Hartmann 1933, p. 97.

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tice both anthropomorphising spheres of life, art and religion; our last chapter will be devoted to this investigation. All that has to be referred to here is a perspective, is the close relation of religious belief to the concrete objectivity of its objects that have been created in an anthropomorphising way; a relationship so intimate that the fading away of the concreteness of the objects tends to carry with it a fading away of belief. The dogmatic character of any conceptual generalisation (theology) does not, therefore, imply degeneration as would any dogmatism in science and art; it is rather the necessary consequence of precisely such concreteness. A truly religious man believes not in god in general, but rather in an extremely specific god, with exactly determined characteristics, deeds, etc. (even when this is a deus absconditus). It is precisely this concreteness that dogma conceptually fixes in place, and, as long as it remains valid, it does so with a necessarily intolerant exclusivity. The abatement of intolerance in such questions suggests an attenuation of belief such that the salvation of the soul no longer appears to belief to be inseparably linked to this determinate objectivity. For as long as this salvation is believed in a lively and passionate manner, it can allow no agreement or compromise with regard to the ‘beingjust-so’ of religious objects. Hegel rightly recognised this in his Jena period: ‘A party may be said to exist when it falls apart internally. Thus, the case of Protestantism, whose differences are now supposed to coincide in the attempts at unification – a proof that it no longer exists. For in falling apart, the inner difference establishes itself as what is real. All the schisms of Catholicism ceased with the rise of Protestantism. Today the truth of the Christian religion is always being proved, one does not know for whom; for after all we have nothing to do with Turks’.109 The need for religion of course does not cease even after such transformations. It is – as we Marxists know – embedded far too deeply in the mode of human existence in class societies and in the remainders of this mode of existence to die away as a result of this sagging intensity and increasing decomposition of objective concreteness. Indeed, the transformation that thus comes into being, the here and there exclusive priority of pure interiority and subjectivity (Kierkegaard), occasionally expresses its true essence even more powerfully than was the case in its heyday. To be sure, these are exceptional cases. For a subjectivity that completely loses the capacity for objectivation can easily receive the character of a faceless inauthenticity. That is to say, since the general need for religion continues to remain effective, religious comportment in part retreats into a voided subjectivity outright and in part is scattered over all kinds of fields of everyday life, where it lives itself out in these fields so 109

Hegel 2002, pp. 245–6.

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that it imparts a religious ‘colouring’. Hereby, the proximity to the structure of everyday life repeatedly emphasised by us naturally comes to the fore in a particularly clear way. Simmel gives – without any pejorative intention – a good description of this situation: ‘The relation of a devoted child to his parents, of an ardent patriot to his fatherland or a similarly enthusiastic cosmopolitan to mankind; the relation of a worker to his class, which is pressing onward, or of a nobleman conscious of his rank to the aristocracy; the relation of the vanquished to his conqueror, or of the good soldier to his army – all these relations with their infinitely manifold contents can indeed have a general tenor as far as their psychic aspect is concerned – which much be called a religious key’.110 We will go into all of these issues in detail in the last chapter. If we now briefly summarise that which has been expounded up to this point in relation to the affinity and disparity between religion and everyday life, then we thus arrive at the following conclusion. At first glance, religious comportment sets itself apart from the commonplace everyday through emphatic accentuation of belief. Belief here is not an opinion, a preliminary stage of knowledge, an imperfect knowledge that is not yet verified. On the contrary, it is a comportment that alone opens up access to the facts and truths of religion and, at the same time, implies the readiness to make that which has been achieved in this way into a guideline for life, for immediate praxis and for praxis extending to the whole man, universally fulfilling him. Neither the ‘facts’ nor the conclusions drawn from them necessitate or tolerate a verification of their truth or applicability. Facts are attested through higher revelation, and this higher revelation also prescribes the way of responding to them. Belief is the medium whereby the subject is related to this object created by himself as if it were existing independently of him. This medium also creates the immediacy of drawing practical conclusions: the life of Christ and the emulation of it are immediately linked together through belief. The structural proximity to everyday thinking is also expressed in the revealed character of religious truths, however. Of course, for the non-believers (and for the followers of another revelation) that which is revealed is simply an empirical fact that needs attestation just like any other fact. Only through belief, not through its content as such nor through its relationship to reality, is that which is revealed emphatically lifted up to this special position out of the infinite number of often similar facts. At the same time, what is emphasised precisely in this way in the content of the revelation is the concreteness of the being-just-so already mentioned by us, its unique facticity. This may be ‘rationally deduced’ through dogmatism and theology or, on the contrary, this 110

Simmel 1959, p. 23.

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crude facticity may become the focus as paradox, and precisely ‘folly’ and ‘outrage’ appear to be its necessary consequence among unbelievers. Either way, both equally show that it is only through this emphasis on belief that revelation distinguishes itself from any given empirical fact. Like the pure subjectivity of belief, the empiricist character is thus illuminated precisely in periods that intensify the antithesis between religion and science to the point of a crisis for religion. At the time of such a crisis, while trying to rationalise the contents of religion and harmonise them with science and philosophy in this manner, the late Schelling fled into philosophical empiricism in the hope of thereby finding an appropriate armature of thought for mythology and revelation. He attempts to justify a merger of empiricism and revelation in opposition to a systematico-rational intellectual processing of reality. Whether this is now openly expressed, as in the works of Schelling and Kierkegaard, or whether the seemingly cohesive conceptual relationship purports to conceal this state of affairs, as in earlier theological systems for unifying knowledge and belief like that of Thomas Aquinas, the pure facticity of the form and content of the revelation cannot be eliminated. And so the ultimate empiricism of religious comportment persists (even if it is cleverly hidden by theological dogmatism). In this context it is very interesting that from the other side as well (from that of science) empiricism may make men amenable to a compromise with religion. In his critique of spiritualistic tendencies among natural scientists of his day, Engels states, ‘Here it becomes palpably evident which is the most certain path from natural science to mysticism. It is not the extravagant theorising of the philosophy of nature, but the shallowest empiricism that spurns all theory and distrusts all thought’.111 Again, the far-reaching structural affinity between religion and the everyday is also clearly expressed in this. Insight into this structure was necessary in order to understand at once the surprising fact of the amicable coexistence of sometimes highly developed science with magico-religious representations, which occasionally survives for long periods. As long as it is a question of purely empirically collected meaningful experiences in hunting, agriculture, etc., it is readily evident that the (at this stage) insurmountable uncertainty of life as a whole leads to magical belief, rites, etc. This situation also repeats itself at many higher levels, however. So says Ruben:112 ‘Indian astronomy was in fact a strange blend of superstition and science. Astronomers were astrologists and Brahmin, and as such they lugged with them a burden of ancient inherited superstition without having even 111 112

Engels 1987c, p. 353. Walter Ruben (1899–1982), noteworthy Indologist of the German Democratic Republic. [Eds.]

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the intention of freeing themselves from it’.113 And elsewhere the same author emphasises the high level of development of Indian mathematics, which surpassed much of what the Greeks accomplished. Regarding their way of solving indefinite quadratic equations, he says, ‘This has been called the finest of what number theory achieved before Lagrange; he was the only mathematician to recover this method and develop it further. Indian mathematicians were inspired to pursue such problems, however, by the demands of their astrology, with which these problems remained closely linked. This makes it clear that Indian philosophy could be inspired by mathematics just as little as it was by astronomy’.114 In the next chapter we will speak at length about the negative role of philosophy suggested here. All that has to be added to what has been explained up to this point is that the empiricist character of early technological development also undoubtedly abetted such compromises. On the one hand, because the scientific results obtained from empirico-technical needs bear in themselves a kind of isolatedness; development can very easily come or be brought to a standstill. As Bernal has showed, production aiming at rationality through competition can indeed realise its basic tendency often only in a long roundabout way. On the other hand, primitive handicraft (and even incipient science) has to cultivate social character, results, and methods in a traditional way and as a matter of routine; indeed, it has to treat these things as a ‘mystery’ of families, guilds, etc. Naturally, the latter tendency is already the predominant one in the case of magicians, medicine men, etc., but it is consolidated wherever priest castes are cultivated, and it interacts with the just cited trends in handiwork in a mutually corroborative way. All of this adequately explains why over the course of history the antithesis of science and religion (an antithesis existing-in-itself) was openly dealt with so relatively rarely. Scientific thinking is – despite significant individual achievements – brought down to the level of everyday thinking and, regarded as a whole, brought to a standstill; that is to say, it produces only as much as is absolutely necessary for the continuance of society. It is perhaps the social use of numbers that most vividly shows the tendency that we have examined here – namely, the fact that social needs force people towards abstractions, which are formed according to their own inner dialectic and point beyond everyday thinking, though in the course of history these abstractions nevertheless come to a standstill within everyday habits and form their inner possibilities in only a very limited way (indeed the generalisations drawn from these abstractions and their inner possibilities then regress 113 114

Ruben 1954, p. 263. Ruben 1954, p. 272.

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back again into the everyday). No need at all for numbers (for the manipulations that can be put into effect with their help) emerges as yet in the internal life of small primitive societies. Even when the talk is of quantities, which we, in keeping with the habits of our social development and remaining completely in the framework of everyday thinking, would quite spontaneously express with numbers without fail, these quantities are treated by primitive people as individualities that are qualitatively recognised and thus distinguished from each other, thus brought into relationships with each other. Lévy-Bruhl gives an indicative example of this drawn from the life of the Abipone and adapted from Dobrizhoffer: ‘And when they are about to start on an excursion, “as soon as they are mounted, they all look round, and if one dog be missing out of the many which they keep, begin to call him …. I often wondered how, without being able to count, they could so instantly tell if one were missing out of so large a pack”’.115 Max Schmidt is probably right when he sees in exchange and the early trade in goods the social need that forced numbers, counting, and measuring on people. He too emphasises that counting is not a need in the material economic life of primitive peoples. Counting first comes into being at a certain stage of commerce and the exchange of goods. Its propagation entails that certain goods are exchanged in determinate (numerically determinate) proportions: ‘It is only when one kind of object that is generally sought-after or is conversely present in superior numbers enters into such an exchange relation with various other kinds of objects at the same time that it yields a means for also putting the latter into a value relationship to one another. The former thus turns into the standard of value for these other particular kinds of objects for the time being’.116 The fact that, once discovered, number – just like geometry, which comes into being along the path of measurement – contains within itself boundless possibilities for the formation of science does not change the fact that for centuries and millennia it slots unresistingly into the relationship between religion and the everyday outlined above. Once magic or religion adopts numbers and incorporates them into its own system, this reversion thus becomes even clearer by means of the qualitative way of looking at things characteristic of the everyday. Any numerology, any religious utilisation of numbers, any accentuation of the effects of certain numbers in bringing happiness or misery, etc.: all of this tears the respective number that is used (for example 3 or 7) out of the numerical series in which it has its normal quantitative meaning and transforms it into a determinate, unique, emotive quality –

115 116

Lévy-Bruhl 1926, p. 183. [Eds.: The quoted passage is from Dobrizhoffer 1822, pp. 115–16.] Schmidt 1920, p. 119.

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that is to say, it gives that particular number a place in the thought-structure of everyday life. It perhaps appears as if we had committed an improper abstraction up to this point in the case of the structural proximity of magic, animism, and religion to the thinking and feeling of the everyday. We have indeed stressed the emphatic character of the representational constructs that come into being here, but we have not gone into whether or not (and if so, to what extent) an elevation over the everyday is aimed at and achieved. This tendency is not very intellectual for the time being, but it becomes increasingly so as religions also develop world-images (cosmologies, philosophies of history, ethics, etc.) in order to express their contents even in the language of science and philosophy. With such doctrines and a wide variety of methods (asceticism, artificially induced ecstasy, etc.) alongside these doctrines as well, they want to raise man beyond everyday thinking and feeling. In the most general sense, it is thereby a question of making an absolute transcendence something that can be experienced. The absoluteness of this transcendence and the ability to experience it must be equally emphasised at the same time. Scientific praxis only knows of a relative transcendence – that is, the not-yet-known, objective reality existing independently of consciousness but not yet controlled by scientific thoughts. (It is a different issue that idealist philosophy frequently interprets the methodology of the sciences and their epistemological foundations in the sense of the absolutisation of transcendence similar to theology; this is not the place to discuss the various nuances of these views since, as we saw in the case of Kant, scientific doctrine still works – in practical terms – with a relative transcendence.) Since reality can only be come to terms with in an approximate way – both in the quantitative and qualitative sense – by human thinking, a realm of the unknown is always available on the horizon of life; initially and above all as the nature encompassing him and, indeed to an increasing extent after the break-up of primitive communism and with the emergence of class societies, even as one’s own social existence. For while the development of civilisation more and more transforms the erstwhile transcendence of nature into ascertainable knowledge that is recognised as lawful, everyday man’s own existence becomes ever more opaque, ever more ‘transcendent’ for him in class societies. In theory this situation first changes with the coming into being of Marxism and in practice – for the everyday as well – with the concrete formation of a socialist society. Religion and the everyday are also closely related to each other insofar as they both make an absolute of transcendence. In the everyday this happens spontaneously and naively, just as in originary magic the not-yet-known (or more accurately, that which seems to be incomprehensible under the given concrete conditions) is looked upon as ‘eternally’ transcendent. Magic stands

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out from the everyday only to the extent that it devises ways and means – or intends or purports to find such ways and means – that appear to come to terms with this transcendence in practice. It ushers in a certain split into everyday thinking insofar as it treats the instruments of the practical control of transcendence as ‘mysteries’, the knowledge of which is a privilege of the magician, etc. However, this split leads man in everyday life back to transcendence, to belief, to the immediate linking of – transcendent – theory with everyday praxis. This structure, which involves the mediation of transcendence through a caste of ‘specialists’, is preserved even in the transition from magic to religion, save that transcendence and comportment towards it obtain an increasingly enriched, increasingly more concrete content related to human life as a whole. What this sphere, historically ever so greatly changing, retains as a common and enduring thread, however, is the sharp divorce of transcendence from the reality acquired in everyday life and acquirable in science, though at the same time it is to act as an immediate answer to the immediate questions of everyday man. From Xenophanes117 to Feuerbach, materialist philosophy is a view on the anthropomorphising character of all religious comportment, from the most primitive animism to the most modern religious atheism. The main thesis of this view, which holds that man creates his gods according to his own image, hence need not be dwelt on here since what is being examined is indeed not the claim of religion to proclaim the truth but rather the structure of religious comportment in relation to that of science (and art), so as to throw more light on the genesis of the latter and its direction of development. The essential aspects may be summarised thusly: first and foremost, man is at the centre of all religious comportment. Regardless of the extent to which the religion in question devises a cosmological, historico-philosophical, etc. world-image, whatever is devised is always in terms of man. This relationship always has a subjectivist and anthropomorphic character, however, as the world-image that is thus constructed is teleologically centred on man (upon his fate, upon his salvation) and has immediate reference to his comportment towards himself, towards his fellowmen, towards the world. Even if the religious world-image – as in religious atheism – proclaims the cosmic and historical course of the world to be meaninglessness, even if it takes the view of radical agnosticism, this world-image does not cease to be teleologically centred upon man, to be a basically anthropomorphic attitude. Here, the emptiness and god-forsakenness of the world

117

Xenophanes of Colophon (c. 570–478b.c.e.), pre-Socratic philosopher, poet, and rhapsode noted for his criticisms of anthropomorphism in religion. [Eds.]

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is just as little an objective statement of the facts as Christ’s or Buddha’s work of redemption is in theology; instead it is an immediate emphatic demand, an appeal to man to seek his salvation somehow or another in the somehow or another created world. Here is precisely the decisive point of separation between science and religion; even if systematising theology appears with the claim to being of a scientific nature and endeavours to approach science in the details of its methodology, of the recognition of its facts, etc., this similarity remains superficial. That is to say, from the objective world-image of science there does not – directly – follow any immediate incitement to a foreordained action, to a mode of comportment determined in advance. Of course, knowledge of the outside world forms the theoretical foundation for all action. This action likewise springs (in its objective motives) from the laws and tendencies of reality, but where these motives are clearly defined scientifically, their recognised essence cannot possess any immediate pointed effect on the actions of the individual. However decisive scientific knowledge may be for the what and the why of all praxis, human action is determined by social being both immediately and ultimately. Scientific knowledge serves precisely to abolish all such immediate and aprioristically determined subjective inferences and to prevail upon people to act on the basis of an impartial and objective consideration of facts and relationalities. This tendency of course has an effect in everyday life too: the clash of both attitudes here quite often does not take place in the consciousness of people as the clash of the scientific and the religious, although the sense of whether the human control of reality can take place on an anthropomorphic basis that is teleologically pointed towards man or whether an intellectual removal of these aspects is necessary in order to adequately carry out this human control of reality remains a real divergence of everyday thinking even at a more developed stage. What again comes into play in all of this is the character of religion that is closely related to everyday thinking. However vigorously religion lays claim to leaving the terrain of the everyday’s delusory and misleading semblance far behind and to having discovered the foundation of an incontrovertible absoluteness (revelation), the achievement of which gives undeniable directives for action and comportment, the structure of the immediate relation of theory to praxis that comes into being as the completion of this has, as shown, the strongest conceivable affinity to that of everyday life. This necessarily follows from the anthropomorphising character of the religiously wrought mode of reflecting reality. We have tried to prove that a tendency towards knowledge of the essence is already contained in everyday reflection and praxis. But this first turns into a conscious method in scientific comportment: into the clear

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separation of appearance and essence so as to make a return to the lawfulness of the world of appearance possible out of a clearly recognised essence. The more vigorously this method is developed, the more sharply the reality reflected in science separates from the immediate everyday modes of reflecting reality, both in terms of content and form. As seen and assessed from the viewpoint of the everyday, the scientific reflection of reality thereby frequently appears as paradoxical. Marx has – after setting out at length that an explanation of profit is possible only by the theorem that, on the average, commodities are sold for their actual values – vividly generalised this important result for the overall methodology of science in its bearing towards the everyday: ‘This seems paradox and contrary to everyday observation. It is also paradox that the earth moves round the sun, and that water consists of two highly inflammable gases. Scientific truth is always paradox, if judged by every-day experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things’.118 We have already spoken of the reconversion of many of the results of scientific reflection into immediate everyday praxis. It thereby becomes possible that in this reconversion the paradoxical relations of the scientifically reflected world fade away again into immediacy, its actual categories disappear, methods and outcomes are incorporated into everyday life by means of habituation, tradition, etc. so that the results of science can be practically utilised without causing an instant fundamental alteration of everyday thinking. It is self-evident that the socio-historical accumulation of such appropriations of the outcomes of science also alters the general world-image of the everyday. However, this occurs mostly by means of very slight alterations (hardly noticeable on the surface) that gradually modify the horizon, contents, etc. of everyday life and thinking to a great extent but do not fundamentally transform their essential structure for the time being. (Of course, cases of revolutionary transformation also occur; it suffices to bear in mind the overthrow of geocentric astronomy.) We said that a path from appearance to essence also exists in the religious reflection of reality. However, its specificity is precisely its anthropomorphising character: not for one moment does that which is construed as essence lose human features. In other words, whether it involves the constitution of nature or of human (social, ethical, etc.) issues, the essentials are condensed into typical human characters and fates in which the typifying (the emphasising of that which is essential) is accomplished in the form of myths that present these essentials as events in the ancient past, in the hereafter, and perhaps even in the heart of history in the manner of the Gospels, whereby an isolated island of

118

Marx 1985, p. 127.

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myth comes into being. Even to the extent that they involve nature, these myths work with personifying and anthropomorphising means. What also thereby comes into being here is a certain paradoxical relationship between the normal reflection of the world in the everyday and its religious reflections. The fundamental difference with respect to the just indicated paradox of scientific reflection is that objective reality (always only approximately comprehended) does not contradict that which is immediately experienced in the everyday. Rather, this objective reality is contrasted with another reflection controlled by anthropomorphism that is also experienceable immediately and is to be experienced immediately. The problems that thereby arise can best be studied in the various god-man myths. Of course, theologies use a lot of ingenuity to clear up these paradoxes intellectually as well. The genuinely religious relationship, however, can at most be supported in this way but never founded. It is an immediate, emphatic relationship to a god-man of this or that constitution. The coming into being of these genuinely religious relations will depend upon how far each individual person recognises the idealised or sensuously immediate likeness of his closest and most personal life issues (desire, angst, longing, etc.) in these myths. The socio-historical transformations of myths and the thoughts and feelings calling these transformations forth and in turn called forth by them do not belong here. Since the reign of magic, these transformations tend to have the characteristic of preserving the given state of society and are even consciously cultivated in this direction by means of theological interpretations. But it also happens that these socio-historical transformations boisterously express the desire, angst, longing, etc. of the oppressed; Vico already recognised this in the case of a few Greek myths, and, for instance, the heretical religiosity of the Middle Ages from Joachim of Fiore up to Thomas Münzer and the English Puritans unquestionably moves in this direction. However, the same basic structure remains in force in all of the strongly opposed socio-historical variants that come into being here: an anthropomorphising and more or less figuratively sensuous ‘exegesis’ of reality as the apprehension of its ‘essence’, and this exegesis is directly and emphatically aimed at the soul of individual people in order to overturn immediately into – religious – praxis in them. By its nature, the process by which science detaches itself from everyday life thus collides with the religious way of looking as well, quite apart from content-related antitheses in the reflection of reality and its interpretation. The fact that these antitheses blunt themselves – for a long time even – under certain social conditions does not change anything when it comes to the indissolubility of this antithesis as a matter of principle. The second essential viewpoint is whether the title of reality can be attributed to the objects of such an anthropomorphising and anthropocentric mode

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of reflecting reality. As is well known, every religion stands and falls with the affirmation of this dilemma. In the past, conflicts with science mostly were given the twist that a higher reality (or a higher knowledge about reality) could be achieved by means of religion than by science. In later periods of the dissolution or repression of religions, the antithesis is then attenuated so that it concerns an ‘other’ reality (an ‘other’ aspect of reality) – one that is not ‘above’ scientific reflection but rather ‘next’ to it. The ideological compromises that are attained or achieved thus change nothing in the basic fact, because consciously anthropomorphising religious reflection must lay claim to the products of its reflection as absolute realities. As soon as this claim lapses, religion ceases to exist as religion. To briefly anticipate now something that is to be treated in detail later: herein lies the field of the intimate contact, of the mutual fertilisation, and at the same time of the irresolvable contradiction between religion and art. Feuerbach, who also fights against the reality-character of religions because he recognises in them merely the products of human fantasy, says regarding this issue that religion ‘is poetry, but with one important difference: poetry and art in general do not represent their creations as anything but what they are, namely products of art, whereas religion represents its imaginary beings as real beings’.119 Lenin thus summarises these thoughts in his Feuerbach notes: ‘Art does not require the recognition of its works as reality’.120 If the claim to the adequate reflection of reality is the field in which religion and science must ultimately collide, then the common anthropomorphising method of reflection creates the terrain for the contact and rivalry of religion and art. The above-cited antithesis in relation to the constructs’ claim on reality seemingly makes a struggle irrelevant. And indeed, there are long and important periods in which relatively conflict-free cooperation was possible. But even then only relatively. For the commonality of the anthropomorphising reflection reveals that for both it is a question of the social fulfilment of needs that are of a similar nature, though in entirely opposite manner in both cases, whereby the otherwise closely touching contents and forms tend to become antithetical. It is a question of much more than merely the need for personification that arises at any primitive stage early on in cognitively coming to terms with reality, in which, as we have seen, the foundation of the antagonism between science and religion persists. We will later show in detail how fundamental human needs have roused the anthropomorphising reflection of reality by means of

119 120

Feuerbach 1967, p. 181. Lenin 1972b, p. 73.

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art. These needs are in very close contact with those that religion satisfies, especially at primitive stages: with the creation of a likeness of a world adequate – subjectively as well as objectively – to man in the highest sense. The difference indicated above (that art – in contrast to religion – ascribes no objective reality-character to the constructs created in this manner and that its deepest objective intention is directed towards the merely anthropomorphising and anthropocentric representationality of this world) is in no way an instance of contenting oneself vis-à-vis religion. On the contrary. This objective intention includes – regardless of what the artist or the person receptive to art thinks about it at times – the rejection of all transcendence. In its objective intention, art is just as inimical to religion as science is. Contenting itself with the this-worldliness of its depictions involves on the one hand the sovereign right of the creator to remold reality and myths according to his own needs. (That this need is socially conditioned and determined does not change anything in this state of affairs.) On the other hand, all transcendence is – artistically – transformed by art into a this-worldliness and is placed on the same level as that which is to be represented, as that which is in fact this world. We will later see that these tendencies call forth various theories directed against art (mendacity, etc.). The struggle between art and religion springing from these antagonisms is far less present in general consciousness than that between science and religion, although admittedly even this struggle is often blurred by both sides. Therefore, in a separate chapter we will have to concern ourselves with those places where the historical antitheses between science and art – antitheses that arise repeatedly but that do not follow from the objective essence of the two fields – now and then come up as well. It is clear that all of these objective antagonisms could not possibly express themselves in the early stages of mankind. In magic the undifferentiated seeds of scientific, artistic, and religious comportment are still completely mixed and united, and the tendencies of science growing out of labour cannot yet become conscious. Detachment takes place relatively late, depending on specific social conditions that are extremely uneven. We have already pointed out that in certain cultures high art and a relatively great development of certain branches and problems of the sciences can come into being without our being able to talk about an artistic or scientific spirit, about a subjective becoming-conscious of the objective intention of these areas. In what follows we will first of all briefly examine the principles of the autonomisation of science and conclude our subsequent observations about a similar process in art with the presentation of its struggle for liberation.

chapter 2

The Disanthropomorphisation of Reflection in Science 1

Significance and Limits of Disanthropomorphising Tendencies in Antiquity

We have seen how the need for a knowledge of reality that rises above the level of the everyday – not only actually or accidentally in particular cases as it were, but also fundamentally, methodologically, and qualitatively – grows out of the demands of everyday life, particularly of labour. On the other hand, we have also been able to see that this same everyday life brings forth continuous tendencies that hamper and prevent a comprehensive generalisation of meaningful labour experiences into science. The progress of the human race at primitive levels (and, as we will see, not only at these levels, although in later periods with much less force of resistance) brings forth forms of reflection and thought that, instead of radically overcoming spontaneously naïve everyday personifications and forms of anthropomorphising, reproduce these at a higher level and precisely for this reason set limits to the development of scientific thinking. Engels briefly characterises this situation: ‘Even the correct reflection of nature is extremely difficult, the product of a long history of experience. To primitive man the forces of nature were something alien, mysterious, superior. At a certain stage, through which all civilised peoples passed, he assimilates them by means of personification. It was this urge to personify that created gods everywhere, and the consensus gentium, as regards proof of the existence of God, proves after all only the universality of this urge to personify as a necessary transition stage, and consequently the universality of religion too. Only real knowledge of the forces of nature ejects the gods or God from one position after another …. This process has now advanced so far that theoretically it may be considered concluded’.1 Only in Greece did this conflict between the higher personifying forms of thinking and scientific forms of thinking actually unfold in the early days of human development. Only here did the conflict rise to a principled level and thereby bring forth a methodology of scientific thinking that constitutes the precondition for turning this way of reflecting reality into a

1 Engels 1987a, pp. 605–6.

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general, constantly operative mode of human comportment through practice, habit, tradition, etc. and the precondition for not only its immediate results having an enriching impact on everyday life, but also its method influencing everyday praxis, indeed in some cases transforming it. It is precisely this conscious, general, and principled character of the antithesis which is decisive. For, as we could already see, in many cases the development of meaningful labour experiences indeed gives rise to separate, even highly developed sciences (mathematics, geometry, astronomy, etc.). If, however, the scientific method is not generalised philosophically and contrasted to anthropomorphising worldviews, its separate results can adapt themselves to and be incorporated into a wide variety of magical and religious worldviews, and the effect of scientific progress in individual branches upon everyday life will be as good as nil. This possibility is further increased by the fact that, in such cases of its being a monopolised possession, science tends to be the ‘secret’ of a tightly closed caste (for the most part, of priests), which artificially and institutionally prevents a generalisation of the scientific method into a worldview. The specific position of Greece in this development, its embodiment of the ‘normal childhood’ of the human race (Marx), has very determinate social foundations. First and foremost, the particular form of the breakup of gentile society. Marx gives a thorough and detailed analysis of this, from which we can merely highlight the single most essential points here. The most essential of these appears to us to be the fact that the individual becomes the private owner (and not only the occupant) of his parcel of land, though at the same time this private property is tied to community membership: ‘To be a member of the community remains the precondition for the appropriation of land, but as a member of the community the individual is a private proprietor’. For the relations of production, this of course entails that no state slavery comes into being (as in the Orient) but that slaves always belong to private owners. It is clear that such a social being must also consciously have an effect in the direction of an enhanced and more differentiated cultivation of the subject-object relation compared to formations in which, on the one hand, primitive communist communal forms of social life remain preserved and those formations in which, on the other, instead of having the freedom and autonomy of individual communities arising in Greece, communal forms are under centralising despotic control (Orient). This tendency of development is enhanced and accelerated further as a result of the fact that it is very closely associated with the emergence and rapid growth of cities and urban culture. This form that developed in Greece ‘does not presuppose land as its basis, but the city as already constructed seat [centre] of the rural population (landowners). The cultivated fields are

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the territory of the city, whereas [in the first form of property] the village was a mere appendage to the land’. We do not have to examine the set of indissoluble problems related to such a formation here. Only for the sake of rounding this discussion off should it be noted that Marx regards the relative constancy of wealth as the basis of the flourishing of such a community: ‘The precondition for the survival of this community is the maintenance of equality among its free self-sustaining peasants, and their own labour as the condition for the continued existence of their property’.2 These basic features of economic development have an extremely important implication for our problem: political democracy (of course, one of slaveholders) coming into being on this basis also extends to the field of religion, whereby an early and far-reaching emancipation of the development of science from the social and ideological needs of religion was possible. In his observations regarding this topic, Jacob Burckhardt3 focuses on this new situation along with its most important consequences: ‘The absence of an all-powerful priesthood that might have merged religion and philosophy into a rigid system was of paramount importance and decisive for the Greeks, as was also the fact that religion did not foster a priestly caste which, as the guardian of faith and knowledge, might have pre-empted the purlieus of thought’.4 However, this is just the aspect of negative freedom in the development of a scientific method and ideology. On the other side, the same developmental tendencies of Greek society that we have just briefly portrayed brings forth a social contempt for labour, the consequences of which one can observe time and again in the course of the history of Greek science and philosophy. Marx derides Nassau Senior because he calls Moses a ‘productive labourer’. In the course of this, he highlights the sharp antithesis of the relationship to labour in antiquity and capitalism: ‘Was it Moses of Egypt or Moses Mendelssohn? Moses would have been very grateful to Mr. Senior for calling him a “productive labourer” in the Smithian sense. These people are so dominated by their fixed bourgeois ideas that they would think they were insulting Aristotle or Julius Caesar if they called them “unproductive labourers”. Aristotle and Caesar would have regarded even the title “labourers” as an insult’.5 With that said, the social foundations for the first clear separation of the scientific reflection of reality from that of the everyday together with that of religion are first given. Only the autonomy of science that is thus achieved makes it possible to gradually form a unitary scientific meth2 3 4 5

Marx 1986, 402–03. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), influential Swiss historian of art and culture. [Eds.] Burckhardt 1963, p. 279; likewise: Beloch 1893, pp. 127 ff. Marx 1989, pp. 184–5.

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odology and worldview; to recognise categories in their scientific specificity and purity; and to generalise, systematise, etc. the separate results of praxis and research. Of course, the freedom that is thus achieved for the self-movement of science does not mean that it evolves without conflict. On the contrary. Precisely because of this it first becomes possible to express clearly and formulate scientifically the content-related and methodological antithesis to religion (to everyday thinking as well). For this very reason it would be false to make an illegitimate absolute out of this freedom. From our assessment above regarding how impossible it was for the Greek religion and priesthood to subjugate science for their own purposes, a peaceful relationship between the two in no way follows. The working out of the specific categories and methods of science inevitably meant an ever more decisive struggle against any kind of personification and with it those myths in which Greek religiosity was objectified. (From the historical situation indicated by us, it likewise necessarily follows that an otherwise unprecedented role was bestowed on art, particularly poetry, by means of the formation and interpretation of these myths; whence the conspicuously antagonistic atmosphere between philosophy and poetry is also to be accounted for as one of the traits of Greek development.) As for religion, one must not construe the absence of a priest caste simply as the social powerlessness of religion. The entire structure of the polis and the dominant position of public life that is already expressed in land ownership (as one can be the private owner of his parcel of land only as a citizen of the polis) would contradict this. The religious cult, the temple, etc. were protected by law since the beginning of legislative power (and earlier through custom). And in the course of the intensifying attacks on the personifying and anthropomorphising reflection of reality, these laws even extend to assaults against religion in theory. Thus in Athens there came into being the law against asebeia: ‘People shall be brought to trial who do not believe in religion or who give lessons in astronomy’.6 Thus, for example, Anaxagoras, Protagoras, etc. were taken to court. It is very significant that astronomy plays a decisive role in the law itself, as in the charge against Anaxagoras. It is and remains for a long time the battlefield where anthropomorphising and disanthropomorphising reflections of reality notably collide. At the same time, however, it becomes apparent that scientific research into details that are founded on accurate observation and mathematics does not suffice to deal with the principled antithesis. The (in many respects) highly developed astronomy of the East was able to be integrated into personifying

6 Cited in Nestle 1940, pp. 479–80.

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conceptual systems. Only methodological and ideological generalisation in the case of the Greeks shows that on this question the paths can and must divide. Greek asebeia trials are a prelude to those proceedings that the Inquisition conducted against Giordano Bruno and Galileo. In this manner, Greek development creates the foundations of scientific thinking. Though it must be instantly added that these same laws of the Greek mode of production that brought forth this possibility likewise put insurmountable obstacles in the way of its complete unfolding, of its being carried through consistently: the contempt for productive labour that came into being because of the slave economy, what Jacob Burckhardt calls ‘anti-philistinism’. We also cannot possibly occupy ourselves here with this issue in detail, even if we were to limit ourselves to the particularly essential issues here, to the reciprocal fertilisation of production and theory. It is enough if we – following Plutarch’s biography of Marcellus – briefly adumbrate this situation. Plutarch recounts how attempts to apply the laws of geometry to machine construction called forth the most vehement resistance from Plato, who saw a debasement of geometry in the fact that it was applied to practico-mechanical problems and drawn down into the sensuous and physical world. Under such influences, mechanical science parted ways with geometry and turned into handiwork that was used most notably in the army. And even in the case of Archimedes, Plutarch emphasises how he despised the use of mechanical science as handicraft and took part in the defence of Syracuse with his inventions only out of patriotism. The contempt for productive labour is certainly only the ideological flipside of the fact that the use of machines (a scientific rationalisation of labour) is not economically possible in a slave economy. As a result, in Greek development neither could the results of theoretical research have a decisive influence on the technology of production nor could the problems of production have an additional fructifying effect on science. It is indicative that the most brilliant inventions made by Hero of Alexandria in ancient times remain just gimmickry, and it was left to the science of the Renaissance to draw actually practical (and for that reason theoretical) conclusions from them.7 This limit is perceptible everywhere in Greek science and philosophy; it inhibits the consistent and detailed construction of scientific principle and scientific method in the shaping of the reflection of reality, it inhibits unitary concept formation in science and philosophy precisely in their antithesis to everyday thinking and religion, and at the same time it inhibits the construction of an all-round relationship between science and everyday praxis.

7 Kudrâvcev 1951, p. 71.

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Within these limits, however, Greek philosophy not only posed the decisive issues concerning the specificity of the scientific reflection of reality but also completely clarified them in many cases. It worked out – and with this the formation of dialectics at a higher level is most closely related – both the forms of separation and the antithetical nature of scientific and everyday (even religious) thinking as well as the function of scientific reflection in the service of life and its fructifying return into life. The limit indicated above entails that the interdependencies between science and life become much more concretely apparent in the field of social knowledge (for instance, in ethics) than in the methodology of the natural sciences, where, particularly in the later stages of the development of the philosophy of nature, the focus is again predominantly on anthropomorphising categories. In spite of all of this, the main line of development is the substantiation of a real objectivity of knowledge and its disentanglement from that subjectivism which remains insurmountable within everyday life: what thereby becomes the focus is the critique of misperceptions, of the fallacies that the immediacy of everyday thinking brings forth. From this standpoint, the philosophy of the pre-Socratics signifies a turning point in the history of human thinking. Whether fire or water is determined to be the most universal substance from which all the appearances of reality are to be derived or explained, whether an objectivity-urging dialectical contradictoriness of rest or motion is revealed: in all of these cases, philosophical endeavour aims at leaving human subjectivity (with its limitations, constraints, biases) far behind and reflecting objective reality as it is in itself – as little clouded by the additions of human consciousness as possible – with the highest fidelity. This movement culminates in the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, where already our entire human world of appearance is conceived of as the lawful product of the relationships and movements of the elementary components of matter. Even though everywhere here – and especially at this intellectual peak – the weakness portrayed by us (the impossibility of making the philosophically correctly grasped principle into a real scientific research method applicable all the way down into individual studies) invariably shows up again, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that Greek philosophy found here the conclusive – indeed one that is to be corrected in its details in many cases – methodological model for the reflection of nature. Analysing the methodological foundations of what was achieved from Thales to Democritus and Epicurus, one can make two foundational assessments. First, that a truly scientific conception of objective reality is possible only by means of a radical break with the personifying and anthropomorphising way of looking. The scientific manner of reflecting reality involves disanthropomorphising both the object as well as the subject of knowledge: the

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object as its in-itself is purified as much as possible of all the additions of anthropomorphism; the subject as it focuses its comportment towards reality on thereupon continuously examining its own intuitions, representations, and conceptualisations as to where and how anthropomorphising distortions of objectivity are able to find their way into the reception of reality. Development in practice will be the result of later growth, but the methodological foundations are already laid down here: that the subject of knowledge devises his own instruments and ways of proceeding with whose help he, on the one hand, makes the reception of reality independent of the limits of human sensuousness and, on the other, automates, as it were, self-monitoring. As to this issue of disanthropomorphising, however, let it still be – secondly – noted that its implementation goes together with the becoming-conscious of philosophical materialism. We have seen that the elemental, spontaneous materialism of everyday life is not able to summon up any intellectual protection against the encroachment, against the domination of idealist and religious personification. Accordingly, the philosophical materialism appearing at a relatively high level of culture is in no way its direct continuation and development. It can of course draw upon such lived experiences, but even this occurs in a thoroughly critical and dialectical way as, on the one hand, immediate sensory impressions are taken as a basis and defended against idealist reinterpretations, though, on the other, a continuously intensifying critical verification is carried out regarding these same sensory impressions. The spontaneous conviction of the existence of an outside world independent of human consciousness thus undergoes a qualitative change, a qualitative enhancement by its becoming philosophically conscious, by its ideological generalisation. In this way the conscious conflict of materialism and idealism first enters into philosophy and turns into its central issue. And the level of this materialist generalisation, which conditions at the same time the breadth and depth of the permeation of science with disanthropomorphising reflection and conceptualisation, delineates the terrain of the conflict between materialism and idealism at the same time. Of course, it cannot be our task here to sketch out this antagonism even in passing. All that must be noted is that in the course of history disanthropomorphising materialism takes over ever-increasing areas of human knowledge that idealism as such is forced – nolens volens – to vacate. In terms of the battlefield, the possibilities of idealism become more and more straitened, though it goes without saying that this does not signify a capitulation but from time to time an aggravation of clashes, under changed conditions. It is characteristic, however, of the weaknesses (dating back to the slave economy) of Greek materialism and the Greek mode of disanthropomorphisation that for the most part these altered forms only show up after the Renaissance.

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And even in the Renaissance itself there are still vehement feuds around the anthropomorphising nature of knowledge overall (Fludd against Kepler and Gassendi). It is in accordance with the position of Greek culture that the disanthropomorphising tendency of the pre-Socratics necessarily culminates in a critique of the myths that determine the content and form of the religious world-image of the era. And since poetry plays a more crucial role in their formation, development, reinterpretation, etc. than it does later in history, it is also involved in this critique of religion. Greek philosophy’s so-called hostility to art from the pre-Socratics to Plato has its intellectual roots here. In the revival of disanthropomorphising tendencies since the Renaissance, this attack on art disappears or at the very least plays an extremely episodic role. On the one hand, this is related to the development of the exact natural sciences and to the concretisation of disanthropomorphising categories, whereby it becomes possible to recognise in art a different specific form of the reflection of reality (keep in mind the position towards art taken by Galileo, Bacon, etc.). On the other hand, this is also related to the medieval creation and interpretation of myths carried out by the church, against which art too had to survive a struggle for freedom. This struggle against any anthropomorphising whatsoever clearly comes to the fore as a matter of principle in Xenophanes’s famous remarks: Mortals believe that the gods are born and have human clothing, voice and form. If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods’ bodies have the same shape as they themselves had. Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and dark, Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired.8 With this an extremely important reversal in human thinking came into being: what until then acted as the basis for explaining phenomena in nature and society, as the central principle of truly objective reality from primitive magic up to developed religion, henceforth appears as a subjective phenomenon of

8 Cited in McKirahan, Jr. 1994, pp. 60–1.

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human society that is itself in need of explanation. Whether the posing of this reversal leads to a radical denial of the existence of the divine realm and the actual ungodding (disanthropomorphisation) of the universe, or whether the social necessity of religion is still recognised in the discovery of its source in human needs, in the activities of human imagination, is from the point of view of our investigation not decisive, however important it may be for general cultural development. All the more so, considering that such a defence of religion on the basis of consensus gentium is of very little use as an apologia precisely for that religion which is to be protected by it. It is precisely because of this that Protagoras arrives at a perfect – if one may use this expression for Greece – historical relativism, according to which each people possesses and venerates the gods appropriate to them.9 However, this tendency can go even further; for instance, it receives a completely cynical and nihilistic form in the case of Critias, for whom religion is ideologically justified for the production of order as a means of spiritual policing: Next, as the laws did hold men back from deeds Of open violence, but still such deeds Were done in secret, – then, as I maintain, Some shrewd man first, a man in counsel wise, Discovered unto men the fears of Gods, Thereby to frighten sinners should they sin E’en secretly in deed, or word, or thought. Hence was it that he brought in Deity, Telling how God enjoys an endless life, Hears with his mind and sees, and taketh thought And heeds things, and his nature is divine, So that he hearkens to men’s every word And has the power to see men’s every act. E’en if you plan in silence some ill deed, The Gods will surely mark it; for in them Wisdom resides.10 Parallel to this critique of religious anthropomorphising, the critique of everyday thinking unfolds in Greek philosophy as well. It is a continuous motif of its entire development and is already present in the dialectic of being and becom-

9 10

Nestle 1940, p. 280. Sextus Empiricus 1953, p. 31.

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ing in the works of the Eleatics and Heraclitus. It receives ever more sophisticated forms in later philosophy, in which – and this appears inevitable at this stage – the critique of the subjective and anthropomorphic limits of everyday thinking overturns here into a partially or entirely religious idealism: the social development in which the necessary impasse of the slave economy is ever more clearly expressed notably brings out for our problem the fact that objective knowledge of nature, which in this period peaks in the individual sciences, is less capable of influencing the general cognitive comportment of anthropomorphising than the vastly more fragmentary understanding of the decidedly philosophical beginning. Hegel caught very clear sight of the situation that thus comes into being. He sees the difference between ancient and modern scepticism (and also the difference between the early and late period in antiquity itself) in the fact that the former is a critique of everyday thinking while the latter is primarily directed against the objectivity of philosophical thinking. It is clear that what is important for us as a supplement to what has been carried out until now is precisely the former, while the latter, as an aspect of the reversal indicated above, stands outside the framework of our investigation. About the former, Hegel states the following: ‘But the content of [the Ten Tropes of Scepticism] proves … how they are simply and solely aimed against the dogmatism of ordinary common sense; no single one of them is concerned with Reason and its cognition; all of them concern only the finite, and the understanding, or the cognition of the finite throughout … Consequently this skepticism is in no way directed against philosophy, but against ordinary common sense, and that in a popular mode, not in a philosophical one; against the ordinary consciousness, which holds fast to the given, the fact, the finite (whether the finite is called “appearance” or “concept”), and sticks to it as certain, as secure, as eternal; the skeptical tropes show common sense the instability of this kind of certainty, in a way which is at the same time close to ordinary consciousness’.11 One only has to read through the remarks by Sextus Empiricus about his first tropes in order to see that he analyses the possibilities for error – deriving from subjectivity – in the human senses and draws attention to the contradictions that necessarily come into being out of them. Hegel’s conception of this kind of scepticism focuses on the fact that ‘it can be seen as the first stage for philosophy’ because the antinomies that thus come into being illuminate the untruth of mere everyday thinking.12 At the same time, Hegel speaks of the finite and expressly emphasises that it is immaterial whether in the course of

11 12

Hegel 2000, p. 332. Ibid. [Eds.]

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this the talk is of appearance or concept. He thus sees that which is decisive in dialectics, that which dissolves dogmatism (anthropomorphising, subjectbound immediacy) along the path of the antinomies that thus come into being and leads to objectivity, to knowledge of the world in itself as a result of this liberation. He thus shows – regarding the same problem, albeit at an essentially higher level – the antinomies of geometry in relation to everyday thinking: ‘For instance, we naively grant validity to point and space; a point is in space and is something simple in space, but it is dimensionless; consequently it is not in space. Insofar as “one” is spatial, we call it a point; but if this statement is to have a meaning, then “one” must be spatial; and if it is spatial, then it has dimensions, so it is no longer a point. It is the negation of space insofar as it is the absolute limit within space; as such, it makes contact with space; this negation therefore has an association with space. Therefore the negation is itself spatial, so internally it is a nullity; but thereby it is also something internally dialectical’.13 It should be noted only in passing here that this problem already turns up in the works of Protagoras and was even dealt with by Plato in his Seventh Letter as well as by Aristotle in the Metaphysics. The antithesis between geometry in everyday thinking and its objective truth, which does not rise to prominence until it is freed of aspects of our sensuousness, of our way of proceeding, etc., thus ranks among the common property of Greek thinking. The pathbreaking greatness and insoluble problematicness in the disanthropomorphising tendencies in Greek philosophy often show themselves to be inextricably intertwined with the fate of the theory of reflection. That knowledge is based on the correct reflection of objective reality is self-evident for Greek thinking. For that very reason, the question is hardly posed in the works of the pre-Socratics, not even when the transition to dialectical reflection is accomplished as a result of the problem of the objectivity of essence. But even the transition from the philosophical interpretation of objective reality to the preponderance of epistemological issues in no way displaces the theory of reflection from the centre; on the contrary, this transition reinforces its position. As differently as the reflection of reality is understood by Plato and Aristotle, its central significance – in contrast to modern philosophy – remains uncontested. However, since the preceding development along the line of clarifying being-in-itself had already posed the question of the knowledge of essence, and not only knowledge of the immediately sensible outside world, the turn to epistemology must look for an answer precisely here. In fact, in the works of Plato the questions of concept formation, reflection of reality

13

Hegel 2006, pp. 314–15.

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that is as accurate as possible for forming a concept, and the elucidation of intuition and representation are especially important. With this turn to epistemology, however, the path to idealism is taken. The set of problems that thereby comes into being and the contrast of Aristotle to Plato and even more so to later Neo-Platonism (above all, Plotinus) do not belong in the framework of our observations. Here, the only important issue is the fact that the idealist duplication of reflection (instead of simply being the reflection of reality, it is the reflection of the world of ideas and the world of empiricism) necessarily and gravely jeopardises the previous achievements of the disanthropomorphisation of knowledge. Admittedly, a whole range of fundamental outcomes of this process remains unchanged, like Plato’s position on mathematics and geometry. However, the separation of the world of ideas and reality, the distinct – metaphysical – reality that is ascribed to the former by Plato, again reduces human thinking to the already abandoned level of anthropomorphism, as Aristotle clearly sees and sharply criticises from the beginning. For instance, Aristotle criticises the whimsicality and contradictoriness of the claim made by the Platonic theory of ideas ‘that there are certain entities apart from those in the sensible universe, and that those are the same as sensible things except in that the former are eternal and the latter perishable’. Beyond this antinomy, however, he adds that such a way of looking at things necessarily leads us back to anthropomorphism and thus religion. He accordingly continues his train of thought thusly: ‘For Platonists say nothing more or less than that there is an absolute Man, and Horse, and Health; in which they closely resemble those who state that there are Gods, but of human form; for as the latter invented nothing more or less than eternal men, so the former simply make the Forms eternal sensibles’.14 One sees that the anthropomorphisation of the world of ideas immediately springs from the fact that idealist philosophy ascribes to essence its own existence next to, or rather over, the world of appearance. This ‘own’ existence must be necessarily endowed with its own proper traits, and since these traits are not likenesses of the material world – of inseparable attachment and dialectical contradictoriness at the same time – then what can they be other than the proportions of human beings? That is certainly only the most general foundation for the complicated state of affairs existing here. For the idealist tendency has vastly more concrete consequences here, though they invariably stem from the same source. We already pointed out earlier, though still in a very abstract way, that just as the isolated psychology of the labour process offers

14

Aristotle 1961, pp. 111–13.

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the model for idealist world-images, so too does labour – comprehended in its true concrete totality – constitute the starting point for the correct reflection of reality and with it the elimination of anthropomorphising ways of looking at things. This antithesis becomes most clearly apparent in the relationship of subjectivity (activity) and matter. It perhaps suffices if we illuminate this antithesis in the conceptions of Aristotle and Plotinus. Aristotle primarily distinguishes sharply between creation through nature and creation through the labour of man: ‘Things are generated artificially whose form is contained in the soul … the physician continues reasoning until he arrives at what he himself can finally do; then the process from this point onwards, i.e. the process towards health, is called “production”. Therefore it follows in a sense that health comes from health and a house from a house; that which has matter from that which has not (for the art of medicine or of building is the form of health or the house)’.15 The clear separation of natural and artificial genesis not only makes knowledge of the essence of labour possible but also prevents its false generalisation, the uncritical application of its categories to non-human reality. However, this is precisely what occurs in the works of Plotinus. It is of the essence of labour that in it the properties of matter appear to the labourer as possibilities in relation to the concrete goal set by him. Now Plotinus generalises this respectively concrete and determinate possibility into an abstract and absolute possibility, and he contrasts it with the mental portion of labour that appears in this context – likewise generalised in an abstract way – as actuality in opposition to potentiality. He explains, ‘For it is not even possible for what is in potency ever to come to actuality if the potential holds the rank of principle among beings [G.L.: polemic against materialism]: for it certainly will not bring itself to actuality, but the actual must be before it, and then this potential will no longer be a principle; … For, certainly, matter does not generate form, that which is without quality the qualified, nor does actuality come from the potential’.16 All of objective reality (especially everything created by nature) is thereby reduced to the pattern of production by means of labour. Which necessarily entails that the producer can now be notionally endowed with anthropomorphising traits as well. In the works of Plato, Aristotle already caught clear sight of the inevitability of this misrepresentation by making ideas independent of objects. He polemicises against the conception ‘that the Forms are the causes both of existence and of generation. Yet, assuming that the Forms exist, still the

15 16

Aristotle 1961, pp. 339–41. Plotinus 1988b, p. 93.

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things which participate in them are not generated unless there is something to impart motion … Even if the one class is eternal and the other not, it will make no difference’.17 For the objective idealism of antiquity, the world of ideas transformed the autonomised essence detached from the world of appearance into a real basis of reality. Thus, no way remained open other than to construe the causation thus established in an anthropomorphising and mythologising way as the ‘labour process’ of the coming to be, being, and becoming of the world, thereby taking the sting out of everything that earlier philosophy accomplished towards disanthropomorphising of knowledge and substantiating it as science. However, the role model provided by the labour process as the foundation of new anthropomorphising is still more closely historically conditioned than it appears in this brief and abstract exposition. That is to say, not only is it a matter of projecting abstracted labour in general into the real causal relationships of objective reality, but also over and above that it concretely involves projecting the specific conception of labour in antiquity. This conception inclines – and the more the contradictions of the slave economy are manifested, the more it so inclines – towards a contempt for labour, especially bodily labour. Philosophically, this entails that the mytho-anthropomorphising relationship of the world of ideas to material reality must be a hierarchical one in which the particular creative principle necessary for existence has to stand ontologically higher than that which is produced by it. Plotinus says, ‘And all things when they come to perfection produce; the One is always perfect and therefore produces everlastingly; and its product is less than itself’.18 This hierarchy, according to which the created or the produced must necessarily be lower than the creator, is here a consequence of the Greek valuation of labour. It in no way unconditionally or necessarily follows from the essence of philosophical idealism, even though it does involve a return to religious ideology. Under the influence of capitalist economy and its conception of labour, however, Hegel, who is also an objective idealist, determines this relationship in a completely antithetical way. Of the labour process and its product, he says, ‘To this extent the means is higher than the finite purposes of external purposiveness: the plough is more honorable than are immediately the enjoyments which it procures and which are purposes. The tool lasts while the immediate enjoyments pass away and are forgotten. It is in their tools that human beings possess power over external nature, even though with respect to their purposes they are subjected to it’.19

17 18 19

Aristotle 1961, pp. 69–71. Plotinus 1988a, p. 33. Hegel 2010, p. 663.

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This is not the place for determining where the anthropomorphising myth of the demiurge enters into the works of Hegel as well. The hierarchy that thus comes into being in antiquity acquires a decisive significance for later thinking. In terms of content it generally reverts to primitive religious representations. However, as it carries this change out upon a developed philosophical basis and as it partially incorporates the results of scientifico-methodological progress, it creates the intellectual basis for conserving religion at a highly developed stage of civilisation and science. It is unnecessary to explain in detail how important this tendency is: to sustain, exploit, and indeed even to improve individual scientific results and the necessary practical method of scientific research (disanthropomorphising included) by radically removing the ideological sting. That is to say, it allows scientific research that has been set up in a disanthropomorphising way to overturn into a new anthropomorphising in the treatment of ‘ultimate questions’. The Platonic theory of ideas is a classic example for this; similar attempts to figure out how to save the scientific method for praxis while permitting it no influence in (religious) ideological issues also, of course, turn up in the East. However, since in most cases there the priesthood controlled mental life much more strongly than it did in Greece, this integration of individual sciences into an anthropomorphising mysticism could take place much earlier, more radically, and with less conflict than it does in classical antiquity, in which a whole period of principled disanthropomorphisation preceded this reversal, in which the tendency towards the scientific does not give up its ground without a struggle. On the other hand, the reduction of worldview to anthropomorphising that sets in with Plato determines the fate of scientific thinking in Europe for almost a millennium and at times pushes the real achievements of antiquity almost completely into oblivion. This reversal sets in at a lofty level of disanthropomorphising thought and can even boast substantial philosophical achievements (the further development of dialectics through Plato). Thus, it cannot suffice to state that the world of ideas must bear anthropomorphic traits nor to expose its social causes; instead, the resulting antithesis must be illuminated a bit more. The deep ambiguity of the Platonic world of ideas is based on the fact that it is supposed to be simultaneously and inextricably the highest abstraction, the purely supersensible, and most vivid concreteness. The autonomised essence detached from things, a creative effective force that produces the world of appearance, is embodied in the world of ideas in mythically sensible forms. In the case of Plato himself, this ambiguity is frequently still in a latent state, though it unfolds all of its contradictions quite openly in Neo-Platonism. That is why we build our observations on Plotinus, who speaks of the world of ideas in

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this way: ‘when the discussion is about intelligible substance and the genera and principles there, one must remove the coming into being in the sphere of bodies and the understanding through sense-perception and the magnitudes …’20 In sum: reality itself, which is indeed to be the likeness and product of the world of ideas, minus becoming and quantity. Both of these abstractions would be – as abstractions, as pure thought operations – as such capable of being carried out fully, although it is precisely research into quantitative relations that has proved to be indispensable for a rational knowledge of the object-world. But how is the relationship to this world that Plotinus demands supposed to be created when it is construed – which is indeed the presupposition here – not as a pure abstraction, gained from that which is sensibly given? An existing world – of the highest actuality in contrast to the mere potentiality of matter – at once absorbed in sensible/insensible/supersensible immediacy and construed as pure essence, as sole substance and motive force of actual reality: how can the method of its reception be formulated? For this purpose, the conception of ‘intellectual intuition’ had to be devised. (What matters is the concept, not when and how the term was formulated.) This conception takes disanthropomorphising aspects, admittedly distorted, from science. For it is clear that such a reality, one that is in keeping with immediately sensible reality, though without becoming and quantity, cannot possibly be apprehended with the normal means of thinking. However, going beyond the scope of everyday thinking here cannot possibly be just the continuation of scientific disanthropomorphising. Not only are precisely quantifying abstraction and the comprehension of the laws of becoming decisive for this scientific disanthropomorphising, but also the tendency to comprehend the pure in-itself of appearances with the greatest possible elimination of the features of human receptivity must predominate, whereas a Platonic ‘intelligible reality’ is inextricably linked to the essence of man as man. The demand thus comes into being simultaneously to rise above the anthropological level of man and yet to preserve this – purified – level, indeed to achieve oneself precisely by means of this purification. As already noted, the deep affinity to religious comportment is founded on this: a retention of immediacy in the linking of the subject and object of everyday life with an emphatic elevation over this sphere, with its pathetic abandonment and negation. On the one hand, the act of such a simultaneity thus preserves the immediate everyday relationship between theory and praxis with all its limits on penetrating the true objectivity

20

Plotinus 1988b, p. 123.

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contained therein. On the other, it postulates abandoning the normal human comportment towards reality: since the object (intelligible reality, the world of ideas) is more than human, the subject must also rise above his own level in order to be able to assimilate it. Apparently, it is a question of an act of actual humanisation at the same time: the theory of ideas and religion are in agreement that the human soul only is able to find itself here; this is in contrast to the scientific attitude, in which being human is – allegedly – abandoned, violated, emptied, and distorted. (This brusque antithesis is admittedly the product of a much later development. In the works of Plato, mathematics and geometry are still indispensable preconditions of ‘initiation’, of embarking on the path to the world of ideas; in the works of the Neo-Platonists, this antithesis is somewhat more clearly, but often still latently, present. This antithesis first openly emerges in the modern period as the act of ‘ungodding’ the world is construed as jeopardising the humanity of man, his human integrity; as happens, for example, in the works of Pascal.) The situation is diametrically opposed in reality. The disanthropomorphisation of science is an instrument of man’s controlling the world: it is a making-conscious, a raising-to-the-level-of-method of that comportment which, as we have shown, begins with labour, lifts man out of animality, and helps him to make a human being out of himself. With this, labour and the supremely conscious form (scientific comportment) growing out of it are not merely an instrument for controlling the object-world. Inseparably, they are also a circuitous route that, as a result of a richer discovery of reality, enriches man himself, makes him more complete and human than he could otherwise be. Compared with this, that elevation over the everyday that intellectual intuition and religion call for assumes that man’s core is just as transcendent for him as the world of ideas or religious ‘reality’ is transcendent from the objective, mundane world. All of the methods proposed here, from the theory of eros to asceticism, ecstasy, etc., inspire the pursuit of this transcendent essence in man and set it against the real man in a brusquely exclusionary, antagonistically dismissive way. A pseudo-anthropomorphising thus comes into being here. In fact, it does so in a twofold sense, both objectively and subjectively. Objectively, a ‘superhuman’ world, a world ‘beyond man’, is laid down, not merely to exist independent of human consciousness, like the real world does, but literally to represent a beyond, something qualitatively different and higher compared to everything else that is perceptible and conceivable. However, the totality of this world’s aspects also bears the traits of an anthropomorphising that, as such, has been projected into that which is beyond man. Subjectively, the subject must radically break with his given humanity, even with his morally formed personality,

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in order to be able to establish a fruitful contact with such a world. Although in Plato’s theory of eros itself the ascent from human ethics to the intellectual intuition of the world of ideas still shows more transitions than breaks and leaps, it is justifiable to stress brusquely the subjective opposition to intrapersonal ethics as a subjective aspect of this ascent. For here too the line of succession has not hesitated to develop an openly prominent antithesis out of a latently present one. It is characteristic for any actual ethics – may the distance of the ethical precept from the average level of praxis in the everyday world be ever so great – to appeal to that essence in people that includes in itself everyone as a human being and personality. Even if its unfolding calls forth great inner struggles and deep crises, the immanent circle of human personality is still not burst open at all. The hard-won essence demanded by ethics is still the essence of each individual person as a person. This is precisely the place, however, where the subjective aspect of the ascent to the world of ideas involves a break: even the ethically realised human essence is merely mundane, material, and creaturely in comparison to that subject which is worthy and capable of partaking in the intellectual intuition of the world of ideas. It is therefore a matter here, precisely in that sphere whose essence is to be bound to humanness, of a disanthropomorphising, though also bearing the imprint of pseudoanthropomorphising. For in place of actually overcoming in a concrete way those aspects in man that fetter him to the surface of the everyday and bar him from working out that which is essential to himself using his own powers, what occurs is an abstract transcendence in the claims to go beyond the limits of the human altogether. And it is in the nature of things that those currents in ethics which aim to work out and determine the immanently human core of man – a core which is deeply associated with and rooted in social development – can also focus in conception and presentation on an actually objective scientific conceptualisation. Compared with this, going beyond the scope of the human in an abstract and transcendent way must, when generalised in theory and practice, drift towards approximating or even actualising magicoreligious practices, rites, etc. In antiquity this had already taken place in NeoPlatonism, Neo-Pythagoreanism, etc. long before Christian religious doctrine incorporated these philosophies. What subjectively comes into being here as well is thus a pseudo-anthropomorphising. Because its detailed treatment cannot take place until later, it should only be noted here in passing that this overturning of the conception of a world of ideas beyond man into anthropomorphism necessarily involves a far-reaching, admittedly often unconscious adoption of aesthetic principles. This is understandable, for the supersensible-sensible character of a world of ideas imparts

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necessary and certainly important features of art or, more precisely, of pseudoactualisation – by being projected into the transcendent – of the principles of artistic creation. The perfect, or at any rate superhuman, demiurge must naturally also be a kind of super-artist. The peremptory rejection of art in the works of Plato and its conditional rejection by Plotinus are only a consequence of this position. (The import of this animosity towards art is thus precisely the opposite of what was noticed in the case of the pre-Socratics.) We now cite a longer passage from Plotinus’ expositions about ‘intelligible beauty’ so that the general outlines of this problematic situation become clear to the reader. We can then draw the conclusions for aesthetics itself at a more developed stage of our analysis. Plotinus says, ‘Each there [in that higher heaven] has everything in itself and sees all things in every other, so that all are everywhere and each and every one is all and the glory is unbounded … A different kind of being stands out in each, but in each all are manifest. Movement, too, is pure: for the mover does not trouble it in its going by being different from it. Rest is not disturbed, for it is not mixed with that which is not at rest. Beauty is just beauty, because it is not in what is not beautiful. Each walks not as if on alien ground, but each one’s place is its very self and when it ascends (so to speak) the place it came from runs along with it, and it is not itself one thing and its place another. Here [in the world of the senses], however, one part would not come from another, and each would be only a part; but there each comes only from the whole and is part and whole at once; it has the appearance of a part, but a penetrating look sees the whole in it … They do not grow weary of contemplation there, or so filled with it as to cease contemplating: for there is no emptiness which would result in their being satisfied when they had filled it and reached their end; and things are not different from each other so as to make what belongs to one displeasing to another with different characteristics; and nothing there wears out or wearies’.21 That all the categories and categorical relationships here are hypostasised out of aesthetics – admittedly in an ecstatically exaggerated manner – is obvious. We had to concern ourselves at some length with this backward-pointing movement of disanthropomorphic tendencies in Greek philosophy because its principled significance for the fate of the scientific reflection of reality is extraordinarily great. Especially because the reversal was effected not from the outside, not directly by that magico-religious circle of ideas which Greek philosophy originally undertook to overcome (and in the overcoming of which Greek philosophy indeed made world historically important advances), but

21

Plotinus 1988a, pp. 249–53.

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rather by philosophy itself. As we can already see from what has been explained up to now, in all questions of the formation and interpretation of the theory of reflection the struggle between anthropomorphising and disanthropomorphising tendencies must take place at an essentially higher level than it did before. Henceforth, it is no longer just a matter of the attempt to overcome a primitive anthropomorphising way of seeing. Since this turn, it also comes down to bringing to an end the antagonism of these tendencies within highly developed philosophy and science. Indeed, this is all the more true considering that the struggle did not come to a standstill even in late Greek thinking. We have indeed briefly indicated the resistance of Aristotle to the anthropomorphising and objectively anti-scientific spirit of the theory of ideas, and it suffices to mention Epicurus’s name in order to illuminate this situation from another side. A spirit gruffly directed against religious belief is manifest in the works of Epicurus; Lucretius emphasises the world significance of this core of his philosophy, and even Hegel, whose dismissal of Epicurus frequently reaches to the point of a complete lack of understanding, highlights in relation to Epicurus’s physics the fact ‘it opposed the superstition of the Roman and Greek world and raised human beings above it’.22

2

The Contradictory Recovery of Disanthropomorphising in Modern Times

In spite of this resistance, it must be noticed that anthropomorphising tendencies predominated at the end of antiquity and also essentially dominated mediaeval thinking. A new, major attack on the anthropomorphising principle begins with the Renaissance, and it gives all problems that basic character that they have kept – admittedly with many not unimportant variations – to this day. Historical causes explain the essentially different traits of this more recent development. In relation to our problem, these causes exhibit two main tendencies. First, the breadth, depth, intensity, etc. of disanthropomorphisation’s progress depends on how far the labour and science of a period are able to come to terms with objective reality. We have pointed out the limits of the slave economy in antiquity, which entailed that the scientific basis of the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality had to be narrow from the very beginning, without the social possibility of a resolute expansion. Consequentially,

22

Hegel 2006, p. 288.

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antiquity’s ingenious early generalisations were unable to penetrate the details of objective reality and enrich themselves upon particular facts, relationships, regularities, etc. and thereby ascend to concrete universality, to a comprehensive methodology. This changes after the collapse of the slave economy in the Middle Ages. Engels shows how these ‘Dark Ages’ led to an abundance of scientific and technological discoveries whose existence first made possible the new turn to the scientific in the Renaissance.23 True, their influence on the theology-dominated thinking of their time was piecemeal and at the same time quite limited. A certain accumulation, an overturning of the sluggish growth of quantity into the new quality of a new scientific attitude, was necessary in order to bring forth this reversal. Second, however, this tendency, which springs from the metabolism of society with nature, intersects with another tendency that is just as important. It comes down not only to a society determining how great the material for knowledge happens to be and, in this way, determining how profound the set of issues it presents to science and philosophy end up being, but also to how far those generalisations and truths scientifically obtained from this particular material field can be ideologically tolerated. It is not our task here to investigate in concrete terms this set of problems in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity. Here there again exists a problem of determining where the questions and answers of dialectical materialism pass over into those of historical materialism. The latter has to explore and reveal those concrete social regularities that determine why a social formation at a certain level of its development can already no longer tolerate that mode of the reflection of objective reality that has become possible within it due to the level of its productive forces; why at certain stages of certain formations the need for the generalisation of individually achieved, individually necessary and useful meaningful experiences is still not awakened; and, finally, why under certain social conditions this need obtains an irresistible force; etc., etc. For us, concerned here with the dialectical materialist problem of how the disanthropomorphising aspects of the scientific reflection of reality are formed, taking a general notice of these relationships is indeed paramount. We thus call attention to the social motives of uneven development in this area as well and disclose certain concrete correlations that are also indicative for advances and reversals here. However, all of these issues are in the first instance considered from the standpoint of the dialectical materialist issues of reflection itself.

23

Engels 1987c, pp. 465–6.

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Therefore, if we now pass to the analysis of modern development, we must above all highlight the main aspects of its difference from antiquity, the specific traits of this period – admittedly at the level of highest generality – whereby they bring about a new and, in a certain sense, definitive turn in the process of the disanthropomorphisation of scientific reflection. In the course of this, the primary and overarching aspect is the unfolding of the capitalist mode of production. This economic formation is the last class society not because of some accident but on the contrary because of the essence of its lawfulness, thus out of historico-systematic necessity. On the one hand, capitalism produces the material conditions of a society without exploitation; on the other, it even itself begets its own ‘gravedigger’ – the proletariat, a class in which the ‘condition for [its] emancipation … is the abolition of all classes’.24 From this arises, long before this contradictoriness of capitalism became blatantly apparent, its specificity as an economic formation, its difference in principle from all previous formations. Marx identifies this difference as follows: All previous forms of society were destroyed by the development of wealth – or, which is the same thing, by the development of the social productive forces. Among the ancients, who were conscious of this fact, wealth was therefore directly denounced as bringing about the dissolution of the community. Feudal society, for its part, was destroyed by urban industry, trade and modern agriculture. (Even by some inventions, e.g. gun powder and the printing press.) With the development of wealth – and hence also of new [productive] forces and expanded intercourse among individuals – the economic conditions upon which the community was based were dissolved, as were the corresponding political relations between the various component parts of the community: the religion, in which it was viewed in idealised form (and both community and religion, in turn, were rooted in a given relationship to nature, into which all productive force resolves itself); the character, outlook, etc., of the individuals … True, development not only took place on the old basis, there was also a development of this basis itself. The highest development of this basis itself (the flower into which it is transformed, while remaining this basis, this plant as flower; hence withering after flowering and as a result of flowering) is the point at which it is itself worked out and developed to the form in which it becomes compatible with the highest degree of the development of the productive forces and thus also with the

24

Marx 1976, p. 212.

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richest development of the individuals [possible on this basis]. As soon as this point has been reached, further development appears as a decline, and the new development begins from a new basis.25 In contrast, capitalism knows no such limits. Of course, it possesses certain limits; indeed it produces and reproduces these limits continuously, though, as Marx says, as constantly sublated limits, not as a ‘sacred limit’: The barrier to capital is the fact that this entire development proceeds in a contradictory way, and that the elaboration of the productive forces, of general wealth, etc., knowledge, etc., takes place in such a way that the working individual alienates himself; that he relates to the conditions brought out of him by his labour, not as to the conditions of his own, but of alien wealth and of his own poverty. But this contradictory form is itself vanishing and produces the real conditions for its own sublation.26 Elucidating how this specificity of capitalist development relates to the necessity and specificity of proletarian revolution is not our task here. At the same time, two aspects are important for us. First, the unfolding of the forces of production has no ‘sacred boundary’ in the sense of prior formations but, considered in itself, possesses the immanent tendency towards limitlessness. Second, the limitless expansion of the forces of production advances in continuous interaction with a likewise limitless formation of the scientific method in a mutually fructifying exchange and influence. With the fall of the limits of earlier formations on production, all limits to propagating and consolidating the scientific method fall as well. Only now does the development of science first receive, in theory and in practice, the character of infinite progress. Closely related to this is the fact that the results of science, above all by means of the reorganisation of the labour process, increasingly pervade everyday life and essentially modify its modes of appearance and expression, though without being able to revolutionise its fundamental structure. That requires, for instance, the ever-greater rending of the intimacy of handicraft and art that existed for thousands of years; the scientification of the spheres of life and labour, which were entirely removed from such influences up to that time; etc. This radically new situation also influences the character of the second socially inhibitory motive examined by us in the development of the scientific

25 26

Marx 1986, pp. 464–5. Marx 1986, p. 465, translation modified.

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mind. In the case of disanthropomorphising tendencies, the generalised results of science are rejected for reasons of their intolerable class implications. The phenomenon itself is of course a general one: such intolerability always indicates the problematic status of the position of a ruling class. When its results are thought through methodologically and ideologically, the science that came into being with the help of the forces of production unleashed by it contradicts the ideological presuppositions of its class rule. The new situation in capitalism consists of a schism in the interests of the ruling class: on the one hand, it will not tolerate any breach in the worldview that props up its reign; on the other hand, compelled by threat of ruin, this same ruling class has to constantly develop the forces of production and hence accordingly has to promote science as well. This socio-historical double-function of the ruling class in relation to our problem of disanthropomorphisation in the scientific reflection of reality gives a new character to ideological reversals. Needless to say, the ruling class attempts, particularly at the outset, to respond in the old way to renewals of the scientific method and to its new results. One sees this most clearly in the great struggles around the Copernican turn in astronomy. Without being able to go into details, it must nevertheless be established that the ideological powers of the reaction at that time were compelled to gradually accept the new outcomes and at the very least to tolerate further work on the basis of the new method, even in the case of the rejection or indeed the prosecution of its ideological consequences. (Let us recall the position of Cardinal Bellarmine.) The subsequent clashes of science and reactionary ideology exhibit the same image even more clearly. It in no way follows, however, that the method and outcomes of science (in which, as we will soon see, the principle of disanthropomorphising dominates ever more consciously and vigorously) would be ideologically acceptable to the ruling class. On the contrary, its struggle against such results intensifies, though it is compelled to make use of new means. These means must now be constituted in such a way that they do not interfere with science’s normal, practically effective course of development (disanthropomorphising included, of course). They must merely take the sting out of ideological generalisations of these results, drawing from them such conclusions that are in keeping with the tendencies to conserve the state of society for a time. This instantly amounts to a narrowing of the battlefield. Whereas the objective idealism of late antiquity set the concrete – disanthropomorphising – world-image of scientific philosophy against another equally concrete, albeit anthropomorphising, world-image (be mindful of contrasts like Democritus and Plato or Epicurus and Plotinus), in most cases the modern tendencies towards reversals fall back on an epistemologically oriented subjective idealism. Since it has become impossible to set the

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disanthropomorphising world-image of science against a concretely anthropomorphising one without jeopardising the further development of science, the key feature of such modern reversals rests with the ‘critical’ reproduction of the claim of human knowledge to grasp objective reality. Science can now, at will, do as it pleases in the world of appearances because no conclusions can be drawn from it for the world existing in itself, for objective reality at all. Subjectified philosophical idealism falls back on the position of the merely epistemological prohibition against an objective world-image. It is not our task here to even adumbrate the great variability of the possible resulting positions that can be taken here. The room for manoeuvre that thus comes into being in this way extends from the simple ‘epistemological’ reconstitution of religions all the way to religious atheism, from the perfect agnosticism of positivists all the way to open mythmaking, etc. We can all the sooner dispense with a detailed treatment of this multiplicity of forms as these forms exhibit the same physiognomy from the point of view of our problem: that of anthropomorphising. Naturally, this tendency is most clearly apparent where the philosophical salvaging of old religious representations or the new creation of myths is involved. True, even here the old, deceptive belief in the objectivity of such constructs created by man begins to falter. In the works of Schleiermacher or Kierkegaard, subjectivity’s becoming-consciousness has already turned into the principle of new religiosity, but this orientation could also be demonstrated in other less obvious cases. After all, the entire tendency towards the conservation or new creation of religion, precisely in pointed contrast to science, has received new emphasis. Already in the works of Pascal, the world’s ‘God-forsakenness’ due to the advance of disanthropomorphising science appears as a terrible vision, against which all of the ‘human’ (i.e., anthropomorphising) powers of religion and belief are to be emphatically mobilised. This exhortation intensifies over time. The less the ruling class can tolerate the true likeness of reality as such, the more strongly science receives the characteristic traits of the inhuman and anti-human in the ideology of this class. If now the emphasis of such an ideological polemic against the scientific is focused on vilifying as inhuman the scientific method, the approach to objective reality as existing in itself, and its disanthropomorphising reflection, then it is clear at the same time that only an – overtly or covertly – anthropomorphising method can come to the fore philosophically. At the same time, the increasing significance of subjectivism in this process must – regardless of whether this happens consciously or not – reinforce anthropomorphising tendencies. This is perhaps even more clearly apparent in the pure philosophy of modernity than in religions or worldviews proceeding on the basis of religiosity. These must arise with a claim to objectivity – albeit

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often heavily attenuated – however little this claim can actually be justified in a philosophical way. By contrast, if one keeps in mind the subjectivation of time from Bergson to Heidegger and of space from Scheler27 to Ortega y Gasset, it is clear here that lived experience (that which is experienced, that which is added by the subject, his way of immediately taking in reality) is set as the ‘true’ reality of objectivity, as ‘genuine’ against the ‘dead’ objectivity of scientific knowledge. Thus, for Scheler, ‘the extended physical world [becomes] less real and substantial’ due to the lived experiences of modern transportation.28 Ortega y Gasset sees great philosophical progress in this: ‘In fact, from the places where I happen to be situated at any given moment, all other places of the world organise themselves into a vital perspective that is dynamic in its affecting tensions: the perspective near-far’.29 In relation to space, just as happens earlier in relation to time in the works of Bergson, anthropomorphising subjectivity is openly pitted as the higher principle here against disanthropomorphising science. One sees that ideological reversal takes place here no less markedly than in antiquity. The essential difference consists, however, in the fact that the shock of the scientific spirit, which generally took place in a like manner, affects the methodology and praxis of science itself in a completely different, much weaker way. On the whole, one must say that the progress of the knowledge of reality and its effect on everyday life goes on unstoppably. True, only on the whole, for undoubtedly no Great Wall of China can be erected between worldview, epistemology, etc. and the practical methodology of science. In addition, modern anthropomorphising has grown so abstract and faded, so vaporous, that it can easily creep into the methodology of sciences without bringing about the semblance of a change of method on the surface. (Think of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.) On the other hand, the passage of time clearly manifests itself in such a change in the function of the anthropomorphising worldview. Disanthropomorphising has fought for and won a definitive victory in the scientific reflection of reality, and its effects inexorably spread out – despite such ideological reversals – into the praxis of the sciences and the everyday. Later, as we will demonstrate in detail in connection with the irrefutably necessary facts of the labour process, the disanthropomorphising of the most important activities of people in the age of capitalism is a necessary process that, with the development of the forces of production, inexorably intensifies, covering and growing steadily more and more conditions of human praxis 27 28 29

Max Scheler (1874–1928), pioneering German phenomenologist. [Eds.] Scheler 1924, p. 145. Ortega y Gasset 1954.

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both extensively and intensively. This state of affairs determines the specificity of ideological resistance, its nature, scope, and limits; it ensures that, despite all efforts, no reversal of the sort that occurred at the end of antiquity can recur. This is because of the constantly growing ambit of human praxis must increasingly work with disanthropomorphising categories; and because, when it comes to questions of worldview, even the ideologues of anthropomorphism not only are unable to arrest this advance of practical disanthropomorphisation but also are without the desire to do so. Lastly, it is also because precisely this disanthropomorphisation has turned into the foundation of the power of that class whose ideology the champions of anthropomorphisation represent. Hence its ideological struggle – in contrast to late antiquity and the Middle Ages – limits itself to interpreting differently, as we have seen, the consequences of the progressive disanthropomorphisation of science for one’s worldview, without thereby being able to alter the essence of this process even in the slightest. The ‘free will’ of the atomic particle may carry confusion into some problems of physics and in many cases inhibit the progress of physics towards a rational uniformity in the explanation of phenomena. Yet the apparatus of thought with which it is processed must all the same (despite a built-in anthropomorphising mythology) remain disanthropomorphising in terms of its practical methodology, like that used by the enemies they oppose. As we have seen, the anthropomorphising reversal against the new scientific spirit is therefore less a recapturing of lost terrain, as it was from Plato to the scholastics, and more of a subjective-religious and ‘lyrical’ song of consolation. The peculiar situation of modern thinking (the principle of the scientific attains a hitherto unprecedented universality, and at the same time the antithesis between it and a philosophy of worldviews was never so brusque) is explained precisely on the basis of our previous remarks: for the bourgeoisie and its intelligentsia, that world-image which the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality imposes upon man appears indispensable practically and economically but less and less tolerable ideologically. As a general appearance, this phenomenon is unquestionably related to the growing susceptibility to crisis of bourgeois existence and its increasing lack of perspective. Fright at the fragmentation of religion, at the ‘God-forsakenness’ of objective reality grasped in a purely scientific way, of course sets in – in isolated instances – early on. Pascal is the first great example of how one can be, as a mathematician and physicist, a trailblazer of the new in terms not only of individual results but also of methodology and nevertheless still necessarily not be immune to mental shock simply because one has come to terms with the world in a way worked out by one’s own efforts. The ultimate basis for such a comportment is a social one. The depletion of the world-image of

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anthropomorphising religious representations can – as the history of thought teaches – make both an inspiring and a depressing (indeed to the point of despair) impression on the individual. This effect is deeply grounded in the lives of the people in question, in their existence as whole, vivid people of the everyday. For the most part, for these individuals it is not a matter of something provable with either scientific or logico-methodological reasons that elucidate still discrete facts or relationships; rather, the whole man’s attitude towards life is founded on lived experiences, emotions, meaningful experiences, etc. However, this existence is – in a way that is not transparent for the individual in most cases – objectively determined by the social being of the man concerned, by the general structure, level of development, etc. of the society in which he lives, by the position he occupies in this society. In The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann splendidly describes this foundation of the attitude towards life in capitalist everydayness (an attitude that remains completely unconscious in most cases), and this account is crucial for the problem being discussed here. About Hans Castorp, who incidentally is an engineer, he says the following: A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and contemporaries; and although he may regard the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as unequivocal givens and take them for granted, having as little intention of ever subjecting them to critique as our good Hans Castorp himself had, it is nevertheless quite possible that he senses his own moral well-being to be somehow impaired by the lack of critique. All sorts of personal goals, purposes, hopes, prospects may float before the eyes of a given individual, from which he may then glean the impulse for exerting himself for great deeds; if the impersonal world around him, however, if the times themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle, provide him with neither hopes nor prospects, if they secretly supply him with evidence that things are in fact hopeless, without prospect or remedy, if the times respond with hollow silence to every conscious or subconscious question, however it may be posed, about the ultimate, unequivocal meaning of all exertions and deeds that are more than exclusively personal – then it is almost inevitable, particularly if the person involved is a more honest sort, that the situation will have a crippling effect, which, following moral and spiritual paths, may even spread to the individual’s physical and organic life. For a person to be disposed to the more significant deeds that go beyond what is simply required of him – even when his own times may provide no satisfactory answer to the question of why – he needs either a rare, heroic personality that exists in

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a kind of moral isolation and immediacy, or one characterized by exceptionally robust vitality.30 Now under capitalist conditions, particularly under those of its decline, this social being yields a growing inscrutability of life (of social life) as a whole, in sharp contrast to its growing elucidation in the individual results and methodology of science. Thus, even a natural scientist like Planck, who fervently keeps the methodology of his research pure of all modern attempts to mythologise, can promulgate an accord between religion and science (with clear insight into the disanthropomorphising tendency of the latter and into the anthropomorphising nature of the former). At the same time, it is characteristic that he draws the line of division between knowledge (science) and action (religion), whereby he assumes the imperfectability of knowledge in the latter because ‘man’s volitional decisions cannot wait until cognition has become complete or he has become omniscient. We stand in the midst of life, and its manifold demands and needs often make it imperative that we reach decisions or translate our mental attitudes into immediate action. Long and tedious reflection cannot enable us to shape our decisions and attitudes properly; only that definite and clear instruction can which we gain from a direct inner link to God’.31 It is clear that what Planck understands here by ‘action’ are the conditions of life in the everyday. That the socially or socio-economically conditioned character of this milieu and the forms of action possible within it do not become conscious for him in the process changes nothing in the position he takes. This position only reveals again our earlier conclusion as to how closely the structure of religion and that of everyday praxis are related to each other. For that reason, his attitude confirms Marx’s fundamental thesis regarding the conditions of existence and of the withering away of religion: ‘The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society possess a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development’.32 30 31 32

Mann 1995, p. 31. Planck 1949, p. 185. Marx 1990, p. 173.

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We have chosen Planck as our example here because he unselfconsciously discusses the disanthropomorphising method in the sciences in a spontaneously materialist way and looks upon the growing attempts to make the reflection of reality independent of the human sense organs as a matter of course: ‘Once the specific perceptions of the senses as fundamental concepts of physics had been eliminated from that science, it was a logical step to substitute suitable measuring instruments for the organs of sense. The eye gave way to the photographic film, the ear to the vibrating membrane, and the skin to the thermometer. The introduction of self-registering apparatuses further eliminated subjective sources of error’.33 At the same time what is entirely missing in these observations by Planck is that angst according to which the disanthropomorphisation of scientific knowledge subjectively could, as a reflex of a ‘God-forsaken’ world, turn into a principle of inhumanity. On the contrary, he clearly sees that the emerging process here of the endless approach to the world existing in itself and independent of our consciousness is the only real means of bestowing upon people knowledge of, and with it control over, objectively existing reality. That is why he is so characteristic: in him we find the ideological coexistence of religion (as a principle of action but no longer as knowledge of the world; as an element of everyday life and not as the guidance of science) with a disanthropomorphising that has been driven as far as possible in the scientific reflection of reality. Such conceptions as Planck’s can only erect a weak dam against the irruption of mystico-anthropomorphising tendencies into worldview and, mediated in this way, frequently into science. In order to complete the breakthrough to the new principle in the reflection of reality, to the precise and well-grounded departure from the anthropomorphism of everyday thinking and religion, just as the Renaissance and its immediate aftermath carried this out by continuing and concretising the great beginnings of early Greek development, the pathos of a wholly new ideological certainty is necessary. A brief excursus into the anthropology and ethics of this period is essential not only to illuminate this a bit but also to make the subjective side of this mode of reflection clearer at the same time. Because it is impossible here for reasons of length to treat these issues in detail, we limit ourselves to a single, admittedly central issue. What is clearly expressed along with it at the same time – this time viewed from the positive perspective – is the socio-historical character of the spontaneous and conscious mode of comportment of everyday thinking in its interdependency with differentiated, self-created objectivations that have become autonomous.

33

Planck 1959, p. 240.

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This is also the case when (indeed, precisely when) individual thinkers are, as in the cases to be considered here, in no way conscious of this socio-historical determinacy, or even when they – implicitly or explicitly – are of the opinion that they are beyond such determinations. This usage of the scientifically disanthropomorphising point of view, emphasising a thereby achieved philosophical substantiation of the control of man over his own life in society, is expressed most clearly in the works of Hobbes and above all in those of Spinoza. Both strive to make the ‘geometrical’ method that paved the way for knowledge of nature usable for the building up of anthropology, psychology, and ethics.34 This is not the place to offer a critique of the methodological illusions that are present and operative here; later we will briefly come back to their determining motives. Here it is only important to emphasise that the rejection of any transcendent (thus religious) power plays at the same time a decisive role for the productive control of man over his own affects, for his freedom in the sense of that word as developed by Hobbes and Spinoza. As a precise analysis could easily demonstrate, Spinoza’s great notion that an ‘affect cannot be checked or destroyed except by a contrary affect which is stronger than the affect which is to be checked’ has for its model the observation of the labour process.35 However, whereas in everyday and religious thinking the pattern of planning teleology is projected into objective reality, here the teleologically applied causal lawful regularity of the labour process itself (as Hegel later formulated it, with the help of the tool nature ‘wears itself down’) is adopted in order to illuminate man’s inner mode of comportment and his relationships to his fellowmen. Knowledge of the laws of reality existing in itself (laws that are independent of human consciousness) thus turns into a vehicle here for obtaining the freedom of man, his freedom understood as seeing through the real objective forces that he can make usable only through adequate knowledge, his freedom understood as exposing those imaginary, unconsciously self-created forces that he is likewise able to overcome only through such an elucidation of their essence. Needless to say, all of this is the result of a development that has lasted for thousands of years. In general, we have regarded the becoming-effective of the disanthropomorphising principle from the viewpoint of the alteration of the objective world-image of man, of the rationalisation of his praxis. Justifiably, since this transformation process and its consequences indeed represent that which is primary and decisive in the effect of scientific disanthropomorphisa-

34 35

Hobbes 1983, pp. 25–6; Spinoza 2002a, pp. 277–8. Spinoza 2002a, p. 325, translation modified.

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tion. However, its subjective reflex, its influence on personal worldviews, on ethics, on living, etc. must not be entirely ignored as well. The less so because, as we have seen and will repeatedly see, the ideological resistance to this principle of the genuinely scientific is always focused around the following point: disanthropomorphisation is said to be on par with inhumanity, dehumanisation (the ungodding of the world), the metamorphosis of man into an automaton, the abolishment of his personality and the meaning of his activity, etc. In recent times such lines of reasoning turn up even in the works of people who accept this methodology, not only in a purely practical way but also on behalf of the fields of knowledge. For example, Gehlen, whose own important findings we have already made use of and will yet make use of, says this regarding the relationship of man in the ‘archaic’ (according to Gehlen, the pre-magical) period: ‘Because man is essentially a cultural being, because his own nature deep down into the interior is a nature artificielle, indeed because he actually arrives at objective nature itself theoretically and practically in a one-sided way, to the extent that he arrives at it at all, such that any “image of nature” is only a tendentious extract: that is why an aspect of the artificial, indeed of the fictive, is absolutely a priori. Hence reality “in itself” inside and outside of him is quite transcendent, and if and when one nevertheless somehow arrives at it approximately, as in the natural sciences, it displays its inhumanity so that the archaic possibility of seeing himself in nature is taken away from modern man’.36 Here is what the nowadays widely read and much quoted Robert Musil has to say: ‘I fear that the following thought (in the afternoon, on the sofa) does not belong with my essays but to my biography: God, according to the normal idea of the relationship of the spinning electron and the body as a whole; what significance does it have for him if one builds Gothic or some other kind of structures? Spiritual differences do not have any effect on the laws of nature; if the human being is not to be more superfluous than a pendulum, then the superstructure of the whole is spiritual. To be precise, it is probably the next level in the superstructure’.37 Similar utterances could be quoted en masse. Against this, however, it must be emphasised that since Greek antiquity, since the first conscious emergence of the disanthropomorphising principle, a human mode of comportment (an ethics) has unfolded continuously and successively, albeit with reversals, often inconsistently, and in zigzag lines. This ethics corresponds to this disanthropomorphising principle and develops out of it, though of course this ethics does not disanthropomorphise. In sharp

36 37

Gehlen 1956, p. 238. Musil 1998, p. 358.

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contrast to the positions taken above, it is precisely in this situation that this ethics beholds the Archimedean point of a genuinely humanistic worldview in accordance with man and his dignity. Such an ethics thus begins with and culminates in man, but for this very reason it presupposes an outside world looked at in a disanthropomorphising way. Earlier we indicated these tendencies in Greek philosophy. Marx sums up the consequences of interest to us here in relation to the ideal of human comportment as follows: ‘the wise man, the sophos, is nothing but the idealised Stoic, not the Stoic the realised wise man; he will discover that the sophos is by no means only a Stoic but is met with just as much among the Epicureans, the Neo-academists and the Sceptics. Incidentally, the sophos is the first form in which the Greek philosophos confronts us; he appears mythologically in the seven wise men, in practice in Socrates, and as an ideal among the Stoics, Epicureans, Neo-academists and Sceptics. Each of these schools, of course, has its own sophos … Indeed, Saint Max [G.L.: Marx means Stirner] can find “le sage” again in the eighteenth century in the philosophy of Enlightenment, and even in Jean Paul in the shape of the “wise men” like Emanuel, etc.’.38 For all the differences that may exist within these types for historical, social, and personal reasons, a common world-historical trait is expressed in them; that is to say, it is precisely the scientific comportment towards reality that constitutes the foundation of the ethical comportment of humanity of the highest order. Aristotle may criticise that which is exaggerated in the Socratic identification of knowledge with morality, but the rejection pronounced therein only concerns what he deems to be excessive, not the principle itself. Conceived of in this way, the common ground here – for all the divergences in howsoever important details – is focused on two sets of issues. First, on the ideological immanence of ethical comportment, that is to say on that relationship of freedom to the correct (scientific, disanthropomorphising) knowledge of objective reality, about which we just spoke. It involves a rejection of all transcendent ties and relatedness for the humanistic and moral comportment of man as well. Even the person living in a world that he seeks as far as possible to know as it really is in itself (free of all human introjections) thus has the task of building up his own life – embedded in the socio-historical development of mankind – and finding the meaning of his life in living, in his life itself. From this follows the second set of issues, according to which man, as ‘microcosm’, is to be regarded equally immanently and according to his own laws, without any mythologising of his own strengths and weaknesses as derivatives of transcend-

38

Marx and Engels 1976, p. 138.

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encies. Spinoza’s already cited ethical theory of affect clearly shows where such a path leads. Of course, such doctrines vary quite greatly, depending on how the society in which man has to act as ‘microcosm’ has been constituted. We have certainly been able to observe how in our day theorems of cosmic transcendence and the ‘eternal’ unknowability of man grow out of the essence of present-day capitalism, out of its hypostatisation. Such a distortion, however, is in no way inevitable. The Stoics and Epicureans also lived in a society that they rejected; in their case, however, this rejection did not abolish the immanent autotelism of man as ‘microcosm’ but on the contrary strengthened and deepened it. The lack of the opportunity to live up to genuine humanism in society is precisely a decisive motive for building up the wise-man-type even more resolutely, in an even more humanly immanent way. The intellectual and emotional reconfiguration of the world regarded in a disanthropomorphised way is thus no nihilistic or relativistic dehumanisation of human reality, nor does it result in a frantic lack of direction for human action. On the contrary, we have to do with a reactionary mythos wherever this occurs. For our purposes it suffices if we allude to this problematic situation in the analysis of the affects of fear and hope. (Of course, the talk here is only of affects. When it is of fear and hope at a higher spiritual level – when in the case of an important decision, for instance, one ‘is afraid’ as to whether or not he will have sufficient power and resolve to do the right thing – it is a matter of emotional reflex of moral deliberations and not affect.) Descartes already recognised the polar cohesiveness of these particular affects, their boundedness to mere belief.39 At the same time Hobbes emphasises that their object is a merely ‘apparent’ good or evil and thus has a merely subjective character, is more occasion than cause, and can thus be triggered by ‘what the mind cannot truly conceive … [even] if it can be expressed’. In doing so Hobbes refers to ‘panic-terrors’, in which fear and flight come into being ‘even though the cause be unknown’.40 Very similar is the analysis of these affects in the works of Spinoza. He too emphasises their subjectivist character. Their object arises out of ‘the image of a thing in doubt’; their character is thus ‘an inconstant pleasure’ or an ‘inconstant pain’.41 That is why he emphasises that these affects ‘cannot be good in themselves’; they ‘indicate a lack of knowledge and a weakness of mind’, which is also why ‘the more we endeavour to live by the guidance of reason, the more we endeavour to be independent of hope, to free ourselves

39 40 41

Descartes 1989, pp. 110–11. Hobbes 1972, pp. 57–8. Spinoza 2002a, pp. 288–9.

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from fear, and to command fortune as far as we can, and to direct our actions by the sure counsel of reason’.42 The effect of this attitude is extraordinary. Since we cannot go into the historical details here, referring to Goethe will have to suffice. During the masquerades in the imperial palace in Faust, he lets Fear and Hope perform shackled together, and Prudence says this about them: Two of mankind’s greatest scourges, Fear and Hope, stand here in fetters, kept away from you by me …43 And Goethe generalises the issue still further with a quite characteristic phrase; after having stressed the social harmfulness of fear and hope here, he regards both of those affects in his ‘Proverbs in Rhyme’ as decisive characteristics of the philistine: What’s a philistine? A hollow belly Full of fear and hope That God has mercy.44 All that can be of importance here is briefly indicating the relationship between the rediscovery or the methodologically clear elaboration of disanthropomorphising reflection and humanism, the protection of the freedom and integrity of man. In passing, we can also throw some light on how anti-ascetic all of these tendencies are. It goes without saying that the forms of appearance of a tendency that seeks to salvage the freedom and integrity of man are historically conditioned. Likewise, that such a socio-historical conditionality of the questions and answers in anthropology, ethics, etc. is not a superficial matter but rather intimately refers to decisive content-related and structural issues. Therefore, the recognition of the basic humanistic tendency in the remarks presented just now in no way implies their ‘eternal validity’. The ‘geometrical

42 43 44

Spinoza 2002a, pp. 345–6. Goethe 1984, p. 141. It is perhaps interesting to remark in passing that the Goethean definition became quite popular in the classics of Marxism. Engels uses it to characterise the petty bourgeois, in which the content of hope is concretised as the ascent into the upper middle classes and the content of fear as proletarianisation. Regarding Goethe’s particular use of the concept of the philistine, which deviates from Romantic and later uses, see Lukács 1953, p. 33.

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method’ of Hobbes or Spinoza is just as conditioned by their time as is the degree to which the atmosphere of their ethics is coloured by Stoicism and Epicureanism. Both forms can appear as outdated in concrete terms through the historical development of society and of science within it without thereby losing their fundamental significance. When, for instance, in post-war imperialism the affect of fear becomes detached from all hope and – in connection with Kierkegaard – develops as angst into the universalist basis of bourgeois ideology, it turns into the foundation of religious worldviews (religious atheism included). When hope obtains a scientific fundament and attachment to cognitive merit and concretion, however, as happens as early as the time of the great French Revolution and at a qualitatively yet higher level since the advance of socialism, then all of this is a further developmental stage of humanity. The talk is no longer of the mere affect hope but of the emotional reflexes of a scientifically – or philosophically, economically, etc. – merited perspective. If we finally offer a few remarks concerning the foundation of these relationships between consistent disanthropomorphising in the scientific reflection of reality and the comportment of man in everyday life, then at the same time these remarks must brusquely reject all tendencies that, on the one hand, behold something ‘inhuman’ in scientific comportment, and all the more in the scientific worldview when it is carried through to its end, and that, on the other, look in an adversarial way upon the purely scientifically comprehended world as the essence of man. So as to survey this situation clearly, it must not only be remembered that the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality is an instrument of the human race directed towards its own higher development and control of its world. In fact, it must also always be kept in mind that this process is that of the higher unfolding of the person himself at the same time, an enlargement and consolidation, a concentration of all his capacities, which affect his overall personality immeasurably. Earlier we briefly and allusively talked about how in relation to the highest systems of objectivation that man has created for himself – science and art – the whole man of the everyday metamorphoses into the man-made-whole (directed towards the concrete system of objectivation at that time). This issue in its relation to art will frequently occupy us at some length later; the side of the problem facing towards science can, in keeping with the scheme of this work, only be treated in an abbreviated, quite generalised manner. A higher objectivation can only come into being when all of its objects that have been acquired and worked on through reflection, as well as their relationships, undergo a homogenisation in keeping with the function of the mode of reflection in question. Without being able here to go into the aesthetic significance of these actions, which will be analysed in detail later, it is readily appar-

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ent that a homogenisation in keeping with the particular scientific objective takes place wherever such a conception of reality is sought. Mathematics is the purest form of such a homogenisation of the content and form of reflected reality; it also most clearly expresses the disanthropomorphising tendency in this transformation of subjective comportment. It would be a mistake, however, to overlook the fact that all sciences (even the social sciences) invariably create a homogeneous medium in order to better comprehend and elucidate the characteristics, relationships, and lawful regularities of that part of the realities existing in themselves that is being investigated on the basis of a determinate cognitive goal. The essential thing that is common to all of them is that it is always a matter of the in-itself of reality existing independently of man; also, where it is man himself who is being biologically or socio-historically studied, it is – ultimately – a matter of such impartial objectivities or processes. Especially in contrast to artistic reflection, the basic direction of disanthropomorphising also manifests itself in the fact that the cohesive, infinite and total character of the object, of reality existing in itself, remains tendentially preserved as faithfully as possible even if it is only a methodologically isolated piece of it that is being consciously treated. Such a part, both as object and as aspect, never obtains an absolute autonomy, a self-contained autotelism, as in artistic reflection; it never turns into its own ‘world’ as it does in artistic reflection, but preserves – objectively and methodologically – its partial character. It follows that any scientific reflection of reality can (in fact must) also directly and steadily take on and make use of the results of many other experiments, while in aesthetic mimesis it is precisely the homogeneous medium of individual works that represents something unique and final, so that taking on elements – even from his own works – that are alien in terms of form or content can constitute a danger for the artist. By contrast, the foundation of the homogeneous medium in scientific reflection is – in the end, and admittedly only in the end – something uniform for all disciplines. The differences between individual sciences and even between individual scientists are not to be thereby denied, but these differences are – compared to the aesthetic sphere – of a relative character. For as much as the different sciences and individual research studies in them may also go their own ways, there still tends to be only one science, a converging over-all approach to the unitary in-itself of the object-world. No single thing rendered by science would be able to attain truth and thereby survive if this tendency were not – regardless of whether this happens consciously or unconsciously – inherent to it. This does not abolish the individual character of the many achievements, though it imparts to individuality an entirely different cachet than in the realm of the aesthetic.

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This structural difference of objectivity – within the objective unity of the reflected world – must be held on to if we want to correctly comprehend the specificity of the man-made-whole as a subjective mode of comportment that disanthropomorphisation accomplishes in man. The previous expositions already show how false it is to discover inhuman principles either in a worldimage that has come into being in a disanthropomorphising way or in the comportment corresponding to such a world-image. As we could see in the discussion of labour, disanthropomorphising itself is deeply embedded in the everyday life of the whole man, and even its instrumentation frequently displays such fluid transitions that the boundary is often difficult to detect. For each tool objectively contains disanthropomorphising foundations: in order to be able to carry out tasks that are useful to people with a tool, its nature, its possibility for effect, etc. must be disclosed by means of disregarding the whole man’s ordinary, everyday way of looking at things for the time being. However, to the extent that it just serves to reinforce either innate or socially acquired human capacities and to make up for their mistakes, the use of tools in everyday life leads back to the whole man. So, despite the sliding transition, there still exists here a leap towards the genuine disanthropomorphising of science. Eyeglasses do not disanthropomorphise, but telescopes or microscopes no doubt do, for eyeglasses merely correct a disturbed normal relationship in the everyday life of the whole man, whereas telescopes and microscopes open up a world that is otherwise inaccessible to the human senses. The boundary, which is of course increasingly blurred by intermediate stages in practice, is therefore drawn precisely according to whether the instrument leads back into the everyday life of the whole man or whether it makes a qualitatively different world from this one perceptible: the world of being-in-itself, the world of that which exists independently of man. This leap gives rise to the mode of comportment proper to the man-made-whole. While using such an instrument, the transition appears extremely simple; it is more complicated when the instrumentation is predominantly intellectual, such as in the use of mathematics, in which tasks otherwise unknown to man are posed to human thinking that must be resolved with a method that is qualitatively different from everyday thinking. In any case, its world of purely quantitative relationships is indeed a reflection of objective reality; however, as the abstraction of quantifying was being carried out and the homogeneous medium of quantity purely and exclusively taken into account came into being, conceptual formations and linkages flourished that have no analogy in the everyday life of the whole man, though they can be used very fruitfully for knowledge of reality existing in itself. With respect to everyday life, thinking that disanthropomorphises also presents completely new challenges for those sciences dealing with man and

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his relationships. Here too it is question of lifting phenomena of a certain quality out of the immediate and seemingly disorganised complex of directly given reality, accordingly homogenising them in order to elucidate otherwise imperceptible relationships existing in themselves, and objectively studying these relationships in terms of both their immanent lawfulness and in their interdependency with groups of objects that are of a different nature. To a certain degree, the economy can be regarded as a textbook example of this homogenisation process. Of course, this process can arrive at the cohesion and precision of pure mathematics only very rarely. Of course, there have been and are multiple examples in the social sciences where phenomena have been lifted out and homogenised in a way that is false scientifically, but this changes nothing essential in the inevitability and fruitfulness of such a mode of positing. (In considering the possibilities for conflict that come into being here, recall that even in the case of the application of pure mathematics to physical phenomena, for example, problems of a similar sort can turn up and have turned up as well.) The nature of the ‘man-made-whole’ in the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality results from the dialectical interaction of the gradual transition and leap in relation to this homogeneous medium on the one hand and in relation to the whole man of the everyday on the other. For it is of the essence of this leap that a certain desubjectivation does indeed occur, though by means of this many of the decisive characteristics and qualities of the whole man who is carrying this leap out are abolished merely so far as they stand as obstacles in the way of the reproduction of that particular homogeneous medium by the subject in question. All other human forces (moral ones included, of course) continue to remain in effect; indeed, they tend to play a great role in the expansion of disanthropomorphising reflection. (Thus, not just sagacity, powers of observation, the ability to combine, etc. but also endurance, courage, resilience, etc.) The leap manifests itself clearly enough in the fact that what becomes decisively important for the outcome is not so much the size or intensity of individual gifts as it is the manner in which their combination and proportion react to the particular homogeneous medium and to the particular concrete task within its purview. This dialectic comes to the fore in a particularly clear way in the social sciences. The fact that passionate partisanship towards and in the conflicts of a period can lead to the discovery of entirely new relationships and to their properly disanthropomorphising objective presentation can be readily studied in examples like Machiavelli, Gibbon, Thierry, Marx, etc. By contrast, one can likewise easily observe that the content, tendency, mode, etc. of certain attitudes and positions that have been taken can impede the conception of relationships existing in themselves in socio-historical reality and exert

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a disruptive effect on disanthropomorphising reflection (indeed to the point of downright abolishing it). In the character of Professor Cornelius in the story ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow’, Thomas Mann described one such mode of comportment with subtle irony, and he even lets the irresolvable set of problems contained within it build up in the professor himself, who ponders the issue in a solitary monologue: ‘“And taking sides is unhistoric anyhow”, so he muses. “Only justice, only impartiality is historic”. And could not, properly considered, be otherwise … For justice can have nothing of youthful fire and blithe, fresh, loyal conviction. It is by nature melancholy. And, being so, has secret affinity with the lost cause and the forlorn hope rather than with the fresh and blithe and loyal – perhaps this affinity is its very essence and without it it would not exist at all! … “And is there then no such thing as justice?” the Professor asks himself’.45 The abruptness of this transition from the whole man to the ‘man-madewhole’ also becomes apparent when we follow the path from scientific disanthropomorphisation back into life in the case of eminent scholars. How often it happens that these scholars fail to draw the proper and automatically resulting conclusions from their own theories, indeed from their epoch-making discoveries, so that the positions they take in the everyday (even in other fields of knowledge, not just in those in which they themselves have failed to participate in research but even in those where they are engaged with the demand for first-hand findings) diametrically contradict these theories and discoveries. It of course cannot be the task of these observations to analyse such contradictions in a systematic or historical way. That is why we have only pointed out the major types of the set of problems that turn up here in order to suggest the relationship of the ‘man-made-whole’ in disanthropomorphising reflection to the whole man of the everyday in its single most general features. However, even such an exceedingly cursory image already shows that it would be biased to behold something anti-human in the act of disanthropomorphisation and in its universal culmination, which our age in particular brings forth. Tendencies towards anti-humanity always grow out of the ground of socio-historical life, out of social structures, out of the class positions within a formation. These tendencies can also rise to prominence in the sciences, but – when considered generally – neither more nor less than in life or art. The concrete exposition of such issues is a problem for historical materialism and lies outside the ambit of the tasks that this work has taken on.

45

Mann 1989, p. 207.

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At the very least, all of this had to be briefly adumbrated so that the second great (and, in reality, decisive) intellectual battle surrounding the disanthropomorphisation of scientific reflection could be correctly understood. Since it is methodological and philosophical issues, and not purely historical ones, which are of primary interest for us here as well, we limit ourselves again to the contemplation of a few foundationally typical positions that have been taken. This scheme is expressed most clearly by Galileo: ‘Philosophy is written in this book that lies open before our eyes (I am referring to the universe), but one cannot comprehend it if beforehand one does not learn to understand its language and to recognise the characters with which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is not humanly possible to understand even a single word of it. Without them one uselessly turns around in an obscure labyrinth’.46 From our standpoint the most important thing in this quote is the proclamation of a new language with new characters, which is an unequivocally clear image for the new forms of the reflection of reality, of their conscious, methodical, clear delimitation from the immediate modes of appearance of everyday reality that are bound to human sensuousness. It is not an accident that this method is developed in the struggle around Copernican astronomy; after all, this is the first fatefully decisive break with the geocentric and (in close connection to this) the inevitably anthropomorphising view of the cosmos. It is unnecessary, even in just a few remarks, to consider the collision of the new world-image with the one that had until then been prevailingly religious. However, precisely on account of the close interconnectedness established by us earlier between everyday life and the religious reception of reality, it is perhaps not without interest if we briefly point out that Galileo’s new conception consciously and brusquely contrasts with the forms of reflection found in everyday thinking and that the sharp detachment from them is central to his methodological observations: ‘Notions of large and small, of up and down, of the useful and the purposive are impressions and habits of a human and thoughtless everyday that have been transferred onto nature’. That is also why the ‘limited power of representation that already comes upon its limit with large numbers’ must be overcome; the size of the cosmos likewise exceeds the abilities of everyday thinking to formulate.47 From the standpoint of the methodology of science and from that of philosophy, the break carried out here encompasses a much broader field than we

46 47

Quoted in Olschki 1927, p. 465. Olschki 1927, p. 384.

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can describe in the space we have. However, regardless of whichever issue we would even raise – whether it be the rejection of the teleological way of looking at things (associated with issues of ‘utility’), whether it be the methodology of experiments, etc. – we always come back again to the disanthropomorphising mode of reflection, to the abandonment of the immediacy of everyday thinking. A reference to aesthetics may be permitted finally. We have been able to see during the discussion of Greek philosophy how often the tendencies towards disanthropomorphisation set up a competitive relationship between philosophy (science) and art at that time and led to the condemnation of art; with the higher stage of anthropomorphising in philosophy, as in the works of Plato, this relationship gets still worse. Galileo also marks a turn here. Precisely because he recognised science’s mode of reflection more clearly than anyone else before him, he can far surpass his predecessors when it comes to offering the proper insight with respect to the specific aesthetic essence of art.48 Nor is this just an individual idiosyncrasy of Galileo’s; we can perceive a similar tendency in the works of Bacon as well. In this context we cannot go into the causes of later regressions into old comportments. We find in the case of Bacon the most versatile and universal description and substantiation of the new disanthropomorphising methods. If one wants to properly grasp his stature and his significance in the process being analysed by us in which thinking comes to itself as an approximately adequate reflection of objective reality, then it is especially necessary to break with the error that existed before Hegel, though it was ‘deepened’ by him philosophically: Bacon as a pure empiricist, the intellectual father of later empiricism. Of course, praxis (the transformation of the world through correct knowledge) is at the centre of his philosophy. In itself, however, this objective is by no means identical with empiricism; as we will see, this non-identity is precisely what we have in the case of Bacon. One of his more recent biographers, the English Marxist Farrington,49 formulates the issue in this way: ‘His special concern was with the place of science in human life’.50 However, this only means that Bacon, as the most significant thinker of this era, did not want to treat science and art separate from the lives of people; rather he sought to fathom their particular essence in connection with life. His classification of experiments shows how little an empiricist he was at the same time. He sharply marks off the realm of experimentation from the – actually empiricist – praxis of the han48 49 50

Olschki 1927, pp. 170 ff. Benjamin Farrington (1891–1974), Irish public intellectual and scholar of the Classics. [Eds.] Farrington 1951, p. 4. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.]

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dicrafts of his era and adds that ‘the hope of further progress in the sciences will be well founded only when natural history shall acquire and accumulate many experiments which in themselves are of no use, but which simply help towards the discovery of causes and axioms; these we have been accustomed to calling illuminating experiments as distinct from profitable experiments’.51 The goal of proper experiments is thus to break with the immediate connection with everyday theory and praxis (represented here by the handicrafts) and to overcome its immediacy by discovering and engaging the most important mediations possible. True, Bacon does not thereby want to erect a Great Wall of China between science and everyday praxis (labour, handicrafts, etc.). Invoking Celsus, or rather one of Celsus’s quotations, Bacon points out that everyday praxis brings forth significant results extraordinarily often, though it does so ‘more or less by chance and incidentally’, at any rate without being influenced or facilitated by theory and philosophy.52 In turn, however, the irony towards philosophy that comes to light here is no glorification of an atheoretical empiricism but rather a polemic against the philosophy of his predecessors and contemporaries, in the works of which he did not find his sought-after cooperation of disanthropomorphising reflection with the intention towards a generalised, systematised praxis that is no longer immediate. The polemic is therefore directed against both merely artisanal pragmatism and theory that is indifferent to praxis. Both result in an irregularity, an aimlessness of research, above all of experiments that merely analogise with regard to relationships. At the same time what is to be overcome in both are the contingency and superficiality of everyday thinking (Bacon speaks of the thinking of the common people), which both artisanal pragmatism and praxis-indifferent theory confront – as in the works of Galileo – as an obscure labyrinth according to him: ‘The fabric of the universe, its structure, to the mind observing it, is like a labyrinth, where on all sides the path is so often uncertain, the resemblance of a thing or a sign is deceptive, and the twists and turns of natures are so oblique and intricate. One must travel always through the forests of experience and particular things, in the uncertain light of the senses, which is sometimes shining and sometimes hidden. Moreover, those who offer to guide one on the way are also lost in the labyrinth and simply add to the number who have gone astray’.53 Bacon does not emphasise the methodological significance of mathematics and geometry quite as decisively as do Galileo, Descartes, or Spinoza. He does, however, fight more fiercely the schematism of 51 52 53

Bacon 2000, p. 81. Bacon 2000, pp. 60–1. Bacon 2000, p. 10.

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thinking that arose out of the scholastic traditions of Aristotelianism, and he does stand up more passionately for the creation of a disanthropomorphising research and conceptual framework determined by the in-itself of the object (and not by the human subject). This resoluteness is grounded above all in the fact that, among those of his great contemporaries who wrestled with the same issues, Bacon was the one figure in whose work the dialectical relationship of correct, objective knowledge to productive praxis and to really coming to terms with nature became clearest. Far more comprehensively and systematically than anyone else in this great era for the establishment of disanthropomorphising thought, Bacon carries out the separation of borders between everyday thinking and the scientificoobjective reflection of reality existing in itself. In his theory of idola, there is a systematised typology of those modes of comportment in everyday life and thinking that inhibit and distort an adequate reflection of the world in itself. It is an idiosyncratic epistemology. Whereas the thinkers with a distinctly epistemological orientation in bourgeois development tried to find the boundaries of the adequate acertainability of that which is existing in itself and in this way subjectivated thinking, and whereas the philosophies convinced of the possibility of gaining knowledge of objective reality carelessly disregarded such epistemological misgivings or rejected them outright (Hegel on Kant), Bacon’s ambition is directed towards establishing the approximately limitless knowledge of reality in itself through a critique of the immediate reflection of the everyday, of its weaknesses and limits. Accordingly, his epistemology also diverges from later scholastico-philosophical epistemology in that he attaches great importance to the anthropological and social reasons for the limits and distortions of the everyday thinking he criticises. The ‘boundaries’ of knowledge here are thus not ‘supratemporal’ structural conditions in the subjectobject relation in general but instead are restraints and wrong paths brought forth by anthropological or social development that human thinking can definitely overcome if it resolutely rises above everyday – anthropomorphising – thinking, which Bacon regards as possible and necessary. Therefore, even if Bacon draws completely different conclusions from it, the manner of this epistemological critique is thus much closer to earlier Greek scepticism than it is to the modern bourgeois subjective idealism in gnoseology. A brief overview of the idola can easily illuminate this character of Baconian epistemology. Bacon distinguishes four major types here. First are the idola tribus, which have a predominantly anthropological character. In his critique of them, Bacon rejects ‘common sense’, immediate everyday thinking, as insufficient and anthropomorphic: ‘The assertion that the human senses are the measure of things is false … The human understanding is like an uneven mirror

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receiving rays from things and merging its own nature with the nature of things, which thus distorts and corrupts it’.54 The second type (idola specus, an allusion to Plato’s allegory of the cave, though with a conflicting slant) is supposed to define errors in the thinking of the individual, in which the anthropological critique already grows over into a social one: ‘For (apart from the aberrations of human nature in general) each man has a kind of individual cave or cavern which fragments and distorts the light of nature. This may happen either because of his upbringing and the company he keeps; or because of his reading of books and the authority of those whom he respects and admires; or because of the different impressions things make on different minds, preoccupied and prejudiced perhaps, or calm and detached, and so on. The evident consequence is that the human spirit (in its different dispositions in different men) is a variable thing, quite irregular, almost haphazard’.55 The third type (idola fori) already comes into being ‘by agreement and from men’s association with each other’. Here, Bacon emphasises the social significance of language but rejects its immediate everyday form and the way of thinking that expresses itself therein as deficient for an objective knowledge: ‘words are chosen to suit the understanding of the common people. And thus a poor and unskillful code of words incredibly obstructs the understanding. The definitions and explanations with which learned men have been accustomed to protect and in some way liberate themselves, do not restore the situation at all’.56 Bacon specifies the danger that everyday words (those of the common people) pose to a clear terminology of the sciences that is in accordance with objective reality. People intend to control their way of speaking, but ‘it is also true that words retort and turn their force back upon the understanding’. For ‘words are mostly bestowed to suit the capacity of the common man, and they dissect things along the lines most obvious to the common understanding. And when a sharper understanding, or more careful observation, attempts to draw those lines more in accordance with nature, words resist’.57 There thus come into being two dangerous ‘idols’. That is to say, everyday language gives rise to a doubly false nomenclature: everyday words ‘are either names of things that do not exist (for as there are things that lack names because they have not been observed, so there are also names that lack things because they have been imaginatively assumed), or they are the names of things which exist but are confused and badly defined, being abstracted from things rashly and unevenly’.58 The critique of words already 54 55 56 57 58

Bacon 2000, p. 41. Ibid. Bacon 2000, pp. 41–2. Bacon 2000, p. 48. Bacon 2000, pp. 48–9.

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passes over here into the critique of immediate – for the most part analogical – everyday thinking. Bacon admonishes in another place that ‘the human understanding from its own peculiar nature willingly supposes a greater order and regularity in things than it finds, and though there are many things in nature which are unique and full of disparities, it invents parallels and correspondences and non-existent connections’.59 In everyday thinking this corresponds to a heedless disregard of the habitual, as one tends not to concern oneself with the causes of those things that frequently occur.60 Equally tenacious at holding its ground in everyday thinking is that which has been believed to be true since time immemorial, along with those things that accord with it; even when the number of conflicting cases is quite large, these are not taken into account, etc. Finally, the setting-up of the fourth type (idola theatri) is directed against previous philosophies, which Bacon accuses of anthropomorphising precisely in the sense that they ‘have created false and fictitious worlds’.61 At the same time he expressly emphasises that his critique bears not only on philosophy in the strict sense but also on the principles of individual scientific praxis. The Baconian critique of everyday thinking is simultaneously directed against the possible anthropomorphising errors both of sensuousness and of understanding. ‘The senses are defective’, he explains, ‘in two ways: they may fail us altogether or they may deceive. First, there are many things which escape the senses even when they are healthy and quite unimpeded; either because of the rarity of the whole body or by the extremely small size of its parts, or by distance, or by its slowness or speed, or because the object is too familiar, or for other reasons. And even when the senses do grasp an object, their apprehensions of it are not always reliable. For the evidence and information given by the senses is always based on the analogy of man not of the universe; it is a very great error to assert that the senses are the measure of things’.62 Instruments and, above all, experiments are the means of getting beyond these limits: ‘For the subtlety of experiments is far greater than that of the senses themselves even when assisted by carefully designed instruments … And therefore we do not rely very much on the immediate and proper perception of the senses, but we bring the matter to the point that the senses judge only of the experiment, the experiment judges of the thing’.63 We have already touched on the Baconian critique of understanding (of everyday thinking). Contem-

59 60 61 62 63

Bacon 2000, p. 42. Bacon 2000, p. 92. Bacon 2000, p. 42. Bacon 2000, pp. 17–18. Bacon 2000, p. 18.

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plating only that which is merely straightforward in the outside world inhibits and weakens understanding, which deadens the compositeness of the outside world and undermines understanding. Here is where Bacon thus takes up the struggle against all of the metaphysical biases and rigidities of everyday thinking. He calls for the changing of such ways of looking at things that make the understanding both pervasive as well as impressionable. The real barb of his polemic here, however, is directed towards the issue of mediations. He criticises philosophy – emphasising Pythagoras along with Plato and his school in the process – because it introduces ‘abstract forms and final causes and first causes, and [frequently omits] intermediate causes and so on’.64 Here too there exists a two-front battle against abstraction and immediacy, which come together precisely in the vaulting over and neglecting of mediations, in which both appeal to the spontaneous responses of the human subject to reality and neglect a dedication to the world of more concealed mediations that contradicts immediate semblance. According to Bacon, what comes into being is an inadmissible concatenation of singulars with ‘remote and highly general axioms’, not only in the syllogistics handed down by scholasticism, etc., but also in everyday thinking, which, with the help of analogies and inferences by analogy, has preserved from prehistoric times the habit of drawing general conclusions from singularities.65 By way of contrast, Bacon calls for an incremental ascension from the observation of singularities all the way up to the most general principles. He regards the former as intermingled with the immediate meaningful experiences of everyday life (think now of their correction through experiments), the latter he finds to be ‘conceptual and abstract, and [to] have no solidity’. He says, ‘It is the intermediate axioms which are the true, sound, living axioms on which human affairs and human fortunes rest; and also the axioms above them, the most general axioms themselves, are not abstract but are given boundaries by these intermediate axioms’.66 In summary, one can say that the most general pivotal meaning of Bacon’s epistemology is, for all its other divergences, in line with Galileo’s methodological endeavours: to remodel the human subject and to surmount its immediately given limits so that it is fit to correctly read the book of reality in itself. That what is involved here is a common tendency of the era that found expression in very different forms but was in accordance with the nature of things can be easily learned from Spinoza’s early work, ‘Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect’. In many places this work exhibits conspicuous paral64 65 66

Bacon 2000, p. 53. Bacon 2000, p. 83. Ibid.

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lelisms to Bacon, even though the fundamental philosophical position of its author (and accordingly his method as well) is essentially different. Here too, however, ‘emendation’ means distance from everyday thinking, from its immediacy and its anthropomorphism, the reshaping and re-education of the subject in the direction of assimilating the lawful regularities of reality in itself without subjective human distortions, of thinking through and relating to these lawful regularities in accordance with their own nature and not with human affects. Spinoza just as sharply emphasises that the (properly construed) organisation of thoughts is identical with the organisation of things, as one must guard against the illusion of confusing reality with what is merely in human understanding.67 Spinoza assumes that man picks up an awful lot of what he needs in life in a variety of ways: through hearsay, through indefinite meaningful experiences, etc. Just as in the works of Bacon, the talk is thus of a critique of everyday thinking. Interestingly enough, Spinoza’s struggle against abstractions sets in here as well. Such abstractions take as their starting point inferences that are founded on mere sensation and do not come upon the true, the objective essence of things, and their conclusions ‘are at once confused by the imagination’;68 at most, what can be apprehended in such a way are the accidents, but never the essence.69 Therefore, the great danger of such abstract thinking that remains at the level of the everyday is that it is directed towards fictitious ideas;70 the more general it becomes in this abstraction, the more confused the outcome.71 That is why Spinoza regards the accurate distinction between imaginative and cognitive faculties as being of crucial importance. That is to say, correct knowledge is gained so that the objective effects of the true idea ‘in the soul correspond to the specific reality of its object’.72 Only then – thus after the implementation of disanthropomorphisation – is the danger removed that ‘we may confuse true ideas with false or fictitious ideas’. Only then does it become clear ‘why we understand some things that do not in any way fall within the scope of the imagination, and why there are in the imagination some things that are completely opposed to the intellect …’.73 For our problem, the parallelism of the basic tendencies is quite plainly visible here precisely because many of the important philosophical positions

67 68 69 70 71 72 73

Spinoza 2002b, p. 25. Spinoza 2002b, p. 8. Spinoza 2002b, p. 9. Spinoza 2002b, pp. 13–14. Spinoza 2002b, p. 15. Spinoza 2002b, p. 24. Ibid.

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in the works of Bacon and Spinoza are dissimilar, indeed often completely opposed. It is a question here of the essence of a great tendency of the time that proceeds from production and comprehends the life and thinking of people in equally revolutionary ways. In the course of this we have foregrounded the polemic against everyday thinking mostly because these great intellectual figures very often took a diplomatic stand on religion (Gassendi even more than Bacon). After all, the pyres of Vanini and Bruno as well as Galileo’s interrogation by the Inquisition are still fresh in the memory of both Bacon and Spinoza. Yet remainders of old idealistico-metaphysical views are often mixed into their observations, views which certainly appear faded almost to the point of being merely terminology in Spinoza’s ‘Deus sive natura’. However, the sharp delimitation of the scientific reflection of objective reality from the sensuo-intellectual immediacy and confusion of everyday life already implicitly includes all of the principles of a delimitation from any religious conception of the world and the rejection of its validity. In principle it indeed especially comes down to the sharply worked out contrast between anthropomorphising and disanthropomorphising reflection. When man thereby rises above his immediate circumstances – mental circumstances that are tradition-bound in their immediacy and hallowed by custom – and attempts to submit this world to his own power by dedicating himself to the in-itself of objectivity independent of man and by shaping his purely human powers, eliminating all transcendence, then he has also taken the decisive step ideologically. The work of emancipating human thought that was revolutionarily begun by the Greeks now repeats itself at a higher level. The antithesis to idealism and religion is thereby de facto expressed. It can even be formulated as follows: the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality does not know any transcendence in the strict sense of the word. Of course, the knowledge that has been thus gained only extends to a certain point of objective reality. On the one hand, however, it is in the very nature of such a relationship to that which exists in itself that the current boundary is conceived as being provisional. The possibility always remains open – in principle – of going beyond this boundary under favourable conditions, with the necessary efforts, etc. That is why, on the other hand, there is no transcendence lying beyond this boundary. No matter how qualitatively different it may be from what has been known until then (the ‘world’ of quantum physics in contrast to classical physics), this distinction remains one of the concrete explorations of the new field, but it is not epistemological in character: the current boundary of knowledge is no limit to what can be known in general. In those places where the subject – anthropomorphisingly – determines the method of cognition, however, this boundary must necessarily receive a specific emotionalism. It is

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indeed the emotionalism of his current ability in relation to his comportment towards the world, his command of objective reality. Now if the comportment of man is subject-related, as it is in the everyday, in religion, and in subjective idealism, then it is inevitable that the boundary understood in its immediacy and not in accordance with its place in the historical cognitive process is made into an absolute. The emotionalism that tends to accompany such positings – humility, angst, resignation, etc. – is the natural consequence of an immediate comportment towards a fact of life that in itself is greatly mediated and calls for greater mediations. This situation is reflected in the relationship of intellectual comportment towards the way of life of the whole man. Earlier, we cited a few samples from the anthropology and ethics of this period. These few examples already showed that the process of the disanthropomorphisation of thinking is diametrically opposed to inhumanisation. It is precisely the unfolding and strengthening of human species-powers, their elevation to a higher level, which is the goal. The this-worldliness of thinking – a necessary consequence of disanthropomorphising – is the heightening of human power in a world that is becoming increasingly richer and ever more intensively conquered. It is not a void, an abyss, as Pascal and many after him have experienced and expressed it. The irresistibility, irrevocability, and irreversibility of this movement – in contrast to its Greek development – is related to its being founded in a social being of an entirely different nature than that of the ancient slave economy. At that time, as we pointed out, slavery did not allow a rational reorganisation of production even in those areas where the development of science would have made such a thing possible in itself. The contempt for labour that is inseparably associated with slavery (the contempt for philistinism as Jacob Burckhardt puts it) impeded a fruitful interaction between material production and science, which is why in many cases the greatest achievements of liberated thinking had to remain general, abstract, and philosophical, unable to find their way into the everyday life and thinking of people in a revolutionary way. The Middle Ages showed how the significant, and for the time being isolated, advances of science in this direction were possible as a result of the withering away of slavery. On this basis, by making use of and further shaping this heritage, the capitalist economy was able to begin its triumphal march. It cannot also be our task here to portray this process in even a cursory way, but rather only to account for disanthropomorphising tendencies in this development. For this reason, we speak here only of the decisive turning points and not the preparatory transitions: of the machine, in fact, of the machine tool, as Marx emphasises with great resoluteness. Marx cites what John Wyalt says about the spinning machine, which is that it was ‘a machine “to spin

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without fingers”’.74 From this viewpoint, Marx portrays the antithesis in principle between manufacture (even with a highly developed division of labour) and machine industry: ‘In manufacture, it is the workers who, either singly or in groups, must carry on each particular process with their manual implements. The worker has been appropriated by the process; but the process had previously to be adapted to the worker. This subjective principle of the division of labour no longer exists in production by machinery. Here the total process is examined objectively, viewed in and for itself, and analysed into its constitutive phases. The problem of how to execute each particular process, and to bind the different partial processes together into a whole, is solved by the aid of machines, chemistry, etc.’.75 It goes without saying that the no longer human driving force extraordinarily accelerates this process. The essential thing, however, is that the labour process becomes more and more detached from the subjective abilities, etc. of the worker and is regulated in accordance with the principles and requirements of an objective in-itself: ‘The activity of the worker, restricted to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and governed in every respect by the movement of the machinery, not vice versa’.76 Only in this way is the material basis for the limitless development of science given: the (in principle) limitless mutual fertilisation and promotion of science and production, since – for the first time in history – the same principle (that of disanthropomorphisation) underlies both. Of course, this new principle prevails in an extremely contradictory way. The portrayal of these inner and outer contradictions cannot be our task in this context either. We have already pointed out that the interdependency between economic benefit (in capitalism: profit) and technico-scientific perfection continuously drives towards dichotomies that frequently hamper and hinder carrying through the main tendency. All that can be pointed out here is a fundamental contradiction. As opposed to the Romantic, backward-pointing critique of the development that comes into being here, we have repeatedly shown that the principle of disanthropomorphisation is in essence a principle of progress and humanisation. However, since the driving force (the pursuit of profit) is by its nature contradictory, this principle must continuously express its character in fundamental problems as well – that is to say, the principle of humanisation even appears as the principle of the utmost inhumanity, indeed of anti-humanity. Polemicising with bourgeois apologists who tried to dispose

74 75 76

Marx 1990, p. 493. Marx 1990, pp. 501–2. Marx 1986, pp. 82–3.

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of this contradictoriness, Marx very trenchantly emphasised this duality in the characteristics of the machine: The contradictions and antagonisms inseparable from the capitalist application of machinery do not exist, they say, because they do not arise out of machinery as such, but out of its capitalist application! Therefore, since machinery in itself shortens the hours of labour, but when employed by capital it lengthens them; since in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital it heightens its intensity; since in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature but in the hands of capital it makes man the slave of those forces; since in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital it makes them into paupers, the bourgeois economist simply states that the contemplation of machinery in itself demonstrates with exactitude that all these evident contradictions are a mere semblance, present in everyday reality, but not existing in themselves, and therefore having no theoretical existence either.77 However, merely highlighting this misanthropic way of expressing economic progress under capitalism gives a one-sided picture. We have already cited the Marxist critique of that. Here it is a matter of a fundamental inner contradiction of capitalist society. What is expressed in it is the intrinsic specificity of this formation, that is to say the fact that it is – in fact in an inseparable way – all at once the highest form of all class societies in which production and science can maximally unfold the objective possibilities of development given here and under ‘antagonistic conditions of distribution’, though at the same time it is the last class society and produces its own ‘gravedigger’. The dual function of the disanthropomorphisation of labour and thought in its capitalist form reveals at its developed level this inseparability of the economy’s practical forward thrust and ideological reaction, of the establishment of the objective foundations of a developed humanism and the trampling of humanity in economic praxis. At a more primitive level, for example in the works of Sismondi, this contradiction could appear in candid and critical forms; indeed, the more developed capitalism is, the less an objectively good faith can attain expression in Romantic critique. The dilemma is not resolvable for bourgeois consciousness at any level, however, as Marx clearly says in one of the passages already cited by us. All of the examples that we have quoted in the preceding 77

Marx 1990, pp. 568–9, Lukács’s emphases. The most detailed treatment of this anti-humanity in the capitalist implementation of the principle of disanthropomorphisation in the labour process is found in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.

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considerations of the modern renewals of religion reflect this contradiction. Now, however, on the basis of the inevitability of capitalist development with all its consequences (for science as well), combined with the attempt to stylistically renew the mental comportment of primitive levels, it plays the role of counterweight against the ideological ramifications of general disanthropomorphisation in science and the praxis of labour. The ideology of general despair, of the horror of a ‘God-forsaken’ world; fear of the mechanisation of the soul, life, and thinking; fear of ‘autonomised’ technology that has grown towards tyranny over humanity; fear of ‘massification’, etc.: all of these are only apologetic variations of the topic under conditions of contemporary capitalism, a topic that is characterised in its basic features by Marx. For bourgeois thinking, this contradictoriness of social being impedes a concrete and fruitful implementation of the disanthropomorphising theory of reflection in the social sciences. The major approaches of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of classical economics had to remain fraught with many insurmountable abstractions, above all given the fact – which likewise follows from the dilemma indicated above – that their generalisations could not comprehend dynamically propulsive, contradictory, and uneven historical development. That is why for them it had become impossible to implement with complete methodological consistency the principle of disanthropomorphisation in those sciences which deal with people. All the more in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the course of which a methodological dualism increasingly evolved: either to congeal the socio-historical process into a dead formalism with the help of – false, superficial – abstractions (sociology, subjectivist economics, etc.) or to strive to ‘salvage’ historical ‘life’ in such a way that manifestations of human life are irrationalised, which in the late bourgeois mythologisation of history turned into a proclamation of a religious anthropomorphism. This of course does not preclude the implementation of disanthropomorphising methods in individual issues of the social sciences; for example, the use of statistics in economics and sociology, indeed even that of higher mathematics in subjectivist economics, etc. Nothing in the methodological and ideological foundations was thereby altered, however, and the overturning into an anthropomorphising irrationalism is all the more blatant and unexpected, the more complicated and immanently developed such a mathematical apparatus may be. How this false dualism was overcome through dialectical and historical materialism, how in it the disanthropomorphising theory of reflection also turned into the foundation and method of socio-historical reality in its being-in-itself, cannot be discussed here. Our objective was certainly not even to outline an epistemology and methodology of scientific thinking. It consisted only of sketching out the separation of dis-

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anthropomorphising reflection from that of everyday life and thinking in its most important stages. And even that was no end in itself but merely a prerequisite to our being able to pose and solve our actual problem in the right way: the separation of aesthetic reflection from this ground. The significance of the unevenness and contradictoriness of this separation process on the one hand and of its definitiveness on the other will frequently play an important role in our upcoming considerations. In order to be able to set up this problem as correctly as possible, another two remarks are necessary. Namely, first, we must consider how the triumph of disanthropomorphising reflection in science has repercussions on the thinking of everyday life. For already at the outset we talked about how the differentiation and autonomisation of spheres like science or art do not sever or impoverish their interdependency with the everyday but on the contrary intensify it. In fact, as we know, in two respects: both through the impact of posing questions addressed to science as a result of the demands that spring from everyday praxis and through the repercussion on everyday praxis of the achievements of the sciences. We already spoke by way of intimation about the complicated unevenness in the first interaction during the discussion of capitalist economics and technological progress. In principle, this relationship receives a new character in socialism: partly as a result of the fact that the incitements from ‘below’ no longer come into being in a purely spontaneously way, are no longer momentarily subsumed profit interests, but can be promoted in an organised manner; partly through the prevailing tendency to democratise education as a matter of principle, which strives to bring more and more layers of the labour force to the level of designers and engineers. That this development can sometimes be checked, obstructed, and indeed even distorted through counter-tendencies does not affect the bases of our analysis. A comparison with – seemingly – analogous appearances in capitalism must therefore be rejected because in the case of the latter it is a question of antagonistic contradictoriness that is founded in the essence of the formation, while in socialism we have to do only with a distortion of the true principles of its growth, which are hence correctable – as a matter of principle, even if not always quickly and easily. The repercussion of the achievements of science with regard to objective methodology and the subjective mode of comportment is likewise an exceedingly complicated process. There is no doubt that in this respect capitalism signifies something qualitatively new in comparison with all previous formations. Not only because the technico-scientific progress of the last few centuries (and in them especially the last few decades) has become incomparably more rapid and revolutionary than in earlier millennia, but also because the revolu-

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tion of production and science that is thus carried out has impacted everyday life in a revolutionary way as well. We cannot describe this process even allusively. All that is necessary is to establish that, even in this tumultuous transformation, the basic structure of everyday praxis and thinking portrayed by us earlier could not be revolutionised in its fundamentals. It is true that science and technology have ceased to be the ‘secret’ of some sort of caste, that their results have, in practice and propaganda, by and large turned into the common property of the broadest layers of society. However, as a result of this situation’s extremely diverse modes of appearance (from ‘crafting’ up to the reading matter of popular science, etc.), has the basic attitude of everyday man – and each person is in certain connections a man of everyday life – really been upended? Has this attitude changed into a scientific one? Max Weber gives a not inaccurate description of the new situation that comes into being here: ‘Let us begin by making clear what is meant in practice by this intellectual progress of rationalisation through science and science-based technology. Does it mean, for example, that each one of us sitting here in this lecture room has a greater knowledge of the conditions determining our lives than an Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly. Unless we happen to be physicists, those of us who travel by streetcar have not the faintest idea how the streetcar works. Nor have we any need to know it. It is enough for us to know that we can “count on” the behavior of the streetcar. We can base our own behavior on it. But we have no idea how to build a streetcar so that it will move. The savage has an incomparably greater knowledge of his tools’.78 The general accuracy of this description – of course, only with respect to the average, since individually there are many exceptions, and the great number of these exceptions also amounts to something new – is already confirmed by the leading tendency of modern technological development: namely the fact that the more complicated certain machines become, the simpler it becomes to handle them and the less a real knowledge of the devices themselves is called for. The English expression ‘foolproof’ applies in relation to the apparatuses of daily use as criterion of such a self-regulating automatism, which the handling of these apparatuses automatically controls without any thought or expertise. What thereby comes to an end in the subjective praxis of everyday life is that tremendous disanthropomorphising labour of mediation that brought forth such devices and is subsumed by the immediate connection between theory and praxis, between objective and its being carried through in everyday life. Of course, the technological development of our time nevertheless signifies a thorough alteration of everyday life, though this altera-

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Weber 2004, p. 12.

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tion still does not radically revolutionise its essential structure. This is not the place to determine the extent to which a generally widespread polytechnical education – the sublation of the antithesis between bodily and intellectual labour in the manner communism will bring about – modifies this situation. For each person, scientific comportment towards the objects and devices of everyday life will thereby certainly increase to a remarkable extent, but today one cannot foresee that this comportment would have a general and complete, universal effect and that the praxis of everyday life would transform into a consciously applied science throughout. Regarded from another side, however, something new in principle vis-à-vis capitalism comes into being in socialism. We have already referred to the limits of the application of disanthropomorphising methods to the social sciences in bourgeois society. These especially manifest themselves in the fact that in everyday life it is very difficult to generalise from meaningful scientific experiences in an ideological way; that even theories like Copernican astronomy or Darwinism cannot break the force of purely superstitious representations; that the majority of people stick by, in the sense of everyday praxis portrayed by us, their social surroundings in a completely uncritical and immediate way. Socialism makes a change in principle possible here. We have already referred to its consequences in relation to religious beliefs (upon which, of course, they can only have a tendentious effect). However, even the elucidation of the social relationships of people does not signify without further ado an absorption of everyday comportment by means of the scientific reflection of reality. (That this process can be checked and inhibited – for instance through false theories like those of the Stalinist period – does not need to be examined in detail here.) The two kinds of specialised and perfected reflection (science and art) can indeed pervade and influence the world of the everyday praxis of man much more strongly than happened earlier, but a world of the immediate response to a reality that is still not yet processed will therefore still remain. Materially, on account of the extensive and intensive endlessness of objective reality, the content of which can never be exhausted even by the most complete science and art. At the same time, the existence of such unelucidated terrain is the basis for the further development of science and art. Subjectively, partly as a necessary response to the situation portrayed just now, partly because this extensive and intensive endlessness of objective reality also brings forth – at an increasingly higher level – a corresponding inexhaustibility of life-issues for each human individual. Just as the free arrangement of life in the higher communist phase of socialism cannot amount to a recurrence of primitive communism, so too – in the ideological field – it cannot be a Viconian ricorso to the undifferentiated blending of the scientific and artistic reflection of reality with that of

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immediate everyday praxis. (Thus a renewal of their blending in magic at a higher level.) Progress is not possible without differentiation and specialisation. However, the socialist sublation of the antagonisms of this development does not abolish these conditions for further progress. How the interactions that then come into being will look in concrete terms appears to us – for today – to be an idle question. The second remark bears on the historical development of the disanthropomorphising comportment itself, on the discovery of new categories of objective reality in the course of this, and on the relation of such categories to other modes of the reflection of reality. Up to this point, we have repeatedly concerned ourselves with the unity and variety of these forms of rendering. It is readily apparent that certain fundamental categories of objectivity, of the relation of objects to each other, of the lawfulness of their motions, etc. must constitute the basis of any faithful reflection of reality. However, on the other hand, we had to notice that the concrete, typical objectives of people and society play an extraordinary role in the way in which these categories are implemented, whereby a history of categories in subjective terms also comes into being. In this development the qualitative recovery of the disanthropomorphising principle in modern times and the theoretical outcomes achieved with its help obtain a specific significance. A merely abstract comparison of anthropomorphising art and disanthropomorphising science would congeal this antithesis into something metaphysical. The significance that the discovery of something like geometry has had for art – we will soon go into this issue in detail – would on its own already be a dramatic refutation of such schematic contrasts, though the cooperation of science and art in working out of the laws of perspective in the Renaissance also verifies caution against rash constructions. For all of these reservations, the overturning into quality that disanthropomorphisation has brought for the scientific reflection of realty in the last few centuries must nevertheless be taken into account in its intrinsic specificity. Euclidean geometry, for example, undoubtedly already represents a high level of disanthropomorphising reflection. Nonetheless, its perceptibility still remains in indissoluble contact with the human visual conception of reality. The higher development of science, however, rends these connecting threads. The process of extricating scientific reflection from human sensuousness is too well known to have to be portrayed here. It need not be separately enumerated how, in the course of this, new categories and categorical relationships thereby turn up that become significant for the formation of scientific concepts, which can have nothing more to do with the immediacy of everyday life and of the aesthetic reflection rising up out of it. It suffices if we recall the

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newly discovered operativity of causality in statistical probability. With such and similar categories and relationships, the fields of science and art henceforth part ways categorically. It becomes possible for science to calculate with precision something like the risk of casualties in a battle, etc. In the context of war, the human individual – of course, raised to the level of the typical – still remains the object and means of composition for art. Where there have been attempts to ‘slot in’ the statistical into literature, these have miserably (and, in terms of aesthetics, necessarily) failed, as have the attempts of individual surrealist or abstract artists to harness for painting the results of the latest research in physics on the internal structure of the atomic world. That this new situation has also brought about confusions in both fields – besides the wrong paths taken by art that were indicated just now, there has also been an intermittent encroachment of subjective idealist views into the sciences (denial of causality in statistical probability calculus, the fetishisticformalistic overestimation of mathematics, etc.) – changes nothing in the epochal significance of the separation that thus comes into being. In the process what remains decisive for us is the fact that the more successfully science advances in the disanthropomorphisation of its mode of reflection and its conceptual processing, the more unbridgeable the gulf between scientific and artistic reflection becomes. Following on the disentanglement of the undifferentiated unity of the magical period are long periods of parallel development, of mutual immediate fertilisation, of the immediately visible emergence of the fact that both reflect the same reality. Today as well, of course, this truth does not stop being a truth: only science is being pushed forward into fields that can no longer be graspable at all for the anthropomorphism of art. For this reason, the participation of art in scientific discoveries, as occurred in the Renaissance, ceases together with the immediate passing over of scientific results into the world-image of art. (The latter was already problematic in the second half of the nineteenth century; think of heredity in the works of Ibsen and Zola.) It would be a metaphysical inflexibility, however, if one were to conclude from this a complete cessation of the interdependencies between science and art. On the contrary. Many tendencies are operative that are apt to intensify these interdependencies. The cessation of an immediate interdependency – which, for the most part, was more mediated upon closer examination than it appeared to be at first glance – can be superseded by more fruitful (although more widely mediated) interdependencies, by ones that rise to prominence beyond the fertilisation of the general world-image of art by means science and vice versa. The detailed treatment of this issue likewise exceeds the scope of this work; all that was to be briefly indicated here is the methodological position of the new situation.

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Preliminary Issues of the Disentanglement of Art from Everyday Life as a Matter of Principle If we now turn to the aesthetic reflection of reality, then we see that the single most general principle of differentiation is similar to that of science: both become detached from everyday life, thinking, feeling, etc. in a very slow, contradictory, and uneven manner. A very long development is required until each is constituted and goes it alone as a particular sphere of human activity (in the framework of the social division of labour at the time, of course), until the specificity of the relevant particular mode of reflecting objective reality evolves, until its lawful regularities as such become conscious first in praxis and later in theory. Needless to say, the reverse process also pertains here: the flowing back into the everyday of the meaningful experiences collected in a reflection that has become differentiated. In the case of the analysis of scientific reflection, however, we could observe that, in general, the more emphatically the relevant specialised sphere has been able to form its particular specificity, the more powerfully extensive and intensive is the impact on everyday life. Despite this single most general similarity, both of the differentiation processes also show enormous disparities. Of course, the grounds for these disparities can really only be elucidated in the course of the following concrete studies of the specificity of aesthetic reflection. Here we just point – in anticipation – to one aspect: to the occasionally emergent, sudden, and indeed stupendous early completion in certain artistic activities at entirely primitive levels (cave paintings in southern France, certain primitive ornaments, etc.). These facts are all the more significant considering they are inseparably related to tendencies that essentially govern development, namely that artistic activity as a whole is constituted in a uniform way much later than is science and becomes detached from the general stock of everyday, magical (religious) praxis much more slowly and hesitantly than does science. This distinction has quite palpable, material causes. Acquiring knowledge of the surrounding outside world, incipiently recognising its relationships, is such an integral part of everyday praxis that even the most primitive people could not help but, on pain of ruin, take this path somehow or other. No matter how deeply embedded this incipient science may be in the everyday of the magical age and no matter how slowly consciousness of what they objectively do may unfold in people, the movement is nevertheless irresistible, since it is deeply

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rooted in the protection and reproduction of sheer existence itself. The social necessity of art has no such massively self-evident roots. Not that it is decisive that any practice of art presupposes a certain degree of leisure, a freedom – even if it is only relative – from everyday cares, from the unavoidably immediate responses of the everyday to basic needs. Such leisure likewise presupposes the very first beginnings of science, even if these beginnings are nowhere near being consciously recognised as such. However, their closer and more evident connection to the demands of the day compel the leisure necessary for art in a double sense. First, as the imperative power of these everyday postulates impacts the community and realises a division of labour, no matter how primitive (with leisure for deliberating on such issues); second, as the knowledge that thus comes into being achieves the commencement of control over the environment, things, etc. – over man himself above all. There comes into being a certain technique of labour and with it a certain elevation of labouring man himself over his earlier level of mastery of his own bodily and mental capacities. All of this – a definite, albeit ever so modest, elevation of technique and of the re-education of the people wielding it – is also a prerequisite for the very first beginnings of an aesthetic artistic activity, no matter how unconscious it may still be. Keep the Stone Age in mind. The stage in which suitable stones were found and kept already involves approaches to such a reflection of reality from which science later develops. For there is already a degree of the capacity for abstraction, of the generalisation of meaningful labour experiences; there is already an attempt to go beyond the scope of purely subjective, scantily organised impressions in order to be able to clearly behold the relationship of the form of a certain stone to its suitability for certain tasks. At this stage, however, an approach to art is still not possible. For that to happen for the first time, the stone must not just be generally grinded or scraped, reshaped by human hands into the tool; only at a relatively high level can the technique made use of in the course of this even allow a merely unconscious incorporation of artistic motives. Boas correctly accounts for the fact that a relatively developed technique of scraping and grinding is necessary so that the stone receives the right form, so that its abraded surface exhibits not a muddle of parts but rather their identity, parallelism, etc.1 In the beginning, this still involves absolutely no aesthetic intention; it is nothing more than the superior technico-artisanal adaptation to the immediate practical purpose of labour. It is readily apparent, however, that before the human eye is capable of perceiving forms and struc-

1 Boas 1951, p. 21.

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tures with precision, before the hand can accurately wrest from the stone the parallelism, equal spacing, etc. that are required at the same time, all prerequisites for even the single most primitive ornamentation must be absent. The objective level of technique is thus likewise a developmental level of labouring man. Engels gives a very clear image of the decisive features of this development: ‘Before the first flint could be fashioned into a knife by human hands, a period of time probably elapsed in comparison with which the historical period known to us appears insignificant. But the decisive step had been taken, the hand had become free and could henceforth attain ever greater dexterity; the greater flexibility thus acquired was inherited and increased from generation to generation. Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour’.2 Engels further demonstrates that the formation of the hand has had important repercussions on the rest of the organism. We have already been addressing the relationship of language to labour, to the dexterity acquired in it, to the higher community that comes into being in it. It is still worth mentioning here that Engels forcefully accentuates the specifically human refinement and differentiation of the senses. At the same time this is not a question of physiological perfection in the first instance. On the contrary. In this regard many animals are vastly superior to man. However, it does come down to the fact that the ability to perceive things qualitatively changes, broadens, deepens, and becomes refined by means of meaningful labour experiences. We have already referred to this issue in other contexts. Here too Engels stresses the interactions of this development with labour, language, the capacity for abstraction and deduction, etc. What we find above all in the anthropology of Gehlen is a further concretisation of this process of differentiating the senses. His accurate analysis of certain facts and relationships is all the more valuable to us considering that his philosophical presuppositions and conclusions are often diametrically opposed to our own. However, since it exclusively comes down to our identifying a concrete developmental tendency here, we will eschew any detailed polemic or critique. The reader will already be able to gather from Gehlen’s terminology where the antitheses between a modern idealist and a dialectical materialist anthropology are situated, both in principle and in detail. Gehlen discusses the gradually emerging division of labour among the senses, in which it is immaterial to us that he observes this process in the course of childhood development, while according to our view the essential process took place in the childhood of the human race. We indeed consider – following Hegel and Engels – the

2 Engels 1987c, p. 453.

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‘development of individual consciousness through its different stages [to be] an abbreviated reproduction of the stages through which the consciousness of man has passed in the course of history’.3 Gehlen thus explains, ‘This process involves the coordination of all types of movement, particularly between the hand and the senses (above all, the eyes). As a result, the world is “worked through” with an eye toward its potential availability and usefulness to man. In succession, objects are experienced by man then set aside; the objects are thereby unwittingly endowed with a high degree of symbolism such that, eventually, the eye alone (an effortless sense) can take them in and quickly assess their potential usefulness and value’.4 Without even adumbrating a critique of the idealist conception and terminology here, it should still be noted that behind what Gehlen understands by ‘symbolism’ is an essential issue of the coming into being of specifically human visuality and its continuation into fine art. To this end, all that must be noticed is that the concept and expression of ‘symbolism’ is by no means an ‘addition’ of the subject to the impartial mode of appearance of objects but rather is a continuation, formation, and refinement of its reflection. When, for instance, the talk is about how developed human sight can visually comprehend something like weight, material structure, etc. without having to resort to the sense of touch, this is due to the fact that the visual indicators of such attributes are indeed not immediately conspicuous, therefore are not perceptible to the eye at a primitive level, and hence are comprehended for the first time generally through the sense of touch. But they are nonetheless objectively components of the visual comprehensibility of objects. Idealism expresses such discoveries – accomplished by the labour process and the division of labour among the senses arising from it – with the word ‘symbolism’ and in this way constricts the field of visual reflection, the objective basis of such a division of labour. The possibilities for conquest in the narrower field of aesthetics of course go even further. Later in the discussion of influential theories, such as those of Konrad Fiedler, we will be able to see that philosophical idealism constricts the field of sensuous perception in order to be able to create room for its subjectivist constructions. The most important of Gehlen’s remarks are those in which he vigorously accentuates the division of labour between the senses of sight and touch in labour. We have also already quoted these remarks of his. The value of such an analysis is embedded both in principle and in the details. In principle because in this way the gap between the most highly evolved animals and labouring

3 Engels 1976, p. 361. 4 Gehlen 1988, p. 32.

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people who have further developed meaningful labour experiences is clearly expressed – in fact, precisely in this division of labour and cooperation among the senses. Gehlen gives good descriptions of this that are especially in need of supplementation insofar as the difference appears as a metaphysical chasm that has been there for all of eternity and the relationship between the anthropological essence of man and the opposing one of animals does not appear as the product of labour. That is to say, what needs to be supplemented in Gehlen’s account is how the outcomes of labour – the humanisation of man – are presented not as the results of this process, but rather as its preconditions. Within the limits just noted, Gehlen gives outstanding and extraordinarily fruitful observations and descriptions with respect to the character of human visuality. We will later come back to their significance for art. For now, we quote only an essential passage in order to clearly illuminate the division of labour among the senses by means of labour, the taking over of the functions of the sense of touch by the eyes. Gehlen explains, For example, when we look at an object such as a cup, we tend to overlook its highlights and shadows as well as any ornamentation. In part, our eyes tend to use these things as indications of the cup’s space and form to help recognize the object, whereby the far sides and the portions averted from us are indirectly ‘experienced’. Any overlapping portions are assessed similarly. In contrast, the material structure (in this case, ‘thin porcelain’) and the weight of the object are seen, but in a different, more ‘predicative’ way than the character of the container (its hollows and curves) which stands out in the foreground. Similarly, certain visual data – for example, the handle or the ‘wieldable’ point on the total form – suggest ways of manipulating the object. The eye can take in all this information at one glance. One could say that our eye, while quite indifferent toward the actual amount that can be perceived, is very sensitive to highly complex suggestions.5 Gehlen even quite correctly recognises the role of habituation in this process, though again without taking the role of labour (and, at a later level, that of art) into account at the same time. We have far outstripped real development and must further continue to anticipate here as well end results for the purpose of illuminating the – unknown and probably never actually knowable – initial conditions of the differentiation

5 Gehlen 1988, pp. 55–6.

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(the gradual detachment) of artistic reflection from that of everyday life; its autonomisation not only with respect to everyday life but also with respect to science (and, on the other hand, to magic and religion). Again, it is a question of Marxist method that the anatomy of man provides the key to the anatomy of the ape. With the help of impulses that became visible only at more developed stages but were triggered by earlier ones, these early stages that are in themselves unknown and scientifically inscrutable are reconstructable in their quality, direction, tendency, etc. by their knowable consequences. We pursue development in the reverse direction from the endpoint it has reached so far (taking into consideration the intermediate stages known to us); and from the manner of differentiation, we draw conclusions as to the primitive undifferentiated condition, its dissolution, and the seeds of the future embedded in it. The – quite problematic – differentiation process of artistic reflection that can be traced in this way offers highly specific difficulties, even in comparison to those of science. This chiefly has to do with its coming to consciousness much later. We were already able to see in Greek development that the most consciously ideological form of scientific comportment – that of philosophy – virtually plays a pioneering role with respect to actual individual sciences. A certain developmental stage of the forces of production and, along with them, the technology of individual sciences is of course necessary for contemplation and the emergence of consciousness to ever come about. Once it is here, however, as the generalisation of meaningful experiences, especially in Greece, it goes far beyond the degree of technology and the individual sciences that had been achieved at that time and that was achievable within the relations of production then. Indeed, this function of philosophy does not cease even in the recovery period during and after the Renaissance. Engels says the following about the role of philosophy with respect to the development of the natural sciences: ‘It is to the highest credit of the philosophy of the time that it did not let itself be led astray by the restricted state of contemporary natural knowledge, and that – from Spinoza down to the great French materialists – it insisted on explaining the world from the world itself and left the justification in detail to the natural sciences of the future’.6 The philosophy of art (aesthetics) could never play such a role for the self-reflection of art itself. Even in the case of great figures such as Aristotle, it always only cropped up post festum, and its most significant results were, just as in the works of Aristotle, the conceptual fixing in place of a level of artistic development that had already been achieved. This is not an accident. For with all of the gradualness and contra-

6 Engels 1987c, p. 323.

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dictoriness of the process by which scientific reflection detaches from that of the everyday (and from that of magic and religion), the gulf between them is nevertheless sufficiently obvious to become – under favourable social conditions – rapidly and essentially rightly capable of a philosophical generalisation. However, the specificity of artistic reflection – when looked at in immediate terms – sets itself apart far less sharply from this common foundation. It produces very long-lasting transitional appearances; at a highly developed level, it can still keep up the closest attachment to the everyday, magic, and religion; it expresses them and, going by immediate semblance, completely fuses with them. Again, it is instructive to study this constellation at a developed stage. We are thinking about Greek development here. On the one hand, we see that literature and art (as compared to the East) can unfold relatively autonomously, free from theocratic prescriptions. However, precisely as a result of this it becomes apparent how long it takes for art to detach itself from religion and stand on its own feet. Dating it quite early, one can go back as far as Sophocles, though a real consciousness of this separation is first present in the works of Euripides. We have already pointed out in other contexts that here is where the mental foundation for the critically dismissive comportment of early philosophy – itself anxious to liberate science – towards art and the artist (Heraclitus, etc.) is located. These philosophers see in the aesthetic principle – not unjustly – an anthropomorphising principle, and since they regard the anthropomorphism of religion, myth, etc. as their chief intellectual enemy, in this context the aesthetic is branded – very unjustly – the ally or instrument of anthropomorphising superstition. The difficulty of a similarly decided autonomisation like the one fought for and won here for philosophy and science namely has to do with the fact that the aesthetic principle – about which we will have a lot to say in what follows – indeed has an anthropomorphising character. As we have seen, was it not already difficult, did it not already require a process encompassing millennia, to separate the disanthropomorphising principle of the scientific reflection of reality from any anthropomorphism? And did this not have to cost these efforts the insight into the fact that artistic reflection indeed anthropomorphises by its very nature, though it represents such a particular instance of this principle that it – materially and methodologically, in terms of content and form – sharply differs both from the reflection of everyday life as well as from that of magic or religion? Here only one remark may be permitted in the interest of clarifying concepts. As we have already repeatedly emphasised, the antithesis of the disanthropomorphising and the anthropomorphising principles of reflection plays a pivotal role for us. The essence of the former is already clearly determined;

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we have likewise discussed the dialectic of the ideological issues associated with it. Many more ambiguities are possible in the case of anthropomorphisation. For instance, there are researchers who recognise anthropomorphising only in those places where man expressly and directly projects his own forms and characteristics into the cosmos. Gehlen thus recently stated the following about this issue: ‘Magic is fundamentally in the self-interest of the group or even egocentric, and it by no means requires for its technique humanised anthropomorphic entities. Even omens are almost always nonhuman; for magic, one draws on animal spirits willingly; one summons rain, clouds, quarry; the emblems of shamans are the bird, the horse, the tree of life, etc. Only at the stage of polytheism does this change, as soon as the gods take on human shape and become the only real gods – that is to say, it becomes certain that they rule … The anthropomorphic god is precisely one who no longer acts in an anthropocentric way …’.7 Gehlen confuses the object of anthropomorphising with its method. (We cannot go into the reasons here for this confusion, which arises from his whole philosophy of history.) There is no doubt that religions with deities, in particular monotheism, represent more developed and higher forms of anthropomorphism than does magic. If the world is ruled by god or by gods, then the imagined immediate influencing of the course of the world by magic is without question thereby repressed, and the ability of the world to function independently of man is ideologically specified. With that said, however, is the magical ‘worldview’ actually superseded? Gehlen himself is compelled, in connection with Eduard Meyer8 and Jacob Burckhardt, to concede the opposite: ‘Everywhere, ethical consolidation goes hand in hand with the regression into the most primitive forms of religion that already appeared to have been completely overcome’.9 This survival of important aspects of magic in religions is not accidental. It applies not only to ancient and Eastern polytheism but also to monotheistic religions; only in Calvinism did a serious attempt arise to radically liquidate the remnants of magic. Thus the ‘regressions’ noticed by Meyer and Burckhardt are such only in a quantitative regard. Even earlier, a great many remainders of magic lived on in peaceful harmony with the new conceptions of gods for the most part. It thus also becomes apparent that Gehlen not only overestimates the antithesis between magic and religion but also carries a non-existent antithesis into it precisely in relation to the anthropomorphising principle. Let us grant that the objects of magic are focused on natural phe7 Gehlen 1956, pp. 274–5. [Eds.: Lukács’s emphasis.] 8 Eduard Meyer (1855–1930), influential German historian of antiquity. [Eds.] 9 Gehlen 1956, qtd. on p. 275. [Eds.: Gehlen is quoting from Eduard Meyer’s Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums [‘Origin and Beginnings of Christianity’] (1921–23).]

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nomena (animals, forces, etc.) – from whence does magic take its conception of their essence? Undoubtedly from man’s meaningful experiences regarding himself at that time, about his relationships to the nature surrounding him. That these are less openly ‘personified’ than those of later religions simply stems from the fact that human personality was far less developed, far less conscious of itself. When, for instance, the figure of the demiurge first comes to the fore later, this is informally explained by the fact that a much greater role is necessarily attributed conceptually to ‘impersonal forces’ at the time of mere gathering, of the predominance of hunting, fishing, etc. in the self-preservation of people than in later stages, in which a much greater share belongs to labour in this self-preservation. However, this merely alters the objects (their character, nature, etc.) that are projected as causes into the outside world, but not the act of projecting from inner meaningful human experiences into objective reality. This is precisely where anthropomorphising and disanthropomorphising part ways: whether it takes as its starting point objective reality – the contents (existing in themselves), categories, etc. of which are lifted into consciousness – or whether a projection from the inside to the outside (from man into nature) takes place. From this point of view, the cult of animals or natural forces involves just as much anthropomorphising as the creation of humanoid gods. In keeping with its importance, this question of anthropomorphising will play a central role in our later reflections. It has been mentioned here in an unavoidably still very abstract, anticipatory fashion only so that certain characteristics of this process of disentanglement can already be made visible in their general outlines. In the first place, the difficulty and intricacy of the objective process of detachment, namely how – regardless of what kind of consciousness it is accompanied by – in artistic praxis a specifically aesthetic objectivity comes into being that, even though it too anthropomorphises, qualitatively differs by nature from the everyday, magical, and religious forms of objectivity. In the second place, our earlier claim about the post festum character of this mode of reflecting being made conscious is already somewhat better substantiated at this abstract level of observations. It is understandable that the general principle of incipient praxis (‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’) appears here in particularly extreme measures. The specific mode of aesthetic objectivity and the specifically aesthetic comportment towards it had already long since developed in practice before an only somewhat serious intellectual advance could be noticeable when it came to separating the various forms of the anthropomorphising reflection of reality from each other in conceptually sharp and theoretically sound ways, as happened in connection with the disanthropomorphising contradictions in philosophy. Indeed, it requires a

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development lasting thousands of years – with few exceptions, among which Aristotle certainly belongs – to remove elements of scientific ‘truths’ from the criteria of aesthetic ones, to not evaluate the ‘truth’ of aesthetic reflection – positively or negatively – according to scientific standards. Difficulties still accumulate as a result of the fact that the first forms of expression of the scientific and philosophical reflection of reality also emerge heavily mixed with aesthetic elements. In addition, these aesthetic elements unquestionably derive immediately from the magical period, in which tendencies that later differentiate themselves are still found to be inseparably intertwined. Think of ancient Eastern poetry, in which this tendency – by its material nature, an inorganic one – was preserved for a very long time. However, even in Greece itself, where the separation in content (indeed objectivity itself) is constituted relatively early, we often find scientific or philosophical productions that were written in poetic language, sometimes with a poetic outlook; thus, the philosophical poetry in the works of the pre-Socratics, thus the early Platonic dialogues. Without question what arises out of this is a double development, a very slow and uneven differentiation: on the one hand, the philosophical poem as a particular genre within the lyric (Schiller), and on the other, the sloughing off of poeticising expression in science and philosophy. However, even works as formidable as De rerum natura by Lucretius have not yet carried out the clearly differentiating separation of aesthetic elements from the scientific and philosophical reflection of reality, and even in the works of Dante we still find traces of the merging of the scientific and the poetic reflection of reality. This primordial inseparateness is still obstinately conserved in many modes of expression in the social sciences and public life. With respect to the latter, it suffices if we refer to ancient rhetoric. Antiquity undeniably considered this an art. Here is not the place to explain in detail all the contradictions that result from this. Perhaps it will suffice to point out that, on the one hand, because of this basic conception rhetoric receives a formalistic character that occasionally turns into mannerism. For what must be missing here is a formal treatment that sets out from poetry’s objectively present meaningful content, even if not always consciously recognised as such, which through the genre-like determinacy of the concrete content is secured by the unambiguous resolution of concrete problems of form. On the other hand, the purely formalistic ‘aesthetic’ conception of rhetoric that thus comes about must lead to its argumentative‘scientific’ elements receiving a sophistic character, since they are one-sidedly regarded from their immediate (emotional) efficacy, and their actual truth content, their accurate correspondence with the facts, is eclipsed and indeed completely disappears from time to time.

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It is not difficult to see in this issue that an exact theoretical differentiation in this field still has not been fully carried out down to the present day. This means trouble for any aesthetics that claims to separate its field very sharply and seamlessly – thus metaphysically – from the phenomena of life lying outside its purview. On the other hand, in our view (to be sure, a view that we have only very abstractly expressed and must gradually concretise) these contradictions are easily resolved. Our view assumes a constant back-and-forth between everyday life and art, in which problems of life are transformed into specific aesthetic forms and are correspondingly resolved artistically; and in which the achievements of the aesthetic conquest of reality flow continuously into everyday life, enriching it both objectively and subjectively. Accordingly, it becomes clear that forensic speech as well as journalism, reportage, etc. constitute important components of practical everyday life. Their belonging to everyday life and their incapacity to crystallise into the solid, if also constantly changing, lawfulness of an aesthetic genre are based upon the fact that here the immediate affiliation of theory and praxis is the deciding purpose in the composition of the whole and the configuration of the details. Above all, a speech is supposed to accomplish a determinate, concrete, single purpose: to persuade the listeners that X be convicted or acquitted, that bill Y be adopted or rejected, etc. This is in conflict both, for example, with scientific jurisprudence, which investigates those general precepts under which such an individual case is to be subsumed, and with drama and the novel as well, which take pains in the composition of a determinate individual case to artistically work out the typicality that is contained therein in terms of characters and situations. This gulf separating it from both art and science is not bridged through an implementation either of artistic means or of scientific ones. The regulatory principle that is decisive for the essence of the whole remains the goal of immediately mobilising the most diverse and (among themselves) the most heterogeneous means for an immediate practical purpose. The fact that art too aims at an immediate effect has always caused confusion in this issue. However, we can easily see that the meaning of ‘immediacy’ in both cases is extremely different. In rhetoric the supreme purpose is to accomplish something immediately practical; whether the means always appeal directly to immediacy remains an open question. In art, however, the emphasis is precisely on the immediate effect achieved by the medium of composition; however, its implementation into the practical – the educational effect of art, about which we will speak at length later – is something that is quite intricately and unevenly mediated. Of course, these distinctions in no way preclude transitional cases. On the one hand, in a speech or journalistic article the scientific method and the material that has been comprehended and classified by it in a

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scientific way can predominate to such a degree and be so overwhelming and groundbreaking in a scientific sense that the effort is scientific and its rhetorical or journalistic form appears to be a secondary accessory. On the other, a rhetorical effort or a journalistic text can work out the typicality of the case being discussed with such force that it triggers an artistic effect – thereby becoming independent of its occasion to a large extent. It is clear, however, that it is a question here of borderline cases in which – and this is the essential point here – the standard is being taken from the methodology of science or from aesthetics; such outcomes are achieved by exceeding the normal limits of rhetoric but not by complying with its rules. They therefore do not abolish the indicated antithesis. Even as borderline cases, they only point once again to the basic fact emphasised by us: a double-sided interaction continually prevails between the everyday and science as well as between the everyday and art. Similarly, the formation of an actually scientific mode of reflection takes place at a slow pace in historiography. During the whole of ancient development, the borders with respect to aesthetic composition remain extremely fluid; indeed, a certain prevalence of the aesthetic rises to prominence again and again. The anecdotal-novelistic arrangement and narration of events that is predominant at the beginning (for instance, in the works of Herodotus) indeed increasingly abates, though the influence of pseudo-aesthetic and rhetorical elements in particular remains extremely important throughout. The definitive constitution of history as a science first takes place late, in the modern era. It is based upon the fact that the strengthening tendency of the scientific reflection of reality is more vigorously directed towards not only faithfully reproducing the facts of the course of history in their general outlines, but also comprehending their historical being-just-so as necessary, unperturbed by the subjectivity of the historian in question.10 How easy it is to understand that the triumph of the disanthropomorphising principle in the reflection of reality is expressed in the endeavour to reproduce as far as possible the objective being-in-themselves of the facts of life and to neutralise as much as possible human subjectivity in the investigation, selection, and arrangement of the facts. This tendency is based on the growing insight that objective, scientifically discoverable, and explicable social forces are operative (that is to say, the structure of social constructs at a given time, their transformations, and the causes for these transformations) just behind the qualitative alteration of the facts of life, the relationship of people to each other, and the conditions for their

10

The rudiments of this are of course also in place in antiquity, especially as Thucydides very much anticipates later development with his history of the Peloponnesian War.

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actions, psychology, and morals. The qualitative being-just-so of these facts thus no longer appears as a simple immediate datum, an abstract suchness, but rather as a nodal point, the interdependency of objective lawful regularities. Ancient historiography knew little of both and therefore paid hardly any attention to them. That is why artistic elements play such an important role in the presentation of the being-just-so of facts and events. Artistic freedom in the ‘invention’ of the speeches given by historical personalities is just one conspicuous symptom of this situation. Aristotle’s comparison of generalisation in poetry and in history (to the disadvantage of the latter) illuminates the developmental level of differentiation in antiquity. We will not involve ourselves here with the problems surrounding the relationship between history and the philosophy of history that play an important role as a transition, since they in essence comprise a problem within the realm of the scientific reflection of reality. Historiography is constituted as a systematic science only when, as indicated above, facts not only are respected as such – they are thus no longer typified or stylised in an aesthetic way – but also are reflected and presented as modes of appearance, nodal points, crossroads, interdependencies, etc. of the lawfulness of historical development. That the literary expression of such relationships also often resorts to artistic means confirms from a new side the principle of reciprocal interactions already highlighted by us. (In the second volume’s discussion of the work of art and the types of creative behaviour, we will address in detail the role of scientific elements in art.) However, these interactions do not abolish the structurally decisive mutual withdrawal of these spheres from each other. Just as historical science can remain purely scientific (that is to say, it disanthropomorphises) while broadly utilising the aesthetic means of expression to be found in literary presentation, so too art as such does not have to be disturbed in the purity of its effects in any way when its appropriation of life material relies on the methods and findings of science. We can see instances of the first possibility in the historical (indeed, even in the economic) works of Karl Marx, who has done the most in terms of methodology to theoretically justify and practically carry through the objective disanthropomorphising principle in the social sciences. As for the second possibility, Thomas Mann’s late work offers a representative example. The intricacy of this situation had to be touched upon, at least by way of intimation, so that the difficulty of detaching the aesthetic sphere from the everyday, from religion, and even from science clearly comes to the fore. We have, not unintentionally, tried to elucidate the observations of such interdependencies and transitions in examples of verbal expression at a relatively developed stage. The difficulty of conceptually separating the various spheres indeed appears to be quite great here as well, yet increasing conscious-

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ness awareness, particularly about science and scientifically informed praxis, makes unraveling all of this possible. It is precisely this finding, however, which very clearly points out the difficulty of this task in primitive stages of development. Needless to say, the insights gained here in principle must direct us: above all, the fact that we perceive objective, de facto completed (or begun) separations even in those places where consciousness of the difference is still completely missing. At the same time we must, at least with one remark, refer back to what was implied earlier: namely, that it is far easier to carry out, at least conceptually, a separation in the case of the blending of scientific and artistic principles brought forth by social life than it is in the cases of the coalescing of art and magic or religion. For in the first case, as has already been shown, disanthropomorphising and anthropomorphising modes of reflection of reality are facing each other, whereas in the second what is involved are varieties of anthropomorphising that indeed are opposed to each other in their ultimate principles, though in praxis they remain fused together for millennia. Their gradual separation not only is a sluggish, contradictory, and uneven process, but also is one that takes place with problems and inner crises for art itself. A preliminary remark on principle still has to be made before we proceed from these introductory comments to the philosophical analysis of the process of disentangling art from primordial, undifferentiated human praxis. As has been already emphasised, we have only used verbal forms of expression as examples, knowing full well that we have thereby not even remotely outlined the entire field of the aesthetic. On this artificially constricted terrain, however, it already becomes apparent which persistent principle of most aesthetics impedes philosophical apprehension of the essence and emergence of art: conceiving the essence of the aesthetic as something primordial and uniform from the outset. This is especially so if we also think of ornamentation and fine art, of music and architecture. With the mere utterance of such concerns, the ultimate unity of the aesthetic in principle is in no way to be denied. On the contrary. The end result of our considerations aims precisely at properly founding this unity in principle, more securely than is possible by means of a suprahistorical and a priori assumption of a ‘primordial’ aesthetic capacity in humans. This assumption must naturally prevail in all idealist conceptions of the aesthetic. All idealism necessarily and uncritically takes as its starting point man’s current state of consciousness, which it lays down as ‘eternal’. Even when it admits its real historical development, the historical development that is thus constructed is only ostensible. On the one hand, it is merely extrinsic: at best, the historical process is there in order to empirically ‘realise’ what has already been established a priori in the analysis of consciousness; compared to aprioristic deduction, it

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is superficial and contingent. Since subjective idealism – whatever its terminology may be – takes as its starting point the antithesis of being and validity, since it conceives of validity as something that is not touchable by ontological historical development, no interaction in the sense of the constitution and modification of validity can take place between the two. On the other hand, in the contemplation of science and art, objective idealism – even when, as in the case of Hegel, it makes historical becoming and the humanisation of man the focus of its methodology – must also take as its starting point a premade concept of man (in the contemporary sense or at least in the sense of people who have already become socio-historical). Indeed, in the works of Hegel the so-called symbolic period is placed in front as prologue to the proper development of the arts to some extent. But here too all of the categories of later completed art are already posited as being implicitly present. Development exists just in the sense of their becoming explicit; it is thus – precisely in accordance with the general Hegelian dialectical concept of development – a merely apparent movement that cannot bring forth anything essentially, qualitatively new. And mechanical materialism labours with such a suprahistorical concept of man that such issues pertaining to genesis cannot turn up in it at all. When, as in the works of Darwin, the finished categories of the aesthetic are already present in the higher animals and thus turn into a heritage of a pre-human past for man, nothing whatsoever changes in this situation. This dogma is, as we have seen, so deeply entrenched in previous aesthetic thinking that, although, as we will shortly see, Marxism breaks with it, even a Franz Mehring considers it to be ‘a first prerequisite of a scientific aesthetic … to prove art to be a distinct and primordial capacity of mankind’.11 It is certainly no accident that in the process Mehring appeals to Kant. For a long time, such conceptions were based in ignorance of the humanisation of man and, in connection with this, in the stylisation of prehistoric times (the beginnings of the development of mankind) into a ‘golden age’. This is not the place to discuss the different social foundations of such – mutually different, indeed opposite – outlooks. For us it is primarily important to have a look at those conceptions that have very often arisen out of opposition to capitalist society’s hostility to art and hence have projected an unspoiled aesthetic ‘golden age’ into the beginnings of mankind. That is why for its own present time the civilisation that arose out of the dissolution of this ‘golden age’ has the task of consciously realising the principles that once grew spontaneously and unconsciously. It suffices to illustrate this if we refer to the aphorism from

11

Mehring 1929, p. 260.

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Hamann’s ‘Ästhetica in nuce’ that has become famous: ‘Poetry is the mothertongue of the human race; as gardening is older than farming: painting, – than writing: song – than declamation: parables – than arguments: bartering – than commerce. A deeper sleep was our most ancient ancestor’s rest; and their movement, an intoxicating dance. Seven days they sat in silence of reflection or wonder; – and opened their mouths – for winged oracles’.12 It is not all that difficult to demonstrate Hamann’s self-deception. If it were perhaps true that gardening is older than farming, then even then it is merely a question of different ways of cultivating the land; this garden still has nothing to do with a garden in the aesthetic sense. Hamannian painting (hieroglyphs, etc.) is an imagistic expression of thoughts, a magical complex of signs, thus far removed from being a progenitor of later painting, etc. Even when certain analogies appear imagistic in language and thinking, they contain within themselves the seeds both of parables as well as of arguments, but not in the least do they include ‘poetry’ as the dominant mode of expression of a ‘pre-logical’ (of an aesthetic) period. We have already spoken about the apparently spontaneous pictorality of primitive language (although we know it all only at a relatively more developed level). To behold a poetic mother-tongue of mankind in it is tantamount to projecting our later sensations regarding picturesque expression into old words that, by their nature, are as abstract as later ones are without, however, being capable yet of a real generalising synthesis. The notably simple beauty of old folk songs, which we justifiably admire as exemplary, is endemic to a far more developed stage; to one where the sentence, the context, the individual word – perfected in conceptual generalisation – is already in control and brings forth poetic, picturesque, etc. effects by virtue of an allembracing mood. In Hamann’s remarks one senses a distant echo of Vico.13 In the works of Vico, however, the aesthetic stylisation of prehistoric times is far more critical. Indeed, Vico speaks of a ‘poetic’ age in the development of mankind as well. His conception wavers between a realistic recognition of its actual primitiveness, or lack of differentiation in comparison to later stages, and an identification of this sensuously expressed primitiveness with developed poetry and art. He demands that philosophers and philologists take as their starting point bona fide ‘first men’, thus men who were ‘stupid, insensate, and horrid beasts’; he brings up travelogues regarding Native Americans and the reports of Tacitus 12 13

Hamann 1995, p. 411, translation modified. As far as I know, a connection between Vico and Hamann cannot be established philologically, although Viconian suggestions could very easily have reached Hamann by means of English archaeology, for example.

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on the ancient Germanic tribes for comparison with primitive antiquity.14 In all of this, very earnest approaches to a truthful grasp of the starting points of human culture are in place. Vico also sees that later forms of activity were contained only as seeds in its initial period, though contained there nonetheless. There thus comes into being the Viconian conception of prehistoric times: we must ‘trace the beginnings of poetic wisdom to a crude metaphysics, from which various sciences branch out as if from a tree trunk. On one side, we find the branches of logic, ethics, economics, and politics, which are all poetic sciences. On the other, we find further poetic sciences: physics, with her daughters, cosmography and astronomy; and astronomy’s two daughters, chronology and geography, whom she endows with certainty’.15 Even for Vico, however, it remains an insurmountable obstacle that he is compelled to derive the dialectic development of human activity from the structural transformation of subjectivity. This leads to the overemphasised contrast of abstract, rational responses of later times to those of the first men, who ‘lacked the power of reason, and were entirely guided by their vigorous sensations and vivid imaginations’.16 It is readily apparent that this antithesis, which is founded on mere subjectivity, also leads to an idealising of the primitive condition, which admittedly is a theory that Vico – to his credit, let it be said – never consistently goes through with, as happens somewhat later in Hamann, for whom that which was an ingenious idea for the periodisation of the history of human cultural in the case of Vico degenerates into mythologisation, into a subjectivist method. Thus, in ‘Socratic Memorabilia’: ‘But perhaps the whole of history is more mythology than this philosopher [Bollingbroke – G.L.] thought, and, like nature, a sealed book, a concealed witness, a riddle that cannot be solved, without plowing with another heifer than our reason’.17 That for a great many philosophers the declaration of the aesthetic as a ‘primordial capacity of mankind’ does not contain any conscious expression of mythicising thoughts changes nothing in the fact that the entire theory is – objectively – a myth. Only the discovery of labour as the vehicle for the humanisation of man can bring about an essential turn to reality here. As is well known, it was Hegel who first emerged with this conception in the Phenomenology of Spirit.18 However, it cannot develop its complete fruitfulness in his works on account of his idealist biases and limits. Marx says of this Hegelian theory, in which he admittedly

14 15 16 17 18

Vico 1999, p. 144. Vico 1999, p. 139. Vico 1999, p. 144. Hamann 1995, p. 383. Cf. Lukács 1975, pp. 338 ff.

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beholds a reason for the greatness of the Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘The only labour Hegel knows and recognizes is abstract mental labour’.19 Most of Hegel’s inversions in this set of issues can be attributed to this fundamentally idealist bias in his standpoint. The coming into being, shaping, and unfolding of human activities can only be understood in interdependency with the development of labour, with the conquest of man’s surrounding world, with the reorganisation of man himself by means of this development and this conquest. We have already briefly outlined the principles of the interdependencies growing out of this, in which it was apparent that today even anthropologists and psychologists who have remained unaffected by Marxism (indeed, even those who reject it) must increasingly recognise the transformative function of labour for man, even if they are not able – precisely as a result of their position towards Marxism – to completely comprehend this complex in its moving historical totality. It thus suffices here to point out that Marx expressly accentuates also in relation to the aesthetic this conception of humanisation, the higher human development of man up to the present stage. For instance, with regard to music, he explains the following: On the other hand, let us look at the question in its subjective aspect: only music can awaken the musical sense in man and the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers, i.e. can only be for me in so far as my essential power exists for me as a subjective attribute (this is because the sense of an object for me extends only as far as my sense extends, only has sense for a sense that corresponds to that object). In the same way, and for the same reasons, the senses of social man are different from those of non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity – a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification – be either cultivated or created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses – all these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history. Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist, only its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in

19

Marx 1992a, p. 386.

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its crudest form, and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from that of animals …. [T] hus the objectification of the human essence, in a theoretical as well as a practical respect, is necessary both in order to make man’s senses human and to create an appropriate human sense for the whole of the wealth of humanity and of nature.20 We have quoted from Marx’s expositions at such length primarily because they contain an unequivocally clear position taken to our present problem, to the socio-historical development of the human senses and mental activities, and for that reason they take up a clear position against any conception of the ‘primordial’, ‘eternal’, etc. art-sense in man. He shows that all of these capacities and the objects appropriate to them only came into being gradually, historically. In fact – and this is a very important difference from scientific reflection – it must be particularly underscored that not only receptivity, but also its objects themselves are products of social development. The objects of nature exist in themselves, independent of human consciousness and its social development; the latter’s activity in reshaping consciousness is certainly necessary so that they are recognised, so that they are transformed from objects existing in themselves into objects existing for us in scientific reflection. Music, architecture, etc., however, come into being – also objectively – only in the course of this process. Their interdependency with productive and receptive consciousness must thus also exhibit different features than those that are merely determined by making-a-for-us out of an existing-in-itself. To be sure, the scientific knowledge of reality also has an object that comes into being socially, but once it has come into being, it has just as much of the character of an it-itself as do the objects of nature. As different as its objective structure and the lawfulness of its efficacy may ever be from those of nature, its scientific reflection also takes the straight path from the in-itself to the for-us. The fact that a pure form of objectivity is far more difficult to achieve here, that the deviation from this objectivity is likewise determined by social development, changes nothing essential in this situation. Marxism highlights with equal emphasis both sides, the similarities as well as the differences, here. On the one hand, the entire methodology of Marx’s writings on the social sciences shows that it conceives of its objects as processes that function completely independent of human consciousness. On the other hand, Marx points out – making a reference to Vico – that ‘human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not

20

Marx 1992a, pp. 353–4.

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the latter’.21 Insofar as the products of artistic activity are regarded purely as products of this development, which undoubtedly is in keeping with the facts (that is to say, insofar as they are regarded exclusively as parts of the social being of people), this same lawfulness to which we pointed just now applies to the scientific reflection of this being. However, within this social being, considered by itself, this lawfulness exhibits entirely new and idiosyncratic features, the working out of which will be precisely the chief task of these observations. To anticipate in the abstract these trains of thought would now mean enumerating those things that can be actually and meaningfully comprehended only in the concrete, in the proper theoretical and historical context. All we can do here – by way of anticipating ourselves – is point out that the interdependencies between objectivity and subjectivity are a part of the objective essence of works of art. It does not come down to the effect on X or Y but to the objective structure of the work of art as having an effect one way or another. What in any other field of human life would be an instance of philosophical idealism – namely, the notion that no object could exist without a subject – is in the aesthetic a characteristic trait of its specific objectivity. (Of course, the block of marble wrought into a sculpture exists as a piece of marble that is just as independent of any consciousness as it was before its being so wrought as any object in nature or society. Only by means of sculptural labour and exclusively in terms of this labour does the subject-object relation indicated by us – and to be discussed by us in detail later – subsist.) The expositions given by Marx and quoted by us illuminate precisely this specific objectivity of the aesthetic field, its specific interaction with the coming into being of an aesthetic subjectivity. In contrast to bourgeois historicism, which at most acknowledges a historical development of human intelligence, Marx quite emphatically highlights the fact that it is precisely the development of our five senses which is a result of all world history up to now. Needless to say, this development encompasses – and this can be clearly seen as the basis of Marxist observations – far more than the unfolding of a receptivity to art. The example of eating precisely shows that what is at issue for the time being are basic manifestations of life, the objective and subjective higher development of which is equally a product of the development of labour. This is no straightforward progression; Marx’s examples show how, even at higher levels, the relations of production and the social division of labour can become obstacles to the correct subjective relationships to objects. The history of the coming into

21

Marx 1990, p. 493.

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being of art (of both productive sense and artistic receptivity) can thus only be discussed within this framework of the world history of the five senses. With that said, however, the entire aesthetic principle turns into a result of the sociohistorical development of mankind. One can see from the foregoing that there can be no talk here of a primordial human capacity for art. This capacity has – like all other human abilities – historically developed bit by bit. Now, after a long cultural development, it already can no longer even be imagined without the anthropological image of man. However, among other things, the break with philosophical idealism also consists in not exaggerating into abstract, suprahistorical entities those human quirks that have today become self-evident and ‘natural’. The lesson for us in Marx’s remarks thus far exceeds this simple recognition of the radical historicity of art, artistic receptivity, etc. While working out this interdependency between the human senses and their objects, Marx does not forget to draw our attention to the fact that senses which are qualitatively different from each other must have qualitatively different relationships to (and therefore also different interdependencies with) the world of objects. ‘An object’, Marx says, ‘is different for the eye from what it is for the ear, and the eye’s object is different from the ear’s’.22 No one will deny this fact itself. However, one must draw the necessary conclusions from it. And these are centred around the problem that the points and sources of art’s origin have necessarily got to be dissimilar. Here too, all of the relationships are turned on their head by philosophical idealism in aesthetics. For philosophical idealism, it thus appears as if the uniform, ‘primordial’ (a priori) aesthetic principle should conceptually differentiate and thus arrange itself into a system of arts, whereas in reality different artistic activities, objectivities, receptivities, etc. spring from qualitatively different relationships to reality, underlying which are a uniform objective reality on the one hand and the qualitatively different organs of receptivity and their socio-historical development on the other. The fact that these then so greatly converge in history as a result of the uniformity of objective reality and its social foundations, functions, etc. (the fact that their crucial shared principles can be recognised as generally aesthetic), changes nothing in this state of affairs. We stand helpless in the face of the philosophical comprehensibility of the genesis of art if we do not take the facts described above as our starting point. This issue has also emerged from time to time in idealist philosophies of art, though here too with the typical falsifications of a dialectical problem into a

22

Marx 1992a, p. 353.

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metaphysical one. Konrad Fiedler, who at times has been very influential in German aesthetics, writes the following in the preface to his most important work, ‘On the Origin of Artistic Activity’: ‘Since there is no art in general but only arts, the question as to the origin of the artistic capacity can only be raised in the special area of a certain art’.23 Fiedler leaves open here the question of whether the results of his research allow inferences in other areas; his way of handling the question, however, indicates that he denies this possibility. He carries out two abstractions here that confuse the issue and make it irresolvable on account of their idealist and anti-dialectical nature. More precisely, these abstractions push the problem in the direction of a pseudo-solution. First of all, he disputes the reflection of an objective reality by means of our senses and our thinking; he sees therein a bias to be overcome: ‘In ordinary life – and not only there, but also in numerous areas of higher mental activity – one contents oneself that it is precisely objects in reality which conform to objective relationships …’.24 For Fiedler, therefore, it does not come down to the outside world, to its interaction with our sense organs, but exclusively to pure subjectivity: ‘One immediately realises the absurdity, however, in wanting to search for something in the outside world that one has not found in himself to begin with …’.25 Fiedler’s concrete polemic is directed here against the necessary inadequacy of linguistic expression for that which is concrete in appearances. Though in a few places he may find fault with partial aspects in ways that are not completely inaccurate, in the process he entirely overlooks the endless process whereby language approaches the ever-more adequate reflection of reality and with it the intricate dialectical interaction between the object-world and the subjectivity striving to comprehend and control it. As a result, expression is not only subjectified, but also fetishised. Language, Fiedler says, does not signify a being (it does not reflect being), but rather is a meaning: ‘And since that which comes into being in linguistic form does not exist at all outside of this form, language is thus only ever able to signify itself’.26 Since Fielder needs these observations in order to set visual expression brusquely, seamlessly, and exclusively against linguistic expression, this isolation and fetishisation of the latter also implies the isolation and fetishisation of the former. Secondly – and very closely connected to what has been explained up to now – Fiedler attempts to delimit visuality as the foundation of fine art as rigorously as possible from the reflection of reality by the other senses and by 23 24 25 26

Fiedler 1913, p. 185. Fiedler 1913, p. 201. Ibid. Fiedler 1913, p. 205.

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thinking, feelings, etc. and to discover for fine art an isolated world of pure visibility (in the case of Fiedler, less for art than for artistic activity, which is likewise isolated). This separation and isolation is carried out chiefly in relation to the sense of touch. Fiedler calls for a precipitous jettisoning of everything that ostensibly could become conscious through such human mediations. If this isolation is carried out by man, then Fiedler says, In contrast to what he is used to calling reality, he finds himself in a greatly changed position; all that is physically solid is taken from him since even it is not anything visible, and the sole material in which his consciousness of reality can take shape are the sensations of light and colour that he owes to his eyes. The whole tremendous wealth of the visible world now reveals itself to him, relying for its existence on the most delicate and, as it were, immaterial material, relying for its forms on the formations into which the individual weaves together that material.27 We see here both Fiedler’s extreme subjectivism (as the visual image that thus comes into existence is not a subjectively accomplished processing, synthesis, etc. of objective reality reflected by the senses but is instead, in the spirit of Kantian epistemology, the product of a ‘pure’ activity of the subject) as well as the reduction of visual reflection to that which Fiedler just conceives of as pure (purified) visuality. In relation to the latter, it suffices to refer to our earlier expositions on the division of labour among the senses – one that came into being by means of labour – in order to clarify Fiedler’s extremely anti-dialectical viewpoint. That is to say, visuality and the sense of touch are metaphysically separated from each other only from the point of view of a pre-Kantian and Kantian ‘rational psychology’. In this regard the significance of labour consists – already at an everyday level that is nowhere near the aesthetic – precisely in the fact that the eyes largely take over the functions of the sense of touch. Qualities such as weight, materiality, etc. are thereby perceived just by means of vision and become the organic components of the visual mode of reflecting reality. It goes without saying that artistic activity qualitatively enhances and further shapes these tendencies that come into being in labour. The universality, the world-encompassing character of artistic seeing and shaping thereby comes into being, whereas Fiedler has turned into the theoretical harbinger of the objective and ideational impoverishment of the fine arts. For it is clear that Fiedler draws the boundaries here still more precipitously; he asks

27

Fiedler 1913, pp. 255–6.

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‘that we dispense with all consciousness of something comprehensive and general …’ in order to be able to relive ‘even just approximately’ the purely visual mode of perception of the artistic.28 In order to properly comprehend the real phenomenon of the aesthetic in its becoming and its essence, the dialectical materialist outlook must equally break with both metaphysical extremes: with the a priori derivation of individual arts from an allegedly primordial source, from the ‘essence’ of man; and with their rigid isolation from each other. If we thus assume a multiplicity of real origins in the philosophical treatment of the genesis of art and regard the unity of the aesthetic, of the commonalities in this multiplicity, as a result of socio-historical development, then we thus come to an entirely different outlook than that of idealist philosophy, both in relation to the unity of the aesthetic and to the differentiation and autonomisation of individual arts (and of genres within them). We have already expressed our firm rejection of any a priori principle, especially any such principle involving unity. Engels rightfully highlights this precept of dialectical materialism: ‘The general results of the investigation of the world are obtained at the end of this investigation, hence are not principles, points of departure, but results, conclusions’.29 In our case, this precept applies to a heightened degree. For in the passage quoted here, Engels is thinking above all of the general problems of the natural sciences, where the principles to be discovered by human consciousness already existed in themselves and were operative before thinking would have been able to reflect, interpret, and systematise their relationships, unity, etc. In our case, however, the belatedness of the principle is situated not only in the for-us but also in the very in-itself. Uniformity of principle comes into being in aesthetics gradually, socio-historically; it can therefore naturally only be recognised as such retroactively, in keeping with the levels of unity that have really come into being. This fact itself already points to several issues having to do with meaningful content. If the senses, receptivity, etc. also appear to be heterogeneous with respect to each other and even are heterogeneous in their immediacy, then they nevertheless cannot be hermetically separated from each other, as Kant and Kantians of Fielder’s type imagine. They are always the senses, etc. of a whole man who lives in a society with those of his own kind and whose most basic manifestations of life must take place in this society and therefore must have deeply social elements and tendencies in common with these other people. We

28 29

Fiedler 1913, p. 307 and pp. 361 ff. Engels 1987a, p. 597.

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must consider the division of labour among the senses; the facilitation and perfection of labour by means of this division of labour; the reciprocal relationship of each sense with the others through this ever-more differentiated colration; the growing conquest of the outer and inner world of people as a result of such subtle cooperation; the propagation and consolidation of the world-image as their consequence. On the one hand, all of this creates the material and mental preconditions for the emergence and development of various arts; on the other, as soon as these various arts were born, this creates in each the tendency both to form its own immanent qualities ever more idiosyncratically and to invest these qualities with such a universality or all-encompassing force that it gradually – irrespective of the autonomy of each individual art – forms the medium of the aesthetic, that which is common to all the arts. The two tendencies combine to form a contradictory unity, the unity of a contradiction: the simultaneous unity and differentiation of the whole man active in a society (of his responses to nature and society) ever more forcefully refines and specialises itself within his own subjectivity; the specialised inner division of labour, however, constantly refers back to the whole man’s own overall personality and thereby makes it richer and more comprehensive. This somewhat circuitous determination is also necessary in order to delimit our conception as sharply as possible from all theories that regard the full and formed personality of man merely as a hallmark of primitive stages and view this personality as threatened (indeed annihilated) by the inexorably advancing division of labour. Needless to say, it is a fact that the capitalist division of labour in particular also frequently brings about the crippling of personality through too much differentiation. However – when we take the development of the human race as our scale – we have shown elsewhere, based on what Marx says about Ricardo, that the tendency indicated by us prevails. Everything that has been explained up to now still does not directly refer to art as such. All of these appearances clearly come to light in the developmental history of mankind long before the aesthetic principle reveals its autonomy. (In the development of a particular individual, these general tendencies also frequently crop up before he reflects on the aesthetic. However, the recapitulation of the development of the human race in the development of the individual is no mechanical copy or abbreviation. The fact of the existence and general effect of works of art signifies far more than a mere abridgment of such a process.) On the one hand, that which is specifically aesthetic presupposes, as already mentioned, both objectively and subjectively a relatively high level in the development of this tendency; on the other hand, however, as an autonomous social and human mode of expression, it slowly becomes detached from the general foundation portrayed here, since in every single utterance it object-

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ively and subjectively possesses a total – yet relative, tendential – character, an intention towards wholeness. The basis for the unity of such tendencies can only be situated in the materiality, the substrate of their being. This is certainly the supreme general law for any real (and not just subjectively ingenious) unity. What Engels says about the unity of the world also holds for its parts, for all of the different ways of coming to terms with these parts by means of reflection through human consciousness.30 So too for art. Its particular mode rises above the general forms of coming to terms with reality in everyday life as a result of the fact that society in its ‘metabolism with nature’ (Marx) is the material substrate of human existence and activity, which is – in the end – inseparably and yet manifestly reflected by art in its real relatedness to the whole man. The expression ‘in the end’ must be particularly highlighted. For, on the one hand, in general the artistic reproduction of reality for the most part immediately reflects the relations of production of a certain society at a given time, most immediately the social relationships of people to each other that grow out of these relations of production. Only as the basis of this – thus, in the end – does the reflection of the metabolism of society with nature also appear. The more extensive and intensive this metabolism becomes, the more pronounced the reflection of nature itself appears in art. It is not the beginning but rather the product of a supremely developed stage of this metabolism. On the other hand, however, the reflection of the metabolism of society with nature is the conclusive, truly ultimate object of aesthetic reflection. In itself, it is precisely the relationship of each individual to the human race and its development which is contained in this metabolism. This implicit content now becomes explicit in art; the often concealed in-itself appears as a vivid being-for-itself. Of course, this is the case – to a certain degree in a rudimentary, spontaneous way – in everyday life as well, above all in labour. This is inconceivable without such a unity in the double relatedness to nature existing independently of man and at the same time to man, with his goals that came into being socially, with his socially formed abilities, etc. Here is indeed where the metabolism materially comes into being. In labour itself, however, this unity is all at once permanently operative and continuously cancelled. That is to say, the subjective and the objective components each obtain a – relatively – autonomous efficacy and are further developed – relatively – autonomously, however in continuous interactions. The further development of the subjective components seems readily understandable. The further development of the objective

30

Engels 1987b, p. 41.

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components of nature in their metabolism with society consists in the fact that this metabolism always makes manifest new sides, new characteristics, new regularities, etc. of nature on behalf of man and thus includes nature ever more extensively and intensively in this metabolism with society. Cancelling this unity thus means abandoning the unity of a certain level of development in order to replace it with another more complicated, more widely mediated, more highly organised level. This process, however, most closely interacts with a development of subjective components that is immediately and seemingly moved from within. In the course of the extensive and intensive growth of the metabolism of society with nature, the relationship of people to each other – their immediate and often widely mediated social interaction in labour and life – must likewise be reshaped in accordance with the needs of this growth. The cancelling of the unity – at that given time – is thus always an aspect and indeed a motivating aspect of this unity itself. As is self-evident, the scientific reflection of reality is an important aspect of this dialectical movement. Insofar as it is directed towards intellectually apprehending this process itself, it must attempt to apprehend the categories operative here in their real objective proportions, in their true mobility. The aesthetic reflection of reality must go another way here. In the first place, science is by no means always – immediately – directed towards this process of metabolism itself. As much as this process in the end determines the development of the scientific reflection of reality, as this reflection develops to higher levels, it too goes its own ways, which often flow back here again only after a great many mediations. In contrast, artistic reflection always has society in its metabolism with nature as a basis, and only on this foundation can it apprehend and shape nature with its own means. As immediate as the relationship of the artist (and the receptive person enjoying his work) to nature appears to be, it is objectively mediated in broad and intricate ways. True, this immediacy, which must still be discussed in concrete relationships at greater length later, is no mere illusion, at least not a deceptive one. This immediacy is an intensive component of aesthetic reflection that has turned into form, the form of the work of art; it is an aesthetic immediacy sui generis. But with that said, the objective mediatedness noted above is neither denied nor abolished. It is a question here of one of the essential, fundamental, and artistically fruitful internal contradictions of the aesthetic reflection of reality. Secondly, however, this immediately indissoluble relationship of aesthetic reflection to its basis for being gives rise to an idiosyncratic quality of the content and structure in the reflected and shaped object. As much as it may confine itself to individual problems, the scientific reflection of reality must always be striving to approach as much as possible the extensive and intensive totality of the general determinations of its object

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at a given time. In contrast, the aesthetic reflection is always only immediately directed towards a partial object. This immediate partialness escalates still further as a result of the fact that each art is able to reflect objective reality only in its own medium (visuality, words, etc.). In immediate aesthetic reality there are only individual arts (indeed, only individual works of art), and their aesthetic commonality is only conceptually (but not immediately artistically) graspable. Of course, the contents of the whole of reality stream into this medium and are artistically processed therefrom in accordance with its own lawfulness. We have already touched on how in our discussion of the division of labour among the senses, and we will come back to it in detail later. In another respect as well, however, the object of aesthetic reflection cannot be general: aesthetic generalisation is the elevation of singularity into the typical, not (as in scientific generalisation) the discovery of the relationship between the individual case and general lawfulness. For our present problem, this means that in the work of art the extensive totality of its ultimate object can never appear directly. It is only by mediations – set in motion by evocative aesthetic immediacy – that it will find expression in its intensive totality. It further follows that the real basis underlying reflection as a whole (society in its metabolism with nature) can only appear in the mediated-immediate manner indicated just now. Whether the immediacy of a piece of nature (as in landscape painting) or of a purely interpersonal event (as in drama) becomes the concrete object of the composition in the process, this character becomes equally apparent, for in both cases the ultimate foundation is the same. Only the relationship of foreground and background, of that which is clearly expressed and that which is merely adumbrated, etc. changes or is reversed. All of this shows that, precisely in relation to the basis of its principle of unity (society in metabolism with nature), developed aesthetic reflection is already far removed from the mode of appearance of this foundation in the everyday, above all in labour. In the first place, the cancelling and restoring of the fundamental unity in labour that we mentioned earlier ceases to apply. In fact, it is primarily because this character of labour is most intimately grounded in its interdependency with scientific reflection.31 True, this tendency of labour comes to fore with complete clarity only at its most developed stages,

31

As has already been pointed out, this becomes apparent in the fact that the actually sharp antithesis between art and labour arrives at a clear expression first in the work of art itself. The artistic creation process has diverse points of contact both with labour itself and with the scientific reflection of reality. The latter is an indissoluble aspect of this process. The issues that show up here can be concretely investigated only in the second part, in the analysis of aesthetic modes of comportment.

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when the science evolving out of it already gains a completely autonomous form and reacts to it. Then the disanthropomorphising forces of the scientific reflection of reality become operative in both components of labour: its scientific analysis (both in isolation and based on their interdependency) aims in each case at the materially achievable optimum in impact, in the coming into its own of the object in itself, made independent as far as possible from the particular characteristics, abilities, etc. of the people involved in the labour. The metabolism between society and nature indeed underlies all of these analyses of labour in itself and determines its developedness and its direction, its method and its outcomes, but this relatedness is ever less immediately apparent in their subjective reflexes. The retreat of natural limits necessarily has an effect in such a way. This structure appears in a completely clear way only at highly developed levels, although the tendency towards such disanthropomorphisation unconsciously and spontaneously sets in with labour itself. However, it is crossed and overlaid by other tendencies for long stretches. Among these tendencies, the artistic now plays a prominent role at times. Whoever wants to intellectually separate both tendencies sharply from each other often comes up against not inconsiderable difficulties. The artistic tendencies operative in labour thus frequently reveal characteristics of the in-itself unknown until then and promote labour skills (control of matter, refinement of tools and their handling, etc.) and those directed towards the scientific as well. Indeed, both can be related in conscious alliances, as in the Renaissance, for instance. Nevertheless, the divorce between labour and art still remains conceptually necessary and possible, though one can only read it from the objectivations themselves and not from their reflexes in accordance with consciousness. The dividing line runs wherever immediate utility ceases – at a more primitive early stage, perhaps with the decoration of man himself, the embellishment of tools, etc. Whereas the unfolding of the disanthropomorphising reflection activates ever more mediated utilities and thereby elevates the immediate useful effect of labour, the aesthetic elements represent a surplus that contributes nothing to the real, effective usefulness of labour. (We refer later to how great a role imagined usefulness that has sprung from magical representations plays in the emergence and development of the constructs of art. That said, however, precisely what is concealed is the objective aesthetic character of objects or performances.) For that reason, the relatively late appearance of the aesthetic vis-à-vis labour is already explicable: what is objectively presupposed for the creation of ‘superfluity’ is not only a certain level of technology in substance, but also a certain amount of leisure brought about by enhancements in the productive forces of labour.

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If we take the first – by no means aesthetically obvious – appearance of a principle related to the artistic to be the manufacture of a product of labour that in its entirety or in some respects is not determined by material usefulness, then it is already clear at this stage that this principle cannot possibly be based on a disanthropomorphising reflection of reality. The most primitive useful effect already sets in motion a system of mediations that suspends the relatedness to man in order to be able to achieve his purposes more effectively. Such a suspension does not take place here. Of course, even this statement must be dialectically understood. Artistic activity preserves certain features of simple labour itself and the exploration of objective reality associated with it, not just in architecture, sculpture, or applied crafts; and to the extent that this aspect is operative, a suspension also necessarily takes place. Beyond this aspect in subjectively bringing forth works of art, the aspect of utility remains an indissoluble foundation of many arts, so that they cannot even reach completion in a purely artistic way if they fail to realise the goals of practical utility at the same time. However, the more artistic activity is constituted as such, the more such disanthropomorphising aspects turn into sublated ones and the more they become mere means for realising the purposes of a fundamentally different sort. This antithesis in the process of bringing forth and in the subjective comportment of those involved in it can be expressed – in the most general sense – most simply as that of ‘consciousness about …’ and ‘self-consciousness of …’. In its everyday use the word ‘self-consciousness’ has a twofold significance, but oddly enough it is precisely this double meaning that is suited to clarify what is intended here. That is to say, on the one hand it signifies strength, man’s securely standing on his own feet within his concrete surrounding world; on the other it signifies the elucidation of a consciousness (and of the being underlying it) by means of his own mental power directed towards itself. To behold in self-consciousness something purely internal, something abstracted from the world and only related to the subject, is a very late conception that completely obscures the essence of the phenomenon. It is precisely the first meaning given by us – certainly the older one as well – which is altogether unthinkable without regard to a concrete surrounding world. And it is likewise clear that, even in the second sense of the word, self-consciousness can only then really develop if the subjective, self-related reflection contains the contents of a concrete surrounding world as completely as possible. Goethe already repeatedly opposed the concept of self-consciousness in the sense of ‘know thyself’. His remarks in a conversation with Eckermann illustrate our formulation of self-consciousness quite well: ‘It has at all times been said and repeated that man should strive to know himself. This is a singular demand, with which no one complies, or

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indeed ever will comply. Man is by all his senses and efforts directed to externals – to the world around him, and he has to know this so far, and to make it so far serviceable, as he requires for his own ends. It is only when he feels joy or sorrow that he knows anything about himself, and only by joy or sorrow is he instructed what to seek and what to shun’.32 Of course, Goethe takes this polemic to be less about artistic comportment, which he regards in an entirely spontaneous way to be a comportment that is attentive to the world, than it is about everyday life. He expresses this very clearly in another place: ‘If we take the significant dictum “Know thyself”, and consider it, we mustn’t interpret it from an ascetical standpoint. It does not by any means signify the kind of self-knowledge advocated by our modern hypochondriacs, humorists and “Heautontimorumens” [self-tormentors], but quite simply means: pay attention to yourself, watch what you are doing so that you come to realize how you stand vis-à-vis your fellows and the world in general. This needs no psychological self-torture; any capable person knows and appreciates this. It is good advice and of the greatest practical advantage to everyone’.33 Despite this brusque rejection of a one-sided turn inward, also plainly visible in the Goethean description of this comportment in everyday life is the relatedness to the subject, to the real man, the whole man. In everyday life, however, this self-consciousness is just as related to immediate praxis as is – gradually disanthropomorphising – consciousness about the outside world. We have now traced in rough outline how the latter becomes detached from immediate praxis, gains its own form, and cultivates its own methods, admittedly in order to influence immediate praxis, reshape it, and raise it to a higher level by means of expansive and ramified mediations. The coming into being of the aesthetic involves self-consciousness becoming detached from everyday praxis in a way that is similar to the coming into being of ‘consciousness about …’ in the autonomisation of the scientific reflection of reality. After all that has been explained up to now, it is clear that this detachment is no abolishment of anthropomorphising reflection but rather just an idiosyncratic, autonomous, and qualitatively different variety within its purview. True – and in this objectively and subjectively lies one of the greatest difficulties (even for subsequent comprehension) for the detachment of the aesthetic from the foundation of everyday life – the anthropomorphising tendency is such a general one that solely the scientific reflection of reality carries

32 33

Goethe 1850, p. 180, translation modified. Goethe 1998, p. 88.

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out a radical break with it. ‘Man never understands how anthropomorphic he is’, Goethe says.34 The spontaneity of everyday life is anthropomorphising, and, as already explained, religion is as well. The philosophical presentation of this quite intricate detachment process will be the main subject of our later explanations. Its concreteness and systematisation thus cannot possibly be anticipated here. An arid index of the contents of the essential viewpoints, aspects, stages, etc. would cause more confusion than enlightenment at this point of our understanding. We only want – anticipating as far as possible things that remain to be concretised later – to refer to our just now determined concept of selfconsciousness. As has also already been indicated, its object is the concrete surrounding world of man, society (man in society), the metabolism of society with nature, of course mediated by the relations of production; yet all of this is experienced from the standpoint of the whole man. That is to say, behind all artistic activity is the question: how much is this world actually a world of man that he is able to affirm as his own, as a world that is adequate to his humanity? (Later on, concrete analyses will show that both decoration or ornamentation and even an acrimonious, sharp critique of the surrounding world do not contradict this determining question – indeed, they dialectically deepen and concretise it.) To a certain degree, similar tendencies are of course detectable both in the everyday and in religion. In the everyday they act as spontaneous needs that life either satisfies or denies. Understandably enough, since the indissoluble contingency of all everyday life, the contingency of its wishes springing from that which is merely peculiar to it, etc. can only permit accidental fulfilments, although it is of course no accident – objectively and socially for the common run of cases – which kinds of subjective needs can be fulfilled or must remain unfulfilled at a certain class position in a concrete social condition. (Objective knowledge of such general possibilities, of such room for manoeuvre for wishfulfilment, of course does not abolish that contingency which is operative in the case of each particular individual.) In the everyday, accordingly, wishes and their fulfilments centre on the individual at a given time; that is to say, on the one hand they arise out of his real individual existence peculiar to himself, and on the other they are directed towards a real, practical fulfilment of concrete, personal wishes. Unquestionably, artistic composition originally grows out of this ground. In accordance with the actual intention, the decoration of man in

34

Goethe 1998, p. 23.

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the magical period – be it in the form of an autonomous object or the painting of one’s own body, primitive dance, song, etc. – is based on the personal desire of a concrete man or a likewise determined collective in the success of which each man is immediately personally interested. Magical, religious anthropomorphism firmly retain this boundedness of – real or imaginary – fulfilment only to the desire of the individual as individual or as member of a concrete collective. The fact that fulfilment – sometimes, not always, but particularly at the primitive level – receives an otherworldly character alters nothing essential in this structure. For even the aim much later (the salvation of the soul in the hereafter) is bound to that which is peculiar to a given person, precisely in his peculiarity. Now it naturally follows from this structure that the turning of objects, performances, actions, etc. into art can only take place unconsciously (in the sense of that word given by us earlier). In the process, there comes into being a particular kind of generalisation and at the same time a particular kind of objectivity that indeed sets such products apart from magic, religion, and the everyday. Even in such cases as those in which the creator and the receptive person are honestly and deeply convinced in a subjective way of their standing on the ground of magic, religion, or the everyday. The abstractly anticipatory way in which we are presently handling this issue, which will be explained in concrete terms later, only allows us to offer intimations that remain quite general. The generalisation here – in strict contrast to the disanthropomorphising of science – is this: that which is artistically shaped gets rid of whatever is merely peculiar to individuality (and thereby of the practical fulfilment of needs in actuality, this-worldly or otherworldly), without losing the character of what can be individually and immediately undergone in lived experience. Indeed, this generalisation precisely tends to reinforce and deepen this character. That is to say, it emphasises – in preserving individuality in the object and in its reception – the generic and in this way sublates that which is merely peculiar. The relatedness of the object to society and its metabolism with nature likewise thus becomes – without obtaining conceptual formulation – much clearer than is possible in everyday life. The determination of self-consciousness is also likewise thus raised to a higher level. As the person situated in the sphere of the aesthetic – the creator as well as the receptive person – reflects on the generic (in fact both in terms of the object and the subject), self-consciousness stands out from the narrow and peculiar sphere of that which merely clings to the everyday and obtains a generality that is certainly entirely different from that of the scientifically disanthropomorphising. It is a sensuously manifest generalisation of the whole man, consciously underlying which there is an anthropomorphising principle.

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The contradictoriness in this generalisation, which will be discussed in detail later, necessarily entails that the fulfilment of needs, wishes, longing, etc. must lose its practical character in actual fact. Viewed from the standpoint of the immediate facticity of the everyday, it is a purely fictive fulfilment; or rather: it is the lived experience of fulfilment in a typical case, detached from the actual reality corresponding to it in life itself. Here is where the – apparent – proximity between art and religion comes into being. That is to say, the fulfilment proclaimed and portrayed by the latter can, in the sense of the reality of life as well, be no more than the suggestive, lived experience-inspiring pre-demonstration of a future (otherworldly) fulfilment. (In this regard, the difference between magic and religion has to do with the fact that the former undertakes the fulfilment of everyday practical wishes while in the latter, at least as a rule, fulfilment is otherworldly, is oriented not towards individual goals but rather towards the fate of the whole man. The subjective reflex of transcendent fulfilment just appears to be this-worldly, thus the assurance of salvation in Calvinism, for example. In many religions, of course, magical remnants live on as beliefs in the satisfactions peculiar to needs on Earth.) The affinity appears to be even closer as a result of the fact that the underlying principle here can likewise only be an anthropomorphising one. It is no wonder that for millennia works of art came into being and were enjoyed in the belief that they merely served as the sensuous clarification of such religious contents of fulfilment. However, the difference (indeed, the antithesis) within anthropomorphism here is as pronounced as the one that we noticed earlier between the anthropomorphising of religion and the disanthropomorphising of science. The contrast here is focused on the determination of the ‘fictive’ character of the objects of fulfilment in art or religion. We have already briefly discussed the general antithesis in relation to the reality of the objects, in fact precisely as a result of the fact that the ‘fictive’ character of art is always radically carried to a finish, whereas in religion this ‘fictive’ quality always arises with the claim of being a transcendent reality that is truer than that of everyday life. The concrete issues that spring from this situation can only be argued at a more developed stage of our expositions later. Only one issue already needs to be referred to here – likewise anticipating what will be discussed in greater detail later – and that is the this-worldliness of art as a matter of principle, its essentially (and emphatically valued) earthly human character. Needless to say, this is intended in the sense of objectivity, as the objective meaning of an aesthetically shaped reality. Subjectively, a transcendence may be intended by the creator and accepted as such by the receptive person, and it is quite possible that the objective meaning of the artist – grounded in the social human essence of art – only prevails after centuries or

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indeed even millennia. For the constructs of art relinquish the claim of being a reality, which objectively involves a rejection of transcendence, of otherworldliness; they create specific forms of the reflection of reality that is to be worked on and that spring from this reality and effectively return to it. Even when they appear to go beyond the facticity of reality as it is immediately given in everyday practice, they do this – in this regard, just as scientific reflection does – in order to comprehend this reality again, in order to control it in a way that is in keeping with its intrinsic specificity better than everyday practice and its immediate subjectivity are capable of doing. Art is thus just as this-worldly as science is; it is the reflection of the same reality as that of scientific reflection. What is being asserted here, unavoidably only in a very general way, will be presented and substantiated in detail later. Of course, this does not change the fact that both art and science pursue otherwise opposing directions when it comes to the decisive issues of reflection. We have already outlined the path towards disanthropomorphisation in scientific reflection. The task of the following observations will be to work out the intrinsic specificity of aesthetic (anthropomorphising reflection), indeed both in relation to the reality aesthetically reflected in works of art (society in its metabolism with nature) and in relation to the new abilities developed in man by means of this mode of reflection, which, as we will attempt to show, are grouped around the formation of self-consciousness in the sense given above. If the single most general outlines of the aesthetic are now clarified by means of such determinations, then it must already be added that naturally the anthropomorphising aesthetic reflection must never lose immediate contact with the sensuous apperception of the world if it is to remain aesthetic. Its generalisations are realised within human sensuousness; indeed, we will see that they must in a certain manner carry with themselves an intensification of sensuous immediacy in order to be able to successfully carry through the process of generalisation in an aesthetic way. In the aesthetic, there can be no analogy to the role of mathematics in the sciences. From this there also follows a principally different kind of differentiation into genera and species than there is in science. In the latter, the constitution of the object existing-in-itself determines the differentiation into various sciences (physics, biology, etc.). For its part, the anthropomorphising mode of aesthetic reflection entails that the differentiation into types and sub-types (arts, genre) is bound to the possibility of forming the human senses – these senses being understood, of course, in the broadest sense. As much as we had to take a position against the mechanical autonomisation of individual senses (as happens in the works of Fiedler) and as much as we will later demonstrate that the aesthetic formation of each individual sense goes in the direction of the universal reflection of reality, it

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must be just as decidedly emphasised here that this coming to terms with reality by means of aestheticised reflection unfolds for each sense autonomously or relatively independently from all the others. The universal principle in aesthetic subjectivity, which as the result of a developmental process lasting for thousands of years appears self-evident to us, is also, in its essence a result, an outcome. It enriches and deepens itself through the interaction of senses, feelings, and thoughts that are enriched and deepened by the various arts. However, the prerequisite for such a fruitful interdependency was and remains the autonomy of the individual arts and genres, autonomy in the formation of individual senses towards universality. The aesthetic principle, the aesthetic unity of the different types of aesthetic reflection, is thus the end result of a long developmental process, and the autonomous genesis of the different types and sub-types of art along with the aesthetic subjectivity corresponding to them in production and reception is much more than a merely historical fact. As we will see later, it is deeply rooted in the essence of the aesthetic reflection of reality, and failing to take it into consideration distorts the essence of the aesthetic itself. For the sake of some clarity at the outset, we had to present this differentiation more simply than it is in reality as well. That is to say, it would be a simplification to think that each human sense can correspond to only one art. It suffices if we point to the far-reaching internal heterogeneity of the visual arts, architecture, sculpture, painting, etc. Here too, of course, there exist from the beginning and in the course of development interdependencies that come into action ever more intimately, that have an ever-deeper and more essential effect. We refer just to the infiltration of painterly views into sculpture and architecture under certain historical conditions. The situation that thus comes into being is further complicated as a result of the fact that the aesthetic reflection of reality is historically place- and time-bound in a qualitatively different sense than the scientific reflection of reality is. It is obvious that any subjectivity is of a socio-historical character and also has not insignificant ramifications in the history of science. However, the objective truth of a scientific statement depends solely upon its – approximate – correspondence with that in-itself which it transforms into a for-us. The question of truth accordingly has nothing to do here with issues of genesis. This can certainly provide an explanation for how and why the attempts of scientific reflection to draw closer to objective reality had to be incomplete under certain socio-historical conditions or could be more or less complete under others. The situation is entirely different for art. We have repeatedly pointed out that the fundamental object of aesthetic reflection is society in its metabolism with nature. Here as well, of course, there is available a reality existing

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independent of the consciousness of the individual and of society, as in the in-itself of nature; however, it is a reality in which man is necessarily always present, both as object and as subject. As has already been emphasised, aesthetic reflection always carries out a generalisation. However, its highest level is the human race, that which is typical for its higher development. But it still never appears in an abstracting form. In the final analysis, aesthetic reflection’s profound truth of life is not based on the fact that it indeed always aims for the fate of the human species, but rather that the human species never splits off from the individuals forming it and never wants to make out of them an entity existing independently of them. Aesthetic reflection invariably shows mankind in the form of individuals and individual fates. Its specificity, which we will talk about at great length later, is expressed precisely in how, on the one hand, these individuals possess a sensuous immediacy that differs from that of everyday life by means of the intensification of both aspects and in how, on the other, the typicality of the human species is inherent – without abolishing this immediacy – in them. From this it already further follows that aesthetic reflection cannot for one moment be a simple reproduction of immediate given reality. Its handling, however, is not limited to the requisite selection of that which is essential in phenomena (the scientific reflection of nature has to attend to that as well). Rather, in the act of reflection itself there is inseparably included as well the aspect of a positive and negative position taken towards the aesthetically reflected object. But it would be utterly wrong to behold an element of subjectivism or even of a subjectivist addition to the objective reproduction of reality in this rudimentary partisanship of art that inevitably became conscious only at relatively late stages of development. In every other reflection of reality such a dualism, which must be overcome in the correct praxis, is included. Only in the aesthetic does the fundamental object (society in metabolism with nature) involve in relation to a subject – working its way towards self-consciousness – the inseparable simultaneity of reproduction and the position taken, of objectivity and partisanship. The simultaneous positedness of these two aspects constitutes the indissoluble historicity of any work of art. It does not simply fix in place the facts existing in themselves as science does but rather immortalises a moment of the historical development of the human race. The survival of individuality in the typical, of partisanship in objective facts, etc. presents aspects of this historicity. As truth, artistic truth is thus a historical truth. Its proper genesis converges with its true validity, since this is nothing more than revealing, making manifest and experienceable, a moment of human development that deserves to be held on to both in terms of its content and its form.

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In the following observations, it will be shown in concrete terms that this close entwinement of subjectivity and objectivity, which follows from the anthropomorphising essence, from the object and subject of aesthetic reflection, does not destroy the objectivity of works of art; on the contrary, this is precisely what first establishes its intrinsic specificity. It will likewise be shown that the emergence of the aesthetic out of different sources (indeed, even sources that are immediately heterogeneous) does not lead to a disintegration of its unity in principle but rather to its gradual constitution as concrete unity. Of course, the unity must be dialectically conceived here as well. Hegel calls the unity of the sciences a ‘circle of circles, for each single member ensouled by the method is reflected into itself so that, in returning to the beginning it is at the same time the beginning of a new member. Fragments of this chain are the single sciences, each of which has a before and an after – or, more accurately said, has in possession only the before and in its conclusion points to its after’.35 This structure of the circle made of circles is even more distinctly pronounced in the field of the aesthetic. Owing to its object, which already from the outset, already before it has turned into subject matter for art, displays a handling by means of the activity of the human race. Owing to its subject, the function of which goes far beyond reflecting in the most faithful approximation possible the in-itself, which is independent of consciousness, as a for-us according to the measure of consciousness. This subject, in fact, stamps each element of the object (to say nothing of its wholeness) with a relatedness to itself and validates the position it takes up in the whole as well as in every part: each genre of art (indeed each work of art, ultimately) comes by a – relatively – autonomous existence, on which the Hegelian ‘before’ and ‘after’ is applicable only with very complicated mediations and transpositions. (Later, we will still talk frequently and at length about the issues arising from this.) Thus, whereas the differentiation of the scientific reflection of reality into the different individual sciences is determined by the object in accordance with its essence, the subjective aspect plays a decisive role as well in the coming into being of individual arts and genres. Of course, not the mere capriciousness peculiar to the individual subject. Art is a social phenomenon in all of its phases. Its object is the foundation of human social existence: society in metabolism with nature, of course mediated by the relations of production, by the relationships between people conditioned by these relations. Such a socially general object cannot possibly be adequately reflected by a subjectivity persevering in that which is merely peculiar to itself. In order to achieve a level of

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Hegel 2010, pp. 751–2.

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approximate adequacy, the aesthetic subject must cultivate in itself the aspects of a human generalisation, of species-character. Aesthetically, however, it cannot be a matter of the abstract concept of species but rather of the concrete, sensuous, individual person, in whose character and fate the characteristics of the time and the species’ just achieved level of development are contained concretely and sensuously, individually and immanently. Out of this grows the issue of the typical as one of the central questions of aesthetics, which will often occupy us at length later. The differentiation of the aesthetic into individual arts and genres or (more precisely) the synthesis of such arts and genres into the aesthetic can thus only evolve out of the dialectic of this subject-object relation. Only when a certain mode of comportment of the human species towards society and the metabolism with nature within it possesses or achieves a lasting and essentially typical character can an art (a genre) evolve and survive as such. As has clearly emerged from what has been expounded up to now, this issue is primarily a question of content, of meaningful aesthetic content. However – and this likewise follows from these observations – aesthetic form is not of such a generality that it would have to or even could comprehend a multiplicity of contents in the same way, as happens in science, in which the unique form closely connected to the particular content is considered to be the immediacy that must be overcome. Rather aesthetic form becomes aesthetic precisely as a result of the fact that it always appears as the specific form of a determinate content. Thus, the specificity of the different arts and genres must also be treated as a question of form. In the process, the task will be to reveal how forms emerge out of the aesthetic reflection of essentially similar subject-object relations in the sense indicated above that, as such, nevertheless exhibit a certain constancy – precisely as essential forms – in all their historical and individual variety. That is why this issue is an aesthetic issue in principle and an insuperably historical one at the same time. Not only because, owing to our determination of form, any genuine work of art also creates – uniquely – the general form anew. Not only because the great turns in social development bring forth qualitatively new types even within the same genre (Greek, English, French, Spanish, etc. drama). Not only because socio-historical development radically reshapes individual genres (the novel as bourgeois epic) – this alone would just lead to a radical historical relativism. But rather because the problems of historical transformation would remain misunderstood in their effect on art if that which abided in forms were not comprehended and derived from the essence of aesthetic reflection, thus from the basic principle of the aesthetic. The correct answer to this question, which tends to show up in aesthetics as a system of arts, can thus only be satisfactorily elucidated on the simultaneous basis of the

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dialectical materialist explanation of the aesthetic in general and the historical materialist laws of its historical transformations in their specification. These general remarks, which remain quite abstract for the time being, already show that the problem of a ‘system of arts’ moves in a new light. It can involve neither a deduction from the principle of the aesthetic, nor an empiricist stringing together of the existing arts; rather, on the contrary, it involves a historical and systematic way of looking at things. This dispenses with any ‘symmetrical’ arrangement of the arts and genres, though without thereby giving up on the prospect of their theoretical foundation. It leaves open the possibility of the historical withering away of individual genres as well as the historical emergence of new ones; again, in both cases without being confined merely to the socio-historical, without dispensing with theoretical deduction. At the same time, our observations up to now already show that it is not a matter of a simple retroactive synthesis of two points of view that are in themselves disconnected; in fact, any dialectical materialist analysis comes up against problems of historical materialism and vice versa. In the case of each individual observation, it is only a question of the preponderance of one or the other point of view. Thus, it is only the methodological locus and method for answering these questions which could be indicated here. Lenin was the first to formulate the derivation of forms from the recurrent, constant, and relatively stable aspects of reflection. In connection with Hegel’s deep realisation that an objective reality corresponds to the syllogistic forms in logic, he writes: ‘For Hegel action, practice, is a logical “syllogism”, a figure of logic. And that is true! Not, of course, in the sense that the figure of logic has its other being in the practice of man (= absolute idealism), but vice versa: man’s practice, repeating itself a thousand million times, becomes consolidated in man’s consciousness by figures of logic. Precisely (and only) on account of this thousand-million-fold repetition, these figures have the stability of a prejudice, an axiomatic character’.36 This is the methodological model for any theory of arts or genres in aesthetics. Needless to say – in keeping with our determinations regarding the essence of aesthetic form – this Leninist formulation cannot simply be taken over and ‘translated’ into the aesthetic. The magnitude of the possible and necessary variations within a form signifies something qualitatively new vis-à-vis logic. In its application to aesthetics, Lenin’s great notion that scientific (logical) forms are reflections of that which is persistent and recurrent in appearances must be thoroughly concretised in accordance with the specificity of this manner of reflecting reality.37 36 37

Lenin 1972b, p. 216. Cf. Lukács 1983a, pp. 89 ff.

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The Abstract Forms of the Aesthetic Reflection of Reality It must be emphasised again and again: we know practically nothing about the actual historical origin of art. In many important arts, such as poetry, music, dance, etc., it is even hopeless from the outset to search for ‘original’ documents. What ethnography has to offer us here – even when the most primitive peoples are involved – dates from a condition that has long since moved on from its beginnings. But even in places where archeology and ethnography have monuments of material culture at their disposal, the boundary between pre-artistic constructs and works of art is not to be drawn with even approximate historical accuracy. Here too (especially here), the process of the disentanglement of the aesthetic from the magical everyday can thus be philosophically traced backwards only from that which is already aesthetically formed. The difficulty that we identified earlier is apparent straightaway here as well: it consists in the heterogeneous sources for the genesis of individual forms, which we now have to investigate and in which, as was already emphasised in the observations mentioned above, this heterogeneity of genesis in no way amounts to a hermetic isolatedness of a single aspect from other aspects, and still less is it able to impede the aesthetic unity that later comes into being historically. This general difficulty increases still further insofar as we will not be dealing with the coming into being of different arts and genres, but rather with principles and elements of construction in artistic production that play a very different role in different arts, that are only given to us in these extremely varied functions at much higher levels of development (rhythm, proportion, etc.), and that have preserved their original self-sufficiency (ornamentation) only in exceptional cases, of course without ever again being able to achieve again that significance in overall culture that they had in certain early stages.

1

Rhythm

Despite such difficulties, the image of the disentanglement of the aesthetic from everyday reality can be philosophically and truthfully retraced in its essence if we choose our starting point in the centre of everyday life, in labour.

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That is why we consider Bücher’s1 attempt to derive rhythm from labour (as well as the ample and persuasive illustrative material collected as proof for his thesis) to be an important contribution to the uncovering of these relationalities. Needless to say, even today there are quite a few people who want to hark back to ‘deeper’, ‘more natural’ sources.2 There is no doubt that that the biological existence of people (and even of animals) as well as the events in their surrounding world offer quite a few rhythmic phenomena. In the case of such phenomena, however, we must separate two different ranks from each other with some precision. That is to say, on the one hand, those rhythmic elements of the nature that surrounds people (day and night, seasons, etc.) that in a much later, more developed stage were called upon to play a great role both in the everyday and in artistic activity once rhythm had turned into an important aspect of human existence as a result of labour. By contrast, the myths of prehistory indicate that in primitive times this rhythmic sequence was by no means experienced and construed as being as self-evident as it later became. LévyBruhl speaks of ‘ceremonies which have for their aim the securing the regularity of the seasons, the normal production of the harvest, the usual abundance of fruit and of animals used for food, etc.’.3 And Frazer says: ‘If I am right, the story of Balder’s tragic end formed, so to say, the text of the sacred drama which was acted year by year as a magical rite to cause the sun to shine, trees to grow, crops to thrive, and to guard man and beast from the baleful arts of fairies and trolls, of witches and warlocks’.4 It is highly likely that myths like those of Isis and Osiris, of Persephone and Demeter, etc. originally had a similar meaningful content. And it is self-evident that a rhythm of such appearances can then only be perceived as such if the sequence, the alternating, etc. is construed as objective entirely without question, as absolutely independent of our assistance. The lived experience of such rhythmicity in external nature thus presupposes the feeling of or belief in a certain ‘security’ in relation to its regular functioning. On the other hand, we have to do with certain rhythmic appearances in the bodily existence of man (breathing, heartbeat, etc.). Though he may still not be very conscious of them for a long time, these necessarily have a great influence on his entire comportment. And one must by no means limit this fact to people. In his experiments on dogs, for instance, Pavlov repeatedly emphasises

1 Karl Bücher (1847–1930), German historian of economics and founder of the Institute for Newspaper Science. [Eds.] 2 Of course, it is not the same thing that Aristotle regards rhythm and harmony (along with imitation) as natural human aptitudes in Aristotle 1996, pp. 6–7. 3 Lévy-Bruhl 1926, p. 246. 4 Frazer 1955e, pp. 88.

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the facilitative function of rhythm. He says, ‘As is well known, rhythm is used to simplify all movements and in general to simplify the whole of life’.5 So too: ‘a superbly trained rhythmic conditioned reflex was to be found in these dogs; that is to say, by a constant succession of positive and inhibitive stimuli, the system was formed very soon’.6 As far as our inquiry is concerned here, it matters little that Pavlov produces this rhythmicity in his experiments artificially. At most, this shows that the aptitude for rhythmic facilitation exists in the animal only as an aptitude; it can only arrive at expression in contact with man, who is already acquainted with labour and consciously makes use of its outcomes. The facilitation of certain efforts by means of making them rhythmical is crucial, and this can frequently be actualised by man and animal – without their becoming conscious of it. Rhythm is thus an element in the physiological existence of living creatures. We have already pointed out that particular functions can only proceed normally if they stick to a certain rhythm; arrhythmia is a symptom of disturbance, indeed of sickness. Furthermore, in life there come into being habits of movement that these foundations form into unconditioned reflexes over the course of a long time, that let the most comfortable, least tiring way emerge quasi-automatically: rhythm in the flight of birds, in the gait of animals and people. Of course, all of this still has nothing to do with rhythm as an element of art. Scheltema7 rightfully and wittily says, ‘We walk rhythmically because an irregular gait would be far too exhausting, and as a result even our footprints form a regular pattern in the bare sand without anyone thinking of referring to an ornament here’.8 Recognition of such factors coming from physiology thus must not obscure the central issue of genesis, above all the specifically human character (determined by material culture) of rhythm stemming from labour. In nature, man lives in himself, just as the animal does; their interdependency is that of similar powers, which do not single out from the natural world the rhythms that perhaps come into being as well. In labour, however, man tears a piece of nature (the object of labour) out of its natural contexts and subjects it to being handled in such a way that natural laws are teleologically exploited for a human objective. This is heightened even further when such a teleologically transformed ‘nature’ appears in the form of a tool. A process thus comes into being that is indeed subject to natural laws, though it no longer belongs to nature as such. In this process, all interactions are natural only from the viewpoint of 5 6 7 8

Pavlov 1955a, p. 53. Pavlov 1955a, p. 500. Frederik Adama van Scheltema (1846–1899), Dutch art dealer and historian. [Eds.] Scheltema 1950, p. 41.

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the object of labour but are social from that of the tool, of the labour process. This dual character of being puts its mark on the rhythm that comes into here. Whereas physiological adaptation to the environment conceivably brings forth something rhythmical in the case of the animal, what arises out of the metabolism of society with nature in labour is rhythm. In which, of course, it must not be forgotten that the general relationship between facilitation and rhythm stems from nature and is consciously exploited ‘only’ in labour. However, this ‘only’ denotes a leap of world historical dimensions. The difference is quite plainly displayed by the fact that labour is more developed, the more the movements of the labouring man – a critical factor in the rhythm of labour – are ‘artificial’ (the less they emerge out of physiological spontaneity). Goethe saw this situation clearly and formulated it in these terms: ‘Animals are taught by means of their organs; man teaches his organs and controls them’.9 For Goethe as well, however, ‘man’ here unquestionably means labouring man, formed and forming himself into a man by means of labour. It must therefore be emphasised once again that Bücher’s merit is that he takes as his starting point not just labour but also the labour process in concrete terms and that he analyses its subjective aspects as they relate to rhythm. The most important aspect for us is the facilitation of labour as a consequence of its being made rhythmical. Bücher proceeds on the assumption that fatigue primarily arises out of continual mental exertion during labour. This can only be minimised by means of automating it, by movements becoming mechanical and involuntary. But this is precisely the function of rhythmisation. Facilitation ‘occurs when it manages to regulate the expenditure of forces in labour to such an extent that it results in a certain proportion, and the beginning and end of a movement always lie within the same spatial and temporal limits. What we call exercise is produced by means of the movement of the same muscle with equal strength taking place at equal intervals; once put into operation, exercise mechanically carries on an active bodily function within determinate temporal and dynamic relational measures without necessitating new volitional activity until it is obstructed (in certain circumstances, even accelerated or decelerated) by the intervention of a modified volition’.10 We do not need to investigate this exercise issue more closely here. It is of significance to us insofar as the control of one’s own movements and one’s own body is just as much of a technical precondition for one group of artists (play-acting, dance) as the control of material to be worked on is for other groups. We see again that the genesis

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Goethe 1998, p. 151. Bücher 1909, pp. 22–3.

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of art in general can be reasonably discussed only at a certain level of human labour. Bücher’s train of thought, however, does feed into our problem even more deeply. Exercise can only come into being and be developed by means of the regularisation of labour, and Bücher inserts the correct observation here: ‘a movement can more easily take shape in a uniform fashion the shorter it lasts. In this connection, measurement is considerably facilitated by the fact that any labour movement is composed of at least two elements, a stronger one and a weaker one: lifting and lowering, pushing and pulling, stretching and retracting, etc. It thereby appears to be intrinsically inhibited, and this entails that the movements proceeding within the same time limits and recurring with equal strength on a regular basis must always confront us as rhythm’.11 What would thereby be demonstrated in its necessary relationship to labour is the elementary fact of rhythm, which at this level is of course just a phenomenon of everyday praxis and – in itself – does not even contain within itself an unconscious intention towards the aesthetic. And Bücher justifiably points out that the different rhythms of different labours enter into consciousness as a sound wherever ‘the contact of the tool with matter gives off a tone’.12 At the same time, of great importance here are the varieties of these rhythms, which are not solely determined by the bodily constitution of man but also by their interrelation with a social potentiality, with the material demands of concrete ways of labouring that Bücher provides evidence for through a whole series of examples. For in this way the social character of the phenomenon is presented in a clearer light. It is not even necessary to go into detail regarding the issues of cooperation between two or more labourers, although in some quite vivid cases (such as, for example, the cooperative labour of two blacksmiths) Bücher does show how the labour process here generates a quite determinate rhythm not only of movements adapted to each other but also of tones that are audible at the same time. The most important thing, however, is that this rhythm is not something that is naturally fixed in place, as is the case with certain movements in the animal kingdom, where our senses, which have been trained by the rhythm of labour, detect such things; instead, this rhythm is an ever more varied, ever more perfectible component of specifically human praxis. That is why what constitutes the foundation here is no ‘instinct’ or involuntary unconditioned reflex, but rather a conditioned reflex in Pavlov’s sense, a reflex acquired through exercise. And precisely the multiplicity of these rhythms, which are already formed in comparatively undeveloped stages, give

11 12

Bücher 1909, p. 23. Bücher 1909, p. 24.

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rise the fact that this common basic phenomenon turns into an acquired component of human everyday life, one that is applied in various forms to different objects. Subjectively, the emphasis on the gap between rhythmisation that comes into being by means of labour and that which comes about ‘naturally’ in the lives of animals (and even of humans) means that the latter takes place completely spontaneously, without any consciousness reflecting upon it, since it constitutes an organic, innate component of animal (or human) existence, while the former constitutes the result of a process of practice in the case of each individual. Repercussions on self-consciousness come into being by means of the fact that something learned turns into something involuntary, though never in the same sense or with the same self-evidence as in the case mentioned a moment ago. That is to say, things that have been securely acquired by means of meaningful experience, exercise, habit, etc. always retain the emotional emphasis of the person by whom they have been acquired. Needless to say, there are numerous transitions. For example, after a long illness one must learn how to walk again, etc. However, the internal relationship to walking nevertheless remains different from that to rowing or playing tennis. Objectively, it is a question here of vastly more varied rhythms on the one hand and much more complicated and, as such, more accentuated rhythms brought forth by the interdependency of the labour process and its object on the other. This characteristic of the objective situation determines the subjective aspects described earlier. Of course, it is highly probable that the physiologically determined rhythm of life produces aptitudes for this training – aptitudes which rise from dormant potentiality into efficacious actuality in the course of labour’s unfolding. However, this issue is still far from being cleared up as yet. Darwin’s examples of ‘aesthetic’ phenomena in the animal kingdom are not convincing. Of late, when Bernhard Rensch13 tries to prove the ‘aesthetic sense’ with experiments on apes, he deals with the concrete conditions in a very uncritical manner.14 I am not at all referring to the fact that he beholds a phenomenon analogous to ‘fashion’ in those instances where the reactions turn out very differently, even though it is well known even in the case of man that fashion can only arise at a quite developed stage and that the aesthetic reactions of primitive peoples often remain unchanged for centuries. But he does not even pay attention to the specific conditions of his experiments. Animals placed in

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Bernhard Rensch (1900–1990), German evolutionary biologist. [Eds.] Rensch 1957.

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captivity possess a ‘security’ (both in relation to nourishment as well as to being in jeopardy in life) that otherwise would never exist for them. Their attentiveness thus unfolds in a way that is completely different from how it would under their normal living conditions. Secondly, they react to finished objects presented to them that they themselves could never have fabricated. Rensch’s most interesting experiment involves the reaction to regular and irregular patterns. At most, however, the preferences for the former give proof of one of the potentialities mentioned by us, but not for one moment do they prove the effective existence of an ‘aesthetic sense’ in the case of an animal living in freedom under normal conditions. This potentiality is indeed an interesting issue (even in relation to primitive man) and is worth investigating in depth. In order to do this, however, the conditions of the experiments would have to be consciously and critically made entirely different than they are, not just in the case of Rensch but also in that of many others. This bears not only on the living conditions of captivity but also on the mode of existence of domesticated animals, on the basis of which direct conclusions as to the animal in general are likewise methodologically inadmissible. We made this excursus in order to formulate clearly from the start the methodological issues that are supremely important for our problem. If we now come back to the problem of labour and rhythm, then it is clear that this stage of development in itself still has nothing to do with art. The aesthetic character of rhythm exists in itself in the everyday of primitive man only insofar as the kind of labour generating a relatively reduced expenditure of force along with better results at the same time triggers pleasurable feelings of relief, of being master of himself and the object of labour, together with a self-consciousness (in the first meaning given in our earlier definition) about the labour process. As long as such feelings occur only as the immediate accompaniment to the labour process at that time, this embryonic in-itself of the aesthetic remains objectively as well as subjectively latent, and for its development it requires further differentiating aspects that separate rhythm from this originally indivisible attachment to concrete labour processes at that time, impart to it an autonomous function in people’s lives, and in this way make possible – already beyond labour itself – its generalisation and application to all kinds of fields. The first such mediating moment will probably be the joy over the enhancement and facilitation of labour, above all the self-consciousness of labouring people that grows out of both lived and meaningful experiences. As do all important facts of life in this period, this feeling (which indeed turns up again and again, even at levels that are much higher than those in the early days of labour, so long as the labour process is improved and facilitated based on the

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performance of those labouring) is expressed in a magical wrapping.15 For our purposes, it is quite indifferent how internal this connection with magic is, how far it determines – by way of mediations – the actions themselves or is, in the true sense of the word, only a magical wrapping for contents that in themselves are alien to magic. In our opinion, Gordon Childe is in general absolutely right when he repeatedly points out the superficiality of such relationships: thus, for example, he points out that at a much more developed stage it was perhaps a Sumerian priest who in fact invented writing, though he did so not as a priest or mage but as a result of his worldly, administrative functions; so too in Egypt and in Cretan culture.16 In a certain sense, this holds true for more primitive levels, although in those cases the magical covering is certainly thicker and the real interaction between meaningful real labour experiences and magical analogising may have been much more intimate than their generalisation was. However, this subjective intertwining does not abolish the intrinsic divergence between deeds and intentions. The separation here is therefore certainly in place much sooner and more radically than in the period of art’s emergence. And Gordon Childe conclusively – and rightly – points out that science could not directly arise out of magic and religion, indeed that medicine or astronomy had to become sterile as sciences as a result of their being annexed by religion.17 In any case: science can only become science if it forms its specific – disanthropomorphising – methods in a struggle against magic and religion. As we have likewise shown, the same also applies to the aesthetic, where this process of detachment – for reasons that have also been given – is nevertheless even more intricate and difficult than it is in science, though. In the matter of labour and rhythm, one must hold on to the fact that the coming into being of rhythmic movements is a result of the improvement of the labour process itself, of the development of the productive forces of labour; thus, it cannot be immediately or directly determined by magic. If now, however, we reflect on the triggering moments for the autonomising of the aesthetic, the primary object of our interest is not so much the objective process itself as it is its subjective reflection in consciousness, the incipient formation of a unique reflection of reality. When we spoke earlier of an initial emergence of self-consciousness as a result of greater work performance achieved with less effort, implicitly included therein was a tendency towards the detachment of rhythm from its concrete 15 16 17

The complicated meaningful experiences of the machine age do not need to be consulted here, since in that case the labourer has turned into an annex of the machine. Childe 1937, p. 209. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] Childe 1937, p. 255 ff.

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role in a determinate labour process. The more varied the rhythms are that arise out of the material difference between many kinds of labour, the more easily this detachment takes place, the more decidedly the rhythm can turn into a component of everyday life that is relatively independent of the circumstances that originally triggered it. The process of such detachments and generalisations is something that is quite habitual in everyday life. Gehlen describes such processes at great length. He sees the abstraction being carried out here in the fact that a determinate sensuous feature of things or processes, of shape or colour, that signifies a specific thing to us is actually ‘abstract’, that is, it has been emphasized while any other, equally possible, related impressions are neglected. When we then encounter something else with the same feature and treat it in the same way, we have again made an abstraction, this time from any differences between the two things which we choose to treat in the same fashion. And he does not look upon this abstracting as a deed (as a positive action); instead ‘other perspectives are inhibited’.18 Now if such analogising abstractions can take place at a relatively low level of development, their propagation is naturally much easier wherever it is a question from the start of conditioned reflexes fixed in place by the individual himself. We will still repeatedly come back to how the exceedingly varied ways of transferring the rhythm originating in labour to all kinds of modes of expressing human activity are brought about. Here it should only be briefly mentioned – and this will soon play a not inessential role in the discussion of ornamentation – that at a certain level in the formation of technique the original spatiotemporal rhythm of labour can rise to prominence as a purely spatial rhythm in the product of labour. Boas portrays this process in these terms: ‘Another fundamental element of decorative form is rhythmic repetition. Technical activities in which regularly repeated movements are employed lead to rhythmic repetition in the direction in which the movement proceeds’.19 With that said, of course, all that is accounted for is the technical link between an originally spatiotemporal rhythm and purely spatial rhythm; it is another question entirely that an element of the aesthetic is made out of this. All that should be noted here – by way of anticipating ourselves – is that the rigidly fetishised 18 19

Gehlen 1988, p. 201. That Gehlen speaks everywhere here of ‘symbols’ and misjudges the role of analogy in these acts does not abolish the accuracy of the description itself. Boas 1951, p. 40.

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separation and confrontation of space and time common in bourgeois thinking is absent in spontaneous everyday life. This is by no means accidental. For precisely as a result of the immediacy of everyday praxis, any objectivity or process therein is spontaneously construed as something indivisibly spatiotemporal. In comparison with this elemental dialectic of everyday life, the – quite often – metaphysically rigid separation of space and time appears as an intellectual regression, as a faulty reflection of the in-itself of objective reality. The tenacity of such metaphysical views is partly based on the fact that there are cases in which a metaphysical separation of space and time is necessary or scientifically fruitful; it suffices to refer to geometry, a science that developed extraordinarily early. In the matter of rhythm being discussed in concrete terms by us now, it is clear that its original form of appearance in labour had to be spatiotemporal. As far back as in the rhythm of movement among animals and primitive man, still more – and already in far more conscious way – in any labour rhythm. Since it is the general tendency of the aesthetic to sublate fetishisations (both the spontaneous fetishisations of the everyday and the metaphysical preconceptions that have infiltrated them) by means of a new immediacy, it performs this function in the field of rhythm as well. The complicated questions connected with this can only be dealt with later. Boas’ expositions are instructive insofar as they attest by means of examples this spontaneous transitioning into purely spatial rhythm as far back as a relatively primitive stage of development. At a much higher level, a conscious restoration of the original spatiotemporality of rhythm already occurs mimetically in dance (I say at a higher level because music and possibly singing are certainly united with the rhythm of movement here). Gehlen describes this process quite rightly when he says, ‘In freeform dance, movement communicates with the music, which in good dancing is not simply “accompaniment” but instead seems to continue the inner music of the movements purely into the audible sphere, and again the movement seems to draw the music, which in itself is without space, into itself and to condense it at a visible spot’.20 Following Bücher, we have already called attention to the rhythmised sounds that come into being with such a labour and are often different from each other in terms of their strength and tone. And remnants of the oldest traditions indicate that at a still quite primitive stage the rhythmised essence of labour tended to express itself as the accompaniment to the rhythm of movements by means of exclamations – inarticulate, but closely incorporated into the rhythm. Bücher describes this state of affairs as follows:

20

Gehlen 1988, p. 132.

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The first step that primitive man took in the direction of singing during his labour would thus not have consisted of his stringing together meaningful words in accordance with a certain rule of syllabic case in order to thereby express thoughts and feelings in a way that was pleasing to him and intelligible to others; rather, this first step would have consisted of his varying those half-animalistic noises and stringing them together into a certain sequence that adapted the singing to the labour in order to reinforce the feeling of facilitation that those noises afford him in and for themselves, perhaps even to raise this to the level of a positive feeling of pleasure. He built his first work songs out of the same primary matter from which he formed the words of his language: simple natural noises. Songs thus come into being, as was already discussed several times above, that only consist of a meaningless series of noises, and by their performance alone does the musical effect (the tonal rhythm) come into consideration as the means of supporting the rhythm of movement. The necessity of constructing both kinds of rhythms in sync with each other was given by means of their shared dependence on respiration.21 These observations again show how ‘natural’ elements become operative. Bücher is quite right when he draws attention to the unifying role of respiration. Needless to say, we do not possess any genuine documents of this initial stage, even less of that stage in which emotive words and still later songs that are coherent in terms of content developed out of inarticulate sounds. To be sure, we do have work songs; in fact, we have such songs whose composition comes from and is based on the rhythm of labour. The overwhelming majority of such work songs, however, date back to the period in which primitive communism had already broken up; the singing labourer is thus already an exploited person, very often a slave. Hence the meaningful emotional content of such songs already has a complexity (labour as bondage, labour as exploitation, fear of the master or overseer, lamentation, revolt, etc.) that the simple work songs of a still classless society could not possibly have. The more primitive nature of such initial work songs is certainly based not only on a qualitatively less differentiated meaningful content but also on the fact that the way of working in an undeveloped society was necessarily able to provide relatively slight variation in rhythms.

21

Bücher 1909, p. 359.

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If we now try to fill in the gaping holes here, then we nevertheless must – with all the reservations emphasised earlier – fall back on magic. Bücher has shown in a number of examples that a relationship exists between songs arising out of the rhythms of labour and the circle of magical ideas.22 It is certainly no accident that one of these examples is a women’s song of sickle-throwing because the survival of such traditions is more in keeping with circumstances both among women and in the countryside than it is in other areas. True, it is not even a question here of an actual work song, but rather of the accompaniment sung to a game that certainly grew out of labour. However, reinforced by magical ceremonies that have likewise been introduced and that are performed by singing in the prescribed manner to the prescribed rhythms, the survival of such contents shows that the development of actual labour songs out of the rhythm of labour had to have a close contact with magical contents. In terms of content because from the countless facts of the different kinds of manifestations of life it clearly emerges that primitive people interpreted their dominion over the outside world and their own abilities in a magical way, that they were thus accustomed to ascribe the increased productivity of labour and the feelings of pleasure awakened by it to the effect of magical powers. From the side of form, this content-related contact between rhythm and magic is further deepened and reinforced by means of the elevating effect of each strictly observed rhythm, an effect that likewise enhances vitality and self-consciousness. Once the relationship indicated here is in place, then the transfer of rhythm from one field to another appears entirely natural. In many cases, the role of rhythm in actual magical ceremonies is documented. These ceremonies were a universal means, however, in the regulation of the most varied fields of life. Thus, once the mode of transfer prevailed and rhythm thereby detached from the concrete labour in which it originally came into being, then there was already nothing more to stand in the way of a further generalisation, of a still broader application of rhythm. To be sure, the imitation – primarily determined by magic – of real-life processes is a part of this precisely so as thereby to bring the desired goal closer to realisation magically. Already the fact of such an imitation that is not for an immediate, practical specific purpose (or better still: the fact that it is an imitation oriented towards a phantasmagoric purpose) removes rhythm from real labour itself, gives it a sensuously generalised setting. This can only be briefly pointed out here since the whole intricate complex of mimesis is first addressed in the following chapters. In the course of this,

22

Bücher 1909, pp. 331 ff.

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dance attained the greatest significance. On that point, it should just be briefly noted here that not just among primitive peoples but in antiquity as well dance had by no means lost its original connection to labour, to exercise and play, to the customs of everyday life, even though it had already turned into an art. In any case, alongside a series of cases drawn from the life of primitive peoples, Bücher quotes a wide variety of examples from antiquity, such as Xenophon’s Symposium. Now, howsoever this process may have taken place whereby rhythm goes beyond the scope of concrete labour, becomes relatively disentangled from it, and is sensuously generalised in the most varied manifestations of life, the essential thing philosophically is the fact that rhythm turned from being an aspect of real-life rhythm into its reflection. This reflective character of even the most abstract aspects of the aesthetic cannot be emphasised forcefully enough. Because modern bourgeois aesthetics, which gets wind of odious materialism in any theory of reflection, always takes pains to exclusively oppose the simple and the abstract – particularly the mathematisable and geometricised – forms and formal elements of the artistic reproduction of reality. In most cases, simple reproduction is interpreted as mere naturalism and as such is to be vilified or at least downgraded to something secondary; by contrast, the abstract forms receive an artificial light ‘from above’ as revelations of a transcendent power or for the most part as objectivations of the world-flight of a soul condemned to eternal solitude by its nature. Compared with such conceptions, the plain fact must be emphasised that any use of rhythm outside of its immediate and concrete form of appearance in a determinate labour is already the reflection of what it really carries out in reality itself. This shows that both of our findings (rhythm as the reflection of objective reality and the genesis of rhythm out of labour) are closely connected. The direct derivation of rhythm from the physiological characteristics of man not only blurs its specifically social human traits, as frequently happened with Darwinists in their day, but also creates – particularly in recent decades – a mechanical separation of man from his social environment. This has perhaps been most pointedly formulated by Caudwell. He says, ‘Poetry is rhythmical. Rhythm secures the heightening of physiological consciousness so as to shut out sensory perception of the environment. In the rhythm of dance, music or song we become self-conscious instead of conscious. The rhythm of heart-beat and breathing and physiological periodicity negates the physical rhythm of the environment. In this sense sleep too is rhythmical. The dreamer retires into the citadel of the body and closes the doors’.23 Probably under the influence 23

Caudwell 1950, p. 199. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.]

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of Freud, poetry is drawn along the line of dreams here, and just as dreaming is the guardian of sleep in the works of Freud, rhythm turns into a guardian of the solipsistic insularity of the ego; and all of this is projected into prehistoric times as a ‘cosmic’ phenomenon. It may only be mentioned here in passing that Caudwell, who otherwise vigorously emphasises the social character of art everywhere and even beholds in rhythm a balance between the meaningful emotional content of poetry and the social relations in which this is specifically realised, gets into such a contradiction with his own views in this issue that for him the lyric constitutes a metaphysical antithesis to epic and the dramatic arts. More important is the fact that for him any relationship to the world, to the surrounding world of man, hence vanishes from self-consciousness; that it is no longer the relating of the reflections of the world to man – a relating that is founded in praxis – but is instead the flight from the world, the theoretical justification of a hermetic barrier separating man from the outside world. Undoubtedly, the comportment of a large part of the bourgeois intelligentsia in the imperialist period is expressed in this, though it is radically anti-historical when it is interpreted as an ‘eternal’ principle in the development of humanity. The mystification that comes into being in this way is aggravated even further due to the fact that Caudwell wants to support his thesis physiologically. We have pointed out that the role of physiological aspects must not be underestimated. Nevertheless, rhythm that comes into being in labour is the product of an interaction between the physiological conditions of man and the requirements of an optimal work performance, in which the constant reference to the physiological rises to prominence just in the effort to facilitate labour. As we have likewise emphasised, in later phases of development the influence of physiologically determined rhythm (respiration in poetry, singing, etc.) is also not an unimportant factor in its further formation and refinement. However, it must be decidedly disputed that these aspects can be taken by themselves, in fact that as negations of all ‘external’ rhythm they can have led to poetry or music. Coming to terms with the rhythmic appearances of nature (for example, with the changes of the seasons) already requires a relatively highly developed culture. In this regard, Gordon Childe rightly points to the difficulties that the original lunar calendar caused.24 Caudwell himself demonstrates the role that art plays in speaking the unspeakable in his intrinsically legitimate polemic against Wittgenstein’s theory of the ‘unspeakable’, in which a metaphysical dilemma was devised between (semantic) expressibility and mystical intuition. But since here he can appeal only to a solipsistic self-consciousness, his com-

24

Childe 1937, p. 243.

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parison – ‘The musician is an introverted mathematician’ – is just as metaphysical and mystical as Wittgenstein’s rightly criticised theory.25 True, such an assessment involves the taking of a position that is not only against the mystical genesis out of the isolated ego but also against those conceptions that want to reduce reflection to a photocopy of immediately given reality at the time. Here we come up against the general limits of contemporary bourgeois thinking in aesthetics, which does not recognise the existence of dialectical materialism and invariably directs its polemics against its more primitively mechanical and metaphysical variety. Dialectical materialism has to fight for the shaping of its own method, however, vis-à-vis not only philosophical idealism but also its mechanistic precursors. Lenin carries out the distinction between dialectical and metaphysical materialism in the following way: ‘the fundamental misfortune of [the latter] is its inability to apply dialectics to the Bildertheorie, to the process and development of knowledge’.26 It is certainly interesting that, as soon as the talk is not of the philosophical theory of reflection but rather of the interpretation of determinate facts of life, there are more than a few researchers who make use of the dialectical theory of reflection (conceived of in different terminology) in practice. Keep in mind Gehlen’s anthropological explanations, in which he recognises abstractions and emphases in the reflection of reality in practical terms and thus dialectically understands these in concrete cases, even though – entangled in the general bourgeois biases of the imperialist period – he provides the misleading label of ‘symbol’ for a phenomenon he otherwise describes correctly. The use of rhythm outside of concrete labour takes place in a similar way. In the reflection of a sensuously given wholeness, one of the important aspects (just rhythm, in fact as it immediately is for the time being) is given particular emphasis and precisely thereby is disentangled from its original concrete world of appearance, is incorporated as an autonomously comprehended (reflected) piece of reality into the wealth of meaningful experience, and is preserved therein so it can be made use of once again in new contexts. This process is quite widespread in everyday life; in most cases, it occurs on the basis of analogies and analogical inferences. If these have seeds grounded in objective reality (that is to say, if they are relatively faithful reflections), then they can turn into an enduring possession of everyday life and indeed can even give rise to occasions for scientific generalisations. If these analogies and analogical inferences are not like this, they wither away or live on as prejudices, superstitions, etc. (Bear in mind

25 26

Caudwell 1950, p. 247. Lenin 1972b, p. 360.

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the popular prejudice against redheads.) Even the aesthetically ‘semi-finished products’ of the everyday exist and act in this way; for instance, the true and false achievements of practical insight into human nature. In most cases, it is emphasised either insufficiently or not at all that the reflection of reality constitutes the indispensable mediation for each further step in such an expansion of praxis. For us, therefore, this everyday phenomenon of human praxis is not the real issue; instead, the question of how in this case the normal reflection of reality grows over into an aesthetic reflection of reality is. The dialectical (the not mechanically photographing) character of reflection will first become apparent in all of its complexity in the discussion of the immediate mimetic reproduction of reality, where some issues come up, like the metamorphosis of the extensive and intensive limitlessness of reality into a circumscribed likeness that is still capable of reproducing its intensive limitlessness. At the moment, it is precisely out of the – relative – simplicity of the situation that difficulties grow. Nevertheless, it just comes down to the fact that an aspect of a complex is reflected in isolation so that it will be usable in a different, new complex. As we have emphasised, this is a completely normal phenomenon in everyday praxis that can no longer stir up any particular concerns once the dialectical reflection has been understood in its mediated function. The difficulties that now stand before us have a double root: in the first place, it is a question of a mere aspect of aesthetic unity, the specificity of which, however, consists precisely in its being able to be regarded even in isolation – in a certain way – as aesthetic. In the case of most aspects, such an isolation is – in the aesthetic sense – something that can hardly be carried out, or that very least it can with a great deal of difficulty. When we perhaps try to regard a character from literature in isolation, for the most part this is only possible to an extremely relative degree. Down into his ownmost quality, this character is determined in his deepest essence by his fate, by the situations he experiences, by the other characters with whom he is interdependent, etc. Even this isolating analysis presupposes these bonds (even if it does so unconsciously from time to time), and such contemplation always flows (intentionally or unintentionally) into an analysis of the work as a concrete whole. There is of course an endlessly vast literature on the isolated characters of Hamlet or Faust, on Quixotism or Bovaryism. It remains aesthetically relevant, however, only to the extent that it does not pry the character out of his or her given surrounding world. If this happens, then what is involved is the phenomenon of the influx of artistic design into everyday life, which has nothing to do with what is being discussed now. We have seen, however, that this is not the case with rhythm. Of course, this is related to the fact that we had to do with a content-form complex in the case indicated a moment ago, whereas

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what is involved here – and this leads to the second aspect of our inquiry – is a purely formal aspect in itself, devoid of concrete fulfilment in terms of content. The distinction that comes about here refers not only to content-form complexes but also to form-content relationships. Because even in themselves, formal categories like composition, rising action, etc. cannot be analytically disentangled from the concrete totalities in which they figure just so. In the second part of this work, we will have to concern ourselves thereto at length with the fact that these categories can be formulated as important and fruitful concepts for aesthetics. Here, however, it is not a question of the concept but rather of the thing itself, of its immediate, concrete, sensuous reflection and its immediate, concrete, sensuous use. Such a distinction between the thing itself and its concept is of major importance for the whole of aesthetics. It obtains a particular significance when it is a question, as it is here, of an aspect that is capable of becoming independent and already thereby obtains a certain abstract character with respect to the concrete totality. In the concrete totality of the work of art, rhythm remains subject to the general aesthetic lawfulness of form; that is to say, it too is the form of a certain (particular) content. At the same time, however, its abstract character is – in constant concrete sublatedness – preserved nonetheless. That is why it is quite possible here that both of these sides are reflected separately; of course, subject to their contradictory unity in the concrete context of the work. This unity of unity and doubling is a phenomenon that already shows up in everyday life as soon as the singing accompaniment (emphasis) of the labour rhythm takes on a more or less concrete form. Gottfried Keller describes such a case with subtle humor in Epigram. A master shoemaker prepares a new supply of cobbler’s thread and accompanies his labour by singing Goethe’s ‘Small Flowers, Small Leaves’: ‘[H] e sang it according to a very sentimental, old-fashioned melody with folksy modifications that naturally had to fit rhythmically to his walking back and forth and were often lengthened or speeded up by the motion of the work’.27 This situation can be elucidated even better if we have a look at prosody, in which elements of the rhythm of speech are dealt with as concepts. Its usefulness as scholarship – for aesthetic theory and praxis as well – is of course indisputable. If issues of concrete verse rhythm turn up at a developed stage, however, then in most cases a dialectical antithesis exists between the abstract requirements of prosody (in which the original rhythm arising out of labour appears in its pure form) and the demands of the henceforth complex and

27

Keller 2006, p. 214. [Eds.]

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genuine verse rhythm growing out of a word’s meaning and sound, which the prosodic laws of course underlie as a general foundation. At the very least, Klopstock has vividly described some of the issues that turn up here: Therefore, if we accurately work out our hexameter in accordance with the prosody of our language and its other rules; if we are meticulous in the choosing of harmonious words; furthermore, if we understand the relationship that a verse obtains towards other verses within periods; finally, if we not only are acquainted with the great multiplicity of periods that are different from each other in many ways but also know how to intentionally arrange these alternating periods: only then may we believe we have achieved a high degree of poetic harmony. But the thoughts in a poem are still particular, and the euphony is also particular. They still have no relationship to one another other than the fact that the soul is entertained by the sensations of the ear at the very time that the thought of the poet engages the soul. If the harmony of the verse pleases the ear in this way, then we have indeed already accomplished a great deal, but still not everything that we could. There still remains a certain euphony left over that is connected to thoughts and helps to express them. But there is nothing more difficult to determine than this supreme subtlety of harmony.28 The antithesis frequently appears to be one that is indissoluble in the abstract, but great poetry always consists of a concrete dialectical resolution of precisely the most pointed contradictions. In order to shine a light on this situation – but not even to hint at the solution, since that is possible only in a genre theory of lyric poetry – we now quote some particularly incisive expressions made by great lyric poets who have concerned themselves with this issue at a theoretical level as well. Goethe thus invariably rejected the poetic practice of the strict metrists and dogmatists of prosody and, brushing aside the advice of such critics, retained his casual, often plainly faulty hexameter in many places in Hermann and Dorothea in order to safeguard the integrity of genuinely poetic rhythm. Along these lines, he writes to Zelter about (or rather against) the sonnets of Voss: ‘From sheer prosody, his poetry has entirely vanished’.29 And Edgar Allan Poe, who is otherwise fundamentally different from Goethe when it comes to important issues in lyric poetry, calls scanning (that

28 29

Klopstock 1830a, p. 10. Goethe 1892, p. 59.

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is to say, the reading of poems in prosodic rhythm) nothing less than the death of poetry: ‘the verse is one thing and the scansion quite another. The ancient verse, read aloud, is in general musical, and occasionally very musical. Scanned by the Prosodial rules we can, for the most part, make nothing of it whatever’.30 It should be noted only in passing here that similar contradictions between rhythm and metrics (prosody here) are also to be found in other arts. For instance, Wölfflin refers to such contradictions in the architecture of the Baroque.31 The most incorrect conceivable thing to do here would be to infer from such dichotomies that the prosodic rhythm of poems be something purely arbitrary or merely scholastically conventional. Sticking just with ancient metrics, we see that Bücher has notably demonstrated that their principal forms are anything but arbitrary ‘inventions’ of poets or the congealed rule of their practice; rather, it is precisely out of the rhythms of labour that these forms gradually turned into elements of poetry. In the process he takes as his starting point the stamping and punching rhythm that the human voice had to follow and accompany in the original work songs. In concrete terms, he explains, ‘The iamb and the trochee are stomping measures: a weakly and a strongly treading foot. The spondee is a punching meter that is easy to recognise wherever two men beat alternatingly; the dactyl and the anapest are hammering meters that are still to be observed today in any village smithy where the worker lets a single beat on a glowing iron precede and follow two short fore- and after-beats on the anvil. The blacksmith calls this “letting the hammer sing” ’. And so on. In order to guard against an excessively literal, mechanical interpretation of his findings, Bücher then emphasises that ‘once it exists, the art of versification pursues its own pathways as soon as the poem has disentangled itself from music and bodily movement and has become sufficiently autonomous enough to lead its separate existence’.32 This wariness is still justified as well, given that ancient poetry is, as is well known, indeed built up out of these elements of the rhythms of labour, though nowhere does it preserve the rhythm of a particular labour. Instead, what it gives is the combinatorics of these elements conditioned by a whole series of fundamentally different points of view: whereas the work songs themselves – as Bücher likewise demonstrates by referring to the few verses from a grinding song preserved in Plutarch – exhibit completely different rhythms following the motion of the millstone.33 One can discern similar 30 31 32 33

Poe 1910b, p. 303. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-lanuage edition.] Wölfflin 1966, pp. 61 ff., 124 ff., etc. Bücher 1909, pp. 369–70. Bücher 1909, pp. 58 ff. Cf. Burckhardt 1963, pp. 198–9.

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rhythms in work songs hailing from a wide variety of periods and parts of the world. The disentanglement from the original rhythm of labour is thus quite farreaching. We do not know the exact path along which this disentanglement takes place and probably never will know it, step-by-step. But it appears undeniable to us that the intellectual and emotional world of the magical period played an important role as the initiating moment in this and that at a later stage the breakup of primitive communist communities, the emergence of classes, and the mutual confrontation of oppressor and oppressed, of exploiter and exploited, furnished the material for differentiation in terms of content, thoughts, and emotions. Howsoever the case may have been in the separate stages of this development, the fact remains that, on the one hand, rhythm not only always becomes graded and varied but also is continuously enriched in terms of content; however, on the other hand, it preserves its originally simple, formal nature – relative to the intellectual and emotional contents – in this process. At the same time, this relatively simple and pure formality is powerfully and immediately emotive. Aristotle already saw this clearly. In rhythms and melodies, he sees likenesses of distinct human passions, of anger and gentleness, of courage and temperance, as well as their antitheses. That is why they come very close to ethical characteristics and feelings in his eyes.34 We have already discussed the arousal of joy and self-consciousness due to the facilitation of bodily exertions by means of the rhythm in labour at first; and the simplest facts of life, such as the pleasure in the rhythm of marching while walking, often increased to the level of exaltation, particularly when it involves masses of people, plausibly confirm this. Since there certainly was an initial period in which all of the victories of man over nature and all of the enhancements in his capabilities associated with it were explained as the effects of magical forces, no basis existed for rejecting this ideology of transition in the rhythm of labour. The less so because this rhythm’s spontaneous, almost purely or predominantly bodily consequences – the actual grounds of which could of course not be seen through at that time – obviously had an immanent direction, emphasis, tint, etc. that appeared to run parallel with magical interpretive tendencies and to promote them: to wit, the control of a natural force or the enhancement of result in one human activity by means of another activity that imitates it, though it bears no causal relation to it whatsoever. This situation is a given for the relationship between labour and rhythm in the case of primitive

34

See Book 8, Chapter 5 of Aristotle 2017. [Eds.: Lukács misattributes this to Chapter 6 of Book 8 in Aristotle’s Politics; we have accordingly corrected it here.]

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man, and one could say it naturally gives a handle to magical interpretations. As indicated, the fact that rhythm plays an important role in a vast series of magical ceremonies still more explicitly points out this relationship. Of course, a development takes place later that increasingly casts aside this boundedness between magic and rhythm. It in no way contradicts this fact (indeed, it makes it even more probable) that – as we will see later – rhythm, its formation, its differentiation, etc. became of paramount importance for early magical dances, etc. In any case, even for the most highly educated man rhythm exerts a kind of ‘magic’. That is to say, on the one hand, it brings about a heightening of our self-consciousness, of our ability to control the surrounding world and our self, without, on the other hand, our realising where its power stems from or the means with which it operates. Plato also regards rhythm and harmony as ‘gifts of the gods’, which humans owe to the muses and to the leaders of the muses, Apollo and Dionysus, as their first festive comrades.35 And Goethe already expresses this emotional foundation of rhythm in an entirely unmythological way: ‘There is something magical about rhythm; it even makes us believe that the sublime is something of our own’.36 It is not surprising that in our day these facts are sometimes turned back into something mystical. Caudwell, whose views we have already disputed, sees returns to the magical period in arts, like lyric poetry and music, over which rhythm wields conspicuous control: ‘Hence poetry is more instinctive, barbaric and primitive than the novel’.37 By no means was this sentence quoted because it is particularly apt. As a matter of fact, it is entirely wrong because the tendency towards the barbaric and the primitive, which undoubtedly control a large part of bourgeois art and art theory in the imperialist period, certainly does not find its pinnacle in lyric poetry as opposed to epic forms or fine art but is instead a general ideological appearance. In which it is still to be noted that what we perceive – often justifiably – as barbaric in contemporary culture never has anything to do with a return of times that are long since past but is instead a specific phenomenon of our very own period. Thus, to cite an extreme example, Hitler’s entirely and certainly barbaric system. As wrong as Caudwell’s view is, however, it is quite indicative of the force of such ideas in our time, especially because Caudwell’s chief endeavour was directed towards a Marxist analysis of aesthetic phenomena. The danger of such tendencies is primarily expressed in the interpretation of general issues of art and their current state by construing a way of feeling that grows out of the social situation of intellectuals in the 35 36 37

See Book 2 of Plato 1997. Goethe 1998, p. 28. Caudwell 1950, p. 246.

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imperialist period as ‘magical’ or ‘primitive’ and making it into the basis for the essence and genesis of art. But no less a danger is the distortion and obfuscation of issues of genesis as ultramodern feelings that have been primitively camouflaged by means of such ‘introjections’. Precisely because we – historically – ascribe considerable significance to the magical period in the genesis of the aesthetic, we must strongly object to such theories time and again. In the discussion of ornamentation, we will come back to the key exponent of this method, Wilhelm Worringer, in detail. Our reflections up to this point have shown that these appeals to the ‘primitive’ not only are anti-historical but also contribute nothing essential to the resolution of aesthetic problems. If we now turn back to Goethe’s profound statement about rhythm, we can clearly learn from his joint efforts with Schiller how aesthetic issues of this sort can be truly concretised. At work on Wallenstein, Schiller came upon the problem of prose and verse, and with his considerable power of abstraction, particularly in the field of the aesthetic, he generalised his own difficulties in production up to the level of the repercussion of rhythm on meaningful poetic content. It is in this sense that he writes to Goethe: I have never before felt so fully convinced as just now, while engaged with my present work, that in poetry material and form, even in an outward respect, are directly connected. Since I have been changing my prose into a poetico-rhythmical form, I feel that I must be judged quite differently to what I have been previously. A number of motives which appeared appropriate in the prosaic form I can no longer make use of; they were good only for ordinary common sense, the organ for which seems to be prose. Verse, however, absolutely demands appeals to the imagination, and I was forced, in the case of several of my motives, to be more poetical. In fact, all that which rises above the common reality ought to be conceived in verse, at all events at first, for what is flat is nowhere brought so much into the light as when expressed in poetic language.38 Therefore, we have to do here – in concrete form – with the same function of rhythm in heightening and enhancing everything as we do in Goethe’s aphorism that we cited earlier. That aphorism merely summed up the effect, the subjective reflex, in a vivid way, whereas Schiller’s observation is directed at the interaction of form and content. It takes as its starting point the formal

38

Schiller and Goethe 1877, pp. 428–9, translation modified.

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function of rhythm as something given and then examines in principle the ways in which any meaningful content must be modified (enhanced) so that its proper, organic unity with rhythmic form and its requirements comes about. We cannot possibly cite all of his very interesting thoughts in extenso here; they show how rich, complex, and full of content these interdependencies become in each concrete case. Nevertheless, his final conclusions must be quoted, since a profound and accurate summary of the relationship of rhythm to the total meaningful content of the verbal work of art is contained in them, although Schiller is just considering drama in concrete terms here. It is important for us to grasp the aesthetic ‘place’ of rhythm as accurately as possible here. Furthermore, these lines of thought point to important questions that we can only approach in the next chapter: to the role that the abstract elements and aspects of aesthetic form play in the constitution of the most authentic, concretely artistic forms that aesthetically guarantee the reflection of objective reality. As we will see, the clarification of its essence at this abstract level is only preparatory work, only a purification of the terrain, so we can later pose this question adequately. In keeping with the whole nature of our work, it is not yet a question of the concrete resolution of aesthetic problems themselves at the same time. At this stage, their inevitable clarification serves only to elucidate in a philosophical manner the genesis of art, its detachment from everyday life and from its other objectivations. Schiller closes his messages to Goethe concerning this matter thus: ‘Rhythm, in a dramatic work, effects one great and important point in addition, inasmuch as it treats all characters and all situations according to one law, and, in spite of their inward differences, develops them all under one form, by which means the poet obliges his readers to demand from all something general and purely human, be they ever so different in character. Everything has to be combined under the concept of the species of the poetic, and rhythm serves this law both as a representation and as a tool, inasmuch as it embraces everything under its law. In this manner it forms the atmosphere for the poetic creation. The more material part is left out, for only what is spiritual can be borne by this thin element’.39 In these observations Schiller primarily points to three important effects that rhythm has on complex, substantial, and contentsuffused artistic constructs. First, to the function of rhythm in unifying and homogenising that which is heterogeneous in terms of content; second, to its significance in selecting that which is weighty and in eliminating negligible details; third, to its ability to create a unitary, aesthetic atmosphere for the

39

Schiller and Goethe 1877, p. 429, translation modified.

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whole of a concrete work. The mere enumeration of such standpoints suffices for us to see how far rhythm, as a concrete aspect of a concrete creative totality, has removed itself from its simple abstract origins. Henceforth it is called upon to fulfil functions that naturally were not contained in it even in germ at the time of its emergence. Though the continuity of rhythm with its beginnings is by no means accidental or arbitrary, it too cannot be comprehended just from its formal nature. If at the same time we are mindful of Schiller’s remarks that we analysed a moment ago, then it becomes clear that such tasks as those he allots to the arranging activity of rhythm can only be carried out if rhythm is in certain relationships homogeneous with the other elements of the art form in question that are arranged by it. There can now be no doubt that these are reflections of objective reality in the given case (and even generally). After all, precisely what Schiller wants to achieve by means of a consciously applied rhythm is a state in which a stronger movement towards the emphasising of that which is essential comes into being in the images of reflection called into play and in which they cast off their original autonomy with respect to one another as separate, heterogeneous pieces of reflection and achieve the homogeneity of a unitary dramatic current. It is clear that only the reflection of reality is able to perform such a function in arranging the elements of reflection into a unified likeness of reality in the work of art. The metamorphosis of the real aspect of response in rhythm as an aspect of the labour process into a reflection was, as we have seen, already the indispensable precondition for its application to different areas of everyday life; but there, as we have likewise emphasised, it intellectually received a magical wrapping for the time being. The seeds of its aesthetic function, however, were already objectively contained in this; indeed, this is precisely where its specific character as an aesthetic category already increasingly comes to the fore. First its formal character. Henceforth rhythm is indeed a reflection of reality, though not the reflection of its concrete content. Rather, in contrast to this, rhythm is instead the reflection of those determinate essential forms that objectively structure and arrange such contents, that make them useful and helpful for man. Magic also plays a certain role in this propagation and generalisation. It increasingly removes the reflected rhythms from their real origin; applies them to new forms of movements, singing, etc.; and thereby creates new variations and combinations between them, without relinquishing or attenuating their arranging functions. Indeed, on the contrary: it is precisely the magical bond and the ceremonial aspects in it which emphasise even more strongly (but this time not for material reasons, rather for emotive and evocative ones that arouse feelings) in rhythm the principle of an order affirmed by man that

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also awakens and elevates his self-consciousness. It is still to be emphasised that this increasingly forceful appearing of rhythm as form is a form of certain content-related (magical content-related) aims. The more concretely these are determined as such, the more strongly the formal character of rhythm stands out. It is indisputable that this attachment to magic very often leads to an ossification into that which is strongly prescribed in terms of ceremony. However, this alters nothing in its importance as bridge or transition, only that this transition or bridge must not be straightforward, but rather full of struggle. A similar movement from a particular artistic content-relatedness to the clear fixation of formal character appears – with all of the contradictions that we analysed earlier – when social development works out the particular shape of the aesthetic. It is thus a matter of a protracted process with several nodal points (indeed leaps) until an important, abstract formal element of the artistic reflection of reality is made out of the reality of rhythm in the labour process. As something repeating itself countless times in reality is fixed in place in its lasting aspects by means of reflection and is applied ever afresh to new facts and complexes, something similar to what Lenin ingeniously claimed about syllogistic forms as reflections of reality occurs. Here, however, this reflective character of a form (of a variously applicable principle) is of a qualitatively different sort than the – logical – phenomenon described by Lenin. The concept of rhythm in prosody constitutes a truer analogy to this. We have been able to see, however, that this does not come into consideration in its pure essentiality for aesthetic praxis; what does instead is the content-saturated, particular concrete rhythm itself. But our earlier observations also showed that the prosodic ‘concept’ of rhythm is not simply an abstraction external to aesthetics. The final rhythm of a work is the result of a unity of both aspects that is rich in contradictions and full of struggles. This distinction leads over to the second standpoint. Insofar as it too belongs in the context of science and thus includes tendencies that likewise act in a disanthropomorphising way, the concept of rhythm in prosody (or music theory, etc.) has in its conceptual essence something of the nature of other concepts. In contrast – as an aesthetic category – the particular concrete rhythm itself is purely anthropomorphising. It arises out of the interdependency of labouring man with nature, mediated by their social relationships with each other, and insofar as rhythmic relationships are discovered in the development of art that exist independently of man and his consciousness, they are – as objects or means of expression for art – accordingly anthropomorphised and related to man, to the human race. (Day and night, seasons, etc.) And when in the course of development man realises and aesthetically evaluates rhythms of a physiological character in himself (respiration, pulse, etc.), these serve the refinement,

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differentiation, and further development of rhythms that have already come into being without decisively altering their basic character; mostly because for a long time they were already involved – unconsciously – in the composition of the rhythmic. That is why any rhythm that comes into consideration aesthetically has an emotional, evocative character. This already embryonically exists in reality, in the labour process, though merely as a spontaneous by-product. Only when this rhythm – as the reflection of a form, of a process of formation in the sense indicated above – is consciously applied does this evocation turn into the goal, and its originally purely causal way of being brought about turns around into something that is teleological. Of course, labour itself is teleological as well, though in it the real product of labour is the goal of a real labour process, in which rhythm is only an aid; in contrast, evocation turns into telos in reflection (even if the work itself is imitated in dance, for instance). This transition already begins to take place in magic. In such a way, however, that what in our analysis appeared as a goal is posited only as springboard, as an intermediate goal serving higher ones. The aesthetic already thus exists here in itself; in order to achieve its genuine being-for-itself, it has to tear away the embrace of the transcendent and posit the evocation of human self-consciousness as the only true and – in these contexts – ‘ultimate’ goal. Here too, the coming into being of the aesthetic is therefore a secularising, a making-earthly, a moving of man to the centre of things. The anthropomorphising principle here is no circumscription of horizon, no lack, no false projection into a magically fictive object-world but rather the discovery of a new world, one that is of man for man. We had to anticipate ourselves again with those last remarks. In fact, in a twofold sense. On the one hand, the general essence of the aesthetic had to be pointed out (at least abstractly) without our also being able to hint, even just tentatively, at the whole process of the emergence of art at that time out of the depth and abundance of the everyday and its flowing back into the everyday; the concept of the aesthetic therefore had to be conceived too narrowly and too generally at the same time. On the other hand, it also had to be taken too far. For we indeed spoke a moment ago of art in general and not specifically about the aesthetic essence of rhythm or about a partial aspect of the aesthetic that is abstract and formal. In accordance with what has been explained up to now, we can briefly summarise this as follows: rhythm is – precisely as a partial aspect that is abstract and formal – objectively worldless, even though it is related to the world and puts it in order as far as possible. Looked at in subjective terms, it is subjectless, even though it is always evocatively directed towards the subject in its intention as well. With that said, all that we have outlined is to some extent the essence of such abstract aspects of the aesthetic. Worldless-

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ness and subjectlessness are the content-related attributes of a construct of a formal sort. (Here the talk is of worldlessness in the general aesthetic sense, as a characteristic of abstract aspects of formation. Needless to say, there are cases in the development of art in which art forms that by their nature are supposed to shape a ‘world’ – epic, drama, painting, etc. – become worldless due to certain abstract tendencies of their period. This possibility had to be briefly mentioned here in order to avoid confusing the worldlessness of rhythm with these other kinds of worldlessness.) This is why these elements of the aesthetic are most directly accessible from a disanthropomorphising, scientific view. This is also why they can most easily congeal in a formalistic way. This congealment can already take place in the period of magic’s coming into being, before the autonomisation of the aesthetic, as a ceremonial formalism keeps down that which is spontaneously evocative, transforms it into routine, and inhibits its unfolding. However, even the later history of art shows how easily the generalisation – which does not absolutely proceed from immediate artistic praxis – and systematisation of the rhythmic starting point can turn into a scholastic congealment, into a merely formal and, in the deepest sense, anti-artistic virtuosity. The causes for such phenomena are quite suitable for elucidating the essence of rhythm as a specific, abstract, aesthetic form. It has already been repeatedly said – and it will play a decisive role in later concrete expositions – that the most crucial attribute of the specificity of aesthetic form consists precisely in its always being the form of a certain content. With respect to this principle, even the abstract elements of this form cannot – ultimately – constitute any exception. As soon as these elements lack such a connection to a – continually uniquely concrete – meaningful artistic content, the congealment indicated above occurs without fail. And it should be noted here only in passing that what is expressed therein at the same time is continuity in the development of rhythm out of labour, out of human praxis. It also emerges there out of a concrete interaction between the concrete abilities of man and the concrete characteristics of certain natural processes. As we have seen with the dominance of the machine, as soon as labour is no longer concretely determined by man, rhythm ceases to exist and function in this sense, although – looked at in a purely objective way, regarded conceptually – the machine can likewise have a rhythm of motions. (That this rhythm can likewise be artistically shaped in certain circumstances is not to be denied. However, it has then been transformed from an object-determining form into an object of artistic forming on the basis of the development of anthropomorphising rhythms.) However, the accentuation of the generally aesthetic side of rhythm does not yet suffice for its complete determination. We had to vigorously emphasise the

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aesthetic side of its worldessness and subjectlessness. Its aesthetic determinations are by no means thereby abolished, however, but rather just determined more closely. With these qualifications, ‘worldlessness’ thus signifies that, as the reflection of a formal aspect of the world, rhythm cannot intrinsically comprehend the world in terms of content. In a certain sense, it is contentless; that is to say – when looked at in the abstract – it is formally relatable to any kind of content. In the first place, however, this possibility of a relationship to a content is an imperative at the same time; without such a relationship, rhythm does not exist aesthetically. Secondly, the abstract determination of the relatability to any kind of content must be concretised, meaning that from the analysis of a rhythm the contents to which it is applicable can indeed never be sifted for themselves; in each particular concrete case, the content has a clear and unequivocal affinity to a determinate rhythm. ‘Worldlessness’ thus signifies contentlessness in the sense presented here, coupled with a certain indissoluble (albeit not determinable a priori) passive intention (one that takes content as its starting point) towards a wholly concretely determined rhythm. Things are similarly constituted in the situation surrounding the subjectlessness of rhythm. Here too, this kind of reflection of a form is in itself independent of the subject creating and receiving it. But here too, this independence is not of the epistemological sort, as it is in science, but rather involves a certain intention towards subjectivity as well: towards the evocation of certain concrete feelings, sensations, etc.; in fact, both for the creative as well as for the receptive subject. This intention is not a direct one, but rather is mediated by the contents to be given form; yet the form does not completely melt together in the senses with the content given sensuous shape, as happens in real mimetic forms. Instead, amidst the necessity of a concrete and organic unity, amidst the compelling lived experience of a form growing out of the meaningful content, it still preserves a certain evocatively operative autonomy as one of its aspects. Consequently, the unity of form and content, which is critical for aesthetics, appears in a modified, more limited manner. This is an essential characteristic of all abstract forms as reflections of certain isolable formal aspects of reality. We will first be able to discuss in detail the extraordinarily great significance of this nature of abstract forms for aesthetics in the analysis of ornamentation, where such abstract forms no longer occur as mere aspects of a – not abstract – complex but instead are capable of being organised into independent art forms.

2

Symmetry and Proportion

From the point of view of philosophy, the issues of symmetry and proportion offer far fewer difficulties than do those of rhythm. Primarily because symmetry

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and proportion are indeed abstract formal reflections of determinate, essential, and recurrent aspects of objective reality as well, though they can never occur in human (and especially in artistic) praxis with that – relative – autonomy that we had to find in the case of rhythm. They invariably remain mere aspects of a complex, the crucial structural principles of which are not of an abstract nature. The whole complicated dialectic of the – relatively – autonomously operative aspect thereby ceases to apply in them; they must be examined only as aspects. In a certain sense and at the same time at a higher level, these issues return again when symmetry and proportion occur as aspects of an abstract total form elevated in ornamentation to the character of a work. In that case, however, they are just partial aspects of that dialectical contradictoriness that denotes the essence of ornamentation in aesthetics. The disparity of these abstract categories with respect to rhythm, which we discussed earlier, also manifests itself in the fact that these categories are much more obviously present in nature existing independently of man than is the case with rhythm. It would even be quite natural to exclusively behold in them a reflection of such conditions existing in nature and brought forth by natural laws as those that are found in the scientific reflection of reality as well. The danger that grows out of such an excessively immediate formulation of the theory of reflection in relation to such objects initially appears to just affect the issue of genesis: in this way, aesthetic feelings that can only come into being at highly developed levels of culture are projected into origins. We can discuss in depth the concrete dangers that spring from it only in the analysis of ornamentation. Only one methodological – and likewise anticipatory – remark must be allowed here, a remark that is also perhaps permitted since it was at the very least implicitly contained in our previous observations; namely, that the theoretical importance of genesis is qualitatively different in the artistic reflection of reality than in the scientific reflection of reality. The distinction is related to the already indicated structural historicity of those constructs that artistic reflection creates. If by its objective nature the work of art is historical (that is to say, if its concrete genesis is an objective, indispensable component of its aesthetic essence as a work of art), then genesis and aesthetic specificity are not distinguishable in the precise way they are in science, where the truth content of a proposition, theory, etc. materially has nothing to do with the circumstances of its coming into being. If need be, we can effectively call on the historical perspective as explanation of its incomplete approach to the correct reflection of objective reality. With that said, however, the core issue of scientific truth is not affected. But as we have seen, what comes to light in this is much more than a merely different proportionality in the relation of theory and history;

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in fact, the distinction has an important significance for all issues concerning both kinds of the reflection of reality. We can discuss the issues that are decisive here only at a later point when we refer to the relationship of the in-itself to the for-us in both kinds of reflection. At the moment, another indication of the anthropomorphising character of aesthetic reflection may suffice for us. We have already seen (and the further we come to concretise its nature, the more clearly we will recognise) that the anthropomorphising principle in aesthetics – and only in it – does not mean any subjectivation, not even in the sense of a socially necessary subjectivation, as in religion. Rather it means an idiosyncratic objectivity inseparably connected with the human species as object and subject of the aesthetic. This anthropomorphising is a fundamental phenomenon for symmetry insofar as it comes into consideration for aesthetics. Hegel already found that, looked at in objective terms, there are no differences in themselves between the coordinates of space that we designate with the terms ‘height’, ‘length’, and ‘breadth’. ‘The more precise definition of height’. he continues, ‘is to be in the direction of the centre of the earth; but this more concrete determination does not concern the nature of space in itself’.40 In itself, this is a general geocentric constellation and not one that specifically relates to man. It first acquires its particularity with the upright gait of man, in which, as Darwin and Engels show, a decisive feature distinguishing man from the animal state appears.41 The extent to which all relationships to reality and nature are thereby reshaped already becomes apparent in the fact that wherever symmetry turns up in human production, a prevalence of the vertical axis over the horizontal is to be observed. Thus, Boas says, ‘In by far the greatest number of cases symmetrical arrangements are to the right and left of a vertical axis, much more rarely above and below a horizontal one’.42 Another important aspect is already expressed here, that of right and left. In his interesting book on symmetry, Weyl43 justifiably emphasises that fact that, looked at in a scientific way, the slightest distinction between right and left cannot exist by nature. In contrast, a very sharp distinction (indeed, antithesis) between them comes into being in human society, where they develop into symbols of good and evil.44 They are not just simply given emphatic symbolic values, however; in and for itself, the symbolism indicated up to now could only

40 41 42 43 44

Hegel 2004, p. 31. Engels 1987c, pp. 452 ff. Boas 1951, p. 33. Hermann Weyl (1885–1955), German mathematician and theoretical physicist. [Eds.] Weyl 1952, pp. 16 ff. and 22. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.]

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be (and in many cases even is) an allegorical one associated with right and left. As such, this symbolism can even be reversed. Keep in mind the – admittedly modern – example of right and left in politics, where, since Jacobinism in the French Revolution, to a very wide extent it is precisely the left that receives the emphatic value bestowed upon what is correct, progressive, etc. Here, of course, right and left have already become general concepts from which all sensuousness has been removed and in which only extremely faded memoryimages of original, immediately sensuous lived experiences of right and left have survived. Wölfflin’s extraordinarily interesting essays on this issue, however, show that in the case of right and left it is not just a question of simple associations of an allegorical character. Wölfflin raises the problem of right and left for the composition of paintings, and even there only from a certain level of development. The movement of the eye in the viewer (that is to say, the aesthetic effect of the composition) obtains a decisive significance even if the image is constructed in a way that is essentially symmetrical. Wölfflin illustrates these thoughts with the Sistine Madonna and Holbein’s Darmstadt Madonna. This significance is heightened still further when the composition is not symmetrical. Wölfflin describes the essential lived experience that results from composition in the following way: ‘In the further course of such observations it then turns out that we have occasion throughout to talk of ascending and falling diagonal lines. That which runs in the sense of the left-right diagonal is perceived as rising, the opposite as falling. In the former case we say (if nothing else speaks against it) that the stairway leads upwards, in the latter that it leads downwards. The same line of mountains will be drawn upwards when the highest point is located to the right, and it will sink downwards when this point is on the left (that is why so frequently in evening landscapes the downward slope of the mountain goes from left to right)’.45 For us, it does not matter here whether Wölfflin successfully expresses a general law of composition in painting; he himself comments upon it very carefully by strongly emphasising that this is the case ‘if nothing else speaks against it’; he also does not neglect to add that his observation is limited to certain genres of art: ‘For architecture, the issue of right and left in the sense expounded here plays no role; for the performing arts, it plays a role only from a certain stage of development, and even then it does not do so uniformly’.46 But the analysis of art works that are otherwise very different – I point only to a landscape of Rembrandt’s, to the relationship of the Raphael Cartoons

45 46

Wölfflin 1941, p. 83. Wölfflin 1941, p. 90.

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to the tapestries on which they are carried out – shows that here, at least, it is a question of a partial phenomenon of the composition of the image that is not to be neglected, namely the fact ‘that the right side of the image has a different atmospheric value than the left side does’.47 This as good as completely suffices for our purposes. For it ought to be merely indicated here that, as soon as it is moved into human reflection by means of praxis (this must by no means be an artistic one unconditionally), the objective symmetry of nature is subjected to strongly varying tendencies. Under no circumstances does the effect of this go so far as to abolish symmetry altogether. Symmetry remains, but its aesthetic reflection adopts – in fact, the more developed art becomes, the more strongly it adopts – the character of a modifying approximation. In this determination, both terms are equally important. For ‘approximation’ here is not the attempt, as it is in science, to come ever closer to the object, but rather stops with an artistic intention at a determinate level, one that makes symmetry visible as such for the viewer, that makes it something that can be experienced, though with such weighty ‘modifications’ and discrepancies interpolated that symmetry never rises to prominence in its actual and consistently expressed essence, but rather turns into a mere – though admittedly important – component of the concrete totality of the image. There are of course examples, primarily in ornamentation, of a consistently implemented symmetry, for instance in the so-called heraldic style, where in full correspondence animals, plants, and even people are depicted in a purely decorative way without even broaching the right-left issue being discussed here. It is clear that all that could spring from this is an extremely abstract design tendency that tolerates very slight variations and possibilities for development. That is why it plays a not inconsiderable role in early stages (especially of Eastern art). Later, the heraldic style turned into a sign of congealment, of decline. Riegl, who is so much a witness above suspicion when it comes to possibly underestimating such tendencies, says this about it: ‘The principle of the Heraldic Style, which consists of absolute, bilateral symmetry, actually played a very decisive role in late antique art, probably because of the diminishing creative energies of the period. Hellenistic art had observed only relative symmetry in decoration and avoided the monotony of absolute symmetry whenever possible’.48

47 48

Wölfflin 1941, p. 83. Riegl 1992, p. 44.

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In contrast to rhythm, however, hardly any somewhat reliable conclusions as to the issue of genesis can be drawn from all of this. At first glance, it appears quite plausible that the preference for the right side may be connected to labour and the role of the right hand in it. This is supported by Paul Sarasin,49 who holds that the wedge-shaped stones and hand-axes of the Stone Age were still sharpened partly for use with the right and partly for use with the left hand, that a preference for the right hand is not demonstrable in the Stone Age. Such a preference first came into being in the Bronze Age. Insofar as I know it as a non-specialist, however, the issue is still so hotly contested today that it would be quite reckless to draw conclusions. All the more so, as it appears that Wölfflin’s very plausible hypothesis regarding European art in relation to Eastern art is strongly doubted.50 Therefore, we cannot even say something that is just reasonably likely about this, whether it is a question here of a purely physiological tendency or of a social one modifying the physiological disposition by means of labour. In any case, however, the fundamental contradiction between abstract geometrical categories like symmetry and the structural laws of organic life have become visible here. In his book, Weyl justifiably presents the tendency towards asymmetry in the existence of the organism.51 Here it is a question of a genuine contradiction. For just as the laws of matter generate symmetrical constructs in the inorganic world (most notably crystals, regarding which Ernst Fischer, in a correct polemic against idealist views, explains that here too the content – the structure and laws of atomic motion – determines the form and not, by the same token, the form the content52), issues of morphology at the organic level must be assessed in accordance with the objective laws of matter. Here is where a genuine contradiction now comes to light, namely that the organism is inextricably symmetrical and asymmetrical at the same time. Naturally, this is not the place for a lengthy discussion of this issue. A certain number of its consequences were already touched upon in the issue of left and right. We thus merely refer to one example that is of supreme importance for later art: to the simultaneously symmetrical and asymmetrical nature of the human face. This fact is familiar to everyone. And whoever has made the effort to compare the real physiognomy of a man with those images that one puts together out of the duplication and equalisation of each half of a face will easily see that on the one hand in contrast to the liveliness of the actual face, these 49 50 51 52

Paul Sarasin (1856–1929), Swiss ethnologist and naturalist. [Eds.] See Ciba Zeitschrift 6, 61 (1953): 2026–56. Weyl 1952, p. 30. Fischer 1949, p. 171.

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constructions attain a physiological rigidity that is indissoluble, and that on the other hand the two combinations are completely different among themselves as compared to the original in terms of expression. Without even attempting some sort of analysis of the possible and emergent issues here, the abstract facts touched on are already sufficient for us to see that, as a whole and in all of its details, each human face (and therefore, of course, its artistic reflection as well) contains within itself the dialectical unity of the contradiction of symmetry and asymmetry as a motive factor, that the artistic solution consists not in abolishing this contradiction, but rather in carrying it through in such a way that it encompasses all details and founds the whole work of art as completely and variedly as possible; in doing so, the artistic reflection naturally emphasises both sides of the contradiction more strongly than reality itself does. Symmetry will not and cannot be simply abolished here. It appears everywhere as a facet, as an aspect of the fundamental contradiction; it is abolished only in the sense of the superficial idea that the human face is of a purely symmetrical character. That is to say, what comes into being here is a genuine contradiction in the sense of Marx, namely that contradictions are not abolished, though their conjunction no doubt creates the form ‘within which they have room to move’.53 A contradictoriness of a related sort governs the issue of proportionality. The transitions from the one issue to the other are often entirely imperceptible in practice. Understandably enough, for as soon as the dialectic of symmetry portrayed a moment ago comes to light, as soon as symmetry ceases to be absolute canon – and this happens quite early, not only in the direct reproduction of objects from the outside world but also in ornamentation itself – other supplementary rules must be discovered that make possible in it an organisation of the world of appearance, a distinction between true and false. Such is the case in proportionality as well. It should be noted, however, that on the one hand the issue of proportionality springs precisely from the fact that the organisation of the reflection of reality goes beyond the scope of mere, and in itself quite simple, symmetry and searches for rationally comprehensible principles that get across the objective and apparent lawfulness of phenomena and groups of phenomena occurring in immediately incommensurable ways. On the other hand, it is clear – and we will refer to this at once – that issues of proportionality already arise from the most primitive production with immediate necessity. It is thus certainly no accident that the issue of correct proportions becomes very important for all art and art theory from antiquity into the Renaissance. This especially holds true for the theory and praxis of the composition of organic

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Marx 1990, p. 198.

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life, of man in painting and sculpture (we will soon discuss architecture separately). With all possible theoretical means (with measurement, geometry, support from Euclid, etc.), one seeks to discover those proportions whose artistic presentation could guarantee the beauty of what is thus shaped. Just as in the cases discussed up to now, it cannot be our task here to deal with these issues in detail. It suffices if we point to the so-called golden ratio and only note in passing that the studies on proportionality by major artists, like Leonardo or Dürer, endeavoured to come to terms with a set of issues that encompassed many things. Proportion is unquestionably a reflection of objective reality. The representation of proportion would probably have never come into being if our existence did not take place in a world full of proportioned creatures and things that are commensurate with their objective conditions of existence, if the simplest labour praxis did not show that useful objects can be made that have to be correctly proportioned in the closest relationship to their usability, the purpose of their production. We will likely never know with complete certainty how powerful the mediating role of labour has been in the discovery of proportionality in the world not created by man. The relationship here – as with symmetry – is less comprehensible than in the case of rhythm. Moreover, both symmetry and proportion are such important aspects of the morphology of creatures (including man) that it seems likely to assume that their effect on the cognitive and creative interests was a direct one, in need of no mediations. Such explanations are quite common. Their source in the modern bourgeois theory of art is an aversion to acknowledging the essential aspect of labour in the reflection of reality. Worringer formulates this idea in a particularly radical way. At the same time, it is not methodologically crucial that in the quoted passage his polemic turns against the depiction of geometric forms of inorganic crystalline matter. He says, ‘We may rather conjecture that the creation of geometric abstraction was a pure self-creation out of the preconditions of the human organism … As I said, it appears to us as a purely instinctive creation’.54 Our misgivings proceed from completely opposed presuppositions. We have already emphasised that we regard proportionality as a reflection of actual conditions in objective reality. Our inquiry is just directed towards answering: in which ways have people been made conscious of this reflection? Whether they started from (or could start from) the direct observation of facts of this kind in the outside world, or whether a detour via praxis and labour was necessary for them to make these materio-objective relationships apperceptible. Posed

54

Worringer 1963, p. 35, translation modified.

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in this way, however, the question of genesis points towards aesthetic relationships at the same time: it discloses the anthropomorphising essence of the aesthetic reflection of reality. It now appears unlikely that early emergent man, who has not yet formed his culture on the basis of tools and equipment, would have observed and understood in himself or in other creatures such complicated determinations, like symmetry and proportion, that are incomprehensible without a relatively powerful generalisation. In contrast, the fabrication of even the most primitive tools and equipment compels that practical attention be paid to symmetry and proportion. Meaningful experience had to show that, even in the case of a hand-axe, superior utility presupposes an at least approximate observance of proportions between length, breadth, and thickness. And all the more in the case of more complicated products – be it an arrow, where symmetry is necessary, or pottery, where adherence to precise proportions is indispensable for its usefulness – at least a relatively high degree of the ‘instinctive feeling’ for symmetry and proportionality must gradually come into being. However, in no way does this mean that such craftsmen would have had a clear consciousness of the general concepts that objectively formed the basis of their actions. We just mention how late it was before numbers established themselves in human thinking. People were already quite capable of controlling large quantities in ‘practical’ terms, as in the example of knowing precisely that an animal is missing in a sizable herd. However, this took place by means of qualitatively distinguishing particular animals as individualities but not by counting them and comparing the numbers. The latter is demonstrably the result of a much later development. For that reason, we believe that many things were also already practically achieved and fixed in place in the concrete meaningful experience of labour long before such a generalisation took place that would have permitted the representation of proportion to perhaps be applied to broader areas beyond labour. Only after such meaningful experiences turned into stable habits, only after the growth and formation of production provided increasingly complex issues of proportionality, can generalised questions in relation to proportionality be raised at all; especially when, even on the most primitive empiricist basis, social praxis has already brought forth the handling of arithmetic and geometry. It certainly does not follow that the practico-artistic utilisation of correct proportions would have unconditionally needed to wait until theory had abstractly posed the question of proportionality. On the contrary. We have already repeatedly pointed out that artistic praxis tends to run far ahead of aesthetic ratiocinations. Here too, it is highly probable that a trying out of proportions that was successful for a long time in the various branches of production directed attention towards proportionality in organic life as well and made rational interrogations into it possible. These

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have – even when they occur as the theoretical foundation for artistic praxis, as in Polykleitos’s lost treatise from antiquity – a predominantly scientific character. There is nothing surprising about this. First, it frequently happens that, in the processes of liberating itself from magic and religion, artistic praxis looks for support in science. This is yet socially supported by the fact that the social standing of the scholars in these periods tended to be higher than that of artists, which is why they play the part of scientists seeking a scientific foundation for their activity on such grounds as well. We still find such dispositions in and after the Renaissance. Second – and here is situated the more profound theoretical reason for this relationship – aesthetic reflection of course appears in its proper and pure form in the objective work of art, and it triggers lived experiences commensurate with it in the receptive person. It therefore faces scientific reflection autonomously and of equal value. Artistically coming to terms with objective reality in the creative process, however, can never do completely without the outcomes of the scientific reflection of reality. Objectively and subjectively, this share of scientific reflection in the creative process will be quite different, depending on the period, kind of art, and even artistic personalities. In certain arts (for instance, architecture), the creative process cannot be imagined at all without this share of scientific reflection as an integral component. At the same time, it can be both a matter of assistance in the conquest of the world, of the consolidation of knowledge of it, thus of content-related issues; and a matter of formal issues (so too in the case of proportion). A significant part of creative praxis consists precisely in preserving (indeed, even consolidating) the correct reflection of objective reality as far as possible while at the same time raising the whole meaningful content that it thus gained into the forms of aesthetic reflections and making something aesthetically anthropomorphising out of the disanthropomorphising manner of the reflection that has been – temporarily – appropriated and utilised. Or in converting the latter back into the former if – as is mostly the case in the works of genuine artists – the origin and starting point of the creative process were of an anthropomorphising character. Therefore, the genuinely aesthetic set of problems involving proportionality apply to relatively more developed stages; its laws are searched for in order to discover a solid foundation for the aesthetic essence of the organic world. In this sense, the proportionality of the immediate products of labour (tools, etc.) has no problems: it springs from meaningful labour experience, from the ability (which is ever more highly developed in this experience) to correctly comprehend proportions that are indispensable for usefulness and to bring them to bear in the material at the time. True, an important issue of the aesthetic and its genesis likewise turns up here. Namely, the question of how such a labour that

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was originally directed purely towards daily praxis turns over into the aesthetic. The transition certainly does not take place consciously. The internal coalescence of art and handicrafts is so pronounced in all pre-capitalist formations that for a long time many branches of activity that themselves are objectively and indubitably artistic still survive in the consciousness of the creators and those immediately receptive to it as workmanlike, practical labour. If we now want to approach the question of the genesis of the aesthetic philosophically, we come across the problem of the relationship, of the distinction (or antithesis), between the agreeable (useful) and the beautiful. It was Kant in particular who posed this question, of course in a much broader sense than here, though not in a genetic way, but rather as something timelessly fundamental for aesthetics. His extreme subjective idealist, and therefore rigidly formalistic, answer has frequently called forth protest; in the case of Herder, almost immediately after the appearance of The Critique of the Power of Judgement. The Kantian determination raises exceptionally important questions, but their fruitfulness is greatly compromised by their metaphysical rigidity in the comparison of the agreeable and the beautiful. He has the right feeling that the boundary separating them is to be looked for in the relationships to reality underlying both. It is certainly true that in the case of the agreeable the concrete existence (the concrete usability) of a certain object plays the decisive role in the process, whereas the transition to the aesthetic involves a – relative – detachment from this practical attachment to everyday life and its praxis. But Kant’s subjective idealism, which does not recognise (nor can it) a reflection of a reality existing independently of consciousness, must arrive at rigid dichotomies. He regards the following as the essential thing about the aesthetic: ‘whether the mere representation of the object is accompanied with satisfaction in me, however indifferent I might be with regard to the existence of the object of this representation’.55 The metaphysical rigidity finds brusque expression in the complete indifference vis-à-vis the existence of the object. In reality, where the representation mentioned by Kant is just the reflection of this object, the distinction that clearly exists between the thing itself and its reflection by no means implies such a rigid antithesis. As we could see in another context, everyday life already brings certain distancings from the existence of the ‘object’ now and then. On the other hand and above all, however, a complete indifference vis-à-vis its existence is not contained in the concentration of consciousness on the likeness of the object fixed in place in the reflection. The fact that all of the

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Kant 2000, pp. 90–1.

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determinations perceived in it must tally with the real original and can be verified as correct only in it already rules out indifference in the Kantian sense. Of course – and herein lies the important, albeit relative, accuracy of Kant’s assessment – an aesthetic comportment towards the object only comes into being if the interest focuses on the image of reflection as such. With that said, however, the tie that binds the existing object to its likeness is never completely torn apart. We can closely study this linkage only in those complicated cases of reflection where these linkages are accordingly far more complicated as well; by way of anticipating ourselves, all that is to be noted is that even in the case of a composition marked by the most extreme fantasy (thus, even in the case of the greatest removal of art from actually given reality) this relatedness to the existence of that which is being depicted nevertheless always remains. The lived experience of any ‘artistic reality’ necessarily contains an aspect of pointing towards actual reality itself. May the gap between both ‘realities’ be ever so great, this duplication never completely disappears. An affirmation of the accuracy of the reflection – accuracy understood in the broadest sense and not as photocopied similarity – is always included in the receptive person’s going along with the artistic reality.56 This expresses itself quite clearly in the effect of the work of art. Of course, this is – immediately – a complete surrender to the shaped reflection in such a way that it starts to appear as if the Kantian indifference vis-à-vis the existence of the original were indeed about to come into being. And – as we will see in the second part with the discussion of receptive comportment – this immediacy is an integral aspect of the reception of the work of art. If this does not occur, then one cannot speak of an aesthetic impression at all. At the same time, however, the comportment of simple receptivity (to say nothing of the receptivity of the critic, philosopher of art, etc.) also does not stand still. Even the person who is receptive in a simple way makes the work of art his own as a whole man. His lived experiences, the meaningful experiences of his life, etc. prior to the effect that a given work of art exerts on him are therefore an indispensable precondition, and the truly deep, genuinely aesthetic impression of the work henceforth turns into an inalienable possession of the very same whole man. It will not only influence his future aesthetic responsiveness but also impact his later thinking, behaviour, etc. in a more or less decisive way. It is precisely the reflection of an existing world that constitutes the meaningful content of

56

A dialectically materialist correction of Kant’s theory of ‘disinterestedness’ follows from the foregoing; however, an engagement with it can only follow at more developed stage of our expositions.

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the work; only with an oppressive abstraction can one detach how it is artistically formed from the adoption of a stance towards the content being depicted. The impression assimilated in the receptive person thus also changes his position towards this reality itself. How widely and how intricately mediated this aftereffect turns out, how far it goes in an affirmative or negative direction, etc. does nothing to change the fact that Kantian ‘disinterest’ is thereby abolished without the realm of the aesthetic having been abandoned. At the very least, we had to adumbrate this critique of the Kantian dichotomy between the agreeable and the beautiful, even though the problem that occupies us now is one that is much narrower and more primitive. The discovery of correct proportions in the labour process and the coming into being of well-proportioned and hence useful objects along with them is still not an aesthetic phenomenon in and for itself. Our question thus concerns the following: how can these objects which are useful as such turn into aesthetic objects? The fruitfulness of Kant’s relatively correct insight into this phenomenon becomes apparent in the fact that a detachment from the real practical usability of the existing product of labour does indeed take place. First of all, however, the carrier of lived aesthetic experience here still remains the real object itself; more precisely, it is of course all about the likeness created in the reflection, though there is a great difference whether the consciousness that has to do with the reflection of reality refers to reality in general (admittedly with the historical concretisation at the time), as in Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina perhaps, or, for example, to a certain jug standing before us, whose image of reflection remains indissolubly connected to the real existing concrete object and evokes in us lived aesthetic experiences. Although in both cases the lived aesthetic experience immediately proceeds from the image of reflection, in the first mentioned cases the direct object (the work of art) represents the shaped reflection, while in the second case mentioned the subject of the composition remains bound to a real object.57 In the second place, and for that very reason, aesthetic generalisation stands on a much lower level here and is much more abstract than in the case of the types of world composition emphasised a moment ago. What we explained earlier about the worldlessness of constructs that are based on abstract forms of reflection applies here as well: an aesthetic, sensuous generalisation indeed takes place, though it is one that is aimed at a narrow segment, at a slim aspect of the world of man, not – at least not in accordance with the basic tendency –

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It is a question here of a particular kind of aesthetic reflection, the detailed theoretical discussion of which is possible only in a later chapter.

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at the intensive totality of its determinations, as happens in art in general. And it comes about of its own accord that, in the case of the narrow relationship of subjectivity to objectivity in aesthetics, this worldlessness carries with it a dwindling away of subjectivity, a relative subjectlessness. If one now regards the two standpoints (both the inextricable boundedness of the image of reflection to a certain real object and the world- and subjectlessness of the lived subjective experience possible here) in their necessary conjunction, then the problem of the detachment of the aesthetic from everyday reality is philosophically describable with some precision. We have already called attention to the decisive practical role of correct proportions in the manufacture and usefulness of the objects of everyday life. Unquestionably, an essential principle in the construction of such objects is expressed in the correct determination of these proportionalities, which is also why their exploration necessarily turns into a central task of the generalisation of meaningful labour experiences, of deliberations on these experiences (under certain circumstances, with the use of results from the beginnings of science), of the perfection of the technology of production, etc. The overturning into the aesthetic can only take place in that these outcomes of practical construction form a closed purely visual system and as such turn into the object of immediate perception. Even this perception, however, does not yet have to be aesthetic; it can still simply present a visual survey of successful technological outcomes. It only becomes aesthetic when this perception turns over into the evocative; that is to say, when the visually realised system of proportions is capable of triggering such effects. Needless to say, this has a long pre-history. Joy in successful labour, in a handy and useful object, etc. already necessarily triggers feelings of pleasure in which, without question, an intensification of self-consciousness is also embyronically contained in the aesthetic sense indicated by us. The fact that the transitions here are extraordinarily fluid, that the same objects can trigger a range of lived experiences in the same man (from joy in utility all the way to aesthetic evocation), shows not only – contra Kant – that the agreeable and the aesthetic fail to form rigid metaphysical antitheses but also that this is an essential sign of the aesthetic character of this whole sphere.58 What now pertains to the evocative character of a visual system of proportionality – one that has been realised in a concrete object – thus bases its 58

We will first be able to concern ourselves with this whole set of issues in detail in a later chapter. The abstraction necessary here to regard such objects exclusively from the standpoint of proportionality does not apply there, and other factors (like materiality, colour, adornment, etc.) can acquire the significance befitting them.

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specificity on the fact that a construction that is closely related to utility is immediately and sensuously elucidated at one stroke. At the end of the 18th century, Hemsterhuis already beheld the essence of aesthetic pleasure in the fact that the human soul strives to take in the greatest number of ideas in the shortest possible time.59 The fact that Hemsterhuis considers – in an idealist way – this human desire to be unrealisable because man’s sensuous constitution, organs, and means can only apperceive in the succession of time and of parts does not decisively alter the correctness of his statement. The less so because in another place he rates it as a great advance of human development that we are by nature able to distinguish objects from each other through the use of only our senses, whereby the issue of the division of labour between the senses discussed by us is anticipated. Such an immediate sensuous synthesis of objectivo-material facts and relationships triggers a feeling of pleasure of a qualitatively different sort than that of the mere joy in labour, performance, use, possession, etc. In a certain way, as a feeling of pleasure, it is analogous to that which tends to accompany cognitive insight into unfamiliar and complicated relationships. Here, however, it is not a question of an epiphenomenon, but rather of the thing itself. Above all, it encompasses the immediate sensuous unity of inner and outer, for it is precisely the inner, ‘hidden’ construction of the object which now – visually – appears in the visibility of proportions being pieced together into a system. At the same time, the essence of an object thereby turns into an immediately apperceivable appearance. In sum, even though we have to do here only with extremely abstract formal elements, the essential structure of aesthetic constructs and the specific contradictoriness underlying them already clearly come to light here. The specificity of lived aesthetic experiences highlighted by Hemsterhuis still expresses an additional side of this relationship: the unity of the manifold, in fact not in an intellectually elaborated synthesis, but rather as an immediate concurrence of contradictory aspects that is moving and moved. This material and structural content, which establishes and calls forth such lived aesthetic experiences from the object and determines that these do not become the starting points for further contemplation (instead, they become immediate and conclusive evocations), brings about the detachment of the aesthetic from everyday thinking and feeling and delimits it from the scientific reflection and exploration of reality at the same time. Content as well as form clearly point towards the expansion of self-consciousness in the double sense that we have already determined. This self-consciousness can only develop as

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Hemsterhuis 1846, p. 17.

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it creates an object-world in which the world appears as a world of men, as a world in which man is no stranger. In fact, it is a world that expresses the essence of reality existing independently of him and at the same time is a cosmos created by man himself commensurate with his essence. Needless to say, in order to clearly single out the essence of this relationship, we had to parse the categories operative here in a somewhat blatantly obvious way. So as to portray the correct relationship, we have to refer back again to what was explained earlier: on the one hand, to the impossibility of detaching the reflection coming into effect here from the real objects triggering it and constituting the systematised reflection as an actually aesthetic object; on the other, and in the closest relation with this, to the worldlessness of such objects and the lived experiences evoked by means of them. Only with these reservations in mind can it become clear how and to what extent the aesthetic actually begins to detach itself in its singular autonomy from everyday life here, wherein the – uncrossable – limits of disentanglement in this field persist, and why we are still located only in the vestibule to the aesthetic, even though the disentanglement from everyday praxis has taken place. This issue of finding oneself in the ‘vestibule’ can only obtain its adequate determination in the consideration of ornamentation that is soon to follow, where the abstract principles of organisation in the aesthetic (like rhythm, symmetry, and proportion) turn into decisive regulative and constructive categories in self-contained aesthetic works. However, before we can proceed to deal with this, we still have to contemplate the problem of proportionality from another already indicated viewpoint, namely, as an abstract category, as an abstract organising principle in artistically reflected organic life. We know that this issue already turned up in antiquity. Its theoretical treatment as well as its practical and artistic application reach their zenith in the Renaissance, in a period in which, both in material and personal terms, the scientific conquest of reality was most intimately associated with coming to terms with it artistically. This tendency is of course far more comprehensive than its just being able to limit itself to the issue of correct proportionality. However, most of the studies that thus come into being (anatomy, perspective, etc.) exclusively flow – albeit by way of a detour through science – into purely compositional problems in the fine arts and likewise yield purely compositional problems. We can thus comfortably limit ourselves to the issues of proportionality that at that time arose simultaneously and in line with them and in which the specific contradictions of abstract formal elements come forth. The most popular and influential among the problems that arise in this process is that of the so-called golden ratio. From the standpoint of our question, however, it would be pointless to continue the discussion of its applicability

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or – when excessively generalised – its deceptive nature. All the more considering that the great art theorists of this complex, like Leonardo da Vinci or Dürer, went beyond it and endeavoured to fathom the significance of proportionality in general for all of art. The golden ratio is intimately connected to the issue of beauty, to the beautiful presentation of a beautiful man, whereas the investigations of these great artists bring up proportionality for the various types of people to be presented, which is important for art. Only in this way does the following question become philosophically meaningful: can that which is essential in the presentation of a man be properly expressed by comprehending the proportions of his physical appearance? All measurements, comparisons, etc. made by the major artist-thinker centre around this problem. The indissoluble contradictions that arise at the same time become most interestingly apparent in Albrecht Dürer’s theoretical writings. On the one hand, he exhibits the utmost contempt for the mere craftsman who does not learn and make use of the art of measurement, who approaches the presentation of man from case to case in a purely empiricist fashion. Without having fathomed the correct proportion of a human type, one cannot possibly succeed in its genuine artistic presentation. On the other hand, however, real art also cannot result merely from this correct proportion. ‘But it seemeth to me impossible’, Dürer says, ‘for a man to say that he can point out the best proportions for the human figure’.60 And in another place: ‘But I know of no particular measure to show that makes it the loveliest’.61 Finding proper proportionality is thus imperative for the artist, though it marks only the beginning of the path he must travel on his way to the real work, the genuine criteria of which are located beyond proportionality – even when it is perfect in itself – without, however, abolishing its weightiness. The position taken by Dürer, which appears contradictory at first glance, reveals an important relationship between deepened artistic form and the true structure of objective reality. That is to say, exact, precisely measurable symmetry and proportionality are prevalent where physical laws as such can operate purely; this happens most clearly in the crystalline world. Once life turns up as the organisational form of matter in the world – and the more highly organised it is, the more this is the case – the validity of physical laws indeed does not cease, but these laws do turn into mere aspects of intricate complexes in which they can only operate approximately. It is precisely this state of affairs that is repeatedly expressed – as an irresolvable contradiction according to the form

60 61

Qtd. in Conway 1889, p. 245. Dürer 1893, p. 359.

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of its appearance – in Dürer’s trains of thought: proportionality operates as an active aspect of an intellectually indissoluble contradiction that as a contradiction – in the sense of Marx’s definition quoted earlier – enables the artistic movedness of the visually shaped living organism. At the same time, however, the truth of life that is revealed here in such artistic reflections refers to their anthropomorphising character. In order to clarify this side of the matter, it appears appropriate to make a few more brief remarks regarding how the contradictoriness demonstrated just now is expressed in architecture. The situation of architecture displays a certain affinity to the issues of proportionality dealt with earlier in the objects produced by man for daily use, insofar as here too it is not a question of the creation of an idiosyncratic image of reflection but rather of an object of utility itself that – in a way that is practically and theoretically inseparable from its usability – is also called to bring forth artistically evocative reflections. Though the tremendous difference between the two here – the reasons for which can only be discussed in a later chapter – consists in the fact that the reflections evoked by the products of architecture are far more concrete and versatile and can by no means be called worldless. On that point, it should only be added in passing that the set of problems that will occupy us here is exclusively that of proportionality. Architecture – looked at on the whole – does not know of any set of problems relating to symmetry, no question of right and left; we have already quoted Wölfflin’s views regarding this. For us, this elimination of the set of problems relating to symmetry just means that what gets expressed in complete purity are the contradictions of proportionality. However, it also further shows that this contradictoriness is not just embedded in the dialectic of the reflection of organic life, that its circle of validity must be extended to the inorganic world as well, provided that this world is dearly and complexly related to the social existence of people. What until now appeared as the contradiction between organic and inorganic expands into a contradictoriness of artistic composition in general, regardless of whether its subject matter, material, etc. is organic or inorganic, provided that its object is a ‘world’ of man, that is to say, provided that the work is not worldless. In his description of the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, Jacob Burckhardt casually cleared up the issue that is now occupying us. He says, ‘Perhaps a sharp eye will look along each side in profile and find that there is not a single mathematically straight line on the whole building. At first one will think of inept measurements, of the effect of earthquakes, or something else of the sort. But whoever faces the right corner of the front, for example, so that he sees the upper cornice of the long side in a foreshortened way will discover an outward bending of multiple inches, which can only have been produced on purpose.

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And similar things are found in addition. These are expressions of the same feeling that called for the swelling of the pillars and which everywhere sought to reveal a pulsation of inner life even in seemingly mathematical forms’.62 Burckhardt justifiably calls attention to artistic intention in the deviation from exact mathematical proportionality. This is all the more important considering that the rejection of proportionality in modern times occurs quite often. We already find it in Bacon’s polemic with Dürer;63 on the other hand, psychologising empiricists want to attribute imprecision to the inaccuracy of our visual perceptions.64 The first position taken here steers everything towards matters of taste that are founded in a purely historical way. It is of course a matter of fact that the unfolding of purely picturesque views can carry with it a tendency towards the dissolution of proportionality, towards its being eclipsed. The second position taken limits the issue to psychological oddities, the general value of which is very problematic. As in the works of Burckhardt, only the selection of the right starting point is suitable to generalise the problem in the direction of the anthropomorphising character of aesthetic reflection because it holds on to the unity of proportionality and its abolishing; it does not matter that these conclusions occur unconsciously in the works of Burckhardt. This issue turns up repeatedly and in the same sense later in the works of Burckhardt himself and those of many others (Woermann,65 etc.). I quote only one passage from History of Greek Culture because Burckhardt aesthetically grasps the problem in an even more general way here. After having analysed in detail the great variation of proportions in the Greek temple – in the process going quite forcefully into strict proportionality, into its parallelisms and repetitions – he states, ‘Besides, the degree to which the subtleties discovered by Penrose can be proved to be conscious and intentional may remain undecided. To prevent optical distortion, the columns of the peripteros were tilted slightly inward, their intervals reduced a bit, the corner columns expanded a trifle, and the stylobate and the crossbeams were made somewhat convex. By such means architecture achieved an almost perfect analogy to the subtlest Greek metrics, verifying almost literally the words of the astrologer in the second part of Goethe’s Faust: The columned shaft and the towering triglyph ring, Indeed I hear the mighty temple sing. 62 63 64 65

Burckhardt 1939, p. 7. Bacon 1906, p. 107. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] Thus, for example, Home 1765, pp. 458–9. Karl Woermann (1844–1933), German art historian and museum director. [Eds.]

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The same architectural forms were used in profane buildings in a simplified fashion’.66 At the same time, it is the latter reference to the subtleties of metrics that is particularly important for us, since with that Burckhardt extends the contradiction analysed by us to rhythm as well and brings the issues examined by us there into a unitary relationship to those of proportionality and – as we saw earlier – of symmetry. What all of these abstract forms would then have in common when it comes to their artistic realisation is that they are capable of arranging their subject matter in a completely artistic way only if their absoluteness is abolished, if they have turned into mere aspects of a contradiction – varying in accordance with the kind of art or genre – underlying the work of art. This generalisation takes place precisely along the line of the most essential characteristic of the aesthetic reflection of reality, along that of a necessary anthropomorphising. Aesthetically, the world is indeed reflected and shaped as it is in itself, but this being-in-itself is related in an indissoluble way to man, to his socially developed and socially unfolding speciesneeds. The generalised issue of proportionality thus reads like this: the conjunction of the indispensable importance of proportionality with its nevertheless merely approximate, as it were hidden or secret, nature, operating below the surface, is not only the correct reflection of the essential relationships of objective reality but also a basic necessity of human life. Alongside and inseparable from its truth as reproduction, the artistic rendering of a well-proportioned world (or one in which the deviations from it are presented as distortions) has the accent of being the composition of a world of man, a world that he can experience as adequate to himself, a world that he endeavours to reshape into such adequacy. It must be understood that this is a world of man, of the human species, not of individual X or Y. The basic anthropomorphising principle of aesthetic reflection has nothing to do with a mere subjectivism. Of course, the subjectivity of the artist is the necessary medium of a reflection of this kind, though that which belongs only to the emotional range peculiar to a specific subjectivity cannot possibly grow into an artistic evocative generality; all it can create is an artistically meager form. On the other hand, that which pertains to the human (the species-character) in this reflected medium of art must not be generalised in an abstract way. As a principle, humanity can only become fruitful for art in historical, social, and individual concreteness. It is always the partisan offshoot of a people, and of a class in this people, that can turn into the

66

Burckhardt 1963, pp. 153–4, translation modified.

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mouthpiece of humanity at a certain stage of development of the surrounding world determining them. Again, we had to get ahead of ourselves in the field of the concrete artistic reflection of reality so as to be able to clearly underline the anthropomorphising character of any aesthetic reflection of the outer- and inner-world of man. However, the way back to the reflection of proportionality in the sense stated above is not too far to seek. It leads to the basic problem of the aesthetic, to the coming into being of a world that is ours, that we are capable of continuously relating to ourselves in its entirety as well as in its details, for the very reason that this world – reflecting reality or aspects of it – is based on the principle that it can and must have an evocative character. Dürer’s dilemma, which is irresolvable from the standpoint of handing down laws for painting, expresses – in a way that is much more fruitful for artistic praxis – a basic fundamental fact of human life: namely, that it is the contradictory unity of the orderly and the spontaneous; that its lawfulness can operate only as support, as a facilitative and regulative force for a spontaneity extending down into that which is merely individual; that the latter can actually rise to prominence only as a modifying, concretising tendency that calls forth further development in the field of the former. This contradictory and, at the same time, intimate interacting of tendencies that appear to constitute rigid antitheses that exclude each other when metaphysically construed is hence a foundational principle of art because it is a foundational principle of human (of social) life. However, whereas the often-prevalent metaphysical thinking that powerfully arises again and again for historically necessary developmental reasons focuses on this dichotomy, and whereas the thinking and feeling of the everyday often helplessly protest against such a violation of life (indeed, they are often forced to submit to it), there comes into being in the aesthetic reflection of reality an image of real life in which coming to terms with the outside world appears adequate to the internal demands of human existence. It would be a mistake to believe that proportionality is a special, as it were local, category of the fine arts. There it appears in its proper originary form, as that which is exactly measurable is put into a dialectical relation to organic matter, above all that of the human body. In a figurative – but by no means in an accidentally figurative – form, this issue plays an important role in all branches of art. Aristotle devotes a separate chapter to it in his Poetics.67 It is of course characteristic for the variety of arts that the construction of drama only calls for certain proportions that can be regularised just in its general vicinity; Aris-

67

See Aristotle 1996, pp. 13–14.

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totle indeed occasionally appeals to the fact that the duration of tragedies was measured by a timepiece. However – in this framework – its concrete configuration must be left up to the individual writer. (It is in the nature of the matter that in cinematic art this measurability of proportions, both for the whole as well as for the parts, is far more exact than in the pure verbal art of drama.) The issue of proportion, which of course concerns not only the whole of the work but also the relationship of its parts to each other, appears at first sight to be hazier than it is in fine art. In fact, concrete analysis shows that here too the artistic solution to Dürer’s dilemma is one of the most essential tasks of composition. Since all forms are reflections of reality, however, issues of worldview lie behind all questions of proportionality in composition: the worldview of the creator and that of the society in which and for which his works come into being. It will thus no longer surprise us that Aristotle’s same issues of proportion take centre stage in his ethics. To be sure, for him as well there are actions and modes of comportment that are unconditionally reprehensible. However, in those places where the talk is of the overturning of virtue into its opposite, what turns up is the issue of the mean, which in this context Aristotle regards as an ‘extreme’ and thus by no means as a lifeless average. And failing now is either ‘not accomplishing’ that which is ‘in conformity with duty’ or going beyond its scope. The methodological centre of his ethics proves to be a problem of proper proportionality.68 In contrast, it would be superficial to object that proportion here is merely a metaphor. The truth is that it is much more. Such a connection must come into being in those places where beauty is a central category of life and art. Neither in life nor in art can beauty be based on aesthetic or ethical values of a temporary, relative sort: the structure of man must essentially determine it. Now if this determination is not of a transcendent sort (such as in the case of Plotinus), if it is therefore not merely the borrowed reflection of a beyond, then ‘structure’ here means a harmonious agreement of mundane, this-worldly conditions that are immanent to man and belong to him from his humanity. These now may present a becoming-visible of the harmony of his physical construction or the revelation of the harmony of his intellectual and ethical capacities. The essential determining principle is the same and is – ultimately – that of proportionality. For this reason, this issue goes far beyond that of the abstract formal elements, and it concerns – precisely in a philosophical way – critical problems like the points of contact between ethics and aesthetics as a matter of principle. 68

See the sixth and seventh chapters of the first book in Aristotle 2004.

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In the case of the whole layout of our exposition, it is clear that a comprehensive detailed discussion of this problem is not yet possible. Even the concrete contemplation of the contradictoriness that hence results presupposes beforehand an overview of many crucial areas of aesthetics, above all the actual reflection of real objective reality. All that need be noted by way of anticipating ourselves is that the position of beauty in aesthetics is quite controversial, and the answer to the question formulated above naturally is closely associated with the determination of its place in the system. Most systems that have become historically significant put beauty in the centre of aesthetics as a whole; very little changes when, as with many moderns, a separate ‘science of art’ appears alongside aesthetics in the traditional sense. The author of these observations – in accordance with Chernyshevsky – beholds in beauty a special case of aesthetics, in fact an idiosyncratic form of aesthetic reflection and composition that is possible only under particularly favourable concrete sociohistorical conditions.69 As always, this question can also be answered at a higher stage of aesthetic considerations; it is clear that – consciously or unconsciously – the anthropomorphising nature of aesthetic reflection is confirmed therein. It is a basic tendency that is being carried out. As we have seen, in its abstract mode of appearance it is as faithful a reproduction of objective reality as possible. However, as much as the closest possible approximation to objective reality is the conscious aim of healthy artistic activity, the criterion of aesthetic truth does not necessarily coincide with the degree of such an approximation just like that. Here the talk cannot yet be of the complicated issue of style linked to this approximation. It can only (and already now again must) be pointed out that the anthropomorphising reflection in the aesthetic is not simply a subjective comportment, that in fact it is determined in this direction by its object: by society in metabolism with nature, mediated by the characteristics of the relations of production determined by this. To be sure, its reflection presupposes the stated fidelity to reality vis-à-vis nature-in-itself as well, but the aesthetic truth criterion in the latter case is nevertheless grounded in the socially determined interdependency with nature. An exact analysis of all of the contradictions analysed earlier could be ascribed to this basis. However, since this problem can now be adumbrated in its most general outlines and can by no means be exhausted on all sides, I instance an example that is complicated in terms of content in which the side of the issue that is presently of interest to us comes to the fore with immediate obviousness. In an analysis

69

Cf. my Pushkin essay in Lukács 1952b, pp. 25 ff.

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of Swift, the Polish literary historian Jan Kott refers to ‘the conviction, shared by Swift alike with his epoch, that while proportionately changing the size of a body, its characteristics could be preserved unchanged’.70 Invoking Meyerson,71 Kott shows that this is a mistake; that wasps, for example, would not be able to fly in the land of the giants with the altered dimensions in their former proportions; that when drinking the Lilliputians would have suffered from the capillary action of their blood vessels; etc., etc. But does the recognition of this fact – showing that, under the influence of the scientific preconceptions of his era, Swift objectively failed to approximate objectively existing reality – alter anything in the artistic truth of Gulliver’s Travels? The negative answer is obvious. For us, however, more interesting and important than this negative answer itself is its cause: the social truth of Swiftian satire, in which it is precisely the constancy of essence (thus also of proportion as its sensuous mode of appearance) in contrasting sizes that constitutes the foundation of profound comedy. Swift’s anthropomorphisation in the reflection of reality (an anthropomorphisation that is not subjectively arbitrary, but rather keeps hold on a state of the world, a crucial epoch in the development of mankind) thus does not – despite the time-conditioned shortcomings in the conception of the laws governing that which exists in itself – neglect artistic truth; on the contrary, his anthropomorphisation gives this truth a general foundation that is sensuously and intellectually solid. Kott rightly quotes one of Swift’s letters, highlighting the conscious awareness in his artistic search for the truth: ‘The same vices and the same follies rule everywhere, at least in all the civilised countries of Europe. An author who writes only for one city, one province, one kingdom, or even for only one century, does not deserve to be translated even as he does not deserve to be read’.72 It would of course be risky to apply the result of this analysis to the fine arts without further ado. For in literature the visual form of appearance has a far greater level of indeterminacy than it does here. (This indeterminacy is greater in epic and lyric than it is in drama.) That is why it is possible for Swift – admittedly on the basis of a satirico-fantastical compositional intention – to alter sizes without infringing the proportions. We have already pointed out the social reasons for this possibility, reasons that are founded in the anthropomorphism of art. Of course, such reasons take effect in the fine arts as well, only there the room for manoeuvre when it comes to deviating from that relation70 71 72

Kott 1951, p. 32. Émile Meyerson (1859–1933), Polish-born French chemist and philosopher of science. [Eds.] Qtd. in Kott 1951, p. 33.

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ship of size to proportions which exists in the concreteness of objective reality is much more restricted. The more simply an aesthetic object is structured, the greater this room for manoeuvre will be. (Pyramids in comparison to later, more structured Greek architecture.) The reason for this not difficult to see: in purely geometrical ornamentation, the magnification of size already amounts to a magnification of the intervening spaces at the same time, whereby these spaces can offer empty and lifeless surfaces in magnification or become imperceptible, destroy the rhythm, etc. The alteration of size can therefore peremptorily press for an alteration of pattern and so of proportions. It goes without saying that these consequences become all the more palpable the less an art composition is worldless. It is just as self-evident, however, that it is only a question here of room for manoeuvre and not of a rigidly implemented coordination. Alongside extremely small-scale sculpture, the existence of monumental sculpture that goes beyond the size of the human already displays this room for manoeuvre. It should be kept in mind, of course, that certain movement motifs require or at least favour this or that size from the outset. In painting the possibility of magnifying or reducing the size of the image is quite flexible, if only because the observer – within certain limits – instinctively perceives a normal human size in any image. With that said, of course, not even the single most general outlines of the various rooms for manoeuvre are adumbrated for art. All that is to be noted here is that, within the tendencies given by the genres and kinds of art, it is socio-historically conditioned whether such a room for manoeuvre is construed in a narrow or expansive (possibly exceeding the limits of the aesthetic) manner. In times in which the basic anthropomorphising tendency of art is very strong, in which beauty – in the sense indicated above – turns into the dominant central category of artistic praxis, the connection of size and proportion is quite close; thus, in classical Hellenism and the Renaissance. In contrast, in times in which – for social reasons that are very different and often almost antithetical – tendencies come into being that transcend the relatedness of art to man, this relationship can come completely loose. Thus, in many periods of Eastern art, where religious and theological motives were active in this direction, and in modern architecture, where above all the ground rent problem in large cities exerts irresistible pressure.

3

Ornamentation

We have hitherto regarded the abstract forms of reflection (rhythm, symmetry, proportion) as single factors in their dialectical relationships to the different arts that shape reality in order to bring out as clearly evident as possible both

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the abstract character of these forms and their essence as reflections of reality. In these analyses the origin of dialectical contradictions becomes apparent in the fact that each of these abstract forms contains within itself the tendency to be an organising principle of the reflection of reality, also and even primarily of the aesthetic reflection of reality. Since the laws of organisation governing the concrete and total creative reflection of reality – with which we will be concerning ourselves in detail in the following chapters – are richer and more comprehensive than those governing abstract forms of reflection and, because of the essence of reflected reality, strive to bring to bear other tendencies that are antithetical to those governing these abstract forms of reflection, the contradictions identified by us in certain individual cases come into being. As we have likewise occasionally pointed out, however, these contradictions are dialectical in nature; that is to say, it is precisely this contradictoriness which turns into a fruitful law of motion in artistic composition. We must now go beyond the scope of what has been achieved thus far in two respects. First of all, by showing that the abstract forms of reflection possess the capacity to constitute aesthetic constructs of a particular sort on their own; from this results the issue of ornamentation, which will occupy us in the expositions that now follow. In the second place, the aesthetic lawfulness that has been made manifest in ornamentation reacts to the reflection of concrete and actual reality. What comes into being in the process are dialectical relationalities that go beyond the already partially examined contradictions concerning the individual relationships that must turn into an indissoluble component of any aesthetic construct. We will conclude our investigations into ornamentation with an analysis of these facts in order to be able to move on to the discussion of the mimetic artistic composition of reality. We will see that certain historical facts that apparently contradict such a conception in truth corroborate it all the more. Ornamentation itself can accordingly be defined as a self-contained aesthetic construct that aims for evocation and whose elements of construction are constituted by the abstract forms of reflection (rhythm, symmetry, proportion, etc.) as such, whereas the concrete content-related forms of reflection seem to be excluded from the composition of the ornamental complex. Of course, even this definition must not be understood in a metaphysically inflexible way. Everyone knows that, precisely in its classical modes of appearance, ornamentation repeatedly has recourse to the reflection of the real objects of objective reality (lotus, acanthus, etc.), not to mention the plant and animal motifs, for example, in Oriental rugs and Gothic temple ornaments. This of course means – and we will soon have to speak about it at length – that the

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boundaries between the purely ornamental and the plastic (art which reflects reality concretely and in terms of content) frequently become indistinct, that all sorts of transitional forms arise out of not only historical but also aesthetic necessity. As difficult as an exact determination of aesthetic position thereby frequently is in individual cases, the boundaries are nevertheless assuredly drawn in terms of theory. These arise simply out of the predominance of abstract reflection. That is to say, where the objects of the real concrete outside world are incorporated into aesthetic systems, it comes down first of all to whether such objects are reproduced primarily in accordance with their own inner structure or are transformed into ornaments in the sense of abstract forms, whether they thus burst open ornamental two-dimensionality by means of their existing depth or their original objectivity is reduced to the abstract suggestion of essence necessary here. In the second place, it comes down to whether the real objects, which exist in reality and in their concrete reflection therefore exist inseparably from their real surrounding world, are presented in the artistic composition as parts of such connections or are torn out of these relations in order to be transformed into abstract decorative aspects of abstract relationships. These two viewpoints are just two sides of the same thing: ornamentation is worldless simply because it consciously ignores the objectivity and relationships of the real world, because it puts abstract connections of a predominantly geometrical sort in its place. In what follows, we will discuss at length the aesthetic and ideological bases and consequences of this state of affairs; here, it was only imperative to briefly illuminate the basic structure so as to come by a foundation for these expositions. In order to illustrate this in a vivid way as well, here is the beginning of Stefan George’s poem ‘The Tapestry’, in which this kind of creation of abstract relationships is described in a sensuous literary way: Framed by a silken fringe, in strange accord Here men are intermeshed with beasts and plants, And sickles blue with stars of white are scored And traverse them in the arrested dance. Through lavish broideries run barren lines, And part for part is tangled and at strife, And none the riddle of the snared divines …73

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George 1946, p. 101. [Eds.]

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If we now – it goes without saying, as always here, exclusively from a philosophical standpoint – move on to the genesis of ornamentation, then what becomes apparent again therein is the veracity of our earlier assessment, namely that the aesthetic praxis of mankind cannot possibly be derived from one and only source, especially not from an aesthetic one; instead, the aesthetic is the result of a subsequent synthesis that historically unfolds gradually. Among the tendencies that are operative in the process, a basic one that probably already dates back to the animal world and in itself is completely independent of art must be especially highlighted: the pleasure of being adorned. For the time being, one should take this in its broadest sense so that it encompasses the adornment of both bodies and implements, indeed even the inner and outer adornment that is made use of in architecture. As we will see straightaway, this summary outlines a field within the scope of which the differences are at least as important as the features that are held in common. The inextricable boundedness to a real object remains something held in common, be it this man himself or a handy object used by him, in contrast to the real plastic arts, in which the material substrate possesses absolutely no relationships to human life outside of its aesthetically evocative function (picture as a painted canvas, etc.). Within this commonality, however, the qualitative and (for the social life of men) functional difference of such objects brings forth qualitative differences in aesthetic possibilities, in the capacity for development, etc. If we consider the self-adornment of man for the time being, we naturally do not want to get ourselves involved with an archeological or ethnographic discussion of whether it unconditionally (and in any case chronologically) preceded the adornment of implements. We accept with Hoernes74 and others that this was generally the case.75 What turns up at the same time, now at a higher level, is an issue that already occupied us in the case of rhythm, namely whether (and if so, to what extent) we have to do with an inheritance from the animal state. It is precisely here that Darwin adduces an extraordinarily diverse range of materials, the details of which are fascinating, as corroboration of an affirmative answer to this question. However, on closer inspection the arguments of Darwin and the Darwinists still cannot convince us. That is to say, it is denied by nobody that even in the case of man the urge to adorn oneself is operative as an aspect of a secondary sexual character. The animal’s mode of being and that of man, however, have become so qualitatively different as a result of the coming into being of labour and society that, even in such highly primit-

74 75

Moritz Hoernes (1852–1917), Austrian prehistoric archeologist. Hoernes 1925, p. 18.

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ive forms of activity, such new qualitatively different determinations turn up that, as far as this issue goes, it no longer appears permissible to directly and genetically derive the human from the animal, particularly in its relationship to the aesthetic. Generally speaking, it is a question of the relationship of the separate – in our case, of the adorned – individual to the species at the same time. Marx accurately described this relation, of course without regarding our specialised problem. He says, The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life activity directly distinguishes man from animal life activity. Only because of that is he a species-being …. The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being, i.e. a being which treats the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being. It is true that animals also produce. They build nests and dwellings, like the bee, the beaver, the ant, etc. But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce onesidedly, while man produces universally; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need; they produce only themselves, while man reproduces the whole of nature; their products belong immediately to their physical bodies, while man freely confronts his own product. Animals produce only according to the standards and needs of the species to which they belong, while man is capable of producing according to the standard of every species and of applying to each object its inherent standard; hence man also produces in accordance with the laws of beauty.76 On this basis, it is not all that difficult to draw conclusions for our question. In the first place, adornment is innate for animals; hence, it can no longer improve or spoil in them. In contrast, man is not adorned by nature at all, he adorns himself; adornment is his own activity, the result of his labour. That which is uncritical in the works of Darwin consists in the fact that he fails to see this decisive aspect. That is why his material for the genesis of adornment is not very convincing, even though this material in itself is so rich. This is also expressed

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Marx 1992a, pp. 328–9.

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in the fact that the living thing which is ornamentally beautiful – to human tastes – is generally a member of one of the low species (plants, marine animals, butterflies, most birds). The ‘ancestral lineage’ breaks off precisely at the point at which it would have to begin for genesis. Second, it follows that how a particular man is adorned – be it a tattoo or jewelry that has been donned – by no means results from his innate physiological constitution but is instead a product of social relations and activities. Whether it is now a question of the fact that man wears the emblems of the tight-knit community to which he belongs as adornment or that the adornment expresses his rank within such a community, etc., in any case the way in which one adorns oneself is not innate but something that came into being socially. Third, the immediate relationship of adornment to sexuality thereby loosens or at the very least appears to be much more widely mediated. Darwin has persuasively demonstrated this relationship (‘adornment’ as a secondary sexual character) for animals. Certain modern psychologists – even without being Darwinists – nevertheless have the propensity to construe, to a certain extent, primeval times as the canonical period for all predominant sexuality and to project into it the sexual problems of people from the most developed formations. By way of contrast, it suffices to quote the analyses of Engels, which, precisely on the basis of observations of animal herds and their dissolution (or at least their weakening) by means of the jealousy of the males (thus, precisely by emphasising the antithesis between human and animal herds), demonstrates that ‘when primitive men were working their way up from the animal creation, they either had no family at all or a form that does not occur among animals’.77 Evolving man thus could not know of jealousy, otherwise their first communities would never have been able to become lasting and solid, otherwise ‘an animal so defenceless as evolving man’ could never have been able to survive.78 So it should not be denied that close and intimate relationships persist between the urge of man to adorn himself and his sexual life. What is important (and what gets neglected in Darwin’s parallels) is simply the fact that, due to social life, many things turn into secondary sexual characteristics in the case of man that not only are the product of labour (and are thus by no means innate to man) but also, one can even say, arise out of human social relationships; thus, authority and rank, reputation and wealth, etc. It is a historical fact that these aspects, particularly when they are fixed in place through long habituation, act in a more or less secondary sexual way, but it is also a fact that this field becomes

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Engels 2007, p. 99. Ibid. [Eds.]

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ever broader and more widely ramified with the development of society. Thus, one must by no means look for the genesis of adornment in an immediate relationship to sexual life. Social benefit – either as it truly is or as it is generally fancied to be – certainly comprises the starting point. Even though a part of his ethnographic material may be obsolete, Plekhanov is largely quite justified when he says of tattooing, ‘In the first place the savage perceived the usefulness of tattooing, and only later – much later – did he find aesthetic enjoyment in the sight of a tattooed skin’.79 At the same time, it is not essential at all on which level of consciousness and with how false a consciousness this insight of utility takes place. The conceptual clarification of these rather muddled relationalities is still complicated by the fact that the word ‘beauty’, with which one so often wants to denote the aesthetic, ranks among the most ambiguous terms known to language and terminology. Thomas Mann analyses this concept ironically in Joseph and His Brothers and finds that its meaning ranges from tedious academism to sexual attraction: ‘Deceit, trickery, fraud – how great a role they play in the realm of beauty! And why? Because at the same time it is suddenly the realm of love and desire; because sexuality becomes involved and defines the concept of beauty’.80 At the same time, Thomas Mann analyses this concept here without making reference to its spatiotemporal ambiguity. However, this ambiguity is biologically variegated in the case of animals but is biologically and socially variegated in an extraordinary way in the case of man. As much as Darwin would like to prove the close affinity between the animal and the human sense of beauty, as an honest and conscientious researcher he instances plenty of examples that prove precisely the opposite. It is almost touching to read how indignant he is at times over the ‘bad taste’ of a particular bird with respect to noises and colours that are sexually attractive to it.81 Or he speaks of certain odors that exert similar effects during mating season and apologetically adds, ‘We must not judge on this head by our own taste’.82 It is thus certainly more or less accidental if, even in the very widest sense, aesthetic categories can be applied at all to anything that turns into a secondary sexual characteristic in the sexual life of animals. This aspect of contingency, however, is also not to be eliminated from the socio-historically determined development of mankind. That is why it will not do to – arbitrarily, neutralising all of the social accidents necessary for the aes79 80 81 82

Plekhanov 1953, p. 116. Mann 2005, pp. 317–18. [Eds.] Darwin 1871, p. 61. Darwin 1871, p. 281.

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thetic – treat self-adornment as an aesthetic category from the outset. Again, this is a regression into the conception of the aesthetic as an a priori or anthropological principle that ‘eternally’ belongs to man. For instance, Scheltema does this when, working with ideological presuppositions that are completely opposed to those of Darwin, he construes bodily adornment as aesthetic from the outset, even as something aesthetic in a very complicated and superior way: ‘But there can be no doubt that these forms of adornment are pure forms of art at the same time. For not only was this adornment (a necklace made of shells, for instance) perceived as “beautiful” with complete consciousness, and not only was this strung-together arrangement of equally sized links (an arrangement not to be found in nature at all) a pure product of fantasy, but also this string of shells is understandable just as a necklace as a result of the fact that it suggests a given objective form (in fact, that of the human body) as pure form, which is to say that it interprets aesthetically. Only in this way does the necklace receive its meaningful, decorative beauty such that the round of links emphasises and goes with the disposition and smooth curvature of the neck at the same time’.83 This is certainly a modernising or at least a projecting of feelings and insights of much later stages of development into incipient ones. To say nothing at all of the fact that Scheltema skips over the certainly older practice of tattooing and begins right with jewelry, which, due to the autonomy of the object, permits a certain detachment from the biologically given existence of man and thus contains vast pronounced opportunities for disentangling the aesthetic from the merely useful and agreeable that are not possible for tattooing and other original forms of the adornment of the body. On this account, the contingency of the fact that something can be regarded as aesthetic in our sense of the word here is nearly as strongly active as in the natural beauty of animals. Without going into the ethnographic details, it suffices if one points to cracked teeth and artificially stunted feet in order to achieve clarity concerning the contingency of the ‘beautiful’ that prevails here. The ambiguity of this concept becomes completely apparent here. For, in keeping with its immediate and extremely vague meaning, one would indubitably have to refer to all of the things enumerated above as ‘beautiful’. In such immediacy we have no right at all to judgementally contrast our concept of ‘beauty’ to that of savages and thrust aside with a dismissive gesture their own conception of what is produced by them. On the contrary, we would have to say that all ‘beauty’ is determined by the given state of social development and consequently is, to use Ranke’s expression, equally immediate to God; there

83

Scheltema 1850, p. 38.

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would be no standard by which it could be positively or negatively assessed. The fact that throughout history those aesthetics that are based on the concept of ‘beauty’ do not lapse into a limitless historical relativism but, on the contrary, into a suprahistorical dogmatism is a renewed sign of the insurmountable ambiguity of this concept if one wants to preserve the scope it possesses in everyday life and still identify it with the principle of the aesthetic. This double-sidedness and haziness of the concept of beauty, which can abet both a relativism as well as a dogmatism, is a serious impediment to philosophically uncovering the historical genesis of the aesthetic, even in these subregions. That is why we also recur here to our method already proven in earlier cases by Marx, according to whom the anatomy of the man offers the key to the anatomy of the ape, and thus genesis must be discovered here too by groping backwards from later developments. If we thus regard the process of the disentanglement of the aesthetic from everyday praxis, we also see here a line that leads from that which is just immediately useful and over an agreeableness that is thereby mediated or brought forth; almost everything that is denoted by the word ‘beauty’ from Darwin to Scheltema falls under this heading. Only at this stage does the aesthetic begin to develop as an autonomous principle. Only from here can the immense amount of useful and agreeable products from man’s beginning be sifted in accordance with those aspects in which a more or less clear, a more or less obvious intention towards the aesthetic is perceptible. No single anthropological, psychological, or biological explanatory hypothesis is possible for such findings in concrete cases, which are beyond the task set for us here. In concrete terms, these intentions can have a wide variety of triggering occasions. They indissolubly bear the impress of a certain contingency in themselves, just as we already saw earlier in the emergence of tools out of the acts of picking up and later keeping suitable stones and in the works of Marx in relation to the emergence of value out of acts of exchange that were initially accidental. From this point of view, what comes into being is the following series: ‘cosmetic’ bodily adornment – ornamental objects (found or produced) applied to the human body – adornment of implements. It is clear that in this series the chances for the metamorphosis of accidental intentions towards the aesthetic into a genuine intention towards art and into the carrying out of this intention must constantly increase. In addition, of course, it must be noted that, as we have already expounded, the boundedness of the aesthetic with respect to the useful and the agreeable in this field can only be loosened in marginal cases (most clearly in ornamentation that has been architecturally applied). Therefore, as soon as adornment, be it ever so primitive, is produced by man himself, any analogy with the animal ceases and that which is specific to the

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human (labour) comes into force. We lack reliable data as to how this new kind of adornment grew out of labour and even must lack this data since the documentations of our early beginnings and transitions are almost completely lost. However, there does not seem to be any room for doubt that it does grow causally and genetically out of the development of labour technique. Earlier, with reference to Boas, we pointed out in another context that the development of technique itself brings forth parallelisms, regularities, etc. in the quite primitive grinding and scraping work from the Stone Age. Semper84 identifies similar appearances in relation to primitive textile technique, etc. It is thus clear that in such cases the talk can only be of the technical preconditions for ornamentation, not of ornamentation itself. That is why Riegl’s polemic against the Semper school, which raised so much dust at that time, is pointless and scholastic to a great extent. It is pointless because major technical progress can never create more than the objective and subjective preconditions for the artistic. (We do not need to hark back in detail once again to aspects of these preconditions, like the achievement of leisure, control of materials and tools, the ability to completely realise what has been planned, etc.) It is scholastic because the ‘Kunstwollen’ shot from Riegl’s pistol likewise explains nothing; it merely attaches a hypostatising name to the fact that artistic ornamentation came into being over time. We repeat: the developmental process will no doubt be mediated historically by the most varied contingencies. Our examples showed how contingent relationships brought forth a qualitatively new form by means of quantitative progression. However, if we can also assume in all likelihood a similar process for the historical genesis of ornamentation, our philosophical question (how and why did a particular kind of aesthetic activity come out of this?) is still by no means thereby satisfactorily answered. True, coincidences in social development have an idiosyncratic dialectic. There are coincidences, and then there are coincidences. Ones that are materially attached to the objective growth trends of a determinate stage, the ‘contingency’ of which at first appearance signals simply the beginning of something new, in most cases without likewise awakening a consciousness of the new in the people involved, in whom this consciousness develops slowly, gradually, and often quite unevenly at first. Parallel with the overturning of this contingency into a reality that has become socially general (indeed even into a necessity), it develops into a more or less adequate consciousness. In addition, however, there are coincidences in the strictest sense of the word in any social development, but these inevitably

84

Gottfried Semper (1803–1879), German architect and art critic. [Eds.]

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remain sporadic, wither away, and seldom acquire even a merely temporary social propagation. It is clear that without such a conception of contingency all social development would have to receive a mystified character. It is likewise clear that the talk here can only be of the first type of contingency, but in this case as well the reservation mentioned remains in force. Even the most accurate historical genesis still cannot give any philosophical explanation for the aesthetic nature of its products, necessarily recognised as such. With that said, we return again to the already touched-upon problem of the detachment of the aesthetic from the useful and the agreeable, so far as it does not belong body and soul to everyday reality. We have already indicated that this detachment exhibits a multiplicity of transitions of such differences of degree that already fix themselves in place as qualitative differences. Now that we no longer have to do merely with an abstract formal element but rather with the crystallisation of such elements into an aesthetic unity, the aesthetic significance of these differences can already be pointed out. At the same time, it comes down to which role the ornamentally decorated object occupies in the life of people. A qualitative distance results here depending on whether the ornament embellishes an individual object of everyday use or whether it turns into a decorative element of architecture (that is to say, of public life). This aesthetic distinction likewise has a historical basis. The decorating of implements is assuredly incomparably older than that of architecture, the beginnings of which, according to Engels, can first be discovered in the upper stage of barbarism and which was nothing but utilitarian in its early stages.85 Hoernes, who comes to the latter finding, justifiably warns of the sentimental effect that, in current circumstances which have nothing to do with the old ones, certain remnants of this architecture exert on us to project into the thing itself.86 This tendency appears particularly pronounced in the work of Scheltema.87 With the help of sentimental modernising, he transforms the aesthetic principle into something ‘eternal’. True, concealed behind this circumstance there is a real aesthetic problem that escapes Hoernes. That is to say – and this applies far more to the adornment of implements than it does to architecture itself – in the case of the ornaments that we have come across the process of detachment from utility has already taken place by means of the time elapsed in the meantime, by means of the fact that the implements concerned have been ripped out of the real-life context in which they figured in the period of their emergence and use. 85 86 87

Engels 2007, p. 92. Hoernes 1925, p. 83. Scheltema 1950, pp. 54 ff.

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The impression that comes into being in the receptive person today thus contains the exact opposite of the original. In this original impression, suitability for immediate use was the primary thing, the aesthetic effect was something accidental or ancillary. Today, utility fades into the background and must often be painstakingly reconstructed from figurations of form, or it plays a role as carrier or intensifier of aesthetic evocation by acting as an element of the aesthetic, as something that has turned into a visually effective form. Originally, the old implements could scarcely trigger such an effect. In the meantime, this contrast is instructive, not merely as a word of caution when it comes to regarding contemporary impressions as the basis of a ‘Kunstwollen’ in the past, but also directly and positively. That is to say – when used with the necessary reservations – it indicates something of the direction that the original process may have pursued in the course of the detachment of aesthetic evocation from the feeling of convenience that comes with the expedient use of an object. Usefulness never completely disappears from the lived experience evoked, it just fades into a general utility and thereby into the background, into a basis.88 Naturally, during the time of immediate use, the degree in the proportion of both of these experiential components tends most strongly in the direction of the useful. The converse presupposes a relatively highly developed level of leisure and a relatively pronounced distance from real activity itself, so that real lived aesthetic experiences perhaps could not generally occur in the early stages of human development; in any case they did so only sparsely, by way of exception, ‘accidentally’ (in the sense defined above). The contradiction that thus comes into being (namely, the fact that activities that were not consciously intended towards the aesthetic and whose effect was likewise originally not predominantly aesthetic in character can nevertheless bring forth aesthetic constructs) proves to be only an apparent one upon closer inspection. Or rather, it proves to be the mode of appearance of the fundamental contradiction of human praxis in general, namely the expression of that structure of human behaviour that we have indicated in the motto of this book with the words of Marx: ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’. The objective detachment of the aesthetic from the merely useful and therefore from the agreeable can thus take place without immediately arousing lived aesthetic experiences in its producers and receivers. It is precisely in this regard that the distinction made by us between the adornment of implements and the decorative utilisation of ornamentation in 88

It is clear that such a distancing cannot occur at all in the case of direct body decoration; this can only occur in the case of the adornment of that which exists independently of the human body.

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architecture is of great significance. For this is where the objective process of detachment is carried out in principle. That is to say, as must be explained in detail later, architecture is no longer worldless. Crucial for it is the composition of its own inner and outer space that is not given in this way in nature and that man thus creates in keeping with his material and mental needs as these have socio-historically developed and in the creative intention and deliberate effect of which the evocation of lived experience is already immanently contained. In a way that is specific to it, this composition has the tendency to bring forth a ‘world’ adequate to man. The detachment and dissociation from the everyday is thereby objectively carried out, even if the conscious ideology of production and reception is still a magical or religious one. For even architecture aims at evocation here, although not in an aesthetic direction, of course. It distances itself from the everyday as well, even in a vastly more conspicuous and spectacular way than happens in the other arts; it can therefore objectively carry out this detachment from the everyday in a completely different way than that of the worldless adornment of implements. With that said, the fact that the aesthetic has still by no means been autonomously constituted already follows from these few remarks. In the final chapter of the first part, we will discuss its detachment from such an association with magic and religion at great length. It will become apparent there that this detachment certainly necessitates a more or less conscious ideological struggle, though this struggle is of a qualitatively different character from that involving the detachment from embeddedness in everyday praxis. We have shifted the coming into being of architecture here into the magicoreligious period, perhaps in a somewhat simplistic way. This simplification is valid insofar as the first genuinely aesthetic actualisations of architecture served magical or religious purposes. Even when there were secular buildings (castles, palaces, etc.), the principle of rule was, on the one hand, also based on very powerful magico-religious elements at first, which accordingly had to influence the nature of its artistic expressions as well; on the other hand, it was a question here too of public buildings, the form of which – even as an element of ‘use’ – included from the outset important aspects of ideological efficacy, of evocation. (Expression of irresistible power, making an impression through monumentality.) The growth of buildings for private residential purposes is, when looked at in terms of aesthetics, the result of a much later development. The use of ornamentation in architecture (thus in an art that is not worldless by its nature) does not abolish the worldlessness of ornamentation if one regards it in its being in and for itself; on the contrary, it is precisely this combination which quite clearly brings out its specificity. The principle of adornment receives its most adequate form here. It is no longer an ingredient for the use-

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ful practice of everyday life; instead, in this context the pure joy of adornment, its function of awakening pleasure and beautifying human life, rises to prominence without distractions. There is thus an aesthetic series that leads from bodily adornment to the adornment of implements and on to this point, precisely as a dissociation from everyday praxis. The fact that the role that ornamentation plays here is even an ancillary one (namely, to support the organising of space by means of architecture, to make the arrangement of the surfaces even more vivid through the decorative configurations of the parts, to emphasise and enliven nodal points of the construction, etc.) alters nothing in this state of affairs. Indeed, one can say that it is precisely from within that the worldlessness of ornamentation demands such a subsumption under a plastic art so as to be able to develop its own aesthetic essence in an unadulterated and complete way. We believe it is therefore not inappropriate to consider the aesthetic principles of ornamentation right here. At the same time, application to the other areas touched upon earlier comes about of its own accord, with the difference (which is not decisive here) that worldless ornaments can also decorate objects that are in themselves worldless. As was also already mentioned earlier, in doing so we take geometric forms as our starting point and even apprehend such forms so broadly that the plant and animal ornaments that in most cases arise later remain associated with the general concept of the geometric. For ultimately what remains dominant here too is a geometrically organised system of lines, regardless of whether these lines are only just lines or whether they also include convolutions and curvatures in which plants, animals, and even people as well are not depicted under the conditions of their own existence but are incorporated into a linear (or linearly chromatic) relationship of rhythms, proportions, symmetries, correspondences, etc. in which their shape, their movements, etc. turn into a mere component, into a mere aspect of the unity arising out of the geometrical arrangement. At the same time, it is not decisive whether, in terms of historical emergence in particular, the geometrical figure is the ‘abbreviation’ of an object taken from life or whether such an allegorical meaning is attributed to that figure retrospectively. Both can equally be found in individual cases, but this does not affect the fundamental question to which we are now turning: why do geometrical relationships generate an aesthetic pleasure, why do they possess a power to evoke feelings? (At the end of these observations, we will come back to the necessary relation between allegory and ornamentation separately.) It is readily understood that one has looked for the answer to this question from the geometrical side, although, as we will see, the aesthetic forces operative here grow beyond that which is merely geometrical very early on

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and overtake the seemingly rigid antithesis of the inorganic and the organic as mere ornamentation (as such, the purest form of worldless adorning) grows over into the generally decorative, into one of the constructive principles of the aesthetic in general. In this case, however, the geometrically ornamental is much more than a merely preliminary historical stage. The theoretical foundations of later, more developed stages already reveal their essence as a matter of principle here, so that egress from the geometrical is not only immediately understandable but also aesthetically correct. Ernst Fischer formulates the issue appropriately when he finds ‘that we reflect in ornament the lawful regularities of the inorganic and with them the beauty of the inorganic. The ornament is that amazing form in which one works only with vectors, with intervals of the same kind … This ornamentation manifestly preceded intuitive mathematics and numerals, just as pictographic writing did letters; in a certain sense, it appears to be mathematics that has become art’.89 Here he is looking for – with far-reaching, albeit relative justification – a reflection of the ‘order’ of nature in our consciousness, which indeed generally endeavours to reflect the order in society.90 Fischer singles out here (in our opinion, correctly) the principle of order as that which is essential in the aesthetic feeling of pleasure that ornamentation stimulates, and in complete accordance with our earlier expositions, he refers to the ‘labour- and life-promoting’ role that rhythm plays for people. What makes his extremely interesting expositions a little abstract is the somewhat overly brusque contrast of the organic and the inorganic on the one hand and of nature and society on the other. Control of the inorganic and of nature by man not only is a social process – and Fischer states this as emphatically as do our own observations – but also is inextricably associated with the development of man in this society, to the metabolism between society and nature. The young Marx expresses this state of affairs in an extraordinarily vivid way: ‘Just as plants, animals, stones, air, light, etc., theoretically form a part of human consciousness, partly as objects of science and partly as objects of art – his spiritual inorganic nature, his spiritual means of life, which he must first prepare before he can enjoy and digest them – so too in practice they form a part of human life and human activity …. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body’.91 On what, then, is the early, soon perfected, rich, and yet worldless character and effect of ornamentation based? On the basis of a fundamental law of socio-cultural development, we believe that this phenomenon results from the 89 90 91

Fischer 1949, p. 179. Fischer 1949, p. 180. Marx 1992a, pp. 327–8.

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particularity of the reflection of reality conditioned by this, in fact both in science and art. In the preface to Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel was the first to give a philosophically accurate description of this phenomenon. He assumes that his work has to express a new state of the world, and in what follows he then wants to accurately determine in objective and subjective terms the specific essential signs in the appearance of the new in history. He now assumes that ‘this new world is no more a complete actuality than is a new-born child’. Of course, the new is a product of variegated determinations and tendencies that were operative long before its clear emergence in the womb of the old world, but if it now acquires a shape, then this is ‘the whole which, having traversed its content in time and space, has returned into itself, and is the resultant simple concept of the whole’.92 On this account, the reflection of such a historical state of affairs in human consciousness necessarily has an abstract, esoteric character. In the Logic Hegel comes back to the same problem – this time purely from the standpoint of cognition – in which he now contemplates not so much the shape of the historically new as that of beginning to come to intellectual terms with reality. This beginning is the universal. ‘In the realm of actuality’, Hegel explains, ‘whether of nature or spirit, it is the concrete singularity that is given to subjective, natural cognition as first. But in a cognition which is a conceptual comprehension, at least inasmuch as it has the form of the concept for its basis, it is the simple, abstracted from the concrete, that on the contrary comes first, for only in this form does the subject matter have the form of a selfreferring universality and of an immediacy that accords with the concept’.93 He polemicises here against those who appeal to intuition, for the process he now describes has already incorporated and intellectually exceeded its standpoint. And the same situation results from subjective viewpoints as well: ‘If the issue is merely one of easiness, then it goes without saying that it is easier for cognition to grasp the abstract simple thought determination than to grasp a concrete subject matter which is a complex web of such thought determinations and relations’.94 Hegel likewise calls attention here – which already immediately touches on our problem – to the fact that even geometry does not begin with giving a shape to concrete space but rather with the simplest elements and forms (with the point, the line, the triangle, the circle, etc.). It is now likewise a generally known fact that, on the one hand, geometry was the first scientific activity of primitive man, the first application of sci92 93 94

Hegel 1977b, p. 7, translation modified. Hegel 2010, p. 713. Hegel 2010, p. 714.

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ence to praxis (long before its constitution as systematised cognition); and that, on the other, geometrical ornamentation undergoes its first flowering in the same period that agriculture comes into being and propagates. Of course, both tendencies are intimately related. For instance, Hambidge95 shows that the rectangle first turns up in land measurement and then is carried over into the building of temples, etc.96 The fact that this first conscious and intellectual control of reality – which, from the standpoint of mankind’s development, possesses a more enduring significance than all the far more dazzling artistic achievements of the hunter-gatherer period, even under particularly favourable conditions, as in southern France – has an abstract character in the Hegelian sense stated above does not have to be expressly proven, or so we hope. However, this abstractness receives a particular pathos under the conditions in which it initially becomes comprehended. Primitive man lives in a surrounding world that to a large extent is not controlled by him; it is just a very small corner that is now illuminated by the light of genuine cognition. Regardless, that this cognition was also initially interpreted in terms of magic and later even in terms of religion or mythology does not put it on the same level as some sort of magical pseudo-knowledge. Here too, one can only draw conclusions as to earlier development from later development: one currently ties the pathos of genuine cognition to mathematics or geometry, which was almost exclusively the case for millennia. This line extends from Pythagoras and Plato to Galileo’s new alphabet of nature and Spinoza’s more geometrico. This is the first abstract approach to genuine cognition (entirely in Hegel’s sense) at an unconcrete and as yet absolutely undeveloped stage. It is precisely in this abstractness, however, that it brings together the otherwise unattainably absolute accuracy of knowledge of objective reality with a sensuously evident, easily comprehensible visual clarity. If the aesthetico-ideological pathos that is irresistibly expressed in incipient artistic activity, which, as we have seen, has not yet been autonomously constituted, pushes in the direction of geometric ornamentation, then this is where the cause is to be sought. On the one hand, this unity of reliable and accurate cognition that is already attainable at a primitive stage with an immediate sensuously evident clarity connects what is achieved here to the basis of any science and art, to labour. On the other, precisely in and as a result of this abstractness, this indivisibly dual character of abstract conceptual precision

95 96

Edward John ‘Jay’ Hambidge (1867–1924), Canadian-born American artist and art theorist. [Eds.] Hambidge 1920, pp. 7–8. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.]

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and immediate sensuous obviousness in addition creates the possibility of lifting the thus-created constructs out of the heterogeneous diversity of everyday praxis and imparting to them that distance and specificity with respect to such praxis whereby they can become autonomous works of art. (We have already indicated that this is a lengthy process.) We now recall what Hegel has said about easiness in the apperception of abstraction in the case of the logical treatment of this complex. Precisely here is where the abstraction analysed by Hegel is transposed into something sensuously clear, in fact, not as a return – against which Hegel protests there – to the pre-conceptual sensuous immediacy of mere perception, but rather in such a way that intellectual determinations are completely included in this sensuous immediacy. The possibility that engineering can be considered a geometrico-scientific proof shows that immediately sensuous appearance adequately expresses the essence (what Hegel calls concept) here, indeed comes so close to it in a certain way that one can speak of their immediate unity, the immediate expression of essence by means of appearance. Only at a far more developed stage is this sensuous character philosophically analysed and the ‘dimensionlessness’ of the elements of geometry (point, etc.) brought into focus; thus, already from Plato. In that case, the disanthropomorphising character of even geometric clarity becomes conscious, and the separation of scientific and artistic reflection is also carried out here. Admittedly, in itself this duality is there from the outset, but this alters nothing in that original, longsurviving, emotive interrelatedness about which we have spoken up to now. Easiness of apperception, the overview of the whole, the reception of details thus already has a purely aesthetic character: that of a reflection of objective reality, though one whose intention goes beyond the scope of the most adequate transformation possible of the in-itself into a for-us. This must be included in it; here is precisely where one cannot reiterate emphatically enough that science and art reflect the same reality. As has already been explained, however, what comes into being in aesthetic reflection is such an image of the world in which the relatedness to man forms the indissoluble constitutive principle that for this very reason makes this relatedness immediately come alive by means of an evocative effect. This association with labour and science, along with the clear separation from them, is almost palpably present in geometrical ornamentation. The specificity of that aspect of reality that determines the geometrical method and makes possible its early emergence as science and as art underlies both the association and the difference. The autonomy of art in the exploration and control of reality by man is expressed here in a very vivid way. On the one hand, the attachment to science (as a result of the fact that they share the same object of reflection) shows to advantage in

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the fact that geometrical ornamentation in its actually developed form (above all in Egypt) anticipates in practical terms by a few thousand years the results of later science based on highly developed mathematics. Weyl shows that all the types of variability in the relationships resulting here, which only the mathematics of the twentieth century could explore and fathom in a scientifically accurate way, were already presented and actualised by Egyptian ornamentation.97 But, on the other hand, this congruence is an extraordinarily important – important in itself, particularly for the philosophy of art – retrospective cognition that reveals with irrefutable clarity the essence of the necessarily mutual object of reflection. From the standpoint of art as art, however, it is just a retrospective cognition, as it cannot add anything immediately decisive to the aesthetic essence of geometric ornamentation. Its inexhaustible variability is the source of its aesthetic effect, and in order to call this forth or to experience this, this cognition was neither necessary nor historically possible at that time. Admittedly, the real effect includes – in the sense indicated by us repeatedly – the unconscious endeavour, the unconscious feeling that any sort of connection at all with reality was produced here. As basis, as the impelling motor of creation and enjoyment, it has the lived experience of the incipient human control of nature, of the incipient order brought about by people who exhibited cognition in practice. But this ‘any connection at all’ fully suffices as an explanation of genesis and character. Because this is precisely where the congruity between art and science in the correct reflection of reality comes to the fore in such a clear form, because the congruity is objectively verifiable with precision, though subjectively – and this is likewise verifiable with precision – it can only have ‘unconscious’ sources, there results here a paradigm for art and science’s ‘marching separately, striking together’. In the case of the more direct and total, no longer worldless reflection of reality, these interdependencies are much more complicated. However, their foundation is the same, and that is why this instructive relation had to be particularly emphasised in this simple and abstract case. As we have seen, the simplicity and abstractness of ornamentation entails that appearance and essence seem to utterly coincide. This prominent convergence that is otherwise extremely rare in the object of the aesthetic in such an immediate way is based on the likewise abstract and sensuous character of the appearance and on the abstractness of the essence. But the latter must not be mixed up with contentlessness, as happened in the works of Kant. With the ingenuity of his philosophical eye for aesthetic issues, Kant clearly recognised the profound duality in the aesthetic formation being dis-

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Weyl 1952, pp. 103 ff. Also cf. pp. 49–52.

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cussed here, as he distinguished between ‘free beauty’ (pulchritudo vaga) and ‘merely adherent beauty’ (pulchritudo adhaerens). This ingenious eye, however, is clouded by his subjective idealism and the resulting inability to recognise the role of the reflection of reality in aesthetics. He has the legitimate aspiration to liberate the essence of the aesthetic from that immediate adherence to scientifico-philosophical cognition, as was the case in the works of Leibniz and his school, and to substantiate its autonomy philosophically. But, since he heedlessly disregards the phenomenon of reflection, he can only substantiate the essence of ‘free beauty’ in such a way that it ‘presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be’.98 That is why he becomes entangled in irresolvable contradictions when it comes to the concrete interpretation of this theory. On the one hand, he explains natural appearances (flowers, birds, etc.), which are not always correctly adduced, in an often almost sophistic way. In his discussion of crystals, Ernst Fischer has rightly traced their formedness back to objective natural laws and, within that realm, to the determinateness of form by means of content. On the other hand, in those places where Kant refers to ornamentation itself, he not only draws on subordinate modern examples (wallpaper, foliage, etc.) but also beholds in them a pure contentlessness in place of the abstract content offered by us. (We will later see that the conception of ‘adherent beauty’ is even more contradictory for the same reasons.) The abstract essence of geometric ornamentation is thus by no means, as Kant thinks, contentless or ‘without concept’ if the concept is also absorbed completely into an immediately sensuous clarity. The fact that it has no concretely objective content but rather merely that of an abstract ‘connection at all’ only brings about an extremely specialised character of the content, though not its complete absence. What is above all now expressed in the fact that an aura of the allegorical and the esoteric forms around this abstract ‘connection at all’ is this particular kind of content-relatedness. The pathos that pervades this manner of presentation as likeness, element, or part of the conquest of the world by means of geometry prevails in the powerful urge to interpret the abstract ‘connection at all’ in a concrete way and to restore it from its remoteness back to concrete reality. Geometrical forms are not organically connected to any concrete objectivity of real life, and when such forms of objectivity (plants, animals, people) appear in ornamentation, they too cannot have any particular concrete sensuous being-so but must represent mere hieroglyphs of their meaning, abstract abbreviations of their existence. All the more, considering it belongs

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Kant 2000, p. 114.

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to the essence of ornamentation to tear any object worked on by it out of the nexus of interdependencies of its natural surrounding world and to transfer it into – from this point of view – an artificial relationship. That is why the meaningful mental content of a purely ornamental construct can only be allegorical, a meaning that is completely transcendent with respect to the concrete sensuous forms of appearance. In most cases, reverse engineering in a truthful way the often magically or religiously esoteric interpretations of the geometrical forms that thus come into being is a task that is difficult for ethnology, art history, etc. to solve. Riegl already emphatically called attention to this difficulty.99 In the process, however, it escaped him that the true cause of this difficulty is in the essence of allegory itself, particularly when its interpretation is the privilege of a closed, mystery-guarding priest caste. Indeed, the allegorical is based precisely on the fact that, in the essence of objects themselves, no justified relationship exists between the sensuous visible nature of the presented objects and their compositional meaning that lays bare the whole of the work of art. As seen from this objectivity, any allegorical interpretation is more or less often completely arbitrary. On the other hand, in its original magical or religious form, allegorical interpretation assumes precisely that all appearances of reality can only express the sublime truth of the magical or the religious in an inadequate way as a matter of principle, whereby arbitrariness in the interpretation of the object (thus, from ‘below’) receives a confirmation from ‘above’. This converging dual tendency in allegory is so powerful that even in much later periods it still completely pushes through in relationships between appearance and essence that are no longer abstract. In the Christianity of the first centuries, such concise sensuous stories like those of the Old and New Testaments are interpreted in a purely allegorical way by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others.100 Of course, a qualitative difference exists between these two types of allegory. Whereas the last variety mentioned violates the essence of the artistic composition of the object with an allegorical interpretation or ignores its real meaning, the allegorical essence of geometrical ornamentation organically grows precisely out its aesthetic specificity itself. Together with its essence as abstract ‘connection at all’, the evocative effect of geometrical ornamentation brings forth – on the basis of the ideological pathos that affects this whole complex – out of immediate lived experience the need for allegorical interpretation. As results from this state of affairs by its own accord, this interpretation can indeed

99 100

Riegl 1992, p. 39. Ball 1955, p. 23.

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only be an arbitrary one when looked at in terms of content, though for this very reason it does not carry any violation of artistic essence and artistic praxis with it whatsoever. Boas brings up a large number of examples that show how one and the same geometrical figure was allegorically interpreted in terms of content in the very most diverse and conflictual ways.101 Naturally, such effects on contemporaries can no longer be reconstructed today. Even in the case of ethnographic data drawn from the lives of primitive peoples, doubt is quite warranted as to whether the present given interpretations are not very attenuated or even distorted forms of old traditions. Even Scheltema clearly and unequivocally speaks out on very similar states of affairs: ‘Understanding of the symbolic value of simple geometrical forms has been so completely lost to us that it is hardly likely that we can conceive a correct idea of the significance that the circular pattern with an accentuated centre under discussion here once possessed for our early ancestors’.102 Still less can the current lively effect of ornamentation also be immediately derived from the most accurate reconstruction of the original intention and thereby made understandable. By no means, however, does this rule out a mediated explanation. For, as we have tried to show, a definite objective structure of the works that came into being underlies these original creative tendencies, and this structure can determine the quality of the lasting effects over thousands of years. The character of the essence as an abstract ‘connection at all’ and the real existing relationship between appearance and essence are these formal structural foundations. Perhaps it seems as if this interpretation of the artistic effect of ornaments – construed as allegory – ran counter to our early claim that appearance and essence completely coincide in ornamentation. However, at the risk of anticipating what is to be expounded in concrete terms later, it must be borne in mind that all allegory ever and necessarily redoubles the essence that comes to light in the work of art. That is to say, there is then, on the one hand, a transcendent, allegorical, content-related, conceptually formulatable essence, towards which the totality of what is artistically shaped has to intend. On the other hand – if there really is a work of art involved – the dialectic of essence and appearance that sensuously arises there is not at all affected by it. It can be present normally, as in the example mentioned of stories from the Old and New Testaments. However, it is equally possible that this dialectic rises to prominence as a complete concurrence in the concrete sensuous composition of geometric ornaments. But that is why, even when its allegor-

101 102

Boas 1951, pp. 88 ff. Scheltema 1950, p. 59.

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ical significance has been irretrievably lost, geometric ornamentation is by no means stripped of all artistically relevant content. There continues to exist a significant meaningful content that creates its wealth and depth out of those sources of pathos in the human control of the outside world, out of the sensuously appearing effortlessness and intellectuality of the visible order that thus comes into being, which we described earlier. What is expressed in this is a general aesthetic law of lasting effects. All that has to be said in advance here is that even in the case we are now discussing of geometrical ornamentation, where the first evidence temptingly seems to suggest that aesthetic effect has purely formal bases, the real foundation of effect is still – ultimately – conditioned in terms of content. Of course – and this applies to all aesthetic effects – this effect is directly mediated and triggered by the system of forms at that time. The unity of content and form in aesthetics, the specific nature of artistic form (namely, that it is always the form of a particular, unique content) is expressed precisely in this direct mediating role of form between the work and receptivity, in the fact that the receptive person is directly affected by formal effects, though in his lived experience these overturn in an instant into something content-related so that he thinks he is succumbing to content-related effects. We cannot possibly discuss here the intricate interdependencies between content and form that become operative over the course of the historical fate of a work, genre, art, etc. All that can be pointed out briefly is that, as a result of their continuous dialectical interactions, content-related effects in the seemingly purely formal effect of geometrical ornamentation emanate precisely from the abstract ‘connection at all’ of the presented essence, from the all at once sensuous and abstract intellectual manner of the existing world of appearances. As shown, these content-related effects cannot possibly be identical with the autochthonous ones, if only because the allegorical meaning is no longer decipherable, but even then, it could no longer say anything artistic or evocative to us today. We already referred to mood-content by quoting from Stefan George’s poem. For a long time, however, even this mood-content is not so indeterminate as it may appear to be at first glance; indeed, we have already discussed its ideological bases. Even if it cannot be concretely fixed in place in terms of object and content – and this belongs precisely to the aesthetic nature of ornamentation – then very clear form-content determinations nevertheless underlie it. (A problem that is very important for the whole of aesthetics turns up here at a supremely abstract level for the first time. Namely, the issue that the active content of the work of art, what pertains to its concrete objectivity, can be extraordinarily indeterminate and interpretable in very different ways without its actually being – in an aesthetic sense – indeterminate, indeed without a Kantian disinterestedness having to take its place. The fact that this

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issue turns up here in connection with the allegorical essence of ornamentation does not mean that it would be unable to come into being again in an essentially modified way even at concretely more developed levels, especially in music but not solely in it.) The sensuously appearing abstractness of these aesthetic determinations, which merges into sensuousness but is not abolished by it, entails that its conceptual description must have a predominantly negative character; that is to say, one can correctly outline that which is positively aesthetic only by starting from negations. As it was in the relationship between appearance and essence, so too is it in the further step towards concretisation: ornamentation has no depth. We know this word is ambiguous, yet we hope to be able to show that in the present aesthetic state of affairs it denotes an important side of the matter itself, both in a literal sense and in a metaphorical one (the latter of which generally came into effect by means of long historical praxis). The literal sense can be easily discussed. It belongs to the essence of geometric ornamentation to be two-dimensional. Precisely that immediate obviousness in the concurrence of meaning and sensuousness would be lost with the inclusion of the dimension of depth: the triangle, the circle, etc. can be inseparably themselves and partial aspects of a decorative ornamental surface, whereas in its necessarily perspectival reproduction, a cube represents the reflection of concrete objectivity, in which the scientifically illustrative and the artistically formative principles already brusquely come apart here. We will later see that that the growing over of the ornamental principle into the decorative in the broadest sense is connected to a certain tolerance for the dimension of depth, that of course at the same time a clash of contradictions takes place in which the decorative principle stands in for the tendency to sublate actually existing configurations of the third dimension in the ultimate effect of a surface. Such a struggle-filled contradiction is not yet present in the pure ornament. We have already pointed out that the ornamental use of animals or plants takes this real, lively objectivity and completely homogenises it with the geometric elements of the rest of ornamentation, which now admittedly also makes use of curved geometric lines, and transforms them into pure ornaments. These too merely have a visible existence at all here, even if this existence is objectively somewhat more concretely determined than that of merely ornamental ornaments. When the formal effect is one that is mediated in terms of content, the unity turns over into a fairytale-like mood in contrast to that of life. More complicated issues turn up with the broadened metaphorical version of depth. However, our last remarks have brought us close to their solution because the reduction of a living things to ornamental outlines (as we have already seen, this is necessarily linked to the fact that they are no longer artist-

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ically reflected in their natural surrounding world, that the interdependencies of their existence with this surrounding world are treated as non-existent) amounts to the expunging of their real problems in life, of the real antagonisms of life from the artistic constructs that are thus shaped. But with that said – and this is the crux of the matter – all that is negative in the dialectical sense is eliminated from the ambit of ornamental composition as a matter of principle. These privative facts, however, already put the truth of the metaphorical formulation of depth clearly and concretely before us: for what do we regard as depth in art, no matter what it may concern? The answer is quite obvious: such a reflection of reality that faithfully shapes the contradictoriness of life in all its decisive determinations, in their completely unfolded dynamism. The greater the unified tension of such concrete contradictions is, the deeper the work of art will be. It is a proper use of language when one tends to confer the attribute of depth precisely to those artists who ruthlessly go to the end in this respect: thus, Dante and Rembrandt; thus, Shakespeare and Beethoven. A concrete and animated contradiction, however, is inconceivable without consistency in the formation of the negative. Engels justifiably emphasises – for the field of philosophical thinking, of course, though his findings are easily applicable to art as well – that Feuerbach is shallow compared to Hegel because in the treatment of the negative he lags far behind him in terms of concreity and consistency.103 In these observations made by Engels, the thing that is especially important for us is the fact that the antithesis of depth and shallowness is inextricably linked to the way the negative is treated in the life of mankind. However, it is likewise worth mentioning – since, as one cannot repeat often enough, art and science reflect the same reality – how Engels attaches as much weight to the historical concreity and relativity of the negative as he does to its central significance in social development. No art that wants to adequately reflect concrete social reality can disregard this set of problems without facing the valid rebuke of a shallowness, a flatness, a trivialisation of reality. Only architecture is an exception. However, since the reasons for that are – despite certain affinities to the issue being discussed here – different by nature, if only because this art (despite its ineptness in expressing the negative) is still not worldless, as ornamentation is, we can discuss the absence of the negative in architecture only by analysing architecture. Now the particular position of ornamentation is based on the fact that it is located on this side of the dilemma of artistic composition arising from this situation. The absence of any negativity here is no evasion of its composition

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but is, to the contrary, a necessarily principled specificity of this manner of formation. Accordingly, the likewise necessary lack of depth resulting from this does not include any tendency towards a flatness or shallowness but on the contrary expresses an entirely specific aspect of reality. We have already outlined its essence, at least as far as its main features are concerned. The contentrelated components of this forming now enter more clearly into the light of day: in the process, the likewise already mentioned fairytale-like effect receives, to use a phrase of Friedrich Hebbel’s,104 the accent of a beauty that exists before dissonance, the reflection of a reality that never existed in real concreity in this way, which the legends of nearly all peoples described as the golden age, as paradise lost. Of course, a certain shift of inflection is already included therein with respect to the original geometrico-cognitive, reality-conquering pathos, as the forward-looking quality of the latter receives the aftertaste of a harmony possessed only once. In the meantime, this antithesis, which in any real plastic art would be an irresolvable one, is here not much more than a swaying between different emotionally tinged determinations. At the same time, both poles have a common foundation: the being-singled-out of objects and their relationships from normal reality as, on the one hand, these shed their natural surrounding world while the immediately privative act imparts to them new, otherwise non-existent linkages; and as, on the other, both these objects and their relationships are attuned into the fullest homogeneity with respect to each other, and this order – in relation to the real objectivity of life, an accidental one – is in itself supremely lawful. Ornamentation thus appears as the well-ordered likeness of an essential aspect of reality, as the sensuously manifest abstraction of an order at all. Vis-à-vis normal reality, ornamentation receives the character of something provisional, the sentimental expressions of which are the poles indicated above, without losing its character as reality at all. This provisional, real-unreal character intensifies even more when we regard ornamentation from a different, previously untreated viewpoint: that of its materiality. Earlier, we alluded to the scholastic dispute between Semper and Riegl over how it came into being. On the one hand, it is indeed historically accurate that all ornamentation grows out of technical labour, but it is not possible to derive ornamentation’s aesthetic principles simply and straightforwardly from any given technique. On the other, the ‘Kunstwollen’ that is exclusively opposed to technical genesis is a vacuous, unhistorical, and metaphysical concept that ignores historical interdependencies (even with technique) and in a hypostasising manner thus appends a made-up cause to the final result 104

Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863), German poet and dramatist who was a formative touchstone for Lukács in his first published book, A History of the Development of Modern Drama (1909). [Eds.]

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of actual development. In reality, each ornament is the indivisible unity of the most intimate material authenticity and the most free-floating immateriality. The former is easy to see. For as little as the genesis of ornamentation is directly deducible from the development of technique alone, it is still clear that the execution of geometrically exact figures in a wide variety of materials (textile fabric, ceramics, stoneworking, ivory carving, etc.) presupposes a high level of control over matter. In fact, not just technical perfection in general but precisely a concern that what accordingly rises to prominence are the visualisable possibilities of the material respectively being worked on. What thus comes into being is new nuance of technique that qualitatively goes beyond the scope of practical purposiveness in the control of matter, without giving this purposiveness up (indeed, this gets developed even further) as it discovers the optimal possibilities that are immediately effective visually in the constitution of the material and develops the bringing-out of these possibilities to completion. These possibilities are different in each material so that the actualisation of the same goal (of geometric visibility, clarity, order, precision, etc.) calls for and brings forth different lines of technico-artistic development. What we have named the immateriality of effect seemingly includes an objective and treatment of a completely opposite sort. And, as a matter of fact, operative here is a real dialectical contradiction that is fruitful for artistic development and spurs it on. We have just gotten to know the components of materiality. Immateriality is most closely related to the basic geometric character of ornamentation, to its already thoroughly discussed worldless essence. The contradiction’s basis is already contained within the geometric itself, namely as the contradiction between its immediate sensuous obviousness and the knowledge that the figures that are indeed produced and depicted can never exactly correspond to their own mathematical definitions as a matter of principle; as we have seen, Plato already pointed this out. For science, the solution is clear: the only truth is the mathematically formulated essence; sensuous presentation increasingly turns into – predominantly pedagogic – illustration, in which the necessary deviations are simply ignored. Of course, a maximal approximation is striven for in the case of purely technical application. In art, however, the sensuous appearance turns into the indissoluble form of appearance that the essence takes. Immediate sensuous obviousness merely sees to it that the ‘idea’ of the geometrical construct is evocatively called forth; the deviations that exist in themselves and that are so important for science do not come into consideration here at all. For that very reason, however, ‘ideationality’ is immanently contained in the sensuous construct; brings about its immaterial nature, which is lifted out of real life; and makes it into those components of dialectical contradiction in the aesthetics of the ornament about which we are talking.

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The aesthetic character is now expressed in the fact that this tendency can also be extended without much trouble to elements of ornamentation that are no longer purely geometric (plants, animals, etc.). For the homogeneous and homogenising essence of ornamentation focuses exactly on imparting such an ‘ideationality’ to all shaped objects. This appears as a visually striking reduction to the level of that which is most sparingly necessary in the plain recognisability of the object concerned and in its isolation from any natural surrounding world. Each object is purely on its own, and its compositional connections have nothing in principle to do with its own objectivity as such. It is clear that such a mode of presentation still enhances the already existing in itself ‘ideationality’ of geometric forms. It is equally clear, however, that such a consciously one-sided emphasising of that which is ‘essential’ in the plants or animals interwoven into the composition – an emphasising which at most visually captures a conspicuously incisive characteristic, though it is does not endeavour at all to make its real essence visible as such, and which settles for the instantaneously suggestive recognisability and insertability into an order of the whole that is foreign to objects – only further reinforces the dematerialising, supremely deobjective character. At the very least, the not geometrical components of the ornament are thus as ‘ideational’ as the purely geometric ones are; more precisely, what comes into being is a homogeneous milieu of such ‘ideationality’, of such dematerialisation. As we can see, the contradiction announced by us therefore indeed exists here. It now only comes down to determining its nature somewhat more closely. For it is essentially different from similar contradictions in the plastic arts. For instance, if an image wants to render visible the levitation of a figure with painterly means (as in the Sistine Madonna, Titian’s Assunta, etc.), then it must express a real objectivity – with weight contained within it – a real movement, etc., so that this in itself impossible direction of movement obtains a sensuous obviousness within a world of real objects. It is thus a question of a contradiction that penetrates deeply into the objective constitution of each image-element; that hence, in the sense of Hegelian logic, belongs to the dialectic of essence which discloses the internal contradictoriness of the whole and the part, of appearance and essence, etc.; that springs from the general interrelatedness of all with all; and that poses the contradiction within the materiality shaped by the painting itself and brings it to a solution. Against this, the contradiction in ornamentation is – in comparison to painting, for instance – extrinsic. As is a necessary result of what has been expounded up to now, ornamental objects that have been brought into view have no materiality of their own. All they have in common in a composition is the materiality of the whole (thus wood, stone, ivory, etc.), and because these objects lack their

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own materiality, those tensions that we have indicated in the case of painting cannot come into being. The movedness that ensues as a result of the composition knows neither the dimensions and laws of motion of the real world nor the directions determined by them. It is no more than a guide for the eye of the receptive person that offers rhythmic alternations, a rhythmic hovering, etc. Therefore, the immateriality of ornamentation portrayed earlier conflicts with the materiality of the matter (stone, ivory, etc.), with its being worked on in a way that it is authentic to the material, but not with a shaped materiality of the objects. That is why the contradiction can only just be extrinsic, a ‘passing-over into another’ that Hegel called the attribute of the lowest level of the dialectic, of the ‘sphere of being’ (in contrast to that of essence).105 In the aesthetic sphere of ornamentation, this contradiction is hence of a necessarily subjective character. That is to say, it is not the subjective reflection of a contradiction intrinsically prevailing in the composition itself, as in the examples cited from painting just now, but rather a contradiction that comes into being just in the reception of the work, though it is of course necessarily brought forth by its objective structure. That is why this last revealed contradiction can fit completely into the series of what was expounded earlier. Indeed, for the first time it proves to be entirely clear here that all of these contradictions just indicate different sides of the same factual connection again and again, and thereby concretise it. The worldlessness of ornamentation thereby ascends from that negative, seemingly just privative significance that it necessarily had to have in our first mention of it. It now appears as a thoroughly positive, content-suffused property of art, as its particular, extremely varied, internally ripe, multifaceted character of generating evocations – a character that is in no way exhausted in a formalistically abstract system of pure formrelations. For in fact its formal structure grows out of the urge to communicate essential contents and is suited to evoke a variety of content artistically. Despite successful and important attempts here and there to overcome Kantian aesthetics, Schiller nevertheless often remains caught up in it and especially could never entirely leave behind the principled contentlessness and foreignto-matter quality of ‘pure form’. Yet he gives a suggestive description of this beauty of the work of art in his poem ‘The Ideal and Life’. It is factually wrong and misleading if one relates it, as Schiller wants to do, to the whole of art, particularly to the plastic arts. However, it does give – inadvertently – a marvelous poetic description of what we have been expounding as the positive content of the ornament’s worldlessness:

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Piercing even into Beauty’s sphere, In the dust still lingers here Gravitation, with the world it sways; Not from out the mass, with labour wrung, Light and graceful, as from nothing sprung, Stands the image to the ravish’d gaze. Mute is ev’ry struggle, ev’ry doubt, In the certain glow of victory; While each witness hence is driven out Of frail man’s necessity.106 We already spoke of the early perfection of ornamentation at the beginning of these observations. At the same time, it is not just a matter of ornamentation’s coming into being early nor does it simply come down to the fact that, as we have emphasised by basing ourselves on Weyl, under favourable conditions ornamentation artistically realised all of the variations conceptually possible around a few millennia before scientific thinking was capable of theoretically comprehending it. Rather, it is a question of a position towards reality, of a way of aesthetically reflecting this reality that bears the specific features of the early stages of human development in itself. In addition, this view is corroborated by the particularity of the dialectical contradictions underlying it and determining its specificity. As we have seen, these contradictions subjectively spring from those objective contradictions that tend to occur at relatively low levels in the internal organisation of matter; geometry, which has become so important here, also belongs in this group. What becomes visible here is something that we explained in another context: the historical convergence and divergence of scientific and artistic categories within the reflection of the same reality. We showed there that the higher levels of disanthropomorphising diverge from the sensuous human apperception of objective reality to such an extent that aesthetic categories can no longer correspond with the new categories discovered by these higher levels of disanthropomorphising. Here, by contrast, we have to do with a high point of convergence. For all the differences in the functions indicated by us that geometry carries out in scientific or aesthetic reflection, such an extraordinary and immediately obvious commonality exists between the two as will never again be found again in another formal element of reflection. A reason for the early perfection of geometric ornamentation also resides

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Schiller 1875, p. 198. [Eds.]

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therein. This explains what we earlier called its ‘primitive’ character. For such an intimate convergence of the scientific and the aesthetic reflection cannot recur at a more developed stage. Expressed in this is an elemental, primeval unity of human skills, the fact that later differentiations do not yet exist. Yet it is already no longer a matter of a confused intermixture that indicates one’s being at the mercy of the surrounding world; instead, it comes down to the incipient control of this surrounding world in all of its marvelous definiteness, precision, and abstractness. The plastic arts in the proper sense (arts that have hence left the worldlessness of mere ornamentation behind as well) are governed by dialectical contradictions of a higher order, by more complicated compositional principles. Now since the aesthetic feeling of later periods, both in the case of creators and receivers, was formed by such a development of the arts, the nuance of primitiveness (in the positive aesthetic sense) is also added to the moodaccents of ornamentation as the art of the childhood of mankind (childhood conceived here in a specific, even more incisive sense than in the interpretation of Greek art offered by Marx). Therefore, primitiveness here does not amount to an undeveloped stage of artistic conception or even of technique, as can be the case in the beginnings of the plastic arts. On the contrary, it comes down to a perfection of form that one finds to be no longer attainable again and whose basis is such a unity of form and content as one can no longer realise under the complicated social and mental conditions of later times. This too is an effect that ornamentation could not possibly exert on its contemporaries, though it is not arbitrary all the same, for it derives from the necessary content-form relationship of ornamentation itself. This particular nuance first comes to the fore late as a result of historical development, the place of ornamentation in it, and historical changes in social conditions and their influence on art, its enjoyment, and receptivity to it. Such shifts in the mood-content of effects are a general appearance in art history; their causes, their adequacy to the aesthetic essence of works or their – relative – contingency in relation to this essence can only be discussed in detail in the historical materialist part of aesthetics. We will later come back to the particular philosophical presuppositions or consequences of shifts of this sort. Nevertheless, when we refer to this problem here, we are doing so, on the one hand, in order to show how greatly ornamentation, which seems to be so purely formal, is determined in a content-related and ideological way; on the other, because in recent decades geometricising art has come back ‘into fashion’, though by means of a theory that resolutely turned all historical and aesthetic issues on their head while nevertheless acquiring a certain significance as an expression

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of influential tendencies of modern decadence. That is why it seems unavoidable to us that we should briefly grapple with the viewpoints of this conception of art. The most famous and influential work of this sort is Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. Of course, we cannot analyse his overall aesthetic outlook here. It need be only pointed out in passing that with this titular contrast he opposes from the outset the reflection of reality by means of art, as in his works actually artistic realism does not appear as the antithetical concept to abstraction; instead, subjectivist impressionistic ‘empathy’ (Vischer,107 Lipps,108 etc.) does. Worringer’s brusque rejection of any reflection of reality is clearly expressed in one important place. He says: ‘The banal theories of imitation, which our aesthetics has never shaken off, thanks to the slavish dependence of the whole content of our culture upon Aristotelian concepts, have blinded us to the true psychic values which are the point of departure and the goal of all artistic creation’.109 Worringer’s particular modern decadent position is expressed here in the fact that in ‘abstraction’ he beholds not only a starting point for artistic activity, which is correct, but also the goal of all art. In terms of its politics of art, Worringer’s book is accordingly a theoretical anticipation of expressionism, whose champion he later became. In this book, however, the dialectic of overall artistic development is already reduced to a struggle between impressionism and expressionism, in which Worringer likewise joins the ranks of those imperialist ideologues who strive to ‘dethrone’ antiquity and the Renaissance in order to put in their place the art of primitive peoples as well as that of the East, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Worringer’s overall view should be shown in brief so that his theory of ‘abstraction’, which is naturally based on geometrical ornamentation, will be understandable in its full significance as a historico-aesthetic interpretation of the latter. Worringer’s theoretical foundation is the antithesis between being at home in the world and fearing it; the first founds empathy, the second abstraction. As the first type, classical antiquity ‘is nothing other than a total anthropomorphisation of the world’.110 ‘Man was at home in the world and felt himself its centre’, he offers in another place.111 Worringer ‘forgets’ here the trifling matter

107 108 109 110 111

Robert Vischer (1847–1933), German philosopher credited with introducing the concept of Einfühlung [empathy]. [Eds.] Theodor Lipps (1851–1914), German philosopher and psychologist who extended the concept of Einfühlung from aesthetics to the social sciences more broadly. [Eds.] Worringer 1963, p. 127. Worringer 1963, p. 128. Worringer 1963, p. 102.

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that, as we have shown, it is precisely the philosophers of classical Greece who were the first conscious fighters for the disanthropomorphisation of human thinking and that precisely this was the source of their polemics against art. Of course, Worringer cannot be bothered by such trifling matters for he indeed sets himself the grand task of substituting for the superficial ‘intra-mundaneity (immanence)’ of antiquity the ‘supra-mundaneity (transcendence)’ of a different, true art.112 However, these are merely the general ideological foundations; the essential thing for Worringer is what subjectively results from them. For his dispute between man and world is in reality between instinct and understanding. And Worringer does not hesitate to make his decision for the ‘transcendent’ worldview in the sense of irrationalism, of the supremacy of the ‘instinctive’: ‘The instinct of man, however, is not reverent devotion to the world, but fear of it. Not physical fear, but a fear that is of the spirit. A kind of spiritual agoraphobia in the face of the motley disorder and caprice of the phenomenal world’.113 With that said, Worringerian theory at once goes beyond a merely historicoaesthetic explanation of geometrical ornamentation. Indeed, the basic principles of this theory are said to be those of genuine, of transcendent art: ‘Thus all transcendent art sets out with the aim of de-organicising the organic, i.e. of translating the mutable and conditional into values of unconditional necessity. But such a necessity man is able to feel only in the great world beyond the living, in the world of the inorganic. This led him to rigid lines, to inert crystalline form’.114 The geometric art of the inorganic is thus far more than a certain variety of art that is fully justified within the scope of its principles; rather, it is art’s very model: that which is inorganic and hostile to life is the great goal towards which any genuine art strives. The anti-human is thus declared to be the great, guiding principle of life and art: the urge to abstraction is characterised ‘as an urge to seek deliverance from the fortuitousness of humanity as a whole, from the seeming arbitrariness of organic existence in general, in the contemplation of something necessary and irrefragable. Life as such is felt to be a disturbance of aesthetic enjoyment’.115 Worringer does not stand alone in this conception; the motley ranks of its heralds extend from Paul Ernst116 to Malraux.117 Here are just a few characteristic remarks by Ortega y Gasset: ‘And when we seek to ascertain the

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Worringer 1963, p. 101. Worringer 1963, p. 129. Worringer 1963, pp. 133–4. Worringer 1963, p. 24. Paul Ernst (1866–1933), German novelist, essayist, and dramatist. [Eds.] André Malraux (1901–1976), French novelist, theorist of art, and statesman. [Eds.]

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most general and most characteristic feature of modern artistic production we come upon the tendency to dehumanize art’.118 Ortega y Gasset further shows that the ‘the new sensibility’ in art is dominated ‘by a disgust for human elements’.119 And from this situation he draws the important conclusion that was only immanently present in the works of his predecessors: ‘Modern art, on the other hand, will always have the masses against it. It is essentially unpopular; moreover, it is antipopular’.120 Of course, it is not our task here to grapple with this new art and its theory. After all, it is obvious to any unbiased observer that, as different as they may otherwise be, very important twentieth-century art movements (expressionism, cubism, neue Sachlichkeit, abstract art, etc.) are extremely closely related to these anti-humanist art theories both in terms of their worldview and their artistic presuppositions. The issue that is especially of interest to us here is how all of these human developmental tendencies are falsified in such theories of decadence. It is generally proclaimed by these trends that the objectivity of science and the objective contradictoriness of being not only are to be regarded as an irrationality that is hostile to man but also, precisely as such, should be made into an ideal.121 Identifications of the increasing disanthropomorphising of knowledge with an anti-humanity of scientific knowledge in general, of the nature of objective reality independent of man, with its character of being inimical to man, have already long since become dogmas for those who shrink from the consequences of a scientific disanthropomorphisation that has been consistently carried through to its end. This panic was first broadly and effectively expressed by Pascal. It is not accidental that he is the contemporary of that revolutionary upheaval in mathematics and the natural sciences to which we already alluded earlier, nor is it accidental that as a scientist he ranks among its trailblazers. However, it is also not accidental that he ideologically shies away from its consequences and looks for a world of humanity in the Christian world after science has dehumanised the world and stripped it of its divine nature. What thereby already turns up in Pascal is the motif of fear. But not before social development has advanced so far that the ruling class and its intelligentsia already perceive it as completely dehumanised does angst turn into a cornerstone of retrograde ideology, does its perverse affirmation and suicidal idealisation turn into a reigning motif in the thinking and art of decadence. Worringer and his like-minded cohort express this attitude towards life. 118 119 120 121

Ortega y Gasset 1956, p. 19. Ortega y Gasset 1956, p. 27, translation modified. Ortega y Gasset 1956, p. 5. For more on these general philosophical trends, cf. Lukács 1980a.

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We have seen how the foundations of his conception of abstract forms, of the aesthetic essence of these forms, and of their historical efficacy are related. The seductive effect of such theories is conditioned by their mixture of half-truths and distortions, of course on the basis of a conceptualisation (of an ‘ontologising’) of decadence’s mode of feeling. A moment ago, we uncovered such a unity of half-truth and distortion: the heaping together of the fearsome inhumanity of reality (in capitalism) with the disanthropomorphisation of knowledge of the world through the advances of science. A second mixture of this sort is the hypostatisation of fear into a leader of the muses of genuine art and into the ‘primal feeling’ of mankind at the same time, both at the beginning and the end of mankind’s career. Needless to say, it is true that fear played a tremendous role in the life of prehistoric man. However, it is simply false and distorts the facts when Worringer wants to let us behold the original expression of this fear precisely in geometrical ornamentation (and thereby indirectly in geometry itself). The remnants of magic eloquently testify to the power of such a fear, but, as was already shown here, it is precisely the discovery of geometrical order, of geometrical lawfulness (in everyday praxis, science, and art), that is a first step towards freeing ourselves at least partially from this fear, which sprang from the incapacity of people to control natural forces. As we have shown, the intellectual and emotional effects of this emancipation from fear reverberate in the ideology from a few thousand years after this emancipation gradually took place. It does not matter that the first attempts to control reality by means of mathematics and geometry were also accompanied by magical representations; that is generally characteristic for the first period of mankind’s development. At the same time, the relation of man to the inorganic world is turned on its head by means of views like Worringer’s. The conquest of objective reality, the first steps of which take place here, turns into a ‘spiritual dread of space’;122 the inorganic world (in the already quoted words of Marx, ‘man’s inorganic body’) turns into the embodiment of a principle that is inimical to man. The worldfeeling of imperialist decadence is thus projected into the prehistoric times of human development, and the hypostasis thus achieved serves to portray the way of feeling in this time of decay as the expression of the most authentic human essence, of true art. And finally: the Worringerian generalisation of geometric ornamentation into a foundational principle of any true art is again a mixture of half-truth and total distortion. We have already demonstrated the latter. The half-truth consists in the fact that, in the course of development,

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Worringer 1963, p. 15. [Eds.]

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certain achievements of ornamentation in principle turn into co-determining components of art in general. We will first be able to concretely deal with this issue later. In fact – and this statement of grounds already includes a refutation of Worringer’s theory as a matter of principle – because the tendencies of ornamentation that have become generally operative in the course of this process largely overcome and leave behind their actual, strict geometrico-inorganic character. They turn into an artistically co-determining factor in the reflection of objective reality, above all of man and his world therein. What thus takes place – even in the Gothic, even in the Baroque, etc. – is precisely the opposite of what Worringer supposes: ornamentation does not impose its inorganic laws on an organic (human) reality that is artistically reflected. Instead, the principles growing out of ornamentation cling to the principles of a concrete objective reflection of reality and turn into the formal elements of a no longer abstract, no longer worldless art. It goes without saying that this process can take place only on the basis of dialectical contradictoriness. We can come back to the concrete contradictions once we move into a context that has itself become concrete. Such issues involving the genesis and nature of ornamentation possess a significance of a generally aesthetic sort, thus one that leads beyond the philosophical analysis of its coming into being. That is to say, the worldlessness of ornamentation (and not merely that of purely geometrical ornamentation) brings forth a seemingly simple relationship to its social basis and its development that is in reality much more complicated than that of arts which concretely shape reality. For these arts, socio-historical development itself furnishes the particular content at the time, not only for the reflection of reality but also for its changes in aesthetic form; no Homer is conceivable who could somehow anticipate the possibilities of design of a Thomas Mann. However, precisely because of its abstract and worldless mode, such an anticipation exists in ornamentation to a much greater degree. The immediate connection to earlier achievements of formation or their spontaneous reproduction under altered social circumstances (the almost unaltered continuation of old traditions) possessed and possesses here a far more expansive room for manoeuvre than is the case in the other arts. Of course, one should not conceive of this room for manoeuvre as being without limit. What is again to be emphatically referred to here is our earlier finding that human adornment, in contrast to that of animals, is of a social, and not a biological, character, that this social foundation has a greater effective range the farther the adorning is removed from the everyday and the more it is constituted into an art form. This entails that social development strongly influences the possibilities for the emergence and effect of ornamentation as well. Historical materialist research into art his-

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tory has to reveal the principles on which are based those moments when this change becomes productive for ornamentation and those when sterility must occur. Here it must only be pointed out that at the same time it is a question of objective constellations, of the objective possibilities of such a mode of reflecting reality and the formal system growing out of it. By no means does it depend on Wollen, on the human resolve of a certain period. Indeed, we have seen how great a significance Worringer ascribes to ornamentation, and we likewise are aware that – since Jugendstil – a wide variety of artistic tendencies have sought to create new contemporary ornamentation. We have already grappled with Worringer’s theory, and noting the failure of all of these mentioned attempts is already a commonplace today. Thus, for example, the so-called abstract art movement brings forth a pseudo-ornamentation: it vulgarises and distorts the reflection of reality into the pseudo-ornamental and pseudo-decorative without discovering something actually new at all in real ornamentation. What is clearly expressed in these facts is the objectivity of the foundations mentioned just now. In order to be able to realise such formal systems in a way that is more than ephemerally fashionable, a period must possess the ideological preconditions of ornamentation from its own social life, from the specific mode of reflecting reality conditioned by this social life. Theories, resolutions, programs, etc. can then only become fruitful if they bring the fruitful tendencies of social life itself to mind. As has already been pointed out repeatedly, it is precisely this objectivity of the foundations that indicates how much this seemingly so purely formal art is nevertheless ultimately determined by meaningful content.

chapter 5

Issues of Mimesis i: The Coming into Being of Aesthetic Reflection 1

General Issues of Mimesis

If we now pass over to the other, decisive source of art (that is to say, ‘imitation’), we do not enter a new field from the standpoint of a general epistemology. For our analysis has certainly shown that even the so-called abstract forms are modes of reflecting objective reality. As significant as the distinction between both of these kinds of comportment may even be from the standpoint of aesthetics, they nevertheless remain subspecies of one and the same genus: the reflection of reality. Especially in the case of ‘imitation’ this hardly requires an explanation, because imitation can surely mean nothing else than translating the reflection of a phenomenon of reality into one’s own praxis. That is why it is easy to understand that ‘imitation’ in the broadest sense of the word is a fundamental and generally common fact for any highly organised creature. We find it as a general appearance in nearly all higher animals: at this stage the handing over of meaningful experiences from elders to youth cannot yet take place in any other form than that of imitation. Not only the play of young animals, which is based on imitating the movements and comportments of adults in emergencies in life, but also, for example, the way swallows instruct their young in flying before the migration south belong in this category. Imitation is therefore the basic fact of any highly organised life, which in active interdependency with its surrounding world can no longer be limited to mere unconditioned reflexes. Pavlov says that ‘the animal would be able to subsist by itself with the help of unconditioned reflexes if the outside world were constant’.1 For this reason, the preserving and passing on of meaningful experiences that are indispensable for the life of the species can take place only by means of imitation. It is indispensable for fixing the conditioned reflexes in place, since it is the most effective means of adjusting to the surrounding world, of controlling one’s own body and one’s own movements (one of the most important means in bringing the surrounding world under control).

1 Pavlov 1973, p. 98. [Eds.]

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In the case of man as well, imitation as a basic fact of both life and art is based on such a natural foundation – of course, in the latter instance, through complicated and far-reaching mediations. That is why antiquity, for which the theory of reflection was not yet furnished with the stigma of materialism but – as in the works of Plato – still constituted a fundamental component of objective idealism, unreservedly recognised in its great thinkers (it suffices to point to Plato and Aristotle) imitation as a basis for life, thinking, and artistic activity. Only when the philosophical idealism of modern times saw itself thrust into such a defensive crouch vis-à-vis materialism that it was forced to discard the theory of reflection in order to salvage the priority of consciousness with respect to being – as that which has been produced by consciousness – did the theory of reflection turn into a scholastic taboo. With respect to this fundamental position, it is entirely indifferent for our problem whether it is a question of subjective or objective idealism, whether the producing of reality by consciousness is thought of in a Berkeleyan or Humean, in a Kantian or Husserlian form. The consequences of taking such an idealist position are readily apparent. If the reflection of objective reality independent of consciousness no longer constitutes the epistemological starting point, then imitation becomes something that is partly enigmatic, partly superfluous. All modern theories that are concerned with the play of people and animals stop half-way, precisely at the critical point. We have seen, for instance, how Groos mystifies this issue in order to avoid imitation. From whence premonitions and innate reactions arise; why they manifest themselves as playful imitations of modes of comportment that are useful later, as playful exercises for controlling one’s one body – all of this remains a riddle. But since a recognition of the reflection of objective reality could be embedded in the recognition of imitation, modern idealism prefers a dogmatic mysticism to simple rational explanation. Another reason prevents the correct posing of the question: labour is left out of the investigation into the differences between animal and man. In contrast to Darwin’s immediate line of succession, modern anthropology emphasises this difference very keenly, sometimes to the point of overestimating it. However, if only the after-effects of labour are described (for example, the necessity for man to find his way in ever-changing situations, in contrast to the tendency towards a stable way of life among even the higher animals) without returning to their foundation (labour), then, as we could see in other contexts, the treatment can only move about the surface and has to neglect precisely their most important aspects, just because of the overemphasis of the differences. This weakness is perhaps expressed most strongly in theories applied to aesthetics that incorrectly evaluate the role of labour in the development of people

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into man, of its decisive function in being human. Thus, above all, in Schiller’s famous theory of play as the foundation of the aesthetic: ‘man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’.2 It is not too difficult to understand the – very noteworthy and weighty – reasons that led Schiller to this theory: above all, the critique of the capitalist division of labour, with its consequences constantly and increasingly menacing the integrity of man. A profound humanism thus underlies Schiller’s observations and likewise the quite warranted fear of the effects of capitalist production and division of labour on contemporary art. Nevertheless, the result of his thoughts must ultimately be lopsided. Not only because, as has already been demonstrated repeatedly up to now, the genesis of art and, with it, the philosophical illumination of its aesthetic essence thus become impossible, but also because the exclusionary isolation of art and artistic activity from labour carried out by Schiller, the abrupt contrasting of both, must necessarily lead to a narrowing of art itself, to making it contentless. In his concrete explanations, Schiller was often profoundly sensible of this danger; that he was not always able – even in individual observations – to overcome it goes back to this disastrously antagonistic juxtaposition of art and labour. Fourier’s example shows how important it is here to conceptually apprehend the right relationship in the right way. Starting from the same social appearances as Schiller – at a higher level objectively and subjectively, of course – he reaches, in the critique of the capitalist division of labour in its contrast to the socialist division of labour, the seemingly completely opposite (though methodologically closely related) conclusion that labour would turn into play in socialist society. Even so, the fundamental distinction between self-reproduction and self-enjoyment – both taken in the social sense – is improperly sublated. Precisely that specific nature of labour that accounts for its pivotal significance in the development of mankind is thereby trivialised because, though Fourier rightly critiques its necessary mode of appearance under capitalism, he strives to sublate not only this mode of appearance but also the essence of labour. When Marx rejects this conception of Fourier’s (‘Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like’), he does not neglect in his explanatory remarks, alongside highlighting Fourier’s theoretical merits, to also point out the consequences coming into being in reality here with the correct apprehension of labour: ‘Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process

2 Schiller 1967, p. 107.

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is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise’.3 The most important ramifications are precisely those that come into being outside of labour strictly speaking, in leisure time, though not independently of labour and with very important consequences for it. The fact that Marx refers here only to the scientific side of the issue, and not expressly to the aesthetic side as well, does not matter: the essential interdependency here between labour and ‘higher activities’ is still sufficiently illuminated. In the end, the rejection of the theory of reflection by the philosophical idealism of modern times (the ultimate basis of the distortion of the issues discussed here) still has for our present considerations the important consequence that the reflection of reality is, without real justification or analysis, identified in a completely dogmatic way with a mechanical photocopy of reality. It stands to reason that in the consciousness of even the ancients the theory of the mechanical copy of reality was declared to be non-dialectical materialism. It now ranks among the generally accepted ‘arguments’ against dialectical materialism that without hesitation or proof one identifies its theory of reflection with the theory of the photographic reproduction of reality. We have already referred to a polemical position taken against this in the works of Lenin. In another place he explains his thoughts, going into the material content itself even more emphatically: Knowledge is the reflection of nature by man. But this is not a simple, not an immediate, not a complete reflection, but the process of a series of abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws, etc., and these concepts, laws, etc. (thought, science = ‘the logical Idea’) embrace conditionally, approximately, the universal law-governed character of eternally moving and developing nature … Man cannot comprehend = reflect = mirror nature as a whole, in its completeness, its ‘immediate totality’, he can only eternally come closer to this, creating abstractions, concepts, laws, a scientific picture of the world, etc., etc.4

3 Marx 1973, p. 712. 4 Lenin 1972b, p. 182.

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In keeping with its dogmas, in the bourgeois view of art realism is identified with naturalism, often in a simple and naïve declaratory way, though just as often with the intention of deflecting any concrete investigation of art as the reflection of reality through the bogey of naturalism. We will presently come back to which aspect the issue of naturalism receives in light of a genuine theory of reflection. For a proper understanding of this question, however, it is imperative that we take a somewhat closer look beforehand at the dogma of the photocopy of reality in everyday life, as separate from any artistic activity as possible. In order to be able to sort out this issue, which in our contexts is an epistemological one, just in its roughest outlines, we must first of all eliminate the physiological question regarding the extent to which sensory impressions (for instance, the likenesses of seen objects on the retina) are actual photocopies of visually appearing reality. These facts, which are supremely important in themselves, are therefore only of subordinate importance for us because epistemologically it indeed comes down to how the image that comes into being in consciousness is related to objective reality. But the objective character of the sensory impressions only plays the role of a component in this, admittedly a fundamental one that crucially determines the content of the sense perceptions. However, the likeness of reality in consciousness is the result of a very intricate (to date still nowhere near completely illuminated) process. Man cannot just simply take in the impressions of reality; he must – at his own peril – respond to them, very often even instantly, spontaneously, without having time for contemplation or for an imaginative or conceptual interpretation of sensory impressions. This entails that already at the level of perception a selection attuned to the interdependency between man and surrounding world takes place in the reflection of reality in a conscious sense. That is to say, certain aspects are strongly highlighted as essential while others are entirely or at least partially disregarded, pushed into the background. We already find such spontaneous reactions to the reflection of a datum of reality in the unconditioned reflexes, which means that they can already be detected in the animal world. Keep in mind man’s reaction when an object rapidly approaches his eye. He spontaneously closes his eye and turns his head in order to avoid the approaching object. What does this mean from the standpoint of reflection? Undoubtedly that the distinction between that which is essential and inessential in the image of reflection is carried out in the central nervous system. The implement that threatens the eyes is conceived as something essential. Everything else, even the other properties of the thing in question that do not appertain to this threatening function, turns into a side issue, into mere background.

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Needless to say, ‘essence’ here has a markedly subjective emphasis, so much so that it might perhaps appear dubious to label it with this term. But we encounter a similar selection even when we consider more complicated phenomena of everyday life. As we have seen, it is characteristic of everyday life that its modes of expression must have an immediately practical character. On the one hand, this indeed leads to certain constraints on the possible ways of behaving here – human society has certainly developed the scientific and artistic reflection precisely in order to overcome these constraints. On the other, the praxis that comes into being here nevertheless includes the aspect that is critical for coming to terms with the surrounding world by man, albeit in a way that is not completely developable on this basis. This ascpect is the correct principle: reflecting objective reality and its indispensable truth criteria in an approximately correct way, testing the knowledge that has been acquired so far by means of praxis. A conception of reality that is at least roughly approximate must come into being within consciousness at even the most primitive stage of human existence, otherwise these creatures would have been able neither to safeguard their existence nor to develop any higher. The subjective character in the selection of reflected reality – again, even as simple perception – must therefore contain within itself tendencies towards a more genuine objectivity. In fact, it is precisely selection, distinguishing the essential from the inessential, that must contain these tendencies because it goes without saying that individual facts must be reflected in a way that is approximately accurate. The subjective principle in selection is based on fundamental human life interests, which admittedly do not always rise to prominence in such a spontaneous way as in the just mentioned example but often are the results of contemplation, the accumulation of meaningful experiences, the fixing in place of conditioned reflexes, etc. Of course, the selection effected by this principle does not always impinge upon the actual, objective essence of the objects or sets of objects. However, if it does not at least touch on certain aspects of the essential, a person’s subjective purpose cannot possibly be realised; he must fail or make a different selection that is better suited to objective reality. Accordingly, praxis already prevails as a criterion of truth at a stage at which not even an inkling of genuine categories can exist in human consciousness. It is precisely from this point of view that the role of labour is decisive. For, as was explained earlier, the immediate determination of aims and actions is suspended, sublated in it. Labour can fulfil the goals of people in ever better controlling their surrounding world for the very reason that it goes beyond the scope of spontaneous subjectivity, which of course also includes spontaneous elements of objectivity; for the very reason that it takes a roundabout way to the realisation of its goal, the immediacy of which it suspends in order

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to explore objective reality directly, as it is in itself. The distinction between the essential and the inessential must thus already objectively come to the fore in labour and be reflected in human conscious as it objectively is. We thus see here from a new side here how the scientific (objective, disanthropomorphising) reflection of reality necessarily grows out of labour. This stands in contrast to the more primitive stages of existence (even in the case of the higher animals), where the correction of reality always only adjusts a particular, concrete comportment towards it in those cases where this comportment is false, without being able to essentially alter the structure of the mode of comportment towards objectivity. (We will discuss the corresponding aesthetic development later.) It is the great merit of Engels that, in sharp contrast to both idealism and mechanical materialism, he clearly recognises and has accurately described these circumstances. He says, ‘The first thing that strikes us in considering matter in motion is the inter-connection of the individual motions of separate bodies, their being determined by one another. But not only do we find that a certain motion is followed by another, we find also that we can evoke a particular motion by setting up the conditions in which it takes place in nature, that we can even produce motions which do not occur at all in nature (industry), at least not in this way, and that we can give these motions a predetermined direction and extent. In this way, by the activity of human beings, the idea of causality becomes established, the idea that one motion is the cause of another’. And he justifiably reproaches natural science and philosophy for having ‘hitherto entirely neglected the influence of men’s activity on their thought; both know only nature on the one hand and thought on the other’.5 With that said, the process being investigated by us is clearly delineated in its crucial main lines. From the viewpoint of our particular posing of the question, we must add that clarity about the causal character of the relationships being analysed here certainly does not denote a beginning but rather an already advanced stage of development. For Engels, here it came down to the epistemological issue of causality, not to the stages of genesis. If we now reflect on this, then it is evident that sense perception plays a much greater role in the process than idealist thinkers admit in most cases. In this regard, Feuerbach correctly polemicises against Leibniz by striving to prove that the facts we tend to denote intellectually with the categories of similarity, size, and relationship of whole to part are already given to us sensuously and the function of understanding is limited to verifying them retroactively. ‘The senses present the thing’, he says, ‘but

5 Engels 1987c, pp. 510–11.

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the understanding adds the name to it’. And he draws from this the conclusion that the ‘understanding is the highest being, the ruler of the world, but only in name, not in fact’.6 With that said, of course, the proper dialectic is troubled from another side: coming to terms with the diverse and variable, the complex and nevertheless lawful phenomena of the world would not be possible for man if the activity of understanding remained limited to just name-giving, to just registering sensory impressions. In that case, the most decisive achievement of scientific methods of thinking (disanthropomorphising) would have never been put into practice. Feuerbach is completely justified vis-à-vis the sensory-phobic one-sidedness of idealism, but his polemic sinks to the level of a mechanical materialism here. This can already be seen from one example. He is quite right in relation to the proportions between the whole and its parts. And later, in the case of the transition from immediate sensuous imitation to the more complicated forms of reflection, we will be able to see how great a role the sensuous apprehension of the correct forms of reality’s objectivity and relationships play in their approximately adequate reproduction in consciousness. But is the problem of whole and parts reducible to such immediate findings? Are there not a whole series of questions within this complex for the solution of which the understanding must become active and go far beyond the scope of immediate sense perception? And our present investigation is driving towards precisely just such a complex. For it is clear that the conceptually clarified substrate of everything that was discussed just now is the dialectic of appearance and essence. It does not matter that in order to be able to even take the first step towards the theoretical clarification of the problem many millennia of the practical application of these categories were necessary, nor does it matter that the first decisive approach to the solution was only undertaken in Hegelian philosophy. Of course, it cannot be our intent here to delineate the dialectic of appearance and essence even in its broadest outlines. We must confine ourselves to a few of the central issues that are closely connected to our problem, to the basic character of the reflection of these dialectical relationships. First and foremost, it has to be pointed out that appearance and essence are equally aspects of objective reality, that all epistemological considerations therefore go astray which attempt to institute a hierarchy between them from the standpoint of the real or the unreal. This bears both upon any empiricism or positivism that beholds reality solely in immediate sensuous appearances and deems the ascertainment of the essence to be a purely subjective addition of human

6 Qtd. in Lenin 1972b, pp. 384–5.

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consciousness and upon those varieties of idealism that allot essence to an existence that is – metaphysically – separate from appearances and downgrade appearances to merely subjective phenomena. For Hegel’s dialectical conception – to say nothing at all of dialectical materialism – essence and appearance alike are realities, aspects of objective reality itself that are closely and dialectically connected to each other. Goethe already clearly recognised this. He lets his Eugenie in The Natural Daughter say, ‘What is semblance if it has no essence? / Could there be essence if it did not appear?’7 It is definitely in this sense that Hegel (of course, going beyond the scope of the casually aphoristic) argues that ‘Essence issues from being; hence it is not immediately in and for itself but is a result of that movement’ (that is to say, the self-movement of being over existence, etc. to essence).8 That is why being ‘has preserved itself in essence … it is through this that essence is itself being’. And the interdependency indicates the deepest interpenetration of both aspects: ‘The immediacy that the determinateness has in appearance against essence is thus none other than essence’s own immediacy, though not the immediacy of an existent but rather the absolutely mediated or reflective immediacy which is appearance – being, not as being, but only as the determinateness of being as against mediation; being as aspect’.9 Lenin phrases this capaciousness of the dialectic – which admittedly goes beyond the scope of our individual issue, though it is precisely thereby that this issue fits into a great relationship – thusly: ‘Nature is both concrete and abstract, both appearance and essence, both aspect and relation’.10 With that said, however, appearance and essence are by no means posited as identical. On the contrary. Only from here is it possible to grasp their dichotomy as a characteristic of a unitary and contradictory reality. For this reason, Lenin emphasises on the one hand that ‘the unessential, seeming, superficial, vanishes more often, does not hold so “tightly”, does not “sit so firmly” as “Essence”. Etwa: the movement of a river – the foam above and the deep currents below. But even the foam is an expression of essence!’11 On the other hand, he stresses that essence and law ‘are concepts of the same kind (of the same order)’, though he emphasises that ‘as against the law, therefore, appearance is the totality, for it contains the law but more yet, namely the aspect of the self-moving form’. Lenin sums up his findings here as follows: ‘Appearance is richer than law’.12

7 8 9 10 11 12

Goethe 1987, p. 169, translation modified. [Eds.] Hegel 2010, p. 340. Hegel 2010, p. 344, translation modified. Lenin 1972b, p. 208, translation modified. Lenin 1972b, p. 130. Hegel 2010, p. 442. Qtd. in Lenin 1972b, p. 152, translation modified.

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The merely approximate character of all knowledge is thus also epistemologically substantiated by means of the specificity of the dialectic of essence and appearance. As we have seen, this epistemological outcome is the product of a development lasting many millennia in everyday life, in labour, and in the science and art growing out of them. Hegel in particular examines – relatively rightly from his point of view – the optimally generalised categories of objective reality and thinking. Lenin, for whom the connection to life was much more powerfully developed, completes these analyses and carries them forward by examining philosophical issues even in their most rudimentary, most proximate-to-life modes of appearance. For us, this has the important consequence that not only does he consider the role of perception, representation, and fantasy in the process of reflecting reality in a more detailed way than Hegel does, but also he radically breaks with the idealist hierarchy of the ‘faculties of the soul’ and constantly keeps the whole man in sight as the subject of reflection. Thus, he approvingly quotes Feuerbach’s critique of Leibniz that we cited a moment ago, in which Feuerbach epistemologically refers the objectivity of the sensuousness of things laid down by Leibniz back to sense impressions and beholds a ‘sensuous truth’ in similarity. So too in relation to big and small, etc.; in this way, he analyses the role of fantasy even in the simplest cognitive process. With this last observation, it appears particularly important to us that Lenin presents this role in two respects: on the one hand, as indispensable for the cognitive process; on the other, as a possible source of its aberrations. Starting from the reflection of movement, he generalises this observation to the effect that reflection cannot possibly take place ‘without interrupting continuity, without simplifying, coarsening, dismembering, strangling that which is living. The depiction of movement by means of thought always makes coarse, kills – and not only by means of thought, but also by sense perception, and not only of movement, but every concept’.13 We thus come to the conclusion that the reflection of dialectical movement, of dialectical categories, is a basic fact of life that can certainly be broadened and deepened only by means of labour and science, that can be made conscious only by means of philosophy. That is why what Engels said about another case of the practical application and conscious knowledge of dialectical relationships applies to our problem, to the dialectic of appearance and essence: ‘And if these gentlemen have for years caused quantity and quality to be transformed into each other, without knowing what they did, then they will have to console

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Lenin 1972b, pp. 257–8, translation modified.

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themselves with Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain who had spoken prose all his life without having the slightest inkling of it’.14 Needless to say, the historical development of such a conscious awareness is no straightforward process; all kinds of motives can promote or inhibit it. For example, Engels points out that it is precisely the great recovery of the natural sciences since the fifteenth century that has immediately brought about the predominance of a metaphysical way of looking at things and repressed dialectical thinking to a great extent.15 However, from this indisputable fact it would be utterly false to infer the ‘naturalness’ or even a ‘timeless validity’ of metaphysical thinking. Since objective reality is of a dialectical character, the whole of a person’s practical and mental comportment, his reflection of reality, must adapt to it. As in the case cited a moment ago, counter-tendencies that are temporarily victorious always have specific historical causes. It is from this viewpoint that the artistic reflection of reality must also be assessed. For if dialectics in general and (for our present consideration) the dialectic of appearance and essence are an irrefutable basic fact of life, then it is clear that the talk cannot be of a mechanical, ‘photographic’ reflection of reality as the foundation of everyday life and labour. Without the reflection of the dialectic of appearance and essence, the single most primitive orientation in life is not possible, and our preceding observations have shown that ‘philosophy’, for instance, does not elevate the supposedly photocopy-ish likenesses of reality into dialectical relationalities here, but rather these relationships are contained in the simplest perceptions and are only (but not always) clarified into conscious awareness by thinking. Photocopied likenesses of reality may be detectable on the retina, but already in simple everyday life, in the most primitive everyday life, where the whole man responds to the parts of reality as a whole that are facing him at the time, the perceived likenesses of reality are not photocopies. Indeed, one can say that for people photocopies of the world only ever turn up at a relatively high level of disanthropomorphisation, that is to say with the invention of photography and the perfecting of its technology. There is no doubt that the results that are thereby achieved are, when looked at scientifically, of a disanthropomorphising character. The more technology develops, the more this is the case. This character of photography is also expressed in everyday life, however. When it is commonly said that a photo does not resemble the thing of which it is a photograph, this is nonsense when looked at in an abstractly objective way because the light-sensitive

14 15

Engels 1987c, p. 361. Engels 1987b, p. 22.

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material can present nothing but the most faithful likeness of the object in the given instant, under the given conditions. On the other hand, this expression makes sense from the standpoint of life; it conveys a genuine set of facts in human coexistence. This becomes apparent in the fact that the visual image (or memory image) that one has of others or of oneself must by no means be identical with being made into such a photographic likeness. If we disregard all affects (vanity, sympathy or antipathy, etc.) at the same time, then the fact remains that the categories which have arisen from visuality (like the similar, the characteristic, etc.) imply a selection, a ‘disregarding of this or that’, etc. It can therefore be properly related to a person in his wholeness without mechanically corresponding to his immediately visible appearance in every instant, in every situation. Max Liebermann’s witty saying (‘I have painted you more like yourself than you actually are’) expresses a truth of life. This antithesis is even more conspicuous in the case of the instantaneous photographs of movements, which upon the immediacy of everyday life very often make the impression of something that is at the very least improbable or hard to conceive, although their quality as an accurate likeness cannot be doubted. By contrast, as soon as it is a matter of the scientific analysis of movements (practice in a labour, training method in a sport, etc.), this objective truthfulness preponderates. One thus sees that the faithful photographic copy of reality is the product of a highly developed disanthropomorphising technology and has nothing to do with the immediately sensuous visual apperception of reality in the everyday, let alone that such a copy could constitute its basis, its starting point. Such assessments apparently contradict the fact that the modern art of cinematography has developed precisely on this basis. The contradiction is only an apparent one, however, because the whole artistic technique of film is just based on a reanthropomorphisation of photography. For time being, we leave to one side those aspects of selection, arrangement, etc. in which film has certain features in common with so-called artistic photography; these tendencies of course come to the fore more strongly and forcefully in film than in a simple photographic image. In fact, the essential thing is that in film the individual photos (which, in their isolatedness, are objectively and necessarily photocopies) are strung together in such a way, shot in such a tempo, ‘cut’ in such a way, etc. that their overall impression leads back to the normal vision of man; that the ‘unlikely’ again becomes imperceptible; that the new which comes into being by these means and is made manifest likewise brings about an enrichment of visual reality and the meaningful life experiences of the whole man associated with it, as does any other art (in keeping, of course, with the new forms of reflection and with the new content as well).

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We cannot go into the details here. Suffice it to note that, owing to the fact that the basis and formative tendency of film is reanthropomorphisation, any deviation from the kind of comportment sketched out here must instantly destroy its artistic character. For instance, the use of slow-motion thus transforms a film into something scientific, since in doing so it is a matter of a scientifico-experimental (disanthropomorphising) abstraction – and not an artistic cultivation of human visuality – that therefore goes beyond the scope of the requirements of human visuality in the service of discovering new objects and relationships. The fact that – within certain limits – even this is mutable and expandable in a socio-historical way alters nothing in what is essential about this situation. By the same token, the identification of naturalism with realism that is closely connected to the theory of the rudimentary photocopy – the exaggeration of naturalism into a rudimentary, primitively artistic (pseudo-artistic) mode of comportment towards reality – proves to be a legend, as Engels has shown for metaphysical thinking. Naturalism is a distortion, generated by social development, of the spontaneously dialectical artistic reflection of reality as well. The arts of primitive eras do not know of it at all; on the contrary, as we will see, what very often comes into being there is a one-sided (and often artistically false) overemphasis of what is believed to be the essence at the time. Naturalism can be defined in its particularity, however, only by the fact that it inherently has the tendency to spirit away the antithesis (indeed even the very distinction) between essence and appearance, to annul it if possible. This definition already indicates that it can only be a matter of a late tendency of historical development when it comes to naturalism. As long as coming to terms with the surrounding world is directed predominantly towards nature, then naturally its pathos is chiefly that of discovering and making manifest that which is essential; no matter the naïve or ungainly forms this may adopt, as a tendency it contrasts markedly with any naturalism. Only the preponderance of social aspects in everyday life (the ‘retreat of natural limits’) creates the conditions of naturalism’s coming into being, in fact in periods in which the development of society itself produces – in certain classes – an aversion to revealing essence. But even under such conditions (the investigation of which is the task of historical materialism), naturalism in the narrow, proper sense of the word will be only one of the currents in which disorientation (or the will towards perspectivelessness) is expressed. True, cloudiness in the conception of the dialectic of appearance and essence is a central problem in such periods (a decisive tendency, whose effect on the foundation of the mode of presentation also determines the structure of trends that are apparently opposed). We can thus plainly observe in the literature of our period the fundamentally

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naturalistic character of all kinds trends, from impressionism all the way to surrealism.16 As important as this demarcation between naturalism and realism is for aesthetics and as indispensable as the historical disclosure of the reasons for its emergence, etc. is for art history, it would be a simplifying distortion if one were now to reduce even naturalism to identity with the photocopied reflection of reality. To be sure, this is frequently declared to be the case by the theorists of naturalism. Even if in terms of practice and art a maximal approximation to the immediate surface of appearance in the everyday is what is being sought (as radical as possible an elimination from the composition of all the categories of mediation that are aimed at the essence), the photocopied reproduction of objective reality still remains only an ideal here, not a reality. Whoever carefully studies naturalist works, precisely in relation to such a mechanical ‘fidelity’ in the making of likenesses, will find that not only is the composition of the whole likewise based on selection, omission, emphasis, etc. as in any work of art – if at the same time these principles may be made use of more casually, loosely, etc. than usual – but also in every single moment a reshaping that goes beyond the photographic is detectable. All you have to do is compare any two naturalistic schools of thought with each other in relation to such stylistic characteristics, and you will find our assessments confirmed. The outcome of this excursus, which has gone on for a little too long, is of great importance to us: from the standpoint of the relationship of consciousness to reality, the theory of photocopied reflection is untenable epistemologically. The objective dialectic of the real world inevitably calls forth a spontaneous subjective dialectic – admittedly one that does not become conscious for a long time – in human consciousness. This process of reflection, however, is dialectical not merely in its content and in its form; even its formation and development are likewise determined by the dialectic of history. Naturally, this latter point can hardly be adumbrated here. For not even in the history of science and philosophy do we possess more than sparse and supremely fragmentary preparatory work towards the knowledge of the development of dialectical thinking, of the restraints and obstacles that stand in the way of its approach to the true structure of objective reality. And we have already repeatedly pointed out that the epistemological investigation of everyday life has barely begun, that such a decisive field as this is still almost to be considered a terra incognita. In spite of all these reservations that such a situation peremptorily dictates, our next step must nevertheless be towards reflection in everyday life and in

16

Cf. Lukács 1980b, pp. 76–113; also see Lukács 1969.

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labour. In other contexts and in the initial observations of this work, we already cited a series of facts – for instance, the division of labour among the senses – in which a dialectic similar to the one described here was expressed. Now it must be notably pointed out that in primitive everyday life the imitative word and in particular the imitative gesture play an incomparably greater role than they do at a more developed level. Of course, all dealings between people include reference to certain facts of their surrounding world and to the ways of responding that arise from this. That is why by nature the approximately accurate reflection of reality constitutes the immutable basis of these dealings. However, the more complicated the relationships everyday life become, the more condensed and distilled their presentation becomes and the more the original imitation must fade away – even to the point of immediate unrecognisability – in communication. I instance the simplest possible example. If someone today wants to know approximately how long he has to travel to get from Vienna to Paris, he opens a railway timetable and takes note of stations, departure and arrival times, etc. without being conscious of the fact that all of these abstract abbreviated signs are reflections of real processes about which he wants to know. In the case of primitive man, even immediate expression (certainly the process for envisioning the facts) is of a mimetic character. Max Schmidt describes such a case quite vividly. He recounts how a Native American, when asked about the length of a journey, ‘describes with his hand an arc across the sky corresponding to the sun’s daily course and then makes the gesture of sleep. These gestures are repeated as many times as is necessary for all the travel days up to the end of the journey. The exact time at which the end of the journey is to be reached on the final day is then portrayed by indicating with the hand the height of the position of the sun and the relevant hour of arrival’. Mimesis comes even more clearly into play if one accepts with Schmidt that no counting of travel days is implicated in the repetition, that the Native American ‘actually depicts with his gestures the real progress of the journey in relation to the element of time. Each time he describes the arc with his arms, he has the progress of a quite specific travel distance in mind, and with each separate gesture of sleep, a quite specific resting place is to be expressed for the time being. Not until we add up the number of these separate travel distances and resting places do we then have the idea of a certain number of days. The Native American who himself is carrying out the gestures, however, does not need to have had this idea in his indication of the length of the journey’.17

17

Schmidt 1920, p. 112.

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This very plainly shows the double character of reflection in everyday life as it has been laid down by us in theory: on the one hand, acquiring as exact an image as possible of each segment of reality coming into consideration in each case; on the other, highlighting in this deptiction itself – spontaneously or consciously – those aspects that are decisive for the action at that time. In particular, the two components of this double character of reflection (the basis of which, as we have seen, makes up the objective dialectic of appearance and essence) is heightened even more when the meaningful experience achieved by means of the reflection of reality is to be communicated, passed on, or made into the basis of a concrete action. We saw a moment ago that primitive communication had a distinctive, directly mimetic character. For as soon as communication went beyond the scope of primarily pointing out objects or processes, it had to make use of the means of mimesis in order to obtain the unambiguity achievable at this level. At the same time, however, it is worth remarking – and the example adduced by us shows this very plainly – that the imitation used here can be even less of a photocopy of a model than is the case in perception itself. A relatively high degree of abstraction, an unambiguous emphasis on the essential is necessary in order to characterise concrete objects or processes with relatively few words or gestures, in order to make such characteristics instantly comprehensible. The frequently used excuse that this comprehensibility is based on convention circumvents the question of the coming into being of convention itself. For though many a convention may frequently be determined ‘from above’ (by mages or priest castes, for instance) and by means of this fixation made to congeal words and gestures into mere signs, life itself still brings forth the basic selection of what turns into convention in everyday life. Precisely those words or gestures become conventional over time that have proven themselves best in the dealings of people with each other. And, for its part, this proving of oneself now has criteria that are not without significance to us: in itself, a day’s walk (to stick with the cited example) could be expressed by means of all kinds of mimetic gesticulation. But what will the principle of selection be in the process, even if it later ends in conventionality? Clearly it will be focused unambiguity, but this has an immediate sensuous character that also evokes feelings, especially when we are talking of gestures. Of course, this in no way means that something aesthetic would be intended in the process or even thought of. The evocation of sensations by means of language, gestures, actions, etc. ranks among the indispensable aspects of everyday life, long before art came into being and without necessarily having the tendency of overturning into art. However, the evocative usually includes an aspect that can lead to this overturning, but it must be enriched, transformed,

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and developed by manifold mediations in order to make such an act possible. On its own, the evocation of feelings here is actually just a means either for determining a concrete object, a particular event, etc. and fixing it in place as precisely as possible or for preparing the disposition towards a concrete deed. Thus, even mimetic gestures are in themselves – regarded from the standpoint of higher human development – substitutes for words and hence for concepts, an unconscious intention towards conceptually fixing objects, events, etc. in place and arranging them. In accordance with social function, the kernel or centre is to be sought here. What came into being with the evocative was merely an ‘aura’, either out of the incapacity to express the conceptual in a verbally and conceptually precise way or out of the enrichment of the object through gradually collected and added up lived experiences. We regard as self-evident the fact that later developing art emerges from these expressive components, indeed the fact that without a very long process of encompassing words, gestures, and actions with such an ‘aura’ the arts could not have had any life-material nor any form growing out of life and enriching life by its effect (and no disposition towards its reception); we will return to the questions associated with this in detail later. However, the often indissolubly convoluted duality between an unambiguous meaning (an unambiguous object-relatedness, an unambiguous and approximately accurate reflection of determinate objects) and an evocative ‘aura’ is a general attribute of everyday reality, particularly in its early stages, in which labour has still developed little. The only universal social form of generalisation (magic) does not abolish this duality through differentiation (as do science and art later) but precisely conserves it as a duality instead. But as much as even the everyday thinking of more developed societies goes beyond the scope of the primeval magical conjunction of this duality in its later – giving as well as taking – interaction with science and art, it still belongs to its essence to reproduce these components ever anew in a frequently attenuated, but ultimately unsublated way. Do not forget that even in the most developed language with a relatively high degree of unambiguity in the meaning of words, many words and sentences are inevitably encompassed by such an emotionally evocative ‘aura’ of approval or rejection, of love or hate, etc. The development indicated here comes to the fore in its most general outlines even more clearly when we attempt to reveal the corresponding transitional forms lying between the initially immediate ‘imitation’ and the more highly developed possibilities for communication already supplied in terms of content and form by science and art. In all likelihood, felt or observed analogies for objectivity, relationships, relationalities of movement, etc. developed much earlier than did a knowledge of cause and effect in the later fixed meaning of causality. Indeed, one can even assume with a certain degree of authorisation

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that the analogical inferences emerging from such spontaneously perceived analogies are older than the other more exact logical forms, which are therefore more remote from the immediacy of everyday life. The primitive analogies that sprang from perceptual and sensory foundations undoubtedly have a powerfully immediate mimetic character. They remain more or less embedded in sensuous singularity, although at the same time they must – mimetically – emphasise those aspects that yield the foundation (or, in certain circumstances, merely the occasion) for analogising. (We will discuss later how such a propensity, grounded deeply in primitive everyday life, to discover analogies and make them manifest relates to the development of poetry.) In the coming into being of analogy, the singular is therefore immediately – even mimetically – associated with a generalisation that is often not very well founded. Now it is very interesting that in his analysis of analogical inferences Hegel emphasises as decisive precisely those aspects which go inextricably hand in hand with this immediately mimetic character of the original analogy. He sees quite clearly that what is problematic about the syllogism of analogy arose from its origin (without, of course, going into this issue of genesis): ‘Analogy is all the more superficial, the more the universal in which the two extremes are united, and in accordance with which the one extreme becomes the predicate of the other, is a mere quality or, since quality is a matter of subjectivity, is some distinctive mark or other and the identity of the extremes is therein taken as just a similarity. But this kind of superficiality to which a form of understanding or of reason is reduced by being debased to the sphere of mere representation should have no place in logic’.18 But it is quite clear that what is meant by this are the transitions and remnants from that primitive condition that we considered just now and that are of course also continuously found in everyday thinking today. Hegel even defends analogy and induction against reproaches that derive from the overestimation of merely formal syllogisms. If that which relates to their content can be conceived as the determination of content – which of course is not, we think, often applicable to our beginnings – then there is nothing to argue against their syllogistic character according to Hegel. For him as well, however, a certain set of problems remains in place: ‘This is so because, as we have seen, in the syllogism of analogy the middle term is posited as singularity but immediately also as the true universality of the singularity’. From this follows that uncertainty as to ‘whether the determinateness, which is inferred to pertain also to the second subject, pertains to the first because of its nature

18

Hegel 2010, p. 614.

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in general or because of its particularity’.19 Therefore, despite Hegel’s efforts to salvage this syllogistic form as fully valid, the immediate unity of singularity and universality as the middle term or midpoint of the syllogism results in its ultimately indissolubly problematic nature. Earlier we showed in other contexts that, even when it cannot do without analogy (especially as the preparatory stage of higher scientific forms), the development of thinking must nevertheless go far beyond the scope of it. Analogy and the syllogistic form springing from it are in all likelihood not only the oldest manifestations of scientific thinking but also those manifestations that remain connected to everyday thinking in a way that is more indissoluble than other forms. (We will shortly see how these stages of scientific thinking relate to the development of artistic reflection.) If we now turn back to our earlier observations, then it is clear that the reflection of the objective dialectic of appearance and essence is jointly contained in all of these issues. For when we properly regard the ‘aura’ mentioned earlier in terms of its meaningful content and not just as an evocative form, it is clear that the abundance of the world of appearance of a determinate complex is subjectively reflected in it as opposed to its far too abstractly meager, far too static, etc. essence. This dialectical way of reflecting reality is heightened to the extent it serves a praxis (above all, labour) outstripping the immediacy of everyday life. We have already given an account of the objective side of this process. In other contexts, we have also gone into the subjective factor; it perhaps suffices if we point to our remarks about the division of labour among the senses and the relationship between labour and rhythm. What is involved in both cases is the fact that, as it goes beyond the scope of the immediacy of simple perceptions, reflection more forcefully develops the dialectic of appearance and essence (along with other dialectical contradictions, of course) and comes closer to their objectively true relationships than would be possible in a simple passive reception of the outside world. This is a general trend in human development and of the higher unfolding of the reflection of reality along with it. Both tendencies are inextricable because human growth is only possible by means of praxis, by means of labour, and this in turn presupposes a more accurate and richer reflection of reality. It is therefore permissible to shed more light on this state of affairs with the help of another aspect of praxis, with an aspect that clearly demonstrates the fundamental character of mimesis that exists prior to all artistic activity, though at the same time it also belongs to those facts of life that are indispensable for the

19

Hegel 2010, pp. 615–16.

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coming into being of art and for its efficacy. We mean that psychological process that one generally tends to designate with the expression ‘imagination of movement’. According to Gehlen, this ‘is, in a manner of speaking, the product of the process of abbreviation that a movement goes through before it is perfected, before it can consist of the elegant minimal emphases of the mastered movement’. Gehlen rightly highlights its close connection to earlier meaningful experiences, memories of movement, and previous exercises, and he highlights its role in more intricate and novel movements that deviate from normal custom (in sport, for instance). He says, My meaning becomes clear when we observe the practice of complex movements, in sports, for example: at first, a novice skier or rider has great difficulty in concentrating on holding together the unfamiliar movement combinations which continually threaten to disintegrate. The movements are linked together piece by piece and carefully coordinated under continual control, in the process of which the limbs not directly involved in the movement always revert to their now inexpedient habits. The perfected movement focuses only on the ‘nodal points’ and allows the inbetween phases to run their course automatically. The success of a difficult movement combination requires that the proper nodal points be precisely worked through, because it is on these that the harmonious consequences and joint determinations of the movements automatically depend; they thus represent the whole movement. When unnatural movements (such as pole vaulting) consist in the coordination of these crucial elements, this process must take place before it becomes possible to survey the movement.20 Here too the dialectic of appearance and essence repeatedly emphasised by us in mimesis unquestionably exists, in a particularly distinctive form in fact. On its own, however, it does not suffice for an understanding of this phenomenon. Gehlen, who otherwise painstakingly avoids any dialectical terminology in the interpretation of his very often dialectical observations, speaks here of ‘nodal points’, with which he – unconsciously – suggests the recurrent overturning of quantity into quality. It appears to us, however, that the actual phenomenon is thereby still not even adequately described yet, that one must draw on Lenin’s understanding of the category of seizing the chain link, which he often used. In relation to the organisational and strategic significance of founding a central

20

Gehlen 1988, p. 177, translation modified.

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newspaper for the illegal party in Tsarist Russia, Lenin exposes the theoreticopractical side of our issue in What Is To Be Done? as follows: Every question ‘runs in a vicious circle’ because political life as a whole is an endless chain consisting of an infinite number of links. The whole art of politics lies in finding and taking as firm a grip as we can of the link that is least likely to be struck from our hands, the one that is most important at the given moment, the one that most of all guarantees its possessor the possession of the whole chain.21 The fact that both the ensemble of actions as well as all of its ‘elements’ in politics are incomparably more complicated than in an as yet artificial bodily movement of an individual person does not alter the categorical nature of such ‘chain links’; indeed, its applicability to the most convoluted appearances of life underscores the objectivity and universality of these categorical relationships. It also becomes apparent here that, as the criterion of truth, praxis is based on the approximation to reality in the reflection, that in immediate terms it is merely a selection in the reflected reality – not only in the selection of the correct and in the elimination of the false, but also as a shift of emphasis in the management of those elements and tendencies that are of decisive importance for the action taking place at that time. However, the new way of emphasising the essential and the inessential, the nodal points and the after-effects, that thus comes into being in praxis is subjective only when regarded in immediate terms; that is to say, it is determined by the subjective aim of the currently given task. For, in the first place, this is also only subjective in an immediate sense. Any questioning of reality by means of praxis is objectively founded in many cases, and earlier meaningful experiences and approximately correct reflections of objective reality play a role in this that is not to be underestimated. In the second place, it is precisely this active subjective aspect which advances more deeply into objective reality than does one that wanted to turn into the mere mirror of objectivity, cancelling itself out as it were. The (if one will permit the expression) adventure of subjectivity, which naturally has objective causes at all times and is based on the reflection of reality, indeed not infrequently gives rise to errors. But even these are not to be evaluated in an exclusively negative way, to say nothing of the fact that the well-founded meaningful practical experience of a wrong path taken can already contain elements of positive knowledge or at the very least

21

Lenin 1961, p. 502.

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approaches in this direction; it is thus not uncommon that it brings about genuine explorations of objective reality as ‘by-products’ (‘accidentally’). But it can thus happen that such determinations of reality are discovered on these paths that would have been unattainable for mere contemplation at that time and that also could not be comprehended at all in their theoretical essence in such a situation. In this way – precisely by means of its emphatically practical character – the Leninist theory of the chain link goes beyond that of the Hegelian nodal points and enriches its pure objectivity by revealing the lively dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity. Hegel already realised ‘how absurd it is to consider subjectivity and objectivity as a fixed and abstract antithesis’.22 Lenin, who (among other things) approvingly quotes this passage as well, expresses these thoughts even more decidedly in another context: ‘The thought of the ideal passing into the real is profound: very important for history. But also in the personal life of man it is clear that this contains much truth. Against vulgar materialism. nb. The difference of the ideal from the material is also not unconditional, not überschwenglich [inordinate]’.23 In all of these forms of reflection and mimesis that are connected to everyday life and praxis, it is important not to emphasise differentiated tendencies towards science and art just yet. On the one hand, because such tendencies were originally operative as an inextricable conjunction, and their consciousness and systematisation in the magical period were only a fixing in place of this undissected convolution; because they preserve and ever again reproduce this situation at more developed stages, in accordance with the formation of science and art as forces powerfully influencing social life, admittedly in new forms. On the other hand, because all of the phenomena depicted here contain within themselves a tendency towards developability, towards differentiation both in the direction of science and in that of art. It suffices to refer to the appearances linked to the imagination of movement. In their average occurrence, they undoubtedly belong to everyday life. However, it is very well possible to elevate the process of the anticipation of the analysis of movements (of the discovery and fixation of the nodal points) to a scientific level. This process can turn spontaneous introspectiveness (if it is also controlled and directed at all times by a certain contemplation), the imitation of others, the acquisition of their meaningful experiences, etc. into an object of scientific analysis that is disanthropomorphising in its essential method, that breaks the movements in a purely objective way down to their dynamic mechanical optimum,

22 23

Hegel 1991, p. 273. Lenin 1972b, p. 114.

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and that utilises the imagination of movement in a given moment as an available element of an objective complex. To a great extent, the modern science of labour has developed these tendencies in the comportment of man to machine, to the assembly line, etc., but even in training (above all in the professional athlete) one can find ample examples of this. (In all of these cases, one encounters many transitional appearances, and at times it is difficult to decide where simple everyday praxis stops and scientifically conducted praxis begins. Yet this boundary exists in any case.)

2

Magic and Mimesis

At the very least, the transition of such mimetic phenomena from everyday praxis into the field of art shows intermediate stages that are just as sliding and boundaries that are just as blurred. We have already repeatedly emphasised that in magical praxis the seeds of scientific and artistic modes of comportment that later become autonomous are still to be met with in an undifferentiated state. As has already been highlighted as well, the detachment process of art is the far slower of the two, although – or perhaps because – it is already capable at quite early stages of more clearly revealing certain decisively essential signs of its specificity than science is. By this we mean more than just the anthropomorphising principle in artistic composition. Regarded abstractly and generally, this principle is precisely what is common to art and magic or later to art and religion, even though they are distinct and indeed opposed according to their ultimate meaningful contents. As we will later see, the detachment process here is extraordinarily long, contradictory, and crisis-laden. What matters now is the tendency towards evocation that (as has also been shown) came into being upon the ground of everyday life. At the same time, this tendency turns into a crucial factor of magical mimesis and of early artistic mimesis that is not yet separable from it in practice at this stage. We have already seen that the mimetic expressions of everyday reality whose purpose is practical communication that is concretely determined in terms of content are necessarily surrounded by an ‘aura’ of emotional evocation. This is not only a consequence of the primitive and less precise mode of expression from a conceptual point of view, although this certainly constitutes a decisive component at first. Rather, on the one hand, it arose out of the fact that all social communication moves from the whole man to the whole man and therefore cannot be content with simply passing on conceptually clarified contents but instead appeals to the affective life of one’s conversational partner as well. It does not crucially alter this structure – as far as everyday life is concerned – that

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an attenuation or fading of ‘aura’ takes place with the development of science, that the social division of labour specialises communications more and more. We can content ourselves all the more with the casual establishment of this state of affairs since the problem of genesis has priority. On the other hand – and this concerns the whole of communication, both its content and form – in most cases communication is to persuade one’s conversation partner to do some such thing, to prompt actions, behaviour, etc. of some sort, which, since the relationship moves from whole man to whole man, also necessarily brings into being corresponding elements of an evocative sort in all communicating. The ‘ideological’ as well as the central practical and social modes of expression of primitive periods (magic, construed in the broadest sense) invariably have evocative aims. Not only because an evocative effect (often heightened to the point of ecstasy) on the community is necessary so that the required blind faith in magical ceremonies comes into being and is preserved within it, but also because the relationship (deeply rooted in the fundamental magical view) to those natural forces that are to be positively or negatively influenced awakens an evocative intention. The magical tendencies that are abundantly present in everyday life are thus consolidated, systematised, and further developed. This happens all the more readily since between the functioning of everyday life and that of magic no shift in direction or qualitative change is necessary at all but only an expansion and intensification of what is already present. It is now of decisive importance that mimesis is central to such syntheses. As we saw earlier, Frazer distinguishes between two essential beliefs of the magical era: first, that ‘the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it’; second, that ‘whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not’.24 Of course, the boundaries here are fluid as well, and even if it is certain that the first form is predominantly mimetic, imitation is also frequently found in the second kind, which Frazer calls ‘contagious magic’. Indeed, Frazer comes to the conclusion that ‘while homeopathic or imitative magic may be practised by itself, contagious magic will generally be found to involve an application of the homeopathic or imitative principle’.25 Therefore, recapitulating the most general point, it comes down to the fact that by means of the imitation of the processes or objects of reality these same processes and objects can be influenced in the desired direction. It follows that the imitation must be as concrete as possible. At the

24 25

Frazer 1955a, p. 52. Frazer 1955a, p. 54.

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very least, the starting point of mimetic presentation must be reality itself and not an abstracting reflection of mere aspects of life, as occurs in ornamentation. Therefore, mimetic presentation is – according to its intentions – never worldless like ornamentation. Even if its content passes over into something fantastical that has never been seen or heard of before, the thing that has been created in such a way raises the claim of being reality, a likeness of the world. It will now certainly be understandable to the reader why we have attached so much importance to the fact that even the most primitive reflection in everyday life cannot have the character of a photocopy of reality, that in fact its dialectical nature rises to prominence in it – of course, only in an approximate way, but in a process of approximation that is likewise dialectical. For only on such a basis does it become understandable how the magically and mimetically formative synthesis of life processes (encompassing both natural processes and society) can be accomplished at a rather primitive level. That is to say, if such a process (war, hunting, harvest, etc.) is to be imitatively presented, then what is necessary is a concentration of aspects that are extraordinarily diffuse in reality itself, a forceful emphasis of what is essential to the goal to be achieved, an elimination of the countless accidents that occur in reality. Now if the imitated pieces of reality out of which such a unity is put together were merely mechanical photocopies, then it would have required superhuman artistic efforts in order to unify them into such a whole, and this whole would remain completely incomprehensible to people who were accustomed to apperceiving reality in a mechanical way. Only on the ground cleared by us do the early growth of such constructs out of everyday life and their profound evocative effect become comprehensible. In this regard, mimetico-artistic formations of reality and imitations of processes for the purpose of bringing about certain magical effects follow the same path for a long time. Indeed, one can say that the original impetus of the former was able to outgrow the magical circle of ideas concerning the influence of the events of the world only by means of imitating it. To be sure, there are frequent attempts to derive art from a surplus of energy, from play. At the same time, however, it should be remembered that a surplus of energy is already a social phenomenon in early human organisation: the consequence of a productivity of labour that brings forward (along with free time and leisure) the surplus in physical and psychological energies as well.26 Secondly, it is absolutely undis26

When modern anthropology attaches so much importance to the slow development of children in contrast to young animals, in most cases it ignores the fact that it does not have to do with a natural distinction between the two but rather with an aftereffect of specifically human development, thus (in methodological terms) not with a starting point but

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cerning of how mere play would ever be able to lead to art. Even already in the case of animals, play certainly has a mimetic character. However, that intention is directed – irrespective of the degree of consciousness of it – towards the practice of important movements and kinds of behaviour. If the viewer apperceives these as ‘beautiful’, then he comes across an inadvertent by-product, as in the case of labour, sport, etc. First and foremost, movement and mode of behaviour are conditioned by purpose and are therefore – by tendency – sparing, reduced to an absolute minimum. Certain material relationships unquestionably exist between such a purposiveness and its aesthetic effect, though it does not at all follow from this that the latter genetically arose out of the former. Still less does it mean that this purposiveness contains within itself a necessary inner intention towards the aesthetic. The intention towards the aesthetic must therefore have already come into being, been reinforced to a certain degree, and embedded in the emotional life of people for an aesthetic intention that is not primarily aesthetic to be apperceived as aesthetic at all, not to mention for an aesthetic effect to be received in accordance with its aesthetic intentions. In fact, the aesthetic comes into being by complicated detours. Movements and modes of comportment that in themselves are already mimetic are imitated once again in the daily activities of people, in their dealings with each other. Henceforth, this reflection of reflections that have been put into action no longer just imitates certain appearances of reality for certain immediately practical purposes but instead groups their likenesses according to completely new principles, which focus on rousing certain thoughts, beliefs, feelings, passions, etc. in the observer. Needless to say, such an evocative mimetic intention is found in everyday life as well; without such ‘spadework’, this intention could not become the focus of mimetic presentation. However, in everyday life it is only a part or aspect of human dealings that is indissolubly embedded in actions, forms of communication, etc. Only here does it turn into the centre, into the organising principle of reflection. Now if the original purpose of this unique mimetic construct – we say ‘construct’ because, in order to realise these goals, the parts constitute an artificially created unity that is determined in advance, whereas their models, which aimed at real purposes, are real processes whose kind, scope, beginning, end, etc. are variedly determined by the difficulties of realising real purposes in each case – had thus arisen out of a ‘Kunstwollen’, then its origin would be similar to that of Pallas Athena, who sprang armed from the head of Zeus. That is to say, its source would be

rather with a result, above all with a result of labour (one that already certainly includes the hunter-gatherer period).

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man’s ‘primal’, ‘inborn’ aesthetic capacity, which haunts most aesthetics. Reality exhibits a different image. As has been stressed often, though we possess little accurate knowledge about the actual origins of human activities and capacities, it nevertheless becomes clearly apparent from the entirety of our traditions that the initial mode of appearance of the mimetic reflections with an evocative aim depicted by us up to now were of magical origin. Therefore, in the case of a philosophical genesis of the aesthetic, it comes down to the following: on the one hand, pointing out the principles common to such an imitative magic and to the specifically artistic reflection of reality, thereby conveying why the aesthetic was able to come into being, develop, and grow almost inextricably wrapped up in the magical for such a long time. At the same time, on the other hand, it must be shown that – objectively, not in the consciousness of people – the seemingly perfect union between the two (indeed to the point that they appear to be completely identical) is founded on objectively divergent tendencies that prevail very slowly and very contradictorily, though nevertheless clearly in the end, and give rise to a definitive separation of art and magic ultimately. The definitive presentation of the process by which the aesthetic detaches from the magical and the religious must be reserved for a later chapter because its conceptual exposition presupposes knowledge of the most important categories of aesthetic reflection and can thus only follow upon their exposition. Naturally, aspects of commonality currently have priority among our interests in the discussion of genesis. Aspects of disparity and dichotomy can only be indicated in a supremely abstract way at this stage of our insight into the essence of the aesthetic. The fundamental principle common to art, magic, and religion is that they all have an anthropomorphising character. At the same time, of course, there are also differences between magic and religion; above all, the former is much more naïve, spontaneous, and primordial than the latter. Anthropomorphising is expressed above all in the fact that the motive forces in the subject and in the object-world confronting him are naïvely identified with each other. Certainly, the exact separation of the subjective from the objective only develops slowly. Magical powers must not yet, as they will later, receive the shape of man (gods) so that the represented mechanism or imagined system of objective reality appears as if it were moved by human motives. We can calmly dispense with distinctions of this sort here, which would necessitate a broad treatment of their extremely varied transitions. For the time being, it comes down not so much to the kind and degree of anthropomorphisation as it does to its simple existence. That is why the antithesis to disanthropomorphising science develops relatively earlier. That is why the path shared with art, despite all the divergences, must be much lengthier.

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We already know from earlier expositions that the anthropomorphising in developed art that has become autonomous represents something entirely different from what it does in magic or religion. It suffices here to highlight the salient point of this distinction: it of the essence of the aesthetic to construe the reflected likeness of reality as a reflection, whereas magic and religion attribute an actuality, an objective reality to the system of their reflections and demand belief in them. This entails a decisive antithesis for later development. Aesthetic reflection is constituted as a self-contained system (as a work of art), whereas any reflection of a magical or religious sort is related to a transcendent reality. At the same time, it must already be emphasised here that this is a question of the objective meaning of the construct of art or of magic or religion. In periods of completely developed art that has become autonomous, there are still creators and receptive people who construe works as serving religion, who attribute magical effects to works of art, etc. However, works of art themselves have – independent of these opinions – the objective structure determined above, and in the theoretical determinations of the relationship between both spheres it solely comes down to the objective inner constitution of the products. This objective relation also prevails in terms of practice in social reality – of course, only as a tendency on a world-historical scale – independent of how false the consciousness of an individual may even possibly be regarding his own activity, his own behaviour. However, the contrast laid down here still needs further concretisation. If we have determined aesthetic constructs to be self-contained systems of the reflection of reality, then there is an idiosyncratic dialectic – to be discussed in detail later – contained therein. These constructs are reflections of objective reality, and their value, their significance, their truth is based on the extent to which they are capable of comprehending and reproducing this reality accurately, of evoking in the receptive person the image of reality underlying them. Therefore, neither can their cohesion, their ‘immanence’, their ‘autonomy’ amount to an insularity with respect to reality, cannot be an ‘immanence’ of a ‘pure’ formal system, nor can this ‘immanence’ comprise an indifference towards reality. As we will see later, the construct’s cohesion is the specific aesthetic form for bringing about a true and therefore lastingly effective reflection of reality. The single most general content common to any genuine work of art in this basic orientation of aesthetic reflection is the this-worldliness of art, in contrast to the relatedness of any magical or religious construct to a beyond, to a transcendent reality.27 However, since it belongs to the essence of the decisive con27

We will speak at length about the allegorical tendency that arises from this in religious art when the struggle-filled process of art’s detachment from magic and religion is discussed.

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tents that they must be spontaneously generalised precisely because they entail revelations of the most important currents and growth tendencies of mankind, this orientation of all art towards this-worldliness is given the impress of the anthropocentric. Man as the centre to which everything is related gives genuine meaningful content to this this-worldliness itself. For only then can the artistic depiction of reality (comprehending it in a profound way in order to achieve an apt reproduction) be realised, only then can it become limitless in terms of content (like scientific reflection) and strictly circumscribed aesthetically all at once, only then can it be rounded off into a self-contained work. In another context earlier, we referred to the self-consciousness of mankind as the actual, sustaining subjectivity of art, and straightaway we pointed out that such a self-consciousness is only possible on the basis of a world that has become relatively transparent for man, that it must be based on the deeds that have subjected the outer- and inner-world to man, to the advancing development of mankind. The profound humanism of the aesthetic is jointly contained in this self-consciousness of mankind. It receives a perfect – as well as intellectual – expression in the famous chorus of Sophocles’ Antigone. It is certainly no accident, but rather the organic coexistence of intellectual and poetic wisdom (a commitment to the deepest essence of the aesthetic) that the chorus begins with a hymnal description of the world-conquering deeds of people, an activity only limited by death, though man pushes these limits off more and more. And only at the point at which man is portrayed as founding cities (for a Greek, this amounts to the foundation of society) does the pivotal internal problematic, the great theme of all art appear: the collisions that arise in the polis between people. It suffices only to adumbrate this fundamental meaningful content of all art in order to clearly see that it is not possible for it to come to the fore at the beginning of human development. Everyone understands – and knowledgeable ethnographers and anthropologists have repeatedly shown – that all art presupposes a certain developmental level of technology. Now it is evident that the preparation period still requires something else: a particular attitude towards reality that, even if it is not completely conscious, can only get to develop relatively late because its contents objectively require a far-reaching subjection of the outside world and a self-assuredness of man (achieved in the conflict around the actualisation of this subjection), his confidence in his own accomplishments and capacities as a basis. If the more easily acquirable minimum of technology was already the product of a protracted struggle between man and nature, so must that be the case here to a much greater extent. The wrapping up of artistic mimesis in magical mimesis, however, is more than a merely extrinsic necessity of an accidental beginning. The specificity

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of the dialectic prevailing here entails that mimetic artistry and the artistic receptivity associated with and promoted by it develop and gain strength while hiding behind magical imitation so that when social development has produced and reproduced the contents, modes of comportment, etc. portrayed by us in sufficient intensity, the aesthetic reflection of reality uncouples itself from this alliance with magic, which is not in keeping with its essence, and – admittedly in a slow, uneven, contradictory, and often crisis-ridden way – can constitute itself as something autonomous. If we have referred to the long-drawn-out path shared by magic and art as one that is so not purely by chance, then we have alluded not only to the anthropomorphising principle of the conception of the world governing both fields but also to the specificity of imitation that aims at evocation, which one can find to be a striking characteristic of both as well. In the analysis of reflection in everyday life, especially in people’s reciprocal dealings with each other, we recognised the evocation of thoughts, feelings, etc. as the important aspect. In this regard the magical imitation of actions, for instance, differs from the normal praxis of the everyday in that the evocative element is radically made into the focal point. That is to say, when, for example, a person wants to call forth certain thoughts or feelings in another person, his intention is thus bent on persuading this person of precisely this thing. By contrast, when a similar process is imitated in a magical way, then in the presentation it comes down to arousing the impression in the crowd of spectators and listeners that the persuasion process is successful on both sides: persuasion and becoming persuaded, which in life constituted the main thing in practical terms, now turn into means, turn into formative contents and into creative forms, with whose help this occurrence, which appears as an immediately manifest unity, is to be enabled to call forth the intended feelings or thoughts. Therefore, whereas in life the governing structure of the construction coincides with that of the temporal order of events (starting with the beginning, the action moves in the direction of the end, of course by means of the many accidents that always emerge in the interaction of varying endeavours), its mimetic depiction starts from the endpoint and configures and models the movements leading to it so that this end persuasively affects those who are receptive to it, evoking the desired feelings, thoughts, etc. This naturally brings forth the minimum requirement that those accidents that are superfluous (indeed are disruptive) from this standpoint be eliminated, that those aspects that constitute objective content-related nodal points be emphasised in a more powerfully evocative fashion. Yet – viewed from the content of lived experience – no radically new principle emerges in this transformation of reflected reality. Omitting that which is superfluous and emphasising the ‘chain links’ are already, as we have seen, important aspects of

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the process of reflection in everyday life. As a result, however, the fact that the whole determinate complex of reflection is consistently worked on from this point of view means that modifications which in themselves are merely quantitative overturn into a new quality, that there objectively comes into being a leap between the ordinary forms of communication of everyday life and this reworking of a construct that is chosen, removed from such forms of communication, self-contained, and aimed at certain evocative effects. Of course, this leap need not become instantly conscious, and in all likelihood it does not for a long time become so – or at least we can presume as much since we are completely without accurate data about these beginnings. The feeling of an intensification of life and of the responses to it completely suffices to make the emergence and development of such magico-mimetic constructs comprehensible. From all of this it is clear that for now the lines of departure for magical and artistic mimesis converge almost to the point of unification; our following analyses directed at the main constitutive aspects will show how far-reaching this convergence is at the outset. However, before we may go into this in more detail, it must be revealed that, on the one hand, the seeds of later divergences – objectively – exist even at this level and that, on the other, it is not possible for these divergences to already have become conscious even only embryonically at this stage. We of course allude to the issue of the this-worldliness and the otherworldliness of the ultimate object as the decisive intention of mimesis. In an immediate sense, this-worldliness simply means that the evocative effect of what is presented is solely aimed at the receptivity of man, that the mimetic construct has completely fulfilled its purpose with the evocative effect achieved by it. By contrast, with the imitation of processes, otherworldliness strives to influence powers that supposedly control those real constellations of which the mimetic construct in question is the – anticipatory – reproduction. (The dance-like imitation of war, hunting, etc. in order to favourably influence the outcome of the future corresponding activity.) Seen from the viewpoint of this objective, making an impression on the actual listener and spectator is something that is only accessory. However deep the gulf between these two ultimate goals may even be – when looked at objectively – it can generally exert no practical influence at all on the actualisation of the beginnings of both. For we have ascertained that, on the one hand, an aesthetic, this-worldly position of the task is really not possible at this level and that, on the other, it is clear that imitation which is directed towards the control of otherworldly powers can find the immediate real criteria for its success only in carrying out the mimetic construct, only in the effect on human receptivity. For whether the imitation succeeds in influencing the transcendent powers in the desired way is only elucidated retrospectively, in the actual success or failure of the war,

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the hunt, etc., thus long after the end of the mimetic composition. The consequences of this judgement can thus become supremely effective in the next imitations, where the circle indicated here then becomes apparent again. In terms of practice, therefore, magical transcendence is expressed in an immediate immanence that comes very close to the aesthetic. One must thus take note of the unity – one able to be taken apart only through subsequent analysis, and even then not always – of these (in themselves) divergent tendencies as an irrevocable fact in the praxis of our beginnings. In the course of presenting this overall situation, we will still come back to individual points where this divergence nevertheless gets expressed – often without its becoming conscious as such. Here we must go into just one of these issues a bit more closely, namely into certain ecstatic tendencies, since in part these tendencies are in close contact with others that unconsciously strive from within their magical shell towards the aesthetic (dancing), though in part these same tendencies already display diametrically opposed orientations at this stage. We allude to those rites, customs, etc. of the magical era that are associated with calling forth ecstasy. Of course, we cannot deal with the whole set of issues connected to it here, and we especially cannot take into account its linkage and dichotomy to the aesthetic. All that is to be noted in passing is that in some respects these remnants of the magical period, which continue to have an effect for a long time, are sometimes put in competition with knowledge and ethics in the same manner as ecstasy is with mimesis. We can observe these effects of a contemplative asceticism not just in India, China, etc.; they also play a not inconsiderable role in European culture from Plotinus to Ignatius of Loyola. The motive common to both is the artificial calling-forth of certain subjective conditions in which there comes into being and by which there is propagated a belief that they are capable of putting man in direct contact with transcendent powers in a way that is otherwise unachievable. Gehlen gives a graphic description of these conditions: Dancing, intoxication, toxic excesses, self-mutilation, etc. are a series of actions taken up from the outside inwards, and the excess and hypertension of affectivity and sensibility intended in them achieve the maximum degree because the dissipated energies of inhibition enter into the dynamics of leading to a liberation and relief of man from himself that is felt to be exhilarating. By means of dancing, man to some extent becomes ‘pure spirit’ and capable of acting in that capacity … Since what comes into being are fields of action and techniques that end in an exaggeratedly liberated inner world, ‘la vie à un degré plus intense’ is sought after

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and made into something that is able to be experienced, and a grandiose reversal of the focus of life is made possible ….28 The essential thing for us in such shamanistic praxis is the aversion to any sort of knowledge of the outside world (indeed, to noticing it), the artificial whipping up of the subject into a state in which he can imagine that the frenzy that thus comes into being, which in fact psychologically slackens (indeed, temporarily annuls) relationships to the surrounding world for the subject, brings him into direct relation with that which the culture at the time tends to envisage as the transcendent. What gets crystallised here and in certain analogous renewals of asceticism are those tendencies that are founded exclusively in illusions that arose from the primitive developmental level of the material and intellectual culture and that can be briefly summarised as follows: since, owing to this situation, the subject is not capable (objectively: not yet capable) of theoretically and practically controlling his actual surrounding world by means of the reflection of objective reality or by means of the intellectual manipulation and practical application of what is thus perceived, this ‘detour’ by way of knowledge is believed to fall away, and a more direct path is to be pursued purely ‘inwards’; and since the normal subject of everyday life appears unfit for this, since he is oriented towards the ‘outside’ by his life-instincts, this ‘limit’ of his must be violently eliminated with artificial means. The coming into being of such conceptions is a given in the magical period. Indeed, one can even say that the contrast outlined by us above – for the sake of intelligibility – certainly did not enter into consciousness back then. That is to say, the ascetic and ecstatic methods were used concurrently with the reflection of reality and with mimesis, and there certainly were flowing transitions between them. Only much later, as the tendencies towards the formation of science and art gained strength, did the antithesis that existed in itself from the beginning become one existing for itself. It comes to the fore in a particularly sharp way when great social crises begin to threaten the dominance of those classes that tend to rely upon magic and religion for ideological support. Then the reactionary sides of these tendencies come to light even more clearly than they did in the primitive early years. Although it is to be said that, whereas in the magical period (as we have attempted to show) elements and indeed certain categories of science and art – inextricably intermingled with magical representations themselves – begin to evolve for a long time, what become operative here are forces of the primitive condition that act purely to pull down. If these forces, as a result of

28

Gehlen 1956, pp. 265–6.

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the complicated dialectic in the growth and further development of class society, also acquire influence at more developed levels of culture, this can only take place in a reactionary direction. Ecstasy and mimesis are thus mutually exclusive antitheses, even if they sometimes emerge at the same time in the reality of the magical period. Their antithesis clearly comes to light in the field of dance, which we will yet discuss in detail. Whereas mimetic dancing has the intention of arousing certain feelings in those who are receptive to it by imitating certain life processes – in this comparison, the magical effect of mimesis on the transcendent powers plays no immediately important role – the dancing dealt with here is meant to move the dancers themselves into ecstasy. In his book, Psyche, Erwin Rohde gives a graphic account of Thracian dances in honor of Dionysus: The festival was held on the mountain tops in the darkness of night amid the flickering and uncertain light of torches. The loud and troubled sound of music was heard; the clash of bronze symbols; the dull thunderous roar of kettledrums; and through them all penetrated the ‘maddening unison’ of the deep-toned flute … Excited by this wild music, the chorus of worshippers dance with shrill crying and jubilation. We hear nothing about singing; the violence of the dance left no breath for regular songs. These dances were something very different from the measured movement of the dance-step in which Homer’s Greeks advanced and turned about in the Paian. It was in frantic, whirling, headlong eddies and dancecircles that these inspired companies danced over the mountain slopes. They were mostly women who whirled round in these circular dances till the point of exhaustion was reached; they were strangely dressed … doeskins, and they even had horns fixed to their heads. Their hair was allowed to float in the wind, they carried snakes … in their hands and brandished daggers or else thyrsos-wands, the spear-points of which were concealed in ivy-leaves. In this fashion they raged wildly until every sense was wrought to the highest pitch of excitement, and in the ‘sacred frenzy’ they fell upon the beast selected as their victim and tore their captured prey limb from limb. Then with their teeth they seized the bleeding flesh and devoured it raw.29 And he sums up the meaning of these practices thusly:

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Rohde 2001, p. 257.

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The participators in these dance-festivals induced intentionally in themselves a sort of mania, an extraordinary exaltation of their being. A strange rapture came over them in which they seemed to themselves and others ‘frenzied’, ‘possessed’ … This extreme pitch of excitement was the result intended. The violently induced exaltation of the senses had a religious purpose, in that such enlargement and extension of his being was man’s only way, as it seemed, of entering into union and relationship with the god and his spiritual attendants. The god is invisibly present among his inspired worshippers. At any rate, he is close at hand, and the tumult of the festival is to bring him completely into their midst.30 In his youth Rohde himself was too close to Nietzsche to be able to be truly critical with respect to such appearances. That is why he summarises his judgement of these effects of ecstatic dancing on the participant in this way: ‘The superhuman and the infra-human are mingled in his person’.31 As a conscientious scholar, however, he does not neglect to note that it is anything but a question here of a special characteristic trait of Greek development; instead it is a matter of an entirely universal appearance in the life of primitive peoples, of the praxis of medicine men, shamans, etc., which is preserved for a long time historically (dervishes).32 The cultural preconditions and consequences of such tendencies need not occupy us further here. It suffices for us to clarify the exclusive antithesis to mimetic processes. We will come to speak in other contexts as to the aesthetic conclusions that Nietzsche drew from these uncritically mythologised and modernised facts. If, in accordance with this necessary excursus, we now try to look a bit more closely at the most important determinations that come into being in reflection here, in its transposition into constructs and processes of a mimetic sort, then what comes into consideration as the most primitive and universal aspect is its being lifted out of the normal continuity of everyday life. No matter how abruptly the separate facts of life may interrupt its normal flow, their grounds and consequences nevertheless objectively belong to this flow, hence they are also subjectively experienced as components, as aspects of the unitary and indivisible life of man individually and socially. In contrast, the mimetic constructs of magic – and contained herein is one of the important essential marks of all later art – are not parts of the totality of life but rather reflections of one of its parts, though rounded off into a wholeness and delimited from the rest of 30 31 32

Rohde 2001, p. 258. Ibid. Rohde 2001, pp. 261–3.

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life. It follows that, to some extent, people must step out of the normal continuity of life in order to apperceive these reflections. This implication of likenesses of life is, by their nature, something different than a normal continuation of an aspect of life to which it is attached in terms of time. This stepping out of life likewise ceases with the conclusion of a construct; man reverts back to his normal existence. By contrast, ecstasy and asceticism want to radically tear man out of normal life. The transcendent reality that they mean to force is believed to involve an absolute break with normal life. That is why such a comportment has no regards for objectification, for evocation or receptivity, whereas mimetic comportment is directed precisely at objectivation and evocation, at reception. However, this (in itself) supremely simple and everywhere easily detectable antithesis nevertheless requires concretisation so that it does not lose its truth by becoming metaphysically overloaded, by becoming rhapsodic. That is to say, the withdrawal from normal life and the return to normal life must be understood in a relative way, in fact in a particular kind of relativity that is in accordance with form and not content. What does this mean? First and foremost, that the relevant construct’s being lifted out of everyday life does not in any way amount to a radical break with its contents; on the contrary, it is precisely these contents (a part of these contents) that receive a new, specific form in this reflection. And it is subjectively in line with this objective state of affairs that neither the creators and actors nor those who are receptive to such constructs forsake the totality of the contents of life. They certainly could not do that even if they wanted to. Instead, they just formally alter their attitude towards these contents for a certain length of time. Their attention is momentarily focused not on life itself but just on its reflection that is offering itself or being offered here. And with the conclusion of this temporary suspension of the direct relationship to life itself, people necessarily return to their lives, in which naturally those meaningful experiences and lived experiences that this reflection gives to them are incorporated somehow into the totality of their own meaningful and lived experiences. This suspension can thus be justifiably regarded as one concerning form because, objectively as well as subjectively, the mimetic construct carries out the temporary separation from normal reality only by means of its form. It is only by means of its specific form that it brings forth the intended effect of the reflected contents of life, which as contents are derived from life and return to it. Ecstasy, by contrast, is a radical break with the continuity of everyday life. Many things that are important for the nature of such mimetic constructs already follow from this fact. We have already repeatedly pointed out that the specificity of this form centres around its capacity to evoke thoughts, feelings, etc. We also already showed earlier that for this reason no metaphysically stark

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otherness thereby comes into being vis-à-vis life but merely an overturning into qualitatively new modes of expression that also know of everyday life and cannot do without it. Both sides of these relations of mimetic constructs to everyday life must be emphasised equally. For, on the one hand, no evocation by means of mimesis would be conceivable if the praxis of life had not fixed in place certain emotiontriggering effects in certain contents, words, gestures, etc. Of course, these contents, words, gestures, etc. receive a formal intensification and thereby new qualities as well; but the link to life, the extraction of contents from life, is unavoidable if a spontaneously evocative effect is to be possible. At the same time, though, it may happen that such individual elements just existed embryonically in life and only by means of their mimetic accentuation are they given an active role, an extensive and intensive significance. This interdependency cannot be emphasised forcefully enough in relation to these effects of mimetic constructs. On the other hand, and at the same time, that which is qualitatively new must be taken into consideration. We have already pointed to the aspect of being – relatively – lifted out of the flow of everyday life and also at the same time to the fact this is of a formal nature. For the dialectical way of looking at things, however, such a finding in no way precludes the contentrelated character of the transformations in the mimetic construct itself and in the effects aimed at and achieved by it. On the contrary. Hegel determines the relationship of form and content under consideration here in a properly dialectical way in this manner: ‘What is here present in-itself is the absolute relationship of content and form, i.e., the reciprocal overturning of one into the other, so that “content” is nothing but the overturning of form into content, and “form” nothing but overturning of content into form’.33 This overturning can be observed even at the most primitive level. For Aristotle’s important finding for art that has become autonomous (the fact that those things which trigger aversion in life can generate pleasure in the artistic composition) is an indispensable aspect even in the most primitive magico-mimetic constructs.34 Keep in mind a war dance, for instance. In life, a menacing gesture, particularly of an armed man, is of course frightening or at the very least it prompts the defence of oneself. In dance, by contrast, such a gesture arouses joy, pleasure, and self-awareness because in it and by means of it – the more terror the gesture arouses, the more this is the case – the feeling is evoked in the spectator that 33

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Hegel 1991, p. 202. The priority of content in this interaction will still frequently occupy us in more developed circumstances. First and foremost, here it comes down to the mutual overturning of the one into the other. See Aristotle 1996, pp. 6–7.

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such warriors cannot be defeated, thus they will beat the enemy. And it is similar with respect to the contents triggering various feelings in life itself and in its mimetic presentation. Therefore, by lifting the spectator and listener out of the flow of everyday life, mimesis is no ‘neutral’ form that merely encompasses the contents. Rather it dialectically overturns into something that is contentrelated, its original character changing in a relative but qualitative way. But this effect of formally lifting something out of the everyday still underlies a property that is of decisive significance for the aesthetic character of mimetic constructs, though it remains unconscious for the time being. We allude to its self-contained spatiotemporal and therefore necessarily concentrative character of arranging elements from a unitary viewpoint. In short, the metamorphosis of the events of life into a storyline, into a plot, be it ever so primitive. G. Thomson gives a well-compressed description of how, with the economic decline of the original clans, the most primitive dances, chants, etc. developed into presentations of myths, into their being fixed in place on the one hand and into their further formation and secularisation on the other.35 We do not have to concern ourselves with the details of this path here. What is above all important for us is the fact that even the single earliest mimetic constructs presented determinate events. They had to because only in this way was the magical purpose (the will to influence those powers on which – according to beliefs at that time – the success or failure of these processes in life itself depended) accomplished in accordance with the world of magical representation. Now – already for reasons of purely practical purposiveness – the event concerned, which in reality took place at various points in a space that was perhaps quite vast and sometimes for lengths of time that could be measured in terms of days or even weeks and months, was compressed to one place and to one relatively brief amount of time. The principle of concentration – again, a formal category like the earlier one involving lifting something out of the flow of everyday life, in fact a formal category that must (just like that one) overturn into something content-related at once – is above all necessarily directed towards the sequence of the reflected event concerned. That is to say, that which is essential in the world of appearance is more strongly emphasised everywhere than is possible in the immediate sequence of happenings in everyday life. That is why the dialectic of appearance and essence emerges more sharply and pronouncedly, though it retains that form which appertains to everyday life: the immanent containedness of essence in appearance, in contrast to their methodological separation and reunification in scientific thinking

35

Thomson 1946, pp. 15 and 103.

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even at a primitive level. Therefore, in order to achieve the magical purpose, this concentration is believed to offer all of the important aspects in an abbreviated, compressed manner that forcefully highlights the essence. In this case, however, ‘concentration’ just means that which figures as plot in art that later became autonomous. Aristotle defines ‘plot’ as an arrangement of events that is proper in terms of art.36 It is – even in its most primitive form – more than mere succession. It is precisely the magical determination of aims that achieves a teleological arrangement of parts for a certain presented goal, whereby not only does succession overturn into parts that follow from each other, into a causal nexus (even if this causality is a phantasmagorical one) within certain limits, but also determinate rising actions, deadlocks, setbacks, etc. are affixed to each other and developed apart within the meaning of the set purpose. A category that becomes quite central to later literature, plot thus comes into being with material necessity from the magical determinations of purpose among the very most primitive mimetic constructs.37 Of course, this plot still differs tremendously from later literary storylines. First and foremost, it is far looser; the claim to a compelling causal relationality is still extremely modest. (In this regard, dancing later remains at a relatively primitive level, even when it has already long since grown beyond its beginnings in every other relationship.) Even more important, however, is another aspect that likewise results from this constellation: that of the presentation of people, the formation of character. Here too it is instructive to cast a glance back from a later vantage point to an incipient one, particularly when certain remnants of earlier traditions, even if not in the sense of a conscious historicism, have still remained preserved in more mature constructs. It is already often noted how brusquely Aristotle accentuates the priority of action over characters in drama: ‘Tragedy is not an imitation of persons, but of actions and of life’.38 And in the sentences that follow this claim he accentuates with great energy the primacy of action in life. From this it immediately follows – in terms of practice and theory for later development – that in drama it is action which determines and expresses characters, not the reverse. However, if we contemplate these observations made by Aristotle not in terms of their later development but as a look back at the development of art, then they show that all of the mimetic constructs out of which drama gradually evolved necessarily operated with actions but not characters (in our sense), that the delineation of 36 37 38

See Aristotle 1996, pp. 11–12. We will later see the extent to which the facts of reflection underlying plot (accordingly generalised and modified) also play an important role in a few other arts. Aristotle 1996, p. 11.

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character as a task of art is a relatively late product of its unfolding, the growth of which had to overcome powerful constraints. This definitely corresponds to the tradition that tragedy developed out of dithyrambic choruses, that its iambic parts which were formative of proper dramatic characters arose from and later than the choruses. Behind all these facts, however, there is something that is socially important: first of all, the fact that the social substrate for the presentation of people (the facts of life whose reflection is the literary delineation of character) did not exist in primitive conditions or rather was at a stage in which its mimetic reproduction was still out of the question. Even in such a society, people were of course individually distinct (more or less skillful, steadfast, brave, honest or false, etc.); however, these features came into consideration only insofar as they were beneficial or harmful to the community. Public interest, however, does not represent how they had an effect on the ‘private’ dealings – private according to our feeling, which does not yet apply to this period – among people. Therefore, the social substrate for the presentation of people could perhaps be presented in its effects without its moral-psychological ‘derivative’ (the individual attributes of the character) having to turn into a general necessity. The need – both in life and in its reflection – for individual characterisation first emerges with conflicts that spring from the relationships between individuals and society, thus in a much later period, after the dissolution of primitive communism. And the development of Greek drama shows how slowly even these collisions led to an interest in individual characterisation. In any case, it becomes apparent – as a supplement to what has been suggested here – that, on the one hand, collision is a fundamental category of the literary reflection of reality and carries out the actual disentanglement of literature from its original unity with dance, song, etc.; on the other, it also becomes apparent that such a basic category is not there from the beginning but is rather the product of a relatively advanced social development. This verifies the accuracy of our earlier exposition regarding the myth of the ‘inborn’ character of the aesthetic comportment towards reality in a concrete case. Again, the precise explanation of the concrete issues that come into being here is the task of the historical materialist part of aesthetics. Secondly, one can trace the coming into being of another fundamental category of aesthetics here: that of the typical. That concentration in the reflection of the events of life, which is (as we have seen) already inseparably linked to purely magical mimesis, can only take effect when such happenings and responses to such aspects of life are selected and arranged in such a way that people are instantly, immediately able to apperceive them as likenesses of the relevant part from their life. The approach to the typical is contained in embryo

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in these needs, in which what emerges in a magical covering is the ‘tua res agitur’ that later becomes conscious. True, as we could see above in relation to action, still without that fruitful inner contradictoriness that springs from the contradictory organic unity of the typical and the individual in characters. That is why in this early stage what must be missing are both the room for manoeuvre for the movement of contradictions within the typical from the average to the eccentric (contradictions that spring from the dialectical unity of the individual and the typical) and the thereby conditionally free artistic selection of the typical contradictory appearances of life that call forth such variegated forms of the problematic in developed art that has become autonomous. Just the social side of the later unity of contradictions appears in primitive typicality; in fact, in keeping with our earlier expositions, it does so more in the form of typical situations and events than it does in that of typical characters. Of course, even the latter must possess a minimum of individuality; the personal attributes of the dancer, etc. taking part in it already take care of this. But this minimum comes completely apart in the social character of the typical. The foundation is of course the already stated social condition. This finds an expression adequate to it in the forms of reflection possible back then. For it is also evident from later artistic development that dance and dance-like (semi-dance-like) gestures, sung verse, music, etc. can and must be far less individualised than the pure and merely spoken word. It is no accident that the latter is a much later product of development, nor is it an accident that dance – in the main line of its development – remains at this level of typification and is constituted as an autonomous art form. But already this specificity of primitive typicality, which grows with spontaneous necessity out of magical praxis, contains within itself the seeds for the divergence between magic and art. Originally, both needs probably completely coincide. The diverging of both tendencies can only begin when social development produces collisions between individual and totality, which of course can set in as a typical appearance only with the break-up of primitive communism, with the coming into being of the first differentiation into classes. Certain objective aspects of such a diverging certainly occur early. For as stable and seemingly immutable as primitive societies may even be, the ever so slow growth of the forces of production nevertheless leads to new aspects in life, in the relationships of people to each other, in their relation to nature. These are expressed in the fact that the contents that are to be magically presented incorporate such aspects spontaneously, even if only in such a way that certain old myths – entirely spontaneously and unconsciously perhaps – are interpreted anew. Now since it is of the essence of aesthetic form to be the form of a determinate content and since this specificity of the aesthetic is implicitly

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contained – admittedly in a spontaneous and unconscious way – in the intended evocative effect of magico-mimetic constructs, movements in the direction of the content- and form-related reception of the new necessarily come into being. Magic, however, is invariably and strictly ceremonial. From the magical side of things, mimetic constructs are always meant as conjuration, as rite. The tendency to fix sounds, words, and gestures in place ritually inevitably follows from the magical circle of ideas, in which the objective outcomes that are to be achieved by means of the rite (controlling or influencing transcendent powers) are tied to certain words, gestures, etc. in a certain order. Later we will refer to the struggle between magic and art resulting from this. Suffice it here to note that magical direction has the tendency to let that which is primitively typical to congeal into the conventional, into a tradition that is rigidly fixed in place. At the same time, it can already be seen from these expositions that rigid restriction, the ritualistic and ceremonial qualities of magical (and religious) intentions, results from their ties to a transcendence. At first and without mediation, the two magical purposes (to influence transcendent powers and to have an immediate evocative effect on the receptivity of people) coincide. Only later, in the portrayed cases of conflict that come into being with the intrusion of new contents and (in their wake) new forms, do tendencies towards the separation of these two aspects arise: the evocative intention is naturally and already for the sake of the spontaneous effect prepared to incorporate the new both in terms of content and form; in contrast, the intention aimed at the transcendent must strive to preserve, in as unaltered a form as possible, the traditional sacrosanct contents and forms of reflection and presentation. This is because the effect on the transcendent powers is indeed tied to certain contents and above all to certain forms of the reflection and presentation of life. Congealment into the conventional has its roots here, but not at all as some sort of ‘Kunstwollen’, which could not yet as such exist, but which most likely evolved out of this discord, out of the dialectical break-up of the original – in itself originally contradictory – unity. If and when, alongside the conventional ritual mimetic constructs, popular ones also come into being in which a this-worldly delight in the depicting of human reality for human beings is pronounced; if and when art develops as an autonomous form of social life; if and when a compromise between evocation and convention comes about; etc., etc. – these are questions that can only be given satisfactory answers in the individual studies directed by a historical materialist aesthetics. In order to comprehend this as a stage, as a moment in the philosophical genesis of art, what suffices for our purposes is merely to demonstrate in the abstract the divergence that comes to light here. So as not to derive this genesis along a single track from a lone contradiction but rather to advance in the direction of the many-sidedness of the subject

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matter, we must again go back to the stage before this divergence came to light and submit the aspect of evocation to a more thorough analysis than we have previously. The next issue that we now have to contemplate is the dialectical relationality of evocation to the mimetic. As the most primitive form, the most primordial expression of basic facts in man’s dealings with reality, imitation undoubtedly constitutes the starting point. In fact, in both the subjective and the objective sense. Objectively, insofar as the reflection of the processes of reality is indispensable for the preservation of life. Subjectively – and here the primitive form of imitating reality plainly comes to the fore for the first time – as the copying of already ‘broken in’, proven and tested forms of responding to objective reality develop, set in place, and (in certain circumstances) even enhance the skills of the living creature in the struggle for its existence. That is why this most primitive form of the utilisation of what is reflected must already arise in animal life, thus especially in the play of young animals, as we have already mentioned. One can even detect the seeds for certain aspects of distantiation that are decisive later in the life of people and in mimesis. It is less the manifestly visible feelings of pleasure aroused by play – although even in this the traces of the linkage between imitation and the evocation of such feelings are present – for these manifestly spring from an immediate joy in one’s own acquired dexterity, and thus they are inseparably linked to the act of play. (The degree to which one is close to life in play also becomes apparent in the case of the many players who, even when no material loss is involved, can fly into just as much of a rage, become just as depressed, etc. at the loss of a game as in the real events of real everyday life. When one tends to say that a certain culture is a part of playing properly, of being a good loser, etc., one has thus correctly characterised this side of play that is not very sharply distanced from life.) More important is the distance in the playful imitation itself. If, for example, playing dogs only pretend to bite but do not actually bite, etc., then that indicates a certain – instinctive – distinction between imitated reality and reflected imitation, and thus at the same time the evocation of certain feelings that thereby come about. In the human world, however, imitation goes beyond this immediacy. To be sure, there is often also direct imitation at the more developed level, though even this direct imitation points beyond its immediacy and aspires to a certain – abidingly sensuous – generalisation. Playful practice turns into a byproduct or rather, on the one hand, into a precondition, as is the case for instance precisely among those who take part in a war dance and who already have optimal control over all the movements associated with it; on the other hand, the relation to the future reality in which the seriousness of life grows out of play is not instinctive or indeterminate but rather refers to an entirely

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determinate imminent event, to a certain impending act of war, for instance. This concreity, however, contains a generalisation of a higher sort than the merely instinctive, indeterminate relatedness to life in general. Of course, a generalisation is already present at quite low levels: the fixed feeling of an analogy. Whether analogising just remains emotional or whether two objects (processes) that are immediately and extrinsically more or less similar to each other are already being connected to each other by a certain conceptuality – the war dance is, after all, a reflection, an imitation of an actual battle – alters nothing in the analogising preposterousness and unfoundedness of the inference drawn from it: the fact that the victory fought for and won in the reflection is called upon to bring about this victory in reality. This structure becomes apparent in the whole magical theory and praxis of imitation, of which Frazer gives a good and vivid description: ‘Led astray by his ignorance of the true causes of things, primitive man believed that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only to imitate them, and that immediately by a secret sympathy or mystic influence the little drama which he acted in forest glade or mountain dell, on desert plain or wind-swept shore, would be taken up and repeated by mightier actors on a vaster stage. He fancied that by masquerading in leaves and flowers he helped the bare earth to clothe herself with verdure, and that by playing the death and burial of winter he drove that gloomy season away, and made smooth the path for the footsteps of returning spring’.39 It is easy to show, as Frazer also does, how such an analogising is matter-of-factly pulled completely out of thin air. For us, however, what is more important here are the categorical aspects of the conception of the world behind it and how it is constituted around their ability to develop – primarily in the direction of the aesthetic. We have to be mindful of what was expounded earlier about analogies and inference by analogy because it does not need to be attested that these sorts of generalisations of immediate imitations are based on analogies. Now, as was shown earlier, it was Hegel who beholds an immediate unity of the universal and the singular in the middle term or midpoint connecting inferences by analogy and thereby correctly accounts for its problematic sides from the standpoint of logic and the scientific. This issue is entirely different when we consider the use of analogy in magical praxis from the standpoint of the genesis of the aesthetic within the covering of magic. For this structure of the syllogistic form (an abbreviated, abstracting formulation of what really exists and takes place in such – generalised – reflections) plainly has two sides. On the one hand, there are the

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Frazer 1955d, pp. 266–7.

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intellectual organisation and content-related fulfilment in magical praxis, in which the logical problematic must undoubtedly have an effect, though, owing to the low level of social being and consciousness that takes so long to develop, this can hardly have a perceptible influence on the actual functioning of such magical imitations. On the other hand, imitation itself is immediately there in its dynamic sensuous concreity as the imitation of a singular event, process, etc., albeit one that in its entirety at the same time signifies or at the very least points towards something other, higher, more universal. In fact, it does so in such a way that the significance, the index, does not appear unconditionally as an abstract generalisation, but rather such that the concrete sensuous process contains such a significance within itself. It is clear that if we, along with Lenin, behold in syllogistic forms a reflection of the most universal determinations of real, concretely recurring facts, then reflected here in the immediate sensuous mode of appearance of these same forms is something that constitutes the logical essence of inference by analogy: simply the immediate unity of universality and singularity. This ultimate identity of content conditions the fact that even the categories formative for these must be the same. The decisive divergence between them sets in with the fact that the categories, their relation to each other, and their relations in the formed content receive new functions and new structural relationships as well. If we now reflect on these new functions and relationships, we thus see that such an immediate unity of the universal and the singular can be realised here only by means of the necessarily evocative intention of mimesis resulting from the essence of the form-content linkage. For in the strict sense of immediacy, even in this case, only the singular is given. The fact that the universal is witnessed in its mimetic depiction – for instance, in Frazer’s examples of the relationship of seasonal changes to such presentations immediately imitating human processes – is partly a result of the magical conception of the world and its promulgation, partly the result of the evocative effect of mimetic forms, precisely in immediate lived experience. Of course, these two sides are tidily separated from each other only by means of intellectual analysis. In immediate lived experience, each aspect flows over into the other, and they mutually reinforce each other in this becoming one as lived. However, analysis must not stand still at this immediate unification. The structural fact that it is a question of the immediate unity of the singular with the universal has extraordinarily far-reaching consequences for the historical fate of mimesis. In particular, we have to do with a mimetic structure that is of extraordinary importance for the later fate of art: allegory. If we are to determine this in a more conceptually precise way, we must again contemplate the unity of identity and difference determined above. The fact that the singular

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here is to be immediately identical with the universal gives it a new emphasis with respect to its customary mode of appearance: without relinquishing its singularity as such, it becomes laden with a powerful significance. A tendency towards this necessarily already exists in everyday reality. For otherwise this would be – in its ability to be experienced – an incoherent, pulverised chaos. It is only possible in the manner of purely formal logic to connect such singularities to each other by means of purely intellectual relations and thereby make them comprehensible. If such relationships in the everyday did not somehow rub off on the objects themselves that they link together, no immediate knowledge or everyday thinking would be possible. (The extent to which this knowledge or thinking is problematic is not under consideration here.) Even an evocative effect of mimetic constructs would not be possible if it could not count on the emerging disposition towards the apperception of a meaning-laden singularity. The quantitative progression that mimetically comes into being here, however, also brings forth a new quality: a vastly greater concreteness of that meaning which singularity immediately bears within itself as singularity and at the same time a further, more widely ramified generalisation, an immediate connection to an important force of life at the very least. Only such an intensively meaning-laden singularity can be experienced or thought of as immediately identical to universality. However, this concurrence of both aspects must not cover up their difference, their divergence within the immediate unity, since both not only belong together but also their converging and diverging have a high degree of simultaneity. That is to say, even such a meaning-laden singular is still not in itself the universal in its determinate conceptuality, where it alone is at home, and however much the universal may be concretised into the sensuous, it can still never immediately descend to the plain hic et nunc of the singular. This active back-and-forth between the identity of heterogeneous aspects and their affinity precisely in the act of moving away from each other brings forth their lively motility in the evocative effect of such mimetic allegorical reflections of reality. Goethe quite clearly perceived this nature of allegory and expressed it in this way: ‘Allegory transforms appearance into a concept, the concept into an image, and does it in such a way that the concept always remains infinitely operative and unattainable so that even if it is put into words in all languages, it still remains inexpressible’.40 However, this refers to a socio-cultural condition in which both allegory’s mimetic form of appearance and its transcendent object alike can be re-experi-

40

Goethe 1998, p. 141, translation modified.

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enced, in which the movement described above really acts as the immediate unity of the universal and the singular. Embedded therein, however, is allegory’s internal principle of decay, which arises from its own essence. When Hegel calls allegory frosty and cold, he thereby expresses the negative side of its effect just as precisely as Goethe determined its positive side.41 This negativity arises out of historical necessity as soon as the development of society (its alteration of the universality contained in the mimetic ‘syllogism’) adopts an immediate evocative character, either letting this universality disappear totally or, if it remains known, at least letting it fade away to mere conceptuality. Bereft of this connection, meaning-laden singularity can remain evocatively effective in certain circumstances to some extent, though it lacks its crowning finish that conveys roundness and perfection. It looms in a void, as it were; with its transcendent universality becoming incomprehensible, this singularity is a complement to actual transcendence, to nothingness. Of course, this process takes place differently in different mimetic constructs. As we have seen, abstract ornamentation, which likewise depicts and (as far as its original intention goes) certainly is allegorical in most cases, remains pretty much unaffected by this loss of meaning for later observers. In the case of genuine mimetic constructs, there is a great spectrum of transitions between the completely idle and the almost unimpeded continuation of efficacy. (We will talk about aesthetic issues concerning allegory in the final chapter.) The kinds of and concrete reasons for the variety arising from this do not belong here; they are a problem for the historical materialist part of aesthetics. All that is to be abstractly pointed out here is an aspect in which a further step towards the genesis of the aesthetic is philosophically visible. This step goes beyond both mere singularity and abstract universality, and even beyond the immediate unity of both. It reaches the point at which the singular is no longer just laden with meaning but suffused with it, the point at which universality ceases to be a transcendent, intentional object of singularity but instead permeates it in all of its pores, inheres in all of its atoms so that out of the mere immediate unity of the universal and the singular their real, organic unity turns into a new category: particularity. Only when this process has been completed is the aesthetic constituted as an actual, autonomous principle in the development of mankind. Here, where we are still trying to uncover the paths of genesis philosophically, this issue can only be brought up as a perspective. Its analysis and concretion belong to a more developed stage of our observations. However, at the very least it had to appear as a

41

Hegel 1988, p. 399.

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perspective on the horizon so that it becomes apparent how the categories and modes of comportment preparatory to the aesthetic grow out of certain aspects of magical praxis; only the clear view of whither they are headed can shed light on the obscurity from whence they came. For only here can it become apparent how the inseparable interconnectedness of evocation to the mimetic brings forth a radically new sort of view of the world in reflection, one that is different from but homologous to scientific reflection: both reflect the same reality and the same contents of reality, and the categories shaping them must therefore ultimately be identical. However, the new objectivity, which, as the evocative form of reflection, is related to the whole man, accomplishes an original reworking and regrouping of these categories and helps to discover hidden existing contents (hidden even from science) and also to let those contents that have already been discovered shine forth in a new light. Now that we have hurried far ahead in order to be able to properly describe certain relationships between everyday life and the genesis of art, we return to the phenomena of everyday life. We have already been able to see on several occasions that evocation is an important factor in people’s everyday life. There is a vast multiplicity of human social relationships – and, within these relationships, individual ones as well – in which it plays an indispensable, a decisive role. In fact, not only in those places where appearances in nature, events in social and individual life, spontaneously or inadvertently bring forth such effects, but also as a means consciously used for achieving certain purposes. We refer merely to the – certainly very early – attempts to win others for some kind of purpose, a manifestation of life out of which forensic speech, the art of rhetoric, etc. later grew. It is a basic fact of life that the human volition to mutually influence each other cannot be confined to purely rational argumentation, that instead the reciprocal support of argumentative and evocative aspects constitutes the normal course of persuasion; uses of mimesis certainly occur more or less commonly in both, especially for the intensification of evocative effects. The close connection between the evocative and the mimetic in the everyday dealings of people has for its basis that formation of the senses about which we have already spoken in relation to the effects of labour on man’s conception of the world. We refer only to two critically important factors. The first is the imagination of movement. Its formation makes people not only more dexterous in their necessary daily activities but also capable by the mere hint of a gesture, for instance, of experientially anticipating its later course of action in the imagination, to say nothing of the fact that the imitation of a movement process is able to evocatively reproduce this very process in the

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imagination of the spectator. The same applies of course to noises, to the designation of certain actions by means of words, etc. Operative here as well is the dialectic of appearance and essence. The more developed the imagination of movement is, the more that vaguer and more sophisticated appearances can turn into immediate and evocatively effective lived experiences in such ways. The second critically important factor that has to be briefly discussed here is the division of labour among the senses, which is likewise developed by means of labour. We saw earlier how, for instance, perceptions of the characteristics of things that originally corresponded (in accordance with their immediately considered natural specificity) to tactile sensations (such as weight) can gradually be apperceived in a purely visual manner. The so-called higher senses (sight and hearing) thereby obtain – in contrast to the other senses – a tendency towards universality that goes far beyond the field of labour. The developed dealings of people with each other and the unfolding insight into human nature in these dealings depend as far as possible on a further improvement in this division of labour among the senses, on this tendency towards the universalism of seeing and hearing. For what develops here is the ability to henceforth assess sets of problems that are indispensable for human dealings not just by comparing statements with reality, by intellectually working through meaningful experiences, etc., but also by making such experiences immediately visual and aural. (Of course, the latter precedes the former in terms of historical time.) To give a quite simple example: when someone says to his interlocutor, ‘I can tell by looking at you that you’re lying’, or ‘I can hear from what you’re saying that it’s not the truth’, then behind this state of affairs, which has become everyday and trivial, is a universality of human sight and hearing stretched to an extreme. In fact, this is not just a refinement of their ability to perceive. Such a thing is also possible for the other senses, albeit only within the scope of their actual innate functions in man’s corporeal-mental balance. With the propagation of culture, of course, there also develops here the possibility of an expansion of immediate perceptions to more distant fields. For example, it is possible by means of smell (perfume, for instance) to notice that a woman is under the influence of an outmoded fashion. In order to do this, however, one must know – beyond the realm of the sense of smell – what the current fashion in perfumes is, and the linkage is hence merely associative, an intellectual assessment attached to sense perception. Huysmans’ olfactory and gustatory ‘symphonies’ are therefore abstract, hollow, and decadent fantasies that have nothing to do with the essence of the aesthetic. In contrast, the universality of sight and hearing gives rise to the fact that we visually and aurally perceive phenomena that can neither be seen or heard

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immediately; more precisely, sensitivities develop in human sight and hearing with which very widely mediated, very remote forms of objectivity and expression in a visual or an auditory medium not only become apperceptible to sight and hearing, but also can already become spontaneously understood and appraised in their sensuous immediacy. It does not need to be explained in detail that the insight into human nature indicated here is developed by the praxis of everyday life, in keeping with its needs. It is likewise evident that the reflections of reality that thus came into being are of an evocative character or at the very least also jointly contain elements of evocation. Since they arise out of everyday praxis, they must, on the one hand, approximately accord with objective reality, of course within the limits of these capacities in everyday life in general, and in fact – in individual life – perhaps with even greater sources of error than in other spheres of reflection in the everyday. On this point it must of course be noted that everyday praxis, precisely on account of its immediacy, nevertheless has to eradicate completely false depictions of reality from itself, even if it frequently does so in a slow and uneven manner. At the same time, on the other hand, this kind of visual and aural reflection that is universal in tendency has an inherently evocative character. If, in the example given earlier, lying between interlocutors is noticed visually or aurally, then in the overwhelming majority of cases the emotional reaction is not something that is just associatively or intellectually linked to it but rather springs immediately from sensuous perception itself and is an integral part of it. The objective tendency towards universality that we have established for sight and hearing also has a corresponding subjective flipside: it is the whole man, with all of his feelings, passions, thoughts, etc., who tends to respond to the whole of the world that is accessible to him.

3

The Spontaneous Arising of Aesthetic Categories Out of Magical Mimesis

It is only from here that the gradual process of the detachment of the mimeticoaesthetic (that is to say, the detachment of the differentiated and autonomised aesthetic reflection of reality) from the general ground of everyday life can be comprehended. In order to clarify the first transitions in the sense of a philosophical genesis, a determination must still be kept hold of that, according to its origin, also certainly belongs to the everyday: the conscious directing of evocative elements for a determinate purpose, their well-thought-out combination, arrangement, augmentation, etc. towards this goal. It is not difficult to see that

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what we have to do with here is a basic fact of everyday life.42 In any conversation that is connected to a material, intellectual, or moral intention, what is said is constructed accordingly; an attempt is made to guide the sensuous and intellectual receptivity of those listening in the desired direction. Naturally, this tendency cannot unfold in an unimpeded manner in everyday life. Especially because human dealings are invariably the intersection of and competition between various ambitions that are often antagonistic. Therefore, an individual’s attempted directing of the lived experiences and thoughts of others is repeatedly interrupted, diverted, thwarted, transformed from an attack into a defence, etc. by those involved. And, from the viewpoint of everyday life, as the mere means of determinate and concrete practical purposes, such a directing of evocative elements either fulfils or fails to carry out its assignment based on whether or not these purposes have been achieved in actual fact. Herein lies its sole criterion from the viewpoint of everyday praxis. Of course, even here technical perfection can be judged independently from the fulfilment of a concrete purpose; we speak of adroit, clever, eloquent, etc. people and their opposite. But even in these cases the stated criterion remains in force; this time we mean that the positively judged means would have achieved their purpose under ‘normal’ circumstances, while in the case of negatively evaluated means we look upon the purpose possibly realised in actual fact as the product of a favourable accident. In addition, argumentation and evocation, depending on their purpose, situation, etc., necessarily alternate with each other in human dealings, take over from one another continuously. The evocative (and within its realm, the mimetic) is just one of the means utilised whose value or lack thereof is – within the limits indicated a moment ago – judged afterwards by how capable it is of effectively facilitating the achievement of the concrete intention. Determining which of these components is used, in what proportion it is used, etc. is a purely pragmatic matter in actuality. That is why it is no accident that, although antiquity construed the supreme summit of such tendencies of human dealings (forensic oratory) as an art, rhetoric could still never rise to the level of actual lawfulness. It oscillates back and forth almost seamlessly between the false extremes of a frequently sophistic pragmatism and an entirely abstract universality. Howsoever the principle of consciously directing evocation may have come into being in mimetic constructs, it is certain that, on the one hand, a relative 42

N. Hartmann, who attaches great importance to this aspect of guidance, overlooks the actual linkages (and therefore the genuine antitheses) between everyday life and art. See Hartmann 2014, pp. 64 ff.

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development of the tendencies delineated above has been the indispensable precondition for the emergence and effect of such a directing and that, on the other, the purely evocative directing that newly came into being signifies a qualitative leap vis-à-vis its modes of appearance in everyday life. In order to comprehend this leap according to its true and concrete essence, it is unconditionally necessary to contemplate more closely some of the new determinations of mimetic constructs that come into being here. The most decisive of these determinations appears at first glance to represent a pure tautology: the mimetic construct is not reality but merely its reflection. The tautological character of this proposition comes apart, however, when we are mindful of the fact that here – and only here – the receptive person is confronted with the reflection and not with reality itself. Of course, this is also immediately the case in everyday reality: in all communication that has a directly or indirectly mimetic character, the reflection (in word or gestures, etc.) is immediately apperceived. What is crucial, though, is the fact that in such cases the reflection is confronted with reality itself at once and the effect ceases instantly, as soon as this comparison reveals incongruity between model and likeness. In fact, it is a question of the comparison of a concrete mimetic form of expression with a singular concrete piece of reality that it purports to reproduce. The leap (the essence of which we are examining here) consists precisely in the fact that this immediate concrete relationship between a singular object of reflection and the reality corresponding to it is suspended. With that said, the connection to reality is not severed, because certain comparisons between details of the mimetic constructs and the general meaningful experiences of those receptive to it are continuously being drawn. If this mimetic construct could not continuously and immediately appeal to such experiences, its evocative effect would not take place. What is essential, however, is the fact that in the second case it is not a question of the one or the other real episode of reality (or of their linkage) but rather of a concrete whole, an ensemble. And the receptive person is aware that this whole – as such – is not real but just takes in and presents a reflection of the totality of reality or the reflection of one of its essential parts as totality. Such a relationship to the reflection of reality is only possible, however, if both its elements and their combination are directed towards evocation. Already in everyday life any intellectual, conceptual form of reflection calls for a continuous comparison with its archetype in reality, in fact both that of the whole as well as that of all the singular details. This is the irrefutable and proper mode of cognitive comportment that – at one’s own peril – has to prevail even in everyday life. That is why, as has already been expounded in detail, this kind of reflection has a disanthropomorphising tendency, which already begins to prevail in the most primitive labour praxis – that is to say, a tend-

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ency to free itself from subjective biases, from partiality to subjective immediacy, etc. Because of this, reflection that is being developed and expressed along these lines must always have the intention of reproducing as faithfully as possible the objective essence, the in-itself of reality. Reflection thus has the crucial function of mediating between consciousness and the reality that exists independent of it, of transforming the in-itself into a for-us by means of reflection. Because of this, according to the basic tendency, reflection cannot go it alone and lay down its own immediate relationship to consciousness. When this happens – and it happens not uncommonly in everyday thinking and even in history – an obfuscation of truth is what comes into being. This is clearly visible in rhetoric; as soon as the formal demand of achieving an evocative effect at any price gets the upper hand over the genuine reflection of objectivity by means of thought, this discipline deteriorates into more or less cynical sophistry. This is pretty much what is betokened by the relationship of evocation to thinking that is checked by a constant comparison with reality. Of course, any knowledge of reality can call forth vehement and profound feelings, passions, etc.; it is thus not at all an exaggeration to speak of the evocative effects of thinking. Even its concrete and ingenious form can act in a similar way. However, it belongs to the essence of the matter that in all functions of life in which the correct grasp on objective reality dominates – even in everyday life – the evocative can only have a secondary, accessory significance. It is precisely the problem of the sophistic in rhetoric that was touched on above which designates the most sharpened form of those situations in which the intellectual grasp on reality is reduced to a means for an evocation that is in itself independent of it. (It goes without saying that all of this bears on journalism as well.) Yet things are ordered differently – already in everyday life – when it comes to evocation and, above all, to evocative mimesis. There are innumerable situations in the dealings that people have with each other in which the sincerity of the feeling being expressed plays – relatively justifiably – the dominant role in its evocative force. When, for example, a mother forlorn over the loss of her son erupts into passionate lamentations over this death, extols the virtues of the deceased, etc., then it is quite a subordinate issue whether the eulogy that is expressed in the course of this can objectively stand up to an examination of reality. Similar is the case, for instance, when an anecdote characterising a person is told. This anecdote correctly highlights certain typical features of social, mental, or moral reality so that it will have an evocative effect, and it does not matter – again, relatively justifiably – whether the incident condensed into it is an actual fact whose presentation is being exaggerated or whether it is a purely invented fiction. The famous saying ‘Se non è vero, è ben trovato’ pretty much denotes our attitude to this kind of expression of life.

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Distinct elements of the aesthetic are certainly already contained in the latter mode of comportment, with the result that, given our lack of knowledge of mankind’s beginnings, it is hard to decide in such cases whether it is a matter of a germinal form of storytelling or one of the numerous cases in which art that has already come into being fructifies and enriches everyday life. At any rate, the comportment in both of the mentioned examples is very different. So much so that in the first case the evocative effect depends almost exclusively on subjective sincerity. The talk here thus cannot be of a conscious directing of the responses of those receiving it in the true sense of the word; indeed, the coming into their own of such tendencies in life amounts to an attenuation of spontaneity, of subjective sincerity, thus of the genuine source of evocative effect. A certain tendency towards the directing of the lived experiences of receptive people is admittedly implicitly contained in all communication, here as well since the arousing of the most intense compassion possible is inherent as the intention of any such expression. However, such a tendency bears on the whole of the communicated factual and emotional content and not on the form of communication, not on the details, and especially not on their arrangement. All of this entails that in the evocative expressions of everyday life the mimetic can only be an element of overall communication. Decisive is the fact that people are moved by the facts and events of life itself; this is what is to call forth evocations in the most unaltered facticity possible. Even in those instances where the mimetic is utilised, it is a mere means for bringing the real itself as such to a level of efficacy that can be experienced. In life, therefore, the evocatively mimetic is indeed a – very important – mediating link in making a lived experience out of reality, but still just a mediating link; here too, the immediate relationship to reflection is invariably and necessarily gone beyond, not only in cognition. In his Bern writings, the young Hegel pointed out these relationships while considering the women who sang songs of lamentation at the public funeral ceremonies for Greeks who fell during the Peloponnesian War. Of pain in everyday life, he says: The greatest alleviation of grief is to cry out with it, to have spoken it squarely in its entire compass. Through expression the pain is made objective, and the balance between the subjective, which is alone present, and the objective, which in pain is nothing, is produced …. But if the heart is still full, if pain is still entirely subjective, there is room in it for nothing else. Even tears are such a discharge or expression, an objectification of the pain. The pain, since it is subjective and has also become objective, has made itself into the image. But because pain is by nature subjective,

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it is very contrary to its nature for it to go outside itself. Only the greatest urgency can drive it to do so.43 From this Hegel derives the evocative effect of songs of lamentation that have already turned into art: But when the need is passed, when everything is lost and pain has become despair, it closes in upon itself, and here it is most beneficial to draw it out. This cannot be effected by anything heterogeneous. Only by being itself given to itself does the pain have itself as itself and yet as something in part outside itself. A painting fails to achieve this effect. The pain here only sees, but does not move, itself. For what is subjective, speech is the purest form of objectivity. Lamentation in song has at once, what is more, the form of beauty, since it moves itself according to rule. Songs of lamentation by women called upon for the purpose are thus the most human response to pain, to the need to discharge oneself of oneself, in that one develops the pain most deeply for oneself and holds it up to oneself in its entire compass. Only this holding up is the balm.44 The transitions demonstrated by us are distinctly visible here, and the accordance seems all the more valuable to us since Hegel (in keeping with the fundamental principles of his philosophising) disregards the aspect of mimesis and is only speaking in general terms of subjectivity and objectivity. With that said, the ambit of mimetic evocation in everyday life is outlined, at least in its roughest contours. Perhaps it hardly needs to be repeated that even these last-mentioned ways in which it occurs are indispensable as precondition, as material, etc. for mimetic constructs that are expressly made. Howsoever cursory it may be, their analysis nevertheless clearly displays from the outset that the qualitative leap of which we are speaking is very closely founded on the new aspect of the immediate (and not immediately surpassable) comportment of receptive people to a reflected likeness of reality and not to reality itself. (We have already discussed the more mediated relationships between reality and the reflection that is being put to use here.) Only on this basis can there develop the function of evocation that grows out of life but is qualitatively new with regard to it. It should also be noted that a comportment towards the reflection of reality and not to reality itself still has another,

43 44

Hegel 2002, p. 94. Hegel 2002, pp. 94–5.

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critically important structural consequence. That is to say, whereas in the everyday, as we have seen, mimetic communication also has the character of being a struggle between interlocutors pursuing different goals so that we can talk about a unitary and purposeful directing of evocation in it only very conditionally, only in rare borderline cases, what comes into being in mimetic evocation is a unitary construct that is put together for the sake of this unitary direction. Therefore, even if all aspects of such a directed unity may be present and function in everyday life, their ensemble signifies a qualitative leap, the coming into being of something radically new. Things are the same in a subjective regard. In everyday life, the rule in such communications will be that both parties comport themselves actively and receptively at the same time. Receptivity will very often even be a mere springboard for an active intervention; in such cases the most attentive receptivity is – at least in part – aimed at spotting and taking advantage of weaknesses of the positions in what the interlocutor is saying. Only when people confront a mimetic evocative construct that is pure reflection, and not at all reality, does there come into being a neat separation between the subjectivities concerned in creation and reception. The multiple sliding transitions already had to be enumerated in the explanation of genesis, but they must not obscure the leap that becomes obvious here. The new task by means of which the proper aesthetic depiction of reality comes into being is, as has already been emphasised repeatedly, set by magical imitation. The two-sidedness of magical imitation, its inner dialectic which favours the later separation of magic and art, has likewise been pointed out, as has the fact that this contradictoriness does not yet appear in the early stages. Instead, the disentanglement of aesthetic reflection from that of the everyday takes place precisely within the framework of aims and conditions for creation and effect that are determined by magic, and the process of separating aesthetic reflection from the everyday that is taking place in it only offers the possibility for aesthetic reflection to be disentangled from magic (and religion) later, to become autonomous, and take on its actual function in the overall life of society. We are already acquainted with the magical aims that are decisive here. The crucial convergence of these aims with the aesthetic, the preparatory work for the formation of a specifically aesthetic reflection of reality on the part of magic, consists first of all in the fact that the depiction of a unitary and selfcontained life process is posited as a goal, whereby (as we have already seen) important aesthetic categories such as plot and the typical begin to evolve spontaneously. The second important aspect is the one we just discussed: this unitary life process that is intrinsically rounded off not only composes a closed unity in terms of content – such a unity can even be found in everyday life by way of exception – but also formally consists of the exclusive implementa-

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tion of the reflection of reality and the temporary suppression of reality itself. Receptive people are thus confronted with a systematically arranged construct made out of images of reflection, the unitary and evocative effect of which is the goal to be achieved. We have likewise already highlighted how the comparison with reality is not definitively abolished but just suspended. What constitutes the basis of comparison are the meaningful experiences of reality among receptive people prior to the evocation triggered by the mimetic construct, along with the comparisons unfailingly carried out – admittedly in a supremely heterogeneous manner – after its reception. These comparisons are made between the effective whole and the totality of the image of life acquired by these receptive people up to now, its potential modification by means of these impressions, their incorporation into this totality, its enrichment by means of them, etc. All of this in no way contradicts the immediate suspension of reality; instead, as we will expound in detail later, it belongs to the essence of aesthetic comportment and grounds the position of art in the system of the social manifestations of human life. It is precisely for this reason that the term ‘illusion’, which is commonly adopted in aesthetic writing, is so misleading. The element of deception or self-deception that is ineradicably inherent to this expression is completely missing in any genuine lived aesthetic experience, which is an immediate giving of oneself over to a unitary complex of reflective images of reality without having to do with any ‘illusion’ or with reality itself. When from time to time in the description of aesthetic constructs the talk turns to the profound, genuine, etc. reality of the composition, something completely different is thereby meant that has nothing to do with a feigning of reality itself. True, such views frequently show up. But they are partly expressions of naïve amazement at the incredible technical advances in the artistic reproduction of reality (of the type to be found in Zeuxis’ anecdote), and partly they are motives in the struggle around art’s entitlement to an autonomous existence (art as falsehood). The most important aspect of this complex, however, is a residuum of magical mimesis. For only in the context of the intended effect of the mimetic construct on the transcendent powers across from it do there arise ideas that ascribe to it a function going far beyond the scope of the evocative effect and acting in reality itself as something real. Frazer describes the foundation of this circle of ideas in this manner: ‘Perhaps the most familiar application of the principle that like produces like is the attempt which has been made by many people in many ages to injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does the man, and that when it perishes he must die’.45 It is characteristic for this point of view that destroy45

Frazer 1955a, p. 55.

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ing a likeness is believed to have a magical effect similar to that of destroying certain parts of the body itself. (Hair, nails, etc.). Of course, in purely imitative magic (war dances, etc.) it is matter of similar effects on transcendent powers. With all of this, the field of action for mimetic constructs in the imagination of the magical era extends far beyond their evocative effect. What we – provisionally – determined earlier to be the general duality of magical mimesis thus receives a further concretisation: the relatedness to the transcendent not only is the basis for a later divergence between magical and aesthetic reflection at a more developed level but also proves from the very beginning to be a contradictoriness within the mimesis that comes into being. Our proposition that in the early stages magical and aesthetic reflection are consistent with each other, that the latter can form and develop into its later autonomy only in collaboration with the former, is thus by no means abolished. The contradiction pointed out just now merely relativises this proposition, meaning that from the beginning opposing tendencies within this conformity also take effect that can in many cases modify, obstruct, and in places even completely prevent the constitution of aesthetic reflection. For instance, Hegel points to the Islamic prohibition against the artistic imitation of living things (the arguments for which certainly date back to the magical period) in relation to depiction of a fish: ‘If this fish shall rise up against you on the last day and say: “You have indeed given me a body but no living soul”, how will you then justify yourself against this accusation?’46 Similar magical remnants arise in relation to the miraculous power of works of art at the time of Byzantine iconoclasm, etc. And behind the millennia-long polemic against art as ‘falsehood’, as ‘deception’, are also the residues of such a magical view, even if these residues have become ever so varied in the course of social development. Again, the detailed exposition of the concrete consequences of this state of affairs belongs in the historical materialist part of aesthetics. For our purposes, it suffices to expound in a quite general way the contradiction that shows up here as a moment in the philosophical genesis of aesthetic reflection. All of these inhibitory tendencies, however, cannot abolish the essentially evocative character of the mimetic constructs that come into being in the magical period and are directed by its magical worldview. For whatever the intentions aimed at transcendence co-determining these constructs, the evocative purpose nevertheless remains the immediate determining principle for the majority of them. Only when we regard the aspects that have been analysed separately to this point (the unitary constructs made out of the reflective

46

Hegel 1988, p. 42.

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images of reality, the evocative intention in their selection and arrangement, the conscious directing of evocative effects by mean of such a composition) in their lively dialectical interaction and mutual interpenetration do those tendencies leading to the emergence of the aesthetic come quite clearly to the fore. In terms of form, it is already readily apparent that composition and direction denote at least two sides of one and the same process. It is the metaphysical error of many – primarily modern – aesthetic considerations to want to draw a precise boundary between the two, as if there could be a compositional relationship between the parts of a work of art independent of the effort to arrange, enhance, and attune the evocative effects of the parts and details to each other in relation to the impression of the whole. Such views, which are diametrically opposed to the essence of the aesthetic, could only come into being in capitalism on the basis of the boundless alienation of creation, work, and reception from each other and from human needs. That is to say, what develops on the one hand here is a technique of merely formal effects, of an empty or mendacious evocation, that is developed ‘purely’ out of meaningful experiences and is therefore vacuous and soulless; what develops on the other hand is a defence against it in the form of the theory depicted above of a work in itself, separate from effect. As comprehensible as it is in socio-historical terms, such a development contradicts the genuine categorical structure of aesthetic reflection. This reflection spontaneously strives to awaken certain impressions, feelings, passions, etc., and the artistic sense that emerges grows precisely out of the meaningful experiences produced through the practical effects of mimetic constructs as compared to the subjective ideas concerning their creation. That is to say, a certain ‘technique’ in carrying out mimetic constructs develops whose only purpose is to evoke the prescribed (and therefore indissolubly given) contents in the desired intensity. Because of the structure of capitalist society, these relationships are loosened, sometimes even completely destroyed. What results from this are the false views characterised a moment ago, against which the real artist of this period has to fight a perpetual battle. Let it suffice here to refer to Goethe, who stands at the beginning of the development that leads to this divergence and who vividly feels how difficult it is for creators to hit upon the profoundly artistic without such stimulating supervision, for if one does not discover this aid as something actively operative in social reality, he must automatically reproduce it in his own creative labour instead. Goethe says, ‘Unfortunately we moderns too are occasionally born poets, and plague ourselves round the whole genus without knowing exactly what we want; for, if I do not mistake, the specific indications ought by rights to come from without, and the opportunity determine the talent’.47 47

Schiller and Goethe 1877, pp. 456–7, translation modified.

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For the age in which the aesthetic originates, this determination from without is a matter of course. The mimetic constructs called forth by magic have the task – besides the function of ‘conjuring’, about which we have already repeatedly spoken – of awakening in man by means of the presentation (‘imitation’) of objects or processes those thoughts and feelings that their determinate practical purpose requires in each case. They are hence determined ‘from without’ in terms of both content and form. It follows from the essence of magic that this content-related determinateness implies the ‘imitation’ of expressly specified facts or processes of life, and their shaping is again aimed at evoking the thoughts and feelings that are likewise required by this determinate and practical purpose. Therefore, although both the content- and form-related determinants of magico-mimetic constructs may have nothing to do with the aesthetic in immediate terms, the foundation for the formation of the aesthetic reflection of reality is precisely what is objectively set down because of this. In terms of content: as a fact or process of life is singled out of the animated totality of the everyday and is thus selected and arranged so that the content could take effect precisely in its purpose-conditioned isolatedness. In terms of form: as the receptive person is confronted not with reality but exclusively with its reflective image, which is set the task of evocatively calling forth certain thoughts and feelings. Now, from such a determination of content and form it inevitably follows that each of the two must be attuned to the other in its beingjust-so, that form therefore spontaneously rises to prominence as the form of a specific content, without a consciously aesthetic intention (such a thing could not have yet existed in those days) and without any sort of enigmatic ‘Kunstwollen’. The thing that is decisive for us in this case is that – even though this process takes place spontaneously and unconsciously from the point of view of the aesthetic, and if a certain degree of conscious awareness is indeed present in it, then it can only be a magical conscious awareness (or one that operates in terms of ‘technique’) – this particular kind of content and form (the form of a specific content) is not simply an everyday appearance but is the product of a generalisation in which the essence of the mimetico-evocative reflection asserts itself. For the moment we are only considering those mimetic constructs that present a passage of time (for reasons that will be elucidated by the analysis itself, we will refer to spatial depictions later). Their inner principle of arrangement has to reverse the normal temporal course of everyday life in order to make it suitable (modified first by this operation) for the evocative effects aimed at here. In short, this means that the arrangement within such a construct assumes at its outset the conclusion in which the intended effect is supposed to culminate. All parts, details, etc. are thus selected and put together

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so as to enhance this effect in the main and to form one necessary experienceable path that gives rise to this acme of effect. Of course, this path can be simple or convoluted; in all likelihood, real development went from plain straightforwardness to complications. However, as soon as the slightest complication comes into being in this structure – and again, in all probability, this came about very early, long before the detachment of the aesthetic from the magical – there had to arise from it categories that became very important for aesthetics, like delay, incident, contrast, countermovement, etc. For it is clear that in the case of such a composition aimed at the evocation of certain unitary feelings and thoughts, a delaying moment must act in a simply disruptive way, distracting attention and dissolving the tension, if it is not supposed to awaken and does not awaken immediate lived experiences of tension in the spectators. Precisely this detour must be inevitably necessary for the actual achievement of the goal; indeed, it no longer appears as a mere detour because the resistance and the overcoming of resistance that are expressed in it enrich and deepen precisely those feelings whose awakening is the goal and content of the whole construct. Such motives already show up at the primitive level, as when tracks are lost and found again in a hunting dance, when an enemy’s cunning provides him a temporary advantage in a war dance, etc. And it goes without saying that such deviations from a completely direct presentation of the content must accordingly rise to prominence in all formal elements of the composition if it is to take effect in the desired way. With that said, we have highlighted only one of the essential categories that must come into being and develop in such a presentation. It is already clear in the case we have brought up that the movement (here, the complication) takes the content as its starting point and, in keeping with this content, asserts itself as a formal aspect, as a variation of earlier forms. The law that determines all appearances of this sort is founded in the double reversal already described by us. For it follows from this that, by means of their linkage to each other (that is to say, by means of elevating succession into that which follows from each other), all aspects of what is presented have to receive in particular a greater vividness than they tend to possess in life. In fact, not simply an intellectual highlighting or explaining of phenomena and their relationships – which in the case of dance, for instance, would simply be physically impossible – but rather an immediate manifesting, a visual and aural, emotional and thoughtful evocation, of their being, their movement, their causal connections. This signifies very substantial differences vis-à-vis everyday life, although – and what thereby appears again is an important aesthetic category – its sensuous mode of appearance and its general contents and forms must by no means be radically altered. Precisely what comes to light in magic is the already often-emphasised

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dialectic of appearance and essence, only now with the concrete detail that what is essential becomes more powerfully and clearly perceptible here than in everyday life and yet at the same time remains more intimately linked to the sensuous surface. The evocative effect indeed consists precisely in the fact that what is essential is immediately perceived and felt; it is not gained by means of the intellectual analysis of events. From the beginning, therefore, the mimetic construct must reveal the qualitatively distinct mood of its decisive content in all aspects; the change in moods must be based on and continuously related to this keynote of feeling, and even the contrasts that occur (think of delay here) must move within a circle determined on this basis. Important, later developed categories of aesthetics, like intonation for example, evolve on this basis as well. At the same time, it would be superficial to limit the validity of these categories to music. After all, the initial lines of any lyrical poem (significantly very pronounced in folk songs and popular ballads), expositions of drama, etc. have such a character: the necessary content-related introduction to the material is inseparably connected to the suggestive awakening of that mood that will dominate the whole ensuing action. (Bear in mind the opening scenes in the works of Shakespeare.) Even in its most primitive forms, the evoking of a certain mood by means of intonation is a bearer of the essence of artistic generalisation, of elevating the presented event to a higher level of what can be apperceived than is possible in everyday life as a matter of principle. This is precisely where it becomes apparent how intimately content and form must be brought into interaction in the evocative efficacy of a reflective construct. As indicated, an evoked mood is immediately and above all an issue of form: it integrates the individual depictions of reality that have been made into such a sequence, gives them such proportions and such a rhythm, and models every single element (word, tone, gesture, etc.) on such a quality of effect so that the intonation of the desired mood could come into being. However, as Lenin says, ‘Form is essential. Essence is formed. In one way or another also in dependence on Essence …’.48 Lenin is speaking here of form in general, thus both in science and in everyday life or art. What is specific to our case seems to be a merely quantitative increase. The forming of essence, the dependence of the one on the other, rises to the immediate surface more clearly in mimesis than in other areas of human activity. Yet contained precisely therein is the qualitatively new thing that comes into being. Whereas a tension between appearance and essence prevails everywhere else that profoundly and

48

Lenin 1972b, p. 144.

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determinedly acts on the form-content relationship, in the mimetic construct what appears is shaped in such a way that it will turn into a bearer of essence precisely in its immediate phenomenality. What is sought in everyday praxis and in science with reflection (the closest possible linkage between appearance and essence, a form that does not at all clash with its content) is fulfilled here in the experienced immediacy of the work’s effect. True, this fulfilment is one that is purely related to man. Not only is the contradiction of appearance and essence in objective reality existing in itself sublated, but also what is presented to man is a reflection confronting him and equipped with all the attributes of objectivity, the content and form of which call up fulfilment in him as the attribute of this reflected world. We have already explained that such an effect can only come into being on the basis of an – in essence – accurate reflection of reality. And we will still be coming back to this issue again and again. Both the possibilities of effect in a mimetic construct and the influence it exerts on the broader life of people depend very strongly on this relationship between objective reality and its reflection of this sort. This is precisely what we call the beforehand and the afterwards of effect in aesthetics. Here we have to content ourselves with the mere statement that the circumstances here are much more complicated than in everyday praxis or science. After this necessary excursus, we now come back to the alterations that necessarily follow from the described evocative effects of mimetic constructs. In the case of intonation, the relationship delineated here between content and form is clearly visible. In the first instance, it is unquestionably a formal factor: the selection, configuration, intensification, proportion, etc. of parts and details must primarily spring from the shaping. But since genuine form is always intimately connected to essence, this formal aspect at once overturns into something content-related. Yet it is not a mood in general – such a thing does not exist – to be awakened but rather a mood that is entirely concretely determined, spontaneously developing – seemingly – of its own accord out of the concrete circumstances of concrete people. However, it is clear that, for its part, the reflective image of these life conditions again must already possess in its content-relatedness an intention towards such a form, must to a certain extent carry within itself formal elements in order to be the content suitable for precisely this form, and so on to infinity. As the determination of the essence of these categories, the continuous Hegelian overturning of form into content and vice versa is most clearly apparent precisely here and more pronounced than in other areas of life. If we earlier determined the directing of evocation to be identical by nature with the objective principles of composition, then this has already been corroborated by the expositions so far. The inner relationship of a mimetic construct necessarily intends to transform the succession of shaped

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events into a compelling development of one thing following from another. In and for itself, this is still nothing more than the faithful reflection of the causative structure of objective reality, its real causal relationship. This must remain preserved in its essential content-relatedness if the mimetic construct is to be able to be regarded as a reflection of reality, which is indeed the decisive precondition of its evocative effect, as we often noted. Therefore, without being allowed to touch upon this structure and its concrete mode of appearance, essential changes vis-à-vis the immediate surface of everyday life must be carried out in the mimetic construct. These changes already follow from the fact that a reflective image closely delimited in terms of space and time should awaken the impression of a life that is in itself unlimited; in each case the separate mimetic constructs indeed present only a limited segment of life (war, hunting, etc.). In life itself, however, this is tied to the totality of life with countless threads. On the one hand, raising a part to a – relatively – intensive wholeness presupposes tearing off and destroying a multitude of connections that otherwise went back-and-forth between the part selected and its natural surroundings. On the other hand, those ties that link together the elements of the segment figuring into the reflection also proliferate and intensify. The prevailing causality of life is therefore preserved in principle, though it receives an enhanced intensity, immediately sheds some of its extensively broad mediatedness, and results in an immanence within a spatially as well as temporally delimited field of action. Already this amounts to an essential shift of emphasis that can only be guided in a balanced way into the pathways of the faithful reflection of reality as a result of the fact that the formal compression never remains merely formal; it rather intensifies essential content-related (typical) features and relationships everywhere in order to let genuine reality thereby appear in a separate spatio-temporal field of play. Such a compression, although bearing continuous qualitative changes with it, would not, taken for itself, for still a long time be the most decisive, compulsory, and spontaneously occurring change in the mode of reflection of everyday life. Its essential specificity first comes to the fore when we bear in mind that it has to focus all of its content- and form-related aspects on the evocation of feelings and thoughts. Again: the elements of the specificity of mimetic constructs are also necessarily contained in everyday reality. Their intensification appears at first glance to be merely quantitative here as well. However, as a result of the fact that these elements must be continuously and intently sustained in the whole construct; that the evocative effect of the parts and details must be attuned to one other; that directing as a principle of composition – with all the necessary detours – heads for a precisely fixed goal and every detail (even though as such it has to act immediately and for itself) transforms into

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a mere aspect of the whole that concretely grows atmospherically out of what precedes it and helps prepare for what follows it in an equally concrete and atmospheric way. As a result of all of this, something qualitatively new comes into being: the autonomously operative power of the mimetic construct. This autonomy of the mimetic construct, its detachment from appearances in everyday life to which it is otherwise still so deeply related, gives itself away even more clearly in its concrete process of becoming than in its actual functioning. For its functioning must, as a likeness of objective reality, reproduce its contents and forms in their genuine relationship. By contrast, what occurs as a matter of principle in the case of its process of becoming is a reversal that, for all of its paradoxicalness, is nevertheless based on fundamental and indispensable needs to such an extent that it must already exist in the most primitive mimetic constructs. We allude to the fact that – in contrast to the completed objective composition itself, which must give the succession, the causal chain of events in their actual sequence – the subjective composition (the process of creation) in essence takes the conclusion as its starting point, as has been shown, and teleologically selects, puts together, configures, etc. all moments as a path to that conclusion. It is clear that such a subjective composition must underlie even the single most primitive mimetic constructs. For instance, when we again recall the war dance, it is certain from the outset that it must end with victory over the enemy (bringing this to pass is indeed the magical purpose of the whole). However, if it is to act evocatively, each scene, indeed each movement, must consequently be selected, determined, and placed so as to accordingly prepare for this end (possibly through delays), to ensure its maximum evocative effect. From this teleological viewpoint, the correct and natural chronological order and causal order is now produced in the objective composition. When we are describing this state of affairs here, we particularly highlight at the same time the fact that both aspects (both the teleological reversal and the equally teleological reestablishment of the real course of events) create a distance from everyday praxis, even though individual processes undoubtedly exist in everyday life in which there are seeds for such modes of comportment. What now comes about in this doubled composition is based on a strict subordination of parts to the directing principle. Therein the qualitative difference of such reflections from the original (from objective reality) plainly finds expression. As trivial as it may sound, it must nevertheless be emphasised here that in reality itself every detail is real; that is to say, in human life it also asserts itself as something existing independently of consciousness – to the extent of its objective and subjective importance, of course. But in mimetic constructs the reflection of a detail does not obtain a ‘reality’ (the evocative impression of actuality on a receptive person) unless it fits smoothly into the direction,

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unless it heightens the previously roused expectations of leading over into what follows, etc. The sudden or the unexpected therefore has an entirely different (indeed even opposite) effect to the one it has in life. No matter how ‘off-guard’ the death of a person may catch one, the mere fact of death has something shocking about it; indeed, very often in life it even happens that what enhances the shock even more is precisely the brusque abruptness, the semblance of absolute contingency. In mimetic constructs, however, the surprise must be prepared for. Since it is just a matter of reflection and not of reality itself, a mere fact (a factum brutum) can have no power to convince.49 This is of course not the place to analyse the very convoluted problems that result from the category of preparation – as a sub-issue of directing – the less so because the actual complications first showed up at a much higher level, long after art becomes autonomous. An indication of these issues had to take place, however, because only in this way does the essence of directing clearly come to the fore. That is to say, on the one hand, the mimetic construct can have a ‘reality’ only as a whole, and this construct is a product of directing that has been consistently carried through. On the other, the parts and details must immediately act as autonomous entities because the ‘reality’ of the whole construct is only built up out of such a totality of autotelic components, in which our analysis – even at the most primitive level – clearly shows their profound dependence on the overall context, on the systematisation of concrete directing. We thus see how, from the mimetic aims of the magical era, which in their original intention have nothing yet to do with art and which spontaneously and directly grow out of the magical conception of the world, the most important categories of construction in the aesthetic sphere spontaneously come into being in the mimetic construct by virtue of the immanent necessity of its being carried through with consistency. Indeed, a key determination of the aesthetic is certainly likewise contained in the kind of attachment this construct has to magic: its being determined ‘from without’, which we have already discussed with reference to Goethe. So as to briefly summarise what has been explained up to now, this is inextricably binding in terms of both content and form for a correct reflection of reality in the sense of aesthetics. In terms of content, because the evocative effect presupposes a common ground of social, human interests between mimetic construct and receptivity. (More complicated issues, like the contents of a possibly remote past being able to trigger 49

Alfred Kerr quite vividly describes such cases in developed drama in Hauptmann’s The Conflagration (Der rote Hahn) and Henry Becque’s The Scavengers. See Kerr 1917, pp. 98 and 393. He shows that this effect can even often overturn into something comical in the works of Wedekind. See Kerr 1917, p. 204.

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similar effects, do not belong here. The period of art’s genesis works on contents that either immediately belong to the present or – as, for instance, in the case of myths that of course appear later – are perceived by people as their immediate and soon-to-be immediate past.) In terms of form, because the self-contained system of reflective images, arranged according to the principle of directing the evocation of feelings and thoughts, can, precisely in its closedness, only fulfil its purpose if the evoked thoughts and feelings spring from the content ‘given’ to the mimetic construct and correspond to the aim that is jointly contained in this givenness. No matter how complicated this content- and form-related boundedness of later autonomised works of art to a certain specific task may become with the development of society, no matter how much its immediacy may loosen up, this basic structure of being determined ‘from without’ – in the closest attachment to the formal self-contained being of the works – perennially remains the foundation for any aesthetic reflection of reality. Therefore, it is no accident that the artistic reproduction of the world begins with magical mimesis, unfolds within its domain, and only breaks away from this ground at a certain higher level of development. Undoubtedly there exists a certain parallelism here to the coming into being of the scientific reflection of reality. However, as was shown, its specificity conditions a qualitatively different process of separation and autonomisation. Especially because, from the outset, the magical conception of the world is in principled conflict with the scientific reflection formed from labour and the generalisations of its meaningful experiences. Hence, scientific reflection could only ever grow in spite of a magical conception of the world, whereas the demands that magic makes on mimetic constructs are not, for the time being, in quite so sharp an antithesis to the aesthetic reflection coming into being and whose first steps magic in fact promotes. We have already pointed to the disjunctive aspects and will also soon be in a position to analyse their efficacy at least in its most general features. It further follows from all of this that at this stage of the aesthetic, which is not yet conscious of itself, not only do there come about – with magical contents, under the cover of the magical, and not separable from magic for the time being – mimetic constructs whose objective categories of construction already betray the most important features of aesthetic reflection; but also – likewise without aesthetic self-consciousness – even the most important characteristic traits of aesthetic comportment begin to form. Needless to say, we can possess even less direct knowledge of this than we do of the mimetic constructs themselves, although these too – we are talking primarily about dance, music, song, etc. – are of course not handed down to us in their original form. Therefore, the method of philosophically explaining the lower level from the higher one that

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sprung from it must be adopted here as well. Such a view can only bring about genuine results if it is able to reveal such determinations in the more highly developed formal constructs that are actually indispensable for their functioning and whose existence must thus to a certain degree be presupposed even at the lowest level. If we now want to draw conclusions about the aesthetic comportment of their forebearers from the objectively essential characteristics of the mimetic constructs that have been identified up to now, then we must recall once more the direction of evocation and the composition of objective components, as well as the already examined effective antithesis between reality itself and its reflection aimed at evocation. The issue is seemingly complicated by the fact that we must at first immediately speak of man as performer of the reflection with the aid of his movements, gestures, voice, etc. and not of the constructs in which the reflection has been detached from man himself and objectivated into a formal system that obeys its own laws, as in painting, sculpture, or the verbal arts, which for the most part, however, are certainly products of a higher development phase than dance in particular, which of course at that time contained within itself the seeds of later dramatic art as well. However, it is not too difficult to see that even in this case it is not a question of reality itself but rather of its reflection. This is now the case in dance, dramatic art, etc., both objectively and accordingly in the subjective comportment of creators and those who are receptive. The fact that the dancer or the actor cannot for one instant fancy himself Romeo or Othello but is aware that he is playing these figures probably does not require any detailed discussion: when we tend to say that an actor ‘identifies’ with these characters, we mean (as will be shown later in more detail) there is a maximal approximation in the reflection of reality, but we do not mean that he would intend, for instance, to actually kill Desdemona, to actually commit suicide, etc. The situation is equally clear in the case of those who are receptive. The difference between life itself and its mere reflection is expressed precisely in the essentially contemplative comportment that necessarily comes into being among these receptive people. Even in life itself, the reflection of reality temporarily imposes (sometimes for long stretches) a contemplative comportment on a person: that is to say, if he wants to know his way around in the world – and he must strive for this in order to be able to do the right thing – then he must aspire to take in objective facts in as undistorted a way as possible and to apperceive as faithfully as possible their reflections as they objectively are. In life, however, this comportment is continuously altered by the necessity of instantaneous active intervention or rather is subordinate to immediate praxis, since even the active person is forced – even while taking action – to observe his conditions, circumstances, etc. as precisely as possible. In life, therefore, the

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comportment of a person is above all aimed at intervening into reality, influencing it, modifying it, changing it, etc. His position and accordingly his comportment are constituted in an entirely different way with respect to that self-contained system of reflective images that we have referred to as mimetic constructs. It confronts him not only as a closed system, but also as something immutably given, as something that exists independent of his consciousness that he certainly – as a whole or in singular details – can refuse to accept yet with whose course of action he cannot interfere. (It is characteristic that the attempt to interfere, the confounding of life and artwork, frequently turned up as a motive in the course of later development, though invariably as a comic effect, indicated above, of the confounding of a state of affairs regarded as self-evident.) With his personality compressed into and intensifying the absorption of the work, the receptive person thus focuses on the contemplation of the work as a whole. As has also already been highlighted, this in no way precludes the practical effects of this contemplation of the work on the praxis of life. On the contrary. It is precisely this focusing of a person entirely on the totality of the work that creates the mental conditions to ensure that the whole man who stands in life again turns the new meaningful experiences acquired here to account there, that the shocks triggered in him by the work essentially alter and deepen his personal bearing in life. It is precisely in the single most primitive magical modes of appearance of mimesis that this is most plainly visible: war dances serve to boost the courage, the fortitude of the tribesmen, etc. Not to mention that not only does participation in such performances likewise boost one’s dexterity in the fields being made into likenesses mimetically, but also the promotion of the imagination of movement, etc. triggers similar effects in the spectators, albeit to a lesser degree. That is why the accentuation of such necessary consequences is important even in the case of the most primitive mimetic constructs because from these constructs spring the most important aesthetic categories when the content and accordingly the form as well of such reflections of reality become more extensive and intensive (for instance, posing individual, ethical, etc. problems). These categories include catharsis, for example, to which we will return in the later course of these observations. In what, therefore, does the aesthetic temper or, let us say more circumspectly, the aesthetic trait consist in these modes of comportment? The obvious answer that repeatedly shows up in the course of the formation of aesthetic consciousness is this: since mimetic constructs are above all called upon to evoke feelings, passions, etc., that person who wants to call forth these feelings, passions, etc. directly (in dancing, drama) or indirectly (poetry, visual art, etc.) must experience these feelings and passions in an extremely intensive way;

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the authenticity and depth of their passion will then accordingly transfer to those who are receptive. As a paradigm for such a conception, we cite a very late example. Matthias Claudius50 says, ‘Voltaire says, “I weep”; / Shakespeare weeps’.51 Such a direct transmission of feelings from person to person does not even take place in everyday reality, however. The transmission of feelings certainly often plays an important role here, though there must be especially facilitative circumstances and the absence of inhibitory ones in order for it to achieve such direct emotional contacts. Therefore, directness must already be missing in the receptive relationships to reflective images because the kind of response to a genuine feeling awoken from life is a completely different one. In life, this feeling is (normally) an immediate sympathy, invariably connected – when it is genuine – to the urge to help and the will to intervene. In mimetic constructs, it is an idiosyncratic feeling of pleasure, in which insight into the relationships of life, the enlargement of the horizon of life, the consolidation of the intensive knowledge of the world and of human nature, etc. comprise the decisive contents. The content and orientation of the feelings that are triggered are thus already essentially different from those found in life itself. Aristotle’s profound realisation, which we have already cited, that art can excite a feeling of pleasure even in things that are only connected to pain in life again proves to be true here with all of its widely ramified consequences. Although mimetic constructs reproduce the feelings and passions of life as well as those things which excite them, their function in awakening them is essentially different. That is why, when it comes to bringing forth evocative reflections, the direct transmission of feelings can by no means comprise the foundation of a productive comportment. In addition to the already mentioned circumstances, it cannot do this, because in life any eruption of feeling has its objectively real causes, which are effectively independent of our consciousness – even of the consciousness having the feeling – and accordingly affect all those involved in it and watching it as realities. In mimetic constructs, however, there is no such underpinning reality behind the feelings. Their effect depends exclusively on the preparatory direction of the reflective images that have steered the evocations in a certain way and on that cumulative tendency of directing that grows out of the shaped eruption of feeling. We have already touched on this state of affairs in the analysis of death on the stage. Now it must still be added that the principle of evocation does not merely regulate and determine

50 51

Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), German Enlightenment journalist and poet. [Eds.] Claudius 1954, p. 80. [Eds.]

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this metamorphosis of succession into that which follows from one another. It also – inseparable from this function – broadens and deepens each singular aspect in the direction of universality. Again, this is related to the distinction between objective reality and reflection. The inner and outer surroundings of any expression of feeling in life is, along with this life itself, objectively given with that quality of effect of the real that we have already repeatedly analysed. In a system of reflections, this surrounding world of each singular aspect of evocation must be created by this evocation itself. Later art develops all kinds of means for that to happen. Here we must try to study the principles latent in this creation of a surrounding world under the most primitive circumstances conceivable, where any kind of supporting methods (or surrogates), like stage decorations, for instance, are as yet completely missing. And not only on account of our present philosophico-genetic efforts, but also because the actual aesthetic principle that slowly unfolds under the cover of the magical world can only be recognised and worked out in this manner. That is why we speak now in the first place of the tendency towards an intensive universality in the sign language of dance. If one wants to contemplate the issues that are emerging here, then he of course must not think of modern ballet – which arose out of courtly conventions – where the evocative power of gestures (to say nothing of their universality) has been almost completely lost. Eastern dances perhaps offer a certain point of reference in which the archaic primitive traditions have survived much more powerfully. In the case of Chinese dancers, for instance, it is possible on a brightly illuminated stage to rouse in the spectator purely by movements and gestures the lived experience that the dramatic personae are acting in a completely dark room where they are able to see nothing and perceive their partner only through noises. Or it is possible – entirely without scenery or props – to evoke purely through gestures the pulling up, boarding, and pushing off of a boat; the rowing; the difficulties caused by the current; etc. Needless to say, these are only incidental examples in which we cannot know precisely just how powerfully operative the tradition handed down and the new tendencies in them are respectively. Even so, it can be assumed that the orientation (although not the entire way it is carried out unconditionally) getting expressed in such dances refers back to the beginnings precisely because such a still quite far-reaching state of being fused together with dramatic art is visible in it; and it is certain that the one developed out of the other and not independently of it. Such a tendency of dancing towards evocative universality is attested to in late antiquity by Lucian. Not only does he adduce a series of sciences (including philosophy, ethics, etc.) with which truly mimetic dancers must be acquainted in order to perform their art correctly, but also he

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compares dancing to oratory ‘as having in a certain sense the representation of the manners and passions of men in common with it’, and he regards its chief task and purpose to be ‘the representation of a sentiment, passion or action by gestures’.52 Since in this study Lucian demonstrates the age and dissemination of this kind of dance (its relationships to magic and religion as well) on the strength of a large number of materials, in his works one can also catch sight of a clue to the survival of such traditions. At the same time, the decisive factor for us is just the fact that, besides the evocative metamorphosis of succession into that which follows from one another, a likewise evocative development and intensification of every single aspect in the direction of universality can also be detected in the mimetic construct. Now how can the aesthetic comportment that brings forth such a construct be constituted? It is clear that we thereby take as our starting point the magical purpose and the means necessary for achieving this purpose and that we do not have to search for our way to this comportment from a subject (who is beyond our reach anyway) and his psychology. For, since it is socially necessary, this purpose must nevertheless come through in a good, middling, or bad way sooner or later, and whatever is achieved in this manner will gradually establish itself depending on the concrete historical needs and possibilities. From this it is especially apparent that mere spontaneity does not suffice for these purposes. Precisely because it already has the character of conjuration, ritual, and ceremony, magical mimesis cannot possibly rely entirely on the momentary inspirations of those actively participating in it, at least not in the long run. At any rate, it must fix in place the most important nodal points, aspects, transitions, etc. of mimetic constructs in advance, and it must more or less precisely stipulate for the actors which feelings they have to awaken, in which order, with what intensifications or delays, etc. Therefore, however spontaneously ‘naturalistic’ (in the sense of unrehearsed, improvised) such dances may have been in their absolute earliest beginnings, this spontaneous character could not possibly be abided by for long precisely on account of magical purposes and the instructions that follow from them. Now, it is again extremely interesting that precisely in this way, dictated by the nature of the matter, a comportment must prevail that has a pivotal significance for the aesthetic reflection of reality. It is a question of the comportment by means of which objective reality, the inner world of man, and their sensuous mode of appearance are reflected faithfully and – inseparable from the veracity of the reflection – made manifest with a maximum of evocative force at the same time.

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The fact that therein lies the essence of creative comportment in art has not often been clearly expressed by aesthetic theory; all the more is it borne out by the analysis of works of art themselves. The obstacle to the clear knowledge of this relationship is situated in the close attachment of aesthetic comportment to determination from without, to the social task that the work and its creator have to fulfil in each case. We have certainly seen that the whole structure of the social task has its archetype in the relationship of the magical purpose to its realisation in mimetic constructs. If the social task is a social and human matter of course for the creators (as is the case for centuries, for millennia), then there arises absolutely no need to subject aesthetic comportment to analysis; reflection almost exclusively addresses how the social task could be fulfilled in the very best way. By contrast, as becomes abruptly evident in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in particular, if the immediate relationship between individual and society is greatly relaxed (something that in no way abolishes the objective determination), then for creators the social task prevails only in a very indirect, widely mediated, roundabout way. If it becomes hardly consciously knowable, then there arises a continuously deepening self-reflection on the part of creators: at first artistry and later even art itself appear to be problematic, and the reflections on the human condition and on the human value of artistic comportment springing from this situation take on a self-tormenting, pessimistically coloured character. The orientation of the aesthetic reflection of reality that necessarily goes beyond the scope of the spontaneity of feelings and lived experience, the urge to create and uphold in its forms a distance from life, is no longer regarded as a simple, materially conditioned mode of human comportment towards reality and its correct reproduction but rather as the inhuman nature of artistic comportment itself. We have already mentioned that especially in the imperialist period similar reproaches also turn up against the necessary objectivity of science and against scientific comportment. However, it is in the nature of things that these tendencies only affect research into scientific reflection from without, whereas they play an important role in the inner conception of the art of this period. It suffices to refer to the late Ibsen and to the work of Thomas Mann from Tonio Kröger to Doctor Faustus in order to survey this historical situation clearly.53 The historical materialist part of aesthetics has to deal in detail with the socio-historical causes of the various types to be found in the conception and 53

If we speak here of the distortion of issues, we mean this in terms of the objective nature of artistic comportment, thus from the standpoint of a scientific aesthetics. In the works of Thomas Mann, the profound poetic truth of the conception of the artist as a human problem in capitalist society is not thereby affected. Cf. Lukács 1964b.

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evaluation of artistic comportment. The highlighting of these two extreme poles in the evaluation of artistic comportment had to take place here so that the socially conditioned occultation and distortions of this objective situation do not bar the way to our clear comprehension of the issue itself. It is certainly no accident but rather the necessary consequence of this issue’s historical development that the most systematic attempt to answer this question was undertaken at the turn of the times (on the eve of its modern bourgeois distortion, as it were) in Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting, just as it was no accident that Goethe formulated the question of the determination of the work of art ‘from without’ in the clearest way as well. Diderot looks for the answer to how, on the basis of what subjective comportment, proper dramatic art could come into being. In a theoretically profound and correct way, he takes as his starting point the distinction between reality itself and its artistically correct and effective reflection. That person in the dialogue who represents his views says of this: ‘Again, you are talking to me of a reality. I am talking to you of an imitation. You are talking to me of a passing moment in Nature. I am talking to you of a work of Art, planned and composed – a work which is built up by degrees, and which lasts’.54 Since Diderot clearly sees that in dramatic art it is not a question of life but rather of its artistic reflection, that the talk is not of the expression of feelings, passions, etc. but rather of their evocation in this reflection, he consequently rejects the view that in dramatic art it might be a question of the direct communication of psychological emotions. The extent to which original lived experiences, affects, or observations underlie theatrical evocation is a field where unlimited variations are possible, all the way down to the separate individualities of the actors. The important thing is just that emotion as well as observation must be equally reviewed and sifted through for their evocative possibilities, that artistic labour consists in fixing the thus achieved optimum in place. If anything, Diderot sees in this an idiosyncratic reflection of reality with which all the capabilities of a person (like observation, self-knowledge, the gathering and reviewing of meaningful experiences, pondering over them, etc.) are given functions that are at least as important as immediate lived experience itself – indeed, these capabilities must turn into mere material for what is actually to be shaped, material that is subjected to a constant processes of alteration if the goal of awakening the desired emotions in the spectators is to be achieved. That is why the participant in the dialogue quoted just now states the following: ‘What confirms me in this view is the unequal acting of players who play from the heart. From

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Diderot 1883, p. 25.

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them you must expect no unity. Their playing is alternately strong and feeble, fiery and cold, dull and sublime. Tomorrow they will miss the point they have excelled in today; and to make up for it will excel in some passage where last time they failed. On the other hand, the actor who plays from thought, from study of human nature, from constant imitation of some ideal type, from imagination, from memory, will be one and the same at all performances, will be always at his best mark; he has considered, combined, learnt, and arranged the whole thing in his head; his diction is neither monotonous nor dissonant. His passion has a definite course – it has bursts, and it has reactions; it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The accents are the same, the positions are the same, the movements are the same; if there is any difference between two performances, the latter is generally the better. He will be invariable; a lookingglass, as it were, ready to reflect realities, and to reflect them ever with the same precision, the same strength, and the same truth. Like the poet he will dip for ever into the inexhaustible treasure-house of Nature, instead of coming very soon to an end of his own poor resources’.55 What needs to be especially emphasised are Diderot’s concluding statements. He of course proceeds from a problem specific to dramatic art: the necessity of achieving the same effect (or one that is better and better) at every performance and not entrusting it to accidental moods. However, as the artistic fixing in place of the maximally true and evocative reflection becomes the centre of attention, he shows that the general problem of artistic reflection rises to prominence in the particular and paradoxical problem of the art of the actor: to achieve an optimally approximate and thus – relatively – definitive aesthetic form for reflection. Diderot expressly says, ‘And pray, why should the actor be different from the poet, the painter, the orator, the musician?’56 The paradox of dramatic art therefore consists only in the fact that the medium and material of this formation is man himself and not something that has already been immediately and objectively set apart from or objectivated by him, as in poetry, in the visual arts, in music. Indeed, his generalisation – precisely in relation to our present problem – goes even further. The antithesis between the mere spontaneity of feelings and passions and their faithful artistic reflection appears in his work as two conflicting modes of comportment: ‘In the great play, the play of the world, the play to which I am constantly recurring, the stage is held by the fiery souls, and the pit is filled with men of genius. The actors are in other words madmen; the spectators, whose business it is to paint their madness,

55 56

Diderot 1883, pp. 8–9. Diderot 1883, p. 12.

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are sages’.57 Therefore, what constitutes the bad conscience of late bourgeois artists, what appears in their works as a remoteness from life or their being cast out of life, is something that is deemed ‘natural’ in the works of Diderot because it is the properly founded social comportment of the artist to life and its reflection in art. While Diderot lived in an age in which the naïve taken-forgrantedness of the relationship between the social task and its artistic fulfilment already began to crack, though it allotted genuine artists and thinkers of art with a quite clearly circumscribed assignment in the fight for progress and the liberation of people, he was able to describe this nature of creative comportment in aesthetic reflection in an objective, accurate, and unsentimental way: ‘The great poets, especially the great dramatic poets, keep a keen watch on what is going on, both in the physical and the moral world …. They dart on everything which strikes their imagination; they make, as it were, a collection of such things. And from these collections, made all unconsciously, issue the grandest achievements of their work. Your fiery, extravagant, sensitive fellow, is for ever on the boards; he acts the play, but he gets nothing out of it. It is in him that the man of genius finds his model’.58 With that said, every theory of the direct transmission of feelings on behalf of art and artistic comportment is likewise intellectually obliterated, and great sensibility is put back in the place befitting it (in life as well); sensibility, Diderot says, ‘is by no means the distinguishing mark of a great genius’.59 In any case, it is not a decisive characteristic for art: Shakespeare’s greatness is not determined by his ‘genuine’ weeping but rather by his true, comprehensive, and profound reflection of weeping. We again had to make an expansive digression into more highly developed levels in order to obtain that ‘anatomy of man’ that is fit for elucidating these early stages. Of course, Diderot analyses artistic comportment at an already developed and extremely differentiated level. The determinations, however, that clearly come to light as the result of this examination pertain to the single most universal kind of comportment in the bringing forth of any evocative reflection: its indirectness, its distance from life itself so as to awaken the lived experience of the intensive totality of reality in those who are receptive. The fixing in place of the reflective image precisely at that qualitative level that encapsulates the greatest abundance in the most concentrated form, and for this reason is capable of ensuring such an effect, is the objective foundation of this comportment, no matter how primitive or sophisticated its modes of expression may be. We have already indicated that the magical determination 57 58 59

Diderot 1883, p. 14. Diderot 1883, p. 13. Diderot 1883, p. 14.

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‘from without’ must necessarily carry through such a fixing in place, and indeed this happens all the more emphatically the more forcefully it takes hold of mimetic constructs as something ritualised, as forms of conjuration, etc. If we were to look for the genesis of the aesthetic in purely spontaneous folk art, then what would remain completely enigmatic is precisely the growth of conscious artistic comportment out of such spontaneity. Precisely because the detachment of artistic comportment from the spontaneous emotional world of the everyday does not proceed from art itself but rather takes place ‘from without’ as a result of the needs of magic, this comportment can – up to a certain degree – unfold within this framework and become so determinate, manifold, comprehensive, abundant, and deep that it is later able to stand on its own feet with respect to magic (and religion) without henceforth being exposed to the danger of this foothold sliding back into everyday and (when artistically considered) formless spontaneity. In this regard, how the subjective and objective determinations of the aesthetic have their origin in the magical era becomes quite clearly apparent in the formation of aesthetic comportment, which of course for a seemingly infinite length of time cannot become conscious of itself. The determining principle is the content. Artistic form comes into being as the means of expressing a socially necessary content so that a concrete and generally evocative effect that also constitutes a social need comes into being. It is therefore quite immaterial that, objectively regarded, this content and this need are by and large of a phantasmagorical character. Under the social conditions given at that time, it was a matter of real social needs that could really be fulfilled in these forms by means of the emergence and development of these same forms. We have shown the extent to which the forms of reflection and expression that thus arise under a magical cover already include many of the most important aesthetic categories. And it necessarily follows from the formcontent relationship in aesthetics that as long as social development brings about no new content-related set of problems, as long as the magical contents can exert exclusive social control, we cannot even talk about a parting of the ways in terms of form. Not until new social contents – about which we will forthwith be discussing – come into being that have no place in the magical ‘worldview’, or even contradict it, does the real separation, the tearing off of the magical coverings, begin. It is thus clearly evident from the analysis of the essential facts that detachment here must have an entirely different character from the one it does in science. Gordon Childe justifiably insists that science could not possibly have developed directly out of magic or religion. As Gordon Childe says, it arose out of labour and manual crafts, and it was originally identical with purely practical

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modes of craftmanship.60 His descriptions of Neolithic conditions give a clear image of this. He rejects the expression ‘neolithic science’ and wants to acknowledge only the era’s ‘stock of scientific traditions’, the knowledge of chemistry in pottery, of botany in agriculture, etc., in which the ‘women who transmitted [these traditions] can hardly have discriminated between the essential theme and its accidental embellishments’.61 From this it naturally follows that such a way of proceeding could not possibly disentangle itself at once from the universal and indisputably dominant magical circle of ideas at that time. However, the ideological unity that comes into being is not a mutual interpenetration of two currents but rather just a socially conditioned juxtaposition that is as yet indivisible. Gordon Childe continues the observations just quoted by us in this manner: ‘The practical technical prescriptions of barbarian science were, for sure, inextricably entangled with a mass of futile spells and rituals. Even the intelligent and highly civilized Greeks still feared a demon who used to crack the pots while they were being fired, so they affixed a hideous Gorgon mask to the kiln to scare him away’.62 It is likewise discernible here how this juxtaposition develops so that, as forms of superstition, the surviving magical representations increasingly fall into a constantly deepening isolation from real activities and theoretically foundational thoughts. For more developed levels, Childe thus shows that in many cases writing and mathematics came into being in the priest castes. However, he adds, ‘Admittedly the Sumerian script was invented, and at first used exclusively, by priests of a sort. But the Sumerian priests invented writing not in their capacity of ministers of superstition, but in that of administrators of a worldly estate’.63 It cannot possibly be our job here to follow up on this process, no matter how cursorily. The important thing remains simply to realise that the genuine source of science is labour, that nothing works against complete disentanglement from the standpoint of this inner dialectic, and that therefore the socially inevitable interdependency between science and magic (and religion) thus especially affects the former in an inhibitory manner. Needless to say, this does not preclude the fact that certain concrete jobs, tasks, etc. that the priest regime imposes on science are able to facilitate it to a certain degree. It is certainly no accident, however, that the true great path of scientific development leads from antiquity through the Renaissance into capitalist Europe. The intricate interdependencies between facilitation or inhibition that were 60 61 62 63

Childe 1937, p. 256. Childe 1942, pp. 48–9. Childe 1942, p. 49. Childe 1937, p. 209; on mathematics, see Childe 1937, p. 218.

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operative in the East will not actually be assessable until after the complete exploration of the development of Indian, Chinese, etc. sciences in connection with the growth of the society concerned; we already pointed earlier to a few examples drawn from Indian development. What we have expounded up to now is adequate for our present issue. We have seen that the interactions between magic and art are constituted in an essentially different way. Up to a certain degree, genuine and essential aesthetic categories can unfold even under a magical covering. The later inevitable process of detachment proceeds from the content, from the social contents that by their nature are intended for mimetic evocation and therefore draw on the aesthetic forms developed in the magical period. These social contents take on these aesthetic forms for their own purposes, alter them accordingly, and thus turn the ideological weapons developed in the magical era against magic itself. This is of course a borderline case. As often as not, a simple secularisation comes into being in the forms developed in the magical period; a large portion of what is handed down to us as folk art has such a character. Most frequently, a situation will come into being in which the religious ideologies replacing magic make use of the artistic means of expression that came into being under magical conditions for their own purposes. Nothing essential thereby seems to change in the social position and function of art. This only seems to be the case, however, for it is not the same thing whether art serves the old dominant conception of the world with self-evident inevitability or whether it is made use of as a confederate by an emergent conception of the world struggling with the old one. What undoubtedly comes into being in the latter case is a certain loosening, a certain room for manoeuvre for the efforts of the aesthetic to become autonomous. And even if after the victory of the new ideology it likewise congeals, establishing rigid prescriptions vis-à-vis the content and form of art, it can be difficult to completely force through the original condition of the primordial and undisputed sovereignty of the magical ideology again. We will discuss the issues emerging here at length in the last chapter of the following volume. All that was important here was to point out clearly the principled, philosophically relevant distinction between the autonomisation of science and of art.

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Issues of Mimesis ii: The Path to the Worldedness of Art Our observations up to this point have shown how the aesthetic principle begins to collect and actualise the elements of its autonomous form and the tendency of their formation in a period of mankind’s development in which no one could even suspect what was objectively at stake in their own actions. With reference to its becoming-conscious quite late – and not, even now, in a way that is generally understood – we have shown what is objectively embedded in dance that is magically determined in terms of content and form and that has not yet, in its magical determinacy, become at all problematic. For the time being, the emphasis is on a certain distancing of the active person here from himself in his own activity, in dancing. Of course, the distance that is decisive for our issue would not yet be created in that alone. For the conscious selection of effective movements (a selection that became spontaneous again by means of practice and habit), their fixation with the help of the imagination of movement, etc. certainly already begin to form at relatively early levels of labour (even hunting, fishing, etc.). The important role played by the intellectual and emotional anticipation of motions of the hand, etc. and their purposeful implementation with the help of the imagination of movement and the division of labour among the senses in such activities indicate that, entirely independent of magical goals, human bodily actions must already have a certain distance to themselves in everyday life. The fact that in very many cases (indeed, in most) the thing from which one is consciously distanced at first turns into something ‘instinctive’ by means of habituation does not alter anything essential in the basic facts of a certain distancing. For it can only be a question here of the formation of conditioned reflexes. Pavlov rightly says: ‘The conditioned reflex is the principle of the anticipation of real phenomena’.1 That is why it is very important for our issue that he examines precisely its flexibility, its ability to change rapidly or slowly in response to the altering conditions of what triggers it, even when this change exists only as an alteration of tempo or order. The result is summarised by him thus: ‘This underscores and confirms … the theory

1 Pavlov 1955a, p. 39.

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that the flexibility of neural processes is an independent and primary particularity of nervous activity’.2 It is now readily apparent that it is precisely the overturning of an increase in flexibility into something qualitative which must rank among the important distinguishing characteristics between man and animal, if only because even in very primitive living conditions people necessarily instantly adjust to much more rapidly changing life circumstances with a far greater variation of new contents and forms than is the case with animals. It should be noted only in passing here that in Pavlov’s experiments (as cannot help but be the case in rigorous animal testing) the exciters of the reflexes are not taken from the animals’ normal circle of life. Flexibility would have to be greater under such conditions (for instance, in the case of the hunting dog on the hunt, in the relation of horse to rider) than in experiments with metronomes, rattles, etc. This distinction must therefore be highlighted because everywhere in these studies the talk is of such human reflexes that spring from life itself, from the interdependencies of personal activity – labour, etc. – to those natural objects and conditions, to those technical activities, to those social relationships, etc. to which they are usually linked. Needless to say, this foundation is not in place in the animal examples cited by us; in them it is a person who determines the room for manoeuvre of the conditioned reflexes that come into being for the animals, whereas in the case of man himself – parallel with the coming into being of civilisation – it is a question of a room for manoeuvre that is increasingly self-created. From this point of view, if one compares hunting, agriculture, and handicraft to each other, the increasingly qualitative significance of what is self-created in the room for manoeuvre of the adjustment called for becomes instantly apparent. This does not mean any preponderance of the subjective because, vis-àvis personal consciousness, the property of the tool and of the material to be worked on, the emergent social relationships between people, etc. are an outside world existing independently of personal consciousness that is just as objective as the forest and its animal world are for the hunter. However, the difference is nevertheless tremendous, as the proportions of the self-created occasions for responding to reality shift in favour of the social and the human, and furthermore as the social conditions of action remain (in epistemological terms) just as objective as natural ones, though when looked at from human praxis and its ability to develop they still possess the character of something that has been self-created. One can thus ascertain from this viewpoint that the

2 Pavlov 1955b, p. 93.

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natural limit has receded. Accordingly, such a transformation of conditions is no diminution but rather an intensification of flexibility in forming and breaking down conditioned reflexes and with it at the same time an intensification of the reinforcement of distance to the particular triggering occasion, of critical distance to it. For it is precisely in the flexibility and detachment conditioned by the interdependency between object and subjective response that the basis for the direction of development in the reflexes is located. If these tendencies are weak, then in certain circumstances a fixation of a reflex that was once conditioned into an unconditioned reflex can occur or no pressure to form conditioned reflexes comes into being at all. Pavlov says that the animal could ‘exist with the help of unconditioned reflexes alone if the outside world were constant’.3 And on the other hand, it is precisely the intricacy of the mentioned interdependencies, which came into being primarily by means of labour, that has brought about the development of higher-order forms of reflection and response. It is perhaps superfluous to point out once again that words (and with them the concept in contrast to mere representation) imply a certain distance from immediately perceived causes of response precisely as a result of the generalisation with which they are invested even at their most primitive level.

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The Worldlessness of Cave Paintings from the Paleolithic Age

If we now on this basis regard more closely the distance of man to himself, to his own movements, to their succession and their following from each other in magical dancing, all of which we analysed in the preceding chapter, then what we see jointly contained to a certain degree, albeit with essential modifications, are the features of a human system of responding to reality that are being called into play here. This brings forth a twofold paradox. On the one hand, the construct that thus came into being presents (as a whole) an increased distantiation over the level of the everyday. For what disappears here is that practical reference back to objective reality that every set of movements has within it. That is to say, if a spear is thrown in reality, for instance, then all of the aspects of the movement together constitute a unity, the value of which is measured by the effectiveness of its totality (hitting the target, distance of the throw, etc.). In contrast, here, such a set of movements builds on the previous one and prepares for the one following it, in which the evocation of a particular

3 Pavlov 1955a, p. 434.

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content occurs instead of actual effectiveness so that now and then the awakening of the impression that something which has failed can be considered a success. There is no doubt that with all this the distance from the individual elicitor of a response becomes greater. On the other hand, the correctness of any movement – and in particular of its linkage to other movements – calls for a greater and more differentiated flexibility than is possible in everyday life as a rule. Since, as we have seen, its impact is quite complicated, its main emphasis does not lie in what is materially correct but rather in the evocation that is being immediately brought forth. However, this flexibility of selection must be critically checked and definitively fixed in place following its discovery at that time. Needless to say, everyday life also knows of such a fixing in place. There, however, it takes place as a practical optimum in relation to a real goal, and it must be discontinued every time the objects or the circumstances of their occurrence alter. The opportunity for a possible alteration introduces the potential flexibility in what gets fixed in place, whereas in the case of dance the fixing in place is – according to the idea – something definitive. With all of this, the character of dance as a construct is merely circumscribed anew: everything that it mimetically reproduces is still not a construct. It becomes this only in the reflection that is thus fixed in place. As such an autotelism of a set of reflections comes into being – may the magical covering remain undetachable for a long time, may the aesthetic consciousness corresponding to the aesthetic construct be completely missing or rather just concealed by the magical covering completely – the aesthetic is nevertheless thereby present as an objective principle. We showed a similar genesis on the occasion of the coming into being of the ornament and already pointed out there that actual aesthetic positedness also appears relatively late in its pure form. The path over body decoration and the adornment of implements to pure ornament is long, whereas we can observe the occurrence of pure aesthetic form here at a relatively early level of genesis. Add to this the issue of the creation of the aesthetic construct’s own world, in which (as we will see) both aspects are equally important: the quality of ownness as well as the coming into being of a ‘world’ in contrast to the worldlessness of ornamentation that we have already discussed. Although the formation of a ‘world’ in the aesthetic sense is a long process – and only now can we discuss in detail all the characteristics that determine it – it must already be observed here that the most primitive dance is already directed at ‘creating a world’, whereas by its nature the most perfect ornament must be worldless in principle, which does not abolish its being perfect but rather confirms it. It is thus self-evident that the next, higher stage in the direction of the coming into being of an own world in the aesthetic sense is the disentanglement of

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the aesthetic construct from the bodily activity and immediate involvement of the person himself, its metamorphosis into a truly autonomous construct that confronts man as an autotelic in-itself. This is a very lengthy, frequently convoluted, and complicated process that (in principle) can never be fully carried out. For the very reason that even in the case of complete disentanglement there still are and must be arts in which this separation cannot take place as a matter of principle: dance itself and dramatic art. On the other hand, in the development of these arts it becomes clear that they increasingly lose the pivotal significance they had in the genesis of art. In the case of dance, it is evident that it is necessarily superseded more and more by other arts in terms of worldcreation and must be displaced from the central position it initially occupied in the aesthetic pursuits of mankind. (It is in the nature of the aesthetic, still to be expounded in detail later on, that dance by no means thereby disappears as an art but can remain a perfect one.) The situation is more complicated in dramatic art. With the development of verbal art, immediate recital by means of human voice and gesture undoubtedly fades ever more into the background. In practice, it has already lost any direct significance for lyric and epic, and even for drama the detachment from being performed, the effect made by its being merely read, has become increasingly dominant. Needless to say, it would be a risky and false simplification (indeed, it would be a distortion of the genuine facts) to assume a radical separation had taken place here. Even in lyric and epic this is not the case. To be sure, actually reading aloud or reciting works has pretty much completely ceased as a way of communicating them in practice. The ability to read such works aloud, the possibility of an aural effect by means of the human voice, has nevertheless remained in force as a criterion for rhythm and internal structuring, etc. Although theatrical performance no longer has the significance that it did in antiquity or in Shakespeare’s time, the ability to be performed (the intensification of effects in the transformation into the scenic) has still remained the criterion of dramatic composition in an even more decisive way than is the case in lyric and epic. The structure of individual scenes, their artistic relation to each other, as well as rising action, delay, climax, etc. are even apperceived during the reading as an imagined anticipation of an ideal performance. These relationships, along with what changes and is retained in them, are of fundamental significance for the genesis and unfolding of the aesthetic principle. Almost everywhere – not at all uniformly, of course – a process of diverging from immediate perception and its predominantly physiological determination is what takes place. Moving in such a direction is very important for the constitution of the aesthetic principle, in particular for the formation of the worldedness of the artistic construct. The artistic composition increasingly

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encompasses – quantitatively and qualitatively – contents that would have been unattainable by it when it began. As a result, it becomes more and more comprehensive in the sense of reflecting the totality of determinations, in fact both as an intensification of their inner nature and as an expansion of the field of determinations that are pertinent to and expressible in aesthetic reflection. In accordance with what has been explained up to now, it goes without saying that such an extensive and intensive enrichment of meaningful aesthetic content inevitably entails a refinement of forms, a propagation of their scope of validity, a deepening of their impact on reality. Without this aspect, the artistic development that did indeed take place cannot be comprehended in terms of the philosophy of art. However, this is only one side. Disentanglement from the physiological conditionality that was originally predominant does not mean a complete break with it. Social development, the retreat of natural limits in the intellectual and psychological life of man himself, is indissolubly based on these conditionalities. One cannot even say – as Romantic critics of late civilisations tend to do – that this natural and sensuous component is on the wane. It is far more likely true that the field of man’s meaningful experiences in life and in art has become so vast in comparison to its beginnings that the proportion of what was originally in this totality is less, even if taken by itself it increases in intensity. Similar tendencies could certainly be pointed out even in the history of music, though with completely different issues and developmental tendencies in accordance with its nature. This tendency is expressed most clearly and incisively in the visual arts, the coming into being of which indeed presupposes from the outset the disentanglement that is being portrayed here. For in painting and sculpture there come into being for the first time and in their purest form mimetic constructs for which man himself figures only as creator, without his being found in the world of reflection shaped by him other than – possibly – as the object of the artistic reproduction of objective reality. Therefore, the detachment from the immediately given person that we analysed above, his self-objectivation in reflection (something that can thrive in some arts only as far as man distances himself from himself internally), is in place here from the outset, uno actu with the coming into being of works at all. If what is indissolubly there in the ornamentation of implements is an attachment to the tool that is useful for practical purposes, then this is of a different character. In the ornamentation of implements, mimesis can never ascend to the grandeur of a world of its own. The character of worldless ornamentation is set by the nature of the thing itself here so that even in those places where the original intention was of a predominantly mimetic character, as in the case of the hunters of the Paleolithic Age, the effect is more often that of a partially successful ornament

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than it is of a one-sidedly exclusive reflection of reality (very much in contrast to the painting of this period, to which we will soon refer). A high level of development of art as a whole is necessary so that mimetico-realistic motifs turn into organic elements of ornamentation, as in Rome. Images or statues – in the long run, works of verbal art or of music as well, of course – give rise to an independent world that confronts man even though it is created by man, an autonomous ‘reality’ that assimilates the entire intellectual and emotional life of man and elevates it, enhances it, deepens it, intensifies it. And this is not a by-product – something that can be brought forth time and again even from constructs created for different purposes, from the relationships that came into being, etc. – but rather the exclusive function of such a ‘reality’. This ‘exists’ only insofar as it is able to bring forth evocative effects of this sort; furthermore, it is a piece of stone or wood that has nothing useful about it. Needless to say, what has been explained just relates to the objective meaning of the process of genesis being analysed by us. We have repeatedly pointed out that all of these feelings originally came into being within a milieu governed by magic and in the service of magical purposes; their evocative effect has immediate magical contents. We have likewise shown that at this level of development a real, socially perceptible and therefore decidable conflict between magical purpose and content on the one hand and the aesthetic specificity of the constructs that came into being under the magical covering on the other was not possible in practice, indeed was inconceivable. However, cave paintings from the Paleolithic Age prove that this inner dichotomy existed between these two principles that in themselves are heterogeneous. Upon their discovery, their tremendous realism impressed to such a degree that some even thought they were modern forgeries, so little did such a sweepingly evocative fidelity to nature seem compatible with conventional ideas about early art. It is highly probable that the overwhelming impression on individual researchers has prompted them to deny the magical character of these paintings and to behold in them the first mode of appearance of a primordial ‘pure’ art-drive in man. Such a conception, however, instantly stumbles into indissoluble contradictions with other fundamental characteristics of this art. The works are almost unseeable; that is to say, they are so difficult and labourious for the observer to access that it is out of the question that the awakening of an immediate visual impression or even a visual pleasure could have been the driving motive behind their coming into being. From this point of view, Scheltema describes the circumstances quite rightly when he remarks, ‘It is also important that the cave paintings appear to be completely indifferent to the given background, to the cave wall. One is to be reminded merely of the tangled clustering of animal images in Altamira, of the scratched drawings in Les Com-

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barelles that are hardly visible, or of the fact that particular ceiling images can only be seen if one shoves himself into the tunnels and nooks of the cave while lying on his back’.4 And Hoernes says, ‘It appeared alarming that the rooms in which many images are located were difficult to access and completely dark’.5 Even if we know today that lamps were used to illuminate the caves, especially so that by means of dances an incantation could take place before the images, that does not alter anything at all in the basic fact that these images did not arise from the intention of eliciting a visual evocation in the viewer.6 It is precisely the paradoxical combination of these contradictory tendencies (of the magical intention of succeeding in the hunt by making a likeness of the wild game on the one hand and of the fidelity to nature and the evocative force of the image on the other) that reveals the real situation at this stage: a high-level art, but one that is created under conditions in which its evocative effect could exist only in itself, only as something potential, though in practice it could not rise to prominence at all. In the works of Gordon Childe we find an accurate description of both aspects, which is all the more valuable considering that the contradictoriness of the situation occupying us here does not come into question at all in his posing of the problem and hence remains unmentioned. He says, ‘In the deep recesses of limestone caverns, perhaps two miles beneath the earth, the impenetrable gloom lit only by the feeble flame of fat burning in a stone lamp with moss wick, and often on rock surfaces accessible only by standing on a helper’s shoulders, artist-magicians painted or engraved the rhinoceros, mammoth, bison, reindeer that they must eat. As surely as a pictured bison was conjured up on the cave wall by the master’s skillful strokes, so surely would a real bison emerge for his associates to kill and eat. The beasts are always highly individualized actual portraits, not abstract shorthand symbols. They reflect minute and deliberate observation of real models’.7 What is observable here in an obvious way is how from magical needs a high-level art could come into being without its aesthetic nature having been able to enter at all into the consciousness of contemporaries. It likewise becomes apparent that, from the standpoint of the requirements of magic, aesthetic character and artistic value possess an awful lot that is accidental in itself. Of course, the linkage between the magical and the aesthetic is by no means accidental in itself. From the standpoint of magic, in certain 4 5 6 7

Scheltema 1950, p. 35. Hoernes 1925, p. 150. Kühn 1956, p. 10. Childe 1942, p. 29, translation modified.

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cases the intensively evocative effect that the cohesion and autonomy of the artistic construct presupposes and demands is unconsciously obligatory, as in dance for example. That is why it is clear that the magical goal stands for that determinateness ‘from without’ for nascent art that we already discussed in connection with Goethe. At the same time – and also necessarily – this relationship between magical evocation and the aesthetic evocation growing out of it includes the aspect of solidarity as well as multiple aspects of a merely accidental linkage. This accidental quality can find expression in various ways. On the one hand, evocative effects are possible in which the magical contents have such a preponderance with respect to the aesthetic elements of form and content that these are nearly or completely missing in the constructs themselves. An enormous amount of archeological and ethnographic material testifies to the real existence of this possibility. On the other hand – and this is the case in the cave paintings – something that is aesthetic in a full-fledged way can arise from magical demands without this having to stand for something truly essential to magic’s current praxis; the artistic level of visual composition was indeed almost imperceptible here and, as we have seen, out of the question in terms of evocation. The specific unity of the necessary and the accidental in the magically produced evocation must be constantly kept in view if one wants to understand the genesis of the aesthetic principle correctly. First and foremost, it explains the extraordinary unevenness in the development of many arts and genres of art as well as the same tendency within the same genre. Needless to say, only the most general basis of this phenomenon can be uncovered here; its further specification belongs in the historical materialist part of aesthetics. At the same time, however, this unity casts a light on the particular relation of the magical content-related determination to the aesthetic constructs brought forth by its shaping. We have been able to see in the discussion of ornamentation that, in accordance with its most general character, this relationship is allegorical, albeit in an entirely idiosyncratic way. For in later allegorico-aesthetic constructs the transcendent content always has a certain – greater or lesser – influence on the compositional mode of those objects that are designed to be aesthetic bearers of transcendent allegorical significance. By contrast, in ornamentation this content is transcendent vis-à-vis what is shaped (it is a meaningful content posited independent of any objectivity) in such a way that, as we have seen, it becomes easily replaceable. As a result of this, there is a possibility that ornamental objectivity, the ornamental system of relation, remains completely understandable visually and totally interpretable aesthetically even if the allegorical significance has been utterly lost or become inextricably ambiguous.

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In such cases the vastly more pronounced objective univocity of mimetic constructs and the vastly greater importance of real reflective images of reality in them hamper such a tidy separation of the shaped content from the transcendent and the allegorical. The first impulses towards the composition of a ‘world’ already create intrinsic relationships between the two sets of content so that – frequently – when the transcendent magical significance has vanished, many things in the presentational construct become incomprehensible, and these things are not simply not there as a lost (and aesthetically no longer sought) content, as happens in the case of ornament, but rather their absence appears as a gap, at any rate as something that has become partially incomprehensible in the relationship of form itself. However, this is still just an initial tendency here. Not until the transcendent powers are already personified in an anthropomorphic manner do there unfold the tensions indicated a moment ago that lead later to the problems of allegory. Indeed, the more primitive a magical condition is, the slighter this tension becomes. For whether it is a matter (to follow Frazer’s classification) of imitative or contagious magic, the transcendent powers themselves remain shapeless. Magical enchantment manifests either in the mimesis of mundane shapes into objects or into their manipulation, as for example in the destruction of the likeness of that person who is to be devastated by means of magic. Contingency can be expressed in the unity of magical and aesthetic mimesis each time. This is more likely the case in contagious magic, where the evocative character of the reflection necessarily plays a slighter role than in imitative magic, although even in the latter one certainly finds a wide scale ranging from merely suggestive, abstract memory-images to the level of presentation attained in cave paintings. In any case, here too the link between a presentation directed towards a transcendent effect and the transcendent goal itself – precisely in its presentational character – is much looser than in certain later religious allegories in which the concrete reflective image as such is to be the mimesis of a this-worldly object and its otherworldly archetype at the same time. Since this finds expression in the pictorial presentation of reality more incisively than it does in dance, for instance, the tendency towards the – aesthetic – secularisation of magic, towards the constitution of the autonomy of the aesthetic principle, is more conspicuous in the former than it is in the latter. Many a researcher of the period of art’s coming into being has noticed and established the qualitative difference between dance and visual art. Thus, A. Gehlen, who in the former beholds ‘mimetic presentation in vivo, a transposition of man into this being, an identification that is vividly and actively carried out’. By contrast, he says about the image, ‘The image reproduces essentiality still more completely. The image of an animal is a presentation that has turned into

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a fixed outside world in which the abidingly virtual fulfilment of abidingly virtual needs becomes imperatively graphic, thus the stability of the sympathetic classification of world and man’.8 The correct assessment of a significant fact must be sharply separated here from its idealist metaphysical interpretation. First of all, the expression ‘transposition of man into this being’ (‘animal beings, moon beings, etc.’) used in the case of dance is imprecise, ambiguous: he wavers between modern, nondescript ‘empathy’ and a mystical identification. Evoking the latter is admittedly not uncommonly striven for in the magical or the religious. If it succeeds, then specific lived magico-religious experiences come into being, such as ecstasy (primarily orgiastic ecstasy, for the bringing forth of apathetic ecstasy requires entirely different means that are not even mainly related to art). As much as lived mimetico-magical dance experiences were able to converge with the orgiastic from time to time, it is precisely here that the differentiation is quite clear: whereas lived orgiastic dance experiences principally want to call forth ecstasy in the dancers themselves (shamans, dervishes, etc.), in magico-mimetic dance there comes into being that distancing from itself – needed to affect the observer – that we have already portrayed at length, even in its theoretical consequences. Gehlen is therefore quite justified when he emphasises the visual as ‘a presentation that has turned into a fixed outside world’ as compared to dance. He is also correct when, in the course of this, he accentuates the fact that ‘abidingly virtual needs’ obtain an ‘abidingly virtual fulfilment’. That particular form of distancing from everyday life in which the gap is magnified at the same time as an intensification of the immediate sensuous power of evocation consciously turns into a goal is unquestionably enhanced in the image as compared to dance. It is in this way that the reflection of reality underlying the whole image obtains incomparably greater prospects for development: it can be more propagated, more mediated, more deepened, more intensified, etc. The fact that the aspect of orgiastic ecstasy is forced into the background in the course of this – indeed, it disappears, or has a tendency to do so – is likewise a sign of this strengthened distancing. However, Gehlen immediately distorts and makes an absolute out of the lived experiences of ‘the stability of the sympathetic classification of world and man’ that instantly come into being by interpreting them as the ‘general theme of archaic metaphysics’.9 Since that time, there has been an intellectual stocktaking among people regarding their lived artistic experiences, and definitions of the aesthetic have turned up that

8 Gehlen 1956, p. 200. 9 Ibid.

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accentuate this mutual adequacy of man and world to each other. (One can say that this is the case from Sir Philip Sidney to Stendhal.) Such definitions are unquestionably an important aspect of its essence. In the case of Gehlen, however, it is precisely the correct facts which are being falsely interpreted, for he does not want to behold a determination of art therein but rather the ‘general theme of archaic metaphysics’. Without our being able to engage with the far more remote issue of such a metaphysics, we regard this theory, which occupies a central position in Gehlen’s book, as a pure construction, arisen from the spirit of contemporary, desperate Romantic anti-capitalism. The following objection must be briefly made against it: it completely distorts the development of mankind when it (according to Gehlen’s own words) ‘takes the old myths at their word’ and with the help of such methods intends to be able to conjure up the driving forces from the accompanying ideological appearances (as happens, for instance, when Gehlen derives stockbreeding not from the development of the forces of production but rather from the magico-ritualistic ideological forms of this era).10 For the purpose of criticising the capitalism of our day in terms of culture, which he has every reason to do, Gehlen reduces the historical significance of economic praxis, which he calls ‘rational praxis’ – a terminology that could then only have a certain justification if it exclusively meant the objective meaning of praxis and not its forms of consciousness – so as to overstretch the efficacy of purely ideological (here, magico-ritualistic) factors into something completely inadequate, thereby obscuring and distorting the phenomena that were correctly perceived by him in other contexts. Among other things, this becomes clear in the following argument: ‘… the ice age hunter himself proves that the gamekeeping of large animals could not result from their mere observation and the practical utilisation of observations: as their cave paintings prove, there were never better observers than they, and yet they did not invent the tending of animals, which again was only to develop out of a cultic presentational comportment’.11 No doubt the specific qualities of the cave paintings (among them the extraordinary power of observation) are related to the hunting of wild animals. But it remains a mystery to Gehlen why a transition to animal husbandry had to result from a capacity to observe animals (for hunting purposes) in an acute and accurate way such that, if this did not occur, one would have to explain animal breeding purely out of magico-ritualistic behaviour. An otherwise quite fine observer, he apparently does not want to take note of the fact

10 11

Gehlen 1956, p. 282. Gehlen 1956, p. 281.

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that individual human capacities develop differently within different modes of production. The acuity of the power of perception acquired at one point may remain, but it is directed at other objects and relationships. The end of the ice age simply necessitated other methods of foraging and production, which brought about a radical reorientation of all capacities. For instance, individual results may lag far behind the level of the period of hunting and gathering in terms of artistry; however, the overall culture was a more developed one in principle. Agriculture and stockbreeding came into being in such contexts.12 Gordon Childe also points out that the dog was already a domestic animal in certain hunter-gatherer societies of the Mesolithic Age. That is to say, that level of domestication which lay within the horizon of a group of people living from hunting could also be realised there.13 A qualitative change like animal husbandry presupposed precisely a thoroughgoing change in all the relations of production. These and other false interpretations of historical relationships change nothing in the fact that Gehlen is correct in determining that the picture is a higher level of objectivation – materially directed at the aesthetic – compared to dance. True, even the transition from the simpler to the more sophisticated that is carried out here is by no means direct and linear. It is even quite likely that a great number of the first pictures had a purely or predominantly magical use-character, which only differentiated itself gradually such that the mimetic element (the focus on a genuine reflective image of reality) gained decisive preponderance. For a barely suggestive process of highlighting certain isolated abstract traits of a model taken from reality often suffices for the imitative purpose of magic and its ritualistic manipulations, particularly when it (to use Frazer’s term) is a matter of contagious magic. As we have already shown in theoretical terms, however, what also prevails in those places where a kind of imitation is being directly aimed at is a relationship (determined by accidents in many cases) between magical needs and the aesthetic requirements that are growing out of them. Gordon Childe describes such cases for the hunters of the Paleolithic Age in the following manner: ‘The Gravettians used to carve little figures of women out of stone or mammoth ivory, or model them in clay and ash. Archaeologists term these Venus figures (Venuses). But they are generally hideous; most have no faces, but the sexual characters are always emphasized. They were surely used in some sort of fertility ritual to ensure the multiplication of game … In any case they must mean that the Gravettians grasped the

12 13

Cf. Childe 1942, pp. 36–7. Childe 1942, p. 32.

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generative function of women, and sought magically to extend it to the animals and plants that nourished them’.14 Appreciating the significance of such statements does not mean that one has to unconditionally fall in line with Gordon Childe’s sweeping aesthetic judgement. From the standpoint of an artistic conception and its implementation, Hoernes rightly points to the conspicuous unevenness in the small sculptures found from this period.15 The extraordinarily long coexistence of such tendencies is only one confirmation of what we have explained up to now about the role of contingency in the course of the genesis of the aesthetic. (Bear in mind how much that, even in religious art, entirely inartistic – indeed anti-artistic, from the standpoint of religion – pictures could be operative in peaceful coexistence with major artistic achievements. The fact that one could say that certain levels of development were physically incapable of producing something aesthetically worthless does not change the veracity of this train of thought at all.) The disentanglement of what is by its nature aesthetically shaped by the merely ritualistic or enchanted means of magic also takes place here, though not as some sort of ‘declaration’ of the autonomy of art but rather in such a way that, for the time being, it develops – as a result of the indifference of the magical aims towards the new traits – purely within the intellectual and emotional world of magic. Only gradually does a certain ‘habituation’ to the world-creation of art come into being among people: as a general rule, when social development generally strengthens those thoughts and feelings that are awakened and deepened in this way and thereby enables a de facto disentanglement of the aesthetic, of the specificity of the artistic reflection of reality. Needless to say, this is not only a gradual but also a very uneven process, since its intricate relationships during the complexity of emerging from primitive communism rise to prominence in extremely different ways. This unevenness also gains strength due to the fact that not only are the social needs that condition the determination of the aesthetic ‘from without’ very diverse but also the various arts, genres of art, etc. respond to these manifold tendencies of determination in very different ways. Even just adumbrating the possibilities for and restraints on development that come into being here lies beyond the scope of this work. As we have already repeatedly emphasised, these conditions are at their most favourable in ancient Greece, precisely because of its social mode of religion, which is least of all fixed in terms of theology and castes. In any case, these observations show that disentanglement in the visual arts (and of

14 15

Childe 1942, p. 29. Hoernes 1925, pp. 162 ff.

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course in verbal art as well) happens at a higher level than it does in the case of dance. Negatively in that the possibility for having an inward effect, for bringing forth an orgiastic ecstasy in the dancers themselves, is out of the question in these arts at the outset. In a manner that is diverse but nevertheless convergent according to its basic tendency, both visual and verbal art press for an immediately contemplative comportment as an effect, which already constitutes the subjective correlate to world-creation. Positively in that in these arts the drive towards world-creation becomes animated in a way that is richer and more developed than it is in dance, whereby subjective thoughts and feelings are evoked that by their nature must be independent of magic, even when this difference cannot be made conscious as such at first or for a long time. In terms of form, this world-creation is expressed in the inner roundedness and completion of the artistic construct. However, it is readily apparent that a formal character of this sort can only be the immediate expression of the solid totality of the meaningful content, no matter how narrow or restricted its scope may appear to be in terms of content. This solid totality of the meaningful content constitutes the worldlike, autotelic quality of works of art in their inner completeness. However, even a determination that takes the meaningful content as its starting point is still too formal to clearly designate the single most essential point. ‘Solidity’ has a double meaning here: an objective meaning and a subjective one. In a subjective regard, it refers to the fact that the world presented is indissolubly and exclusively related to man. The synthetic power of his senses and their growing differentiation make reflections of reality possible in which its essential signs are faithfully in place and in the proper proportion. It is precisely in this encounter with objective reality that these reflections reveal a world adequate to man. The objective correlate of this situation consists in the fact that the solidity of what is shaped reflects the intensive totality of the reality that is being depicted, its essential determinations, its objects, and their relationships. As the intensified whole man is thus related to this intensive totality, the world-character of the work of art can be constituted out of this solidity. In the following observations, we will occupy ourselves at length with the multiple determinations of these relationships. In order to intellectually clarify the transition from a state of genesis to that of the work’s completion, let us now briefly discuss the issue of object and relationships. In doing so, we recall our analysis of the worldlessness of ornamentation. An essential aspect of this was its specificity that, to the extent that reflective images of objective reality (plants, animals, etc.) were found in it at all, they had to be torn out of their natural surroundings and inserted into contexts that had nothing to do with their own objective essence. The same act likewise stunted their own objectivity to

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the level of a decorative symbolism. It is one side of the matter that a different, pure system of objects and relationships that is complete within itself (that is to say, the system of ornamentation) arose – and could only arise in this way – out of this doubled abolishment of the all-intensive totality in object, surrounding world, and relationship. Our analysis, which at the moment exclusively highlights the privative elements in this relationship, hence does not entail a value judgement. Conversely, a value judgement with positive content, such as is common practice among modern historians of art, is admittedly rejected. We have already discussed Worringer. Scheltema writes that when ‘the observed objects no longer appear in their original shape to optical memory, higher consciousness sets in by again producing the no longer seen but rather known forms insofar as this is possible and necessary’.16 He thus does not want to historically comprehend the uneven historical transition since the Neolithic Age; instead, he wants to postulate an absolute artistic ideal, at least for Germanic art. With that said, the important issues occupying us here are circumvented. If we aspire to uncover the philosophical genesis of the aesthetic, then the proper determination of the cave paintings of the Paleolithic Age must be resolved in all of its paradoxicalness. On the one hand, their immense realistic force; on the other, the impossibility of their continuation as a matter of principle. Thereafter, the likewise historical and aesthetic necessity for the development of art and the reflection of reality – millennia after such crowning achievements – starts from scratch as it were. Since we are not writing a history of art here but rather aspire to approach the genesis of the aesthetic principle philosophically, we do not just proceed from the generally recognised fact that the crowning achievements of the cave paintings only became known in our day. This fact of the history of art is indeed only a consequence of that catastrophe which wiped this whole culture from the face of the earth and compelled people to begin anew economically (and therefore artistically as well). Precisely when Scheltema wants to prove that Egyptian art immediately built on this first great art, his argument is – in terms of aesthetics – not convincing at all.17 Neither realistic nor stylised Egyptian art has anything to do with the specific essence of the great period of cave paintings. All of its orientations – apart from pure ornamentation, of course – are determined by the tendency to create a world and in this regard signify a break with this unheard-of, unrepeatable early achievement.

16 17

Scheltema 1950, p. 72. Scheltema 1950, p. 77.

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That is to say, the cave paintings of the hunter-gatherer period are realistic and worldless all at once. In effect, this is quite generally accepted today; great differences only exist in the aesthetic and historical interpretation and assessment of the phenomenon. The facts of the case are correctly described by Hoernes as follows: ‘These artists also retained an odd independence in that it did not appear absolutely necessary to them to place their otherwise correctly executed animal figures on the walls of the cave in the only way we find acceptable, namely with the legs facing downwards and the backs turned upwards. We grasp that they did not give the individual figures a frame and that they also did not draw a baseline, but we do not grasp that from time to time they also positioned in different ways animals that in most cases certainly stand on the same ideal horizontal line. In the ‘Great Hall of Polychromes’ of Altamira, the ideal baseline of the figures frequently diverges from the horizontal by around 45 to 90 degrees. The most beautiful recumbent bison figures amidst this pêle-mêle have a perpendicular line as their basis, most of the others have oblique lines of various inclinations, and hardly any figure stands on the horizontal. The painters at Font-de-Gaume took similar liberties (particularly in the salle des petits bisons), as did those at the Cave of Niaux, among others …. This capriciousness of orientation still reinforces the impression that one has before him nothing but individual figures that do not stand in any sort of relationship to each other’.18 It belongs to the deeply rooted aesthetic prejudices of late capitalist art theory that it harbors a more or less open contempt for any realism, which in most cases it terminologically equates with naturalism. This is also expressed in relation to cave paintings. For instance, Verworn19 has them simply grow out of the frivolity of leisure time: ‘The technique of sculptural bone carving and line scratching, as practiced in the fabrication of bone tools and their ornamentation, had, like any technique, to call forth play, and what could be more natural than to realise such representations in play that suffused the whole ideational life of the Paleolithic hunter: the representations of the sphere of hunting’.20 Upon a closer and more impartial consideration of the situation, however, this appears much more complicated. Gordon Childe not only points to the high technological level of these images but also shows in the finds themselves clear traces of what made such a technical ability possible: ‘from the Magdalenian site of Limeuil (Dordogne) we possess a collection of stone slivers and pebbles on which are scratched what look like small-scale

18 19 20

Hoernes 1925, pp. 124 ff. Max Verworn (1863–1921), German physiologist. [Eds.] Verworn 1909, p. 248.

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trial pieces for the cave pictures; some show correction as if by a master’s hand. The collection may be scraps from the copy-books of a school of artists’. He even goes so far as to behold ‘the emergence of the first specialists’ in history here, who were sustained by those who directly produced things on account of their indispensable activities on the community’s behalf. This benefit, of course, lies within the field of magic, which one considered ‘as just as important as the acumen of the tracker, the precision of the archer, and the valour of the huntsman’.21 Naturally, such professional artistry can thrive only on the ground of the given formation. Without a doubt, however, what exists here is an exceptional case: a relatively high culture on the basis of hunting, fishing, and gathering, thus at a very low level of socio-economic development. ‘But this cultural efflorescence’, says Gordon Childe, ‘this expansion of population were made possible by the food supply bounteously provided by glacial conditions and an economy narrowly specialized to exploit these. With the end of the ice age these conditions passed away. As the glaciers melted, forest invaded tundras and steppes, and the herds of mammoth, reindeer, bison, and horse migrated or died out. With their disappearance the culture of societies which preyed upon them also withered away’.22 This explains both the efflorescence and the impossibility of a – direct – continuation. As we emphasised at the beginning, the unique character of this art from the standpoint of aesthetics rests upon its manner of reflection, which is realistic, true to objective reality, accurate, and emphasises that which is essential all at once but is nevertheless worldless. Only in this connection is the latter determination the reason for its uncontinuability; as was shown, ornamentation is worldless by its aesthetic nature. Yet this character it has is nothing less than a motor for its early high level of development. At the same time, however, it is also a reason why ornamentation can survive or continue to unfold in any culture that simply creates certain conditions of existence for it. Looked at aesthetically, though, realism and worldlessness are mutually exclusive antitheses: every reflection of reality that does not stick to an immediate naturalistic surface (thus every reflection that is directed at the reproduction of an intensive totality, of a totality of the essential, sensuously emerging determinations of objects) creates – intentionally or not – a kind of world. The paradox in the crowning achievements of the cave paintings from the Paleolithic Age consists in the fact that the depicted animals seem (when regarded as isolated objects)

21 22

Childe 1942, p. 30. Childe 1942, p. 31.

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to possess this intensive totality of determinations, thus an inner intention towards worldedness; at the same time, however, they are completely isolated and are presented in their abstract being-for-themselves, as if their existence were not even interrelated with the space immediately surrounding them, let alone with their surrounding natural world. Artistically, therefore, they are outside of any world; their composition is ultimately worldless. No motivic isolation is intended by this. Such a thing occurs very often in later painting, but there it is always just a consciously chosen motif in which the relationships to the surrounding world get expressed either directly as interdependencies with the immediate surroundings (even when these seem to be merely background) or indirectly, as happens, for instance, in the countenance, gestures, etc. of a portrait. All of this is still completely missing in these cave paintings. Even if one agrees with Kühn23 that, for instance, tussling bison are what are being presented in late Magdalenian works, at most it is a matter of a motivic (iconographic) composition being brought together. No trace of a multi-figure composition is implicated in the artistic execution.24 And yet we cannot talk here of mere naturalism, of a merely – photographically – faithful imitation of individual models. The presentation is – we are of course always speaking only of the peak performances – always forcefully directed at the typical, and the details that are true to nature are subordinate to the realisticoartistic hierarchy resulting from this. Their closeness to nature is only a vehicle for expressing this typicality visually, pictorially. How is this possible? Our way of taking the world in visually, of responding spontaneously to visual presentations of the world, has already lost access to this kind of ‘pictorial worldview’. And it is the mark of the manifestly great art revealing itself here that it is able to affect us – in fact very powerfully – at all. (At the same time, it is highly probable that in the reception of these works, even when we make ourselves conscious of and thus experientially acknowledge their uniqueness, we approach them – spontaneously, unconsciously – with our later developed modes of perception and imagination much more than this was inherent within the objective intention of their being-shaped.) Pictorially, each depicted animal exists in an absolute, isolated being-for-itself and brings together within itself all determinations that it – objectively, in reality – has acquired from infinite interactions with its surrounding world. It possesses these, however, so that such a possession of determinations is centred with strict exclusivity on the isolated singular exemplar, and this exemplar brings

23 24

Herbert Kühn (1895–1980), German prehistorian and art theorist. [Eds.] Kühn 1956, p. 14.

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out the singularity – precisely by means of such an insular separation – and makes an archetype of itself. If we want to intellectually clarify the possibility of this paradoxical case, then we must be especially mindful of the low level of material culture in this time of origin. This becomes apparent in the everyday life of the subject in such a way that there existed an extraordinary endowment in the sensuous observation of details in the surrounding world and the fixing of them in place that far surpassed that of later cultures. I mention our earlier finding that, for instance, shepherds – admittedly of a later stage of development – were indeed not capable of counting their flock, though they carried each separate animal with them so sharply imprinted and individualised in their memory that they could notice instantly whether this or that animal was missing. Spencer25 and Gillen26 thus speak of the wonderful ability of primitive peoples to distinguish between the traces of each animal, to recognise their path and direction in forests, etc.27 Taking such facts as a starting point, Verworn calls this art ‘physioplastic’; it ‘expresses the actual object itself or its immediate memory-image but absolutely no speculation about it, absolutely no reflection and deliberation’. He contrasts it with later art by setting the most hideous children’s drawings higher as ‘ideoplastic art’ since they are beyond such immediacy and thoughtlessness.28 Here too, the correct mingles – in a way that is instructive for us – with the false. Verworn is undoubtedly right in his assessment of the level of mental development. However, he commits the typical modern bourgeois idealist error of breaking people down into ‘faculties of the soul’ and then distributing these faculties to different historical stages, whereas in reality it was always a matter of the development of the whole man, and the changes in the subjective factor must take place within the unity of this whole. It is precisely for this reason, however, that the differences and antitheses between periods obtain, when they are apprehended in Verworn’s way, a rigidly metaphysical character, as in the just cited contrast, which distortedly pits the periods against each other abstractly and stuffily in accordance with the old literary historical patterns (for instance: Enlightenment as the exclusive domination of intellect; Sturm und Drang as the exclusive revolt of feeling against intellect, as ‘preRomantic’; etc.). If the people of a hunting culture had possessed just isolated

25 26 27 28

Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), English-Australian anthropologist and evolutionary biologist. [Eds.] Francis James Gillen (1855–1912), Australian anthropologist. [Eds.] Cited in Lévy-Bruhl 1926, pp. 110–11. Verworn 1909, p. 50.

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objects or their equally isolated memory-images, then they were undoubtedly miserably famished. Our earlier cited example of their brilliant capacity for orienting themselves in forests already shows that their keen perceptions were organically connected to each other and constituted certain concrete totalities among themselves. At the same time, there is no doubt that reflection played a slighter role than in later times, even in the case of the farmers and stockbreeders of the Neolithic Age. However, to come back to our isolated images of animals: when magical belief was widespread, the correct depiction of an animal guaranteed the success of the hunt. What is this if not the reflection of a relationship between objects? As a matter of fact, a reflection that abstractively goes beyond that which is sensuously given. (We are not talking here of the material accuracy or inaccuracy of the reflections but rather of their reflective character.) The hunters of the Paleolithic era therefore linked objects to each other both in sensuous-immediate terms and in intellectual reflections. How does the isolated animal image nevertheless come into being in their painting? First and foremost, one must always remember that the surrounding world never offers isolated objects to man and animal but only ever their concrete ensemble. It is a very interesting aspect of Pavlov’s dog experiments that the triggers (completely heterogeneous to each other and – when looked at both materially and from the standpoint of the dog – randomly sequential) of reflexes or inhibitions (metronome, acidic tastes, etc.) were apperceived by the dog as concretely belonging together following a certain number of repetitions; in such a way, in fact, that the fixing of the conditioned reflexes in place is conditioned by their order, by their temporal intervals, etc. Changes, even of just a component, can occasionally induce nervous breakdowns, now and then even permanent disorders. Pavlov and his colleagues justifiably use these experiments to fathom the various types and forms of flexibility in the adjustment of laboratory animals.29 If such links also then come into being in animals, even if the relationship of the alternating stimuli is a mere factum brutum without immanent objective signification and in itself does not relate in any way to their normal life, then how are they supposed to be absent in the case of higher animals in their natural surroundings or even in that of people? It is a question of a more or less flexible and yet fixed system of conditioned reflexes. Of course, it is precisely Pavlov who has already shown that a higher, second signal system comes into being in man by means of the formation of language (and, we add, of labour) that grows into the foundation of the sci-

29

Pavlov 1955a, pp. 338–40; Pavlov 1955b, pp. 95, 258–60, etc.

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entific reflection of reality and that comprehends this reality in its objectivity, in its relationships and relationalities, in its relative and ever greater, ever more comprehensively perceived totalities of the surrounding world, up to the totality of the world itself. It will be the task of a later chapter to show that the syntheses of art (including, above all, the reflecting of reality as an evocative ‘world’) require and bring forth a higher signal system sui generis. This shares with the Pavlovian second signal system a more comprehensive character of presenting the essence as compared to habitual conditioned reflexes, though at the same time it does not make unconditional use of the unambiguous conceptuality of the second signal system in order to accomplish syntheses of a far higher order than the conditioned reflexes, with which it shares a certain attachment to the immediate sensuous excitation. This anticipatory reference was therefore necessary in order to indicate at the very least the ‘logical position’ and thereby the methodology of the solution to the problems cropping up here. In a similarly anticipatory way, it must now already be noted that, by their nature, the various reflex and signal systems indeed distinguish themselves from each other, though they are by no means separated from each other without any transition. It is well known that a movement back-and-forth between conditioned and unconditioned reflexes can and must occur in the course of evolution, still more between the various systems enumerated here. These tentative, anticipatorily suggestive remarks must suffice here; a somewhat rigorous exposition must be reserved for the chapter devoted to this issue. These anticipations were therefore necessary because only with their assistance can certain issues of uneven development be illuminated and those errors be avoided whereby one either foists the structure of our inner life onto past periods, which a few enthusiastic admirers of these paintings do, or – as in the case of Verworn – stylises their primitiveness in the pejorative sense and thereby creates homunculi who would not be able to exist in reality for one instant. By contrast, our observations aim at showing how, on the one hand, such an extraordinary perfection in the work was possible as a result of exceptionally favourable conditions at a stage that was supremely undeveloped socio-economically and how, on the other hand, precisely in its aesthetic essence this artistic height could not ascend beyond that level that was objectively and subjectively possible at this point in social development. We have already pointed out these extraordinary conditions in connection with Gordon Childe’s research. They are primarily expressed in the fact that, as a categorical exception at this stage, a kind of professional artistry became possible here by means of which the whole intensity of the existing visuo-sensuous reception of reality could be formed in a great painting, whereas in the normal everyday praxis of savages these capacities got stuck with less favourable con-

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ditions and could not leave any traces behind at all (or at least not any that are worth considering in terms of aesthetics). This artistic realisation, however, only actualises what is potentially available in the capacities founded in social modes of life. It is by no means a transgressing of the horizons that this social being imperatively imposes on the consciousness of the people living within it. Of course, even this favourability of conditions for hunters in the Paleolithic Age is far simpler than it is at a more developed stage. However, precisely what becomes visible as a result of this is the fact that, even under far more complex social conditions, certain – admittedly much more intricate – constellations appertain to the emergence of art in general and even of a great art out of normal human capacities that have come into existence socially. And it also becomes apparent that these conditions – the more developed culture is, the more this is the case – are different for the different arts as a matter of principle. Here too the facilitative tendencies were favourable only for the development of a certain kind of painting. Likewise, the boundedness of people and artists to the horizon of the material and mental culture at the time is only absolutely true at the level of this supreme abstraction. As soon as we contemplate this bond in different social structures, it becomes apparent that its concrete dynamic at the time decides whether the limits that come into being here are rigid or elastic. The particular, remarkably high level of this hunting culture was quite literally an exceptional case that did not even allow the abstract possibility of a continuation, let alone an immanently higher guidance into a more developed formation. This is chiefly related to the predominant role played by nature in the transformation of the material basis. The end of the ice age put an end to the extraordinary abundance of game, and with this change this entire cultural upswing disappeared as early as the Mesolithic Age. Needless to say, there are formations whose inner dialectic gives rise to the ones following from them (feudalism-capitalism, even more clearly capitalism-socialism). In such cases a ‘prophetic shaping’ can come into being on the preexisting basis without thereby abolishing the structural and content-related boundedness to the socio-economic foundations identified by us. Again, this shows how in all such issues the methodological standpoints of dialectical and historical materialism pass over into each other, how no single issue in such a set of problems is actually solvable without one additionally making use of both dialectical and historical materialism. From revealing the real basis of the cave paintings, we thus get around to determining more closely their paradoxical artistic essence. The subjective aptitude was the power of observation – far surpassing our own – when it came to visual phenomena in their uniqueness and in their so intimately con-

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nected typicality. Because, for instance, if we more closely consider from this viewpoint the case indicated earlier of the accurate perceptions of footprints, we thus see that the utmost sensitivity for the individual case in its utmost diversity (young or old animal, wounded, etc.) presupposes an immediate sensuous subsumption under something general (the footprint of this species of animal). The concurrence of individuality and typicality in these paintings is therefore only a heightening of visual perceptual skills into the artistic, and these are skills that the praxis of reflection necessarily cultivates in the everyday life of a hunter. As we have seen, the concrete possibility for a translation of these capacities that are indispensable to everyday praxis into the artistic comes into being by means of the social division of labour, of the ‘coming into being of a professional artistry’ in which later distinctions in talent and ability already begin to become apparent embyronically. The magical objectives of these reflections of reality is now a determination ‘from without’ that is characteristic of the creation of art in all times: in terms of both content (as the focus on what were then the most important objects of life, on the game to be slain) and form (as the solemn demand to visually shape these objects in their actual, natural constitution, thus individually and typically all at once). The determination ‘from without’, which is purely magical here (that is to say, it is the mimesis of reality undertaken so as to influence the forces that are operative ‘behind’ reality in a way that is advantageous to the community), creates the intention of a high-quality realism of individual compositions that appears so paradoxical to us in the case of the complete and radical disregard of all the relationships of the object in question to its surrounding world, indeed even to the space immediately surrounding it. Even this paradox becomes comprehensible from the magical determination of the evocative objective. The essential linkage determining success has a ubiquity here; that is to say, the mimesis must relate solely to the isolated object, but in doing so it can always under such conditions exert its effect on any individual exemplar of the mimetically reproduced generic type. The pathos of this focus on an object made into a likeness outside of any surroundings but precisely for this reason understood in a realistic and typical way still has deeper reasons than the unconditionally dominant ‘false consciousness’ of magic in those days. Rather, its effect is reinforced and deepened by means of its being founded in the absolutely primary demands of life. Examining the songs and stories of primitive peoples, Boas rightly calls attention to the fact that entirely different emotions are invested with importance in them than in ours. In the course of this he refers to hunger in particular: ‘To primitive man, hunger is something entirely different from what it is to us who ordinarily do not know what the pangs of hunger mean, who do not realize all the implica-

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tions of starvation’.30 Magically determined mimesis sublimates such emotions into the capacity to present objects in a realistic and typical way, which nevertheless heightens their intensity as well as sharpens their aim at the individual animal with complete indifference for its surrounding world – such is the direction of this ‘Kunstwollen’ that we have described. As the specifically visual capacities of primitive hunters were now artistically developed and aimed at the evocative on the one hand, and as their activity received such a determinate focus by means of such tasks on the other, the paradox indeed does not lose its aesthetically paradoxical character, though it appears sufficiently determined socio-historically. We are not talking about the normal childhood in the development of mankind that Marx highlights in the works of Homer but rather about a premature isolated eruption of realisticomimetic capacities and possibilities among people who indeed neither directly undergo a line of succession, an affiliation, a further development historically, nor can they be put in contact with later development in an evolutionary way. In spite of all this, however, a fundamental fact of all art clearly comes to light here: the indissoluble cohesiveness between evocative mimesis and artistic realism. For the reasons expounded, one side of mimesis is missing here (worldcreation) just as completely as the other (the realistic creation of the object) stands before us in its perfection. And what is expressed therein at the same time is the dual determination of any great art: the inseparability of its historical essence from its fulfilment of the aesthetic norm applying to the whole of mankind’s history. This aesthetic unity is actualised precisely by raising the mentality of a wholly incipient, supremely primitive stage to the level of art here: the unity of the indissoluble socio-historical boundedness to the ground of emergence with the – in all genuine art – unlikely and nevertheless immediate persuasively operative elevation over the cognitive and emotional level of that everyday which has brought forth this ground.

2

The Preconditions for the Worldedness of Works of Art

If we reflect on the difference between this art and the art that was referred to as that of man’s normal childhood, we can become conscious of another determination of the genesis of the aesthetic that also plays an important role in its further development later: the surmounting of natural limits, the dominance of determinations deriving from the social integration of people who

30

Boas 1951, p. 325.

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ascribe their existence to the relationships of people to each other and to their increasingly bountiful – and socially conditioned – metabolism with nature. Homer’s inimitability consists not least in the fact that this retreat of natural limits has already begun, though at the same time the pressing social life of man nevertheless manifests itself as a new ‘nature’, one created by man for man. This envelopment still prevails in the paradoxical beauty of the cave paintings; the natural limits do not yet appear as such but rather as an innate outline of human life itself. Objectively, with his first movement in connection with labour, with his first word articulating or intending a concept, man certainly ceases to be completely bound to nature. However, an incredibly long path is needed in egressing from nature to transform this in-itself into a conscious foritself. It is precisely magic as worldview (accompanying the first steps of this retreat of natural limits in the consciousness of people post festum – simultaneously illuminating and obscuring them) that makes a for-itself which has turned into a form impossible both in thoughts and in forms. What is normal about Homer’s childhood features is simply based on the fact that no influence of this kind can impede man’s contemplation of himself any longer, whereas for most of the other products of this stage such powers still remain operative. That is why the words of Marx hold true for them: ‘There are unruly children and precocious children. Many of the old peoples belong in this category’.31 Needless to say, this retreat of natural limits is somewhat relative, and this relativity contains an indissoluble and (precisely for that reason) extremely fruitful contradiction. Objectively and subjectively, man can indeed never completely egress from nature. Objectively because the decisive field of his social activity must always remain the metabolism of society with nature. No matter how much he may subject nature to his goals, no matter how much he may control it, the indissolubility of nature as the object of his praxis is posited along with this control itself. Subjectively because no matter how socialised man becomes he must always exist biologically as a natural being. As man, he is indeed the product of his own labour, though for that reason all he can do is forcefully reshape his biologico-animal conditions, producing in many respects something that did not yet exist in nature before this process of self-creation. Nevertheless, the indissoluble attachment of even the highest capacities most removed from nature to their biological basis remains something that cannot be abolished. For this reason, the fundamental contradiction is relativised further and is reproduced at ever higher levels. For, on the one hand, the anthropological essence of man suffers no intrinsic, qualitative change since

31

Marx 1973, p. 111.

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man became man; on the other, in the course of development socially produced characteristics and modes of representation are fixed in place to such an extent that, as opposed to any new things coming into being, they occur ‘naturally’ in their immediate effect, they constitute a kind of ‘second nature’. Hence the retreat of actual natural limits in real evolution is often indistinguishably intertwined with a struggle against the ‘second nature’ arising from social habituation. However, the dialectic of such an arduous and conflict-fraught path upwards is of particular importance for aesthetic reflection. In keeping with its disanthropomorphising character, the scientific reflection of reality, which directly sprang from labour and often directly affects it, must lead a frontal assault against man’s biologico-anthropological limits. The development of the aesthetic principle must occupy a far more complicated position in this set of contradictions. For both holding on to the forces that concentrate themselves into and constitute themselves as ‘second nature’ and forming alliances with new things that seek to destroy or at the very least remodel this second nature can – depending on the situation, often even depending on the artist’s personality – be favourable or unfavourable for the development of art. Regarded from a broad historical perspective, of course, the forward-driving principle that opposes a congealed ‘second nature’ is proved correct – though not unconditionally here – as a general rule. For the retreat of natural limits is a general law of mankind’s development, and as unevenly as art too follows this or serves as its signpost, a convergence must nevertheless come into being here in the end. For – in order to come back to our present issue – the meaningful content of the mimetically shaped world continuously grows in the course of this movement. Only verbal expression is negative in the retreat of natural limits. At the same time, in reality it is always a question of an intensification and enrichment of the metabolism of society with nature, from which it inevitably follows that the subject of this process (the people who constitute society) must also develop augmented and more variegated relationships to each other, which will also augment, reproduce, and refine their inner determinations. When and under which conditions such a development exerts a facilitative or confusing, inhibitory, etc. influence on culture in general and on the arts in particular is a problem that must be solved both in individual concrete cases and in a more generalised manner by historical materialism. In any case, in the everyday life of people new problems come into being in its course, new contents accrue with which aesthetic mimesis or artistic design has to grapple. Therefore – again, regarded from a broad historical perspective – the ultimate configuration of the world proper to works of art, the abundance and comprehensive character

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of their worldliness, will be a result of this development. The forward-driving power of artistic development is simply – in the end – this relationship it has to everyday life; art must solve in an artistic sense the new problems that everyday life raises for it. Now, whether these new problems are posed directly from the side of content or whether instantly and seemingly direct attempts to renew forms crop up by the action of such a social task for art on the part of everyday life is again a concrete historical issue that need not occupy us more here. This is merely to say that, as a matter of principle, in their immediate mode of appearance the most formal aesthetic issues are – in the end – always to be traced back to a new objective constellation in social reality, to its reflexes in the lived experiences of everyday life, even if artists play an extreme pioneering role in the process by immediately translating tendencies operative only in a rudimentary or embryonic way into transformations of forms. In order to clarify the genesis of the worldedness of mimetic works of art in a philosophical sense even further, we want to point out an issue which seems to be purely a question of form: the coming into being of local colour in painting. In terms of time, of course, we are once again quite markedly removed from the cave paintings discussed earlier. However, since a long supremacy of worldless ornamentation ensued upon the collapse of the exceptional culture that gave birth to such images, we can address (as has also happened so far) the issues of philosophical genesis quite as a matter of principle and not in a rigorously chronological way, all the more so since the talk here will be of the kinds of transformation that in accordance with their ultimate structure invariably recur in the course of history, admittedly always in different ways. Wickhoff32 has investigated this issue in Greco-Roman art. On the basis of broad historical analyses, he comes to the conclusion that the handling of colour, even in a work as relatively late as the Alexander Sarcophagus, was purely decorative; that is to say, it was based on the laws of physiological colour selection due to complementary colours. (Yellow and purple, red and green, etc.) Wickhoff says, ‘The spectator who naturally lives under the same physiological conditions as the artist received from works of art where this law was observed an impression of pleasure and repose, somewhat similar to that produced by simple mathematical relations in architecture, without being yet exactly conscious of the reason thereof’.33 Accurate local colours crop up only very gradually in details (face, body, weaponry, etc.), without putting the essence of colour 32 33

Franz Wickhoff (1853–1909), Austrian art historian and influential representative of Vienna School of Art History. [Eds.] Wickhoff 1900, p. 89.

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composition on a new basis for the time being. Wickhoff finds the reason for this groundbreaking change in the history of painting in the fact that there came into being a need to present the objects in a way that was inextricably linked to the space surrounding them: ‘As soon as the evolution of the background, whether as landscape or interior, was accomplished, arbitrary choice in the distribution of colours was either no longer possible, or, at any rate, was far more restricted than in the preceding period. The landscape and the sky above, sea and rivers, exteriors and interiors with their carpets and furniture, became intelligible in their context only when represented in their natural colors, and this perforce led speedily to a completely natural rendering of the figures moving in these surroundings’.34 One sees that this issue is attached (even if not in an immediate historical sense, then nevertheless according to the essence of the aesthetic) to those problems that we discussed earlier in the case of the cave paintings of the Paleolithic Age, to the problems of the worldedness of painting. For it is readily apparent that the pictorial mimesis of visible reality can only obtain the character of a ‘world’ when the presented objects really correlate with each other and their surroundings in a way that results from their objectivity itself. As the sensuo-intellectual concrete unity of such sets of relationships, pictorially shaped space is alone capable of evoking the existence of a world artistically. As soon as this contradictory and concrete unity is missing, that depth which we outlined during the discussion of ornament must be missing in the image. In accordance with artistic intention, it must remain decorative and ornamental, as in the images of Bushmen, indeed already in some of the cave paintings from the Paleolithic Age in southern Spain in contrast to the presentations of animals analysed by us. At the same time, it is probably no accident that in their colouring the former lean very strongly towards purely physiological conditionality, even if individual objects – when looked at in the abstract – are coloured in keeping with models taken from reality, whereas the latter approximated local colour more closely despite their very narrow range of colours. And it will likewise not be accidental that only flat outlines come into being in the first case, even with the most passionate shaping of the figures, even with their most intensely dramatic relatedness to each other. By contrast, what comes into being in the second is an inner vivid animatedness, in which one might have the impression that the space in which the animal lives had been removed, in contrast to the first case where space does not exist at all nor can it exist, even if people and animals are related to each other in terms of action.

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Wickhoff 1900, pp. 90–1.

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To be sure, people who otherwise developed very differently closely controlled (and therefore were aware of) the space immediately surrounding them in practice. Therefore, it is by no means a matter of ‘discovering’ space when the need for its pictorial mimesis turns up. The ‘spaceless’ painting with decorative physiological colour composition described by Wickhoff indeed stretches into times in which Greco-Roman culture had already long since led the geometrical control of space beyond the original purely empirico-practical beginnings, indeed was already able to give such control a theoretical expression. What now develops in the process is a new need dictated by life and not merely a new kind of nature observation, let alone a mere development of technique. If in the works of Wickhoff there is talk of a purple background for yellow grape vines, then neither the creators nor those receptive to the work believed that what was involved in this was the reproduction of a colour situation to be found in reality. It is precisely the simultaneity of the new pictorial problem (namely, the local colour of objects and the composition of a concretely object-imbued space) which shows that the need arising from everyday life was, if anything, directed at the ensemble of these two determinations than at a new quality in the artistic reflection of reality. The sharper natural observation of local colours that is thereby promoted and the effort to come to terms with the composition of space technically (perspective, etc.) are after-effects, not really starting points towards the new. Leonardo da Vinci correctly outlined the aesthetico-philosophical reason for those new needs that call forth such revolutionary changes in the form and content of art: ‘If poetry deals with moral philosophy, painting deals with natural philosophy. Poetry describes the action of the mind, painting considers what the mind may effect by motions’.35 Quite in the spirit of Leonardo, one must only give the concept of motion a very broad meaning so that it contains within itself all of the interdependencies between man and his visually perceptible surroundings (with that also conceived in the broadest sense as a matter of principle). One must further be clear about that fact that such visual needs do not just come into being spontaneously but can even to a certain degree be conscious from the standpoint of artistic activity and receptivity, even if the aesthetic participants – both active and passive – are not capable of conceptually formulating what it is they are experiencing and doing. Ultimately, there must also be clarity about the fact that the lack of conceptual elucidation that comes into being in no way undoes the profound relationship between the visual arts and natural philosophy that Leonardo correctly recog-

35

da Vinci 1883, p. 328, translation modified.

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nised. Needless to say, what must be held on to in the final analysis are both the parallelism and the divergence. In Leonardo’s time the interdependency between natural philosophy and the visual arts was not only more intensive but also more conscious than it was in antiquity. It is an undeniable fact, however, that artists, even before Leonardo, made use of the results and methods of natural science that were much more intimately linked to natural philosophy than they were later. Such a linkage also existed in antiquity, admittedly in a looser and less conscious way. With the establishment of such conscious or half-conscious relationships, however, the issue of objective relationships is not exhausted either in terms of history or aesthetics. We invariably take as our starting point the fact that, on the one hand, everyday life poses certain questions to science and art, prompts them to resolve certain problems – even when this is expressed in false forms or not at all – and, on the other, all the results of both objectivising fields enrich everyday life by means of the most varied mediations. They make its thinking and modes of sensibility broader, deeper, and more comprehensive, whereby science and art are again compelled to reformulate their field of activity, etc., etc. Our problem of pictorial space can only become comprehensible from amply convoluted developmental conditions. In the first stages in which scientific (natural philosophical) thinking comes into being and frees itself from magical and later religious preconceptions, everyday praxis unquestionably receives a decisive impulse from such thinking; we have already repeatedly referred to the importance of geometry. The notion of space, based for the time being on intuition and imagination, thereby rises to the level of pure conceptuality, whereby perspectives are opened up that were inconceivable in the lives of people until then. It suffices if in the course of this we bear in mind the path leading from the search for shelter in caves, etc. to the construction of safe and permanent homes. As people learn to intellectually and practically control the space surrounding them in such a way, an entirely new set of lived experiences comes into being in them that necessarily had to be completely unknown in the period of savagery: the lived experience of unconditional mastery of their surroundings, of their surrounding world; the lived experience of the world as home to man. The material foundation for this develops over the course of many millennia: the consciousness of a certain assuredness of life, secureness as the objective and subjective form of normal existence. At the same time the word ‘normal’ must be particularly highlighted, for shocks, catastrophes, etc. cannot be eliminated from the objective world-picture and therefore from its possibilities for lived experience. However, the fact of an objective ‘security’ of normal human life, no matter how narrowly its compass may be limited at first, signifies a revolution in the human mode of sensibility, which today has already turned into such a mat-

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ter of course that its actual, categorical antithesis can hardly be re-experienced anymore.36 However, this does not in any way mean that at least certain crucial nodal points of this route were historically undetectable in a more or less exact way. We are now going to briefly look at the leap described here in the history of painting (the composition of space in the image) as an important stage of this developmental process. Only after practical, economic, social, and technological successes had brought a certain degree of security into the normal life of people, only after scientific thinking had led the relationships of space to a relatively high level in terms of theory and practice – only after all of this could the feeling emerge that the space surrounding man was not something extrinsic or hostile to him as a matter of principle. On the contrary, it is his own world, something that belongs to him and constitutes – in a certain sense, to a certain degree – an extension of his own personality. With the adornment of implements, for instance, man conquered for himself even in this new sense individual objects that had already constituted an elongation of his subjective radius of action in terms of practice and technology since time immemorial; he made them into a component of an extension of his self. The universal propagation of the adornment of implements in the case of primitive peoples shows that what is involved here is a basic fact of life. However, with all due respect for this important step in the direction of man beginning to create in himself and around himself his own world adequate to himself, it must not be forgotten that even the greatest accumulation of such objects can never be capable of setting up a world of man in its entirety so long as it remains at this level, nor could the most beautiful bodily decoration elevate him to the level of a real personality. For that to happen, a higher degree of penetration into man’s immediate surrounding world by the life principles of his existence is necessary, and this is precisely what occurs in the development that we indicated a moment ago. It is certain that a break with immediacy takes place in the process, a certain distancing of man from himself, from his own activity and his own existence. The first real subject-object relation comes into being in labour, and with it there then comes into being for the first time a subject in the true sense of the word. Hegel already rightly pointed out that the immediate lack of distance to be found in mere desire and its mere satisfaction ceases in the process: ‘In the 36

It is indicative that even the most extreme philosophies of despair in modern times (from Schopenhauer to Heidegger) regard as one of their chief polemical tasks the struggle against this feeling of security, against its supposed blindness and narrow-mindedness, against the ‘decline’ that is expressed therein.

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tool the subject makes a midpoint between himself and the object, and this midpoint is the real rationality of labor’.37 It is readily apparent that the adornment of implements is a further intensification of this distancing, in fact – and this is precisely the essential thing for us here – in a different direction, as we briefly explored above. Already by its merely positing this new distance, the image furnishes a new, qualitatively emphatic intensification: a construct created by man comes into being that exclusively serves the goals of enlightening man about himself through the reflection of his inner and surrounding world, thereby raising him above himself as he is given for himself in everyday life and helping him to arrive at self-consciousness. Man is really and truly himself as he creates his own world in the world reflected by him and makes it his own. The immediate seemingly purely technical issue of painting (mimetically presenting all things in their ensemble as a concrete space by means of the discovery of local colour) turns into a mature paradigm of this attitude towards life in the aesthetic: the creation of a world of man’s own. The word ‘own’ here has three meanings, and all three are equally important for knowledge of this phenomenon. First of all, it refers to a world that man has created for himself, for that which is humanly progressive within himself. Second, it refers to a world in which the ownness of the world (of objective reality) appears in a reflection, though in such a way that the inevitably small extract that is taken from the world and constitutes the immediate content of the image grows into an intensive totality of the determinations which are pivotal in each case and thereby elevates the conjunction of objects that in itself is perhaps accidental into a world that is intrinsically necessary. Third, it refers to an own world in the sense of art, in our case to an own world that is visual in which the contents and determinations of objective reality can be mimetically evoked, inspired into aesthetic existence, and come to light only to the extent that they are translated into pure visuality. The work of art and its intensive totality of determinations thus presuppose such a homogeneous medium of its sensuo-intellectual mode of appearance. As a result, the plurality of arts is not the result of the differentiation of a unitary aesthetic principle (of the aesthetic idea in the works of the great idealist philosophers). Rather, it is the primal fact of the aesthetic, and the aesthetic principle can only be achieved – thoughtfully, no longer at the level of the immediately aesthetic – as one philosophically raises into consciousness that which is common to this homogeneous medium. Even this systematic cohesiveness is not readily deducible from such a principle; rather it springs

37

Hegel 1979, p. 113, translation modified.

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from the system of those needs of human life that make possible and demand a further development into the aesthetic. Later we will concern ourselves with the mimetic issues that arise from the own worlds of works of art when they are understood in this way. An anticipation of the starting point had to take place here because otherwise the demonstration of the genesis of art would remain incomprehensible at the highest level of its objectivation, of its autotelism. We therefore return to the philosophical problems connected with genesis. If we philosophically consider the transition from an essentially physiological colouration to the use of local colour that is faithful to the object, then it manifests itself for the time being as a cancellation of immediacy and thereby – in keeping with Hegel’s correct view – as a path from the abstract to the concrete, ‘for immediate and abstract mean the same’.38 The truth of this Hegelian statement already became apparent in our discussion of ornamentation. The relativity of these determinations must also be borne in mind here if we are to correctly discuss the dialectic in the course of this. For any immediacy is indeed abstract in comparison to the concretising that rises to prominence in its sublation. The construction of the worldedness of works of art – looked at from a world-historical perspective, apart from the unevenness of development, from their regressions, etc. in this context – undoubtedly pursues such a direction. Therefore, a universal law of the development of the arts is expressed in it. However, the fact that certain realisations of immediacy occupy a privileged position precisely in relation to their identity and abstractness does not contradict this universal law. This is precisely what we thus find in ornamentation, where the total unification of immediacy and abstraction turns into a constitutive principle of its specificity, its place in the systems of arts. Even in those places, however, where no such final fixation comes into existence, as in the case of physiologically conditioned colouration discussed just now, the beginnings occupy a particular place. On the one hand, the overcoming of its exclusive control signifies such a qualitative leap in development that, strictly speaking, the history of actually mimetic painting begins here. On the other, as we will see in detail later, this sublation includes a decisive moment of retention, of elevation to a higher level in the new relationship. All of this certainly complicates the Hegelian identification of immediacy and abstractness but in no way diminishes its universal truth. It is precisely in the most recent paintings that we can see that any decided attempt to return to abstract immediacy precipitates an abstraction, a worldlessness,

38

Hegel 1995a, p. 253, translation modified.

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just as the tendencies towards pure abstractness necessarily bring about a prerepresentational, worldless immediacy. Whoever would directly deviate from the dialectic intellectually fixed in place here would behold in its universality a one-time, definitive act. All immediacy is objectively mediated, and the most widely ramified mediations again and again bring forth new immediacies. This is the case here as well, for the immediacy of the use of physiological colour combinations for decorative artistic purposes is certainly derived from the merely physiological needs of life by means of a long and complex series of mediations. Immediacy is not a starting point in the field of chromaticity any more than the perceiving of outlines and surfaces results in ornamentation. And if in the development of the aesthetic there is a real parallel to physiologically determined colouration, it is to be found precisely here. In the passage quoted by us, Wickhoff talked about the ‘simple mathematical relations in architecture’ as an enlightening analogy of effect. We believe all the more that the comparison to ornamentation would be even more apposite considering that both modes of artistic presentation also often tend to turn up together, mutually reinforcing each other, in Oriental rugs for instance. On the other hand, it should only be briefly pointed out that in the later development of painting local colour not uncommonly plays the role of an immediacy to be overcome, as in the coming into being of chiaroscuro or still more in the emergence of plein air painting. This indissoluble relativity of immediacy and mediation is a general law of objective and subjective dialectics. While this general law remains valid, there is something further that is added to the specific domain of the aesthetic: namely that each work of art represents an immediacy as a matter of principle, that solely for this reason artistic creation therefore destroys the old immediacy of life and renounces it in order to produce a new immediacy in the work, one which assimilates the new entanglements of life. We indicated this a moment ago in the case of local colour. As a supplement to the concrete dialectic that is being expressed here, it should be noted that it would be quite false to infer an absolute immediacy from the fact that the original colouring which was overcome by local colour was physiologically conditioned; to believe, for instance, that this immediacy were directly deducible from the physiological constitution of people as natural beings. Kant already called attention to the fact that the pure colours of the spectrum not only include ‘sensory feeling but also [permit] reflection on the form of these modifications of the senses’ and can thereby immediately turn into an expression of this in their being-just-so.39

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Kant 2000, p. 181.

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We will content ourselves here with an indication of Kant’s opinion, which is not without significance for the issue being discussed at the moment. Since Kant himself beholds an issue of natural beauty in this immediate ideational quality of colours, we will deal with his theory in the discussion of this set of issues in detail. It should only be noted that Kant wants to account for the emotional linkage between moral contents and pure colours by means of an effect of nature on man. From the standpoint of an aesthetic elucidation of the issue, this conveys little of how purely physiological impressions can turn into the bearers of human, moral, and social contents and hence into vehicles of a mimetic activity and receptivity. For then this moral significance would be just as physiologically immediate as the effect of pure colour itself, which contradicts all meaningful anthropological experiences concerning the coming into being of both moral and aesthetic feelings. Goethe speaks about this issue in an essentially more concrete way in his Theory of Colours, as he devotes an entire section to it with the significant title, ‘The Sensuo-Moral Effect of Colour’. Goethe’s observations go far beyond those of Kant in that he does not simply accept as a matter of physiology the agreement between the natural and social contents noticed by both him and Kant and does not let this agreement directly overturn into something moral; at least in his examples, he instead adumbrates an interaction of both components, even if it not worked out in a consciously methodological way. He thus speaks ‘of the jealousy of sovereigns with regard to the quality of red’; he says that ‘[b] lack was intended to remind the Venetian noblemen of republican equality’, etc.40 Indeed, during the discussion of the allegorical use of colours, he emphasises that ‘there is more of accident and caprice, inasmuch as the meaning of the sign must be first communicated to us before we know what it is to signify; what idea, for instance, is attached to the green colour, which has been appropriated to hope?’41 However, if such ‘sensuo-moral effects of colour’ are possible – and ethnography shows that such effects already crop up very early – then it is clear that the classification of these two components that are in themselves heterogeneous must be far from unambiguous. For instance, we know that black is certainly the colour of mourning for many peoples, though in not a few cases the colour white takes its place, and even other colours can immediately trigger the sensuo-moral effect of mourning. To be sure, in his Theory of Colours Goethe does not halt at the effect of simple colours and their complementarity. He also goes far beyond Kant in that no colour constitutes a

40 41

Goethe 1840, pp. 315 and 329. Goethe 1840, p. 351.

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definitive metaphysical unity for him. In fact, slight nuances (like the constitution of the material to which the colour is applied) can even let the ‘moral’ effect overturn into its opposite. His explanation regarding the colour yellow will suffice as an example: when applied to dull and common surfaces like common cloth or felt, yellow’s ‘beautiful impression of fire and gold is transformed into one not undeserving the epithet foul; and the colour of honour and joy reversed to that of ignominy and aversion’.42 It follows from all of this that as early as the stage of physiological colouration the individual colours do not act in a simple and directly physiological way; instead, they become laden with meaning in various ways as a result of the social development of the peoples who used them. As its normal manner of composition, complementarity is indeed founded in a physiological way. Nevertheless, it is clear that the associations fixed in place by means of social habituation and custom must play a role that is not to be neglected in its effect. However diversely mediated this immediate beginning may be and however much its physiological essence may be carried through by many social determinations, the transition to local colour and to the pictorial composition of space still remains a leap. We have already indicated the content-related side, the social task that painting received here: the creation of an own world for man. The issues of form growing from this are focused around the mimetic reproduction of an intensive totality, out of which arises the function according to which all the individual elements of form and even more so every relationship between them simultaneously turn into bearers of different, multifaceted evocative effects while completely preserving their immediate simplicity as parts of a whole. A world can indeed only come into being in a work of art if both the details and their connections call forth in the viewer the lived experience of an inexhaustibility comparable to objects and their interdependencies in real life; indeed, this emotion must be essentially condensed and enhanced vis-àvis real life. For in reality every object attests to its relations to other objects, the law governing its animatedness and so on, its existence – even by means of this existence itself. Or rather, no proof is needed, because everyday man learns at his own peril to be mindful of the being of that which is. Even in everyday life, the cognition or lived experience of the limitlessness of the determinations of objects, their relationships, etc. is indeed an important component in the proper relation of people to objective reality. However, not until art – and only in art – does this inexhaustibility of characteristics, relationships, etc. turn into a constitutive principle and at the same time into a criterion of existence

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Goethe 1840, p. 308.

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(in the sense of aesthetics). For only the evocation of such constitutions brings forth the duality of the artistically shaped world (its character as world): it is a world that confronts me independent of me and inexhaustibly for me yet – uno acto with this autonomy – is experienced as my world. Needless to say, even this intensive limitlessness is socially determined to a large extent. Life itself molds the content, quality, and abundance of determinations summarised here and puts them before the artist as a formal program of his social task. Therefore, an impoverishment or an enrichment in this category, an increase or decrease of intensity in it, can take place historically. If we experientially reject certain earlier products of art as primitive, etc. or remain unsatisfied with the lived experience of them, then in most cases the reason for this is that these earlier products are situated on a downward sloping branch in this process or disregard precisely those determinations that the present at this particular time deems to be decisive for aesthetic existence in the work of art. Looked at from the perspective of a world history of art, however, this line is ascending. That is why in our case nothing argues against the qualitative leap if in the creation of a world proper to painting some visual determinations in addition to local colour and the composition of space are still missing that will shape occasions for revolutionary transformations in favour of these turning points in the course of the later history of painting. Vis-à-vis the physiologicodecorative conception of colour, this qualitative leap undoubtedly exists. For even in the case of what Goethe called the sensuo-moral effect of colours, it is merely a matter of a kind of association (the conditioned reflexes) formed by means of social habituation. That is why on such a basis the compositional assembly of colours had to have recourse to physiologically determined complementarity in a more or less direct way. In the discussion of the compositional issues concerning ornamentation, we already pointed out their simplicity, abstractness, and – relative – immediacy. As objects obtain their local colour, as the pictorial problem of their material constitution, their hardness or softness, their heaviness or lightness, etc. thereby emerges, the – physiological – natural limits must also recede in the composition. The more that colouration discloses the characteristics of an object that it shapes, then the more complex the compositional linkage between colours must become as well, in more roundabout ways can its ultimate harmony be realised in the totality of the image, and the more it removes itself from mere consonance on the basis of complementarity. Here too, the meaningful visuo-sensuous content and its pictorial shaping far exceed the scope of the conditioned reflexes and demand a synthetic visuo-sensuous capacity of the viewer and even more so of the creator, who, transcending it in no immediate way, nevertheless reaches the level of conceptuality by synthetic comprehensiveness and precision. (Even

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this issue can only be discussed at length in a subsequent chapter.) Here it is a question of a general phase of the autonomisation of art, one that is based as a matter of principle on the essence of the aesthetic itself. The fact that we have presented it in the field of painting happened only for reasons of an easier exemplification. Transitions of this sort are certainly verifiable in all varieties of art.43 Here we want only very briefly to point out a situation in verbal art that is different in every concrete regard but nevertheless analogous in terms of our genetic problem. It was already emphasised in other contexts that many original word formations appear to have, as it were, a spontaneously picturesque character for us, as they even denote sets of sensuous impressions (colours, for instance) not with a concept-like word but rather metaphorically, at the level of a perception passing into representation; keep in mind our examples cited earlier, in which ‘like a crow’, etc. is said instead of ‘black’. When we first brought up these examples, we already polemicised against the culturecritical, Romantic orientation that beholds something ‘poetic’ in this kind of linguistic expression and would like to oppose it to later language that inclines towards conceptual unambiguity. In reality, a genuinely poetic language can only come into being if this primitive mode of expression, which simply reflects the outer- and inner-world in an immediate and ‘natural’ way, is radically overcome. This is first the case when each word has risen to the level of the concept (even inclusive of the loss of immediate sensuousness), when evocation by means of the words syntactically combined into a sentence (thus, by means of an ensemble of individual verbal signs of reflection that are finely differentiated from one another and mutually strengthen or dampen each other in their effect) is carried out. The aesthetic analogy to the issue of colours discussed a moment ago clearly comes to light here if we are conscious of the fact that such a ‘sensuo-moral effect’ is posited by syntactically synthesised totalities in indivisible simultaneity with the variety of the evocative function of all their elements. That ‘prose’ which the word attains through the conceptual unambiguity of its meaning is poetically sublated precisely in this way, in fact so that the poeticisation in no way destroys the intellectual acuity of the word or the sentence. If anything, preserving this acuity is likewise a motive in the system of multiple meanings and relationships between meanings that heighten such totalities into totalities in the aesthetic sense. One must never forget that what 43

I refer just to Riegl’s excellent analysis of the composition of space and the realism in relief in ‘The Place of the Vaphio Cups in the History of Art’. See Riegl 2000. The fact that our problem of genesis hardly gets considered by Riegl makes our agreement in the analysis of the facts all the more valuable.

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Goethe calls the laconism of folk poetry (reduced to that which is absolutely necessary, often outwardly an expression that is approximately a definition) plays a not inconsiderable role in the progression of linguistic means of evocation. The conceptual character of words is thus not simply transformed back into an evocative sign of sensuous perceptions. This also happens, but, just as with the preserving of logico-objective meaning, it is just one aspect among many. Only all of these aspects together – the eclectic function-ladenness of any word, of any syntactical combination of words, of any logico-rhythmic, pictorially vivid synthesis in an individual sentence and in the conjunction of sentences; the organic unity (raised to a new immediacy) of sound evoking meanings and moods; the sloughing off of the empty conventionalised husks of a word and thereby the awakening of its original, intellectual, and now manifestly fresh meaning, etc., etc. – only all of these aspects in their cooperation will be capable of creating arrangements of words whose evocative effect, even in the briefest poem, conjures up a world of their own, own in its meaningful content-like and formal (verbal) constitution. It is therefore profoundly untrue that the development of language – necessarily tending towards logical unambiguity and precision – would have to attenuate its sensuous potency. To a great extent, this certainly happens in the everyday life of developed societies, where language often congeals into a purely technicist means of communication and is schematised to a great extent because of this. And without question it does not seldom happen in such cases that even the language of poetry is deformed into something clichéd or that, as a result of a process that is directed against this only in the abstract but does not go down to the root of the problematic, everywhere just the signs are inverted – pour épater le bourgeois – and sought-after models are put in place of hackneyed ones. We can content ourselves here as well with a simple indication of such regressions, for the world-historical line of literary linguistic development proceeds in the manner of world-creation outlined above on the basis of a growing polyphony of meanings arising out of relationships with growing versatility in evoking rhythmic, tonal, pictorial, etc. effects. The ever more complex objective relationships of people in society and their reflexes in inner life are expressed in their synthesis. However, it would be a failure to recognise the state of affairs that came into being historically and is coming into being aesthetically if, with regard to the growing intricacy of the meaningful content and accordingly of its means of expression, one were to disregard the simplifying nature of literary language that constitutes a new immediacy in the synthesis. Precisely in such refining relationships the plainest great feelings can receive a corresponding expression of supreme simplicity. Seemingly hackneyed, trivialised words or phrases can become the bearer of new momentously human

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modes of behaviour, and these words and phrases – precisely in their everyday word-form – can shape literarily adequate creative worlds. It suffices if we recall the famous closing replies of Goethe’s Thoas in Iphigenia in Tauris, the words ‘Then go!’ and ‘Farewell!’ With all of this, some of the most essential features of the structure of the work were at least indicated, and the terminus ad quem of the disentanglement of the aesthetic from everyday life was thereby fixed in place more clearly than before. First and foremost, though, it came down to elucidating the principled direction of this process in which the aesthetic finds itself and is objectivated as an autonomous construct. What has been expounded here in a largely abstract way will be concretised further in the following discussion in terms of the philosophically decisive categories. However, since this entire first part is focused on emphasising the specificity of the aesthetic in accordance with the method of dialectical materialism, the result of its totality can only be to show the work of art as a central construct of the aesthetic sphere in its necessity in a historicosystematic way. Its concrete categorial construction in detail – certainly not yet reaching down as far as individual genres, styles, etc. in terms of concretisation – will constitute the subject of our second part. The fact that here, in the investigation of genesis, we have rushed so far forward with these latter observations is a consequence of our general method, which undertakes to grasp the developmental tendencies, the genetic rudiments of the early stages from fully developed objectivations. The central issue of our current observations, however, still remains the genesis of the aesthetic. In order to summarise everything that has been enumerated up to this point and to take the next step in terms of genesis, a brief look back at the path taken up to now may be permitted from the viewpoint of the current issue. With our latter research into the worldedness of the mimetic reflection of reality, we have been led to certain issues of composition, for the time being in their simplest, most primordial form: the linkage of the reflections of various objects into the unity of a shaped world – a unity that is experienceable, that compels lived experience. In the form of an archeological historical summary of grouping in the visual arts, Hoernes gives an instructive summary of the situation that comes into being at the level of development discussed by us up to this point. Needless to say, it is only a question of establishing facts in historical development. We cannot go into Hoernes’ reasons and valuations here: ‘The oldest surviving works of visual art contain innumerable attestations of the incapacity for the simplest grouping. This inability is prevalent in the fields of both figurative and non-figurative forms. Rhythm and symmetry, principles that one readily imagines to be already decisively operative at the beginning of development, play a surprisingly minor role there. In a vast majority of those works, the

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individual image and the individual mark introduce a separate existence that is supremely strange and unfamiliar to our concepts, our habituation, a stubborn existence without mutual connection, without co- or subordination, without emphasis of one through the other and the like. This is one of the essential features of Paleolithic or diluvial artistry. Post-diluvial art comports itself in an entirely different, downright antithetical way. Ornamentation, the leading direction of the latter, is completely based on the simplest laws of rhythm and symmetry’.44 Again, we choose painting as an exemplification of this state of affairs because in it the relationship that is critical at the moment appears in its clearest and most direct form; we will later discuss the far more mediated issues in the other arts later. It thus comes down to the fact that both of the worldless, magically enveloped currents of the – in most cases unconscious – aesthetic reflection of reality analysed in our preceding observations (the mimesis of isolated objects and abstract ornamentation) are brought into contact and elevated into a certain synthetic unity. To be sure, such a thought is completely untrue and schematic if one fetishises the individual schools of thought in artistic production into dynamic entities, as happens so often in the history of art and in aesthetics. When conceived of in this way, primitive mimesis and pure ornamentation would mutually confront each other in a radically exclusive way, and their synthetic unification could only be accomplished by means of a theoretical salto mortale. We know, however, that in the real world of real man such fetishised fixations persist at most in the imagination. What we call an artistic tendency certainly always springs from the everyday reality of people; in keeping with the meaningful content, the essential endeavour (the way in which such a tendency evocatively reflects reality) is not the result of an enigmatic ‘Kunstwollen’ but rather is produced in the form of social reality at the time as this consciously appears in the everyday, in fact in the form of needs that come to the fore in their positive mode of appearance in an entirely hazy, featureless, and indeterminate way that the people of everyday life would somehow be able to formulate only in extremely exceptional cases, though they possess very determinate intentions precisely in keeping with the essential meaningful content. This can be seen in the great decisiveness with which everyday people express their negativity, their capacity for resistance: if art’s response to those social tasks that have become intuitive in this manner is not in keeping with the – false or generally unformulated – way they pose problems, then it experiences a resolute, often unhesitating, rejection. Of course, one must not conceive of

44

Hoernes 1925, pp. 582–3.

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a mechanism functioning in an infallibly accurate way here. Even the negative certainty depicted here only takes effect as a socio-historical tendency with a great many irregularities and variations that can certainly be elucidated at any given time in concrete cases by means of a concrete analysis of the historical situation at the time. Now apart from the general ups and downs in the clarity of the modes of expression of such needs influencing art’s path, it must still be pointed out that the desire manifesting itself here is naturally a ‘demand of the day’. The artistic response to this, however, can be directed – while including this ‘demand of the day’ – at the meaning of the relevant present moment in mankind’s development. In such cases a misrecognition of the actual meaning can very easily take place; that is to say, the achievement is only appreciated as the fulfilment of the day’s work, whereas the actual value first becomes conscious much later (Shakespeare’s effect in his time) or it can even be completely rejected or misrecognised. All of these complications – their manner, number, etc. – could still be greatly increased, but nothing alters the fact that what we have to do with here are basic structural facts in the coming into being of artistic currents. This is all the more the case considering that the fundamental essential characters of this state of affairs are much more universal than the mere relationship between the artistic work and the intellectuo-human needs of the everyday. In fact, it is a question of the formation of anything new, be it in a theoretical or a practical regard, be it in science or politics, morality or art. Hegel has well described certain aspects of such situations: ‘that hidden spirit whose hour is near but which still lies beneath the surface and seeks to break out without yet having attained an existence in the present. For this spirit, the present world is but a shell which contains the wrong kind of kernel …. It is not easy for us to know what we want; indeed, we may well want something, yet still remain in a negative position, a position of dissatisfaction, for we may as yet be unconscious of the positive factor’.45 The idealist conception of the world-spirit is obviously reflected in the fact that, as spirit, the new idea has the initiative instead of being brought forth by the needs of the historical moment. Historical materialism, which deduces such changes and turns from transformations in the base and from the necessity for the superstructure to be made in accordance with these alterations, first gives an adequate explanation of this problem. From the standpoint of our issue, it is important, on the one hand, to emphasise what is common to all spheres of socio-human activities: the feeling of pleasure or displeasure and of ease or unease vis-à-vis precisely that which

45

Hegel 1984, pp. 83–4.

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exists, the longing for the new, etc.; and behind all of this, amongst often very heterogeneous subjective acts, there is at any given time a common meaningful social content, from which they rise and towards which they are directed. For the sake of keeping this exposition simple, complications in terms of class are not being adduced. For instance, the description given here always holds true for a class that is crucial in the given historical moment. In most cases the rift between being and consciousness will apply to all classes so that new needs, etc. come to the fore everywhere for the most part. However, their content, their orientation, etc. will be different, indeed opposed.46 On the other hand, the satisfaction of this common need is expressed quite diversely in the various fields of human activity. There come into being new scientific methods and results, new political rallying cries, organisational forms, objectives, new ethical norms and moral models, new customs and modes of comportment in everyday life, etc., etc. In art, this is the hour of birth of new forms. Of course, we cannot portray the extremely intricate process of the emergence of new forms out of contents here (this too is a central question of our second part). It must only be pointed out that – just as the whole life of people at any given time takes place in the same objective reality – the new meaningful content ascending from the change of the social structure must ultimately be the same in the different fields of social activity. What is specific to the artistic form ‘merely’ consists in the fact that it has to respond to and is determined to satisfy a necessity of life arising from this situation. Precisely the new comprehensive content-relatedness, which encompasses all spheres of life and calls forth qualitative changes in the whole man, brings forth such a universality of new experiential needs that – in general – many older evocative forms confront without being able to absorb. Because now it is precisely the artists whose sensibility develops in this direction professionally who will naturally respond to such changes in a particularly sensitive way. That there are also artists who again and again artistically absorb and present reality unchanged in the old manner, in whom this attitude has turned into something that is already unwaveringly a matter of habit, can alter nothing in this basic fact. As artists now respond to the new phenomena of social change in their own way, in their works there even comes into being the illusion that it is merely a matter of a new, purely formal question that would have grown out of the development of art itself, out of the needs of their own artistic self-realisation, etc. Immediately and subjectively, this too is indeed correct, in relative terms; however, it is only

46

Cf. Marx on the effects of self-alienation in the case of the bourgeoisie and proletariat in Marx and Engels 1975, p. 36.

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an immediate and subjective truth that is not capable of advancing to the point of seeing through to the objective causes of one’s own behaviour. And it is certainly no accident that often – of course not always – it is precisely the great artists who at least possess a certain inkling of which social task brought their specific design into being. (The extent to which this inkling is intellectually formulated or represents a false consciousness need not occupy us here.) Finally, it should be added that changes in the base, with their ideological consequences depicted here, likewise show an uneven development. For our purposes, all that should be singled out from this inexhaustible complex is the fact that an alteration in the social relationships of people to each other, in the metabolism of society with nature, necessarily affects with different intensity those complexes of lived experience that immediately influence the foundations for the mode of evocation in different arts and genres. This entails that the changes in form depicted here seldom crop up at the same time and with the same force in the field of art as a whole, that the same social development soon acts favourably or unfavourably on the one art or genre and soon on the other. The actual coming into being of painting in the sense which it has preserved in all historical changes until today can thus be understood in principle from mimetic and decoratively ornamental tendencies being brought into contact with each other and uniting. Our immediately preceding remarks show the way in which such an encounter between artistic efforts that originally were completely heterogeneous may have taken place. The paradox of this situation, which seems irresolvable as long as one developed art form is confronted with another equally developed but different art form, is first abolished when the starting point of need is taken, need that came into being on the basis of socio-historical changes in the life of people, in their relations to each other, in the metabolism with nature of the society in question. What comes to light as an exclusive opposition in that which gets fixed in place in a congealed way in the finished composition can very well transform from a chaotic everyday need back into an element and movement of life itself, coming to the fore entirely without paradox in a new uniformity as a new demand of the day. In such processes the lively and productive interdependency between the artistic reflection of reality on the one hand and everyday life and thinking on the other clearly comes into view. That which art shapes, reproducing the world in its manner, notably lifts the facts of socio-human existence to a much higher level of clarity and consciousness than this might be possible for the people of this sphere with the own means of the everyday. This effect unfolds in two closely linked directions: first, the evocative impression, which makes the artistic formal construct into a lived experience in those who are receptive, in everyday man, overturns into something content-related; the more deeply

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the evocative impression overturns into something content-related, the more powerfully this is the case. The new reality that the work of art generally makes come alive by means of its evocative reflection thereby turns into a component of everyday life – one that enriches, expands horizons, and intensifies the ability to perceive new facts and relationalities of life. Second, however, it would be an illegitimate simplification regarding the primacy of content-related reality to neglect the direct or indirect influence of new forms on everyday reality. The higher development of the receptivity to the new cannot possibly take place without the man of everyday life also being able to further develop the forms of his observations and their arrangement, his connecting of facts and their relations. However great the tension may even be between apperceptions of this sort in the everyday and their formalisation in art, in both cases it is nevertheless a question of the reflection of the same objective reality, indeed of the same new structures and tendencies in it. Now since previous art acted on the everyday in such a manner and transformed its people in such a way, it is not difficult to see that if social life produces the new and this new accordingly alters the comportment of people, their feelings, thoughts, etc., then the influences of previous art depicted a moment ago are jointly contained in the new needs that come into being here, regardless of whether the people who now raise such demands are conscious of it or not. From the character of the everyday examined in detail earlier it naturally follows that the interdependencies between it and art can never confine themselves to these two spheres. Apart from the direct effects that the results of labour, technology, science, etc. exert on artistic development, it is self-evident that these also can by no means leave untouched the needs coming into being in the everyday and hence art’s social task. The seemingly formless demand of the day thus arises out of the entirety of new meaningful experiences, in which the aspects depicted a moment ago that are derived from earlier artistic practices must also play an important role, certainly in their specific intention towards new art. (It goes without saying that in this process meaningful art experiences of the past can also have a conservative function that obstructs the new. Going into the complications growing out of this is already something that belongs to the historical materialist observation of actual artistic development.) During the discussion of ornamentation, we already pointed out its early perfection and the relative timelessness of its later effects. We also attempted to show how this mode and fascination it has are related to the first great intellectual control of objective reality, to the lawful arrangement of its phenomena through geometry. Since it is not just a question here of a multi-millennia period of mankind’s development but also of what is perhaps the most decisive

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turn in it (passing over from the period of hunting and gathering to that of production), such effects must be of long duration. No matter how undeveloped production may be at first, a qualitative leap nevertheless objectively came to pass that sooner or later had to impact the whole material and intellectual culture of people, to constitute its continuous foundation. The occurrence and ever greater prevalence of principles of organisation – as the reflection of the new control of nature and at the same time as the means of facilitating this new control (the elevation of these principles into elements of construction in worldviews freeing themselves more and more from magico-religious bonds) – becomes aesthetically manifest in the long-lasting prominent efficacy of ornamentation, an efficacy that indeed turned into a monopoly. The remnants of mimesis from the hunting period most likely exhibit no continuity to the erstwhile accomplishments that sprang from an exceptional, never repeatable situation. Gordon Childe rightly says of the transition to the new formation: ‘Other peoples, who have left no such brilliant memorials behind them, created the new food-producing economy’. And he likewise rightly points out that the mimetico-realistic apogee could not be of long duration even in the hunting period. After the ice age, presentation developed into conventionality: ‘The artist no longer tries to portray, or even to suggest, an individual living stag; he is content with the fewest possible strokes to indicate the essential attributes by which a stag may be recognized’.47 Naturally, the reinforcement of the new formation took effect even more strongly in this direction. Scheltema is right when he speaks of a complete ‘rearrangement of the seen memory-image into a constructed ‘mental image’ that limits itself to mere communication, to making questionable objects recognisable’.48 He also attempts to prove that, as the sculpture that was already developing in the south came to northern Europe, it ‘came to naught, as it were’; ‘after early imitation, foreign figural form is denaturalised until it can eventually congeal into non-pictorial, geometric patterns’.49 Such statements have a certain value for us by showing how firmly rooted in the culture of primitive cultivators and breeders the abstract geometrically ornamental reflection of reality was: even when they came into contact with the works of more developed cultures, everyday life rejected with spontaneous self-evidence the mimesis that was being expressed there and instinctively adjusted it to their own aesthetic needs; that is to say, a transformation of mimesis back into abstract ornamentation is what took place. (Even such a negative example confirms our earlier 47 48 49

Childe 1937, pp. 72 and 73. Scheltema 1950, p. 72. Scheltema 1950, p. 87.

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expository remarks regarding the relationships between structure and developmental tendency in the everyday and corresponding trends in art.) What Scheltema gets right in his individual fact-findings is distorted, however, in that, on the one hand, he stylises this stage of development into an absolute model, insofar as he states, ‘It will become even more clearly apparent that, on account of its odd fidelity to the object, ornamentation can only be abstract and geometrical in principle. It is already clear here, however, that, for the stated reasons, Old Nordic ornament can never present nature and only seldom can it even be symbolic in nature’. On the other hand, the necessity of aesthetically depreciating mimetic realism, above all that of antiquity, is to result from this ‘state of affairs’: a higher ‘Germanic’ art principle is to be deduced from the struggle (a struggle that is comprehensible in purely historical terms) of an organically evolved and organically developing lower culture against the influences of a higher one, for which there still did not exist any social and therefore any aesthetic foundations in it as well. According to Scheltema, ‘even here, in the case of this pure ornamentation, a rejection of southern “anthropomorphism” can very well be spoken about in certain circumstances’.50 The philosophy of history that is manifesting itself here is carried through in a consistent way. As this has become the great fashion since Chamberlain51 and Spengler, an attack ‘against the meaningless classification of the course of history into antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity’ is mounted, from which the conclusion is drawn for art history that medieval art is immediately allied to prehistoric times, which not only annuls the role of antiquity but also arbitrarily eliminates the mimetico-realistic tendencies of the Middle Ages.52 Such fashionable philosophies of history, as well as the one put forward by Worringer that we criticised earlier, blur and confuse what are precisely the most important developmental facts of art. In this case, the issue of actually developed, world-creating mimesis, the actual coming into being of art as art. The ornamentation of primitive farming peoples is an organic product of their level of production. Looked at from a world-historical perspective, it stands higher than the exceptionally advantaged beginnings of primitive mimesis because it can already – in keeping with the higher mode of production underlying it – pose and solve the problem of unity, organisation, hierarchy, coordination, and subordination, and thus it is able not only to create works that are superior in themselves but also to posit principles in the world that must become an inalienable property of all later art. It is now imperative that we 50 51 52

Scheltema 1950, p. 101. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), British-born German racial nationalist. [Eds.] Scheltema 1950, p. 188.

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see – and, on the other hand, that we resist (each in his own way) Worringer, Scheltema, and those authors associated with them – that mankind has progressed objectively and socio-economically beyond this state of primitive agriculture and stock breeding and hence had to exchange an abstract regulative principle for concrete regulative ones in art as well. This is not a demand placed on art by any philosophy. Instead it is a question of a quite simple fact of life that is easily visible to an unbiased view. Primitive life can even get by as life with few principles of organisation. The life within such a society, the relationship of people to each other and to their concrete community, is still without internal problems at this stage of primitive communism. The metabolism of society with nature is still supremely simple, control of nature is limited externally and internally to a tiny ambit. As we demonstrated at that time, the abstract (yet, within its abstract area of validity, absolute and infallible) principle of the geometric could therefore also become so powerfully and emotionally important in artistic praxis that it could control artistic work and enjoyment for millennia. The seemingly surprising historical sequence of worldless mimesis, worldless ornamentation, and world-creating art is cleared up if one is mindful of the fact that only by means of the universality of labour in society does something like rhythm (but also symmetry or proportion) receive a power pervading all manifestations of life. This is still absent in the existence of hunters and gatherers, despite the significance of rhythm for dance; despite its wide dissemination, it remains limited to abstractness for a long time. Only the growing universality of labour creates the ontological possibility of likewise mimetically reproducing the real objectivities and object relations in rhythmic organisation, arranged according to symmetry and proportion. However, precisely because the foundation of this Neolithic society constituted a continuable mode of production that could be developed to a higher level, society had to progress ever beyond these stages, at least in certain places and times. On the one hand, Gordon Childe rightly speaks of a ‘Neolithic revolution’, but he just as rightly adds that on this basis a second revolution had to follow, as he calls it an ‘urban revolution’. This second revolution notably differs from the first in that it does not signify a fresh start vis-à-vis gathering like the first one does; instead, the difference consists precisely in the qualitative leap that it carries out, which at the same time represents a sequel to and continuation of the older formation. Of interest to us here are the new needs that come into being in everyday life on this basis, those demands of the day that the new society places on art. On the one hand, the breakup of primitive communism is the decisive thing: primeval society comes undone, and the problem of the contradictoriness between society and the individuals constituting it is posed by life itself. With reference to Marx, we pointed earlier to the fact that

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the content and form, the structure and development, etc. of this revolution can pursue very different paths; what is thus especially decisive is the distinction both between Greece and Egypt, the Middle East, etc. and between these two groups and the Germanic peoples. For our observations, the crucial significance of Greek antiquity chiefly resides in the fact that here for the first time a system of antagonistic contradictions between society and individuals was carried to a finish; for the first time all the determinations of this set of problems could receive a comprehensive formation. This already distinguishes the Homeric epic from analogous poetry in Asia; this difference is chiefly expressed in the coming into being of tragedy as a genre. The introduction of dialogue by means of a second actor in the works of Aeschylus is the formal artistic expression of how the dialectico-dialogical principle in drama became the basis of the mimetic creation of a world. And the known fact that the content of this completely new genre of art is, at least initially, simply the confrontation of the new gentile society (emerging from the breakup of the old gentile society) with its own origin confirms our expositions up to this point: the dialectical contradiction between yesterday and today, the characteristic of today being the result of such clashes, is an entirely new conception of the world in which man has to live. The new form of drama is the fulfilment of the social task that the tempestuously changing social reality addressed to art in a formless and chaotic manner. Because drama is possible as a world-creating genre of art only on the ground of a social level already conscious of itself as a public sphere, the genetic relationships that contributed to its coming into being are relatively easy to see through. More difficult is the situation for the creation of space and thereby of worlds in painting that is being examined by us here. Here it is a question of the coming into being of needs whose roots are planted much more deeply into everyday private life and therefore are much more difficult to clearly show than the facts of a public life manifest to all. Even so, it is permissible to briefly point out a few aspects. From man’s search for shelter in caves to the founding of cities, a long process takes place in which the growing security of life and with it increasing leisure and culture – when we speak of everyday needs here, we are doing so pretty much without exception in relation to the ruling and exploiting classes that have already decidedly developed – have to create a decorated home out of a saving shelter. Also, around the home there come into being – publicly and privately – pieces of nature, merely selected by man at first and later even expressly developed, in which nature already appears subjected to such an extent that those things in which it has turned into the bearer of lived human experiences, feelings, etc. begin to play the dominant role (groves, gardens, etc.). For instance, if in the time of Homer even the most ostentatious

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gardens may have been fruit and vegetable gardens, their descriptions in his works show that the relationships of people to them were not limited exclusively to their material fecundity; instead they evoked the most diverse kinds of lived experiences.53 This is even more decidedly the case when it comes to the effect of groves devoted to gods and heroes, and the fact that the feelings that are awakened in the course of this are also religious in content alters nothing in this state of affairs. One could enumerate such facts for a long time. For our purposes, however, it suffices to note that, from a certain cultural level onward, people begin to pleasurably experience concrete, object-suffused spaces as their natural, permanent surrounding world, and, in comparison to the visual empowerment of such spaces, mere geometry (no matter how ornamental it has become) would have to prove itself powerless as evocative expression. This situation appears in an even sharper light if one bears in mind the fact that for imaginative activity such temples, castles, and groves are suffused with mythical memories of heroes, gods, demigods, etc., that the events from their lives linked to such places are a part of the effect that a grove, for example, triggers. What emerges from these and similar psychological facts of everyday life is the demand of the day that is being examined by us and that is made on painting: it is fulfilled by the mimetic depiction of a concrete space at any given time, a space that is suffused with objects of a likewise concrete sort and that has to encompass both the shapes and objects in such a way that these seem to have the only adequate locus of their existence in it and for the observer must also have the form of appearance of being the visible and clearly arranged likeness of man’s own world. At the same time, however, the needs outlined above that call forth such demands condition the spatially decorative character of mimetic presentation. Therefore, this does not merely reflect a concretely animated space; at the same time, it has the function of animating a real and concrete space in order to make it still more into a home for human beings, a world of their own. The simultaneity of these two sets of demands determines the decisively essential characteristics of the new visuo-artistic synthesis coming into being here: the inseparability of two- and three-dimensionality in pictorial artistic work. Let us recall that for the most highly developed mimetic painting of the Paleolithic Age there was absolutely no coordination whatsoever on a twodimensional plane. All observers of cave paintings describe how the presentation does not take the wall on which it was painted into account at all. And this exclusive focus on the individuality of a mimetic object has a doubly negative

53

Gothein 1966, pp. 54–8.

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consequence: the absence of the two-dimensionality of the image at the same time effaces the relationship of the presented object to other objects in space and to concrete space of some sort itself. It is certainly no accident that when (as we have seen) such a suggestive representationalism of multiple objects begins to come into being, at the same time the wonder of singular individuation comes to an end along with it, and the linked shapes approach an ornamental simplification and abstraction. And for its part, the other extreme of the past (ornamentation) makes the third dimension completely disappear; even if such a thing is in fact materially present as a result of a relief-like arrangement, it is not possible as far as the visuo-artistic effect is concerned. The presented objects are without mimetic amplitude. They are merely the ciphers of a secret code that is just barely recognisable, all the more so given that, as a rule, the relationships do not spring from the essence of the objectivity of what is being presented, as we have likewise seen. It would be very simple and, in keeping with the method of an idealist dialectic, also consistent to behold a synthesis in the form-content complex that is occupying us at the moment, a synthesis emerging out of a purely mimetic thesis and a purely ornamental antithesis. The dialectic of reality, however, is far more intricate than such schemata. We have certainly seen that the artistic trends depicted by us and the work structures corresponding to them did not emerge out of each other but are instead aesthetic reflections and expressive forms of an intricate historical development. Therefore, as Engels says of Marx’s presentation of the negation of the negation in Capital, the negation of the negation that appears at the end here does not crop up as ‘proof’ of a historical necessity: ‘On the contrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law’.54 This holds true in a heightened way for the case being discussed here, since it is not a question of a primary movement of social life, of the movement of the economy, but rather of a movement in the superstructure where, as we have tried hard to demonstrate, every change results from fundamental economic changes. The relationship of the ‘negation of the negation’ to the preceding aspects displays this structure quite clearly. On the one hand, the awakening of mimesis has absolutely no historical relationship to the mimesis of the Paleolithic Age. Not only does it emerge spontaneously from the new living conditions but also it is so deeply and qualitatively different from the mimesis of the Paleolithic Age that it can by no means be regarded as its

54

Engels 1987b, p. 124.

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continuation. On the other hand, the reception of the ornamental-decorative principle also does not signify an unaltered absorption into the new synthesis. Instead, the long meaningful artistic experiences that were made during the utilisation of this organising principle of evocative visuality turn into essential components of the new artistic consideration of the world in a manner that is once again qualitatively changed. In short, one could say that they were the sole deciding principles of artistic organisation in worldless ornamentation. In the new context of a mimesis directed at universality, not only the presented objects themselves but also their relationships to each other and to the space that encompasses them and that these objects pervade (a space that turns into an evocatively concrete, sensuously individualised space by means of the system of intricate interdependencies that are thus created) can no longer be determined, or at most can only be determined in a secondary way, by abstract geometrical categories. The pivotal organising principles must thus likewise be mimetic in character. That is to say, in the main current of development a composition comes into being whose principles can be derived from the three-dimensional coexistence of shapes and objects, from the manner of their relationships (for instance, of their dramatic qualities, as these are to be found in different ways in the works of Michelangelo or Rembrandt, or of a representative function, as is often the case in those of Raphael, etc.). And even in their early stages these principles already have the physiognomy of a developed aesthetic: in concrete terms – and without derogating artistic value – they are unrepeatable. That is to say, they must grow organically out of the being-just-so of the content that is being shaped in each individual case, they must universalise their uniqueness in the specific mode of art. That is why the historical and individual variability of the compositions that thus come into being is inexhaustible. Under no circumstances, however, does this signify a subjectivist capriciousness. On the one hand, the principles of composition are determined at any given time by the content. Again, this springs from the social needs of a concrete populace, a concrete class in a concrete time, and it suddenly overturns – mediated by the worldview of the artist, by the position he takes on the issues that are ascendant here – into a visual formation. Thus, the formative subjectivity here can indeed freely prevail to quite a large extent, though at the same time it is limited by the manner, scope, etc. of the room for manoeuvre in terms of content and form that thus comes into being, and it is thereby pushed in certain directions, towards certain modes and means of expression, etc. On the other hand, the creative subjectivity is guided by the path determined from these components. An artist cannot possibly evade – if he wants to remain an artist – consistency in carrying through what he has begun in one way or another, because the aes-

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thetic value of his subjectivity proves its authority precisely by being able to pursue an artistically viable (albeit still quite bold and unfamiliar) path and follow it all the way to its final consequences. This, however, is only one side of the composition problem: the unity of three-dimensional, concrete, visually evocative representationalism. But – inseparable from the concrete spatial unity of the manifold that is created in it – every image also actualises a two-dimensional unity of the manifold. One cannot conceive of the concurrence of both of these – when viewed in an abstract intellectual way – disparate and indeed heterogeneous systems completely or closely enough. Every stroke of a painting, every colour, every line, every shadow, etc. must totally fulfil its necessary function – in properly guiding evocation – in both the two- and three-dimensional unity and systematisation. The worldedness of painting comes into being not least by means of this convergence. For the intensive endlessness of the presented ensemble and all of its parts is very powerfully bound to the fact that every element of the image has to fulfil inestimably many tasks in the formation of individual figures and in the compositional nexus, and thus each element must be capable of revealing new sides at every moment. Such a tendency is already embyronically contained in the initial form of mimesis, but it is raised to a qualitatively higher level (it broadens, deepens, and intensifies) by means of the inextricable unity of a spatio-representational mimesis pushing for a concrete totality and this new form of the decorative and ornamental. This indissoluble interrelatedness has a modifying influence on both factors. What must gain even more strength in this interdependency is the drive for totality, for rounding off tendencies often directed at extensity in a relatively small space, for the intensity of the relational system between the objects of the presentation. By contrast, the decorativeornamental principle loses much of its abstractness and contentlessness (or its transcendent content-relatedness, which is the same thing). However, as its labour in the service of the whole is reduced to connecting concrete objects and their equally concrete relationships to each other two-dimensionally (that is to say, to realising the decorative possibilities of these objects and their relationships), what is privative about this principle receives a positive accent. It turns into a principle of the definitive perfection of the aspiration for concrete totality, for a solid content-relatedness, for a world proper to art for man. Let the reader be reminded here of our analysis of the abstract forms of reflection. We already showed there that – with the exception of entirely pure geometrical ornamentation – all abstract forms of reflection in the mimetic composition of reality possess a merely approximate character. Such forms (rhythm, proportion, symmetry, etc.) appear as organisational principles of a real objective reality, of a worldly reality; their application is all at once a fulfil-

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ment and a self-dissolution. The more worldly a mimetic construct becomes, the more decided this merely approximate character of abstract forms must become. At the same time, however, this signifies a qualitative change in the whole content-form relation. The geometrical now appears merely as an extreme limit of mimetic focus, almost as a ‘regulative idea’ in the Kantian sense, by determining everything and nothing in real representationalism. It perhaps suffices to recall one of the most famous examples of such kinds of compositions, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Louvre). Wölfflin has described the entire composition as an isosceles triangle: in the works of da Vinci ‘all the figures have contrasting movements and the opposing directions of the main forms are resolved into a compact, closed mass’; he attempts ‘more and more movement within an ever-diminishing space’, etc.55 No special exposition is probably necessary to make clear the dichotomy of the artistic function of such a triangle to one in ornamentation that is genuinely abstract. What becomes concretely apparent here is something that earlier could only be asserted in an entirely general way: because of the universality of labour in people’s lives, abstract principles of organisation must be reworked into categories of concrete representationalism. When decorative-ornamental tendencies in the image are referred to here, it is no longer a question of pure geometry, as the previous expositions already clearly showed. Indeed, one can say that the more painting is developed and turns up as art, what receives greater significance is the decorative consonance of colours, the ultimate founding of the most complicated functions of colours in constituting representationalism and spatiality (chiaroscuro, shadow, aerial perspective, valeur, etc.) on their physiological harmony. This appears in more mediated and hidden forms the more that painting is developed as such, but it must still always exist as a basis, otherwise the totality of the two-dimensional becomes motley, without character, nebulous, etc. Of course, this supremacy of the purely pictorial is not limited to colouring alone but rather pervades all aspects of composition. A drawing in black and white can be sketched in a purely pictorial sense, and in colour images the drawing can very well dominate in such a way that the colours are reduced to accessories. (Think of Rembrandt on the one hand and of Botticelli on the other.) Howsoever complicated, convoluted, and concealed these determinations may effectively become, what nevertheless comes into being at any given time is a two-dimensional harmony of the image, its being organised and controlled by decorative principles. True,

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this does not always rise to prominence straightaway. It is precisely the history of modern painting which shows that new trends were often as good as enthusiastically received or passionately rejected depending on how the specific mimesis of the present – with the demands of the day arisen from it in relation to the composition of an own three-dimensional world – turned out. It is only after these struggles had long since finished that the ornamental, the decorative essence of such images moved into general aesthetic consciousness. These and similar facts, amplified by subjectivist and formalist tendencies that philosophical idealism facilitates in the late bourgeois consideration of art, give rise to the fact that so many major art experts simply equate the decorative in painting with the artistic. For example, in painting Bernard Berenson56 distinguishes between illustration, by which he understands any ‘extra-artistic’ content (whether or not it belongs to the outer world or the inner spirit), and decorative principles, which he alone pronounces artistic. He conclusively explains that ‘all the decorative elements, the more essential elements, as I believe, are above the revolutions of fashion and taste’.57 Such a sharp division of content, which is supposedly completely extraartistic, from form, which in the same manner is the only thing that is supposedly artistic, tears apart the vital unity of the work of art. This is very common in the consideration of art that has taken place over the last century, even if the understanding and analysis in the works of gifted historians are much better than the theoretical observations that underlie them. Even Riegl thus wants to oppose content and form in a mutually exclusive way: ‘The iconographic content is indeed entirely different from the artistic one; the function (directed toward certain ideas) which serves the first is external like the intended use of crafts and architectural works, while the actual artistic function is directly only to present the objects in outline and color on the plane or in space in such a manner that they evoke the redeeming appreciation of the viewer’. Riegl advantageously distinguishes himself from many other art historians in that, at least as a problem, he perceives the relationality between artistic and iconographic content: ‘There can be no doubt that a close relationship exists between the ideas that the human being wishes to see visualized in the work of art and the manner in which he wants to see the sensuous means handled for this purpose (the figures, etc.)’.58 It is of course a fact that very often the handling of the iconographic content becomes completely detached from aes56 57 58

Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), American art historian who specialised in Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings. [Eds.] Berenson 1897, p. 14. Riegl 1985, p. 127, translation modified.

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thetic issues of composition and that just as often, on the other hand, only a pretext is needed in order to express pictorial, decorative effects independent of the space and time of history. At the level at which we have elucidated the aesthetic up to now, the dialectic of content and form that is carried out cannot yet be contrasted with its mechanical oppositions in all details in a completely persuasive – because concrete – way. (This too will be a task of our second part.) As a matter of principle, however, it must already be pointed out here that what one tends to call iconographic content is a part of that demand which life makes on art at any given time. It encompasses certain human situations, the actions that prepare for these situations and that result from them, certain characters, fates, relationships between people, etc. Now while the contentrelated demand vis-à-vis artistic presentation accounts for such a complex as myth, saga, sacred or secular literature, we can say with all certainty when it comes to content (even when this is given a profound and exact theological formulation) this complex is, from the viewpoint of the artist, made out of raw material that is chaotic and formless in character. Orientation and formedness only come into being when the artist transforms that which is thus set against him as postulate, as social task, into an artistically concrete imagecontent, for pictorial shaping – both decorative and mimetic shaping as well as their unity in the concurrence of three-dimensional compositional principles and elements with two-dimensional ones – can only rise to prominence as the particular form of this content that is henceforth particular and no longer merely universal in an iconographic way. This relationship must of course be understood in the correct dialectical proportions. Painting is neither a straightforward actualisation of an iconographically imposed social task nor is it a simple occasion from which art can make whatever it likes. Its essence is best paraphrased as a room for manoeuvre: in concrete terms, by somehow encapsulating the desires of the everyday and imparting to them a certain shape, a certain orientation, etc.; in abstract terms, by the artistically formative activity clearly actualising the often contradictory possibilities that are dormant in the everyday. Riegl even gives a very vivid and instructive example of the extremely convoluted relationships that come into being here. He shows that, on average, certain contents of this sort do indeed converge with certain formal solutions, but that at the same time no clear or even compulsory linkage between the two exists. Different solution processes thus reside in the realm of what is possible without completely abolishing the fundamental content-relatedness, even though it is subject to considerable variations as a result. In the works of Riegl, this comes up in connection to the so-called regent group portraits, a subject matter of seventeenth-century painting in Holland that was popular for

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well-founded social reasons. Riegl shows not only in terms of theory but also with reference to a great deal of factual material that this subject matter ‘naturally’ called for and brought forth a mode of composition aimed at coordinated attentiveness. At the same time, however, he shows how in Staalmeesters Rembrandt put subordination in the place of coordination in as much as here too he complied with the basic principle of his worldview, which ‘in his sketches … was always searching for the heart of the dramatic conflict’.59 We need not concern ourselves with the further details involved with this issue. Just two findings remain important. First, the ‘iconographic’ social task offers a certain compositional room for manoeuvre for the artist, even if the differences that crop up in the course of this do not always sharpen into the dichotomy that comes to light here. Second, principles crop up in the course of this that in their immediacy are called upon to formally arrange both the two- and the three-dimensional composition (coordination and subordination), though as soon as these principles are put into artistic practice, they pursue a content-related direction that is decisive for the quality of the evocative effect of the image (here: state of calm or inner drama). This connected double determination shows, on the one hand, the both firm and elastic dialectical interaction between the content- and form-related aspects of the work of art and, on the other, how the position taken by the artist to the great questions of his time signifies all at once the starting point and crowning achievement of the composition, precisely in relation to the seemingly purely formal question of the ultimately decorative principle of form in the image. Rembrandt’s overwhelming greatness is based not least on the fact that he is repeatedly confronted with the dramatic contradictoriness of an ascendant bourgeois Holland, where his contemporaries of high artistic standing essentially experienced a security of bourgeois society that they affirmed. The compositional antithesis between coordination and subordination being discussed here has its source in this as well. Incidentally, it would be a great – schematic and formalistic – error simply to identity the contrast of such compositional principles with the antitheses in worldview that are being indicated here. Subordination can very well express repose and equilibrium, as in the Castelfranco Madonna, but when Pieter Bruegel, for instance, arranges the bearing of the cross by Christ in a ‘coordinated’ manner so that Christ almost disappears in the endless flood of sacrifices (that is to say, of the regime of Alba in Flanders), it involves a magnificent and previously unknown intensification of the dramatico-tragic principle. And it is readily apparent that what is carried out here in all cases

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Riegl 1999, p. 282.

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of the application of decorative-ornamental principles remains valid for ultimately encapsulating mimetico-worldly constructs in formal terms. Our earlier expositions have shown that the abstract forms of reflection which world-creating mimesis incorporate not only fail to antinomically contrast with mimetico-realist tendencies but also are called upon to reinforce precisely these tendencies as a result of their fruitful contradictoriness. For us, this finding is nothing new. Already in our consideration of rhythm, we quoted Schiller as to how its consciously founded application in the verbal work of art primarily serves to raise the realistic reflection of reality to a higher level. A certain ostensible paradox comes into being only in those places where ornamental elements – ones that at an early stage suffice on their own to create a great, admittedly worldless but (precisely in this worldlessness) internally perfect art form, the validity of which has not ceased and will not cease – become components of a mimetic composition in painting. It was necessary to expound their function in the new world-creating painting at length because it is precisely here – and, with the exception of relief sculpture, only here – that it illuminates such functions. From the outset everywhere else, the abstract forms are mere aspects of the overall composition, without the capacity to form autonomous, self-contained aesthetic systems; and in the other arts (in literature or music) the decorative-ornamental principle is operative only in a figurative, indirect sense. (We will shortly see that real aesthetic problems are concealed behind such a seemingly just metaphorical significance, although one must by no means equate these problems with the ones being dealt with here.) The sham paradox had to be resolved through the discussion of painting for this very reason, and it thereby had to be shown that, according to their aesthetic essence, the ornamental-decorative tendencies in painting are in the service of the perfect artistic composition of mimesis. (The fact that, in the course of history, images frequently come into being in which the preponderance of the decorative principle leads to flatness or vacuity or that of the mimetic principle leads to disorderliness in the aesthetic sense alters nothing in the validity of this finding.) In essence, this service consists in the fact that the self-containedness and above all the typical character of the figures and situations are given an otherwise unattainable intensification. Indeed, we just now pointed out that in the context of mimetic presentation the decorative principles of organisation that are seemingly the most abstract and formal gain a concrete content-related atmospheric value, a concrete substance-filled evocative force, whereby in a purely compositional and positional way that which is correctly laid out in a faithful reflection can be driven far beyond that which is typical of it existing in itself. The decorative-ornamental arrangement – again,

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only in this inseparable unity with that which is mimetically to the point – can also serve to bring individuality, hierarchical relationality, position in the dramatic scene, etc. more clearly to view than otherwise. Wölfflin is quite right when he highlights such merits in da Vinci’s The Last Supper as compared to Ghirlandaio, for instance.60 It is precisely the position of the table parallel with the picture plane, the emplacement of Christ in the absolute centre, and the apostles placed on each side in two groups of three which make possible such a classically clear typicality, such a representative drama. Great forerunners like Giotto, in whose painting of the Last Supper those present sit around the table, and major successors like Tintoretto, where the table points into the depths of the background of the image, can achieve a drama that is perhaps even more emotive, though without actualising this synthesis of unity and an orderly, individualised, clearly structured, and rich typicality. This latter comparison is no value judgement. Wölfflin can catch sight of a less successful attempt at da Vinci’s perfection in Ghirlandaio; Giotto or Tintoretto strive for completely different effects. The comparison is instructive only insofar as the relationship between the decorative organisation of the image and the meaningful intellectual atmospheric content come to light even more clearly. Furthermore, the unity being examined here brings forth a heightening of the intensive limitlessness of all the details and of the wholes encompassing their relationships. The growth of functions (the bearer of which each individual detail is) is already driving in this direction; the more emphatic such a composition is, the more vigorously this takes place.

3

The Preconditions for the Own World That Works of Art Compose

It does not come down to trying to enumerate and analyse all of these systems of relation here. What has been adduced up to now no doubt suffices to cast a light on the mutual reinforcement of the mimetic and the decorative in painting as a basis of its creation of a world. And since both are principles of the sensuo-visual reflection of reality, not only does a world generally arise from their combined functioning but also one does whose determinations are altogether rooted immediately in the homogeneous medium of pure visibility and can lay claim to no aesthetic existence or validity beyond its realm. If the term 60

Wölfflin 1952, pp. 23ff. [Eds.: Lukács cites a page – 257 in the 1904 German edition – on which no such comparison between da Vinci and Ghirlandaio occurs; instead, this comparison begins on page 25 of that text and continues for several pages thereafter, and we have accordingly corrected the citation for the English translation here.]

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‘immediate’ was used here, then it is to be taken in a double sense. First, we are talking about the immediate starting point of this mimesis, which limits the reflection of reality to that which is visually perceptible and discards from the objectivity that is to be created everything that affects consciousness only by means of other sense organs or by conceptuality, reasoning, etc. or that is produced by consciousness. Konrad Fiedler’s great misleading mistake consists not in the emphasis he places on this aspect but rather in the fact that he decrees we stop here and make an absolute of this stage for art in general. For when purged of all non-visual aspects, the system of visual images of the reflection of reality includes all determinations – transposed into the purely visual – of the physical and the social, of the mental and the moral life of people. We have already presented in due course how the division of labour among the senses, etc. already accomplishes important preliminary work to this end in everyday life. The reappearance of this plenitude of life-contents must now be established in the inextricable embeddedness in the purely visual. As the work of art brings about this second immediacy, it can first constitute in the work of art a real own world: this second immediacy can actualise something world-encompassing, something universal in the homogeneous medium of pure visibility. That fruitful contradictoriness which creates aesthetic design and the tension that is brought forth by it in the work as a whole and in all of its elements becomes apparent here as the sublated antithesis of limitlessness (of determinations) and the finiteness of space for it. The regulative function of decorativeornamental principles in a world-creating mimesis consists – when looked at in negative terms – in a tendency to discard, reduce, and crowd together. This overturns into something positive, however, by elevating the decisive relations of the typical to a conspicuous, decorative-ornamental special position and bringing to the surface the key movement forms of the mimetic as such a closed system of decorative-ornamental connections. Only in this way does the spatial limitation of the image appear not as a relinquishment but rather as an emotive fulfilment of intensive limitlessness in aesthetic composition, as a world proper to visual art, as the intensification of the real world through its evocative-mimetic reflection. Only in this way is the objectivity of the work of art completed. (For it is clear that the preceding analysis of painting was carried out not only in connection with its specific problems but also in order to clarify the essential structure of world-creating art in general. The pluralistic mode of being among the arts entails that such general expositions can become more concrete when they immediately take up the particular issues of a certain art. Mutatis mutandis, however, the talk here was of any world-creating art.) The strict lawfulness that pervades such a complicated system of relation and objectivity in works of

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art makes a sui generis object out of each one, an object that confronts every subject in an indissoluble being-in-itself whose aesthetic existence remains in force completely independent of this subject. This is another side of the work of art as a proper world. However, this – aesthetic – existence it possesses is completely anthropomorphic in character. It is a construct, created by means of the humanly sensuous (here, visual) reflection of reality. Its aesthetic existence is based exclusively on its power to evoke a world in receptive subjects. Therefore, not only is it an own world for itself but also at the same time and inseparable from this it is the world proper to man. Everything that has been said up to now about the anthropomorphism of the aesthetic sphere achieves its genuine fulfilment here. The advance of the deepening reflection of reality and of its handling in a way that is appropriate to the regularities of aesthetics does not go in the direction of a removal from the circumstances of human life. Therefore, its tendency towards objectivity is not disanthropomorphising, as we could observe in the case of scientific reflection. The path to objectivity here instead leads, precisely by achieving its goal, back into the subject of man. The world proper to art incisively expresses this fundamental, fruitful, and motivating contradictoriness of the aesthetic in this double meaning: on the one hand, as the ownness of a self-contained objectivity independent of the subject; on the other, as the deepest revelation of what is actually most essential to the subject. The contradiction can then only become fruitful, however, if its two poles are completely developed and as such enter into an indissoluble relationship to each other in such a way. Therefore, as human life (conceived of in the broadest sense of the word) turns into the object of the aesthetic and the active man worthy of being human turns into its subject, the structure of the work of art expresses this unity in the form of the absolute identity of inner and outer. When looked at in immediate terms, even this determination is a formal one because the sensuo-evocative becoming of all interiority in the homogeneous medium of the art form in question means that everything that belongs to man, to his relationships, to his inside, can come into existence – aesthetically – only to the extent that it is developed into a sensuous, into a purely external formal efficacy in the specific forms of this genre of art. Nevertheless, as we have been able to see over and over again, this formal relationship is merely the immediate expression of a deeper content-relatedness, namely that of the great truth of life: man can only know himself by being able to know the world that surrounds him as it really is and in which he has to live and act. This truth of the aesthetic makes a circular movement out of self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. The proper urge to ‘know thyself’ launches man into the world and acquaints him with his fellow human beings, with the society in which they are active, and with nature, the field of action and basis of their activity; this

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turn thereby leads him outwards. However, this search for objectivity, for the actualisation of material objectives, acquaints man with the deepest layers of his own essence, to which he never would have been able to access by attempting ‘pure’ introspection. This wisdom, which repeatedly crops up in everyday life, in the meaningful experience of the world and insight into human nature, and in ethics and philosophy, appears as the content of that second immediacy which any genuine work of art turns to man. For everyone who surrenders themselves to it, such a becoming-immediate is, in all frankness, a veiled image at Sais for the scattered attention, for the all-too-near and at the same time alltoo-distant average goal-setting of the everyday. Only in the sense outlined here does Novalis’s verse hold true for the real lived experience of a genuine work of art: One person succeeded – he lifted the veil of the goddess at Saïs But what did he see? He saw – wonder of wonders – himself.61 It is in such a manner that artistic form elevates man. Neither in the subjective nor in the objective sense is the world proper to art something utopian, something that would transcendently point beyond man and his world. As we have shown, it is the world proper to man in the subjective as well as in the objective sense; in fact, in such a way that the highest concrete possibilities of man and world stand before him in the sensuously immediate actualisation of his best efforts in a way that is real and profoundly his own. Even when art – in poetry or music, for example – apparently confronts man with a world of ought, this ought takes on the form of a fulfilled being in it, and the man experiencing the second immediacy of the work can enter into communication with it as with his own world. Only in the ‘afterwards’ of the effect does the ought-character turn up again, but even here the great works of art – irrespective of whether or not their meaningful content includes an ought – move closer together once more. Even the most idyllic song or the simplest still life expresses an ought in a certain sense: it is addressed to everyday man with the prompt to likewise achieve that unity and elevation which appears to be realised in the work. It is the ought of any fulfilled life. With proper analysis, the intricate dialectic that is evident in such formulations can clarify the specificity of the work of art, of the only adequate form of realising the aesthetic. That is to say, it becomes apparent that certain concepts which are completely indispensable for disclosing what is essential in

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individual spheres of human activity – like knowledge for science or ought for individual morals – play a dual role in the attempt to delineate the crucial feature of the aesthetic. On the one hand, their application to the aesthetic (above all to the work of art) proves to be inadequate. The objectivising of all appearances in works of art indeed reveals some determinations of being and essence that were often inaccessible until then, and so it goes here as well in the exploring of the determinations of human interior life parallel with science. All the same, everyone instantly feels that this augmenting, enriching, and deepening of what we know about the world and man is inadequately circumscribed by the concept of knowledge. What the work of art offers can be more and less than knowledge at the same time. It is more insofar as art is frequently capable of uncovering facts that were inaccessible to knowledge until then, and it can even do this in a way that for a long time still remains impossible to translate into disanthropomorphising cognition. Indeed, it can concern extensions of what we know of the world and ourselves that – for various reasons – a precise transliteration in the sense of this conceptual system will never come to experience. It is less because, seen from the perspective and methodology of science, what is offered in it can only ever have the character of a facticity. When looked at in a purely scientific way, the ‘proof’ of its necessity, which is unconditionally postulated in terms of art and aesthetics, can never rise above the level of making immediately evident the aspect of necessity in the being-justso of a phenomenon or a set of phenomena. Therefore, from the standpoint of knowledge in the proper sense, everyday life and art move closely together as a vast reservoir of issues and observations that can be extraordinarily important for the development of science, though their actual completion, their elevation to objective conceptuality and lawfulness, are only able to be meaningfully experienced in science itself. The fact that time and again there were and are epistemologies that place precisely this kind of sensuously universalised reflection of reality higher than the ‘normal’ scientific method – theories of intuition in irrationalist movements – is only one more piece of evidence for the rightness of our comparison. The situation would be very easy if from all of this we could draw the conclusion that one is just never to use the term ‘knowledge’ in relation to art at all. However, this would in turn be an illegitimate simplification. It is certainly only in science that knowledge can find its wholly adequate methods. But it also appears in those places where preliminary issues and demands are posed. And in everyday life there are always attempts at knowledge, often only used in an experimental way, calling into question their own generalisation. And even when clear boundaries between adequate and inadequate forms of knowledge can be drawn here, what must nevertheless be spoken of is a move-

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ment towards knowledge that in the end is unitary and in which the borderlines admittedly often grow hazy in practice. It is clear that the knowledges produced and propagated by art belong in this sequence. In this view, the special place of art vanishes or fades away to the point of unrecognisability. Even in the latter case one must not only see the negative; it testifies to how much art is no luxury product of civilisation, although it is the result of leisure achieved by means of the development of labour. For a long time, denying the purely negative assessment of such social facts certainly does not amount to their recognition as the adequate assessment of the efficacy of art or even just of the knowledge-like elements in it. For only with regard to the scientific expansion and reinforcement of knowledge do art and the everyday move closer together in such a way. In itself, their distance from each other is huge, despite or rather because of the interdependencies frequently being analysed by us, but here as well this distance is self-evident without congealing into a metaphysical dichotomy. The concept of the social task often used by us in critical places already points towards these relationships in which artistic composition grows out of everyday life and – according to first appearance – shares its immediacy. In reality, the second immediacy created by the work of art is nothing less than its opposite in a critical sense. For its being bound to a homogeneous medium at the time, its bringing into focus the totality of determinations in each sensuoevocative mode of appearance that springs from this, also brings forth as a necessary precondition of effect, at least as far as what is intended is concerned, a subjectivity that towers above the limits of the mere everyday. Only from this point of view does the specific essence of the knowledge reflected and mimetically shaped in the work of art become intelligible. It is and remains much more decidedly related to the subject than in everyday life. However, what happens only spontaneously in everyday life and consciously among, at most, some individuals turns into a central task in the work of art, namely the fact that the relatedness to the subject is set up for the purposes of the subject’s higher development. We have already spoken about one side of this demand: about the cohesiveness of self-knowledge with knowledge of the world. Another trait of this intention is directed against any schematising routine, against all fetishisation. The artistic contemplation of reality, the requirement for any genuine mimesis, wants to behold each object just as it actually is, just as it necessarily appears in a given concrete context, just as the homogeneous medium brings it into view in an enhanced way; that is to say, in an entirely new way, entirely from the beginning, as if a representation, an opinion, etc. had never before existed regarding this object. (The extent to which knowledge and learning are necessary to see and symbolise what is being seen is not something we need to go into here.) This is a significant deliverance from

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the limits of the practicality of everyday life, in which, precisely as a result of an immediately practical comportment to most objects (people and human relationships included), these same objects as often as not fade away into abstract representations, even into representations that did not arise from first-hand experience and were not checked over by the subject but rather pass unseen from person-to-person as practically useful clichés. As such, true art is a salutary break with these habits that are largely inevitable in everyday life but that nevertheless can (and often do) do harm to the humanity of man. Art, however, does not just discover this new immediacy but also strengthens it. Not only does it thereby turn into the seeing, hearing, feeling organon of humankind – the humankind in each individual man – but also at the same time it is humankind’s memory. Again, the contrast with the everyday must be borne in mind: the infinitely numerous fleeting and intermittently fixed memory-images that in their majority are more mnemotechnical mementoes than even the abstract reflections of actually concrete objects; the falling into oblivion of important events, persons, situations, relationships, etc. that very often totally disappear in consciousness when their immediate practical significance is past and can no longer be brought to life, even if one wanted to; the encumbrance of memory with disruptively superfluous facts, etc., etc. Art accomplishes two things here. On the one hand, that which is worthy of remembrance is artistically held on to in a form corresponding to this worthiness. If the individual subjective act of reception leads to a thing being remembered, it loses that decisive accent that it has in everyday life because it can indeed – according to this principle – always be evoked anew. However much the object that is thus fixed in place may vanish from individual memories, in the memory of humankind it is – according to this principle – held on to permanently. On the other hand, precisely that which is worthy of remembrance is incorporated into this memory: that which amplifies, enriches, and deepens our concept of man, his relationships, and the nature to which he is connected. Permanence, which is to say ever-new reproducibility, becomes merged with correct selection in an inextricable way: the memory of humankind only holds on to that which is important and does not burden itself with superfluities. Of course, these facts and their consequences are by no means things of which every man is conscious in the everyday. Yet the mournfulness of forgetting and the angst of being forgotten have quite a vast universality. Their most widespread (most immediate) form is angst, an objectively unrealisable longing to which even art is therefore not capable of giving an answer. In and behind this longing, freed of the empty promises of particular religions that perpetuate the narrowness of the boundedness of persons to the everyday in

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this way, a deeper one is concealed: the feeling of humankind in separate individuals, the desire to salvage that which is adequate in it for them. In the elegy ‘Euphrosyne’, Goethe shaped this feeling in its concrete, normal immediate embodiment, raising it into something essential, objective, human. Euphrosyne’s parting words to the poet as she hastens towards Hades are: Fare thee well! I am hurried away by a vague commotion. Listen, I have one wish: kindly grant it, my friend: Let me not go down unmagnified into the shadows! Only the Muse can endow death with an inkling of life. For there are floating, in the domain of Persephoneia, Multitudes without shape, shadows bereft of all name; Whomsoever the poet will praise, though, walks with a difference, Has an identity, formed, joins in the heroes’ choir. Joy will be winging my step, if a song from you has announced me, Gracious upon me will rest, also, the goddess’s gaze. Then she’ll receive me with clemency, speaking my name, and the others, Goddesses, close to the throne, lofty women, will wave. The most loyal of women, Penelope, she will address me, Also Euadne, who clings close to the husband she loves.62 Continuing to live on in the memory of mankind, the name here is equated with worthiness in a genuine and poetically vivid way, though at the same time the decisive role of art is highlighted. Here the naming of names means the shaping of essential typicality. The materialist Goethe thinks that man, when he is dead, ‘belong[s] to elemental matter’.63 Even if in the same manner he sometimes carries on a brilliant intellectual game with the notion that the most significant entelechies would survive and hardly touches upon the fact that not only in the quoted elegy but also in the conclusion of the tragedy of Helena he shapes this being-preserved in the memory of humankind as a continuation of life for the figure in Hades, that which has been theoretically conceived by us about the mission of art as the memory of mankind quite clearly comes to the fore in a poetic way in the works of Goethe. He is profoundly convinced that, independent of what it represents as talent and achievement, everything genuine and realised in the human is ultimately equal and remains worthy of immor-

62 63

Goethe 1983, pp. 149 and 151. [Eds.] Goethe 1984, p. 251. [Eds.]

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talisation by means of art. That is why at the end of the Helena scene in Faust, where the words quoted by us about the dissolution of man into the elements of nature are to be found, he lets the Chorus Leader say, ‘no less than merit, faithfulness preserves us as persons’.64 In which, in accordance with what we have expounded so far, it is clear that the concept ‘person’ is only a form of appearance (one that corresponds to everyday thinking but has been made manifest in a mythologising way) for one’s retention – overseen by art – in the memory of humankind. The basic democratic idea – the independence of such ‘immortalisation’ from genius, achievement, etc. – is emphasised with anonymous faithfulness. The latter considerations are already closely connected to the second set of issues to be discussed right now: that of ought in the mimetico-evocative reflection of reality and its adequate effect. By their content-related nature, the last-discussed questions are ethical. That is why it is already readily apparent that in the intention towards worthiness – regardless of whether this is expressed in the process of creating works of art or merely in the effect of finished works of art on people – the selection which affects the memory of humankind gives rise to a field of contact between ethics and aesthetics that is oftentimes just as paradoxical as the one mentioned earlier in relation to the issue of knowledge between science and art. In a concrete discussion of this question, it is above all clarity which must prevail about the fact that the meaning of ought is more universal than its most incisive and popular mode of appearance in morals. This aspect is of particular importance for aesthetics. Keep in mind the famous passage in Aristotle’s Poetics: ‘Sophocles said that he portrayed people as they should be, Euripides as they are’.65 At first glance something quite close to the ethical seems to be pronounced here. But if, as is necessary here, this dictum is generalised in an aesthetic sense, then there can be no doubt that the authors of Iago and Richard iii, of Tartuffe and Vautrin, have followed the Sophoclean path in their composition. (This is not the place to discuss whether this assessment concerning Euripides is just.) The ought in this generalisation is nothing more than a movement towards the typical, without any consideration for whether the typical is ethically affirmative or reprehensible. Any content-relatedness in the ethical sense is therefore eliminated here. Regardless, however, it is not formal in the way that Kantian ethics conceptualises this. True, the issue of content-relatedness is circumvented in Kantian ethics: by constricting the validity of the ethical postulate to a special

64 65

Ibid., translation modified. [Eds.] Aristotle 1996, p. 43.

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case, to an antithesis between the purely ethical (intelligible) self and the overall other ‘creaturely’ personality of man, Kant can fall for the illusion that the categorical imperative can resolve without conflict all moral problems even in terms of content. The young Hegel already clearly demonstrated that one of Kant’s illusions is present here. If in the realm of the aesthetic we speak of a removal of content-relatedness from the ought, then we mean solely the content-relatedness of the ethical postulate. The tendency towards typicality in any artistic composition is universal; the issue of good and evil is not to be immediately found in it at all. This ought is immediately and exclusively directed towards making visible all the possibilities that exist in man at a historically determined place and a likewise historically determined time. In fact, as we have seen, it is directed towards such a making-visible in which, inseparable from the historical hic et nunc (precisely by holding on to this indissoluble hic et nunc), that thing reaches expression whereby precisely this phenomenon enters into the development of humankind as an essential aspect and as such can be incorporated into its memory by means of the work of art. With this determination, we have highlighted the mere immediacy in this seeming amoralism of art. As a matter of fact, this tension between everyday life and art prevails in the figure of Tartuffe or Iago just as much as in that of Brutus or Horatio, as much in a caricature by Daumier as in the images of the prophets in the Sistine Chapel. These examples already show that no ethical neutralism is thereby being proclaimed for art. On the contrary. Art’s fundamental partisanship, which is expressed in the fact that every act of mimesis jointly contains at one and the same time a positive or negative position taken to the object being presented, also proves to be true here: the examples of Molière and Shakespeare, of Daumier and Michelangelo, speak such a clear language that they make any commentary superfluous. The microcosmic character of the work of art includes the intention to make the overall ethical life of man (the bad as well as the good) evocative in such a reflection as well, though in such a way that those things in it that abide and enter into the continuity of mankind’s development are shaped in the proper lasting dynamism and proportionality. The (at the very least) approximate success of this intention is an important aspect of the effect or obsolescence of works of art. But since in this regard mankind’s development also takes a very convoluted path, this likewise explains the fluctuations (often lasting millennia) in which authors and works remain vital or fall into oblivion. Both in the case of knowledge and of ought, we thus see a strange mixture of the convergence and divergence of these categories in various spheres. The ostensible paradox that results at the same time is easily solved if one takes into

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consideration the fact that, on the one hand, science, ethics, and aesthetics are, according to their principle, universally aimed at the whole life of people. On the other hand, in the course of human development, as result of the disparate but equally indispensable functions that each of them fulfils, these fields must sharply differentiate and develop idiosyncratic structures, category systems, modes of comportment, etc. In this sense, it must always be remembered that the autonomy of each such sphere is relative. Indeed, each sphere can properly fulfil its function in the entirety of human life only if it preserves and develops this autonomy. However, their determining issues nevertheless ascend from the broad basis of everyday life, and their results flow back into it. This basic fact must never be ignored when their relationships to each other are being considered. Otherwise the danger of a metaphysical overstraining of the autonomy of such spheres is what comes into being. Real paradoxes, which certainly have occurred frequently in the course of the history of human thought, would thus only come into being either if one were to exaggerate their necessary convergence to the point of identity or if the important existing differences, the legitimate tendencies towards autonomous validity, were to congeal into a metaphysical separation and absolute autonomy. As soon as these two false extremes are avoided, the often intricate relationships can be made more concrete without difficulty and can be accounted for in their concreteness without paradox. Thus, as we have seen, the so-called amoralism of art and, as we will yet see, the attempt at an immediate application of aesthetic categories to the moral life of people. What above all follows for the issue of the world proper to works of art that is now occupying us is a content-related universalism. This in no way means that every work would have the duty to reflect all the phenomena of its historical position. It is a question here of a universality in the intensive sense of the word; that is to say, of the universalistic conception and reproduction of that concrete complex that has now turned into the theme of a determinate work. Even this universalistic tendency is narrower or more comprehensive depending on the art form and genre, but in relation to the possibilities of a concrete subject the orientation towards all-sidedness persists despite all of these qualitative differences. We have already seen the relationship of such a form-conditioned intensive limitlessness to the work of art as an own world. However, no necessary conflicts arise from the fact that in this way the most important forms of essence and appearance in other equivalent fields turn into mere material handled according to its own sovereignly established laws. True, only if it is understood that any such field takes its material from life, in the immediate praxis of which all the results of the differentiating spheres that create objectivations exist united, and in this unitedness react to this. Therefore,

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ethics in itself does not turn into the material of the aesthetic, etc. but rather both gather their material from the everyday life that is fructified by them. The tension that arises from the concentration of all such determinations into the world proper to works of art is ultimately the tension between man and mankind. It underlies the objective composition and is expressed not only in the process that leads to it but also in the composition itself. If the types of art were simple generalisations, then this tension would of course be missing along with the endlessly circling life of the work and its parts as well. Only as a result of the fact that both the whole and each detail live in and by this tension, that both strive at once for the utmost singularity and the greatest universality, does the elevated and solid vitality of the typical come into being. (We will later present in its own chapter how the central position of the category of particularity springs from this constitution of aesthetic constructs and what it means for the aesthetic principle.) If such a tension between man and mankind already objectively underlies the structure of the work, it therefore is expressed in an even more overt way in aesthetic effect. The fact that this carries an elevating, broadening, and deepening of the whole man with it is so evident that these traits (admittedly interpreted in a wide variety of ways) recur in nearly all descriptions of it. Often in a way that distortedly reflects this character, however. The effect that thus comes into being can simply be flattened. This is the case in all theories that rewrite the evocative effect of mimetic reflection as ‘illusion’ or ‘empathy’. In the first case, the comportment towards art spirals down to the level of the everyday. There (and with some changes in scientific knowledge as well) it exclusively comes down to the reality of the object, to knowing precisely the extent to which the representation of an object corresponds to a reality. As we have already explained, illusion is in this regard deception in the proper sense of the word. But we already know that whole duality is missing in art: from the outset, those who are receptive to art comport themselves to a reflected image and – according to principle – are aware of it as such an image. In a more mediated manner, the theory of empathy also brings lived aesthetic experience to the level of the everyday. There empathy is a behaviour that comes into being spontaneously and is quite common. Starting with the fact that, for example, many emotionally perceive the noises of train engines as impatience – here it is clear that in terms of sensation empathy is by its nature something homologous to what analogy is in terms of thought – and ending with the fact many likewise judge their fellow human beings according to what they themselves would do in their place in a given situation, empathy already manifests itself in everyday thinking as a clumsy and crudely simplistic way of responding to objective reality. Made wiser by meaningful experiences,

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the more developed insight into human nature of the everyday already goes far beyond the scope of it. It attempts to explore the preconditions, principles, modes of sensibility, habits, etc. of our fellow human beings in order to form judgements on a more approximately material basis regarding what they do and fail to do. It therefore becomes apparent that, as soon as the sense for the objectivity of the outside world awakens, empathy is thrust into the background in everyday praxis as well. With that said, its role in everyday life is not gainsaid; recall what we stated about the positive sides of analogising. True, empathy is always related to the subject (and to his sensations), which is by no means unconditionally the case in analogy. The negative sides of analogy therefore stand out much more glaringly in empathy than they do in analogy itself. It is no accident that this category only occupies a central place in aesthetics – on a temporary basis, of course – when subjective idealism supplants objective idealism in bourgeois philosophy, when subjectivist tendencies gain the upper hand in the theoretical justification of artistic praxis. (Theories of impressionism and already in part those of naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century.) By means of all of this, what becomes decisive in aesthetic practice is not only the subjectivist nature of empathy but also the pulling down of art itself and its lived experience to the level of the everyday. The fact that many times this happened in the justified opposition to an academicism that had become remote from everyday life, that the response to empathy was carried out in ever more subjectivist and reactionary forms, cannot attenuate this judgement. Even more dangerous and delusive is Nietzsche’s theory (cropping up almost at the same time as that of empathy) of Dionysian frenzy as the basis of a genuine relationship of man to art. As we were able to frequently observe in the aesthetic theory and artistic praxis of the imperialist period, the soulless and deadening monotony of everyday life, the habituation to it in a way that reifies and withers the soul, triggers the need for strong stimuli as a counterweight, though this counterweight does not break free from this objective frame.66 Nietzsche’s theory of Dionysian frenzy puts this in itself desperate and deeply unfruitful desire at the centre of aesthetics. In connection with Rohde’s descriptions, we have already become acquainted with and acknowledged the ethnographic facts on which he draws. Here as well, it does not come down to grappling with the whole theory. It is necessary merely to see that, for this conception, Dionysian frenzy – of shamanish and dervishistic frenzy, as we have

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Cf. Lukács 1980b, pp. 198–237.

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found out through Rohde – supplants artistic objectivity, mimesis. Nietzsche says: ‘Such magical transformation [that is to say, frenzy, G.L.] is the presupposition of all dramatic art’. That is why for him the chorus is not only more primal than drama (as is historically the case) but also more ‘important than the “action” proper’, which is put in ironic quotation marks by Nietzsche; despite all ‘Apollonian’ reservations, that which is actually dramatic is demoted to the level of mere semblance.67 The bearer, exponent, and trigger of frenzy, Dionysus is the real hero of any Greek drama, so ‘that all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage – Prometheus, Oedipus, etc. – are mere masks of the original hero, Dionysus’. ‘The philosophy of wild and naked nature beholds with the frank, undissembling gaze of truth the myths of the Homeric world as they dance past: they turn pale, they tremble under the piercing glance of this goddess – till the powerful fist of the Dionysian artist forces them into the service of the new deity’.68 The fact that Nietzsche is soon afterwards awakened from the Schopenhauer-Wagnerian form of frenzy, that he later deems its Wagnerian form (the archetype of his early work) vacuous and extravagant, pernicious, indeed strange, should not figure as an argumentum ad hominem here but only as characteristic of his whole theory of frenzy. One could say it is the third phase of shamanism. Succeeding the first phase of shamanism (the primordialprimitive one) was the second phase, that of the religious backlash against progressive tendencies, and now finally it is the complementary appearance of the dreariness and tedium of the everyday in imperialist capitalism, a precipitous flight from this cheerless wasteland. This frenzy is only a desperate flailing about of people who can find no direction and no content in their life. The ‘transcendence’ that they intend to capture in it is the nothingness of their own ruined and maimed personality, the vacuity of their relationships to the world. When with affected pride they refuse its absorption by means of science or mimesis, they merely persuade themselves that they can conceal their impotence from themselves. The fall from frenzy into an everyday that still appears voided nevertheless gives them what they have coming to them. If the intoxicants in magical ecstasy were the instruments of a subjectively achieved fulfilment, then the metaphorico-literary frenzy of the moderns is really just a wayward counterpart to the ordinary drunken frenzy of the philistine. Whether it’s Hitler temporarily moving an entire people into such a frenzy or Aldous Huxley getting a certain drug from the pharmacist in order to purchase an

67 68

Nietzsche 1967, pp. 64 and 65. Nietzsche 1967, pp. 73 and 74.

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immediate relationship to transcendence, what is visible everywhere is such a sham exaltation above the level of the everyday. Openly philistine empathy simply stays at its level, and only in their hangover do the new shamans return to this their homeland. Genuine aesthetic tension has to create something with neither shallow nor ‘deep’ or drunken philistinism. In the work of art, it objectively springs from the relationship shaped between man and mankind, from the growth of characters and objects into essential aspects of what they have presently become. In the lived experience of receptivity, it subjectively springs from that deep need for the permanence of the essential that we have already described. The fact that this need is almost always expressed with a false consciousness, that in most cases it comes to expression as delight in the successfully completed appearance in purely content-related terms (characters as role models, favourites, etc.), seldom in a purely formal way, alters nothing in this basic fact. For those who have eyes and ears, who have a lively sense for the real existing genuine relationships between man and world, this assigning of all the best things operative in life to the reality of mankind possesses a certain self-evidence. We said ‘reality’ because once mankind consciously appeared on the horizon of people it frequently adopted the form of a mere ideal, of a postulate, for a long time. It is the greatness of our era that the fate of mankind more and more enters into the consciousness of people as a reality, that people learn to experience themselves in the present as parts of mankind, that the past appears before their eyes ever more clearly as the path traveled by them. In this respect, the haze of false consciousness begins to dissipate, the haze that has not allowed man to comprehend by thought and emotion his own universalisation (a universalisation he has accomplished in himself) in terms other than those merely of membership in a clan, at most in a nation. With that said, of course, such closer ties do not cease to exist and to function. Indeed, they frequently become even more intensive, just as the coming into being of national consciousness did not abolish the relationships to family and class but rather intensified them. In retrospect, however, it is clear that long before man became conscious of his belonging to mankind, this was jointly intended in the thoughts and feelings of the best of us and was above all jointly shaped in art. It must likewise not surprise us that the resistance to thoughts of progress is at its strongest precisely in the era that makes possible this tremendous broadening of the horizon of life and all at once the proclamation of the ontological solitariness of the individual and of the meaninglessness of the course of history, the inflation of national feeling to the point of the negation of mankind, the distortion of the concept of mankind into the negation of fatherlands, etc., etc., peaked. The fierce struggle that thus comes into being both in social reality

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and in intellectual life is a sign that we have entered the historical moment of a great turning point. It is a matter of the broadening and deepening – of the becoming-concrete – of the personality when it is capable of experiencing and consciously feeling its participation in the life of mankind as an organic aspect of itself. The dialectic of socio-historical development makes the subject of man ever more individual and, when looked at in immediate terms, ever more autonomous. By separating in this way from immediate ties that are close and innate, this subject simultaneously grows into one that is broader and of a higher nature. It reflects in his intellectual and emotional life, although not always with adequate consciousness, the newly emergent historical situation and his new position in it. Even this path is objectively and subjectively very uneven and contradictory, and in the course of this the aspect of the growing autonomy of personality has just as decisive an importance as the extensive-intensive augmentation of its higher social ties (class, nation). Despite all the necessary contradictoriness of these conditions, it is nevertheless a question of a unity in the end, not only from the side of the growing social synthesis but also from that of the human personality at the same time. Marx says that ‘the liberation of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes wholly transformed into world history’.69 The most important thing for us in this statement is the dialectic of the inner abundance of the personality and that of its actual social relationships. It confirms the things we expounded in general terms earlier: the path to the actual formation and self-knowledge of man goes over his conquest of the outside world. He must conquer this – be it something socio-human or something natural mediated by the socio-human – in terms of thought and feeling and transform it into his own world. Only in this way can he broaden and deepen himself as a personality. The relationships mentioned by Marx exist in themselves, independent of his consciousness. Their metamorphosis into a for-us does not abolish their objectivity. From the standpoint of personality, however, the process that takes place here can turn out very differently. The altered relationships must of course somehow be taken note of, but – at least temporarily – they can further confront human inner-life in rigid exclusivity or even be subjectively worked on in such an intensive way that the new relationship to the outside world begins to correspond to a new or at least adequately renewed feature in the interiority of man. In the course of such adjustment processes, the enrichment of the outside world also metamorphoses into such an enrichment of the personality.

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Marx and Engels 1976, p. 51.

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The uttermost extreme in the development of the animal- and human-world is visible here. The dialectic of adjustment to new conditions and the passing on of new ways of responding to the outside world that thus came into being objectively regulate the development of animal species. The fact that in the life of people the inner dialectic of their cooperation (the development of the forces of production) increasingly gives content and direction to changes is objectively already a qualitative difference. There is a further intensification of the objective side of this difference in the fact that in the course of this the structure of that society which enters into metabolism with nature differentiates itself, takes on higher forms, and therefore lets this metabolism grow extensively and intensively. The subjective transformation delineated by us completes the specifically human side of this principle of development. Even the fact that the higher forms of community (class, nation, mankind) which are decisive for man do not derive from the – humanly viewed – outside world but are man’s own products (even if they are created unconsciously) shows this antithesis between animal and human development most clearly. That is why it cannot be emphasised forcefully enough that the ascension of consciousness by the individual’s sense of belongingness to the human species does not abolish the social attachments to class or nation but rather invests them with a richer content, a deeper pathos. The consciousness of the proletariat about their mission to abolish exploitation and oppression on a global scale and thereby create the reality of mankind for the first time is the clearest form of appearance of this situation. In this process art plays a significant role, the full importance of which is rarely recognised. We could already discern that the dialectical tendency towards the identity of outwardness and inwardness is a crucial aspect of any artistic design. In immediate terms, its source is the evocative effect of works of art. The new immediacy into which the work is constituted can only become effective if that which is innermost receives an instantly apperceptible, sensuously outward form of appearance adequate to its deepest essence and if, on the other hand, nothing outward can be found in the world of the works that fails to correspond to something in human interiority. Arisen from magical, mimeticoevocative needs, such a design of this kind must fill itself up with new contents that bring these evocations forth if it is to remain preserved in more developed formations. It must constantly amplify, broaden, deepen, and refine in accordance with these contents. Indeed, radical new systems in the formation of evocation must come into being on the same basis when the new needs for evocation call for a radically different meaningful content. We have likewise seen that one of the most important formal constants of such consciously rounded-off intensive compositions is the carrying of the crucial determina-

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tions of the decisive objectivity at any given time to an extreme, which we tend to designate as aesthetic typicality. This tendency towards the typical comes into being spontaneously, without any conscious aesthetic awareness yet in the womb of magical mimesis. However, since the conditions for the composition of an evocative typicality are extremely sensitive both in relation to content and form, they have unlimited possibilities for development, even under completely changed social presuppositions. The aesthetic basis of this sensitivity springs from the fact that any such composition that is typical – be it merely a war dance from the magical period – brings about the inextricable unity of sensuous immediacy and singularity with far-reaching generalisation. The fact that, in the case of the fundamental alteration and entanglement of living conditions that radically change the needs deriving from them, this unity is self-evident and is a far-reaching spontaneous process for the most part is why this aspect also requires no exhaustive analysis. This kind of generalisation is different. On the one hand, it must be oriented towards the enduring features of the objects being presented, not their momentary features nor those tied to merely individual cases; on the other hand, it must never annul the immediate unity with the singular. From the standpoint of the issue being discussed now, what results from such a unity of antitheses is the fact that those figures most accord with the principles for the formation of types in the presentation of human life, its conflicts, etc. and thus offer the most favourable material for artistic praxis, in which, in Marx’s sense quoted above, the relationships that are coming into being or have come into being already appear as attributes of the characters as well. Greek tragedy already possessed a high level of consciousness about this aesthetic situation. In the case of Sophocles, for instance, note how consciously Antigone is given Ismene as a contrasting figure, in which it is more clearly evident than it would be by mere direct presentation that Antigone already has new, conflictual relationships to her present time as a character trait, as a part of her own interiority, whereas the same relationships confront Ismene purely as something extrinsic, as something foreign to her personality. Precisely because of the deep paradox of fate, this manner of composition attains a high point in Oedipus Rex that has never been surpassed. These examples, these tendencies – repeating mutatis mutandis in the works of all great later artists – display an essential, content-related feature in creating the world of works of art. What in the averageness of everyday life stands before a person as a merely extrinsic fact, as a factum brutum, appears here in its deepest necessity. What is revealed is not only objective, socio-historical necessity – which science is frequently even better capable of carrying out – but also precisely the relationship of this necessity to man himself, to his own development, his own inner richness, and his own

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greatness. Without losing something of its objective character, necessity thus turns into something inward: the deep truth of life that the surrounding world and the conflicts and fortunes deriving from it do not represent a crude and extrinsic contingency for man. The deep truth of life that, instead, the totality of these phenomena displays only the most genuine and important inner possibilities of man and makes him into what he really is at heart – as a product of a world-historical development at the same time – even if from time to time it does so in a tragic way. Art confronts everyday man with such a shaped life. The non-identity of the world created by it with the average of any everyday brings forth the tension mentioned by us earlier. For this reason, however, this can only come into being and become fruitful and facilitative because both of its aspects are inseparable components of all human life, because the utmost polarisation of both nevertheless remains within the immanence of human life, because the most immense elevation merely awakens existing possibilities to reality somehow. With respect to such peaks of life – peaks that art of course can only ever shape because they are elements and tendencies of real human existence – the Faustian longing to ‘Ah, linger on …’ applies. These are aspects that rouse the ardent desire for continuance and recurrence. At the same time, they are points of connection between man and mankind, be it in artistic objectivation or in the facticity of lived life itself. Objectively, all essential steps in socio-historical development have arisen out of cooperation, out of human struggle and suffering. Objectively, a great law-governed continuity constitutes the whole of this development, from our origins until today and beyond today into the future. This can and should be uncovered by science. Mankind as such has evolved in this continuity by people figuring as objects and subjects of this development at the same time. Each man is born into this continuity. His life takes place in it, irrespective of whether he is conscious of it or not, whether his consciousness of it is correct or false, whether he is sensible of the course of life meted out to him as his own or as something foreign to him. Even the form and content of art, its composition and effect, are a part of this continuity. The particular mission of art in this continuity is the one described by us a moment ago. It is capable of those aspects (people and fates, triggering causes and occasions, as well as emotional responses to them, etc., etc.) that in their individual singularity embody this inextricable linkage to the universal and the enduring, those aspects in which it is immediately evident that in this context man not only recognises his own world (a world jointly produced by him; that is to say, by the humanity of which he is a part) but also experiences it as his own, for keeping hold of the whole of mankind as aspects of its development, as aspects of the humanisation of man. Being fixed in place as something

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essential, as something henceforth inalienable in this continuity: this is what is permanent in works of art, their permanence-creating effect. This is what is really meant when we say that works of art shape the world proper to man. The tension that artistic mimesis brings into being therefore does not lead beyond the human world into some transcendent reality, as was the immediate intention of magic and as religion later repeatedly attempted to impose upon art; it begins and ends in man himself. True, in such a way that the human immanence of man that is thereby affirmed by no means leaves man unchanged but rather intensively raises him far beyond his average habitual level. However, this tension also has an extensive aspect. The immediate, tense coinciding of man and mankind in the work and in lived aesthetic experience does not just invest the present with a permanence; it also transforms that which is essential in the past of mankind’s development into a currently experienceable here and now. Even this side of art crops up relatively early. The handling of material in Greek tragedy already makes present the past handed down and continually renewed in mythical form, a past that was far remote from the Greeks but recognised as belonging to their own life. The expansion of the concept of man, which history carries out objectively and subjectively, but which art carries out with an emphasis on the subjective, is likewise an increasing historicisation of human consciousness, of man’s conscious awareness of himself as a historical producer of himself. Science uncovers the objective course of this process and thereby makes it into the property of consciousness. By transforming an ever more spatially and temporally extensive past into an experienced present – without wanting to abolish the character of this past as past – works and their aesthetic effect awaken and develop in man the selfconsciousness of mankind, which at the same time is his conscious awareness of living in a world that is his own, that he himself has created and will not cease to create as a part of mankind. Therefore, the aesthetic evocation of the past is the lived experience of this continuity, not the lived experience of something that is supposedly ‘universally human’ for all time. We remain conscious of a temporo-historical remoteness, and yet we are immediately faced with a nostra causa agitur in fates, people, etc. that have long since vanished. This tension betokens this temporo-historical side of the aesthetic as the self-consciousness of mankind; as we showed earlier, it is the memory of mankind at the same time. However, whereas memory performs all sorts of functions in everyday life (among other things, merely registering and keeping ready to hand facts that can perhaps be of practical importance for the person concerned), the central function that is exclusively operative here is that of bringing up to date, a function that memory shares with conscience. This convergence reveals a deep relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the fact that no really profound

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aesthetic evolution is possible without familiar reference to ethical problems and feelings. However, these feelings remain contemplative in the realm of the aesthetic (they can only be converted into ethical praxis in the afterwards of lived aesthetic experience), which is why the problems also remain problems, ‘merely’ expanding the human horizon and uncovering presuppositions and consequences that otherwise would remain unknown, without being immediately converted into praxis. With all this said, the universality of the world proper to art is still far from being adequately outlined. It is precisely this universality that makes its field into an intensive limitlessness, into something inexhaustible by foreign means. Regarding both sides of the world proper to works of art, all that need be highlighted here is this: the universal humanistic principle analysed just now and that of the homogeneous medium investigated earlier enhance and promote each other in this regard. In terms of the intensive conception of a phenomenon in an intensively limitless relationship, that enhancement and differentiation of the capacity for reception and expression that we could discern in everyday life by means of the division of labour among the senses, etc. still has clearly determined limits. Not only on account of the immediately practical orientation of everyday life but also because, as long as the whole of objective reality confronts him as such, the surface of the receptivity of the whole man likewise carries in itself dispersals of attention and of the capacity to absorb as well. Only the homogeneous medium produces, creatively and receptively, such a focus so that all the objective possibilities and determinations dormant in a concrete phenomenon at the time are able to become current in a manifest way. Here too it is the whole man who creates or receives such an own world in the homogeneous medium. On the one hand, however, he is forced to adopt a contemplative comportment by the non-existence – in the sense of immediate praxis – of the homogeneous medium, by its purely reflective character. On the other, as a result of the constriction of the reflection of the world, of mimesis, to a single organ (visuality, etc.), what comes into being is that focus of all interests, that metamorphosis of the whole man of the everyday into the ‘man-made-whole’ that makes him able to be the receiver of an intensive limitlessness, to recreate it, to enjoy it adequately. We said that our outline, which has long since become ample, is in no way exhaustive. Therefore, allow us to conclude the description of this phenomenon by means of art. Keats describes it in his famous ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. The passage that is crucial for the aesthetic principle reads: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

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Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearièd, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d, For ever panting, and for ever young; And the conclusions he draws from this in the final lines are: When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, – that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.70 The identity of the beautiful and the true is actually the immediate meaning of pure lived aesthetic experience and so an eternal theme of any reflection on art. The fact that, as soon as art and its effect are regarded in the comprehensive context of overall socio-historical human life, a vast and convoluted set of problems comes into being around each of these concepts and all the more around their relationship will still have to be something that frequently occupies us. However, this changes nothing in the plain, immediate self-evidence of this dictum in the immediacy of the purely aesthetic. 70

Keats 1982, pp. 282–3. [Eds.: Lukács quotes these lines in English but does not cite them.]

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Issues of Mimesis iii: The Path of the Subject to Aesthetic Reflection The more vigorously and consistently the specificity of the aesthetic is worked out, the more seemingly paradoxical contradictions arise as a result. Their philosophical explanation can only consist in demonstrating where, to what extent, and in what way it is a question here of merely apparent paradoxes that are resolved with a proper, thoroughgoing illumination of the basic facts and that leave behind a state of affairs that is no longer paradoxical. What must be just as clearly established at the same time, however, is where, to what extent, and in what way we can talk of genuine contradictoriness here, of the motivating contradictions of a determinate group of phenomena that can be grasped only in and from this dialectic of theirs, the essence of which consists precisely in such a contradictoriness of their motivating forces, their structural and dynamic components. Everything that has been analysed in the aesthetic up to now should bring together material for a synthesis of this sort. If this is not exhaustively carried out to the extent that is possible today, then it is inevitable that the aesthetic either degenerates into a – more or less imperfect, more or less useful – precursor of knowledge, as happens in the works of Leibniz or Hegel, or is possibly even considered to be a harmful aberration, as happens in the works of Plato. (The situation is of course no better when the nature of the aesthetic as precursor aims towards religion instead of knowledge, nor even if, in the reversal of this issue, knowledge appears as the subordinate precursor of the aesthetic, as happens in the works of Schelling.) Or the aesthetic is indeed recognised as something autonomous, though precisely as a result of this it directly loses any connection with the socio-historical life of mankind, and its autotelism can only bring about a ‘nature reserve’ rationale for its complete isolation, as is the case in many modern theories. Consequently, the essence of the aesthetic can only be determined in a satisfactory way if its position in the system of relationships between man and outside world is determined in a likewise satisfactory way. A fertile, motivating contradiction is always only one that governs and suffuses the direction of movement, the lawfulness of movement of an essential and indispensable relationship that is coming into being here, precisely in its contradictoriness.

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Preliminary Questions of Aesthetic Subjectivity

All of our observations so far have focused on clarifying the anthropomorphising (indeed, the anthropocentric) principle of any aesthetic positing. If we now are attempting to summarise and systematise findings that up to now have been diffuse and partly incidental, then we come up against the contradiction between anthropomorphising acts both in the creation as well as in the reception of art and their unconditional claim to objective validity. This contradictoriness seems to intensify even more as a result of the fact that it is not simply a matter of anthropomorphising tendencies; instead, such a founding of the aesthetic necessarily makes the subjective aspect inherent to it into the focal point always and everywhere. What automatically results from this is our first task: the clarification of the essence of aesthetic subjectivity. First and foremost – and this is already something familiar to us from our observations so far – one has to ascertain that aesthetic subjectivity is in no way simply identical to the subjectivity of everyday life. At the same time, however, it must be ascertained – not for the first time as well – that this going beyond the scope of the everyday by no means entails the positing or accepting of any sort of transcendent power or substance. The this-worldliness that is intrinsically inherent to the aesthetic principle is so powerful that even in the works of Kant no subject of this sort appears, apart from the theoretical ‘consciousness in general’ and the practical ‘homo noumenon’. The question is thus: how, in keeping with what needs and guided by what forces, does such a heightening of subjectivity come into being that can already be considered to be something qualitatively different with respect to the subjectivity of the everyday? And what role does the aesthetic sphere play in this development? Included in this as well is the question of genesis with which we have been dealing up to this point. For the actual content of these questions has to do with demonstrating the aesthetic to be a human mode of positing brought forth by certain needs that are continuously available from a certain level onwards and that continuously increase from their coming into being as such. If our present reflections are directed towards the kernel of these needs crucial for philosophy – thus towards the subjective aspect of this subjectivity and for the time being not towards those kinds of objects that it is striving to create or apprehend – then for this reason the subject-object relation, which is so crucial for us, is shoved into the background only for the time being so as to better illuminate the other side of the issue; the fact that we behold the basic aesthetic phenomenon in mimesis suffices to clarify our position on this. With great clarity and decisiveness, Klopstock has – precisely from the side that is above all of

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interest to us at the moment, namely that of subjectivity – expressed the need that underlies art. In immediate terms, his assertion refers merely to poetry, though its meaning clearly demonstrates that the whole domain of the aesthetic is also intended along with it. Klopstock says, ‘The essence of poetry consists in the fact that, with the help of language, it shows a certain number of objects that we know, or whose existence we presume, from a side that engages the noblest forces of our soul to such a high degree that one affects the other and as a result sets the whole soul in motion’. Furthermore, he explicates the individual aspects of its determination. The only thing that is important for us here is what he explains regarding the term ‘engage’: ‘The deepest mysteries of poetry reside in the action into which it sets our soul. For us, action is absolutely essential to our pleasure. Vulgar poets want that we should lead the life of a plant along with them’.1 From the standpoint of understanding the need that underlies art, the reference in these remarks to setting the whole soul of man into motion is crucial for the need that underlies art. Even in everyday life, of course, the whole man is always active in a certain sense. As much as the development of his activity becomes increasingly specialised, one can hardly speak in the strict sense of a completely implemented parceling up of his capacities, of a total elimination of certain attributes during the exclusive utilisation of others. However – and this is increasingly the case with the development of civilisation – one can probably speak of the fact that his activity one-sidedly develops certain aspects of his overall personality (be it in the physical or in the mental sense) and intermittently neglects others by contrast, indeed even continually stunts them. The need for balance, for starting to head towards equilibration, harmony, and proportionality, is a mass phenomenon at a certain level of material prosperity, of leisure, etc. (In themselves, the categories enumerated here are the categories of everyday life, and in their original and average de facto occurrence they are still by no means aesthetic.) If earlier we focused on the longing for the wholeness and integrity of man as a universal social need, then here too we must, as we already did earlier, distance ourselves sharply from the Romantic anticapitalist critique of the division of labour. That is to say, such a critique exclusively sees that which is negative in the division of labour, merely the morcellation and atrophy of man, without taking into account the fact that not only does it concern an unavoidable stage in the higher development of mankind but also at the same time the division of labour itself – for all its human-destroying and -abasing modes of appearance under capitalism – awakens (indeed, brings

1 Klopstock 1830b, pp. 36–7. [Eds.: The emphases in the quotes are Lukács’s.]

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about the development of) continuous attributes, capacities, etc. in man that broaden and enrich the concept of his wholeness. That is why even the stage of capitalism that is most unfavourable for the whole man cannot do away with the whole man. On the contrary. The more powerfully the tendencies to morcellate the whole man develop, the more powerfully the countermovement tends to turn out. Thus, what Klopstock speaks about remains a fundamental human need. Of course, it is expressed not only in everyday life but also in the objectivations that grow out of it in the most disparate forms: thus, in religion, myth, poetry, philosophy, ethics, etc. It grows into a consciously aware pursuit only if the development of the forces of production and the prevailing of this development in the relations of production offer maximal opportunities for this wholeness and integrity of the human personality at the same time that they subjectively seem to threaten this wholeness and integrity in the most conspicuous manner possible. What then comes into being – in a conscious way as well – is the longing for fulfilment through art, as Klopstock expressed it a moment ago. However, it is obvious that the need was already there much earlier, though often entirely without objectivated expression or (to the degree that that it was conscious) directed at entirely different goals. As we have seen, this primarily has social causes, the growing contradictions of the division of labour already highlighted by us a moment ago. However, a closer analysis must show that at the same time it is a question not just of a motive confined to a historical stage of development but also of something more general that admittedly does not cease to be social in character, despite its universality and its immediate and seemingly anthropological foundedness. Only its basis is not this or that particular social formation – such a formation only determines the mode in which and the degree to which it makes an appearance – but rather the nature of socialised man in general. It would of course be a metaphysical ossification to assume that the boundaries between the anthropological and the social will always be perceptible to within a hair’s breadth; as is the case everywhere, these boundaries are frequently hazy (indeed evanescent), but they exist nonetheless. Only when anthropology (as, for example, in existentialism) conceives of man as an ‘ontologically’ lonely, purely autotelic creature who only ‘enters’ into social obligations ‘at a later time’ – be this something that is ‘ontologically’ accidental or necessary – can such a metaphysically ‘pure’ parting of the anthropological from the social take place. We have repeatedly pointed out the factual and philosophical untenability of such a dualism. In our eyes, man is already a social being in his humanisation and all the more in his existence as man. However, whereas his anthropological constitution is fixed in place in its most important determina-

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tions and essentials with the conclusion of the process of his humanisation and is no longer subjected to qualitatively decisive modifications, social development brings forth something continuously new as a matter of principle; in fact, not just in terms of the relation of people to each other, to nature, etc. but also for the inner constitution of individual people. This latter finding is of supreme importance to our present observations because we certainly know that only by means of labour can the subject-object relationship become conscious in man (even in its most primitive form), that only the break-up of primitive communism creates the foundations for a conscious awareness of the individual personality (no matter how primitive that conscious awareness may be), etc., etc. Therefore, however much certain needs coming into being in this developmental process and the manner of in which they are satisfied may remain components of mankind’s consciousness from the time of their coming into being onward, their genesis is nevertheless social and not anthropological in character. What is originally behind the Klopstockian demand is the separation of the essential from the inessential in man himself, in his subjectivity. From the outset, he must carry out this separation in relation to the outside world, otherwise he is unable to come to terms with it in the interests of his own existence. The fact that a similar question can and must crop up in relation to himself (the fact that it is a question of a particular sort) is the result of the higher stages of development indicated a moment ago. We have seen that the attempt to control the outside world takes place initially from within a magical covering that contains within itself the seeds of both the scientific and the artistic reflection of reality. Even in the turn inward, needs play important roles of quite a different sort; in fact, not only (as in the case of coming to terms with the outside world) for the early years as a magico-chaotic mixture but also enduringly for the entire later development. Quite apart from the fact that the subjectivity of man can and shall become the object of a purely scientific contemplation – naturally, the purely scientific principle of the disanthropomorphising reflection and interpretation of reality rises to prominence here with the greatest difficulty and at the latest times – what comes into being, simultaneous with the social and relative detachment of the individual personality from the community, is the need for ethics, law, religion, etc. Now if at this stage the aesthetic also only rises very gradually to the level of autonomy, then as a matter of principle the differentiation that is incipient here is nevertheless constituted in a way that is different from that original differentiation of the magical period. For example, it is quite characteristic that – as there was already an aesthetics – historiography, rhetoric, etc. were regarded in highly developed ancient culture as things that were aesthetic by nature.

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Of course, it cannot also be our task here even to just roughly sketch out the deviations from these paths. Here it comes down just to philosophically registering the most universal principles of the points at which they part. A foundational significance is assigned to the Klopstockian demand for wholeness for that very reason. That is to say, whereas the scientific, religious, ethical, etc. currents in the question of the relation of essence and appearance mentioned at the outset also bring strict partings (indeed, oppositions) in man himself, the specificity of the orientation taken towards the aesthetic – an orientation ensconced in such universal tendencies and operative without clear consciousness – is the attempt to seek and find the deep immanence of the essential in the appearance of being present. On the basis of this situation, it is already understandable that only relatively late can such intentions acquire a conscious awareness, an intellectual autonomy. Bear in mind the famous inscription at Delphi (‘Know thyself’); its interpretation by Socrates and other philosophers; the ideal of wisdom in the works of the Stoics and even in Epicurus’ school; and the brusque separation of the ‘one’ from all, which recalls the creature in the works of Plotinus, etc. The brusque parting of essence and appearance is certainly already taking place here to an increasing extent, conspicuously brought about by the annihilation of the primitive public life of polis democracy. But only the sharpness of this parting is a consequence of changes in the social foundation. Nevertheless, this tendency must not be conceived of as something that is completely temporally conditioned. It is self-evident that all religions must press for a strict parting of essence and appearance. This also underlies the methodology of science, which is oriented in a completely opposite direction. The fact that this pure separation is only an indirect way of grasping the appearance in its in-itself, in its objective relationships and proportions in as adequate a way as possible, does not abolish the immediate separation but demonstrates its position in the scientific reflection of reality. Finally, all ethics must likewise begin with such a parting. Whether it stops, as Kant did, at that distinction or whether it – as happened under the influence of aesthetics in many cases – strives towards a reunification of the overall personality, as Goethe and Schiller did in the Weimar period, is not something that can be discussed here. However, everywhere the separation is qualitatively sharper than it is in the aesthetic. At the same time, the cohesiveness of appearance and essence is a basic and indissoluble lived experience, the roots of which go down much deeper than does the becoming-conscious of personality. If so-called sympathetic magic starts from the premise that everything that was in contact with a person – in magical praxis, primarily that which belongs to his physical person (hair, nails, etc.) – can influence his fate, then what is undoubtedly behind this is the feeling that everything which essen-

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tially co-determines man in some sense bears a relation to his physical existence, no matter how distant or superficial that relationship may be. This is also clearly expressed in widespread magical representations about the relationship of man to his names. Frazer says, ‘In fact, primitive man regards his name … “as a distinct part of his personality, just as much as are his eyes or his teeth, and believes that injury will result as surely from the malicious handling of his name as from a wound inflicted on any part of his physical organism”’.2 As in all issues that turn up under magical conditionalities, the boundaries between subjectivity and object-world are still supremely hazy here as well. Not until, with the break-up of primitive communism, the individual personality objectively and subjectively cuts itself off socially – of course only to a relative degree – on the basis of a new foundation and the new forms of consciousness corresponding to it do the deeply rooted feelings described here attain an essentially clearer physiognomy. Not only do many magical representations come completely undone (admittedly, a few remain alive for a long time in attenuated form as superstition, in which, however, their influence on the unfolding of ideological issues gradually diminishes more and more), but also the new living conditions and the new modes of objectivation arising from them notably and powerfully affect the content and form of the traditional selfexamination of subjectivity. For this is what we are talking about here. Those things pertaining to magical ‘causation’ are relatively easily refuted and abased to the level of superstitions. However, the fact that, with all of his – central and merely superficial – attributes, man constitutes a lively and animated whole (one that is preserved in this animatedness) is the inheritance from the primeval past in which this cohesiveness of essence and appearance is expressed in a new way. It would of course be false to think that these new relationships had been discovered and raised into consciousness by means of art alone. The opposite is the case. If everyday life and praxis and (growing out of them) custom and law as well as morality and ethics had not worked on and further developed the conversion of these lived experiences into conceptual reflection, then they would hardly occupy a central place in the mental and emotional life of people; they could not have come by – as a need of life – an intention towards art. For the question of whether the human personality constitutes a whole, whether in the passage of time this wholeness conserves what is essential to it and what is merely appearance, imperiously turns up in all human activities again and again. So as to adduce an 2 Frazer 1955b, p. 318. [Eds.: Lukács misattributes this to Lévy-Bruhl 1926; we have thus corrected the entry here. Also, although Lukács does not note this, the passage quoted by Frazer is from Mooney 1891, p. 343.]

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ordinary example, one could not speak of the accountability of the individual at all without this issue; as is generally known, this only gradually developed out of the collective accountability of clans, etc. but then turned into a foundation for everyday dealings among people. And undoubtedly – with this we return to what was explained earlier – the continuity of the person, his being-preserved in the course of time, is confirmed in accountability. If a man has to stand for a single act committed by him (indeed, under certain conditions, to stand for a certain thought), then it is recognised by his fellow human beings and by himself that the wholeness of his personality has been preserved over time with a certain stable identity. Similar examples could be further enumerated en masse. However, the recognition of totality contained therein, of the continuity of the individuality of man, of the cohesiveness of essence and appearance in it, holds a contradiction – one that is to be unconditionally resolved for the subject. That is to say, affirmation is at the same time a negation. Each time a moment (action, opportunity, thought, etc.) is taken both from the continuous flow and from the construction of wholeness and held out to the individual as something that fundamentally represents – for better or worse – that which his essence entails. At the same time, everything else is thrust aside as something that is merely negligible, merely apparent, irrelevant in this case. This is selfevident for morals and for any control of the world by means of praxis. But even if man takes pains to fulfil Apollo’s commandment (‘Know thyself’) in theory, he must be turned towards a similar mode of comportment vis-à-vis human wholeness. And it would be an illegitimate simplification to simply behold an abstract negation in the negative that is coming to light here. Quite the reverse. Such a negation is essentially a mooring of personality, a way of constituting personality as a matter of fact. When it is absent, as in periods in which social forces destroy ethical norms and set universal scepticism against knowledge, personality also disintegrates into a juxtaposition and succession of instants without relation. Hofmannsthal has described this condition of the self in a concise and beautiful way: This is a thing that none may rightly grasp, A thing too dreadful for the trivial tear: That all things glide away from out our clasp; – And that this I, unchecked by years, has come Across into me from a little child, Like an uncanny creature, strangely dumb; –3 3 Hofmannsthal 1918, p. 34. [Eds.]

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As much as this kind of negation (in Spinoza’s sense) is at the same time a determination, something positive, pointing precisely at that which is essential, and as much as it exerts a completely irreplaceable function in life, it still cannot satisfy all the needs that life calls forth as it is developing the personality more and more. Religion is given a significant role here. In part as many religions hold out the prospect of the retention of the whole personality in the afterlife so that belief in such a continuance crops up as the most obvious and popular fulfilment of this need, in part as mystically oriented ascesis and ecstasy – each in its own way – pretend to bring about an escape from the individual and his set of problems, a self-dissolution into the transcendent or the cosmic. For a long time after the transition from magic into religion, the development of art is undoubtedly linked to the magical tendency down to the single minutest detail, and in many cases art also developed while being wrapped up in magic’s categories, as at the beginning of the magical period. As for what concerns the various species and sub-species of the religious tendency, we have already come across their fundamentally anti-artistic orientation (an orientation that in the long run is inimical to art) in the magical period. The fact that there can be and have been concrete historical conditions in which – as already happened in magic – there emerges a coexistence (indeed a certain mutual influence) need not occupy us here further since this lies outside the main line of development. The retention of personality in the hereafter creates a long, protracted contact surface between art and religion for the simple reason that for both a kind of mimesis was necessary for the reproduction of the human totality in order to satisfy this need for permanence. (We have deliberately dealt with only one side of religious life here; it goes without saying that the presentation of the divine realm itself is materially and closely linked to this complex. It is immediately evident that its rising to prominence in mimetic presentation likewise creates a common field between religion and art.) Yet religion promises a real fulfilment; in fact, in a hereafter in which existence is lifted into a higher level, made independent of the constant selfreproduction of life, of becoming and passing away, and thereby undergoes a definitive realisation. Pre-Socratic philosophy already recognised that the means of expressing this second reality is a kind of mimesis of the mundane. That is why religion can so easily bring the arts into its service: by creating a mimesis of the this-worldly, they can be regarded as a promise, as a guarantee, as a likeness of the otherworldly. True, the principle of the inner parting of both ways is likewise contained – uno acto, as it were – precisely in this usability of art for religion. For, as often as not, precisely when it seems as if art had utterly surrendered itself to the expression of religious contents, its detachment from such contents is most plainly visibly in the objective construct: the work of art

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expresses the religious content so utterly that this content disintegrates into something as intangible as air in such perfection and that which is shaped, that which is intended as means and mediation to the otherworldly, receives a self-contained this-worldliness and stands there, having become independent of the triggering occasion, complete in itself, and precluding everything otherworldly by means of the closed nature of its form. It is in classical Greek art that this parting is realised in the purest form, but all development – even in the East – knows of such struggles (rarely consciously staged) and the rare completions of parting in them.4 This sensuous displacement of the religious by the artistic composition that the religious appropriates as means is no accident. Precisely because religion believes in an actually existing god, in people actually delivered up onto eternal salvation, precisely that equilibration of appearance and essence that characterises the aesthetic must be missing in purely religious representation. This lack hence derives first and foremost from the fact that the religious representation of the hereafter must tear man – regardless of whether it attempts to depict him as god, hero, or mortal being brought into eternal salvation or damnation – out of his natural surrounding world and is compelled to let vanish from his personality the psychological reflexes interdependently linked to it. If such a representation does not do this, as tends to be the case in great art periods that are influenced by religion (that is to say, if religious representation spontaneously transfers man into a human environment, even if it is still ever so religiously idealised), then the victory portrayed above of that which is human in a this-worldly way over the hereafter is inevitable, as was the case in antiquity and even essentially in the Middle Ages. But beyond that, even if closely bound to it as well, the purely religious preservation and retention of the human will have to stunt the appearance side of the human, that which is concrete and rich in it. In religious representations, it never happens that man as he is on earth receives immortality in the hereafter. Religion not only accomplishes a strict selection from among man’s personal attributes but also necessarily makes him utterly lonely: everyone stands alone before his otherworldly judge. If his deeds and works count, then, objectivated strictly, they become detached from his immediate subject; if merely his attitude counts, then it receives this own form it possesses apart from the rest of his life.

4 The fact that in certain cases the tendency towards this-worldly fulfilment is consciously borne by an ideology that also perceives itself to be religious, even though it differs from the dominant religion, only indicates how important the theory of ‘false consciousness’ is for problems of this sort. Individual analyses (for instance, of the Egyptian art in el-Amarna) would take us beyond the scope of this work.

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It thus seems as if the personality of man, sustaining itself on religious belief and saved in an eternal hereafter, would have little in common with his ordinary everyday life. Upon closer inspection, however, this image alters precisely in its most essential traits. First and foremost, what falls away are those things that man has made of himself using his own powers; his reconstruction by means of labour, science, and art, by means of a mundane this-worldly ethical life, appears as the product of an objectionable creaturely arrogance insofar as it is construed by man as his own work, independent of the assistance provided by the transcendent force at the time. In the concept of the creaturely, all of this merges with that which is partial to the immediately given person, provided that the tendencies towards autonomy do not let it appear to be more objectionable than that which is merely partial. By contrast, this partiality appears as the genuine essence of man, one that has been created by god, by the transcendent power; an essence that he has to conserve, though admittedly not in a completely unaltered form – it too is indeed something merely creaturely – but that he is obliged to develop further as that which he is, in humble obedience to the transcendent commandments. In connection with older mystics, Franz Baader5 says about this issue, ‘Pride and baseness are indeed linked to each other extrinsically but are not compatible in an inward and veritable sense as well and can, as it were, coexist only in a savage unloving marriage; as pride is only the caricature of the first element of love (namely, of sublimity) and baseness is the caricature of the second element (humility), so only the religion of love is able to abolish that savage marriage and give it the consecration of the sacrament by humbling pride and lifting up baseness’.6 The last chapter will talk about this tendency in religious comportment at length. Here it suffices to note that, particularly in certain periods, the need for self-preservation is so powerful and at the same time so indeterminate that any question of how completely fades away before the effort to survive at all. Simply identifying the convergence and divergence of fundamental religious and aesthetic tendencies is indeed the only thing that is important for us at this stage: the abyss that gapes between the imparting of permanence upon the totality of man in both spheres. Art that serves religion often is tasked with bridging this abyss. It frequently discharges this obligation with great dedication, adaptability, and finesse; often it even does so with the consciousness of actually being just a maidservant to belief. In reality – independent of the personal thoughts and feelings of the

5 Franz von Baader (1765–1841), German Catholic theologian and philosopher. [Eds.] 6 Baader 1925, p. 109.

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individual artist – for art here it is again and again just a matter of Goethe’s fruitful ‘determination from without’, which is already familiar to us. Religion, religious feeling, and the socially vital and universal religious need set concrete tasks for art, though art is only able to resolve them in its own way, whereby, independent of what the artists and their audience believe, the divergency between the religious and the aesthetic as a matter of principle (their oppugnancy with respect to each other) is expressed. This applies not only to Giotto or Titian but also to Fra Angelico and Grünewald. The grounds for the deep mistrust that whole religious cultures and others harbor against artistic figures in certain periods are to be found here. (At the same time, of course, remnants of magical representations that are linked to works of art and the religious struggle against these residues frequently play a not inconsiderable role as well.) We will grapple with this set of issues in the last chapter in greater detail; here we can only go so far as to show that, on the one hand, this antithesis reveals the basis for why the aesthetic alone is qualified to fulfil the need indicated in the Klopstock quote and that, on the other, the complete autonomisation of the aesthetic can by no means be regarded as concluded with the exit from the magical period. It can already be seens from these few remarks that issues of an entirely different sort, of a much higher order, exist here than do in the genesis of art within magic. We have referred to the specificity of the aesthetic vis-à-vis a religious selection that is increasingly rigorous; that is, we have referred to the fact that the aesthetic strives to awaken a human totality the includes the sensuous world of appearance, that it henceforth is directed in mimesis towards an abundance of reality organised in a solid way. This side of the aesthetic has also been recognised and expressed frequently. This has perhaps been done so most decidedly by Hemsterhuis, who beholds the pivotal hallmark of the aesthetic in such an abundance. ‘Naturally’, he says, ‘the soul wants to make as many ideas its own in the shortest time possible’. Already this dictum emphasises the aspect of intensity; for the great number of ideas is not central by itself, but rather precisely its relative concentration in time; that is, the intensity of lived experience as the hallmark for the fact that the mimetically apprehended object – for Hemsterhuis, it is self-evident that the chief task of art is the reflection of reality – emanates this abundance to the viewer. Admittedly, only a formal criterion of mimesis is expressed in this. Hemsterhuis underscores this formal character even more vigorously by analysing in more depth the mode of the sensuous receptivity to the world and that of its reproduction in the work of art, and in the process he arrives at results that are decisive precursors to that knowledge which, in relation to aesthetics as the homogeneous medium of art forms and art works, we have labeled in life as the division of labour between the

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senses and that we will analyse in even more detail in what follows. Hemsterhuis emphasises that, ‘by means of a long-lasting praxis and with the assistance of the simultaneous use of all our senses, we have reached the point of distinguishing objects from each other in terms of their essence by making use of only one of our senses’.7 As is the case wherever aesthetic questions are properly posed, the formal character is merely ostensible here as well. For it is clear – and this is most certainly the opinion of Hemsterhuis as well – that not just any arbitrary abundance of ideas, not just any arbitrary intensity or concentration, could bring forth the effects desired here. A glimpse at life already suffices for us to appreciate this. For, in itself, any object of reality undoubtedly possesses that endlessness of characterisitcs and relationships whose mimetic reproduction is to bring forth precisely the effect desired by Hemsterhuis, and we have already emphasised that for him the depiction of objective possibility was the primary goal. Though he promptly adds, ‘the second goal is to surpass nature by creating effects that nature cannot easily bring forth or is not capable of producing’.8 This last observation leads us – according to Hemsterhuis – to the knowledge of beauty. Therefore, the task is first to investigate how such an imitation functions and second to determine in what this surpassing consists. The result of this analysis is now the concentration and intensification cited by us: the greatest number of ideas in the least amount of time, with which the concept of beauty is determined for him. With that said, one side (the formal one) of aesthetic feeling (and thereby its awakener, the work of art) is not inaccurately circumscribed; or rather, a decisively important aspect of this formal factor is not inaccurately circumscribed. What is missing in the work of Hemsterhuis is the hierarchy, the superordinating principle, of this abundance. His determination of this abundance merely touches on its juxtaposition or succession. It is his methodologically accurate instinct, however, that lets him avoid a further concretion within this train of thought; that is to say, this concretion would have to be an overturning of this concept of intensity and abundance into something related to content. And such an overturning cannot possibly result from the side of form in a spontaneous or direct way. It does not represent – within a purely aesthetic structure – the Goethean ‘determination from without’ as an aspect of those socially conditioned contents coming up out of everyday life that confront art at the time as needs, as questions posed by the people, to which the concrete form always has to give the definitive answer due that confers permanence. We have already

7 Hemsterhuis 1846, pp. 19 and 14. 8 Hemsterhuis 1846, p. 14.

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pointed out the particular kind of needs turning up here. All that has to be added now by way of a supplemental remark is how that universality of these needs of which we spoke earlier always arises in a concrete, socio-historically determined form. In fact, it does so in such a way that it gives rise to an immediate and – for artist and audience – indissoluble unity in which – again, immediately – universality merges completely into the concrete time-conditionedness, indeed it seems to disappear. However, this occurs in such a way that the ultimately decisive criterion for success nevertheless consists precisely in answering those questions that this universality asks of the artist hidden underneath the covering of the concrete. (We have been considering the typical, the normal case in the operative categories here. Of course, there are also historical and social constellations in which universality seems to obscure the concrete. The set of problems that spring from this is also something that belongs in the historical materialist part of aesthetics.) Of course, this universality is only universal vis-à-vis and in relation to the socio-historical concrete that pertains to the artist. Regarded in and for itself, this universality is of supreme concreity: it contains the most fundamental determinations of the relations between man and world, between the human subject and the forces that lawfully decide his fate, his weal and woe. This determinant of subjective aesthetic need has also long been known and clearly expressed. Bacon, who was one of the first who clearly presented the disanthropomorphising essence of the scientific reflection of reality, also already accurately described the decisive meaningful content of the needs coming into being here and recognised it in its justification. As was customary at the time, Bacon also discusses poetry; the essential things in his remarks, however, apply to the aesthetic in general. Bacon calls poetry a ‘feigned history’: ‘The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it; the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things’. Bacon now enumerates the hallmarks of such a mode of composition that – in keeping with various needs – surpasses normal objective reality in greatness, justice, variety, etc. ‘So as it appeareth’, he says in conclusion, ‘that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality and to delectation. And therefore, it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things’.9 Sir Philip 9 Bacon 1906, p. 250.

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Sidney and others before him already quite similarly deduced the authority of literature (of art) from its nature-surpassing mimesis and championed its own authority vis-à-vis science. In short, such trains of thought that among themselves are quite different are allowed to merge to the effect that art is called upon to create a world that is adequate to man and mankind. It is very important that, in its most consistent representatives, this problem appears inextricably connected to mimesis. Because in the event that the theory of reflection crops up in a mechanical materialist form, the boundaries between art and disanthropomorphising science become indistinct, and the specificity of the aesthetic must vanish or at the very least fade away. On the other hand, when an idealist opposition – one that is often critically justified – to such ‘logical theories of imitation’ throws the reflection of objective reality overboard, then the essence of art is distorted either into a blank subjectivity (as in subjective idealism) or into a mystical unity of subject and object (as in objective idealism). (We will soon come to speak about both of these deformations of the aesthetic.) Only in the final developmental stage of pre-dialectical materialism (in the works of the Russian revolutionary democrats) does the indissoluble relationship between the aesthetic reflection of objective reality and the anthropocentric essence of art begin to be consciously worked out. Chernyshevsky, who most trenchantly champions the theory of reflection in his struggle against Hegel himself and above all against the Hegelian Vischer,10 says this about the artistic reflection of reality: ‘But I cannot refrain from adding that, in general, man looks at nature with the eyes of an owner, and the things on earth that are connected with happiness, satisfaction with human life, also seem beautiful to him’. At the same time, he emphasises the fact that even according to Hegel ‘beauty in nature is beauty only insofar as it hints at man. A great, profound idea! Oh, how good Hegelian aesthetics would be if this idea, beautifully developed in it, were the basic one, instead of the fantastic search for the perfect manifestation of the idea!’11 We will discuss the issue of natural beauty in its own chapter and will have occasion there to grapple with the views of Hegel and Chernyshevsky regarding it. Suffice it to note here that, on the one hand, Chernyshevsky does not regard the linkage of mimesis – instead of ‘imitation’, the problematic nature of which he clearly sees, he uses the term ‘reproduction’ of reality – with the anthropocentric essence of the aesthetic as an innovation of aesthetics on his part, but rather as an age-old body of thought, as

10 11

Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887), German novelist and philosopher of art. [Eds.] Chernyshevsky 1953, p. 290.

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the natural viewpoint for considering the aesthetic. That is why, as we saw a moment ago, he not only points out Hegel’s inconsistent approaches in this direction but also justifiably notes that ancient aesthetics (Plato and Aristotle above all) were already erected on this basis. In his study of Aristotle’s Poetics, he emphasises that the expression ‘imitation of nature’ never occurs in either the Poetics or the works of Plato. He explains, ‘both Plato and Aristotle regard not nature, but human life as the true content of art, and of poetry in particular. To them belongs the honour of thinking about the chief content of art what since their time has been expressed only by Lessing, and what all their followers could not understand. In Aristotle’s Poetics there is not a word about nature: he speaks of people, of their actions, of what happens to people, as of the things which poetry imitates’.12 And he lays great stress on the fact that if, according to the story told by Pliny, ancient visual artists like Lysippos refer to the imitation of nature, then they do not mean the same thing as do modern pseudo-classicists; thus, on the fact that the justified polemic against the socalled theory of imitation actually hits upon these modern pseudo-classicists, not the theory of reflection itself. On the other hand, Chernyshevsky nevertheless goes beyond his predecessors by not being content in the quotation cited earlier with highlighting man’s subjectively and objectively central position in the aesthetic reflection of reality; instead, he refers to how, ‘in general, man looks at nature with the eyes of an owner’, whereby he – carrying forward and concretising certain notions of Hegel’s – already sets foot on the path to dialectical materialism, which, as we have frequently indicated, in the metabolism of society with nature beholds the object of the aesthetic and at the same time that foundation from which spring subjective needs vis-à-vis art and the modes in which these needs are met. This momentous step forward therefore only leads to the threshold of the correct solution but not to the solution itself, because Chernyshevsky likewise merely suspects (but does not clearly recognise) this economic connection of mankind to nature, even though he does so in a way that is more explicit than Hegel in certain respects. And because he does not clearly see the objective dialectic of mankind’s development, which springs from the development of the forces of production, the aesthetic relationship of man to nature also becomes undialectical in his work, unproblematic in a utopian way. His individual observations and examples show that in general he sees and acknowledges an aesthetic relationship only in those places where man can actually have an unproblematic and positive relation to reality as the ruler of nature.

12

Chernyshevsky 1953, p. 441.

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And in those places like the tragic, where Chernyshevsky is nevertheless compelled to deal with dialectical facts, he lapses into illegitimate simplifications.13 We have repeatedly demonstrated here that all criteria and determinations, for which a subjectivity that has been kept as pure as possible constitutes the starting point (a subjectivity that methodologically abstains from the objectworld), have to lead to a formalism. If we have nonetheless analysed in detail certain views (Klopstock, Hemsterhuis, etc.) that seem quite similar to such criteria and determinations, then this was necessary because – despite the ostensible formalism of these views – a few of the most important determinations of the aesthetic came to light in our doing so. They are important precisely from the standpoint of those needs that become operative in human everyday life and lead to the coming into being of the aesthetic. It is hence justified to examine their constitution in order to comprehend the proper objectivity of art in a concrete way, in order to clearly separate this objectivity from an imaginary, abstract, ‘pure’ subjectivity and at the same time – in contrast to the scientific reflection of reality – to recognise the value-related and value-creating indissolubility of the subjective aspect in this objectivity. If a formalism was referred to in the principle of ‘pure’ subjectivity, then the kernel of this issue lies in the fact that this subjectivity is just as isolated as something abstract, it is an abstracting from that object-world which determines subjectivity and has first imparted to it its abundance, depth, etc. and which must remain inseparable precisely from its decisive quality, from its specific and most individual being-just-so. Precisely because the origin of this abstraction is to be looked for in the impressions of the object-world, because it reduces material that has been borrowed from there and subjectively worked on to formal subjective aspects, there is no direct path that leads from this abstraction to concreity; this formalism cannot be directly reconverted back into something content-related. The abstraction must instead be sublated. It must come up again in a concrete subject-object relationship, in fact the original spontaneous subject-object relationship must be reshaped into a conscious one. Only then does that which is actually essential in the determinations of subjectivity appear as what it is in itself: as the decisive, indispensable aspect of aesthetic positing. 13

Cf. Lukács 1954, pp. 135ff., in which the socio-historical grounds of Chernyshevsky’s position are also explained. Theoretical correction only takes place on the basis of dialectical materialism, although Aristotle was already aware that the adequacy of the object, of the ‘world’, to man as a matter of principle in art encompasses the whole dialectical problematic of human life, of the human species; although the apogees of the Enlightenment (in particular, Diderot and Lessing, but especially the writers of German Classicism, thus Goethe and Hegel) repeatedly and clearly comprehended this dialectic, certainly without knowledge of its social basis. Cf. Lukács 1979, pp. 157ff.

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Externalisation and Taking It Back into the Subject

In Hegelian terminology, the final version of this section title would read: externalisation and the retrieval of this externalisation into the subject. The use of this category for the basic acts of aesthetic positing is much more than a mere game with dialectical forms and expressions. As much as there may be problematic things in this Hegelian theory, it gives – even though Hegel himself apparently did not intend to apply it to the aesthetic – the most accurate description of the subject-object relationship in this sphere.14 In order to correctly understand the relationships that are coming into being here, it is advisable to take the corresponding structure in human labour as our starting point. Subjectivity and objectivity have to be inextricably united in it: the potency of the teleology posited by the subject depends exclusively on whether the beingin-itself of the object of labour and of the tool is correctly reflected. On the other hand, its objectivity remains lifeless, alien to man, and unproductive if it is not fed by a subjectivity alienating itself from itself and then returning again to itself from this alienation. Yet this unity is rarely reflected as a unity in consciousness. In most cases, either the being-in-itself of the object prevails – be it as an unconditional surrender to objective labour or, as is often the case at more developed levels, as a forlornness in the object-world, to which the labourer feels himself condemned – or an imaginary omnipotence of the subjectivity setting the goals does. It does not come down here either to analysing the aspect of socially conditioned alienation in the case of the first of these two opposing sides or to demonstrating the mythologising tendency in the second. (It suffices to point once more to the mythical figure of the demiurge, who embodies this second conscious reflex of labour.) And it is readily understandable that alienation receives even greater power in the more indirect, more complex objectivations of human activity, for instance in economic categories like commodity, money, etc.: the relationships between people that are created by human activity appear in everyday consciousness as things towards which man comports himself in just as immediate a way as he does towards objects of nature not created by him, although his emotion protests again and again against such attitudes.15

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I have discussed this issue (both the Hegelian conception and its Marxist critique) at length in Lukács 1975, pp. 539 ff. Three different meanings of externalisation are pointed out there. For the relationship that is to be dealt with here, it primarily comes down to the first meaning (to the relationship to the labour process). The classic exposition of the facts of this case is to be found in Marx 1990, pp. 163ff.

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It is not only everyday thinking that fails to find a way out here and must come into conflict with the natural emotion of people. In his famous critique of the Hegelian theory of alienation, which concretely posed this question for the first time, Marx pointed out those facts of life that can offer a rational elucidation of these circumstances. The first fact clarifies the original emotion of subjectivity in labour (and in any social activity) and thereby turns against its inflation, against all idealist demiurgic myths of thought. The kernel of this reckoning constitutes a philosophical egg of Columbus – the originality, the underivability of the objective structure of reality: ‘Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand equipped with natural powers, with vital powers, he is an active natural being; these powers exist in him as dispositions and capacities, as drives …. That is to say, the objects of his drives exist outside him as objects independent of him; but these objects are objects of his need, essential objects, indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential powers. To say that man is a corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective being with natural powers is to say that he … can only express his life in real, sensuous objects. To be objective, natural and sensuous, and to have object, nature and sense outside oneself, or to be oneself object, nature and sense for a third person is one and the same thing’. And in what follows, Marx gives an even more general philosophical determination of this constitution of the relationship to the outside world that is so fundamental to man, of the condition of his labour and praxis: ‘A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being. A being which is not itself an object for a third being has no being for its object, i.e. it has no objective relationships and its existence is not objective. A non-objective being is a non-being …. But a non-objective being is an unreal, non-sensuous, merely thought, i.e. merely conceived being, a being of abstraction’.16 With that said, the dream of the demiurge is over once and for all. What is revolutionary in labour cannot possibly involve the creation of an objectivity out of nothing, out of a – likewise mythical – chaos. It is ‘only’ – but this ‘only’ encompasses mankind’s entire history – the metamorphosis, in accordance with human purposes, of the forms of objectivity existing in themselves by means of purposive knowledge and the utilisation of the laws inhering in those forms.

16

Marx 1992a, pp. 389–90.

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Ultimately, the human species is the subject that actively or plaintively confronts this objective world and takes effect in it as something that is objective as well. When Marx deals with Hegel’s credit for discovering man’s self-creation by means of labour, he says about the relationship between labour and the human species, ‘The real, active relation of man to himself as a species-being, or the realization of himself as a real species-being, i.e. as a human being, is only possible if he really employs all his species-powers – which again is only possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of history – and treats them as objects, which is at first only possible in the form of alienation’.17 Independent of the Hegelian conception, the idealist kernel of which – the identification of alienation with objectivity – he sharply criticises, he determines the relationship between labour and species in the economic section of the same work in this manner: ‘It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective [world] that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active specieslife. Through it nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man: for man reproduces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world that he himself has created’. Alienation therefore has so little to do with this relation of simple identity believed in by Hegel that it is precisely this – that is to say, the concrete alienation that is brought forth by means of the concrete division of labour in class societies, especially those of capitalism – which obfuscates species-life for the individual, indeed destroys it from time to time. Marx continues this train of thought in this manner: ‘In tearing away the object of his production from man, alienated labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true speciesobjectivity’.18 With that said, the Marxist conception is distinctly outlined. At the same time, it becomes clear from this that here we are dealing with the most universal form of the justification of that need for the aesthetic that we have already repeatedly analysed from a wide variety of aspects. It is the need to experience a world that is real and objective and is at the same time adequate to the deepest demands of being human, of the human race. By nature, the dialectic of this need – a dialectic that certainly remains unconscious but is operative in actual fact – in the praxis of great art exceeds those one-sided determinations in which at any given time metaphysical thinking attempts to force art beyond the aesthetic. Therefore, to cite only a very characteristic example, a lot of times

17 18

Marx 1992a, p. 386, translation modified. Marx 1992a, p. 329, translation modified.

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what is highlighted in a one-sided way is either the unconditional surrender to reality or a dissatisfaction with it, the attempt to go beyond it, to surpass it. In both cases, metaphysical one-sidedness arises from the fact that an act that has its specificity and justification precisely as the unity of the contradictory is what gets divided into separate, inconsistent, and one-sided aspects, and then each aspect that has been unjustifiably made autonomous is set against reality in a judgemental way. The originary aesthetic act, however, knows no such one-sided value judgements. Unconditional surrender to reality and the passionate desire to surpass it go together. For the latter is not the will to impose an ‘ideal’ fetched from wherever, but rather the lifting of those traits from out of reality that inhere in it as such but in which its adequation to man becomes distinctly visible; in which the alienness and indifference with respect to him is sublated without thereby infringing upon the essence of its objectivity, much less wanting to destroy it. For need indeed presses precisely for an objectivity adequate to man. (Needless to say, socio-historical tendencies of alienation can trouble this unity; thus, a scholastico-idealist contempt for given reality, thus a naturalistic cult of contingent details that are not adequate to man.) The unity of this act is simply a higher, more intellectual and conscious level of labour itself, in which the teleology that transforms the object of labour is inextricably linked to listening to the mysteries of the given material. However, whereas in labour it is a matter of the subject’s purely practical relationship to objective reality, which is why the unity of the act is also only just the cohesive principle of the labour process itself and hence loses its significance with its completion only to be recovered in the next labour process, in art this unity gets its own objectivation. Both the act itself and the social need that calls it forth tend to keep hold of, fix in place, and perpetuate this human relationship to reality, tend to create an objectivated objectivity in which this unity is be embodied in a sensuously manifest way, evoking precisely this impression. What already comes to light in this contradictoriness as motor of aesthetic positing (and of the social need that brings it into being) is its perhaps most essential philosophical trait: the simultaneous heightening of both subjectivity and objectivity beyond the level of the everyday. The emphasis is again on simultaneity in the unitary aesthetic act and above all in the self-contained aesthetic construct. By having moved the issue of mimesis into the centre of these observations, we have already sketched the outlines of the problem and its solution. It goes without saying that mimesis involves an intention towards objectivity and (as has already been repeated) that the anthropomorphising character of aesthetic positing, its being directed at evocation, expresses a tendency towards subjectivity as well.

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However, if one wants to correctly understand the nature of this unity, then what must always be firmly grasped is not only this unity itself but also the specificity of the subjectivity and objectivity that becomes effective here. In some respects, the latter is differently constituted than are the disanthropomorphising of science and the phenomena that are preparatory to it in everyday life (above all, labour); the former expresses a determinate generalisation vis-à-vis everyday life and a contemplatively directed breadth vis-à-vis morality. We have already pointed out that aesthetic objectivity by no means signifies an abrogating of reality, an endeavour that necessarily remains abstract and is dictated by a subjective demand of some sort (perfection, conforming with an ideal) to go beyond reality. Instead, it is much more a matter of discovering in objectivity itself, and developing out of it, those aspects in which its adequation to man comes into view. However, the individual partial subject cannot possibly bring forth such an adequation; his demands of this sort, insofar as they only remain such, can never go beyond being a powerless yearning, an unfruitful and unfounded desire and intention. For the adequation we are talking about here is only the manifestation of that labour that mankind has carried out throughout its entire history on nature, on the interdependencies between man and nature, on man himself, that which we earlier labeled, in Marx’s expression, the metabolism of society with nature. Of course, this is a metabolism that is material first of all, a transformation of the surface of the earth in a way that is in accordance with human needs. (It goes without saying that the laws of nature can only be made use of therein – consciously or unconsciously – nor can they be abolished in individual labour.) The ambit of this metabolism, however, is much broader than materially pervading and transforming concrete nature by means of labour and social conflict. For this process has indeed not just created man but in many cases remolded, enriched, elevated, and deepened him. This transformation also involves reality becoming different, externally and internally. And if the talk here is of adequation to man, then what is meant is the extensive and intensive entirety, from the cultivating of lands that were once deserts and from the pitting out of mountains that were once covered in forests to the making of landscapes out of certain aspects of nature that appeared indifferent or even ominous earlier. From the idyll to tragedy, this metabolism of society with nature encompasses all the phenomena of life in the world of people, their environment, the natural basis of their existence and its social consequences. This adequation has nothing in common with its primitive teleological formulations in theological or secular theodicies. It also has nothing in common with, according to the way Kant poses the question, the adequation of nature to ‘our’ understanding in order to recognise particular laws of nature. Elsewhere I have explained that this false posing of the question by Kant is

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determined on the one hand by the epistemological narrowness of subjective idealism and on the other by his ingenious, but nevertheless futile, attempt to arrive at dialectical thinking.19 The adequation we have in mind is this-worldly and immanent, in two respects in fact: first, the movement producing radical changes and that is coming into being here can only take place within the framework of complying with natural laws existing in themselves; second, all determinations of human aims carried out with correct or false consciousness are likewise determined by the objective laws of social development. Thus, as a supplement to Hegel’s remarks on the teleology of labour, Lenin can say, ‘In actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it, – they find it as something given, present. But it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world’.20 Therefore, it is always a question of raising something existing-in-itself to the level of consciousness and not of a subjective demiurgic creation out of nothing. It is apparent from all of this that the adequation of aesthetic constructs to the needs of the human race does not entail subjectivism at all, that on the contrary what arrives at expression in such adequation is the specific character of aesthetic mimesis, that therefore the aesthetic positing of such an adequation must only be a particular case of the reflection of an objective reality independent of consciousness. Nevertheless (or for that very reason) the concept of subjectivity that comes into being here is in need of an epistemological clarification. For in the history of aesthetics the most varied misinterpretations grew partly out of the fact that one simply regarded it according to the schema of epistemology (art as ‘lie’, ‘illusion’, etc.), partly out of the fact that one set its specificity against that of knowledge in a mechanical and exclusive way (irrationalist theory of genius, etc.). The epistemology of materialism adopts an entirely clear position when it comes to the issue of the subject: no subject without object; it belongs to the essence of objective reality to exist independent of consciousness. Therefore, object without subject is not only possible but also an axiom of actuality. To be sure, dialectical materialism limits this sharp separation to pure epistemology. Building upon the establishment of the objectivity of semblance (and not only that of essence), Lenin says, ‘There is a difference between the subjective and the objective, but it, too, has its limits’.21 And in an even more general context, he approvingly quotes Hegel:

19 20 21

Cf. Lukács 1956b; in book form: Lukács 1957. Lenin 1972b, p. 189. Lenin 1972b, p. 98.

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‘ “It is wrong to regard subjectivity and objectivity as a fixed and abstract antithesis. Both are wholly dialectical”’.22 Hegel now concludes the train of thought that is alluded to here with the warning: ‘Anyone who is not familiar with the determinations of subjectivity and objectivity, and who wants to hold fast to them in abstraction from one another, will find that these abstract determinations slip through his fingers before he knows it, and that he says precisely the opposite of what he wanted to say’.23 It cannot possibly be our task here to enumerate or even just suggest all of those cases, particularly in everyday life, in which such dialectical transitions occur. Here as well, the position of aesthetic constructs is a specific one. Whereas the other transitional forms alter nothing in the sharpness of the epistemological distinction between subjectivity and objectivity but only make it clearer that this distinction must not be carried out in an overly rigid way through undue metaphysical generalisation, what turns up here are new kinds of problems. To just highlight the most essential point: the sentence ‘no object without subject’, which in epistemology has a purely idealist meaning, is fundamental for the subject-object relationship in aesthetics. Needless to say, every aesthetic object in itself is also something that exists independent of the subject. But when it is understood in this way, it is only something that exists materially; it is not aesthetic. If its aesthetic positedness comes into force, then such a subject is also simultaneously posited along with it because its aesthetic nature consists, as we have repeatedly expounded, precisely in evoking a specific kind of reflection of objective reality, in evoking certain lived experiences in the receptive subject, by means of mimesis. Apart from that, the aesthetic construct ceases to exist as such. It is a block of stone, a piece of canvas, an object like any other that of course exists as such an object independent of any consciousness, of any subjectivity. Therefore, the sentence ‘no object without subject’ refers exclusively to the aesthetic constitution of such constructs. It would be obvious to counter that this structure is also that of any socially manufactured and used object, that precisely this is what thereby distinguishes it from natural objects. And as a matter of fact, a river remains a river independent of whether it powers mills or carries ships; but when a tool or machine washes up on an uninhabited shore due a shipwreck, for example, it ceases to be a tool or machine. Therefore, is not the subject just as indispensable to its determinate object-being as in aesthetics? We believe that in terms of epistemology – and that is the terrain of our present analysis – something different

22 23

Lenin 1972b, p. 184. Hegel 1991, p. 273.

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is involved. Due to the shipwreck, tool and machine are in effect torn out of that economic, technological, and social context in which they alone can function as tool or machine. Since their objectivity as tool or machine is linked to such a functioning (at least to the possibility of such a functioning because, for example, the tool that has not yet been sold is just as much a tool as the one that has already been put to use), it ceases to be a tool or a machine with the shipwreck, or at least as soon as the possibility of their being put into their ‘natural’ effective relationship ceases. Viewed socially, however, this boundedness of specific objectivity to the possible technical, economic, and social function is something that is as purely objective as the fact that any natural object is bound to a certain position in the natural process for its particular existence and must likewise lose this being when removed from it. (That both processes are qualitatively different from each other alters nothing in the general similarity of their being linked to a concrete object-being.) The labourer who uses a tool or operates a machine is not the subject of this object precisely in the epistemological sense, and even more so the mere existence of such an object cannot depend upon that ‘subject’. They are both together parts of an objectively technological, economic, and social process, and the subjectivity of the labourer with respect to the tool-object is practical, but not epistemological. Of course, according to precisely the view that has been repeatedly expounded here, the aesthetic construct is also an aspect in a social process. The great distinction, however, consists in the fact that its social function is precisely mimetic evocation, thus precisely the creation of an idiosyncratic subject-object relation in which it can first turn into an aesthetic object. (It goes without saying that, as in the earlier case, the category of possibility must also be called in, that the mere producibility of such a subject-object relationship suffices for constituting an aesthetic object.) Yet this mere fact has farreaching philosophical consequences. We have already hinted at the negative consequences, namely the forfeiture of what is specific to aesthetic objectivity either as a result of an overstretched generalisation of scientific categories or as a result of a slide down into an irrationalism. But reverse consequences also rank among the facts of human thinking; that is to say, such thinking can also unduly generalise the aesthetic subject-object relationship and then use this to explain objectivity in everyday life, science, philosophy, and especially epistemology. In this case, points of support for an idealist distortion of reality come out of categories that are meaningful and indispensable in the aesthetic; for instance, the sentence ‘no object without subject’ has thus always played a great role in subjective idealism, be it Kantian or Berkeley-Humean. With that said, by no means is it to be claimed that in all such cases aesthetic structures are uncritically applied to the process of cognition. In the cases mentioned just

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now, this is actually highly unlikely; but we believe, however, it would probably not be difficult to prove that the particular nuances with which, for instance, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche operate on the sentence ‘no object without subject’ are determined to a large extent by lived aesthetic experiences and their undue generalisation to other fields. It would also be worth a study to see the extent to which the acceptance of this sentence also brings about a set of problems in the sphere of religion. Because for genuine religiosity, for religions in their prime, the existence of sovereign religious objects (first and foremost, god) is undoubtedly meant to be independent of the subject. Where a coupling together of both categories (their interdependence) is carried out, as in different currents of mysticism above all, in which the existence of god appears inextricably linked to the rapturous lived experience of a subject raised above creaturely reality, the objectivity of the existence of god – even when viewed religiously – is made questionable. A philosophical self-critique of the whole religious mode of positing comes to light – in most cases, of course, completely unconscious of itself – in it. With inverted signs criticising the religious as a matter of principle, that tendency arises which from Xenophanes to Feuerbach has caught sight of projections created by people of their own life in the objects of religion. It is hence interesting and instructive that Gottfried Keller, a pupil of Feuerbach’s, comments on the mystical views of Angelus Silesius in these terms: ‘Couldn’t we believe that we were listening to our Ludwig Feuerbach when we read the verse: I am as great as God, as small as I is he, Can he not be above me, and I below him be?’24 It is well-known that, since Schleiermacher and Romanticism, such tendencies inadvertently press for a dissolution of religion, in the direction of a religious atheism. However, the issue that stands before us here has a much greater philosophical breadth than the application we discussed above of an admittedly fundamental proposition to fields in which it is not valid. We have already discussed how in speculative philosophy (in the works of Plato in particular) aesthetic categories are given the function of revealing a metaphysical transcendence that is religiously tinged. True, in most cases this mixing of spheres is carried out in a more or less unconscious way. Schelling is perhaps the only major philosopher who, at least in his youth, consciously establishes the aesthetic

24

Keller 1960, p. 649. [Eds.]

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as ‘organon’ of genuine philosophical thinking. In the first draft of a system worked out in his youth, he says of this: ‘Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart. The view of nature, which the philosopher frames artificially, is for art the original and natural one. What we speak of as nature is a poem lying pent in a mysterious and wonderful script’.25 Time and again, Hegel stridently polemicised against this conception, against its foundations and consequences (intellectual intuition, etc.). Since, however, he too stood on the ground of an objective idealism, and for him the identical subject-object also amounted to the foundation and conclusion of systematisation, it was inevitable that certain limits of Schellingian thinking (including this aestheticising tendency) remained insurmountable even for Hegel’s philosophy.26 It suffices here to point out the central problem of the theory of externalisation that is of so much importance to us at the moment. The Hegelian version of the identical subject-object is most incisively expressed in Phenomenology of Spirit, but by the nature of the matter the transformation of substance into subject amounts to its foundation and high point even in the later system. As a result, that science in which the movement of the ‘shapes of consciousness’ culminates (the Phenomenology) is not just the highest, clearest knowledge of what the lower levels of consciousness, each in its own way, have collected as the meaningful experience of reality, but also at the same time a self-awareness of the world, a pseudo-objectivated form of the subjective idealist ‘I’ = ‘I’. It is not a lifting of substance into consciousness that would thereby be turned into the property of the subject but just its transformation into subject: self-consciousness as the highest, as the only adequate level of knowledge. ‘But this substance’, Hegel says, ‘which is Spirit is the process in which Spirit becomes what it is in itself ; and it is only as this process of reflecting itself into itself that it is in itself truly Spirit. It is in itself the movement which is cognition – the transformation of that in-itself into that which is for itself, of Substance into Subject, of the object of consciousness into an object of self-consciousness, i.e. into an object that is just as much superseded, or into the Concept. The movement of the circle that returns into itself, the circle that presupposes its beginning and reaches it only at the end’.27 25 26 27

Schelling 2001, pp. 231–2. I referred to this limitation of Hegel’s in a number of passages and contexts in my book on the young Hegel. See Lukács 1975, pp. 362 ff., 371, 388ff., etc. Hegel 1977b, pp. 487–8, translation modified.

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The epistemological critique of Hegel’s position by Marx is already familiar to us. Briefly, we just list the aspects ‘borrowed’ – this remained unconscious, of course, but necessarily resulted from the essence of Hegelian objective idealism – from the structure of aesthetics. The last proposition (the dynamic circular going together of beginning and end) already gives the system indicated here something of the character of a work of art, since the closed nature of even an idealist system that is not open, that is thought of as not being provisional, in need of supplementation, or for further development, logically entails anything but a return to the beginning. The genuine scientific thought contained in thoughts of a return to the beginning (the methodological meaning of the negation of the negation) is, as Lenin rightly puts it, merely ‘the apparent return to the old’.28 When Hegel makes something total out of it here, he abolishes one of the most important achievements of his dialectical method itself. In contrast, this viewpoint plays a critical role in aesthetics, particularly in the theory of drama that is always very important for Hegel; indeed, it is the essential formal basis of dramatic characteristics. This constancy, this return to the beginning in tragedy and comedy, is of such a pronounced aesthetic character that it was attacked by many (by the young Strindberg, for instance) in the name of natural beauty, though without their having been able to carry this through aesthetically. Things are similarly appointed with the thereby nearly synonymous act of turning into that which something is in itself. Indeed, for the system, this return is the – pseudo-aesthetic – retraction of an essential achievement of the Hegelian dialectical method, namely of the philosophical clarification of the coming into being of something radically new. In the exposition of the ‘nodal lines of measure-relations’, Hegel himself scoffs at those who are incapable of taking note of the emergent leap here into something that did not exist until now.29 In the important passage quoted by us, it is ultimately and primarily of critical importance to Hegel that the ‘the object of consciousness [is transformed] into an object of self-consciousness’. We have tried to show in the preceding expositions of different points of view that, in contrast to consciousness, what characterises aesthetic reflection in its distinction from scientific reflection is self-consciousness as subject, that the discrepancy between disanthropomorphising and anthropomorphising methods is what rises to prominence in this contrast. Only consciousness can adequately carry out the dialectical process of approximation in the transformation of an in-itself into a for-us because it is precisely its separation from self-consciousness which can provide the

28 29

Lenin 1972b, p. 222. Hegel 2010, p. 320.

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starting point for disanthropomorphisation, whereas self-consciousness – not only in its aesthetic mode of appearance, but also in everyday life, morality, etc. – must pursue an opposite direction. However, this is expressed in its purest and most incisive way precisely in the aesthetic reflection of reality. The pitting of self-consciousness against consciousness that is being adduced here is of course immediately determined by the theory of the identical subject-object, though it inadvertently carries important aesthetic aspects of positing into scientific (philosophical) thinking. If we once again spend some time utilising categories like externalisation and its being taken back for aesthetics now that we have made it through this excursus, which was indispensable for the clarification of the distinction between scientific and aesthetic reflection at this level of our insight into their essence, then the aesthetic elements that are disrupting and bewildering for philosophy already suggest that what exists here is a state of affairs that is essential for aesthetics. Together, these two acts certainly constitute continuously and indissolubly interweaved aspects of an act that is unitary by nature; they are not, as in the Phenomenology itself, two acts that are clearly separate from each other and that belong together precisely in their opposition. Of course, an antithetical orientation must remain in force in this application to aesthetics: externalisation means the path from the subject into the object-world, in certain circumstances all the way up to the point of that subject’s losing itself in it entirely. By contrast, the taking back of such an externalisation presents the complete permeation of all the objectivity that thus came into being by the particular quality of the subject. Whoever only has the most elementary representations about the coming into being, structure, and effect of artworks must clearly see that, precisely in the unity of its contradictory components, this act is essentially coextensive with tendencies that are crucial for aesthetic objectivity. In Schelling and Hegel, the identical subject-object itself is much more mystically oriented than it is aesthetically. It leads to a dissolution into nullity in both the object and the subject because the subject also necessarily comes to nothing with the – imaginary – abolition of any objectivity altogether. In contrast, the inseparability of subjectivity and objectivity in aesthetics aims at making both more intensive precisely by means of their interwovenness, at working out the intrinsic specificity of each in more vivid ways. Subjectivity’s tendency to disappear in its externalisation, in its surrender to the objectivity of objects existing in itself, is intended simply for the purpose of discovering what is important in the object-world for mankind at any given time and making it manifest. Now since the foundation for this is the in-itself of objects independent of consciousness, the most exact and exhaustive apperception of it possible is vital for the aesthetic reflection of the outside world.

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It becomes apparent here again that any reflection of reality – generally speaking – has the same object, though any reflection in the service of labour and praxis must, on pain of ruin, be focused on the in-itself itself in a purity that is as free of the subject as possible; hence the tendency of disanthropomorphising that has already been sufficiently acknowledged by us. By contrast, the fruitful contradictoriness in aesthetic reflection consists in the fact that, on the one hand, it strives to comprehend each object and in particular the totality of objects always in an inextricable (even if not directly expressed) reationship to human subjectivity – we have already discussed the character of this subject and will discuss it later in even more detail. On the other hand, the objectworld is fixed in place and made manifest not only in its essence, but also in its immediate form of appearance; the dialectic of appearance and essence rises to prominence not only in its universal lawfulness, but also precisely in its immediacy, just as it is offered to man in life. The close unity of externalisation and its being taken back results from this in the aesthetic sphere: subjectivity is sublated to such a degree in externalisation and objectivity is sublated to such a degree in its being taken back that the aspect of preserving and at the same time raising to a higher level is preponderant in the act of sublation. This concurrence of both movements therefore yields something unitary: a shaped object-world as the reflection of reality that in its intention emphasises its objectivity even more vigorously than is effective in everyday impressions and lived experiences because only a relatively small group of objects confront the observer or reader, and this extract is nevertheless supposed to evoke reality as an objectively self-contained ‘world’ in him. This is in fact true even under circumstances that seem unfavourable for the effect of objectivity in comparison to the everyday insofar as the persuasiveness of the merely actual, of the factum brutum, must be lacking in them, insofar as they are indissolubly posited only as reflections, as mimetic constructs that can compel an objectivity exclusively by means of their meaningful content and their form. In this manner, the surrender of the subject to reality in externalisation, the subject’s becoming completely absorbed in it, brings forth an intensively increased objectivity within itself. However, this is permeated – and this is the meaning of taking it back into the subject – in all the pores of its objectivity by subjectivity, in fact by a determinately concrete subjectivity. In true-born mimetic constructs, this subjectivity is no addition, no commentary, not even a mood encompassing the objects. Instead, it is an integrative aspect in the construction of its objectivity itself, an inextricable component, indeed the foundation of its being-just-so. If the analysis we have carried out up to now of the movement and structure of this act were to be concretised a bit more, then one would encounter

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two fundamental propositions of aesthetics already touched upon a few times but which must be discussed in an even more precise way in later observations. The first of these propositions results from the mimetic character of any worldcreating art. Formally, it is only another version of the mimetic itself, though this new version brings out new contents at the same time. It is a question of the realistic nature of any art, of the frequently expounded determination that realism is not one style among many others in the concrete development of art but is rather the underlying characteristic of creative art in general, that the different styles can only be differentiated within its purview. The new thing that is expressed in terms of content in the process is primarily the capaciousness of the concept of realism. It encompasses both that maximal approximation to the objectivity of the object-world existing in itself (something that we could notice as the meaningful content of the act of externalisation) and the adherence to the sensuous immediacy of appearances that results from it as well. With that said, of course, only two poles of the universality of realism in the cosmos of art are fixed in place: that is to say, on the one hand, the fidelity to the being and essence of the object, its context at the time, its totality at the time; on the other hand, the return to the immediacy of life, insofar as any object achieves figuration in a way that is inseparable from its immediate sensuous mode of appearance. Insofar as only the analysis of this act is being taken as our starting point, determinants that are still largely undetermined in the positive sense come into being that can testify very little as to the concrete intentions of the different styles. In the negative sense, however, clearer determinations come into being insofar as what is thereby expressed is merely the that the mimetic is inextricably bound to an existing objectivity, to a sensuously manifest surface appearance. Thus, a further confirmation of the fact that, in itself, mimesis only requires a concretely meaningful objectivity and its sensuously manifest mode of appearance, but it is not bound to the hic et nunc at the time of that objectivity which it immediately depicts. Abstract aesthetic analysis thus confirms those findings that the study of the everyday and of the genesis of art could establish by way of the non-mechanicophotographic character of reflection in general and of aesthetic reflection in particular. Later, we will come to speak at length about the trends to be found in the concrete, content-related fulfilment of this negative distinction; we have already repeatedly touched upon its issues in other contexts. As a second proposition, what follows from the structure expounded upon here is the fact that any aesthetic objectivity – already as mere aesthetic objectivity – jointly contains a partisanship for or against, that man therefore does not confront, as he does in everyday life, a fact that he affirms or negates, welcomes or rejects, etc. from the viewpoint of his interests (this word is

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to be taken in its broadest sense). At the same time, it is clear in everyday life that factum and value judgement are – relatively – independent of each other. Although the position taken by the subject is essentially conditioned by what constitutes the fact triggering it, what constitutes the subject is in practice just as important a component as the object itself in the coming into being of an affirmation or a negation. That is also why the comportment of a man in such a situation is immediately of a subjective character for the time being. It obtains objectivity if the sequence and context of the facts confirm the correctness of the response, but even in this case the original duality remains: objective fact and subjective judgement about it persist. Entirely different is the situation with the mimetic construct. When we spoke earlier about the permeation of shaped objects with the subject when it comes to the taking back of externalisation, what we rejected was precisely this duality that is found in everyday life. Of course, this structure is not determined in this way alone. Indeed, one can almost say that the phenomenon now being examined by us is only the most incisive culmination of an even more general phenomenon. For the being-justso of all mimetically presented objects, the manner of their connection to each other, thus the most general principle of the objectivity coming into being here in the first place, is based on the complete permeation of objects by the subject as a result of externalisation being taken back into the subject. Also persisting here is the same antithesis to everyday life, in which man, as soon as he reflects on them, does not just immediately accept his impressions but rather distinguishes in a more or less precise way between the object and its reflection in his consciousness (or at the very least he strives to make this distinction). By contrast, in mimetic constructs the impression that an object triggers is a part of its objectivity itself; its intrinsic specificity, its being-just-so, is determined precisely by means of this unity. Within this overall phenomenon, the concrete unfolding of which we will deal with in even more detail, the inclusion (discussed above) of the subjective position taken within the objectivity of what concretely constitutes all objects nevertheless occupies a privileged position. For, on the on the one hand, in life itself the tension between subjectivity and objectivity is at its strongest here; on the other hand, deeply rooted prejudices with respect to art persist here. Everyone will recognise that the mood of an artwork is a part of its objective composition. However, the fact that for this reason any object – and of course its relationships, its totality, as well – is determined by a creative disposition for or against it is perceived as a paradox in many cases: both in the case of those for whom all art occupies such a ‘high watchtower’ that it could not for one moment be united with such an innate partisanship and in the case of those who are accustomed to beholding a structure of this sort only in inferior, so-

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called tendential art, which mechanically copies from everyday life the duality of factuality and judgement about factuality. Even those theorists of socialist realism who behold its specific distinguishing feature in partiality (in rigid contradistinction to ‘objectivism’ of all other kinds) contribute to this confusion. At the same time, the situation in the case of a fairly unbiased assessment is supremely simple: the selection of a group of objects that belong together and the creation of a world out of them by means of mimetic depiction and formation is impossible without taking a position towards that meaningful content and its relationships, which accounts for the being-just-so of the part of the world that is selected and its elevation into an aesthetic ‘world’. It is not true that an understanding of the importance or significance of a piece of reality suffices for this purpose. This is frequently claimed to be the case, but the fate of theories like Flaubertian impassibilité (to cite one of the most important of these theories) readily proves the opposite. Not only are the works that supposedly came into being on the basis of this conception a vivid refutation of it, but also the theory itself, as it appears in Flaubert’s letters, cancels itself out, proving all over to be a very decided position taken towards that reality whose constitution has been determined namely by Flaubert’s selection, composition, mode of figuration, etc. Or the famous art-historian Berenson, who wants to point out the type of an impersonal, impassive art in the works of Piero della Francesca: when he discusses impersonality as method, he only expresses what has long since become self-evident, similar to what we saw in the discussion of Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting.30 However, the impassivity of his artist goes far beyond the scope of this, it extends to the composition itself. Thus, in the three large, entirely uninvolved foreground figures masking the real drama of the flagellation of Christ in the famous painting in Urbino. However, precisely this composition is just as much a clear taking of a position as the near disappearance of Christ bearing the cross within the masses who led him to his torture and execution in the painting by Bruegel already mentioned by us. It certainly is a position being taken with inverted signs vis-à-vis those paintings in which agony or grandeur is what is being accentuated in such cases. Aesthetically regarded, however, all of them accordingly contain a position taken towards the set of objects being presented, in fact a position that immediately and essentially determines the composition and formation of individual figures in the same way everywhere. The partisanship of the artist is quite often very complex, but the more it permeates all aspects of the composition and the

30

Berenson 1897, pp. 70 ff.

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more it remains immanent to any mimetic objectivity, the more powerful the position being taken is and the more powerfully it acts as such. It is a modern prejudice to assume that this ubiquity of position-taking, of partiality, subjectifies works of art. The path by way of externalisation to its being taken back is the exact opposite of subjectivism. Such subjectivism only comes into being when the subject is not capable or is unwilling to pursue the circuitous route to himself by way of externalisation, by way of losing himself in the object-world, by way of unconditionally surrendering himself to it. The aesthetic does not just dissolve such a mode of purely expressing subjectivity into nothingness. Like everywhere else, here too the aesthetic is merely a heightened mode of expression of life itself – one that heightens that which is essential and highlights it more clearly. Hegel, who (as we know) applied the issue of externalisation and its being taken back notably to social life and to the knowledge acquired and developed in the course of mankind’s development, repeatedly analyses those distortions called forth by a subjectivity that wants to rely purely on itself, that believes it is able to forgo the necessity of a reception that surrenders to the outside world, to the object world. He shows this most clearly in the world-image of the so-called ‘beautiful soul’. According to the Hegelian description, the comportment of such a soul looks like this: ‘The absolute certainty of itself thus finds itself, qua consciousness, changed immediately into a sound that dies away, into an objectification of its being-for-itself; but this created world is its speech, which likewise it has immediately heard and only the echo of which returns to it’. Such a subjectivity is precisely consistent with that object-world that inevitably comes into being in such a distorted reflection of objective reality: ‘The hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore, with a sense of its emptiness. Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called “beautiful soul”, its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air’.31 In the Phenomenology itself, and in keeping with the plan of the work, the world-image at the time is developed out of the change in the subject, in the ‘shape of consciousness’; in those places where art is discussed (like Rameau’s Nephew, like the works of Homer, Sophocles, or Aristophanes), only those 31

Hegel 1977b, pp. 399–400. Dealt with in an entirely similar way is the ‘unhappy consciousness’, which plays a great role during the coming into being of Christianity in this work. See Hegel 1977b, pp. 136ff. More than a century before its discovery, Hegel gives a scathing critique of modern introversion in both passages.

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works are selected as representative in which, from the outset, there can be no talk of a problematic of this sort. In the early essay Faith and Knowledge, however, Hegel refers to Speeches on Religion, which was then appearing, and in the critique of Schleiermacher’s writing oriented towards pure introspection, he also touches on the issue of art. He sees features of the aesthete in this objectless religiosity and derides Schleiermacher’s tendency to want to let ‘art … be forever without works of art’.32 We have seen that the problem that becomes visible in the application of this Hegelian category to aesthetics is subtler than that of an aestheticising subjectivity without objectivation into works of art; it is precisely a matter of the self-dissolution of constructs created with such a disposition and intended as works of art. (The last quoted Hegelian critique is immediately directed against another subjectivist distortion, namely against the so-called ‘art of living’. We will first be able to concern ourselves with this issue in the chapter on natural beauty.) We have seen that Hegel quite generally grasps the problem of actually creative subjectivity, its path to itself by way of a correct and absorbed comprehension of the object-world; in the process the aesthetic only acts as a rarely mentioned case of application. That is precisely why it is an interesting confirmation of our interpretation of his theory of externalisation and the taking of this externalisation back into the subject that in the discussion of ‘Religion in the Form of Art’ – in the aesthetic part of the Phenomenology – he can say of the ‘ethical substance’ of man: ‘This activity is pure form, because the individual, in ethical obedience and service, has worked off every unconscious existence and fixed determination in the same way that substance itself has become this fluid essence. This form is the night in which substance was betrayed and made itself into Subject. It is out of this night of pure certainty of self that the ethical Spirit is resurrected as a shape freed from Nature and its own immediate existence’.33 Given therein is a clear positive counter-image to the privative description of the ‘beautiful soul’. One sees that the analysis of aesthetic object-relations leads of its own accord to examining the constitution of the subject in this sphere in a more precise way. If our interest is now focused on this subject, we again come upon one of the many fruitful and moving inconsistencies that concretely determine the field of art. This contradiction can be provisionally and briefly expressed thusly: in immediate terms, it looks as if aesthetic subjectivity were converging very closely with that of everyday life. Indeed, as we have already repeatedly emphasised, insofar as it distinguishes itself from everyday subjectivity, this dif-

32 33

Hegel 1977a, p. 151. Hegel 1977b, p. 426.

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ference seems to consist essentially in a mere intensification of its immediacy. As we could already see, this semblance is deceptive, and if our observations up to now still could not yet sufficiently throw light upon the actual specificity of this subjectivity, upon what specifically constitutes it, then this much is already apparent: in the aesthetic, the distinction from the immediacy of subjectivity in everyday life grows into a qualitative difference, admittedly without abolishing its being bound to the personality, without abolishing the subjective character of subjectivity. Indeed, the direction of the differentiating movement is an opposed one, an amplifying and intensifying of the originally given subjectivity. As we have also seen, this movement takes a path that is diametrically opposed to scientific knowledge. Naturally, even here the personality of the scientist, his subjective constitution and specificity, must be the direct bearer of the consciously aware process of the transformation of an in-itself into a for-itself. Naturally, this transformation can only take place if the whole man champions its actualisation with all of his capacities, not only his purely intellectual ones, but also his willpower, morality, imagination, etc. However – and this is the fruitful, the moving contradiction of the scientific reflection of reality – the process of objectivation already begins in the subject of knowledge himself: it is a matter of the disanthropomorphising principle of this mode of reflection, a principle that is already familiar to us. Because it goes without saying that disanthropomorphising jointly contains a certain de-subjectification. Even in its objectivising constructs, however, the aesthetic sphere anthropomorphises. Therefore, can there be a principle here that drives the subject out beyond mere everyday subjectivity, beyond that which is peculiar to its singularity (in its originally given being-just-so, every subject is something that is incomparably singular) without thereby abolishing its subjectivity as such? And if so, in what does this principle consist?

3

From the Partial Individual to the Self-Consciousness of the Human Species

Our investigations into the subject-object relation in externalisation and its being taken back in designate the direction in which the correct posing and answering of the question must be sought. This direction seems to us to be determined by the fact that both in the product and in the process of labour (relation of the labouring subject to it and to its results) what must be recognised is the role that the relationship of the individual to the species plays in them, in fact in a subjective and objective regard. Already at the beginning of our observations on the theme being discussed presently, we quoted important

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remarks made by the young Marx. With respect to the issue of the subject, these passages justifiably make the relation of the individual subject to the human species the focal point. Comprehending this relationship (a cursory analysis of which we will begin in a moment) in a properly dialectical way creates vast intellectual difficulties; apart from that, however, the objective aspect in it must especially be moved into the foreground of interest here as well. Marx protests against the manner prevalent before him that ‘was only capable of conceiving the general existence of man – religion, or history in its abstract and universal form of politics, art, literature, etc. – as the reality of man’s essential powers and man’s species-activity’. At the same time, he gives a counter-image: ‘the history of industry and the objective existence of industry as it has developed is the open book of the essential powers of man, man’s psychology present in tangible form’.34 He therefore demands that if the talk is of the human species in its becoming and being, then it is to have recourse to this its archetypal phenomenon as a concrete basis for understanding more abstract phenomena, and these phenomena will be elucidated from that archetypal phenomenon (and not the reverse). The later development of the sciences has fully proven the profound truth that is embedded in this finding of the young Marx. Without being Marxists (indeed, in most cases without even knowing Marx just by name), archeologists have uncovered much of importance about the real development of the human race, of the human species, from prehistoric tools and products of labour (and, to my mind, the existing material would have been much more greatly and much more deeply illuminated if archeological studies had taken the Marxist method as their basis). The generally recognised situation that the condition and direction of development of a society about which we otherwise know nothing or scarcely anything can be deduced, along with the living conditions and interdependencies of the people living in it, from the tools and products of a labour, that such facts can also serve in higher formations of human coexistence as a key for clearly elucidating the foundations and essence of complexes that remained puzzling in their immediate ideological mode of appearance, has general philosophical consequences that are particularly important for our present problem. To be emphasised first and foremost here is the fact that not only does the reality of the species thereby clearly stand before us, but so too does the manner of its existence, its essential historical character. On the one hand, this finding is important compared to mechanical materialism, which makes a dead, immovable universality out of the species. Thus, Marx criticises

34

Marx 1992a, p. 354.

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Feuerbach’s following thesis: ‘Essence, therefore, can be comprehended only as “genus”, as an internal, dumb universality which naturally unites the many individuals’.35 Contained at the same time in this is a critique of those conceptions that apprehend the human concept of species far too much in accordance with the model of the animal world. This dumb Feuerbachian unviversality can be valid in it as an approximation to reality. About this distinction, Marx says, ‘The particular qualities of the different races within a species of animal are by nature more marked than the differences between human aptitudes and activities. But since animals are not able to exchange, the diversity of qualities in animals of the same species but of different races does not benefit any individual animal. Animals are unable to combine the different qualities of their species; they are incapable of contributing anything to the common good and the common comfort of their species’.36 It is interesting that at roughly the same time Balzac drew similar conclusions from the same situation: ‘When Buffon describes the lion, he dismisses the lioness with a few phrases; but in society a wife is not always the female of the male’. And from this basic fact he draws the distinctions in more sophisticated relationships: ‘The social state has freaks which nature does not allow herself; it is nature plus society. The description of social species would thus be at least double that of animal species, merely in view of the two sexes. Then, among animals the drama is limited; there is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other – that is all. Men, too, rend each other; but their greater or lesser intelligence makes the struggle far more complicated …. the grocer certainly becomes a peer, and the noble sometimes sinks to the lowest social grade’.37 Therefore, the recognition of the biologico-anthropological foundations of the species, even in the case of humans, must never obscure the socio-historical foundedness of its specific categories. On the other hand, philosophical idealism fixes the concept of what is ‘human in general’ in place in a way that is likewise illegitimate and suprahistorical, as certain human features (issuing and thus universalised at any given time from the ideological needs of a given historical situation) receive this conceptual consecration and are set against the particular or partial attributes, constitutions, etc. of people in a rigid and mechanical way. In art, this relates equally to academicism and avant-gardism. Whether an absolutised and vulgarised version of ‘noble simplicity and quiet greatness’ or a nihilistic existential ‘condition humaine’ receives this metaphysically distorted role of providing 35 36 37

Marx 1992b, p. 423, translation modified. Marx 1992a, p. 373. Balzac 1897, p. xliii.

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criteria, it boils down to the same thing and exhibits the same methodology when looked at in philosophical terms. By contrast, what Marx refers to as species is first and foremost something that is continuously changing in a sociohistorical way, something that is neither lifted into deadening universality out of the developmental process nor is it an abstraction that exclusively confronts singularity and particularity; subjectively and objectively, therefore, the species is continuously situated in the midst of a process, it is a never unvarying end result of the interdependencies between larger and smaller human communities, between more or less natural communities and more highly organised ones, and these interdependencies go all the way down to the deeds, thoughts, and feelings of each individual person that all flow – modifying the end result and building on it – into this end result. Marx vigorously emphasises this unity of the individual with species-being. In the observations concerning this, which we have already cited in other contexts, he says, ‘Man’s individual and specieslife are not two distinct things, however much – and this is necessarily so – the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general individual life. As species-consciousness man confirms his real social life and merely repeats in thought his actual existence; conversely, species-being confirms itself in species-consciousness and exists for itself in its universality, as a thinking being’.38 In this process, it is a question of a dialectic of singularity and its generalisation in the objectivations of the activity of individual persons; therefore, in labour above all. Any product of labour arises from the efforts of individuals, though its essence is founded on the objective necessities of material and social nature. If it is not produced in accordance with these necessities, then the whole labour process is wasted; one can no longer regard it as a product of labour in the exact sense, even though it is a product of labour in a subjective regard. As was indicated earlier, that is why archeology can decipher the contents, forms, essence, structure, etc. of forgotten cultures from their products of labour. For they reveal in objectivated form that which is decisive in objectively existing social needs and in the manner of satisfying them in the most optimal way possible at the time. Their change is the best compass for discovering the paths leading upwards or downwards, the epochs of stagnation, etc. in these cultures. From these products of labour, the affinities and aberrations of these cultures can be deduced down to the level of slight nuances. All of this shows us from a new side the already familiar role of the subject in such

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labour processes; it is an objectivising role, one that leads away from that which is peculiar to the subject: the particular abilities, properties, etc. of the subject are invariably indispensable for this process. Occasionally they are of supreme importance, and under certain circumstances they can even be the immediate vehicle of progress, of the further development of the species, albeit only ever to the extent that they are capable of completely changing over into precisely the objectivity that was decisive in those days, that in the objectivation they shed the traces of that which is peculiar to them. And it is clear that the science developing out of labour exhibits this character even more pronouncedly. The stimulating function of social needs that triggers achievements and the compulsion to comprehend and present in a faithful approximation the in-itself of what is (its being constituted independent of consciousness) is expressed even more incisively. As much as ingenuity is also required to discover certain truths, these truths no longer bear the traces of it in themselves; they are true precisely in their objectivatedness, purified of all subjectivity, and only in this way can they bring about progress in the human species. As seen from these contrasting images, the essence of aesthetic subjectivity appears in a clearer light than it has up to now: as in other complexes of essence, the distinction between animal and man also intensifies into an antithesis in existence as species-being, such that in the case of animals the species has only an objective being, while in the case of man not only can the species more or less clearly enter into consciousness, but also this consciousness turns into an ever more essential aspect of the objective being of the species. Of course, conscious awareness is jointly contained as a vital component in all of the human species activities mentioned up to now, though since objectivity must have a comprehensive effect everywhere, as was shown, no decisive significance can be awarded to subjective conscious awareness in the end result. Such conscious awareness is indispensable for the genesis of human species-type constructs, but with that said it has played out its role; precisely in their objectivity, these constructs bear what we call the human species and carry it forward. Subjectivity plays a qualitatively different role in ethics and aesthetics. In ethics – we are uniformly bracketing ethics and morality together here for the purposes of our present observations – it is indeed precisely the subjective side of human praxis that is in control. It goes without saying that every act of an ethical character intends the preservation and further development of the human race, irrespective of the extent to which this referentiality is conscious in those who are taking action at the time. Because a sense of duty or a breach of duty, virtue or vice, etc. are, by means of the consequences triggered by them, among the building blocks of that edifice which the species represents for people. By now leaving behind in this way positive or negative (forward-driving or retarding)

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traces, they come into the immediate proximity of such constructs as law, the state, etc., in which the inner conflicts of mankind at any given time fix a certain developmental level in place, although in a more removed and mediated sense these conflicts likewise are a part of those objectivations that make it possible for us to read and interpret what the human species was and is. A distinction certainly exists there, even if the boundaries frequently become indistinct, but a closer investigation is not our task here. Perhaps even clearer is the relation of the dispositive side of morality to the species as subject. On the one hand, an intention towards generalisation is contained in the moral disposition as such – in theoretical terms, the nature of this was most incisively worked out by Kant. And since the direction taken when that which is immediately partial to the subject is exceeded must still remain within the field of disposition (of subjectivity), it is clear that the intention, with greater or lesser clarity, must aim at what is common in human dispositions, at what is species-like in them. On the other hand, the essential aspect or nodal point of this sphere (the moral decision) is still inextricably embedded in the personality of the individual person. This nowhere completely abolishable polarity of the partial individual and the species-like universal in the morally acting subject yields one of the fundamental problems of ethics. Only just in a preliminary way can we get involved here with the extremely disparate solutions that socio-historical development has produced, not least of all because the realisation that such a polarity and tension largely dominates the specificity of such an important field of life as that of moral action completely suffices for our present objectives when it comes to knowledge. Therefore, not only is it already a question here of the fact that subjectivity would be sublated into objectivity, as happens in labour or science, but also it comes down to the fact that the partial individuality, drawing nearer to that which is species-like, carries out and experiences a generalisation in itself, albeit one that indeed partly casts off its merely partial features, or at the very least neutralises them, though without thereby destroying the actual specificity of the individuality. Indeed, to the contrary, there is an amplification, an intensification of this actual specificity of the individuality, in its nature. This decisive structural specificity frequently appears in a distorted form. In the works of Kant, it is because he makes a mechanically rigid antithesis between the empirical self and the intelligible self out of the dialectical tension and contradictoriness that exists here. In the case of Romantic ethicists, like the young Schleiermacher, or in that of the existentialists, it is because they shrink from a dialectical sublation of the merely partial. The specific kind of generalisation intended here, this particular kind of sublation of subjectivity in which it is elevated – precisely as subjectivity – to

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a higher level, must be considered if we want to grasp the subjective side of the relation of individual and species in the aesthetic. We have already seen that the situation in the aesthetic is more paradoxical than in the field of ethical praxis: according its structure, the latter remains centred on subjectivity because even if the subject knows he is accountable for the consequences of his actions, quite clearly contained in this act is a taking back of objective facts (admittedly with their entire objective dialectic) into the ethical subject. Taking this back in, however, leaves the objective world completely untouched. Indeed, it is precisely moral responsibility that involves the following postulate for the subject: to know this world as it is in itself. The reproach that often and necessarily emerges in the act of responsibility (‘I should have known this or that’) shows that even the most extreme dispositional ethics cannot be exempt from the obligation to know objective reality as it is. The fact that it can then, according to tendency and in keeping with moral commitments, affirm or deny a social reality that is recognised as accurately as possible alters nothing in this constitution of ethical comportment. The aesthetic subject as such, however, cannot come into existence at all without a corresponding object-relation. Such a temporary transformation of the whole man that makes this subject effective in him and awakens it from the slumber of potentiality can only be realised in the vibrant relation to the work of art, be it in the directedness towards a becoming (as in creative behaviour) or be it as the reception of something already aesthetically formed. As the realisations of aesthetic subjectivity, however, both subjective acts nevertheless appear as merely derivative: only the work of art itself is their adequate, trueborn realisation. With that said, mimesis again shows itself to be the archetypal phenomenon of aesthetic subjectivity as well. This basic mimetic character separates constructs and acts in the aesthetic from the moral comportment of the subject. In the latter the correct reflection of reality is only a means for an ethical praxis, whereas in the former the whole of human praxis (the moral included, of course) turns into mere material, at most into one of the formal elements of aesthetic mimesis. The relation of aesthetic subjectivity to species-consciousness must be regarded from this point of view. It distinguishes itself from any relation discussed up to now in that it does not immediately (not even objectively) contribute to the formation and further development of the species itself but rather contributes exclusively to the formation and further development of speciesconsciousness. What in other fields enters into consciousness only in an episodic way (namely the fact that everything accomplished by mankind – the knowledge, utilisation, and subjugation of nature; the construction of human relationships to one another; the higher development and humanisation of

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man – is all the product of people themselves) is lifted here into the centre of attention with immediate self-evidence. As in all of our previous investigations, here too it comes down more to the thing itself than it does to its immediate, consciously aware reflections, which, as we could see, can also be false, without the fundamental facts being thereby overturned. In the case being discussed at the moment, this thing itself is the specific dialectical unity (that is to say, the unity of unity and difference, as Hegel expresses it) of individual subjectivity with the species. Already in relation to life itself, Marx protests against a divisive contrasting of the individual and the species to each other: ‘Man’s individual and species-life are not two distinct things, however much – and this is necessarily so – the mode of existence of individual life is a more particular or a more general mode of the species-life, or species-life a more particular or more general individual life’.39 It follows that this dialectic is dictated by concrete content even in everyday life: the content of deeds, thoughts, feelings, etc. of man at the time in the socio-historically determined situation at the time decides whether these components of a contradictory unity pursue converging or diverging directions and which of them turns into the overarching aspect. We have seen that the mere fact of moral intention jointly contains a directedness towards that which is species-like in man. Now that which is specific to aesthetic subjectivity consists in the fact that this intention is not primarily realised just in the subject himself but rather appears objectivated in a ‘world’. Everything making this world up, everything that is found in it and is directly or indirectly related to it, must possess a deep, objective meaningfulness (determining all objectivity in terms of content and form), albeit a meaningfulness that is embedded in man himself always and everywhere. It is clear that the subject of such a ‘world’ cannot possibly be the individual in his immediate partiality. This individual also certainly draws up images of such ‘worlds’ again and again in everyday life; for instance, think of daydreams, etc. In any normal everyday person, however, such fancies are expressly characterised as purely subjective, and to attribute objectivity to them by the subject is already a lapse into the pathological. Ernst Bloch has most meticulously analysed such daydreams, and by sharply distinguishing from desire the wishes that thus come into being, he draws the same borderline we just did, but from a different point of view: the wish remains completely stuck in the partial subject, while desire, in contrast, is directed at a deed in objective reality (that is to say, the independence of objective reality from the subject is more or less consciously posited in both cases equally, although in ways that are absolutely different). Bloch explains:

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‘The demand of the wish rises precisely with the idea of the better, even perfect aspect of its fulfilling something …. Thus where there is the imagined idea of something better, ultimately perhaps perfect, wishing takes place, possibly impatient, demanding wishing. The mere imagined idea thus becomes a wishful image, stamped with the cachet: this is how it should be. But here wishing, no matter how strong it is, is distinguished from actual “wanting” by its passive nature which is still related to longing. In wishing there is not yet any element of work or activity, whereas all wanting is wanting to do. We can wish for the weather to be fine tomorrow, although there is not the slightest thing we can do about it. Wishes can even be entirely irrational, we can wish that X or Y were still alive; it is possibly meaningful to wish this, but meaningless to want it. Therefore the wish remains even where the will can no longer change anything. The remorseful man wishes that he had not carried out a certain action, but he cannot actually want this. Even despondent, dithering, often disappointed, weak-willed men have wishes, even especially strong wishes, without these wishes making them want to do something. Furthermore, different things can be wished, one is spoilt for choice here, but only one of them can be wanted; whereas the man who wants has already shown preference, he knows what he would rather do, the choice lies behind him’.40 Only by going beyond the scope of that which is partial to the subject can subjectively processed mimetic constructs rise into the specific objectivity of the aesthetic, whereby they no longer confront this objectivity as purely subjective responses to an outside world untouched by subjectivity but rather are constituted into an autonomous objectivity that is sui generis. (From this side, one can also find in it one of the most important distinctions between the artist and the dilettante or amateur.) By nature, this going beyond the scope of the partial subjectivity of everyday life is at least as decided as it is in science or morality, although for a long time the manner of its realisation does not seem to be as radical. For whereas both the act of disanthropomorphising in scientific comportment and – at least very often – the action of moral imperatives bring about a clear line of demarcation with respect to that which is peculiar to the subject, in the aesthetic the boundaries seem to become completely blurred. Indeed, it seems as if in carrying out aesthetic positing (in the work, in creation, in reception) an exclusive and pure subjectivity should come into being. And this is not just a semblance, because there is no human activity in which subjectivity or individuality would be expressed in such an immediately selfevident way, none in which the personal aspect constituting any objectivity

40

Bloch 1996, pp. 46–7.

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of this sort would have such decisive significance for all relationships as we find in the sphere of the aesthetic. Precisely for this reason, however, the transition into the species-like, the elevation above that which is merely peculiar to man in his everyday immediacy, is just as indispensable here as in the scientific reflection of reality or in moral praxis. The particular manner of this transformation of the subject is determined by the character of the objectivation. That is to say, everywhere else the objectivity of the object-world remains untouched, in that it is recognised in the most adequate possible way and is changed through human praxis, but it is not shaken in its objectivity. Indeed, as we have seen, subjective wishes, daydreams, etc. even presuppose precisely this imperturbability of objectivity. Just art and art alone creates, with the help of mimesis, an objectivated counterimage to the real world, an image that rounds itself off into a ‘world’ and that possesses a being for itself in this self-completion in which subjectivity is indeed abolished but in which the overarching aspects remain preserved and raised to a higher level. Such a sublated subjectivity now awakens the species-consciousness that any human personality immanently has at all times to a more or less conscious degree. This explains the specificity of this transformation of subjectivity: it becomes more genuinely and deeply subjective, personality gains a broadened and more firmly outlined dominion than in everyday life, and at the same it goes beyond the scope of what is peculiar to itself in everyday life. The ‘world’ of the work of art, in which this subjectivity-preserving objectivation takes place, is just a reflection of objective reality, a mimesis which regards and reproduces the world given to man – a world that is both created by him and formed like the one existing independent of him – from the standpoint of this creative process. The transformation of the subject, his overcoming of that which is peculiar to everyday life, is the process of reforming himself to such an extent that he will be able to be a ‘mirror of the world’, as Heine says of Goethe. The depth of the proper knowledge of the world and that of the proper sense of self coincide here in a new immediacy. The translation of these facts into philosophical terminology may sound paradoxical in places. Its difficulty lies not least in the fact that categories and their relations must be used that, in terms of objective reality itself, would have to bring forth an idealist distortion as categories of knowledge. This problem has already been discussed here in general terms. What is at issue now is the – aesthetico-rational – archetype of the central category of modern objective idealism, of the identical subject-object. I have already discussed those of its consequences that distort knowledge in other works.41 Here it is clear that in 41

Cf. Lukács 1975.

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aesthetics it is not a question of an identical subject-object in the strict sense. The aesthetic state of affairs itself is supremely simple as such and is proven by countless historical facts. Time and again in the course of artistic development, we learn – where it is possible for us to know the private personality of the artist – that the individuality objectivated in works of art is and (at the same time) is not identical with the artist’s private personality, that the private personality was sublated into the individuality in the categorical manner depicted by us. The difficulty in conceptually apprehending this process is twofold. First, there cannot be any concrete criterion for this self-sublation of that which is peculiar to oneself as there still is in scientific reflection or in ethical praxis. (The problems the come into being in these fields cannot be dealt with here. It is clear, however, that ethical norms or the principle of disanthropomorphising nevertheless possess the clear character of being criteria, for all of the problems when it comes to applying them to individual concrete cases.) But despite this lack of concrete standards, no arbitrariness holds sway here. With regard to the transformation of his subjectivity, the peculiar subject of the artist has to throw himself into the creative process à corps perdu. Provided the artist has talent, its success depends precisely on whether and to what extent he is capable of casting off that which is merely peculiar in itself and of not only finding and clarifying that which is species-like in itself but also making it come alive as the essence of precisely his personality, as the organising centre of its relations to the world, to history, to the given moment in mankind’s developmental process and to its perspective of movement – in fact, as the deepest expression of the reflection of reality itself. It is clear that, as a matter of principle, it is not possible to discover an a priori criterion in immediate or in artistic lived experiences that could adjudicate with infallible certainty which experienced reflection of reality that has been made evocative (which arrangement of such lived experiences, which assessment of their essence and their relationships) belongs to the peculiar subjectivity and which belongs to species-consciousness. Looked at subjectively, the struggle of great artists around what they very often simply call the faithful reproduction of nature (a struggle that never comes to rest and that begins again and again in each turn of artistic labour) consists precisely in considering reality from the viewpoint of the human species. For looked at abstractly, an awful lot is true to nature that does not reach this height; purely as the reflection of a piece of reality, that which has been eliminated, ruled out, etc. is often just as true as what is finally left in the works. In what does the principle of omission thus consist? In very many cases – and these cases are exactly the ones that are important for our problem – this

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principle consists in the fact that the objectivity intended here (an objectivity that remains subjective in an immediate sense, i.e., the subjectivity of speciesconsciousness) is promoted precisely by means of such a choice, whereas in the opposite case it is merely the subjectivity of the peculiar subject (‘le monsieur’ Flaubert called it with fierce self-irony) that rises to prominence. Tolstoy, who concerned himself with this issue a great deal, once said to Gorki, ‘ “It’s terrible what inventors we all are, myself included. Sometimes you’ll be writing and suddenly you begin to pity someone, so you add some slightly better trait, and then you take a little away from another character, so that those around him don’t look too black by comparison …. You find yourself writing not about real life, what and how it is, but about what you think about life, you personally. Who needs to know how I see that tower, or the sea, or a Tartar? Why is that interesting or needful?”’42 Theodore Fontane presents this contradiction just as consciously in his own works. He calls it the contradiction of ‘our nature’ and ‘our taste’, and he says, ‘If our taste … determines our production, our nature, having taken a different course, leaves us in the lurch, and we come to grief. We have had our way, but the outcome is a stillbirth’.43 Examples could be multiplied at will. However, it is probably more useful to consider this situation from another side as well. There, on the one hand, the critical significance of the selection of motif or of theme for the fate of the whole work – on which the correspondence between Schiller and Goethe attaches the greatest importance – becomes apparent; both Schiller and Goethe are of the view that a miscarriage in this selection even condemns the greatest talent and the most conscious art to failure. What comes to light first and foremost in this is the boundedness of any aesthetic subjectivity to the mimetic object, which is well-known to us. But beyond that, since this merely determines a relationship in general, the question must come up: why does one theme or motif act favourably on creative work and another unfavourably? The answer can only be something to this effect: the facilitative principle is located in an aesthetic generalisation; that is, the selection of theme or motif already moves the creative subject closer to speciesconsciousness or it removes him from it, it helps him to overcome that which is peculiar to himself or it hampers his endeavours to progress beyond it. On the other hand – albeit in close relationship to what we have just explained –

42 43

Gorki 2008, pp. 73–4. Qtd. in Lukács 1993, p. 283. Further remarks in this essay also showed how it comes about that a genuinely realist writer like Fontane sinks down to the level of good belles lettres from time to time, which of course is only the objective work-related side of the dilemma that is being dealt with here from the side of the subject.

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it should be recalled how often in the self-reflections of major artists the following observation turns up: the work devised and begun by them lives its own life, independent of their wants and wishes. When the artist violates the laws according to which the work that is coming into being has been taken up, he once more condemns himself to failure. The contradictions growing out of this circumstance are extremely varied. It can be a matter of scale or genre. For example, Thomas Mann writes that he had devised Magic Mountain as a novella, effectively as a companion piece to Death in Venice; against his original intention, a massive novel of the age was made from this under his hands. It can be a question of the conflicts of that type that we demonstrated just now in the examples of Tolstoy and Fontane. And contradictions of this sort can extend as far as into the centre of worldview, as Engels proved in the case of Balzac. Precisely with that said, the problem stands before us in complete clarity: Balzac’s peculiar subjectivity was that of a normal, intelligent legitimist; from here, it would have been impossible to create a ‘human comedy’, to present an important transitional crisis in the human species in a comprehensive and definitive way. The myths and theories about the higher inspiredness of artistic creation (myths and theories showing up time and again since art came to exist) contain something of the essence of this situation, admittedly alongside subjectivist and irrationalist interpretations that show up time and again at later stages, albeit in a form that is often powerfully distortive. The second difficulty in grasping the relation between individual and species-like consciousness resides in the fact that the latter is not given in a subjectively immediate way at all or is given in an anticipatorily utopian way at most. People experience immediate social ties like family, clan, caste, tribe, class, nation, etc., but they do not – or at least only rarely – immediately experience mankind as the unity of the species (and even then they mostly do so with false consciousness). Only in the condition of a mankind that has been socialistically united can this turn into immediate everyday lived experience. Objectively, it certainly exists since the humanisation of man, and it develops more and more extensively and intensively. It exists at first only as a pure initself, as something equivalent to our anthropological nature; with the growth and enrichment of social relations, ever greater unities develop that people are compelled to experience as the foundations of their individual – physical and mental – existence. What comes into being with capitalism is the world market and, on its basis, a real world history. This is, to be sure, still an in-itself of the human species, but of course an in-itself of a qualitatively higher order than the original merely anthropological one because back then our common bond was experienced only as the result of catastrophes, as ‘fate’, whereas now human praxis is compelled, on pain of ruin, to continuously grapple with a

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human totality that has become concretised; and because the number of those in whom this in-itself of the species turns into an affirmed for-us is constantly growing, as is the number of those – although on a smaller scale – who already actively strive for its complete realisation. Notwithstanding such an unambiguous line of development, the problem already indicated by us persists for aesthetic subjectivity. For it belongs to the essence of art to not be utopian. For the overwhelming majority of arts, art forms, and art works, it is not possible to present the perspective of the future in a form other than that of an implied, more or less visualised direction of movement within the present moment that is being shaped. Philosophy, science, or journalism were and are capable of conceptually anticipating an actualisation of their perspectives in abstract predictions. No matter how utopian this may have turned out in terms of content and form, and no matter how often and how starkly the facts of historical development may bring into view the inaccuracy of most details, if utopian thought (in a vast, world-historical sense) pursues the direction of that path of development taken by the human species, then utopian anticipation grows into a progressive intellectual force. Thus, already in the natural law and ethics of the Stoics; thus, in the declarations of human rights by the great bourgeois revolutions; and thus, in the statements about the future made by major utopians from More to Fourier. And, in a qualitatively higher way, in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin as well. As a matter of principle, it is of course possible for science to reveal genuine perspectives of future development. It suffices to refer to the determination of the two periods of socialism in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme. Of course, what already clearly results from what has been explained up to now is the fact that the content of such predictions can only come upon the most general things. As soon as they go into concrete matters, what comes into being is an absurd and often nonsensical fantasy, even in the works of preeminent thinkers who ingeniously anticipate a great deal at the level of universality (bear in mind Fourier, for example). It was inevitable that even aesthetic theory was influenced by such currents of thought. Its lagging behind artistic praxis becomes visible precisely in such a topic, especially because, as we have already seen, it was precisely the specific character of artistic generalisation which was misunderstood and construed according to the pattern of scientific or philosophical generalisation. The socio-historically necessary unsettledness in the conception of the reality of the human species now pairs in aesthetic theory with its own uncertainty regarding artistic generalisation. This brings forth the muddled and misleading category of the ‘universally human’. We have already discussed its problematic essence. For the issue that is to be dealt with by us now, the idea of the ‘univer-

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sally human’ in aesthetic theory and praxis entails that in it mankind is placed in an exclusively metaphysical antithesis to the concrete forms of human relations, to class and nation above all. Now as these concrete commitments and bonds of mankind – the effects of which on the concrete what and why of any personality, of any human relation, of any fate, etc. are immeasurable – are reduced to the level of the secondary, to something that is to be intellectually disregarded, what inevitably comes into being is a pallid, withdrawn, bloodless conception of man himself. And the conflicts that pervade the lives of people, as well as the deeds and feelings triggered by them, are essential components of any concrete individuality too. If these cease to exist, if they are leapt over or forced into the background, then the abstractness of the ‘universally human’ is aggravated even more. It is no accident that this vacuousness holds sway all the more, the more that art and the theory of art remove themselves from the life of their present and become academic in the worst sense. (So as to guard against any misunderstandings: there is also a decadent, avant-gardiste academicism – be mindful of the ‘Oh Mensch!’ period of expressionism, of the abstraction of the ‘condition humaine’, etc.) Artistically, such a meaningful content that has been voided of principle must lead to an abstract and contrived formalism, regardless of whether this formalism is classicist or surrealist. And content that has been robbed of any concreity, of any meaning that is true to life, can only result in a featureless cosmopolitanism, a solipsistic image of despair, etc. The one-sided and direct orientation towards the species-like in man (an orientation that eliminates real entanglements) must therefore impoverish and distort the concept and image of mankind especially. Of course, the rightness of this train of thought does not exclude the possibility of also raising into an artistic shape those lived experiences of the existence of the human species whose intellectual reflections we analysed earlier. If one wants to grasp this aesthetically, then he must not lose sight of the fact that a concrete utopian artistic presentation contains even more irresolvable contradictions in itself than does a conceptual anticipation of the future. The intensification lies in the fact that an intellectual conception of certain laws and tendencies relating to what is coming is not possible as a matter of principle but can become important for art’s mode of reflection only by way of exception. It is precisely here that aesthetic mimesis comes up against insurmountable obstacles with respect to an object-world whose contents, configurations, relationships, etc. are locked away from us in their concreity. Therefore, art has a much more decidedly anti-utopian character than does science or philosophy. If one invokes against this assertion the ‘prophetic’ poems of Schiller, Shelley, or Blake, the conclusion of the Ninth Symphony, etc., then what must be noted by way of contrast is that such works primarily do not express a future existent

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reality itself but rather the yearning of the subject for it, the subject’s foresight of what is to come, the subject’s subjective relationship to the human race – however generalised this may still be – and not its objective being. The concrete features of the composition thus have their roots and their object in the subject, and this is the concrete product and the concrete component of his own present, of his concrete socio-historical hic et nunc. Hence the objectivated artistic composition of a utopian comportment is – when looked at in aesthetic terms – no utopia. It certainly is a sui generis mode of presentation, the detailed analysis of which we cannot carry out here. All that is to be noted here is that it would be an erroneous, premature generalisation to rigidly set lyrical forms of composition against directly objectivising ones in this issue. In fact, it is a matter of a particular subspecies of what Schiller has defined as ‘sentimental’ in contrast to the ‘naïve’. The elegiac, idyllic, and satirical are the dispositive forms with the help of which the state of affairs meant here can be composed, by which it is of course by no means asserted that these specific contents exhaust the whole ambit of these dispositions. However, they permit a composition in which the not-yet-existing and still subjective reality of the human race can let an important aspect of its beingfor-us attain expression precisely because the ultimate truth of such presentations – even when they are not expressly lyrical in character but immediately evoke instead a detached object-world – is nevertheless situated in the subject. Dostoevsky’s beautiful description of Claude Lorrain’s Acis and Galatea vividly shows what is meant here. From Dostoevsky’s portrayal of Versilov’s memories, thoughts, and feelings, what is essential for our issue is this passage: ‘Here European mankind remembered its cradle, and the thought of it seemed to fill my soul with a kindred love. This was the earthly paradise of mankind …. The golden age – the most incredible dream of all that have ever been, but for which people have given all their lives and all their strength, for which prophets have died and been slain, without which the peoples do not want to live and cannot even die!’44 Here it comes down less to the extent to which Dostoevsky adequately reproduces the objectively meaningful pictorial and mental content of the image by means of his novel’s protagonist. What is decisive is only the fact that this content can only ever turn into the indirect expression of such lived experiences; the elegiac, idyllic, or satirical compositions of the object can thus be raised into bearers of this subjective reflection of the fate of the species. Swift is an obvious example of the satirical possibilities in this regard.

44

Dostoevsky 2003, pp. 466–7. [Eds.]

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With all of that said, however, we have only arrived in the vestibule of our actual problem. This problem consists in the fact that the overwhelming majority of artworks immediately reflect those human relationships and qualities that directly influence people’s fate in existing societies at any given time. The personality of any man that has been shaped, the nature of any artistic feeling arriving at expression, has grown out of those spheres and is bound by the concrete threads of a life that has been truly lived to this immediate field of all human existence, of all human activity. If we again recall here the non-utopian character of aesthetic mimesis, the question justifiably comes up: where is there room for the composition of the problems of the human species? If one wants to understand the dialectic prevailing here correctly, then what must be borne in mind by means of the individual passions of concrete personalities are the immediately given human relationships (from family to class and nation) in their mode of appearance. As the effectively existing relationships between people form each individual so deeply that they are not to be thought away from their concrete being-just-so, what comes into being in life itself is that dialectic that art then mimetically evokes: the ramifications of his being formed by family, class, nation, etc. (ramifications that are operative in the individual) are never simply influences from without, nor are they even ‘layers’ within his personality; instead, they are affects that are essentially of the same type (though these affects admittedly differ in quality, intensity, etc. depending on who he is). In each man, the conflicts called forth by this constellation turn into the inner conflicts of his own passions. This situation that comes into being in life is not only faithfully reflected by aesthetic mimesis but also enhanced and intensified, in keeping with its nature so often portrayed by us. To be sure, Spinoza’s important truth that in the individual only affects can be successfully deployed against affects does not tend to be adduced in aesthetics, yet all the more it is the – unspoken, implicit – axiom of any genuinely mimetic composition. For it is precisely in this way that the extremely convoluted proportion of outer and inner in life, of sociality and personality in the fate of man, arrives at clear and shocking (be it in the tragic or in the comic sense) expression. Since the ‘outer’ social forces get their power by means of the passions they whip up in individual people, though at the same time they are also capable of purely expressing their ‘outer’ social power, the image of the relationship of man to his social conditions can appear both fetishised and defetishised. Marx has vividly identified the phenomenon of fetishisation in relation to the commodity: ‘It is nothing but the definitive social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.45 Now 45

Marx 1990, p. 165.

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one of the great achievements of art (about which there is still a lot to be said) is the breaking up of such fetishes, that is to say the unequivocal expression of social relations as the relationships of people to each other. Only in this way can the contradictory dialectical unity of outer and inner, of the social and the personal, evocatively arrive at expression in truthful proportions. Hegel correctly presented this unity of inner and outer in the witches scene in Macbeth, and he drew the striking conclusion: ‘Now, lastly, the universal powers which not only come on the scene explicitly in their independence but are equally alive in the human breast and move the human heart in its inmost being, can be described in Greek by the word πάθος, păthos …. “Pathos” in this sense is an inherently justified power over the heart, an essential content of rationality and freedom of will’.46 What is immediately described with all of this is merely that dialectic in which the contradiction between the individual and real existing socio-historical powers and above all the unity of these contradictions can arrive at artistic expression. At the same time, however, the key to our current problem is thereby given. It is objectively given in the case of real social powers that have been correctly understood and presented, as even their inner relationships to the development of the human species – mind you, relationships that have not yet become historically conscious or are falsely reflective in a consciousness-like way – must also be jointly formed. Depending on the stage of evolution and on the nation, class, etc., the mode of appearance is naturally already so extraordinarily varied in life that, after a thorough investigation of the details, uncovering the laws prevailing here is probably possible, but not their abstract schematisation. Recognising the almost unlimited variability indicated just now, this reference to the species-like is embedded in the functioning of any social relationship. In this regard, every such relationship has two faces: for every man the deeds, vital questions, etc. are supplied from here, but these deeds can focus their intentions purely on the demands of the day or they can, without relinquishing this boundedness, turn in the direction of species-issues at the same time. The vital questions can never abandon the level of a usefulness that is merely peculiar to someone or something and can – consciously, with false consciousness, or utterly unconsciously – jointly contain references to this supreme universality of human life. Already this situation can be the source of innumerable collisions. Coriolanus’ sense of family (veneration of one’s mother) and love for his native city are seemingly in harmony with his aristocratism. However, the unfolding of such often merely latently existing contradictions breaks up the shal-

46

Hegel 1988, p. 232.

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low pseudo-harmony of the ‘normal’ everyday into brusque contradictoriness, and only their dynamic relationship (their tragic culmination) unveils what is completely linked to that which is peculiar to the hic et nunc in these human relationships and what relates directly or indirectly to the development of the human race, what can become an enduring aspect of continuity within this development. It is therefore by no means necessary for the existence and configurability of the contradictions between individuals and social conditions (and all the more for their relatedness to the problems of the human species) that the dialectical dichotomies become conscious in the people who act and suffer. Here too our Marxist motto applies: ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’. We could already hint at this structure in the example above of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. We also recall a longer quotation from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain that we quoted earlier in a different context. This shows that even here our Marxist interpretation is nothing more than making one conscious of something that is always carried out in the praxis of great artists. As the practical foundation of aesthetic mimesis, this situation is in place everywhere. In Thomas Mann’s case, we are given the characteristics of such interdependencies in an extremely problematic age, but the methodological significance for aesthetic praxis is the same as that of the Marxist analysis of the ‘heroic illusions’ of the great French Revolution. Certainly without the direct influences of such findings having come into being, a book like Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst is a clear example of how in great literature the vital contradictions (and their unity) can arrive at expression as a complex made up of individual passions, the fact that these passions are determined by the socio-historical constitution of a developmental stage, and their significance for the unfolding of the specieslike. It is no accident that the contradictions (and their unity) had to be foregrounded everywhere here in our observations. For the development of the species-like that is taking place in history can only come to light and rise to prominence as a result of the fact that those things which are new in human personalities, relationships, etc. come into conflict with the old institutions, connections, thoughts, feelings, etc. True, the collisions that thus come into being can confine themselves to a purely local and temporary hic et nunc, and in the overwhelming majority of cases this is what they do, though the possibility of an elevation above this level to that of the species-like is latently contained in any such collision; it is only a question of the extent to which it is capable of being made – objectively or subjectively – clear. It is here that the great worldhistorical mission of art has its root: it is able to raise that which is latent into relevance, to impart a clearly evocative and comprehensible expression to that

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which remains mute in reality. Without our inadmissibly generalising his intention, Goethe’s lines, ‘And when in all his torture man grows mute / A god gave me the strength to tell what I am suffering’, can absolutely be interpreted in this sense.47 Already in their immediate forms of appearance, the contradictions of which we were just talking quite often exhibit a structure that is indicative of what we have already explained. Be mindful of the radical generalisations in the demands of the bourgeois democratic revolutions (of the ‘heroic illusions’), of the constant struggle between the great, world-historical interests of the proletariat and those interests that are transitory or for the time being, etc. For example, with the help of the metaphysical juxtaposition of the fundamental and the temporary interests of the proletariat, the reformist movement (signaled by E. Bernstein’s48 separation of ‘end goal’ from ‘movement’) was and is an attempt to eradicate everything that is genuinely human from the theory and praxis of the labour movement, everything that points beyond small reforms within capitalism. It would be a superficial simplification of the issue, however, if we were to attribute a direct relationship to the human in every generalisation that people carry out in their social conflicts and to deny to these

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It is strange that this consistent and profound alteration of Tasso’s words (‘how I am suffering’) is treated as a ‘garbled quotation’ by Emil Staiger. His rationale is as follows: ‘“Tell what I am suffering” is more obvious than “how I am suffering”, but “how I am suffering” is more poignant, more biased towards the self as it were; it specifies the kind and the degree of the suffering, while “tell what I am suffering” specifies only the content’. See Staiger 1955, p. 163. The subjective hierarchy of values contained therein is not to be disputed here. Undoubtedly the priority of the ‘how’ still applies in Goethe’s Tasso period; the only question is how the old Goethe stood towards this problem. He wrote the poem ‘To Werther’ after the ‘Marienbad Elegy’, and with its postulative character, that poem’s closing line (the address to the writer of Werther: ‘Give him a god to tell what he is enduring’) unquestionably prepares the way for the motto of the ‘Marienbad Elegy’; and since this preparation is no quotation but rather a paraphrase, for that reason a ‘lapse of memory’ is out of the question entirely, leaving instead perhaps a change in the worldview and mission of the writer therein. In Tasso the ‘how’ merely expresses the attempt of the hero to subjectively salvage the writer’s own existence, whereas now the talk is already of the general vocation of the writer to express the redeeming word for mankind, in the name of mankind. And the fact that the old Goethe accordingly rated Werther and Tasso as the same type shows his agreement with the judgement of the French critic Ampère, who called Tasso a ‘ramped-up Werther’. We therefore believe that, in order to be completely in the right, one has to regard the ‘what’ of the motto as the wisdom of Goethe’s old age and not as a ‘garbled quotation’. [Eds: The quote in the main text from the ‘Marienbad Elegy’ is from Goethe 1957, p. 101, translation modified.] Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932), German social democratic theorist and politician. [Eds.]

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generalisations any realism oriented towards the facts. The antithesis highlighted by us is only a clear indication of this constellation, but its ramifications can be extraordinarily ambiguous. It suffices to be mindful, on the one hand, of the example already drawn on here of the conflict between Antigone and Creon in order to catch sight of what is human in adhering to constructs of a ‘lower order’ (family versus state) and, on the other, of some of the subjectivist dogmatic abstractions of Stalin and his followers in order to clearly see that not every generalisation of social conflicts is capable of coming upon what is species-like in them. The generalisation of immediate processes that arise as the contradictions of a certain formation also takes idiosyncratic paths insofar as it preserves the essential traits of the concrete situation without unconditionally abiding by the concrete details of its normal appearance in actual fact. Hegel’s error in his assessment of Macbeth is particularly instructive here. He faults Shakespeare for completely omitting the right of his hero to the throne, the injustice that has befallen him in the process.49 Shakespeare used motifs of this sort abundantly in his cycle of king dramas, which shaped the immediate process of the selfdestruction of feudalism. By contrast, the great late tragedies – King Lear too belongs in this series – only hold on to what can be completely adopted into the image of species-like as something preserved from this process of dissolution. He thus concretises the conditions and relationships only to the extent that is absolutely necessary for the moral vividness of the events. The motif demanded by Hegel would vastly reduce this level of the work. Here as well, Shakespeare’s selection and mode of composition in this period must not be construed as a formula, as the only justified method for accentuating that which belongs to the species. The manner, say, in which the labour movement is presented in Gorki’s Mother or Andersen Nexø’s Pelle the Conqueror repeatedly shows – despite all the differences between those two works – the growing over of everyday scenes, portrayed in detail, into that species-like character that, as the historical mission of the working class, is inherent to the class struggle being presented here. These examples should suffice; it is indeed impossible to present even schematically the forms of the dialectic that come into being here. As a supplement to what has been explained up to this point, only two remarks are allowed. First, the generalising reference to the species-like can come upon and elucidate its object precisely in its contradictoriness and problematic nature; it suffices to point to Anatole France’s novel on the French Revolution, which we already mentioned. Second, the species-like clearly moves on a pathway

49

Hegel 1988, p. 208.

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leading upward; however, not only does this pathway include detours and backslides, but also the species-like itself is much more than a preservation of positive achievements. Any significant negativity that has played a role as an important and enduring check on its paths belongs here: Tartuffe and Faust, as well as the satirical images by Goya and Daumier, are no less expressions of the species-like than is the Sistine Chapel. The appearing of the species-like in the social relations of people is therefore no brusque, metaphysical juxtaposition of the ‘merely historical’ and the ‘supratemporal’ principles of people’s fates. It is no abandonment of their socio-historical determinacy, no elevation above this into another, ‘purer’ sphere of existence. Rather, it is an a priori indistinguishable aspect of these conditions that asserts itself as the result of their conflicts precisely in their – historically – forward-driving contradictions. The antithesis of this understanding of the species-like to the conception of the ‘universally human’ is already clearly discernible from this. On the one hand, it is nothing that is given once and for all but instead is the outcome of socio-historical clashes and hence something that is continuously changing and developing; on the other, a continuity – admittedly a very uneven continuity, incurring many interruptions – persists in this process. And for the people living and taking action at the time, precisely that which is being preserved in such a continuity objectively constitutes an important meaningful content of the species-like, in addition, of course, to those contents with which current deeds, thoughts, feelings, etc. contribute to its future course. What further results from such a historical dialectical conception of the species-like is the fact that the sublation of the phases or stages that have been overcome is likewise quite varied: features that are nothing less than central can completely disappear in the course of development, while others, perhaps after being forgotten for long periods of time now and then, nevertheless remain preserved in continuity, of course as often as not with major changes to their contents and forms. However, this objective process of sublation (preservation included) also has this specificity: the lost historical preconditions, foundations, etc. of the present species-consciousness remain sublated (preserved) in the form of a past that has stayed relevant. The living and active man is – if it is permitted to modify Aristotle’s famous dictum – a ‘historical animal’. He is a ‘historical animal’ for his individual life, for those social constructs that immediately determine his fortunes. And since the contents of the species-like are formed within their development, what we noticed a moment ago must also apply to them. It of course ought to be added by way of supplementation and specification that he turns into an ‘historical animal’. For although the need for such a

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historical consciousness-like adherence to what is essential in one’s own past already turns up at very primitive levels – certain magical ceremonies, to say nothing of myths, already testify to this – such a consciousness is formed very slowly, unevenly, and contradictorily in the course of history, even if it does so in a way that is constantly ascending. This already bears upon the individual. For example, Gorki portrays very beautifully how, in the case of an old battered and maltreated female worker, contact with revolutionaries awakens and illuminates the rising conscious awareness in the contemplation of the present while awakening and illuminating at the same time one’s own past that has sunken into forgetfulness, how this contact makes a visible path from her past to her today. What we have described as the unevenness of the course of history, its faltering and seeming to lose its way, appears in the closing thoughts of Hegel’s Phenomenology as nothing less than the answer to the question being posed here. He calls history ‘Spirit emptied out into Time’ and says of its phases: ‘This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance’. But, he adds, ‘recollection, the inwardising, of that experience, has preserved it and is the inner being, and in fact the higher form of the substance. So although this Spirit starts afresh, and apparently from its own resources to bring itself to maturity, it is none the less on a higher level that it starts’.50 The standing of Hegel’s materialism on its head (to use Engels’ expression) becomes apparent here with palpable explicitness. Here we do indeed stand upon the peak of absolute idealism’s fulfilment: substance is on the point of changing into subject and materialising the identical subject-object. On its own, if ‘inwardising’ is to present or at the very least prepare for the act of this becoming one, then it clearly follows from Hegel’s own expositions that recollection can nevertheless only make the reflection of substance into an inner possession, but not this substance itself. Even if recollection is conceived of as ‘inwardising’, that which is internal in it and is taking externalisation back into the subject nevertheless remains just the consciousness of a being that exists independent of it. If this Hegelian version of the phenomenon is thus worse than ambiguous as a description of the real and objective process, then a striking image of the true state of affairs results from treating it as a presentation of the human as it is expressed in the recollection and lived experience of people, particularly as it offers itself in the compositions of art. ‘Inwardising’

50

Hegel 1977b, p. 492.

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is actually that form of internalisation in and through which the individual man – and in him, mankind – can make past and present his own as his own work, as a fate befitting him. It evokes an objective reality, albeit one that is pervaded in all its fibers by human activity, in which human understanding and human feeling have invested all objects with man’s best, enriching himself inwardly in this process of giving and taking action. Now if this – past and present – activity of people within the object-world is taken back into the subject by means of ‘inwardising’, then it is indeed a delusion of absolute idealism that substance could thereby turn into subject, though in it the genesis and unfolding of man as his own work, as his own history, is perhaps elevated to the level of a vivid and evocative clarity. What man has devotedly given away to objective reality (even to himself and others like him) in the various forms of externalisation, whereby he possesses his own wealth of thoughts and feelings, is taken back into the subject here, who experiences the world as man’s own world, as an inalienable possession. In these two inseparable acts, selfconsciousness comes into being, propagates, and deepens. Only in art do these inseparable acts adequately unite in perfect purity. As was already indicated earlier, Hegel pointedly portrayed the intrinsic specificity of aesthetic positing in many of his distorted absolute idealist interpretations of objective reality. (We cannot clear up here the degree to which the objectivity of the sociohuman is transformed from mere substantiality into conscious subjectivity in the course of mankind’s socio-historical development, or rather the extent to which such a subjectivity tends to predominate in its interdependency with the objective substantiality of the social. This important problem is only adumbrated here.) As the self-consciousness of the human species (as the ‘inwardising’ of the path covered in its development along with the stages of this path), the determination of aesthetic subjectivity, above all as it appears in its adequate realisation (in the work of art), confirms and concretises the findings we have arrived at so far as to its nature. The detailed analysis of externalisation as a necessary stage in the attainment of true aesthetic subjectivity shows how false those theories are that look for the path leading here in a mere immersion of subjectivity in itself. Even more decidedly than in ethics, where such a conception of ‘Know thyself’ readily tends to lead to an unfruitful, self-destructive hypochondria, it is a basic fact of aesthetics that the abundance and depth of subjectivity is to be achieved only by means of a deepened acquisition of a real object-world. In contrast to modern theories like ‘introversion’ and to modern authors (even ones like Caudwell, who pledge themselves to Marxism but nevertheless think that aestheticised self-consciousness is a turning away from the outside world), older aesthetics (even idealist aesthetics) emphasises this

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relationship between interiority and a connection to the outside world.51 ‘Originality is identical with true objectivity’, says Hegel.52 It is one of the single most universal meaningful experiences that the unbreakable boundedness to the object-world effects a sublation of the immediate uniqueness of subjectivity, a uniqueness that is exaggerated in this immediacy to the utmost, to the point of solipsism. The ascertainment of such a constitution of the subject dates from as far back as Greek scepticism, in fact as a fundamental qualitative diversity of the individual in all living things, not only of people but of animals as well. From this the conclusion was drawn at that time that objective reality was unknowable.53 The epistemological consequences of this do not interest us very much here. For it is clear that they are completely ignored in everyday praxis by its naïve materialism; everyday people take action and deal with each other as if such a barrier to their comprehension did not exist. Even in relation to sense impressions, perceptions, etc., the generalising function of language creates a sufficient foundation for praxis, not only between people, but also between people and animals (hunter and hunting dog, etc.). In the scientific reflection of reality as well as in the forms of labour that prepare for or make use of it, the disanthropomorphising transformation provides for a common terrain of comprehension among people, certainly so that first and foremost all modes of expressing that which is immediately partial to the subject are pushed into the background and a language oriented towards objects (mathematics, geometry, etc.) is developed. However, the epistemological absurdity of solipsism cannot get rid of the fact that a tension between the generalisations of any language and the specific quality of immediate lived experiences limited to immediate subjects exists and can even arrive at expression in everyday life. For instance, when two people do not or no longer understand one another, what is frequently expressed in their dialogue is the fact that the same word no longer has the same experiential content for the two of them. Powerful, individual emotionladen tendencies can thus let the latent gap existing here, which practically vanishes in normal dealings, appear as nothing less than an abyss between two

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Caudwell says of the lyric, ‘Hence poetry in its use of language continually distorts and denies the structure of reality to exalt the structure of the self’. See Caudwell 1950, p. 199. The fact that Caudwell acknowledges the reflection of objective reality for epic and the dramatic arts is irrelevant. All that is to be briefly mentioned is the odd consequence of this theory regarding how, for the reasons given above, the novel is said to know no rhythm, no style; it is constructed not out of words but out of scenes. See Caudwell 1950, p. 200. Hegel 1988, p. 294. Sextus Empiricus 1994, pp. 12–40.

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people, as the impossibility of their coming to an understanding. This phenomenon must not be confused with the fact that in separate social groups the same word – ‘strike’, for example – can receive entirely opposite emotional emphases, can awaken entirely opposite associations, etc. Here the divergence comes primarily from the object, certainly determined by the divergence of interests but also by something objective here; furthermore, its source is something that is common among the members of the group, not the peculiar quality of the individuals. Among other things, the absurdity in semantics consists in the fact that, on the one hand, it treats these heterogeneous phenomena as unitary and, on the other, it thinks it is able to get rid of real social controversies by means of an allegedly objective scientific definition. It is indeed nothing more than a superficial symptom in these controversies that different meanings are attributed to the same word – which incidentally is not true, because the variable emotional content of the word ‘strike’ derives directly from the fact that capitalists and workers are thinking of the same phenomenon. Under certain circumstances, human emotion can generalise the earlier mentioned phenomenon into one that is inseparably bound to the basic structure of human existence. Thus, in Schiller’s famous line: ‘Speaks the soul, and so speaks ah! then the soul never more’.54 This is not the place to discuss whether and to what extent this phenomenon is as fundamental and universal as Schiller presents it to be. It must already be said for his lifetime that neither Lessing nor Goethe saw something generally characteristic of human existence in this. On the other hand, such a conception has gained more and more ground in bourgeois ideology since the second half of the nineteenth century down to our day. More and more here, the peculiar quality of individuals (the quality of individuals exaggerated into that which is most peculiar to them) is moved into the centre – in an anthemic or elegiac, tragic or satirical way – and it is shown again and again that no dealings are possible between such qualities isolated within themselves. If from time to time there exists the semblance of such dealings, then that which is illusory in it comes to light straightaway. There thus comes into being a world of the sleeping in the Heraclitean sense (‘for those who are awake there is a single, common universe, whereas in sleep each person turns away into his own, private universe’) who disavow or spurn wakefulness as a form of existence, who sink ever deeper into the world of their lonely dreams and from there of course cannot find a path into the dreams of other sleepers.55 One can thus very well accept the fact that, as it appears

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Schiller 1985, p. 334. [Eds.] Heraclitus of Ephesus 1987, p. 55.

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at the level of pure immediacy, the specific quality of a kind of lived experience is not adequately communicable without thereby arriving at a solipsism that we are unable to abolish. In fact, not just for the praxis of everyday life, where this is undeniable, but also for the more intricate dealings of people with each other. Of course, since in psychological terms it appears in the context of the whole personality, this immediacy of that which is merely peculiar to someone will be the source of many conflicts. How much weight this receives in the overall image of the age alters depending on the period and above all on the class aspect. This of course includes the overemphasis of such collisions in our era. It would of course be false to interpret Schiller’s verse simply in this sense, as has often happened. Schiller knows and affirms wakefulness and the community that necessarily exists within it. He only stretches – as he does sometimes, so too here – the conditions of their possibility to an extraordinarily great degree and acknowledges only the spirit as an adequate level of their realisation. Added to this is the fact that what is called ‘soul’ here is a dynamic, non-stationary principle for him, hence one that bears within itself the possibility of becoming spirit. This Schillerian denial of the adequate expressibility of the soul, of the appropriate dealing of souls with each other, presupposes an incomparably higher level of human moral relations than the ideologies of loneliness indicated above. In highly strained idealist worldviews (thus, in the works of Plato and the Neo-Platonists, in Gnosticism), this is often expressed as the distinction between the psychics and the pneumatics, in which the everyday-average is denoted with the term ‘hylic’. And it normally leads to a rejection of the subjectivity that is effective in the aesthetic field. Schiller does not go this far either in theory or praxis; what he undertakes to shape as human dealings between Posa, Carlos, and Elizabeth, between Max Piccolomini and Thekla, is based precisely on the fact that the soul is capable of ‘speaking’. With that said, there exists a real problem precisely for aesthetics here. It concerns the fact that the unique, not immediately communicable kind of lived experience, perceptive quality, etc. peculiar to individuality increases precisely in its qualitative singularity and is nevertheless generalised at the same time without disrupting or hampering this intensification. The aestheticised soul must thus be able to speak in the sense of Schillerian verse without losing that nature it has of seeming to incapacitate communication. Because of this, Schiller brusquely clashes with the modern contrasting of soul and spirit (Rathenau,56 Klages, etc.) that conceives of this incapacity of the soul to be rationally objectivated as the basis of its ‘superiority’ to spirit. It is a generally 56

Walther Rathenau (1867–1922), Jewish industrialist and foreign minister of the Weimar Republic whose book, Zur Mechanik des Geistes [On the Mechanics of Spirit, 1913], which

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well-known and accepted fact that this process takes place in creative subjectivity. But the receptive lived experiencing of art is also constituted in the same way. T.S. Eliot quite rightly describes this fact in its immediate givenness: ‘Even when two persons of taste like the same poetry, this poetry will be arranged in their minds in slightly different patterns; our individual taste in poetry bears the indelible traces of our individual lives with all their experience pleasurable and painful …. No two readers, perhaps, will go to poetry with quite the same demands’.57 All of this applies to the immediacy of aesthetic reception. However, if one had to stop at this immediacy, then not only would the aesthetic fix the solipsism of the world of lived experience in place for good, but also it would secure the proper, adequate sphere of realisation for this world. When around the turn of the century Oscar Wilde and Alfred Kerr declared criticism to be an art, what they meant in actual fact was this: criticism as ‘composition’, as an ‘artistic’ form of communicating this specificity (this direct non-communicability) of lived experiences vis-à-vis works of art; they thus constructed a second floor over the similarly understood relation of the artist to reality. The solipsistic subjectivism of this view is clearly expressed: ‘It thus does not come down to the works that are discussed here. Rather, it comes down to what is said about them’.58 If such principles could be consistently implemented, the ‘bad infinity’ of such an endless process would have to come into being because the impression and evaluation of such a ‘critical work of art’ would again have to be just such a subject-bound ‘composition’ of the criticism of criticism and so forth ad infinitum. But Kerr has to deny his own principles: ‘One who is only an impressionist could well be buried as a critic. Impressionism is not criticism; there are objective demands as well’.59 We have concerned ourselves with the issues that result from these premises only to the extent that they generally bear upon the character of aesthetic subjectivity. The closer study of the critical comportment towards art and its methods can only be carried out in the second part of this work, where its position in the typology of aesthetic modes of comportment will be determined. Kant formulated the real issue of how the ground of a determinate objectivity and commonality (aesthetically going beyond the scope of the solipsism of that which is purely peculiar to oneself) could be achieved without radically abolishing the peculiar – immediately closed in on itself – subjectivity, indeed by means of intensifying it. Kant is right when he postulates a ‘common

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looks at the contrast between Seele (soul) and Geist (spirit). [Eds.] Eliot 1934, p. 141. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] Kerr 1917, p. xvii. Kerr 1917, p. xviii.

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sense (sensus communis)’ as the condition of the communicability and necessity of aesthetic judgements. On the one hand, he distinguishes the necessity that thus comes into being from the communication ‘of mere sensory taste’, in which there can be no necessity of this sort at all; on the other hand, he distinguishes this necessity from that common sense which judges ‘always by concepts’, however ‘obscurely represented’ these principles may be, by which Kant does not inaccurately characterise certain everyday forms of appearance.60 In deducing what is itself common, however, Kant’s subjective idealist presuppositions confound the correct solution. First of all, because common sense is still possible for him only on the basis of conceptual, rational knowledge. Second, a ‘disposition of the cognitive powers for a cognition in general’ is postulated that is ‘determined … through the feeling (not by concepts)’. By now inferring the communicability of ‘disposition’, of ‘the feeling of it (in the case of a given representation)’, from the communicability of knowledge, Kant thinks he has deduced the ‘sensus communis’.61 Working back from the effect to the cause, he has thus just proven in a supremely problematical way the communicability of knowledge, of which there is no doubt anyway, whereas he completely passes by his current goal, communicability in the aesthetic sphere. Kantian philosophy’s casting out any ratio from aesthetics – with the conception of ‘without concept’ – and its beholding the aesthetic ‘archetypal phenomenon’ not in originary aesthetic acts, but rather in the much more derivative ‘judgement of taste’, makes any satisfactory solution here impossible, although raising the question in terms of ‘sensus communis’ already testifies here, as it does in many passages from the Critique of the Power of Judgement, to the author’s wealth of ingenious hunches. Apart from the reasons indicated above, Kant also cannot accurately describe this common sense, let alone correctly parse it, because he takes as his starting point – in a subjective idealist way – a formal analysis of a subject that is not immersed in the object-world. As the preceding observations have shown, however, the determining relationships are primarily of a contentrelated character and spring from the aesthetic mimesis of the object-world existing in itself, independent of the subject, which certainly shows the traces of the activity of the human race in all of the details of its objectivity and is reflected in a way that focuses interest precisely on this character of reality (the emergence of the metabolism of society with nature). The medium of this reflection of reality, however, is bound to that which is immediately peculiar

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Kant 2000, p. 122. Kant 2000, pp. 122–3.

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to the subject in a qualitatively unique way. That is to say, this metabolism is an objective fact in which it must not always be immediately perceptible that its specific qualities spring from this source; they can certainly be intellectually revealed by means of scientific reflection and its conceptual extrapolation. Aesthetic mimesis, however, strives for a different goal, even though it is obliged to reflect objectivity as faithfully as possible: to make such relationships come alive as the deeds and suffering, the successes and defeats, the recoveries and distortions of people (of the human race). The duality of the task arising out of this (that is to say, to bring an objective constellation into subjective, evocative effect without abolishing its objectivity) determines the duality of subjective comportment that becomes necessary here, first and foremost the comportment of the subjectivity embodied in the work: the preservation of the sensuously manifest immediacy of lived experience and what has been made to come alive, in which something of the peculiarity, uniqueness, and incomparability of the subject remains preserved in the sublation. The inextricable union of the uniqueness and generalisation of the subject is expressed in the fact that the consciousness that comes into being here is primarily not a subjective consciousness about an object-world independent of it, confronting it; rather, it is an entirely idiosyncratic form of self-consciousness. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel gives an interesting description of its emergence and essence, in fact precisely in statu nascendi, in which it ‘has at first become for itself ’ and has not yet acquired its position in the overall realm of consciousness. (Of course, Hegel’s description has no direct or intended connection with our aesthetic issues.) About self-consciousness, he thus says, ‘consciousness is for its own self, it is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference, or self-consciousness. I distinguish myself from myself, and in so doing I am directly aware that what is distinguished from myself is not different [ from me]. I, the selfsame being, repel myself from myself; but what is posited as distinct from me, or as unlike me, is immediately, in being so distinguished, not a distinction for me’.62 By virtue of the fact that, in that selfconsciousness that can be determined to be aesthetic, the subjective is always expressed as being steeped in a medium of the object-world, arranging this object-world, distributing its accents, colouring its objectivity with a particular quality, etc., what comes into being is a modification of Hegel’s description insofar as the fluid boundary between what is different from the subject and what is not distinguishable from it also holds true for the artistically shaped outside world. The movement of subjectivity presented in externalisation and

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Hegel 1977b, p. 102. [Eds: The emphases in the quote are Lukács’s.]

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its being taken back in; the surrender of the subject to the outside world for the purpose of completely permeating it with its own quality; the expansion of the subject through the reception and processing of the objectivity reflected by it – all constitute here too the basis for that which is specific to its aesthetic mode of appearance. For all the differences that the self-consciousness developed in the aesthetic exhibits in comparison to its simple and abstract emergence in Hegel’s Phenomenology, the dialectic of the differentiated and the undifferentiated highlighted by him remains an extremely important aspect for the occurrence of aesthetic subjectivity as the self-consciousness of the human species. In dealing with the objective side of this relationship, we have already pointed out that the different ‘layers’ of the relationships of people to each other (from the family all the way up to mankind) are not separated from each other in a rigidly metaphysical way, nor do they constitute disconnected ‘levels’ of subjectivity; rather they are encompassed by fluid boundaries that all at once divide and connect individual areas like seas do in geography. Even in those places where real conflicts can and do exist (nation – mankind, nation – class, class – mankind, etc.), these objectively come into being on a common ground, allow the objective inner contradictions of mankind’s development to come to light, and reveal contradictory tendencies of world history that immanently exist in both of the ‘layers’ that are contrastively emerging. Bear in mind the conflicts that became operative between the revolutionary propaganda wars in the period of the French Revolution and their tendencies towards nationalistic expansion. Not only is it uncertain in some individual cases where the overarching aspect is to be objectively found, but also the national struggles for liberation called forth by the conquering military campaigns have contradictions of this sort in embryo. ‘All the wars of independence waged against France’, Marx says, ‘bear in common the stamp of regeneration, mixed up with reaction’.63 And it suffices to consult Heine or Raabe64 on Germany and Stendhal or Nievo65 on northern Italy in order to catch sight of this contradictoriness in its full breadth and depth. Naturally, it is the task of historical science to investigate such contradictions in detail. For us, here it exclusively comes down to showing that the artistic composition and subjectivity underlying it, embodied in it, and triggered by it reproduces this structure of objective socio-historical reality while preserving its true proportions, albeit with increased intensity. From this it follows that the 63 64 65

Karl Marx 1980, p. 403. Wilhelm Raabe (1831–1910), notable German realist writer. [Eds.] Ippolito Nievo (1831–1861), Italian writer and political activist. [Eds.]

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blurring of the boundaries of objective reality, the merging of its contradictions into each other, requires and develops subjective modes of comportment that are suitable precisely for incorporating this constitution it has into itself and reproducing it creatively or receptively. Our earlier formulation about how the subject must hurl itself as subject into this world of the human species à corps perdu is thereby confirmed and concretised. Here the Hegelian dialectic of the undifferentiated and the differentiated acquires a particular significance. For within itself the creative subject decides where and how the separating lines, positings of distance, unifying syntheses, etc. are to be applied in order to carry out those concrete, sensuously manifest generalisations upon the material of reality that are capable of making an inspired likeness of man and his deeds out of the objectivity of this material (without destroying its genuine in-itself). This creative subject decides on which level is carried out in itself the becoming-one of a purely subjective quality and socio-historical truth, whether it remains a mere reflex of that which is peculiar to itself or evokes subjectivity’s more comprehensive forms of life (from family to humanity) in itself. And it is clear that in receptive subjectivity – mutatis mutandis – processes of a similar sort must take place, of course with the qualitative difference that the subject here is not confronting a reality that first needs to be artistically formed; instead, he is subjected to effects that emanate from a formed work that is guiding lived experience. The distinctions between levels of subjectivity are thus posited in the work and not wrung from the observer of reality; however, it is quite possible that this level is not achieved in his lived experiences, or that these experiences carry into the work something that has not been experientially or interpretively achieved. Now however much this process of reception may be adequate or exhibit a movement upwards or downwards with respect to the work, it will have to exhibit – again: mutatis mutandis – a similar structure in the subject. The lack of clarity that is quite prevalent in this issue therefore mostly comes from the fact that, in grasping secondary, derivative appearances only from here, analyses of aesthetic modes of comportment do not tend to be grounded in their originary aesthetic nature. (Our second part will yield a comprehensive typology of these kinds of comportment. We must confine ourselves here to remarks that are entirely general and therefore remain abstract.) We have seen, for instance, that Kant beholds the ‘archetypal phenomenon’ of aesthetic comportment in aesthetic judgement, where it must nevertheless be evident in the case of an impartial observation that such judgements are only a conceptualisation of original lived aesthetic experiences. That is to say, their correctness in terms of content is dependent on the constitution of such experiences, into which Kant does not go at all, as he seeks to uncover exclusively formal criteria

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of validity. Of course, this conceptualisation is no simple mechanical transposition; it must contain within itself a clarification – or at least an attempt at the clarification – of the general causes of lived aesthetic experience. As was said, an analysis of the general logical and specifically aesthetic problems springing from this situation can only take place later. The reference to this topic was necessary, however, because that dialectic in the subject that is occupying us here receives its real, idiosyncratic form in lived aesthetic experience; therefore, this experience must be drawn on in order to comprehend the phenomenon itself in its purity. In addition, all that is to be noted here is the fact that such intricate relationships between what is originally aesthetic and what is derivatively aesthetic are also to be found in the creative process. Also playing an often considerable role in this are features that to a large extent come into contact with the forms of reflection in the everyday and science, features that indeed are identical with them in places. Let this indication of the set of problems suffice here as well. In most such cases, the distortion – from the aesthetic point of view – thus derives from the fact that relationships that are originarily and aesthetically focused into an inextricable organic unity are torn to shreds and the aspects that thus come into being are frequently set against each other as autonomous entities. This mostly happens in such a way that the peculiar subject of the creator, the specific individual quality of the work, partisanship in terms of class and the depiction of reality in the work, its national and historical complexion, and its manifestation of the human (all of which are indissolubly bound together in the work itself and comprise a unity – admittedly one that is contradictory in a dialectical way) are each henceforth given a life of their own or at the very least are set against each other as tendencies that are completely independent of one another. It should be incidentally noted here that individual historical research as such is of course quite justified methodologically to investigate, for instance, works of art in terms of their fidelity to history, and such research can now and then even contribute to knowledge of artistic problems. The researcher has stepped out of the aesthetic sphere, however, and is looking at art from the outside, not the from within; for him, the aesthetic turns into the mere material of a scientific observation, and the artwork into a mere document. Now as long as conscious awareness prevails regarding the fact that such disparate aspects remain mere aspects with respect to the unity of objective aesthetic constructs, then there is no danger that the uniformity of the aesthetic subject is fragmented. The determinateness of the individual by means of this or that important form of human social relationships certainly does not abolish the unity of individuality; it merely gives it new accents, enriches and deepens it. If, for instance, a worker becomes class-conscious,

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then new contents of consciousness indeed crop up in his personality, contents that under certain circumstances accomplish great changes, huge turnarounds, etc. in him. Nevertheless, the qualitative continuity of the personality always remains preserved in every Saul, no matter how suddenly he may have turned into Paul. The same of course also applies to the reciprocal relationship between social forms to one another and especially to how they determine the personality of people, their development, conflicts, etc. And this truth of life is confirmed (is indeed enhanced) by art. Because it reproduces nature and history from the viewpoint of the people who take action in nature and history, art must therefore not only preserve the aspect of continuity in those places where continuity and becoming-discrete unfold their dialectical contradictoriness to the point at which a leap into a new quality occurs; it must also even treat this aspect as the overarching one. For the effects of the real existing, socio-historically operative relationships of people to each other, all of this of course seems obvious. When we are talking about the unfolding of the standpoint of humanity, the issue becomes more complicated just because this standpoint has not received a form objectivated in the human relationships in any existing society up to now and thus could never yet directly determine the deeds and thoughts of people. But one must never forget that the formation and unfolding of what came into being in history as belonging to and characterising the human race was and is not primarily a result of human thinking and feeling but rather arose and arises from the play of the objective forces of this development. With that said, the importance of such thoughts and feelings is by no means gainsaid; on the contrary, they obtain a considerable importance by means of fixing in place and preserving meaningful experiences and achievements that the objective process imposes on man. However, like all thoughts and feelings, these too are reflexes of what actually takes place in objective reality. We have already emphasised that these aspects in which the specific features of the development of the human race are expressed are always inseparably bound to the history of the forms of community (class, nation, etc.). Their species-character can obtain an existence always only as a trait, as a nuance, as a tendency, etc. of the movement of such forms of community. The inseparability of these relationships as the place- and time-boundedness of every appearance of the human (as its national and class-like essence) is therefore an objective fact of history. Its subjective manifestation, the self-consciousness of this process, must hence – as its reflection – possess a corresponding constitution and structure. It goes without saying that the aesthetic reflection of such a reality must emphasise even more vigorously the tendency, intrinsic to it, towards the inseparability of individual aspects. For as we were repeatedly able to find,

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the essence of aesthetic reflection is based precisely on raising the sensuously manifest unity of the human and its whole contradictory abundance into an evocative effect. This qualitative restructuration of the material of life that is connected in an unmediated way strives to guide the lived experience of reception so that the human uniformity of content – may this be ever so contradictory – attains expression in a heightened uniformity by means of a unifying construction of form. With this, the Hegelian unity and separation of the differentiated and the non-differentiated receives a particular aspect in the subjective dialectic. Self-consciousness, which differentiates itself from itself as consideration for the whole undifferentiated complex of human modes of expression, recognises itself in this complex, objectivates this self-reflection, and strives to achieve the highest generalisation possible (that is to say, to impart to the aesthetic construct the most intensive and enduring effect conceivable). The orientation of aesthetic reflection towards that which is species-like in the human must hence in no way become conscious. The heights objectively achieved in the work depend, in this regard, on the abundance, depth, and accuracy of the composition of reality. Even in taking an immediately unconscious direction towards the hic et nunc of the given socio-historical moment, it can realise this elevation into the species-like, just as it can fail in the most ardent attempt to artistically comprehend precisely that which is ‘universally human’. This shows that in this phenomenon it is a matter of a sharpened case of the unity of form and content in the work of art. The species-like character revealed in this is primarily a content-related problem: out of the limitless number of characters, features, deeds, collisions, etc. that are possible (and even typical) in a certain period and under certain conditions, those are selected and compositionally arranged so that their ensemble makes something manifest that is worth living on in the memory of mankind and that people can experience with the emotional accent of nostra causa agitur over great temporal and spatial distances and under completely changed historical conditions. This is a problem of form, however, with a consequent weightiness. This selection, this arrangement, indeed yields, as fundamental meaningful content, the basis for such a constituted effect; however, whether this becomes relevant at all and even preserves this relevance for hundreds or thousands of years can only be ensured by the specific qualities of form. Form must of course be thought of here in a very comprehensive sense: the genuine and great renewals of form or the coming into being of new forms that turn into the lasting possession of mankind spring from a weighty new meaningful content, its specificity imperiously requiring a radical modification of existing forms or the discovery of new ones. This appears perhaps most strikingly in the case of the introduction of the second actor by Aeschylus, although Giotto’s painterly dramatic art,

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Rembrandt’s colouration, Beethoven’s harmonics, and much more also testify to such a relationship. In that case, the inseparable unity of human generalisation and the sensuously manifest preservation and perpetuation of the socio-historical and the purely personal hic et nunc only seems paradoxical if one aspires to impose the standards of the scientific reflection of reality on its aesthetic reflection. What becomes apparent precisely in the specificity of the aesthetic indicated here is the distinction between a consciousness about reality (even if it sometimes involves man’s self) and the self-consciousness of mankind (even if it is objectivated in a landscape, for instance, or a still life without people) as it appears in great works of art. For content, this self-consciousness has the enduring, the – positively or negatively – meaningful in human life and in the development of the human race, and just as this content sublates everything that is important for life, ranging from the peculiar personality to the human (preserving the former in the latter), so too does its form create a unity adequate to this relationship, a unity of the single most personal thing with the highest generalisation that amounts to a capacity for evocation here beyond the limits of time and space. Even consciousness about objective reality must of course hold on to facts, personalities, times, local conditionalities, etc. in their concrete specificity, though they are starting-points, springboards – the more strongly consciousness has developed, the more this is the case – for comprehending the general laws at work in them or at least for approximating them so as to be able to control even the singular as singular where it is possible to do so. Only in the aesthetic does this personal quality have an intrinsic value, in two regards in fact: as personal quality of the presented object and as the quality of the mode of presentation. It is the bearer of self-consciousness, the awakener of self-consciousness: as memory, as ‘inwardising’ of the path that the human species has gone and will go, the persons and situations, the virtues and vices, man’s inner and outer world. From their dynamic unfolding and dialectical contradictoriness, the human species has raised itself into what it is today and will be tomorrow. If in individual cases this preservation may seem somewhat spotty (for instance, a landscape in the certain illumination of a certain hour, indeed of an instant), in this sense its effect is nevertheless a historical one because it is experienced as a stage of this path; at the same time, however, it goes beyond the scope of the merely historical as the fixed instant is immediately raised into an inalienable possession of mankind in a changing continuity that is becoming richer and deeper. Only the knowledge of these relationships illuminates the essence of the subject through which artistic externalisation gets taken back in artistically. It is and remains inseparably bound to that which is peculiar to the creative

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subjectivity, and even the lived experience of the work cannot possibly break with the peculiarity of the receptive subject. At the same time, what takes place in both is an elevation beyond that which is merely peculiar to each. In preserving the signature of their qualitative uniqueness, what disappears from them (or at least is pushed into the background) is everything in life itself that tends to transform this uniqueness into a being-closed-off in itself, everything that is subjective in a socially pejorative sense, everything that erects a barrier between self and world or superficially covers up the world just with colours of a peculiar quality without penetrating into its kernel. Very long and staggered is the path from here to the return into oneself after being so deeply immersed in the world that everything in it – with increased, objectivated objectivity – turns into the innermost possession of human subjectivity. By nature, however, it is a path from the merely peculiar subjectivity of the immediately existing personality to the actualisation of the species-like in one’s own self. Looked at from the point of view of the subject, it is thus a question of a process that accomplishes a purification and intensification, an enrichment and deepening, at the same time. If it was emphasised earlier that achieving the height of the human in composition does not depend on conscious awareness in intention directed towards that end, then the meaning of ‘conscious awareness’ that is being used here must be recalled again. Thus, it does not involve, say, the mysterious and mystified unconscious of our day. In our judgement, an intention that is not conscious can be linked with the highest conscious awareness of all, in fact not merely in relation to the artistic means that are to be employed (some exponents of the ‘unconscious’ would concede that as well) but also in relation to the content-related goal that is set. The possible absence of conscious awareness relates here to the fact that no contemporaries can foresee with apodictic certainty which features of the people living with him are – in a positive or negative sense – merely time-conditioned and temporary and which are being incorporated by the future into the emerging ‘corpus’ of the species-like. Precisely here there can be no ideological guarantee for artistic forms. Marxism is indeed able to foresee the most general developmental tendencies of society at long distances; it is able to disclose concrete perspectives – albeit still held at a necessarily general level. But it cannot and does not at all want to set itself the task of anticipating all the ‘cunning’ (Lenin) of the path of development with intellectual precision beforehand. The successful or failed composition of the human depends, however, precisely on understanding or being blind to such aspects of the course of development respectively. The scientific accuracy of a prediction or a perspective proves true in the abundance of real facts and tendencies; even considerable deviations in the details do not have to abolish its

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being true. In contrast, artistic accuracy in the figuration of the species-like in most cases proves itself or breaks down precisely in the field that scientifically tends to be labeled as mere detail. Thus, in Balzac’s ‘prophetic compositions’, certain typical human features that would not be fully formed until the Second Empire could develop beyond their infancy at the time of the bourgeois monarchy and pose as reality.66 Thus, in the figure of Phaedra in Euripides and in that of Dido in Virgil, the individual passion of love is elevated into the specieslike, into the possession of the self-consciousness of mankind, long before it would have turned into a general social appearance. What arises from this for the aesthetic subject – for the creative subject in production and for the receptive subject in receiving the work – is a situation that we have already repeatedly designated thus: the aesthetic subject has to hurl itself à corps perdu into the world of these phenomena. This structure naturally entails that irrationalistic theories could lodge themselves in the ostensible gaps of conceptual deducibility. These theories are not refuted but rather acquire an obstinacy when the attempt is made to refute them with the aid of pseudo-rational trains of thought. As a matter of fact, a clearly legible ratio prevails here, although in most cases it can only be discerned and accounted for retroactively. The limit of predictability lies in the materials of reality themselves. This is based not only on the previously analysed relationship of the species-like to other structural aspects of the socio-historical world, and not only on the specific tasks that grow out of this for the selection of the meaningful content and the shaping of art. It is also due to the convolutedness of the historical path itself (something that was already pointed out earlier), to the unevenness of this development, and above all to the fact – one that is decisive for the effect of art – that every present time regards and (especially with regard to the self-consciousness being expressed in art) evaluates the past from its own needs and perspectives. It perhaps suffices if we again point to the checkered struggles around the posthumous reputations of Homer and Virgil. However, the fact that all of these struggles can be retroactively explained in a completely rational way shows the objective groundlessness of any irrationalistic interpretation of this state of affairs; it shows that there indeed cannot be an abstract axiom that would allow a direct deduction of individual phenomena, but no doubt each individual phenomenon can be totally rationally analysed in its socio-historical roots, in the constitution of its aesthetic structure. We thus have to do here with a case of that scientific explanation that Marx formulated in relation to the uneven development of art in general: ‘The

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Lafargue and Liebknecht 1943, p. 11.

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difficulty consists only in the general formulation of these contradictions. As soon as they have been specified, they are already clarified’.67 This nature of the aesthetic as the most adequate form for expressing the self-consciousness of mankind must be held on to if we want to properly appreciate its specificity. At the same time, a return to its originary mode of appearance was often called upon here, and the attempts to explain such aesthetic phenomena without further ado by directly applying the categories of scientific reflection were vigorously dismissed. What follows from this, of course, is neither a rejection of the scientific explanation of aesthetic phenomena – our whole study is to be just such an explanation – nor a metaphysically rigid juxtaposition of science and art, of the consciousness and self-consciousness of mankind. As was already pointed out, the first issue can only be dealt with in the second part of this work. With respect to the second, it was repeatedly emphasised here that science and art (and even everyday thinking) reflect the same reality. The specificity of any reflection develops in the course of history as one of the most important forms of the social division of labour in the general sense, as a division of labour that does not just merely dispose of individual people and groups of people within society according to its needs. Rather, it primarily carries out a division of labour of the senses, of understanding, and of reason in each individual person. The division of labour between science and art is a basic necessity of life, without which the social division of labour in the objective sense never could have been successfully carried out and made to work. The undifferentiated comportment of the everyday, in which everything is attuned to immediate praxis, would be unable to satisfactorily solve problems that are becoming ever more complicated with the development of the forces of production. We have already shown both how the complete undifferentiatedness of the magical period has to come to nothing under the pressure of such conditions and how the main directions of such a division of labour as we have depicted (scientific and aesthetic reflections of reality) come into being. We have also already pointed out that these differentiated forms of reflection arise out of the social needs of the everyday and develop their specific natures – in order to optimally satisfy these needs – in the greatest purity possible, though no isolation from everyday praxis ultimately comes about as a result. On the contrary, the subjective and objective results of scientific and aesthetic reflection continuously stream back into everyday life, into everyday praxis, enriching and deepening these without abolishing their everyday character, of course. For this reason as well, the constantly rising level of the

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Marx 1973, p. 110.

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everyday does not let the needs for the further differentiation of the scientific and artistic reflection of reality expire but instead lets them grow extensively and intensively. On this basis, the division of labour between consciousness and selfconsciousness first becomes completely clear. Consciousness conquers the world existing in itself for man. By transforming its in-itself into a for-us, it creates an authentic space of action for world-conquering praxis, for the transformation of reality into a fertile field of human activity. Its social necessity is therefore immediately evident. However, with the unfolding of culture to an increasing degree, it is a part of man’s taking possession of the world that he also relate the controlled outside world to himself in practice and actuality, that he even acquire a homeland with this conquest. This need is just as basic as the one that led to the autonomous formation of the sciences. The fact that the means for satisfying it were not and even still are not exclusively those of art can yield no proof against this human function of art. For even science does not have an exclusive monopoly on its own field; it is ‘only’ the most adequate form of a certain fulfilment of social demands, and alongside them, stimulating these demands and being stimulated by them, science first grows into its own purity and maturity. However much the relationship of art to life may be even more complicated than the relationship of science, which in itself is likewise not simple, in the course of historical development it achieves a similar position as a summit in the life-complex most adequately expressed by it. We have been able to observe a part of this attachment of art to human existence, its disentanglement from its inadequate forms of expression, its return to life in a more adequate expression and evocation in the case of its relationship to mankind’s primitive forms of expression, first and foremost in its relation to magic. We will come back to the various relationships – thus with the discussion of natural beauty, in the struggle to liberate the aesthetic from the religious – in these problems in even more detail. It was just necessary here to shed light on the fact that art is the highest and most adequate mode of expressing the self-consciousness of mankind in a way that was somewhat more concrete than had been possible up to now. It was necessary to show that our purely aesthetic theses as to the specificity of this reflection of reality (thus, the priority of content over form, form’s character of evocatively guiding reception, its essence as the form of a determinate content, etc.) can only relate to the human, can only obtain their real meaning by the growing over of the reflection of reality into a bearer of self-consciousness. All of the reproaches that have been made against art in the course of a many millennia development, from its ‘deception and lies’ to the inessentiality of the reproduction of something that is already there anyhow, receive a – very con-

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ditional – authorisation in certain historical constellations only because a few critics (and, under certain circumstances, artists and their works themselves) disregarded this relationship or let it fall into oblivion. For the victorious world proper to works of art, their worldedness, and the irresistibility of their evocative power are based precisely on this unfolding of that which is concretely human. If this vanishes, then the most genuine ‘imitation’ of reality, the most virtuosic mastery of forms, the most ingenious invention of new possibilities for effect are only ‘a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal’. Only mimesis makes artistically revealing this meaningful content into a fundamental fact of the aesthetic: into a reflection of the reality existing independent of human consciousness, albeit one in which, by principle, only those things are found that promote or inhibit this development, in which any subject matter or any emotion can be raised into an object only in this context. Only by means of this relatedness do all of the transformations carried out by aesthetic reflection on the world of immediate appearance lose any formal or arbitrary character, and on the other hand, the fidelity of this kind of reflection to reality, even in its immediate mode of appearance, is only warranted by ultimately impinging upon the highest reality of human existence. Only in this way can the supposition of the self-consciousness of mankind – a supposition entailing many contradictions – philosophically justify the specificity of aesthetic reflection. Precisely the contradictoriness concentrated in this concept, utmost objectivity within the utmost subject-relatedness, a subjectivity as criterion present in the objectively existing outer- and inner-world only in a hidden and unconscious (perhaps utopian) way, and at the same time the creation of a world of art that must have nothing utopian about it: this is the basis of the originarily aesthetic, the plain description of aesthetically reflected reality.

chapter 8

Issues of Mimesis iv: The World Proper to Works of Art 1

The Continuity and Discontinuity of the Aesthetic Sphere (Work, Genre, Art in General)

If we have determined art to be the self-consciousness of mankind’s development, then the aspect of continuity has thereby become the focal point. Because, on the one hand, only in this way can the static, idealist presumption of the ‘universally human’ be avoided: it is not a question of the actualisation of a humanity that is given a priori (in the idea) nor is it the dialectical unfolding of such an ‘idea’, in which, as in the Hegelian system, the end contains within itself as concrete fulfilment everything that already existed in abstract form at the beginning. The continuity intended here has no teleological character of this sort. It is – precisely in the literal sense – a real development that has actually taken place in its real ups and downs, with its real branches, attempts, regressions, etc. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that we are primarily talking here of the continuity of the self-consciousness of the human species, thus of the subjective aspect (albeit not that aspect which is individual and peculiar to one) of what has actually happened. The preceding analyses have hopefully shown with sufficient clarity that the subjective aspect of self-consciousness (Hegelian ‘inwardising’) does not amount to any subjectivism, to any imaginary idealist ‘independence’ from the real order of events, or even to the demiurgically creative activity of any kind of subject. The correct reflection of a reality existing independently of consciousness (the immersion of the subject in this reality) is instead the indispensable precondition of any self-consciousness constituted of this sort. As we have seen, subjectivity therefore limits itself to the fact that the image of reflection that thus comes into being is aimed at reproducing reality existing in itself but oriented towards man (towards his activity, towards his relationships, etc.). The continuity of mankind’s development constitutes the ultimate substrate of any such reflection. Therefore, it must somehow be contained in each individual reflection, even though in most cases each such reflection regarded for itself immediately posits the concrete hic et nunc of a given aspect as object. With that said, the normal dialectic of continuity and discontinuity (punctiformity) is given. In any real or geometrically abstracted line, one is con-

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fronted with this indissoluble contradiction that is supremely fertile for knowledge. Certainly in the observation of mankind’s objective development as well; uncovering the concrete forms of appearance of both poles of this contradictoriness and presenting them in their lawfulness is a task of historiography, and hence it need not occupy us here. The dialectic that crops up in our case, however, goes beyond this. We have already repeatedly referred to that nature of aesthetic positing according to which its originary form can only be the supreme punctiformity of the individual artist (and of its absorption by the individual subject of reception). In a generalised way (thus already as the art of a period, genre of art, etc.), all synopses conceptualise this original and unadulterated constitution, thus shifting it into a different sphere that is new for it. Only in the second part, with the discussion of the typology of aesthetic comportment, can we prove with philosophical precision that such a procedure does not necessarily carry with it a falsification or distortion of the genuinely aesthetic, although this too frequently occurs. Even so, it can already be said that such statements contain as much truth as they are capable of translating unscathed and undistorted into the conceptual from the originary aesthetic structure of their objects. At the moment that sounds self-evident, indeed trivial. For a similar demand must likewise be made with respect to the truth content of any concept (judgement, inference, etc.). However, where reality existing in itself is scientifically reflected, its conceptual formulation can and must go beyond the immediate structure of objectivity in a generalising way. As it correctly expresses the conditions, relationships, lawful regularities, etc., what comes under consideration in the individual instance is only the problem of subsuming it at that time under general relationships. Under somewhat more complicated conditions, that is the case for the social sciences as well. The generalisation of an originary aesthetic state of affairs, however, may only go so far beyond the singularity of a work existing at any given time, such that this singularity is preserved unscathed as much as possible in its conceptual sublation. Much more is included in this demand than in the descriptive morphological generalisations of other natural and social sciences. We have already called attention to the main reason for this distinction: the genuine work of art – and only such a work can turn into the basis of a fertile historical or aesthetic generalisation – complies with aesthetic laws by broadening and deepening them at the same time; a simple subsumption of the singular beneath the universal (of the ‘case’ beneath the law) is out of the question here. The possibility of a reversion from law to the individual case of course characterises any scientific generalisation. Quite often, however, actually descending to this individual case is pointless or superfluous, as, for instance, if someone were to turn from the statistically expressed tendencies of population change

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to the question of what the precise reason is for why Peter has married Marie. The generalised concepts of, say, a history of Renaissance painting have to be acquired in such a way, however, that they are capable of concretising and promoting the knowledge of Raphael’s or Titian’s specificity (or that of any one of their images). The adumbration of such a structure of generalisation was necessary in order to clarify the specific essence of the dialectic of continuity and punctiformity prevailing here. If we come back again to the originarily aesthetic, then we see, on the one hand, that the representative of the punctiform principle in the work brings to appearance not just a more or less abstract ‘point’ of development but rather that fact that this ‘point’ is a qualitatively idiosyncratic ‘world’ containing a closed system of decisive determinations, the immediately intensive and concretely deepened lived experience of which constitutes the essence of aesthetic comportment. On the other hand, the principle of continuity in works and their reception only come to light indirectly, in most cases in a supremely indirect way. Whether Homer or Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Giorgione’s Castelfranco Madonna or a landscape of van Gogh’s, etc. is the object of a lived aesthetic experience, the emphasis in this experience is on the complete reception and acquisition of what is concretely expressed in this concrete work (and only in this work), what is being reflected from objective reality and how it is being reflected therein with unrepeatable specificity. Seemingly, the aspect of continuity has thus entirely disappeared from the immediate structure and appropriate effect of the work. That, however, is only a semblance of the immediacy that has been fixed in place as such. For the mere fact of such a lived experience cannot possibly arrive at actualisation without the aspect of nostra causa agitur. And jointly posited therein – and whether consciously to the creator or to those who are receptive to the work – is the aspect of the continuity of human development. This existence of continuity is both more intensive and more ineradicable than the ordinary continuity of the historical, and it is more concealed, less immediately evident, than this as well. That is to say, it is intrinsically possible to methodologically isolate a given historical segment from overall development and to regard this segment for itself alone. This can of course turn into the source of a variety of errors, though it is often unavoidable if certain details are to be investigated to within a hair’s breadth. In the originary aesthetic relationship to reality and in its evocative mediation through the immediacy of works of art, however, this relationship to the continuity of the historical process is always objectively present, though without having to become presently conscious. Its becoming conscious cannot – if it is to remain aesthetic – leap over the aspect of spontaneity in nostra causa agitur; continuity is bound precisely to the depth at which one immediately

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makes this one’s own. In a superficial impression, in which spatial, temporal, and social remoteness often tends to assume the character of the exotic, a statement that is materially not incorrect can perhaps come into being. At most, however, the continuity contained in this is (in itself) not for us, still less would its being for itself be achieved. What becomes apparent here in a particularly clear way is the antithesis of ‘consciousness about …’ and ‘self-consciousness of …’ that we have repeatedly highlighted; in the case of the exotic, one is faced with a reality with which, for all the interest and possible knowledge in which even consciousness of an irreconcilable otherness prevails, he has no inner human relationship, whereas self-consciousness – even when factual knowledge is absent – is based precisely on such an inner relation. This implies no identification, since certainly the disparity of the experienced object in content, structure, etc. from the experiencing subject is one of the preconditions for relationships that call forth self-consciousness. Despite or rather precisely because of this, however, the centre of humanity is encountered at its deepest level, as something that somehow belongs to its own past or with whose subject it is somehow closely related. Under certain circumstances, something that merely seems to be exotic can thus turn into an element of self-consciousness and vice versa. The possibility for such overturnings will above all depend on the artistic level at which it is worked on, but at the same time, of course, objective historical development (the propagation and deepening of culture related to it, etc.) plays a considerable role. The first, primary viewpoint again shows the central position that the human aspect occupies in the essence of the aesthetic. With that said, however, we have only reached the threshold of the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity in the aesthetic sphere. For apart from the fundamental constellation portrayed a moment ago, each work of art is in the continuity of that art form or genre to which it belongs, which is precisely what determines its decisive aesthetic specificity. When we talked above of law and the specific manner of compliance with it in the aesthetic, this has to be understood for the time being in the sense of this relationship, for instance as the connection of a tragedy to the laws of dramaturgy, etc. It cannot be repeated often enough that here too the relationship of a work to its genre and its laws can never be that of a subsumption of an individual case under an intrinsic universality, that with the coming into being of each work that aesthetically deserves this name the content and form of the laws applicable to it undergo a modification at the very least, if significant radical changes to them does not take place, as tends to be the case in epochal compositions. It must of course also be added that genres – in terms of the most universal fundamental principles – are indeed subject to historical change, but they are preserved in

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this change in such a way that they inwardly are enriched and deepened as genre in such ‘revolutions’. (It is one of the great merits of Lessing in terms of theory to have conceptually expounded this in relation to ancient drama and Shakespeare.) However, this dialectic of continuity and punctiformity is also operative – at a higher level – in the field of the aesthetic as a whole. The individual genres face one another far more autonomously than do the individual sciences in the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality, and they constitute realms that are far more self-contained and independent of each other than is possible there. Even this antithesis must of course not be hardened and distorted into a metaphysical ossification. For, on the one hand, the – relative – autonomy of individual sciences is likewise an indisputable fact. It is determined primarily by the relative autonomy of their material substrate; the differentiation of objective reality thus underlies the differentiation of the individual sciences. However, this is necessarily a relative differentiation. As material differences underlie the methodological distinction between individual sciences, they thus create the manifold interactions and interdependencies between these renewed connections. In the end, though, the unity of the material constitution of the world necessarily brings forth the ideal of a unitary science again and again. While this has never been realised up to now, the tendency towards unification has made tremendous progress, especially in the exact natural sciences. Fields that for centuries were regarded as autonomous gained a lot in terms of cognitive ability by means of returning immediately divergent appearances to unitary principles. This does not preclude the – henceforth relatively conscious – autonomy of areas of study but rather strengthens any reasonable integration deriving from the nature of the matter with the approximation to the self-existent material unity of objective reality. Precisely the partly opposite direction that many social sciences pursued in the nineteenth century verifies the scientific accuracy of this tendency. For instance, the ‘pure’ – and socially conditioned – separation of economy, sociology, history, etc. was supremely detrimental for all of these sciences. Their cohesiveness, which is likewise conditioned by the uniformity of their substrate, indeed does not preclude rigorously specialised studies, although no essential problem in these sciences can be satisfactorily solved without sustained and detailed reference to the relationships that result from this common material. The unitary system of the sciences that thus comes into being – the ideal of unitary science takes this form – exhibits erratic separations, which are likewise not absolute, only in those places where the material foundation itself likewise possesses fissures (organic and inorganic, etc., although also with transitions and relativisations). The systematic structure likewise results from the nature of the in-itself being

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made into a conceptual likeness. When, under the influence of subjective idealism, the theory of science in the nineteenth century took pains to build up its methodology on the basis of subjective interests (particularly pronounced in the group around Windelband1 and Rickert), it only created confusions. The existence of so-called applied science, with its also teleologically conditioned methods, does not contradict this rejection of subjectivist grounds. Because, for example, the economic objectives of the technological sciences are just as objective and based just as much on a real substrate as those findings (of physics, of chemistry, etc.) that they apply or even develop further in the process. We had to indicate all of this in a cursory way at least so that it will be clearly visible that the ‘differentiation’ of art into different arts, art forms, etc. is something qualitatively different from the actual differentiation of knowledge into the different individual sciences. Despite all differentiation, the latter ultimately constitute a material unity of knowledge, whereas art in general is indeed a synthetic lumping together of what is common to the individual arts, although as we will shortly see the mode of the relationship between the individual arts and art in general distinguishes itself qualitatively from that mode of relationship between the individual sciences and unitary science overall. That is why we put the word ‘differentiation’ in quotation marks, since it, as was already mentioned earlier, is a harmful prejudice of idealist aesthetics to conceive of the system of the arts as the ‘differentiation’ of the ‘aesthetic idea’, of ‘beauty’, etc. Each art, certainly each genre, is in reality a world for itself and has an originary aesthetic principle for a basis that is not identical to the principle of any other art or genre but is indeed qualitatively different from these in many respects. This insight, which has long since turned into a general opinion in the case of artists themselves in their praxis and in the theoretical formulation of their own meaningful experiences, was frequently made into the basis of aesthetic knowledge in the second half of the nineteenth century. We have already mentioned Konrad Fiedler’s widely disseminated views concerning the fact that there is no art but only individual arts; later, under this influence, there came into being alongside aesthetics a so-called general science of art. We do not need to go into a critique of its methodological foundations here. All that needs to be noted is the fact that, as aesthetics was understood in the old idealist manner and the science of art was metaphysically separated from it at the same time, these absent general aesthetic principles receive an empirico-

1 Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915), German philosopher of the Baden School of NeoKantianism. [Eds.]

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positivistic character, and the overall field of aesthetics had to disintegrate into two methodologically heterogeneous parts. If we are ascertaining this autonomous existence of the individual arts, genres, etc., then – in order to further concretise the dialectic of continuity in this realm – the following should be noted. In particular, what becomes apparent historically is the fact that from time to time the individual arts exhibit such a continuous (one could say logical) development, in which a solution grows out of earlier problems, that one could be misled into catching sight of the driving power of this development’s movement in its inner, artistic problems: for example, in the case of Florentine or Venetian painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in that of the French or Russian novel of the nineteenth century, etc. Upon closer inspection, however, what becomes apparent is the fact that such phenomena pop up for only relatively brief stretches of time, that now and then they – so as to clearly express ourselves in a half-consciously exaggerated way – spring from an artistic nothingness or terminate in one. This proves, on the one hand, that a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity historically prevails here as well. However, on the other hand, this dialectic is itself socio-historically determined: the continuity, the organic growth of social problems out of each other, their continuous influence on the coming into being of individual works of art as a social task is the actual basic principle of this dialectic (we cannot analyse here the contradictions of an objective sort that effectively arise out of social development in the process, nor can we analyse those of a subjective sort in the response of personalities to these objective contradictions). In such cases, the art or art form unfolding in an ever so ‘logical’ manner or one that hews closely to a ‘philosophy of history’ is in most cases simply the one that is dominant, that is representative of its period. Here too the basis is objective: the overall development predicated on the development of the forces of production is the reason why an art or genre plays such a dominating role in one period while another art or genre plays that same role in another. This socio-historical determinacy is so powerful that it can even lead to the perishing of certain genres (literary epic) or to the coming into being of new ones (the novel). In this area of the aesthetic sphere, the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity thus has its own physiognomy, albeit one that can only rise to prominence in the framework of a general socio-historical dialectic. As important as the once-again noted fact of the possibility and reality of new genres arising and old naturalised ones disappearing may be, consideration of the totality of art’s course of development nevertheless yields a new aspect. Namely that of an extraordinary stability of art forms. As was already shown, it is self-evident that there is no unitary genesis of a unitary art that would then differentiate itself; rather, the different arts and genres of art his-

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torically come into being independent of each other, determined by concrete socio-historical needs that call them into existence. However, it is a likewise incontrovertible fact that, once they are set up, they exhibit a tremendous tenacity, persistence, and the capacity to develop their foundational principles at the same time. Since time immemorial, literature, the visual arts, music, dance, and the dramatic art have constituted that world that we tend to encapsulate with the term ‘art’. Indeed, even within the arts the genres have an irrepressible viability. No new literary genre has emerged besides lyric, epic, and drama; no new visual art besides painting, sculpture, and architecture; etc. (The only actually new art is that of film.) In no way does this finding abolish our earlier one regarding the rebirth of genre in each significant work. On the contrary. The fact that, as a genre, drama could be preserved in the uninterrupted change from Aeschylus to Chekhov, Brecht, and O’Neill constitutes the state of affairs that is precisely the one of interest to us now. Right here is where the lively dialectic of continuity and discontinuity is to be grasped with our hands in the aesthetic sphere. If with each great historical turn a completely new genre were to come into being, or if aesthetic form were to exhibit as much stability as – in spite of all new discoveries – Euclidean geometry, then we would not be standing before a problem of qualitative novelty. That is: certain modes of comportment towards reality which determine the specificity of arts and genres feature this dialectical unity of the stability of principles and the endless developability of essential and superficial determinations. The problem of aesthetics here is twofold. First, the essence of this dialectical unity itself must be apprehended and analysed. In fact, once more from a two-fold aspect that belongs together precisely in its duality. On the one hand, as the necessary response to certain needs that came into being as a result of the development of society and as a result of the thereby conditioned development of people and their relationships to each other and to nature, etc. On the other hand, as is already familiar to us, as the development of specific aesthetic categories that, as the optimal means for satisfying these needs, at the same time let the specific aesthetic character of individual modes of comportment and the works coming into existence in their implementation in artistic praxis grow into artistic closure and autonomy. Our science still stands at the beginning of the beginning when it comes to the investigation of these states of affairs and their relationships. There are certainly individual attempts (and among these, there are also even brilliant attempts) to comprehend the genre-determining nature of such modes of comportment in a precise way. At the same time, what must be remembered first and foremost is Schiller and Goethe’s joint effort (summarised by Goethe), which in the figures of the rhapsodist and the mimic outlined an exemplary description of those attitudes that

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are indispensable for epic or dramatic ‘worlds’ to come into artistic existence.2 Pertinent here are the endeavours of the Marées circle (Fiedler, Hildebrand3) in relation to the visual arts, some from the theory of music, etc. Apart from that narrowness which we have criticised and will continue to criticise in the works of Fiedler, however, it must be said that in most cases such studies take for their object merely the aesthetic essence of the modes of comportment attached to art forms, whereas the social need is lacking in most cases or at the utmost appears in an extremely abstract form. This is no surprise. For only Marxism has related the specific mode of a reflection of reality to the development of society. Hegel, who sought similar connections between validity and historicity, had to base the first on the myth of the identical subject-object and to conceive of the second in such a general way that his line of succession, to the extent that such a thing came into being, had to end up in the cul-de-sac of the history of spirit. Moreover, in the continuation of the ingenious suggestions made by Marx, a method predominated for a long time that was content with the social (indeed, the ‘sociological’) derivation of ideological phenomena without broadening this genesis to include the material investigation of their specific nature, etc. Only in the works of Lenin do the indissoluble cohesiveness and cooperation of dialectical and historical materialism turn into one of the central issues of the Marxist method. For reasons that would lead us far from our topic were we to discuss them here, this unity demanded by Lenin fell into oblivion again, and only all too often were subjective dogmatic aesthetic judgements inorganically attached to vulgarised ‘sociological’ expositions of genesis. All of this necessarily entails that the set of relationships coming into question here is still as good as completely unexplored. The problem, however, that tends to show up in the history of aesthetics as the system of the arts can only be satisfactorily resolved along this path. It was and remains a real (indeed, a central) problem of aesthetics, since the individual arts are actually connected, frequently complement one another, are interdependent with each other, etc., and since these correspondences and links are not of an accidental sort, not even in the sense that merely historical appearances can exhibit a more or less contingent character with respect to a theoretical system like aesthetics. Instead, the relationship is systematic in nature, only its principium differentiationis can be derived not from the aesthetic ‘idea’ (of beauty) but rather from the system of those – ultimately – social needs that determine the coming into being and persisting of the individual arts. These hence set up a system

2 Schiller and Goethe 1877, pp. 451–4. 3 Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921), German sculptor. [Eds.]

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that admittedly cannot be simply derived from the essence of man but rather from the essence of his socio-historical development. This system of the arts is thus of a historico-systematic constitution. That is why the socio-historical coming into being and passing of art forms does not conflict with such a systematisation; all the less so as it is demonstrable in many cases that emerging or vanishing genres – we refer again to the novel and literary epic – are closely connected to each other in the decisive questions involving principles; for instance, the mode of comportment determining both is informally reducible to the Goethean rhapsodist in the case of the novel and literary epic. The second important issue surfacing here is that of the unity of the aesthetic. The foundation of this unity establishes the clear and essential convergence of needs that in immediate terms are extraordinarily different but underlie the emergence and efficacy of art. The path towards the illumination of its genetic, content- and form-related specificity must therefore clarify the principles of its unity at the same time. In the process, it is above all a question of a two-fold issue related to content: on the one hand, each of the artistic responses (differentiated both individually and in terms of genre) is a response to the same reality, which must be understood not just as reality in general but rather as the supremely concrete aspect of socio-historical development – time, place, context, etc. included. On the other hand, any such response is carried out by people (and for people) and is formed by the reality indicated a moment ago, in which the qualities of thinking, feeling, experiencing, etc. are tied to this reality with countless threads (they come from it and flow into it). That said, the often-exceptional distinctions (indeed antitheses) are not gainsaid or even covered over. For instance, no one will deny that a wealthy aristocrat from the provinces and a sans-culottes from the Parisian suburbs had to experience and think of the great French Revolution in different ways. Nevertheless, in many ways the reflections of these events for both will also exhibit common features that – without doing harm to the disparity in terms of class and the individual – spring from the fact that the dialectical unity and totality of the same society in the same historical instant act powerfully on their psychology in this direction. This relates to all expressions of social and private life, thus also to those needs that in a given society and at a given time call forth the coming into being of new artistic production; that promote or inhibit the kind, prevalence, repression, etc. of individual art forms; that determine the selection at the time of works of art, trends, etc. that are temporally or spatially remote from becoming topical or effective. The fact that in the same society the art of different classes exhibit quite different characteristics does not at all refute the proposition expressed just now. For the unity of society, which is based on its contradictory but unitary economic foundation, also prevails in

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this contradictoriness. Entirely apart from the fact that classes certainly cannot be hermetically separated from each other to such an extent that interactions of the most disparate sort would be completely out of the question. Already the mere fact of sharp conflict requires common fields and a common ‘language’ since the victory of one class and the subjugation of the other cannot possibly do without ideological means of influence. This not only applies to literature, but also is to be traced precisely in the effect of architecture or music. With that said, all that is demonstrated is something that is generally common in the foundations of the different arts. And when one considers that they are all – admittedly in different ways – reflections of the same objective reality, that they are all responses triggered by means of its effects on people, and when one further sees that the different arts keep hold of and shape this response for the purpose of exerting different kinds of evocative effects on (the same) people, then this commonality between the arts initially appears as a self-evident, but still supremely scanty abstraction. Of course, this abstraction is an indissoluble fact. In comparison to the rich and conspicuous abundance of content and form in which the aesthetic manifests in the concrete work of art, genre and (above all) art in general even appear as a meager generalisation. At the same time, however, one must not forget that the universality coming to light at any given time here is not simply a conceptual fixing in place of common features, properties, relationships, etc.; therefore, it is not a direct stepping out of the aesthetic sphere and into that of logico-scientific abstraction. Instead, what unites certain works to a certain genre is itself of an aesthetic character. That is to say, in generalisation an aesthetic content is not simply translated into the conceptual – that takes place in any generalisation, and no generalisation can be correct if it does not preserve features actually common to the phenomena it generalises – but rather the generalisation itself takes the aesthetic as its starting point and is immanently contained in the structure of the work itself and in the aesthetic comportment towards it; its logico-conceptual form does not go beyond the scope of a protection against undialectical contradictions; its truth content, however, is founded in a purely aesthetic way. This state of affairs, which at first glance seems paradoxical, may be elucidated in negative terms for the time being. Dogmatic aesthetics handled its material after the pattern of a descriptive natural science; it confined itself to cataloging common properties, à la Carl Linnaeus, one could say. Consequently, however, the result it arrives at now passes by all of the critical questions when it comes to aesthetic genre: significant artistic achievements remain outside of the framework it puts in place, and by contrast pseudocompositions fulfil all of the demands expressed in the catalog of characterist-

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ics. One can approach this state of affairs with a positive turn: in the reception of the individual work of art, each aesthetic subjectivity that is conscious (in the aesthetic sense), thus every aesthetic subjectivity raised above the spontaneity of mere impression or mere evocative affectedness, at the same time experiences that work’s affiliation to a certain genre. It experiences not only a singular image, but also its concretised pictoriality, its essence as a painting, its affiliation to painting; and similarly in literature, music, etc. We have called this conscious awareness ‘aesthetic’ because it is predicated on a sensuous generalisation and not on conceptual abstracting; it does not at all signify a distancing from the lived experience of the given singular work (thus it does not signify its contemplation as an exemplar of a genus). It goes beyond the scope of a spontaneous evocative impression only to the extent that the evocative force of the artistic shaping in such an impression stops at making the meaningful artistic content come alive as such, whereas the aesthetic constitution, the aesthetic efficacy of the shaping itself is what turns into an important aspect of the artistically evoked lived experience here. That is why aesthetic conscious awareness does not diverge from the singular work but, on the contrary, converges with it even more than does pure spontaneous lived experience by organically integrating the work’s objective structure, the dialectical dynamic prevailing in it, into the lived aesthetic experience. Aesthetic conscious awareness is thus founded in the essence of the work itself. It is just as originarily aesthetic as is spontaneous lived experience, only it is a closer approximation to that objective form-content complex that the work presents in itself. In general, the relationship of works and genres to art is similar, albeit perhaps somewhat more complicated. Here too, the starting point has to be the fact that the genres are even less exemplars or sub-species of the genus art than singular works are of genres; instead, art in general is jointly posited as being inextricably and organically affiliated with each genre in its particularity and precisely in this particularity, just as it is with – and this is the decisive standpoint here – the positing of any singular work of art. It is a relation of inherence and not of subsumption. Inherence is a category to which modern logic devotes little attention. Needless to say, it cannot be our task here to make the attempt to fill in this gap somehow or other. We content ourselves with a brief reference to Hegelian logic, in which these issues that are important to us are at the very least adumbrated. At the same time, it is striking that this category always shows up in the works of Hegel at the beginning of those analyses to which he subjects the forms of judgement and syllogism. In the Philosophical Propaedeutic, both sections are begun with the examination of the qualitative as judgements or syllogisms of inherence. Hegel says of the predicate there: ‘Universality, the Predicate, has here the meaning only of an immediate (or

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sensuous) Universality, a mere possession in common with others’.4 And the second section closes consistently with the ‘sublating of the Qualitative’, with the transition to ‘syllogisms of quantity or reflection’.5 Inherence loses its significance for syllogism in The Science of Logic. Though inherence still stands at the beginning of the theory of judgement, as the ‘judgement of existence’ characterises it, ‘the predicate consequently takes on the form of something that does not subsist on its own but has its foundation in the subject’.6 By contrast, as prelude to the study of syllogisms, the syllogism of existence is already based on the double subsumption of the singular under the universal and of the universal under the singular.7 Indeed, the reproach is furthermore raised against Aristotle that he ‘confined himself rather to the mere relation of inherence’.8 Here is not the place to consider more closely the extent to which this reproach is true. At any rate, Prantl emphasises that Aristotle clearly distinguishes between ‘specifying difference’ and ‘mere inherence’.9 This controversy, which cannot be dealt with here, points towards the issue of genus, species, and individual that is so important to us, and as we have seen, this is an issue that shows a certain structural similarity (even a quite far-reaching one) to that of art, genre, and work. Not just in the immediately preceding remarks have we been able to establish that a relation of inherence is operative in originary aesthetic comportment (and in its objective foundation, in the work of art); the exposition of the human foundedness of work and effect had also pointed towards such a constitution of relationships for the existence of man as individual, as member of a social group, as participant in the development of the human species. What the logical category of inherence thus expresses is the reflection of a fact of being that turns up again and again in nature and society at different stages and in different ways. The validity of the position Hegel takes on this set of problems is based on the necessary objectivism of any disanthropomorphising reflection of reality. Regarded from this point of view, those relationships that are clearly in the category of inherence indeed appear as facts, as relationships that undeniably exist in objective reality, but at the same time as objective reality’s merely immediate modes of appearance. Science has to really and concretely move logic forward in revealing the most universal relationships of form if it wants to intellectu-

4 5 6 7 8 9

Hegel 1986, p. 108. Hegel 1986, p. 115. Hegel 2010, p. 557. Hegel 2010, p. 590. Hegel 2010, p. 591. Prantl 1955, pp. 233 and 263.

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ally approximate the objective dialectic of reality. The sublation of inherence in the works of Hegel, his going beyond the scope of it, aims to supplement or replace this first immediate and therefore logically primitive determination by means of much more complicated determinations that better express movement, change, and development. That is why for understanding the genus ever more concrete, superior generalising historical categories are introduced into the handling of life in the Encylopedia, beside which inherence must act as an impoverished immediate initial abstraction, although nowhere is it denied that it is likewise one of the many determinations of this relation.10 (The fact that the concrete categories of contemporary sciences go far beyond Hegel’s possibilities for concretisation must not be emphasised in particular, although it alters nothing in the methodological side of the issue that is alone correct here.) It is clear that a category that reflects the real conditions of objective reality can and must also be found in aesthetic reflection. In such cases, the specificity of the aesthetic becomes apparent in the fact that the position of the category in the totality of reflection and its function in the dynamic of this totality is subject to a change, though nothing can falsify the basic character of the category concerned. We have already indicated this – and it will be portrayed in even more detail later – in relation to the use of analogy; we have explained this in relation to the category of particularity at length, and in the course of the following expositions we will refer to a change of function of this sort even in the case of other categories. Consequently, for our observations the issue of inherence involves nothing new in principle. True, it must be emphasised at once by way of preface that of course there is no formula (nor can there be) for transposing between the categories of logic and aesthetics. It is not at all a question of the fact that a logical category is transferred into the aesthetic. Instead, what is always and exclusively involved is the fact that, as a result of the identity of the objective reality that science and art each reflect in its own way, the same state of affairs, forms of objectivity, determinations, etc. receive an appropriate function (appropriate to the specific method of approaching reality that each of the two has). That is why the study of similarity and disparity in the functioning of the individual categories must be carried out separately for each of them. Not until this has been carried through for all categories, not until the new relationships between the new functions and the thereby – relatively – changed essentialities are also illuminated in this way, and not until these relationships result in a system can we say that we have completely fulfilled the specificity of aesthetic reflection. As was already said by way of preface, these

10

Hegel 2004, pp. 415 ff.

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observations do not raise the claim of such a completeness. In the present state of the philosophy of art, this would hardly even be possible. For us it is only a matter of presenting in a few crucial cases the way or method that could and would have to lead to such an apprehension of the specificity of the aesthetic. If we now turn to the category of inherence, then we must once again hark back to the fact that – when looked at in logico-scientific terms – it represents a low level of disanthropomorphisation. That is to say, it belongs to those categories that reflect immediately ascertainable aspects of the outside world, in the nature of which both the close linkage to sensuousness and a sticking to subjectivity remain noticeable. We have seen that Hegel emphasises these two sides of inherence in the sentences quoted by us; the first in the Philosophical Propaedeutic, the second in the Logic. Of particular interest to us is the fact that this nature of the category casts a light on its becoming conscious as such. That is, some aspects of taking part (participation) contained in inherence play a not inconsiderable role in Platonic philosophy. The origin of these aspects, however, go back to prehistoric times. Lévy-Bruhl beholds the central essence of what he calls ‘pre-logical’ thinking precisely in participation. ‘I should be inclined to say’, he explains, ‘that in the collective representations of primitive mentality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than themselves’.11 Independent of the supremely problematic conclusions that Lévy-Bruhl draws from the ‘law of participation’, a fundamental element of the magical worldview is touched on here, in fact one that throughout the magical period refers mostly to relationships that in many cases turn out to be completely senseless in the light of a more developed and rational meaningful experience but that can in certain cases still arrive at even partly correct reflections of reality. After the gradual sloughing off of the magical absurd, the category of inherence arose from the establishment of relationships between realities of a different constitution as the sign of certain conditions that would have not been immediately designated as anything else for the time being. It is no accident that it becomes so important in the classification of phenomena (species, genus, etc.) because a long-drawn-out scientific development is still required in what follows until the classification can be transformed into a causally, etc. determined theory of evolution. The conspicuous antithesis in this development is now the fact that inherence never suffers such an overcoming as a category of outer and inner relationships in the aesthetic; on the contrary, it is fixed in place as an indispensable

11

Lévy-Bruhl 1926, p. 76.

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means of composition and unfolds ever more broadly, deeply, and richly as such. It suffices if we recall again the relationship of individual, social group, and mankind. Again and again, of course, there were theories that, even for artistic praxis, took pains to grasp such conditions in the sense of a scientific approach and that, for instance, wanted to replace that simple, immediate, and sensuously manifest inherence, which let – to emphasise just one important case – the individual appear as a member of a class or nation, with a purely causal deduction of these conditions, for instance. (We will talk about the actual role of causality in artistic composition later.) The result was a fetishising of human relationships as their effective totality congealed into the all at once unpoetic and untrue ‘mythic’ construct of so-called milieu. But as a category of composition, inherence signifies an organic inseparable unity of the individual in which and around which social forces take effect, forces that nevertheless equally appear immediately as aspects of his psychology. However, they are not of the same value in terms either of content or of importance or orientation, and this constitution is not expressed in a static equilibrium or in a condition of its derangement but rather as the continuous conflict of different tendencies, as the continuous producing and sublating of the psychological equilibrium of people. The dynamic heterogeneity revealing itself here of the mental aspects that immediately seem homogeneous shows precisely the efficacy of the category of inherence while the taking part of people in relationships of different orders – in keeping with the truth of life – appears as a component of their psychology in which the reflection of these conditions inheres. Irrespective of their existence as powers of the objective being of society independent of consciousness, they remain immanent to the psychology of the individual. The spontaneous immediate unity of personality thus predominates in artistic composition; the relationships to the objective tendencies of society appear precisely in the category of inherence. Of course, this unity can be concretely expressed as conflict, as disjointedness, etc. But – if the composition is to remain a genuinely artistic one – even in the most extreme disintegration it will express the unity of the substance of man, and precisely for that reason the use of the category of inherence is indispensable. In those places where it is broken with, what comes into being is a breach with the truth of life and art, as happens when, in keeping with modern prejudices, pathology provides the ‘model’ for understanding the normal person and, say, schizophrenic schisms in consciousness are not presented as pathological exceptions but rather as the ‘condition humaine’. This basic fact of the artistic reflection of reality has been the cause of a lot of confusion in the theory of both art and science. In the former, this categorically ‘primitive’, ‘elemental’, and ‘primeval’ mode of rendering reality not

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infrequently becomes so exaggerated (and thereby increased to the point of absurdity) that art – allegedly – reproduces a reversion to the magical. We have already referred to the fundamental falsehood of such views and shown that the real state of affairs for both magic and art is distorted (Worringer, Caudwell, etc.) in the process. On the one hand, the ‘primitiveness’ in the category of inherence (and similarly in the artistic use of analogy as well) ties in with a developmental stage that has already long since left the magical far behind and that works exclusively with determinations of inherence that really exist in life; a stage in which the phantasmagorical subjectivity of magic – or rather, its inability to distinguish between the subjective and the objective – already belongs to a past that has been overcome. On the other hand, artistic development does not stop at the plain, unanalysed conception of inherence, much less would it move backwards historically from here. That is to say, embedded in the conditions and relationships that one can sum up in a generalising way as the category of inherence is a genuine material of human life that continuously improves itself with the development of society and in the clarifying and shaped emphasising of which art plays a pioneering role. Even as this category appears in the works of antiquity, it still has only little to do with magical beginnings, and precisely with regard to the issues coming into being here later art has traveled a long path of broadening, deepening, and enriching. Only in a brief and cursory way can we go into the baffling results that arise from the methodological misconceptions of this situation in the sciences. It is primarily a question of the method of psychology as a science. At the turn of the century, the idealist psychology of positivism fell into a crisis; it inability to concretely comprehend phenomena became ever more clearly visible. But instead of now criticising the idealist foundations (getting down to its materiophysiological foundations is not permitted by the associations, nor is the better approximation of phenomena with the help of the laws to be found there), what came into being was the desire for a psychology that approximated the concreity and obviousness of artistic (above all literary) composition and that dealt with its problems in such a manner. Ever since Dilthey’s demand for a ‘descriptive psychology’ instead of a merely ‘analytic’ (that is to say, scientific) one, this movement has been whipping up ever greater waves. Of course, it cannot be our task here to grapple with these different currents. Limiting ourselves to a single methodological remark, we can only say that such tendencies set tasks for psychology that only art (the aesthetic reflection of reality) can satisfactorily resolve. When science pursues such trails, it dispenses with its ownmost essence: it dispenses with uncovering those objective lawful regularities and relationships that – objectively – determine the object of psychology and can only be gotten hold of correctly with a disanthropomorphising mode of

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reflection. The materialist Pavlov has pointed out important guidelines for such investigations, regrettably without much emulation in the field of psychology up to now. In a later chapter, we will attempt to adumbrate the direction in which this method can be made use of for our problems. Our earlier remarks – with reference back to what was said about the human character of art – pointed out that in important respects that which is originarily aesthetic is compelled to work with the category of inherence. It thus seems that one likewise has to attribute an important significance to the category of inherence in the relationships between work of art, genre, and art in general. This appears supremely likely from the outset since their formal relationship to each other exhibits some similarity to that of individual, species, and genus. What matters more here, however, are the differences. One would distort the relation between work, genre, and art in its essential aspects if he were to deal with it in a way that was simply analogous to that of individual, species, and genus. Once more, the issue of inherence becomes the focus here. For we have certainly seen that it was indeed indispensable for originally comprehending concepts linked to the human species, although a more developed scientific consideration had to go beyond the scope of it. In contrast, the adherence to and immanent development of inherence is in point of fact characteristic for these aesthetic conditions. We have already indicated this with regard to the presentation of the central subject of art (man), but even our expositions about externalisation and its being taken back into the subject circled around this issue. It now merely comes down to drawing the necessary conclusions for the question that is now occupying us. What comes about everywhere in the aesthetic is a certain substantiality of the subject, or rather the evocation of the lived experience of his substantiality. This has nothing to do with the Hegelian transformation of substance into subject. We have to concern ourselves here with its mystical essence all the less so because we already took pains in these observations to reveal its rational – aesthetic, not philosophicoscientific – kernel. For the time being, this substantiality denotes the depth and the organic in the unity of the subject. If the intimate cohesiveness (indeed, the grown-togetherness) of essence and appearance was being emphasised earlier from a different aspect, then this likewise points in this direction. Whereas scientific appearance and essence must be neatly separated so that the knowledge of laws could return to the appearances illuminated by them, the work of art affirms a sensuously manifest inseparability of appearance and essence. Essence exists aesthetically only insofar as it is totally melded with the world of appearance, and appearance can only rise to immediate prominence as that determinate and concrete essence of a determinate and concrete appearance. In a sensuously manifest generalisation all at once, mind you; a generalisation

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that expresses essence as existing for itself and immanently inhering in appearances all at once. This originary aesthetic structure of works must remain preserved in the generalisations (like genre and art in general) created from the thing itself if these generalisations do not want to violate the essence of the aesthetic or to warp – aesthetic – inherence into a logical subsumption. Similarity to and difference from species and genus thereby first become clearly visible. That is to say, as was already mentioned, simple, often artificial and rigid classification on a subsumptive basis here represents a higher stage of the scientific than does immediately taking cognisance of inherence. And even in those places where this category crops up at a higher level, as for instance in comparative morphological attempts to systematically organise phenomena, categories of a more complicated and more developed order dominate over mere inherence. In the aesthetic sphere, by contrast, inherence remains indissolubly valid: whether it is a question of the objective constitution of works or of the creative and receptive way of behaving towards them, the individual work and genre to which it belongs are necessarily posited uno actu. A sharp boundary must not be drawn here either in creation or in reception or even in the aesthetic reflection about creation or reception. In fact, in the analysis of a work of art – conceptually in keeping with form – experiencing and thinking continuously move about in that common fluid that brings the work together with its genre. When, for example, the talk is of the painterly qualities of a landscape, the set of problems relating to the painterly in general are conversely contained in the apprehension of the specific individual idiosyncrasy of this particular painting. As has been repeatedly highlighted by us, the manner in which a work of art fulfils the lawfulness of its genre by jointly implicating an expansion of the laws at the same time is unambiguous proof that this relation of mutual inherence between the individual work and genre is a part of the essence of the aesthetic. Things are likewise arranged with the relationship of work and genre to art in general. That is why genre and art are not universal concepts with respect to the work existing for itself alone. Within determinate limits, a certain translation into the conceptual is inevitable and even takes place continuously. However, it if is carried out hastily or in an unyielding way, then, as happens so often in the course of history, we have to do with dead rules that at best pass by the aesthetic without remark, though in many cases they exert deadening effects on meaning and creativity. Instead – we repeat – it is a question of sensuously manifest generalisations that, in keeping with their essentiality, serve that aesthetic process already familiar to us, which sublates that which is merely peculiar to the creative or receptive subject at the time so that subjectivity is raised up to the species-like (to the human)

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without completely obliterating that which is peculiar to it, without sloughing off more from it than is necessary for such an ascent. Inherence is thus expressed in the fact that in each artist – both objectively and subjectively – genre and art in general are simultaneously present at all times. True, it the talk here is of being present in aesthetic subjectivity, then with that said by no means is a conscious awareness that is consciously expressing itself intended, indeed still less the unconscious of ‘depth psychology’. ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’ also applies here. In his day, Hegel incisively formulated how the genus is the negation of immediate singularity, the ‘death of the creature’. What comes into being in our case is the opposite: as the, to use Hegel’s phrase, immediately singular (the individual work of art) is realised and constituted as something enduring and lasting, which follows from the essence of the aesthetic, what happens therein is (again, to use Hegel’s phrase) is ‘the genus … comes to itself’.12 The process thus has almost an opposite character in relation to the individual, species, and genus. With immediate and imperative necessity, the self-preservation, growth, and development of genre and art in general depend on a realisation of individual works of art; by contrast, the dying (obsolescent) compositions fall out of the aesthetic generic process and turn into a nullity (an aesthetic nullity). (What they signify under certain conditions as socio-historical phenomena in the process does not affect this issue.)

2

The Homogeneous Medium, the Whole Man, and the Man-Made-Whole

It is thus established that, with the aesthetic positing of the individual work, genre and art in general are jointly posited at the same time, uno actu. If we now turn to genre, an issue that is an essential determinant for the individual arts, and seem to neglect art in general for a certain stretch of time for reasons of clear methodology, then this, as clearly emerges from the preceding expositions, merely seems to be the case because the issues of art in general are also kept in mind in any properly aesthetic consideration of a genre. The extent to which these issues remain unexpressed for the time being and only figure as background is merely a matter of the methodological question here. This relationship already becomes visible even when we just bring up the issue intended here, the homogeneous medium of any art form (and within its domain, of each work of art) that was frequently adduced in our earlier observations. For

12

Hegel 2004, p. 410.

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the concrete homogeneous medium – for instance, pure visibility in the visual arts – is also a determination of an art form. It can be differentiated according to genre, in which in some respects pure visibility in painting certainly does not mean precisely the same thing as in sculpture; in lyric, epic, or drama, the medium of literary language has a whole series of specific hallmarks, etc. To say nothing of the fact that the homogeneous medium of course receives its originary mode of realisation only in the individual work of art in which its all at once individual and generalised manner of treatment constitutes the most basic formal aesthetic determination. Nonetheless, it can be quite rightly said that the issue of the homogenous medium is actually at home precisely in the domain of art form and genre. Its universality vis-à-vis individual works still has an originary aesthetic character to quite a great extent here. This is much less the case when we are speaking of art in general. The proposition that each art form or each genre possesses its own form of the homogeneous medium as a foundation is already a generalisation that conceptualises the essential common features of media that are qualitatively different from one another. By contrast – and in the sense of our earlier remarks – inherent to any homogenous medium is the internal reference to art in general, the relationship to it in an originary aesthetic manner in the sense of inherence. By holding on to this structural tendency from the bottom-up, the conceptual character that was just indicated can be corrected from the top-down and that which is essential in the meaningful aesthetic content can be transposed into the conceptual nearly intact. These trains of thought give us the methodological authorisation, however, to proceed with the study of the homogeneous medium from the point of view of art forms or genres. Before the central issues linked to the homogeneous medium can be dealt with, it is necessary to clear up its character. Its actual realisation exists in works of art, and in these works it is indeed a medium in the strict sense of the word. This medium, however, is not an objective reality that exists independent of human activity as does a fact or relationship in nature or society; rather, it is a particular principle for the formation of objectivities and their linkages that were specifically brought forth by human praxis. In fact, not even in the sense that socio-historical facta are the products of human activity. Even when these are brought forth with an approximately correct consciousness, the laws and tendencies operative in them (the facts and relationships created by them) constitute a part of objective reality independent of human consciousness. Actions based on their correct reflection must therefore constantly intervene in an influencing, controlling, and correcting way so that such a complex does not move in a direction that transforms the results of a correct action into those of an incorrect one (that transforms the results of a conscious action into those

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of a senseless one). Because the facts that thus come into being are, even if they are consciously produced or influenced by people, facts of an objective reality existing and acting independent of consciousness, they are subject to its lawful regularities, which man is capable of guiding only by means of correctly recognising them and correctly applying this knowledge to them. That which has been brought forth by human activity has a completely different meaning in our case. It is here a matter of definitiveness. What comes into being in the homogeneous medium of an art form are formal constructs that only attain their specific ‘reality’ by reflecting objective reality aesthetically. Their ‘reality’ consists merely in the fact that they can evoke the artistic likeness of objective reality held within them, that they are able to guide or direct the lived experiences of people to an inner reproduction of the likeness embodied in them. Although its concrete constitution (audibility, visibility, language, gesture) constitutes an element of human life and praxis, the homogeneous medium must thus be something that has been lifted of the continuous flow of reality. It turns into the foundation of praxis in artistic creation, where, by putting himself into the homogeneous medium of his art form through its actualisation in the specific quality of his own personality, the artist opens up the possibility of the creation – already examined by us – of a ‘world’ proper to the aesthetic reflection of reality. Generally and abstractly speaking, the realisation of a homogeneous medium in the reflection of reality (in the process of transforming an in-itself into a for-us) is not completely unprecedented. It suffices to recall the role of mathematics in the exact sciences. At the same time, however, what instantly and clearly comes to the fore is the qualitative distinction between science and art in the reflection of a reality that is by its objective nature the same. A homogeneous medium of science can only be obtained from a reality that itself has already been – relatively – comprehended. Elements and relationships of objective reality itself constitute its foundation, and the abstracting treatment of reality (simply the creation of such a homogeneous medium) consists above all in purifying as much as possible that which objectively is of any way of looking at things bound to subjectivity or containing anthropomorphising tendencies. Consequently, it is comprised of elements and their linkages, regularities, etc. that express the lens onto objects that is attainable at any given time. True objectivity is of course subject to a continuous examination of reality. Thus, for instance, any conceptual modelling of a phenomenon that is otherwise not intellectually accessible must be discarded as soon as it is inconsistent with important details of that phenomenon’s mode of appearance; on the other hand, it is possible that a mathematical formula, derivation, etc. contains more features of reality than one originally intended by discovering it. By means of the homogeneous medium,

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there thus comes into being in scientific reflection a path to the objective beingin-itself of objects and their relationships, a tendential neutralising of human subjectivity that perfects itself at all times.13 We already know from our previous expositions that in aesthetic reflection the homogeneous medium is indissolubly bound to the subject, indeed it acquires its significance precisely from this embeddedness in the human personality. The talk has already been of the concrete character of the subjectivity rising to prominence here. We therefore know that its unneutralisable essence is by no means identical with a denial (indeed, nor even with an attenuation) of objectivity, of the aesthetic formal construct’s fidelity to reality. On the contrary, the emphatically subjective character of aesthetic reflection constitutes a chief vehicle of its approximation to objective reality, and the specific constitution of the object of aesthetic reflection brings the world into interdependency with human activity and peremptorily stipulates a determinate subjectivity for its organ of communication. The homogeneous medium here now has a function similar to – but altered in a way that is in keeping with the different tasks – the one it has in knowledge: namely, to be the organ for the approximation of the reflection to objective reality. In both cases, it comes down to facilitating and enabling a reduction of the object to the essential by means of the homogeneous medium so that out of their immediacy those determinations come to the fore that are closely and materially related to the aim of the act of reflection and those determinations are disregarded (indeed, are even completely thrust aside under certain circumstances) that are merely situated in a loose, contingent relationship to this aim or are perhaps not connected to it at all. Such a medium can also possess the quirk – bear in mind mathematics – that a solution of its own can be developed that certainly draws its truth from the correct reflection of objective reality as well (even if it does so in a way that is sometimes extremely mediated), although with respect to individual observations and the conclusions immediately drawn from them it can act as a principle of critique, of rectification. This single most universal formal similarity, however, must at once be set against its equally important disparity. As we know, scientific reflection is a disanthropomorphising reflection that stipulates an objectivity of its homogeneous medium that is in keeping with this disposition. Its functioning, its nature, is determined purely by the constitution of the object at the time. Now since the object of aesthetic reflection is the world of people, of their relationships to each other and to nature, the mode and dif-

13

We need not concern ourselves here with the fact that this path can also become problematic in many ways, as in the case of mathematical formalism.

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ferentiation of the homogeneous medium have to be constituted in an entirely different way here. That is to say, the object of this reflection is to appear not only as it is in itself but also as an aspect of the interaction between society and nature, its grounds and consequences in society. The human relation and response to objects is thus jointly contained in their positing. If, as was demonstrated earlier, this supremely active role of the subject is not to lead to a subjectivist arbitrariness (instead, it is to help to establish a new but well-founded kind of objectivity), then, on the one hand, the creative subjectivity must not be faced with a world that is completely alien to it, to which it could merely take its position after the fact. For without fail, the judgements that came into being in this way here remain tainted with the flaw of a hollow subjectivism. On the contrary, the subject must be actively implicated in the being-just-so of the content and form of the world being depicted. When the individual creative subject arrogates to himself the role of demiurge vis-à-vis the individual work to be created, it is by no means a question of an unfounded inflation of his self but rather the internal, abbreviated, and focused reproduction of the path of the human species. The objects that are depicted and held on to in aesthetic reflection are indeed the form- and content-related outcomes of this process. Even if in themselves they have an existence independent of the human species as the objects of nature do, in very many cases their mode of existence is objectively deeply modified by this process (deforested woods, regulated rivers, etc.), and even where this is not the case, their mode of appearance cannot be envisaged separate from this developmental path (high mountains, seas, etc. as objects of art). It thus becomes apparent again, this time from a different point of view, that the authorisation of aesthetic subjectivity is founded in its relationship to the human race. Only in this way can they gain an idiosyncratic objectivity without losing their subjective character, but also without having to lapse into a subjectivism. On the other hand, it now follows from this specificity that the principle of differentiation for the various homogenous media cannot be located merely in the constitution of the object-world that is being depicted, as in the sciences. Rather, it can also be found in the modes of comportment of the human subject that make access to the important and enduring aspects of such a reality possible. It therefore is located in the objective material of nature and society, whether and to what extent a dominant significance is assigned to their scientific reflection (to the homogenous medium of mathematics, for instance). Again, the attitude of the subject, his comportment towards the world and the issues of reflection and composition, primarily decides whether a certain process in society is to be shaped in an epic or dramatic way. The fact that behind

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such a subjective comportment, such a subjective ‘decision’, there always stand objective socio-historical forces – thus the fact that this subjectivity may seem almost to be a mere bottleneck of objective necessity – has already been frequently suggested; this whole set of issues can only be dealt with concretely in the historical materialism part of this work. In this view, the homogeneous medium now appears for the time being as a constricting of the apperception of the world, as the reduction of its elements and its forms of objectivity and relationship to that which is perceptible from the position of such a comportment, in fact not only in relation to what is being taken in and presented but also in relation to how it is being made to appear. Looked at in terms of form, a subjective capriciousness seems to prevail here, namely in terms of what such a comportment is and which homogeneous medium accordingly comes into being. However, it must be remembered that a reflection of reality that is meaningful for mankind is not possible at all if it is made out of any random attitude and a homogeneous medium that is – allegedly – in keeping with this attitude. It is indeed historically well-known that, of the senses, it is only able to develop sight and hearing. ‘Symphonies of smells’, etc. remain an empty frivolity. These basic facts already show that the restriction (highlighted a moment ago) to that which is immediately incorporable into the homogeneous medium is only seemingly just immediate. A homogeneous medium in the sense of aesthetics can only be formed if the initial constricting of the reflection of reality and that which is perceptible by means of this specific sense only provide a means for depicting and symbolically keeping hold of an aspect of the world that is specific and total at the same time in the new manner thus originated. Therefore, when the original constricting of the perceptible to that which is possible in the homogeneous medium at the time is not a ‘reculer pour mieux sauter’ in the sense of the aesthetic conception of the world, there cannot be any talk at all of a homogeneous medium. That is why the homogenous medium is a merely formal principle only in its first immediacy. Apart from the theory of music, for which such a thought was already obvious because nothing in the reality of nature and society immediately corresponds to its medium of world-creation, whereas the reflective character of the visual arts and of verbal art appeared evident from the beginning, it was Konrad Fiedler who with the greatest emphasis urged the recognition of such a world proper to visuality from which everything that is not immediately visible was to be removed with methodological purity and consistency. In other contexts, we have already pointed out the contradictions that follow from this position and shown that, carried through to the end, it impoverishes (not enriches) the visuality of everyday life and for this reason the great achievements of the everyday praxis of labour, like the division of labour of the senses

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and thereby an extensive propagation and intensive refinement of visuality, are dogmatically discarded. It is therefore no accident that some of Fiedler’s lines of thought lead him to behold only a specific variety of knowledge within the whole of artistic activity. He thereby rejects the aesthetic effect, which can ‘just as well come from a product of nature’, and comes to determine ‘that art is nothing more than a language by means of which certain things are brought into the sphere of human cognitive consciousness. If one regards the knowledge of a certain category of things as the aim of art, then one must also treat its effects as equal with those of knowledge in general. All the effects of art as such may be deduced only from knowledge; because when, for example, a work of visual art has an aesthetic effect, it does not have this effect as a work of art’.14 In its principles, the orientation of so-called interpretation in the theory and history of literature that has arisen in recent decades is not as radically paradoxical as Fielder and his followers (for instance, the sculptor Hildebrand). Biographical facts from the lives of the authors, etc. are incorporated into the immanent interpretation of individual works of writing in order to lead analysis beyond immediate first impressions. A certain amount of progress (admittedly of a highly relative sort) is thus in place in comparison to Fiedler’s dogmatic narrowness. Relativity is also expressed in the philosophical statement of grounds. Whereas Fiedler takes an orthodox neo-Kantian point of view and hence is compelled to deny the objectivity of the outside world and the artistic authorisation of its reflection, this orientation was very essentially influenced by the existentialism of Heidegger, who even published studies of this sort. All of this entails that here too the essential abundance and the lawful relationships both of the real original and its artistic depiction, the social foundation of the work, its artistic synthesis of the determinations operative in it, and the social character of effect are neutralised as a matter of principle. This entails that analysis, the subjective intention of which is directed at comprehending categories of form, in fact heedlessly disregards the decisive questions of literary forming.15 At the level of theory, the issue of the function of the homogeneous medium in the aesthetic must above all avoid that formalistic narrowness that necessarily came to the fore in the orientations dealt with just now. However, it would be just as misleading if a person now were similarly to put too much strain on the priority of content (a priority that has also been properly recognised by us as 14 15

Fiedler 1914, p. 45. Cf. Cases 1955 and the outstanding study in Lifshitz 1957. To be sure, the latter essay does not directly examine this school, although its analyses contain a profound critique of its principles and praxis.

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fundamental) and in this way fall into the absurd, as we could observe occurring just now in the case of the formal side of the issue. This has happened repeatedly and even happens today when the principle of that which relates to content is raised into the sole criterion and only an accessory role is attributed to artistic shaping, only a role of the more or less eloquent expression of something that already exists readymade in the content itself, independent of the success or failure of the form. Needless to say, only extremely rarely is this viewpoint consistently formulated (for instance, by Upton Sinclair), but if one thinks the pseudo-theoretical ramblings of such explanations through to the end and conceptualises them, then something quite similar comes to light. However, the tertium datur that must be expressed with respect to both of these false extremes must not be an eclectic ‘midpoint’; instead, the dialectical unity of content and form (while maintaining the priority of content in the determination of form as the form of a concrete content, while recognising it as the immediate bearer of aesthetic evocation, etc.) is to be held on to and conceptually formulated in all of its intricacy. Now if from time to time this is possible in our analytical exposition only indirectly through the – methodologically – separate components of content and form, then this does not mean the least concession to the eclecticism of a non-existent ‘midpoint’ here that we discarded just now, because in each distinct consideration these dialectical interlacements are immanently kept in mind. In the case of certain aspects of the homogeneous medium – be it rudimentary, be it convoluted – the dialectic of form and content comes to the surface in such an evident way that one can often have a hard time distinguishing between whether one has to do with a problem of form or one of content. Likewise the question, which certainly has a preliminary function to fulfil in this matter, regarding which function the homogeneous medium possesses in the process of the approximation of aesthetic comportment to objective reality. The attitude of the whole man to the entire reality encompassing him in everyday life, his reception of its impulses, and his activity transforming it have – despite a great range of differences in various modes of comportment, situations, etc. – the common trait of a practical attention to individual objects that under certain circumstances are observed with the utmost acuity and precision, although their relationships fall into the circle of perception only to the extent that certain of their features are germane, positively or negatively, to the set goal. This of course relates not only to sense impressions and representations, but also to the thoughts that spring from them and guide praxis or flow from it. The limit that is erected here between perception and the objective being of that which is perceived (a limit that is ever being moved – albeit unevenly – in the course of development) is indissoluble as a matter of prin-

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ciple due to the relation between reality and consciousness. Even when scientific reflection evolves out of everyday praxis (out of labour, above all) and attains the highest degree of differentiatedness, such a limit still remains erected for knowledge in many modified ways. Lenin gives an accurate image of this issue, which we have already quoted in other contexts and from which we now highlight the essential point, namely the fact that the depiction amounts to a coarsening, in fact not only a coarsening by means of thinking but also by means of feeling. According to Lenin, it is exactly the highest form of scientific thinking (the dialectic) that provides the way out for science, the possibility of an increased approximation to reality. Dialectical thinking precisely has the task of surmounting those obstacles in the cognitive approximation to reality that are brought forth by thinking itself. In a presentation of Zeno’s philosophy that Lenin approvingly quotes immediately before the sentences cited by us earlier, Hegel says, ‘for what makes the difficulty is always thought alone, since it keeps apart the moments of an object which in their separation are really united. It brought about the Fall, for man ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; but it also remedies these evils’.16 That is why, in continuing his thought, Lenin regards ‘unity, identity of opposites’ as the essence of the dialectic, as the way out of this dilemma.17 All of this is quite instructive for the issue of the approximation of aesthetic reflection to reality. What is to be especially highlighted in this regard is the fact that the judgement about the ‘coarsening’ or ‘mortifying’ of movement, for example, is expressed not only for thinking but also explicitly for sensation. From the viewpoint of our issue, this is already important because in more recent times voices have repeatedly become clamorous in relation to aesthetics (and of course to philosophy in general as well) that appeal to the subtlety, correctness, suppleness, etc. of sensations, feelings, and instincts vis-à-vis mechanical, coarsened thinking. By way of contrast, it seems to us important to stress that – in themselves – sensations ‘mortify’ the real animatedness of the outside world that is being reflected just as much as thinking does. Now what sets in for art here is the specific significance of the homogeneous medium. We have already discussed the initial moment of constriction. Needless to say, this is a comportment that, generally regarded, is also to be found in everyday life, in the praxis of which it often receives a considerable role. We frequently say, ‘I’m all eyes’ or ‘I’m all ears’ and thereby mean a temporary focus of the whole man on the reception of those impressions, signals,

16 17

Hegel 1995b, p. 274. Lenin 1972b, p. 258. [Eds.]

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signs, etc. that he can only receive through the mediation of a specific sense. There is no doubt that such a purposeful constriction, such a neutralisation of everything heterogeneous, particularly when it is practiced in a systematic way, can heighten the receptivity of the sense concerned to an extraordinary degree, that objects become visually detectable and sounds become audible that man would otherwise heedlessly disregard. In this way, therefore, the constriction of consciousness can call forth a reflection of reality that is superior to those in which man turns to the outside world with the whole surface of his receptivity as it were. So clearly does the way that focus facilitates reflection come to the fore here that what is more important for us now are the differences from what we call the homogeneous medium. First, in the everyday it is a question of a condition that is temporary as a matter of principle. Because once a man has examined the signal that is thus spotted, he turns again to reality as a whole man. Second, and in close connection with this, the focus is determined by a certain concrete, practical goal. The object that is to be comprehended in this way – for example, the trace that is thus noticed, the noise from far away thus heard – ceases to be an object of a sense for those concerned as soon as its existence, its motion, etc. is discerned by means of the focus on this sense. When the hunter puts his ear to the earth in order to hear the approach of a herd, for instance, the sense of sight immediately displaces the leading role of hearing after he becomes conscious of the circumstances. Third, the focus on a pure and differentiated reception is likewise immediately displaced by a purposeful action of the whole man. By contrast, if a homogeneous medium in the sense of aesthetics is to come into being, then on the one hand a certain relative permanence of human comportment is indispensable, and on the other hand a temporary suspension of any immediately practical objective must take place. The latter aspect is seemingly only quantitatively differentiated from the facts of everyday life described a moment ago, in which it is quite possible in extreme cases that such an act of observing as the one indicated by us lasts longer than, say, the designing of an artistic sketch. The average existing quantitative difference, however, is only the mode of appearance of a qualitative difference here. This qualitative difference is located in the manner in which an immediate practical purpose is suspended. Kant formulates the problem contained therein perhaps most sharply, at any rate most influentially, in his famous expositions of the ‘disinterestedness’ of aesthetic comportment, though he muddles the issue in it as well. Because – as often tends to happen – in the course of development the idealist distortion was raised far beyond the original presentation by successors and interpreters. What came into being for art was the postulate (shielded by Kant’s authority) of an absolute disinterestedness; aesthetics was committed completely to pure

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contemplation. And, in the understandable opposition against this, what was relatively legitimate in disinterestedness as an aspect in the overall aesthetic process was – very much to the detriment of understanding what is actually artistic in art – now simply eliminated in various schools of thought, from vulgarly tendential art and the so-called “littérature engagée” to the point of view of many theorists of socialist partisanship. If one wants to arrive at a correct view of the real situation of the problem, then – independent of Kant’s formulation of the question and answer for the time being – the suspension of immediately practical objectives has to be regarded as an aspect of the reflection of objective reality and its utilisation in human praxis. What obtains in this regard is a certain not incorrect and accidental similarity between scientific and aesthetic reflection. Both set themselves apart from everyday thinking and praxis precisely because such a suspension emerges as an indispensable precondition for that differentiated – and therefore effective – reflection of reality. Both take this suspension, in keeping with their specific objectives and therefore in correspondingly different ways, as the basis of their own comportment. It cannot of course be our task here to deal with this question in relation to the scientific in detail. However, already the most fleeting glance must show that, on the one hand, the formation and development of science is ultimately conditioned by practical objectives, that even the most abstract scientific truth that is seemingly most remote from life sooner or later, directly or indirectly, issues into social praxis. On the other hand, though, any scientific labour peremptorily stipulates a kind of suspension of the objective underlying it, perhaps even the objective that immediately sets it in motion. Circumventing this act of suspension during the resolution of the problems that are raised by the reflection of reality distances thinking from the essence of reality and disturbs its approach to it. As much as the pathos of the objective can lead to the posing of greater unsolved questions and to their bold and correct answers, it must nevertheless lead to a restraint on (indeed, to a total prevention of) the fulfilment of the goal when the intermediary stage of suspension is prematurely interrupted. The focus on objective factuality connects this suspension to the suspension from everyday life portrayed earlier. Here, however, it is not a case of a determinate individual factum being perceived in order to draw an instantaneously practical conclusion from its presence or nonpresence for a certain individual action, but instead what is being examined is a complex of a – relative – totality of facts not just for their being or non-being but rather for their relationality, lawfulness, etc. (even in those cases where, for example, a philologist or historian wants to ascertain the reality of an isolated fact, he has this fact by means of its relationships with other interests for him), and so the conclusions resulting from the discovery of the truth do not

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just relate to the individual case but instead lay claim to a – yet again, relative – universality: in this way a qualitative difference comes into being between both suspensions of praxis. What persists in these single most general features is a sweeping parallelism between scientific and artistic reflection, the foundation of which, as has often been emphasised, is constituted by the fact that they reflect the same reality. The disparity becomes apparent in the same two points in which the scientific reflection sets itself apart from that of everyday life. Thus, first in the fact that the object of perception for and especially by means of aesthetic reflection must possess a totalising character in a qualitatively different way than in scientific reflection. As we have seen, in the case of the latter this is invariably a matter of a complex of facts, relationalities, and regularities. However, since objectively this complex always only constitutes a part of more expansive and intricate relationalities, etc., since scientific reflection invariably strives to transform the pure in-itself of objective reality into a for-us that is as unadulterated as possible, attention that is directed at the part in question must never completely tear apart and thereby violate the real, objectively existing factual relationships. The self-containedness that is offered for scientific reflection in each likeness of reality is therefore relative as a matter of principle, is merely delimited from its surrounding world in a provisional, methodological way. For the unity of objective reality, based on the unity of matter, must underlie any scientific reflection (regardless of whether the subject carrying out the scientific reflection is personally a materialist or an idealist); among other things, its disanthropomorphising tendency, which was portrayed by us at length earlier, also has the function of abolishing those separations or delimitations that do not derive from the in-itself but rather from the mode of comportment of human subjectivity. To be sure, this objective linkedness of everything with everything is also binding for aesthetic reflection when it comes to the constitution of its object. But, as we know, this is not simply the being-in-itself of the world but rather that of the world of man (of course, in its objectivity independent of consciousness), of a world in which the traces of human activity appear objectivated, turned into objects, albeit in such a way that their objectivity is related back to man without becoming abolished. By means of this dual determinacy, the issue of the contemplation of the world, from which both objectivity and the beingrelated-back-to-man can first become perceptible, has to bring about likenesses of the world in which the outside world also tendentially makes an appearance not only in its purely objective wholeness but also in this relationship; hence likenesses, each of which can and must exist for themselves, that do not require or brook any supplementation by others. The guarantee for this is that such an

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isolatedness of individual reflections of reality, which does not destroy their objectivity but on the contrary expresses it in a heightened way, is situated in the fact that each work of art makes the determinations that are decisive for the shaped aspect of the world into the foundation of the intensive totality being depicted. Each work of art thus turns into the likeness of the whole world, seen from an important human point of view. The totality of the work of art and the determinations underlying it are therefore primarily not a matter of form but rather of content; this can only attain an objectivity, however, if it becomes aesthetic, that is to say if it enters completely into the world of forms evoking it (otherwise it remains a leftover and more or less arbitrarily chosen extract of reality). Lessing has incisively portrayed this translation of the extensive and intensive endlessness of the objective world into the intensive totality of works of art in relation to the course of the world and tragedy: ‘That really occurred? Granted; then it has its good reason in the eternal and infinite connexion of all things. In this connexion all is wisdom and goodness which appears to us [as] blind fate and cruelty in the few links picked out by the poet. Out of these few links he ought to make a whole, rounded in itself, that is fully explained out of itself, where no difficulty arises, a solution of which is not found in his plan and which we are therefore forced to seek outside of it in the general plan of things. The whole of this earthly creator should be a mere outline of the whole of the eternal Creator …’18 As radically as the distinction between scientific and artistic reflection comes to the fore here, it remains clear that, in relation to the suspension of any objective that is immediately linked to a factum of human life, they stand on a similar ground, that both set themselves qualitatively apart in a similar fashion from corresponding modes of comportment in everyday praxis. Things are constituted similarly around the second viewpoint that is essential in this issue: the universality achieved by means of the suspension of an immediate objective. Needless to say, this universality is qualitatively distinct in both differentiated modes of reflection. We have just this moment expounded how this stands in science: the suspension of an immediate practical objective enables – sooner or later, directly or indirectly – a vastly superior realisation of vastly more general practical tasks. The suspension of immediate interest in aesthetic positing also flows into the practical life of the human everyday. In sharp contrast to scientific reflection, however, only by way of exception does an immediate promotion or obstruction of certain individual practical tasks come into being here. Even in those places where works of art have played an important role

18

Lessing 1889, p. 423.

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of this sort in social life – it suffices to recall ‘Le Marseillaise’ or Beecher Stowe’s novel – a closer consideration at once indicates the specificity of their effect: they call forth passions in people and give these passions determinate contents, determinate directions, etc. whereby people then become capable of intervening practically into social life, of struggling for or against certain social facts. Admittedly, it is a borderline case – one that is extremely important both in terms of theory and practice – when these facts are made directly knowable as such in works of art. But even in those places where this comes to pass, the artistic effect goes far beyond the scope of the individual case: Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not call for help for the slaves portrayed there, slaves who in such a being-just-so indeed probably did not exist at all and in any case were not approachable at all in a practical way for the reader moved by the evocation of the work. Instead, it awakens feelings and passions to fight for the emancipation of all slaves (of all who are oppressed in terms of class). What thus comes into being is a human willingness that must discover concrete means, etc. in life itself (perhaps even in science) if it is to be realised in practice, if it is actually to turn into deed. Such a directed generalisation is already given in music by its essence as a form of art. (Later we will talk about the reasons for why the determinations of aesthetic reflection appear in their purest and most universal form here.) In any case, what is also apparent here is the fact that the generalisation of objectives that come into being as a result of the suspension of immediate practical interest in the aesthetic does not have reality in itself for its object but rather the human world, the world as it objectively exists in relation to man. This is also the case even if in its subjectively conscious intention the work of art is aimed at the defence or destruction of something determinate in the world of man. However, this is not the case in the overwhelming majority of aesthetic constructs. From this it follows that their relationship to disinterestedness comes by a doubly false assessment. On the one hand, frequently in direct connection with Kant, any distancing of oneself from disinterestedness was assessed as a break with the principle of the aesthetic; on the other hand, as was already shown, an opposing false pole of views came into being that beheld a social authorisation for art in general exclusively in the immediate social praxis directly triggered by the work of art. The falseness of both extremes is readily apparent. Both conceptions overlook the fact that each work of art ascends from the meaningful social experiences of people, reflects and works on these experiences, in fact in such a way that, as was already shown, the grasping of any object is already inseparably linked to its affirmation or negation. Of course, this bears upon the work as a whole to an even greater extent. Therefore, when the work exerts an evocative effect, this partisanship must be awakened

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along with it – remaining conscious or unconscious, directly or perhaps in a very widely mediated way. The real strength and profundity of artistic evocation, however, is directed above all at the human interior; that is to say, what are roused in him above all are new lived experiences that spread out and deepen his image of himself and of the world with which he – in the broadest sense of the word – has to do. Ever since the catharsis of antiquity, this effect of art has been recognised by the healthy social feeling of people. Catharsis in the narrower sense of the word admittedly only denotes a certain kind of these effects that certain works of art carry; its real room for manoeuvre is incomparably vaster and extraordinarily varied, depending on the socio-historical conditions and the art forms. The essential common feature, however, is the fact that this kind of aesthetic effect belongs to the afterwards of what is actually artistic. Borderline cases, like the aforementioned ‘Le Marseillaise’, where the overturning of the enjoyment of art into the socio-ethical afterwards takes place at once, cannot change this basic character. On the one hand, this entails the insight that, contrary to both of the extremes mentioned above – and presupposing that we have to do with actual works of art – there can be no art the lived experience of which could persevere in an actually disinterested contemplation. On the other hand – again, presupposing that we have to do with actual works of art – entailed here as well are those works immediately directed at a material alteration of a concrete social state of affairs and whose pathos alights from rising above this individual case as aesthetic constructs and evoking further and deeper things connected with the development of mankind and the essence of the human species than was contained in their immediate, directly pronounced objectives. When this trait is missing in them, they then swiftly vanish from the memory of mankind. (Be mindful of the tendential dramas of Dumas fils, Augier, Sardou, etc., which were once quite successful but are now absolutely forgotten.) The view put forward here – that so-called disinterestedness constitutes a mere aspect (albeit an indispensable one) of the aesthetic, that it is not a question of disinterestedness as the essence of aesthetic comportment but rather just of a necessary but still only temporary suspension of immediate human objectives – is not as diametrically opposed to the real intention of Kantian aesthetics as seems likely at first glance. True, Kant pushes this concept too far because, as a subjective idealist, he wants to eliminate the real, whole, active, material man from the realm of philosophy. It is precisely by this means that the aesthetic is to come by a philosophical grandeur that separates it in a metaphysically abrupt way, without dialectical transitions, from all manifestations of life in the everyday.19 At the same time, however, as something all too mundane and 19

Kant 2000, pp. 91–2.

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material with respect to the ethical, the aesthetic is to occupy the humble rank befitting it in the hierarchy of the system.20 The intermediary position that aesthetic disinterestedness occupies in Kant’s system (above the lowly interests of the everyday but below those of ethics, which alone are worthy of man) is a rigid hierarchically determined place. At the same time, no mediating link of a dialectical movement is countenanced. Schiller was the first to try to break up this rigidity into dialectical movement. Only in relation to nature does there exist in the works of Kant an attempt to dialectically restore the aesthetic back into human life and connect it to the highest interests of mankind. Thus, in relation to the lived experience of nature, Kant says, ‘not only the form of its product but also its existence pleases him, even though no sensory charm has a part in this and he does not combine any sort of end with it’.21 It would not be uninteresting to go more closely into Kant’s almost Rousseauian distrust of art. It certainly springs from the class conflicts of the eighteenth century, from the negation of feudal absolutist culture that adopted a particular form as a result of the inferiority and sordidness of their German mode of appearance and the powerlessness of the German bourgeoisie. We will grapple with the concrete philosophical consequences of this assumption of the ‘intellectual interest in beauty’ at length in the chapter on natural beauty.22 This aspect of Kant’s aesthetics – from his point of view, a supremely important one – already had to be mentioned here because, inadvertently, a self-sublation of mere disinterestedness is posited in it, since what it is aimed at is a universal (for Kant, a moral) praxis transformed by means of its suspension. In a far too specified manner, at that. When Lessing, for instance, interprets Aristotelian catharsis in such a way that ‘this purification rests in nothing else than in the transformation of passions into virtuous habits’, then indeed he too constricts the issue to the purely moral, though in his posing of the question he is far more universal than Kant.23 Our observations up to now provisionally demonstrate two modes of comportment that are closely linked to each other, namely a constricting of the directedness towards the outside world (its contracting to what can be experienced through one of the senses or, at the very least, to what is perceptible from a precisely determined aspect) and, on the other hand, the suspension of immediate practical objectives. Together, both cooperate to make the perception of objects ascertainable in a way that would be unachievable for the normal whole man of the everyday. The homogeneous medium owes its pos20 21 22 23

Kant 2000, pp. 92–4. Kant 2000, p. 179. Kant 2000, p. 178. [Eds.] Lessing 1889, p. 421.

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sibility to this kind of comportment. However, if it is to come to a fruitful actualisation, the constriction must morph into a merely preliminary act, it must let the whole man have a chance to have his say, though in an essentially modified form with respect to the everyday. We have to do here with the aesthetic reflection of reality. (We have already discussed in detail the specificity of this conversion of comportment in scientific reflection.) Both the what and the how of what is perceived, and all the more of what is shaped, are inextricably attached to the subject bringing forth the work here. The authenticity of aesthetic objectivity is a direct function of its breadth and depth. If in the course of these observations we have also criticised a few theorists who championed the decisive importance of the homogeneous medium for any art, then we do so primarily because they constricted its constitution and sphere of activity in inadmissible ways, because they – Fiedler especially – frequently render perennial the act of the outcome (the contracting and concentration of the registration of the world) and reduce the whole issue of the homogeneous medium to this act. If a division of labour of the senses already comes into being in everyday praxis so that we visually perceive in a spontaneous and completely self-evident way the characteristics of things that were originally sensed through touch, and if the observation of scientific activity compels us to acknowledge, for example, that imagination often plays a considerable role even in the disanthropomorphising reflection of reality, then how could we, in the aesthetic, stop at the mere act of reducing attention to the homogeneous medium? On the contrary, everything we have expounded up to now has clearly and unequivocally shown that it is a feature of the aesthetic that the being-just-so of the whole man at the time – from that which is purely peculiar to him individually all the way up to his participation in the constitution of the human (with all of the necessary determinations in between) – is of decisive importance for the content and form of its constructs. In fact, not merely in a genetic regard, as in the everyday or in science, where, for example, very often the thing that requires a tremendous amount of imagination to come into being no longer needs this imagination in its theoretical reproduction and practical use and turns into a normal useful component of the theoretical or practical sphere. By contrast, in the aesthetic the impulses of the creative whole man pass over into the work of art and turn into its objective elements of construction, into determinations of the what and the how of its objectivity so that no effect whatsoever (no reception whatsoever) is possible without a reproduction of the totality of such impulses that are rounded off into a whole, into a unity in the work. Therefore, as the whole man puts himself in the homogeneous medium of his art form, his abundance of determinations and tendencies

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is not lost. It merely receives a new shape in the focus on the coming into being and preserving of the homogeneous medium, in its expansion into a bearer of a ‘world’, into an organon of the aesthetic reflection of reality. We have also already talked about this in other contexts; in contrast to the whole man of the everyday, we spoke of the ‘man-made-whole’ in the creative and receptive relation to art. Only by means of the latter can the homogeneous medium fulfil its aesthetic function. As ever, when something reaches an actual and lasting significance in the aesthetic sphere, it is also a question here of a further development by means of the transpositions of tendencies of everyday praxis that have been around and effective for a long time. The division of labour among the senses in labour was already repeatedly pointed out, as was the fact that it is indispensable for the dealings of people among each other that purely visual or auditory impressions figure as signals for human interiority and are spontaneously deciphered as such in a more or less accurate way on a continuous basis. It also goes without saying and already clearly comes to the fore in the incipient art of the magical period that exclamations, gestures, etc. are spontaneously apperceived and interpreted as bearers of psychological contents. Indeed, these first attempts at the aesthetic reflection of reality already show, for instance, that the cohering and unifying power of rhythm is capable of bringing forth intensifications and enhancements in the homogeneous medium that usually remain unobtainable for the gestural language of the everyday. We say ‘usually’ because it can of course occur time and again by way of exception that life also produces such upward movements of gestures that trigger emotions, even though in the process what must be missing is the principle of rhythm that aims at culmination (the principle of rhythm that arranges, homogenises, and thereby adjusts the contrasts to each other at the same time), even though the aesthetic systematisation of the emotions that spontaneously come into being as self-expression can only have a contingent character. The transitional forms of the magical period in which the aesthetic has not yet developed into autonomy also show that the homogeneous medium comes into existence in or stays away from the same areas depending on whether the conditions of emergence growing out of magic act for or against it. Think of the orgiastic ecstasy already discussed by us, in which the homogeneous medium of dance is not subjectively intended and is therefore objectively achieved only in an accidental way, or think of the so-called Venus figurines of the Paleolithic era, in which the sexual organs completely dominate and where no homogeneous medium of sculptural visuality is aimed at or achieved but rather motives that are completely independent of this determine the ‘composition’ of the figurines. (It is of course possible that in more developed stages similar motives are realised with artistic means in an

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idiosyncratically visual homogeneous medium, but that no longer has anything to do with the problem touched upon here.) The immediate source of the pouring of all the capacities and quirks that constitute the whole man in his other life into the homogeneous medium of an art form springs from its dual constitution. That is to say, at one and the same time and in an inseparable way, it is on the one hand highly personal, all the way down to that which is subjectively peculiar, and on the other a system of the autochthonous, supra-individual lawful regularities of the art form concerned must be complied with if the aesthetic positing is not to founder completely. The inseparability being emphasised here cannot be conceived of strongly or intimately enough. It is invariably a question of one and the same unitary act. As a matter of principle, it is not possible to posit the homogeneous medium of some sort of art form, to move freely and fruitfully in it, if this positing or movement is not personal in character through and through, if all of the aspects do not bear in themselves the unmistakable stamp of the positing individuality. But it is just as impossible to express the creative personality in the homogeneous medium of an art form if its being-actuated does not immediately and evocatively coincide with the fulfilment of laws that the homogeneous medium imperatively stipulates. Two features of the aesthetic can once more be palpably apprehended here. For the necessity of this absolute convergence points anew to the fact that aesthetic laws can be fulfilled only by means of their expansion. A law whose continuance is based purely on objective relationships is arrived at, approximated, missed, etc. This occurs in subjective acts, the bearer of which is the whole man, though the decision (both in the positive and the negative sense) is only related to him genetically, not materially. By contrast, if the objective fulfilment itself is bound to the personality, if the essence of the whole man is not effaced in it, then no fulfilment of the others can be the same, each must have such a personal character, not only in an empirically factual way but also in a value-determining one. Now, if neither an utter nihilism is to come into being by means of this boundedness of the artistic principle to the individuality embodied in the work nor the anarchy of a criterionless equality of any random expression of personality, then the fulfilment of the postulates of the art form at the time – and in them, of art in general – must be secured in theoretical terms as the measure or principle of aesthetic hierarchy. But then the measure of achievement or failure can only be sought and found in whether and to what extent such an emanation of a personality embodied in the work enhances these postulates or cuts them down, deepens or flattens them out, broadens or constricts them, etc. The necessity of such a conception that puts the laws of an art form (and in them, those of art in general) in touch with the expression of the creative personality

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has a wide variety of roots. It becomes apparent here from the aspect indicated a moment ago; however, its strongest basis is the fundamental mimetic character of any art. Even the laws of the art form (and this art form itself) would fall prey to an unbounded capriciousness if they were not necessary mediations for apprehending the world of mankind from a determinate standpoint essential for this in the most adequate way possible. And this basis instantly loses its abstractness (and the remainders of a dogmatic capriciousness that it still bears within itself in a merely abstract version) when its historicity is thought of, namely the fact that any concretisation of the homogeneous medium actualises and makes come alive not only the individuality of the creator but also uno actu the given stage of the historical development of mankind (and the viewpoint of a class, nation, etc. in this) as well as that outlook being objectivated in the laws of the art form concerned. This artwork is qualified from this perspective to illuminate certain aspects of reality in relation to man and the development of the human species in a more complete and profound way than the whole man is capable of in his everyday thinking. These observations guide us to envisage the relation of the whole man to the ‘man-made-whole’ in a more precise way. First of all, it should be said that at the same time it is not a question of a turn inward, not a one-sided intensification of interiority, not even in the case of a genre like lyric, as is so readily asserted in modern theories. Permit us to recall our earlier expositions about externalisation and its being taken back into the subject. There it was shown that in art – just as in life – an abundance and depth of subjectivity is only achievable via the conquest of the outside world. And even the most inward lyric, one that – directly – expresses only mental states, could not possibly be crystallised into form without dependence on a reflection of the outside world, without conjuring up its likeness, even if only as an occasion or as a distant horizon (from time to time an abstractly vanishing one). The term ‘introversion’ borrowed from psychopathology is misleading not just for the general reason that one can make the sick man rationally comprehensible – even for the purpose and field of the aesthetic – only from understanding the normal (and not vice versa) but also because of the concrete structure of the aesthetic. Even when the lyrical subject seems to be haughtily autotelic, even when it thinks it eliminates the outside world expressly in words or by means of the tacitly scornful language of its images and only recognises its own most sovereign interiority as true and authentic, this is nevertheless always just a surface, admittedly not an unessential one. What is contained in the meaningful content, in the essence, and therefore also in the form of the seeming is a profound and intimate – admittedly often negative – relationship to the outside world, even to the actual outside social world of one’s own time, to its past and future, though very

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often it is not openly expressed. Only such a supremely intensive abundance of relationships is able to invest the lyric poem with vividness and profundity. By contrast, real introversion, as it comes to the fore in the case of the mentally ill, is a distortion of a personality that actually cuts in two the threads of connection between the self and its surrounding world – and not just in a polemical, utopian, etc. way, as in ‘introverted’ lyric – and leads interior life into complete desolation and depletion. The specificity of the lyrical reflection of reality, the specific active role – in comparison to epic and above all drama – that the self (reflecting the outside world) plays in it would of course have to be analysed with precision and conceptualised. Since this is not the place to exhaustively deal with this theme, even in just a preliminary way, allow me first of all to quote a stanza by T.S. Eliot, who certainly ranks among those under whose aegis the reflective character of the lyric is gainsaid, in order to show that even that which is innermost is shapeable only by means of the reflection of the outside world. This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man’s hand Under the twinkle of a fading star.24 Secondly, I take the liberty of a brief theoretical illustration of the situation (of the orientation) in the formulation of the question and its answer in order to quote here the closing sentences of a likewise admittedly cursory attempt to formulate the essence of reflection in lyric poetry: what is specific to the lyric form consists in the fact that in it the process of reflection ‘also artistically appears as process; the reality being shaped develops before us in statu nascendi, as it were, whereas the forms of epic and drama – also on the basis of the efficacy of the subjective dialectic – merely present the objective dialectic of appearance and essence in the literarily reflected reality. What in epic and drama is developed in its objective dialectical animatedness as natura naturata is born before us as natura naturans in the lyric’.25 With that said, however, only a negative distinction is achieved, albeit an admittedly important one. For, as a representative of the whole man and as the basis for his transformation into the ‘man-made-whole’ of the aesthetic

24 25

Eliot 1980, p. 57. [Eds.: Lukács quotes these lines in English but does not cite them.] Lukács 1956a, p. 231.

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sphere, the rejection carried out here of pure interiority that has withdrawn into itself also points the way ahead in its negativity insofar as it once again makes connectedness to the world (rootedness in the world) the precondition for the world-creation of art. That is to say, the fashionable glorifications of introversion overlook the fact that the very thing for which they are striving (the intensification of human interiority) constitutes nothing less than the diametrical antithesis of real, pathological introversion. The point of confusion resides in the fact that an opposition to certain social tendencies of developed capitalism objectively underlie these modern tendencies. This turn inward is hence the expression of the rejection of concrete social constellations or facts, even if these are mystified in subjective consciousness into an eternal human relation between inwardness and the outside world. And the true artistic intensity of expression (the aesthetic embodiment of a genuine interiority) can only come into being when this relationship to the world of objectivity becomes experienceable in the work – be it with a false consciousness – a relationship that the turn inward somehow triggers, always with the pathos of rejection. It is precisely here that Franz Kafka’s superiority to his contemporary competitors has its basis.26 In such cases, therefore, as the fundamental feature of artistic subjectivity in general, interiority no longer relates to the aesthetically misleading non-concept of introversion. Now if the real metamorphosis of the whole man into the “man-madewhole” and its fruitful relationship to the homogeneous medium of art forms is to be grasped, then we must return for a moment to those facts of everyday life from which our observations are proceeding and envisage somewhat more closely both their similarities and differences with respect to the situation in the aesthetic. We have seen that there the narrowing of consciousness to the visual and auditory observing of a certain phenomenon was connected to a strong concentration. All the characteristics of the man concerned, all of his perceptions and knowledge up to that point, appear massed together in this act so that not only the phenomenon drawn into this pool of light will be apprehended in its current being-just-so in as exact a way as possible, but also at the same time it can be classified in the system of meaningful experiences of this man as well. Undoubtedly, the initiation of such acts is not unlike the comportment being investigated by us now, especially the focus on and subordination of all the possibilities of human relation according to this, as it were, one-track attention. An even more important difference is that in the everyday, with the apprehending of the sought-after phenomenon, the normal structure

26

Lukács 1969, pp. 43 ff. and 77 ff.

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of the whole man is in play. Whereas from the outset the positing of the homogeneous medium in the aesthetic is, on the one hand, not just directed at a determinate object isolated by means of its determinacy; in comparison to the everyday average, the essentially intensified perception of singularities never congeals into an isolation of phenomena. On the contrary, the detail gains its distinctiveness and significance precisely from its place in a tendentially allsided relationship. On the other hand, this act of contraction and focus is a perennial one. Or rather precisely that mode of comportment that springs from the integration of all the capacities, sensations, knowledge, meaningful experiences, etc. into the focus on the homogeneous medium of an art form at the time is what appertains to the man-made-whole. Therefore, whereas in everyday life the whole man by tendency preserves his unity and wholeness, even if he uses (or holds in reserve) his own powers in the most disparate ways according to the most disparate tasks of life, the man-made-whole is always only ever realised in relation to the homogeneous medium of a particular art form. The authorisation for such a comportment is based on the fact that with its help the same reality with which man has to grapple in all of his manifestations of life is ultimately reflected for the sake of this frequently differentiated overall praxis, although by means of the shift to this kind of comportment towards the world new, important traits and relationships enter into the reflection of reality that would otherwise have remained unachievable for the whole man of the everyday. This fruitfulness of the homogeneous medium, mediated by the man-madewhole at which it is directed, becomes apparent in a series of moving contradictions that constitute the productive relation between subject and object here. The first set of contradictions is already familiar to us, it just appears in a more concrete shape now than before. Each homogeneous medium arises from the need people have to catch hold of the world that is objectively given for them from a certain essential point of view (the world that at the same time is the world of their joys and sorrows but above all the world of their activity, of the building up of their own interior life and its coming to terms with reality) in a closer and more concrete way, in a deeper and more intensive way, in a more comprehensive and detailed way than is possible for everyday life, and to approach it from a set of problems that the disanthropomorphising reflection must necessarily disregard methodologically. Needless to say, this determination outlines the condition of an already accomplished differentiation of human modes of comportment towards the reality facing them in common. However, since we have already portrayed the spontaneous tendencies that in the period of undifferentiated magical unity pressed for aesthetic positing, and since the historical relationship of art to religion is discussed in

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its own chapter, it is not necessary here to further differentiate this situation in terms of history. What is decisive from this new focus points towards the great historical stability of these modes of comportment and of the homogeneous media that came into being in their wake. Of course, Rimbaud’s lyric poetry differs qualitatively from that of Sappho, the pictorial in the works of Cézanne from that of Chinese landscapes, etc. Nevertheless, any unbiased view that has not been misled by an exaggerated historicism will spontaneously notice this universal common ground of the homogeneous medium at the time and its laws. (The fact that historical development brings forth a continuous enrichment, admittedly in a contradictory and uneven manner, already goes without saying.) The surrender of the man-made-whole to his homogeneous medium at the time thus entails this fruitful contradiction: on the one hand, what comes into being in this subject-object relationship is a tremendous vehicle for the conquest of reality. Things, relationships, conditions, etc. come into view – to stick with the example of painting – that no one would have perceived before. And by more or less rapidly turning into the common property of people, these discoveries broaden and deepen for them the world in which they live and act. The possibility of discovery grows out of this subject-object relationship, out of the focus on a certain way of conceiving of the world, out of the radical neutralisation of all diversions and distractions to which the whole man is continuously exposed (indeed left at the mercy of) in the everyday. It is certainly not necessary to prove this finding through examples; everyone knows what the period of the Renaissance means for the discovery of the structure and animatedness of the human body, what the nineteenth century means for the relationship between the light and colour of things. Condivi’s recollections of Michelangelo may illustrate the inexhaustible creative abundance of these discoveries: ‘although he has painted all the thousands of figures that are to be seen, he has never made two alike or in the same pose. Indeed, I have heard him say that he never draws a line without remembering whether he has ever drawn it before and erasing it if it appears in public’.27 From time to time, these tendencies were seen as being far too close to those of the scientific; understandably enough, for the scientific efforts of Renaissance artists like Piero della Francesca or Leonardo da Vinci are well known, though not adequately despite their artistic products. For even if it converges with scientific results in an abstract content-related way, each artistic discovery has something specific that goes beyond the scope of these results, and it is precisely this which makes an artistic innovation out of the mere perceiving of

27

Condivi 1999, p. 107.

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a fact not yet observed until then. The decisive content-related side of this constellation is quite involved; the meaningful content of such discoveries ranges from new clarifications of the mind of man all the way to the beholding of new paths in mankind’s development. Our observations up to now have already touched upon this diversity or complexity quite often, and those now following will repeatedly take up this complexity. That is why a single reference may suffice to immediately make somewhat clear the meaningful socio-historical human-related content as innovations that appear to be purely artistic. Needless to say, this is also readily evident in the case of Michelangelo’s abundance of motion. However, permit us to quote an observation of R.M. Rilke’s about the still lifes of Cézanne. He saw one of his apple still lifes along with Emil Preetorius: ‘Rilke regarded the magnficent painting pensively for a long time and then remarked abruptly, “But one can no longer eat these apples”. To my facetious question of whether one could generally eat apples made of oil paints, he answered softly as ever, though nevertheless definitively, earnestly and without hesitation, “Those of Chardin certainly, even those of Manet still, but that is over in the works of Cézanne”’.28 Rilke’s remark, which at first glance seems grotesque and eccentric, casts a dazzling light on the whole set of socio-historical problems that surround the struggle for the new in the case of the great artist Cézanne: on his attempt to avoid both subjectivist tendencies and those that lead to a dissolution of the unity of the image in the case of his most significant contemporaries. It illuminates Cézanne’s tragic Sisyphean struggle to apprehend the object in a way that was all at once truer to nature and more composed than was possible in the works of his great contemporaries because of their vision and method. With his feigned naïve observation, Rilke points to the historical impasse that Cézanne tragically tried in vain to transform into a broad path: to the removal from humanity that was imposed upon him by the period, to the beginnings of an inhuman art that he initiated very much against his will in such subjectively profound humanistic inner conflicts. Thus, what is simultaneously and inseparably contained in any discovery that the man-made-whole accomplishes in his surrender to the homogeneous medium of his art is something newly discovered in objective reality itself, which constitutes the surrounding objective world of man, and in the relationships of people to it. This dialectical interdependency, the efficacy of which objectively underlies the life of each man, can henceforth be given a sensuously manifest expression by means of this surrender, can turn into the evocative and spontaneously effect-

28

Preetorius 1955, p. 248.

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ive possession of all people, into the vehicle of the development of their selfconsciousness. Let us now have a look at the other side of the contradiction that we have thus far only regarded from one point of view. This other side is embodied in the inner lawfulness of the homogeneous medium itself, in the way in which it compels a confrontation with the volition of the creative individual. Just this moment we were able to observe the simplest consequence of this interdependency. But at the same time this guiding towards the discovery of new ground is a fruitful setting of limits. It had to be demonstrated – against theorists who want to limit the homogeneous medium’s range of meaningful content to its purely sensuous immediacy – what an endless abundance of possible relationships of man to his overall reality can enter into the purely visual, pictorial composition of an apple, for instance; that without transgressing the boundary of the pictorial, its pictorial likeness can disclose decisive socio-historical, ideological situations of man and the positions he takes towards them. However, this influx of the whole man’s diverse meaningful content of life into the expressive world of man strictly enclosed by the laws of the homogeneous medium is likewise advanced by this, within certain limits as indicated. The fact that these limits shift in the course of development, that many things become articulable that were once not even known of in the form of an inkling or at the most could be expressed stammeringly, abolishes neither the existence of limits nor their facilitative effect on breadth and depth of artistic meaningful content and artistic form. Genuine talent, the determining of which one goes about erroneously if he looks for it in the generalised individual characteristics of man (and in their synthesis), is simply the correct relationship of the manmade-whole to his homogeneous medium, the capacity to find that what and that how in the selection of the total meaningful content of life struggling for expression whose content and form are constituted in such a way that precisely this homogeneous medium could turn into the foundation of its own concrete form. The individual laws that govern these interdependencies of subject and object, content and form, abundance and unity, etc. by the homogeneous medium are naturally different in each art form, in each genre. Therefore, they can only be dealt with in the theory of that particular art form or genre and not in the theory of the principles of aesthetic reflection. However, if it is to be correctly understood, the single most universal attribute of this medium (namely, its homogeneity) must already be comprehended not as an abstract, negative characteristic but rather as something positive and concretely effective. Here too, it is not a question of a situation or structure that would be exclusively proper to the aesthetic, that one would have ‘invented’ for its own sake; rather,

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it is a matter of a universal issue of the reflection of reality, though it is given an idiosyncratic, particular form here and undergoes a qualitative intensification. In Hegelian logic, the role that negation plays in this process is of paramount importance for dialectical development. A real, concrete, and animated relationship can only come into being if affirmation and negation (determination and negation) are given such an intimate relationship that negation comes into view as its own negation for determination. (Here Hegel goes beyond Spinoza’s famous determination, which he frequently analysed: ‘Omnis determinatio est negatio’.) Thus, for example, in the relationship of the one to the void: ‘The void is the ground of movement only as the negative reference of the one to its negative’.29 Engels often popularly presented this dialectical conception of negation, without which one could not possibly arrive at a negation of the negation, particularly in a vividly formulated polemic against the vulgar metaphysical conception of negation. This conception opposes the exact Hegelian determination of the properly negative that holds good for any positing. Engels says that in this sense one tends to say, ‘I negate the sentence: the rose is a rose, when I say: the rose is not a rose’. In his further expositions, he points out those supremely simple states of affairs in reality and in its proper reflection that must necessarily lead to the Hegelian conception of dialectical negating. (At the moment, we do not need to concern ourselves with the fact that the problem of the negation of the negation is thereby posed.) Engels says, ‘Negation in dialectics does not mean simply saying no, or declaring that something does not exist, or destroying it in any way one likes …. And further: the kind of negation is here determined, firstly, by the general and, secondly, by the particular nature of the process …. Every kind of thing therefore has a peculiar way of being negated in such manner that it gives rise to a development, and it is just the same with every kind of conception or idea. The infinitesimal calculus involves a form of negation which is different from that used in the formation of positive powers from negative roots’.30 The Hegelian clarification of dialectical negation, particularly in its elucidations by Engels, shows a differentiation of the relations between the poles of Yes and No (between preserving and destroying) in reality itself and in their approximately adequate conception by means of accurate reflection. The most important thing for us in this is the fact that dialectical negation represents a special case of the general abstract negation that is brought forth by reality itself. Everyday life is already continuously forced to grapple with this distinction because its prac-

29 30

Hegel 2010, p. 135 ff. Engels 1987b, pp. 131–2.

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tical ramifications are extraordinarily far-reaching. The spontaneous pursuit of the scientific reflection of reality, which is by no means simply identical with philosophical clarity about the fundamental significance of the dialectical method (indeed, in individual cases – even in methodological scientific findings – the pursuit of the scientific refection of reality can very well crop up, and quite often does crop up, even when philosophical thinking gets bogged down in metaphysics and strictly rejects the dialectic), aims at concretely working out the real relationship of determination and negation for each field in the way appropriate to that field. From the knowledge of the development of life to the role of the negative (of ‘evil’) in ethics, history, etc., the knowledge of such relationships is indispensable for the making of an accurate likeness of reality as it is in itself. In the precise separation of both primary kinds of negation, aesthetic reflection must thus take the path that science and the everyday pursued independent of it. As is the case everywhere else, this similarity here is also based on the fact that all three modes of comportment are confronted with the same reality, that the vital condition for fulfilling their social functions is simply the accurate conception of the essential determinations of this common object.

3

The Homogeneous Medium and the Pluralism of the Aesthetic Sphere

So far, we have been able to see the particular direction in which aesthetic reflection goes beyond the common ground noticed – and held on to in its praxis – here. The decisive meaningful content of this difference consists in the fact that, in contrast to the ultimately monistic tendency of scientific reflection (the unity by tendency and ultimate relationship of all sciences), aesthetic reflection is pluralistic by its nature. This character culminates in the autotelism of each work of art, for the normative effect of which no other work can offer any help or supplement. That is also why, as we have seen, that comprehensive system of categories (the homogeneous medium being discussed now) ascribes plurality precisely to aesthetically autonomous art forms and genres. With that said, however, what appears is the fundamental contradiction of the aesthetic that is already familiar to us: the fact that, both in terms of content and form, the partial positings of works of art (a piece or extract from the totality of reality, shaped by the ‘one-sided’ viewpoint of a concrete homogeneous medium) necessarily raise and actualise the claim of representing a ‘world’, a complete and closed totality. The actual sublation of this contradiction consists – once again, in a contradictory way – in the evocative character of works

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of art, inspiring lived experiences of the world, where the formal rounding off of each aesthetic construct (its autotelism) turns into the bearer of the observation of the world from the standpoint of the human race, into the bearer of the self-consciousness of the human species. These issues have already been dealt with and must be further concretised later. At the very least, they had to be briefly considered here so that the conceptual concretisation of the homogeneous medium appears in the proper perspective. If the work of art is to be an intensive totality of those essential determinations that result from the aspect of the homogeneous medium, then it is vital to remove all the contingent, peripheral, and ephemeral relationships whose complicated interacting constitutes the trendline of necessity in life from the aesthetically reflected likeness of reality that is geared towards an intensive totality. Only the interplay of this emphasis and this omission can make a ‘world’ out of isolated aesthetic constructs that are limited both in terms of form and content. When art applies these principles to the issue of determination and negation examined a moment ago, then what becomes quite plainly apparent vis-à-vis life is the intensification into something new that is carried out in the aesthetic: while each negation that occurs is essentially associated in a dialectical way with the positivities being shaped (is the negation of each negation itself and nothing more), a system arises out of the exclusively essential aspects, something that can never occur in life itself as a matter of principle and that nevertheless reveals the single most essential things about life. It becomes obvious here again – noticed in passing – that aesthetic reflection can have nothing to do with a mechanical photocopy. The situation described just now is most conspicuous in music: the correlating of tones (negation as the proper negation of any concrete determination) can only be built up on this principle, and music would inevitably have to sink into mere sound, indeed into noise, if a break with this autocracy of the essential (with this rigorous and exclusive relatedness of essentialities) were not carried out in it. It is no accident that in the discussion of Heraclitus’ dialectic Hegel, responding to objections against it, appeals to the essence of musical harmony. Against Eryximachus of Plato’s Symposium, who construes harmony as flat homogeneity without negation and contradiction, he explains, ‘Harmony is not the repetition of one tone, for distinction belongs to harmony; it must essentially and absolutely be a distinction. This harmony is simply absolute becoming, not mere change (now this thing and then another thing). But the essential point is that each particular, every different [note], is different from another note; it is not, however, [just] abstractly different from any other note – it is different from its own other. Each note is only insofar as its other is contained implicitly in its concept …. In the same way the tones must be different, yet, as elements that differ in

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this way, they have a relation one to another. A determinate antithesis belongs to harmony, its opposite, as in the case of color harmony’.31 In a certain sense, one could certainly say that the sharpening of this issue’s own negativity is simply just a sharpening. That is, in the strictest sense of the word, also correct. However, it is a matter of the sharpening of tendencies that really are operative. Just as in scientific reflection (likewise a major discovery of Hegel’s) there is a continuous increase, admittedly with qualitative leaps, leading from simple difference to contradiction and antithesis, so too in the aesthetic there is one leading from nuance to contrast. With the ascertainment of the deep cohesiveness of even those things that are most antithetical, the ultimate homogeneity of less disconnected things is thus answered for our present problem. As far as I know, my friend Leo Popper,32 who died young, was the first to say that it is a question at the same time of a universal principle for each art composition. In his analysis of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s manner of composition, he speaks of the role of the cooperation of solid corporeality and air, ‘which closes up the body against the world … and nevertheless weds it again to the world in a wholly profound way. But with the force with which these bodies incorporate air into themselves, they also attracted each other, ate each other, digested and ate each other again, until they were like one matter, and all related to each other. The flower had something of the water, the water something of the street, the ore something of the sky, and there was nothing that would have been unlike everything else. There thus came into being the primary matter of these paintings. Entirely homogeneous, entirely wrought from things, and yet in the end like a piece of matter from which the painter himself was made. From time immemorial, instead of a multiplicity of matter that is all difficult to differentiate, every painting has had a particular material of a unitary and specific weight; a light or heavy matter to which involuntarily fell the mystical role of unifying what God had separated but which, if it was beautiful, fulfilled in deepest seriousness this task and was able to express all matter as a “universal dough”’.33 Leo Popper correctly and picturesquely describes a basic fact of art here. For it is readily apparent – and we will still come back to this – that in this ‘universal dough’ the differences of matter have not perished without a trace according to either intention or outcome. On the contrary: this ultimate homo-

31 32 33

Hegel 2006, p. 76, translation modified. Leo Popper (1886–1911), art critic and theorist who was a member of the Sunday Circle with Lukács in the 1910s. [Eds.] Popper 1910, p. 600.

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geneity that it possesses does not abolish distinctions, even when these distinctions rise to the level of dichotomy. It merely makes sensuously manifest a quite deep affinity (an intimate cohesiveness) of the very things that are most alien to each other in life and thereby creates a unitary atmosphere for all the relationships being shaped in a work up to the point of tragic dramatism, an atmosphere that is not extrinsic to objects and indifferently surrounds them but instead is one that brings into view the actual atmospheric fatefulness of their being-just-so, of their inmost essence. It is precisely the greatest and most genuine art that discloses this tension between supreme unity and supreme disparity, in which upholding the ultimate homogeneity of things that are vigorously divergent remains artistically the overarching aspect. The abundance of the most diverse kinds of people in the Shakespearean world has turned into a commonplace. But it is precisely the profundity of his tragic nature that would be inconceivable if such a homogeneity did not transparently shine through from behind this multiplicity, a homogeneity that makes something well matched and inextricably unified out of the contrast between Othello, Desdemona, and Iago, a homogeneity of an endless variety that aesthetically corresponds to the unity of the manifold in the cognitive reflection of reality. As seen here, the uniformity that thus comes into being – the most intimate and organic uniformity that human consciousness knows – is of a character that is contradictory in itself; it is a unity of mutually exclusive antitheses, the dichotomy of which remains preserved in it. This objective constitution which it possesses necessarily entails that the creative subjective process that it brings forth must likewise be contradictory. It is precisely in the homogeneity of the medium of the art form (of the work of art) that this subjective side of the contradictoriness shows up most clearly. We quoted Leo Popper’s excellent description of the result of the creative process in Bruegel’s work. Popper clearly sees that this outcome – even in the case of the Bruegel’s great artistic conscious awareness – could not possibly be the object of his intention but rather arose out of nothing less than its failure. He again correctly writes, ‘what the painter was thinking of was precisely the opposite, was an entirely free response to the nature of the individual materials. We see how hair, snow, velvet, and wood are recognised each in their own way with the utmost affection, and how everything takes place in order to do justice to them individually. But we also see that all of this is in vain because the air and the own material of the painting (the colour) create a unity that drowns all final differences’. The unparalleled greatness of these paintings thus arises from an irresolvable contradiction. Leo Popper likewise sums up the principle of the final unity correctly: ‘And the painter would have never achieved it without this hopeless

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intention: to reproduce that which is most itself’.34 Bruegel’s case is of course a particular and idiosyncratic one. Nothing would be more misleading than to apply an insight gained here without further ado to other great artists, to the relationship of their intentions to the perfections of their works. Because as a result of the diversity of subject-relations to the world and to art; as a result of their differences of level, from that which is merely peculiar to someone all the way up to the self-consciousness of the human race; as a result of the plurality of arts as a matter of principle, which is naturally not just a plurality of form or even of material (of subject matter) but also, inseparable from their specific regularities, acts as a plurality of meaningful artistic content, worldview, form; as a result of the socio-historical conditionality of each artistic positing that carries with it its own historical genesis and its significance for the development of the human race in the perfection of the work: what comes into being in each meaningful work is an idiosyncratic and unique unity of determinate antitheses – those that are most important at any given time. And it is evident from what has been explained up to now that what must be embodied at any given time in the personal quality of the individual works is the synthetic artistic principle, this unity and sublation of contradictions (even in the sense of preserving and raising to a higher level), precisely the homogeneous medium of individual art forms. The limitless pluralism of the aesthetic sphere becomes apparent in this situation. This of course does not mean that general determinations are missing for the whole field; all it means is that this pluralistic character must always constitute the foundation for their application to an art form or even to the work-individuality. Like now in the case of the relationship of creative subjectivity to the homogeneous medium. That discrepancy between intention and what one has achieved, to which (following Leo Popper) we have called attention, is a general phenomenon of any artistic creation in which the objectivity (objective lawfulness) of art forms (of art) rises to prominence visà-vis the individual’s will. The obverse (a miscarriage in the literal sense of the word) is common knowledge whenever an endeavour – be it ever so estimable and of such a high standing in human, ethical, social, etc. terms – brings forth something that falls out of the realm of the aesthetic either completely or partially on account of its anti-artistic essence or its anti-artistic components. What is more, it is a question of the relationship of the creative subjectivity to the laws of the art form (of art). But what comes into being is the simple relation of inadequate talent, false intentions, etc. to aesthetic objectivity, which is

34

Popper 1910, pp. 600 ff.

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why such blunders also do not differ as a matter principle from those of everyday life and of science. Unlike in the first case dealt with here. Of course, the situation already analysed by Hegel at length is well known: that the sociohistorical actions of people bring forth something different, often something more that is standing at a qualitatively higher level, than was contained in the conscious objectives, and it is likewise self-evident that objective laws of social becoming underlie this relation. Looked at abstractly, no special status is thus accorded the aesthetic. However, what already becomes apparent from the side of the subject is the not inessential distinction that the ‘cunning of reason’ (to use Hegel’s phrase) coming into operation here always entails a purification and elevation of subjectivity that does not belong by any means to the essence of what takes place in the parallel appearances of life, even though it can of course occur by way of exception, as an accident from the historical point of view. This elevation is first and foremost the sloughing off of that which is merely peculiar to the personality, though without the path towards the overcoming of the personal having been taken. On the contrary, it becomes apparent that precisely this removal of peculiar velleities brings out the kernel of individuality all the more powerfully, makes it all the more vivid. The process that thus begins with the discarding of biases, of insights and feelings that have become routinised, of thoughts and sensations that one can only entertain if he is not willing to follow through with them, etc.: this all arises out of the resistance of the homogeneous medium to half-measures, to that which has become ossified. It is an aqua fortis: the healthy burgeons in it and lives up to an intensity undreamt of beforehand; the sick dies off and vanishes. However, one should not construe all of this as a collision between the self and an outside world that is alien to that self. An interdependency between creators and the homogeneous medium is only possible as a result of the fact that an appeal to a deeper and more comprehensive layer in the personality itself is inherent to the conflict, to the inability to carry through something intended with respect to the homogeneous medium. The dialectic of intention and outcome is the upward movement of creative individuality itself, a movement that is animated by contradictions. Even in as significant an example as that of Bruegel cited a moment ago. What he wanted is already a high variety of the genuine grasping of objectivity. However, as he failed at this, what came into being was a rare paradigm of the deepest ideological expression of which painting is capable at all: the paradigm of the unity of the world, a unity that is related to people and yet objective, that is founded in things. Everything that is joyfully colourful and casually random in the most immediate reality of appearance is preserved in this unity. For the sake of this uniformity, it does not have to be compressed into

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a spiritual-moral matter permeated by the soul, as in the works of Rembrandt. And yet its uniformity is no first step, no beginning, no mere picture-book of surfaces, but is rather a bringing of essential forces and connections to the surface, which can likewise make the naïve lust for life into a concern of mankind, as Rembrandt does the endless chain of the most profound and terrible tragedies. Looked at in terms of ethics, this elevation of the subject is the path from giftedness to ingenuity, from novel talentedness to the lasting establishment of a stage of mankind’s development. But whereas the contradiction between intention and outcome is a generally recognised fact, the movement upwards is quite often distorted by Romantic myths. The reason for this is easy to see. Since the genuine pinnacle of art reveals important aspects in the course of the human species, a conviction in these paths must be in place in order to comprehend the way leading to here as one of ascent. In those places where this insight is missing, the contradiction must be construed – romantically – as abstract, glaring in its abstractness and triggering hideous dissonances. It is certainly no accident that this way of regarding art received its most powerful expression in the works of Kierkegaard. He says, ‘What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music. It is with him as with the poor wretches in Phalaris’s bronze bull, who were slowly tortured over a slow fire; their screams could not reach the tyrant’s ears to terrify him; to him they sounded like sweet music. And people crowd around the poet and say to him, “Sing again soon” – in other words, may new sufferings torture your soul, and may your lips continue to be formed as before, because your screams would only alarm us, but the music is charming. And the reviewers step up and say, “That is right; so it must be according to the rules of esthetics” ’.35 As a matter of fact, all the themes of an age that perceives itself to be inhuman are already intellectually anticipated therein. Only Kierkegaard’s own concrete taste in art remains bound to the ‘age of art’, to Classicism and Romanticism. But as he transforms the real and therefore fruitful contradictoriness between subjectively intentioned expression and the expression that is objectivated in the work into a rigid, insurmountable antithesis, the dialectical genesis of works of art turns into an irrationalist myth of the abyss for him, and that which is aesthetic in the work turns into a puzzle that is contrary to reason. The contradictory movement upwards that we have observed leads to effective work, but it can then only be understood as meaningful when the work itself

35

Kierkegaard 1987, p. 19.

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and its effect occupy a meaningful position in the totality of human activities, in the line of development of the human species. This is continuously presupposed in these observations as a known and recognised fact, even as the attempt is continuously made to account for it intellectually at the same time. That is why we can now content ourselves with simply registering Kierkegaard’s conception as a symptom of an influential tendency and can turn again to the real issue of the homogeneous medium. This time, however, we no longer regard it as the goal of subjective endeavours and as the object of their inner dialectic but rather as it objectively comes into operation in its total or partial completions, however they are ever achieved. If one wants to determine the essence of the homogeneous medium underling the being and function of any work of art here in an entirely general way, then he arrives at the concept of guidance. A work of art can be recognised as such only if it permanently holds the possibility of guiding those who are open to its reception. L’art pour l’art tendencies of recent decades certainly exhibited one tendency of positing the objectively existing ‘beauty’ (aesthetic constitution) of works independent of any effect. Behind this was a rejection – one that was subjectively understandable to a large extent, indeed justified – of contemporary average opinion; Michelangelo’s or Beethoven’s greatness is not to depend upon the judgement of taste made by Philistine X or Y. As justified as such feelings may even be, their substantiation is nevertheless based on weak analogies. For the example of scientific truths unconsciously hover before such trains of thought. However, if it is said that, for example, the truth of the Copernican theory is independent of whether and when it has been recognised, then what is objectively meant by this is that the earth actually revolves around the sun, independent of whether people perceive or recognise this state of affairs. The substantiation of objectivity in the aesthetic, however, cannot operate with such arguments. We say that the relationship of a Titian Venus to the reality reflected in it does not compare to the relation of likeness to original in the Copernican example. This theory is scientifically true because in a close approximation it has transformed something existing in itself into something that exists for us. A Titian Venus is an actualisation of aesthetic principles because the way it reflects reality as the totality of artistic determinations gives a true likeness of that totality of determinations that are significant in this case for the development of the human race, because this mode of reflection is capable of evoking such a totality in man as a matter of principle. Therefore, whereas scientific objectivity is rooted in the independence of the being-in-itself from consciousness, aesthetic objectivity cannot even be conceptually detached from man, from his thoughts, feelings, etc. We already know in general terms that the opinion and taste of Philistine X or Y do not tip the scales in the process, that this

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boundedness instead asserts its objectivity as the self-consciousness of mankind.36 That is why the ‘how’ of expression in the aesthetic has a qualitatively different significance than it does in science. No one would deny that there too the exposition of the for-us can be clear or abstruse, elegant or clumsy, etc. and that accordingly it can accelerate or hamper (retard) the penetration of new ideas. It is erroneous, however, to behold an analogy to aesthetics here, as is not infrequently the case in the present – this time in opposition to an unsubstantial sentimentality. The aestheticisation of science and philosophy in Romanticism or at the end of the nineteenth century has diametrically opposite motives, though it similarly disregards the real issue. Bertolt Brecht expresses the prevailing opinion today as follows in his ‘Short Organum for the Theatre’: ‘Today one could go so far as to compile an aesthetics of the exact sciences. Galileo spoke of the elegance of certain formulae and the point of an experiment; Einstein suggests that the sense of beauty has a part to play in the making of scientific discoveries; while the atomic physicist R. Oppenheimer praises the scientific attitude, which “has its own kind of beauty and seems to suit mankind’s position on earth”’.37 Such a manner of analogising thus causes confusion because it distorts the form-content relationship in aesthetics. Because if one thinks it through to the end in a consistent way – which Brecht fortunately avoids in his mature artistic praxis for the most part – then a conception of the meaningful artistic content would have to come into being that conceives of it as being by nature independent of formed expression and thereby reduces the function of form to something actually useful, though ultimately secondary. Meanwhile, it is evident – and even Brecht’s praxis essentially takes this path – that artistic expression is inseparable from meaningful aesthetic content. Even in those places where this expression is of a profoundly intellectual sort, as in the philosophical poems of Goethe or Schiller, or in the paintings of the late Rembrandt, etc., we cannot – in the aesthetic sense – carry out such a separation. Precisely those words, precisely those proportions of light and dark, also account for the intellectual profundity of such aesthetic constructs. A change of word-order or a shift in the nuance of valeur would suffice to make something trivial out of profundity here. Whereas the meaningful content of Galileo’s or Einstein’s theories wins or loses through the greater or lesser concision of their formulations, through the simplification or complication of their deductions,

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A detailed treatment of the concrete issues resulting from this can only take place in the second part of this work. Brecht 1992, p. 180.

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only if its approximation to the state of affairs independent of consciousness and existing in itself is modified as a result of this. The meaningful content of an aesthetic construct – even if it is essentially of an intellectual sort – consists not just in such a relatedness to the in-itself, although this certainly constitutes an essential aspect of its totality. At the same time and inseparable from this, it is a personal position taken towards this set of reflections. The tragic shock, optimistic faith, ironic critique, etc. contained in it has no less a significance than the meaningful content of thought itself. For this reason, objectivity is not abolished; it receives a new accent. It comes down to the amount of importance the meaningful content and the position taken towards it can possess for the development of mankind and how both can turn into the possession of the human race. As a result, the effect grows into an objective and central essential characteristic of the work; indeed, regarded in immediate and therefore abstract terms, it is the specific essential characteristic of its aesthetic existence. From this arises the constitution and significance of what we just called guidance, namely the power of the work to evocatively arrange and systematise the lived experiences of those who are receptive: the composition of the work. This identifying of composition with the capacity to guide receptive lived experiences may possibly disconcert at first as an exaggeration. Nevertheless, the composition of a drama or a symphony is an objective, self-contained relationship that lays claim to being an intensive totality. And there is no doubt that this relationship objectively exists, that is to say completely independent of whether X or Y perceives or recognises it. Objective, precisely formulatable laws underlie it that likewise are in force independent of the opinion of X or Y. But if one regards this relationship and its lawfulness somewhat more closely and concretely, then what shows up once again from this side is the issue that we ascertained just now as the difference in the relation between content and form in scientific and aesthetic reflection. It becomes apparent at once that one cannot unequivocally grasp and reasonably concretise relationship and lawfulness in works of art at all without reference to aesthetic effect. That is to say, such abstractly formulated or applied laws – thus ones that have been formulated or applied independent of evocative power – can be complied with completely, and the construct that thus comes into being can still have nothing to do with aesthetic positing. Just as many dramas were written exactly according to the – correct – specifications of Aristotle and other classical writers and just as many works of music were composed under the strictest and most meticulous observance of codified theory without hence resulting in actual dramas or symphonies. What thereby comes into being, however, is not only a soulless academicism in artistic praxis but also the theoretical destruction of the proper aesthetic rela-

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tion of form and content. Theodor Storm concisely formulated the parting of the ways in this issue in an epigram apparently directed against Emanuel Geibel: Lyric Form Poet Laureate: Form be the vessel made of gold In which we golden content pour! Another Poet: Form is nothing but the contour Rounding off the living body.38 Evocative force is simply what distinguishes the genuinely aesthetic from its surrogate: composition not merely as the proper and abstract assembly of indifferent elements from the standpoint of mankind’s development but rather as the awakener of deep emotions that – mediated by the essential relationships of man and society, of society and nature – stir up and awaken the centre of man’s being in the most varied ways, in an endlessly different fashion. A composition can thus only flourish to perfection in the aesthetic sense (that is to say, not just in an abstract or formal way) if this pathos of evocation is its own as a whole and in all details. That is why the capacity to guide receptive emotions belongs to the essence of artistic composition. It is not just a simple, albeit necessary, consequence of compositional premises; rather, it determines the composition – to use a fashionable term – ontologically. Of course, the mental and emotional life of man is continuously guided in reality as well. Indeed, he lives in a surrounding world that exists independent of his consciousness, unceasingly rouses his thoughts and feelings, and even guides them as result of its continuity. In this regard, the crucial difference between life and art consists in the following: first, the continuity operative in life is haphazard both in itself and all the more from the viewpoint of individual consciousness, whereas the work of art is methodically designed to inspire such a continuity. Second, in life the person is compelled – on pain of ruin – to respond actively to the inrushing impressions, whereas he confronts the work of art as something unchangeable, as an object-world to which he can and ought to comport himself only in a receptive manner. (We have already discussed the issue of the suspension of

38

Storm 1889, p. 178. [Eds.]

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activity – of ‘disinterestedness’ – and the significance of lived artistic experience for its own ‘afterwards’, and we will return to this question a few more times.) Third – and this is of great importance for what we are dealing with now – everyday man stands in a whirl of heterogeneous tendencies, whereas here the homogeneous medium of the work of art (of the art form, of art) that has an effect upon him channels his lived experiences in a certain direction from the outset and allots to them a determinate field of attention in which to live them out. He is thus temporarily metamorphosed from a whole man of the everyday into the man-made-whole, whose active and passive capabilities are already steered from the very beginning in a certain direction by means of such a concentration, mediated by the homogeneous medium, by the inrushing of all lived experiences into this riverbed, by their reworking therein. It is undoubtedly one of Nicolai Hartmann’s merits that he granted a great deal of space to this issue in his Aesthetics and pointed out important determinations in its concrete description. What he thus emphasises about music is the fact that a unity necessarily comes into being in hearing in spite of the fact that the notes are pulled apart from each other in time: ‘The movement needs time, it marches past our ears, it has duration; in each moment only a segment of it is present to its hearers. And yet to the hearer – at least to genuine “musical” hearing – it is not torn to pieces, but is apprehended as interconnected, as a whole. Despite its separation into its temporal stages, it is still apprehended as a coexistence of its parts – not as parts that are temporally simultaneous, but as belonging to each other, as a unity. This unity is, to be sure, still temporal in nature, but not a simultaneity’.39 And further: ‘A musical work requires the listener to anticipate and to recall, and, in every stage of his hearing of it, to have an expectation of what is coming, to anticipate the specific development that the music requires. This is true even when the actual development of the piece reveals itself as a different one than expected. For the resolution of the tension aroused by the music can be different from the one expected, and the exploration of unexpected (innovative) musical possibilities is an essential element of surprise and enrichment. In music, such things are no different from poetry (e.g., an unanticipated development of the plot of a novel or drama) …. For in music each passage is directed beyond itself, both forwards and backwards’.40 Similar to architecture: ‘The whole of the organized structure cannot be seen from any given point – at least not by the senses. Yet the observer has an intuitive consciousness of the whole; and that consciousness develops quickly

39 40

Hartmann 2014, pp. 125–6. Hartmann 2014, pp. 127–8.

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and surely as one wanders through the various interior rooms of the structure, or as one changes one’s position while observing the uniform interior spaces or the external shape, so that the various perspectives, sides, and component elements are taken in one after the other. The succession of views is no doubt random, and not a process of being led through some objectively given series, as in music, but it is nonetheless a temporal succession of individual pictures, each giving way to the next one, and which, optically, are quite different from each other. Aesthetic seeing, however, occurs when, standing out from these varying visual aspects, a whole with an objective structure appears, a physically unified composition that is as such not visibly given and cannot be seen from any given point, but rather first appears in the work of synthetic mental representation, and is to that extent “sensuously unreal”’.41 But Hartmann’s idealism – an idealism that, despite objectivistic aspirations, is still ultimately determined by Kant – frequently confounds his theoretical observations, which are cleverly construed and correct for the most part. First and foremost because he does not want to accept a sensuous synthesis of individual perceptions that are themselves immediately sensuous either in musical hearing or in architectural seeing. He thereby shifts the issue of aesthetics beyond art; such as when, in the continuation of the last passage quoted by us, Hartmann writes that the whole of the building is indeed ‘ontically real’ but not sensuously visible at a glance.42 This latter remark is indeed correct in immediate terms, though the aesthetic unity of architecture is not ontic but rather visual in character. The composition consists precisely in the fact that different aspects of the whole that are constantly driving forward from different points of view come into being for the mobile observer, aspects that even in their continuous blending, their referring to each other, their overlapping with each other, etc., make possible a sensuous synthesis, a sensuously lived experiencing of the whole. A merely imaginative synopsis can certainly bring important supplements that are important and useful both for the preparation of immediate vision and for the retroactive memory-like synopsis of impressions, but it cannot supersede the sensuously grounded synthesis that comes into being, even if it is only ever an approximate one. Architecture evokes spatial lived experiences, the necessary succession of which is, precisely because of their continuous preservation in change, more than a mere succession of singular autonomous sensuous images of space. Hartmann underestimates the dialectical character of sensuous receptivity, just as Edgar Allan Poe did – from completely different (almost

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Hartmann 2014, p. 134, translation modified. Hartmann 2014, p. 135. [Eds.]

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opposite) motives – when he denied the aesthetic existence of long poems: ‘What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects’.43 That is also why Hartmann is right only in that succession is arbitrary for first immediacy. It is correct that sequence cannot be given through form in any spatial art with the indissoluble clarity we find in music, literature, dance, or cinema, where the temporal order of events is itself a constitutive aspect of the composition. It is also correct that the succession of what is followed with the gaze in painting and sculpture is more enjoined, more guided than seems to be the case in architecture. Here too, however, a new optimum is to be founded for each work, and such an optimum also exists for architecture, though it is admittedly more difficult to discover. However much individual aspects may be mere aspects, they are nevertheless by their nature aspects of this particular whole at the same time, and their being-just-so directly depends upon the being-just-so of this whole. But this boundedness to the particular whole exists not only for individual aspects but also for their merging into each other, for their sequence. In reality, it is the architectural construct at the time that carries out the function of guiding, of growing over into the gradually emergent synthesis, into the apperception of the whole. In a way that is different for each art form (and within each of their fields, for each work of art), becoming guided is hence the only possibility for those who are receptive to reliving what is intentionally contained in the composition, thus the manner in which the composition itself deliberately becomes reality and is able to reveal itself. Here the formal function of the homogeneous medium (its dialectically contradictory character) becomes apparent with perfect clarity. In his remarks on music that we have quoted, Hartmann emphasises the aspect of surprise. Rightly, because an expectation that was always fulfilled in the appropriate manner would be formal and linear, devoid of content; it could never rise to the level of the multi-dimensionality of a shaped and experienceable ‘world’. Indeed, one could say that each genuine work of art invariably fulfils and fails to fulfil all at once the expectations called forth by itself. For as Hartmann suggests, what is involved is not just the fact that the solution that takes shape is different from the one expected. It would already have to be added here by way of supplement that, in terms of content and form, any kind of surprise moves within a room for manoeuvre that the homogenous medium of the work (and of the art form) imperatively stipulates; true, in such a way that this predetermined room for manoeuvre frees up multiple

43

Poe 1910a, p. 4. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-lanuage edition.]

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possibilities of surprising fulfilments. The beguilement of expectation must therefore possess a certain quality that connects it to the prompted expectation, despite its contrasting nature. When it must be experienced as simple and crude surprise, when despite its possible suddenness a feeling of nevertheless having expected something in some way is not – a posteriori – evoked, then the continuity of guidance is interrupted, and the unity of the work is disturbed. And on the other hand, even the fulfilment of the prompted expectation is never a matter of simply fulfilling what is expected; instead, in genuine works of art it always contains an aspect of the unexpected, of an overfulfilment of expectations. Therefore, as we put it in an abstract categorical way earlier, the fact that each negation must be the specific, proper negation of something expressly determined becomes apparent here in a much more concrete form, although the juxtaposition of expectation and surprise (the negation of expectation) is still a broadly abstracted formulation of the aesthetic state of affairs. This issue can only be dealt with in a really concrete way in genre theory, where it would have to be shown how that stance towards the world that the homogeneous medium of the genre concerned brings forth concretely determines the room for manoeuvre, quality, intensity, frequency, etc. of the surprises possible within it. These abstract observations also show, however, how much the tension between expectation and fulfilment depends on the quality of the homogeneous medium. This quality does not just circumscribe the individual ‘its-ownness’ of each genuine work of art in a precise way; from the very beginning it also sensuously specifies the room for manoeuvre and quality of fulfilments, surprises, etc. – in this sense the category of intonation applies to all arts, above all to those that unfold in time – and to a certain extent evokes an atmosphere that in this regard permits endlessly many possibilities (but still only completely determined ones). It is seemingly a matter of purely formal issues here. However, considering them in a purely formal way would confront us again with those antinomies, would once more bring about those distortions of the aesthetic concept of form that we have already repeatedly encountered. No overly absorbed reconsideration of these issues is needed to realise that the questions dealt with a moment ago already related primarily to content and that only by means of their solution in the sense of aesthetic principles could artistic shaping be stimulated. But the dialectic of content and form also reaches deeper insofar as not only is the raw matter of experienced reality transformed into a semi-finished aesthetic product by the homogeneous medium for the time being but also such a reworking affects the most general forms of its reflection (the categories). In dealing with particular problems, we already came across such transformations, and in later discussions we will have to concern ourselves with a few

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of them in even greater detail. We have also dealt with the real basis for this in their stead: the everyday, science, and art reflect the same objective reality; that is why they share not only the material of life (indeed, according to their needs, according to the direction and degree of receptiveness) but also the very categories that define these modes of reflecting reality. The particular tasks, however, that face each of these fields (and each of their sub-fields) inevitably entail that objective conditions are certainly formed by the same categories, although these categories incur a change in their mode of appearance – the way in which they are arranged, their being carried out or cut short, their proportionate relation to other categories, etc. – in the different spheres. The reshaping that the homogeneous medium accomplishes in the aesthetic reflection of reality must thus also relate to such categories, even quite essentially. Again, this act is naturally a formal one at first, though only in the most immediate and most general sense. Its consequences for the concrete formation in the homogeneous medium are – looked at aesthetically – content-related. Specific shaping by means of such categories that have been, as it were, repurposed initially gives rise to the artistic content, and the shaping of this content remains simply the task of the artistic process of shaping. True, at the same time it must be borne in mind that this philosophically presented genesis of aesthetic content’s forms of objectivity most deeply influences the mode and efficacy of forms as a result of the essence of aesthetic positing. This change in the function of categories in the aesthetic – while that which corresponds to their in-itself in objective reality, that which they generally depict in a formal way, continues to exist – is one of the central issues of the knowledge of that in which the specificity of the aesthetic consists. Yet it is hardly dealt with at all in the history of aesthetics. At most, one simply confuses scientific reflection through the categories with their objective in-itself, or – this likewise frequently happens – one is content with merely ascribing an abstract alterity to the aesthetic field in comparison to the concept-world of science: the level of intuition in the works of Hegel, thinking in images in the case of Belinsky.44 As in many other questions, so too here Aristotle has been the only one to behold the problem clearly. Admittedly only for the distinction of cognition from rhetoric – and only to the extent we are able to accurately know today, for his aesthetic writings have indeed not been completely preserved. But this changes nothing in the significance of his position as a matter of principle, because it is well known that antiquity ranked rhetoric among the arts, so Aristotle could feel justified here in predicating something about the

44

Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848), foundational critic of modern Russian literature. [Eds.]

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distinction between the categories in pure cognition and those in the aesthetic. And this is all the more the case considering that, in dealing with the transition from individual statements into their linkage into enthymemes (this is what he calls this form of appearance of syllogism), he beholds the intrinsic specificity of the former in the fact that it is ‘only about questions of practical conduct, courses of conduct to be chosen or avoided’.45 With that said, the line of separation is clearly pronounced towards the anthropomorphising nature of art. As a matter of fact, Aristotle separates the two fields of apodeixis and rhetoric (the intermediary position that the dialectic occupies for him here need not concern us) in such a way that, objectively, the former has to do with truth and the latter with the probable; subjectively, rhetoric ‘involves the probable and credible with regard to the characters and sensations of people (ἤθη and πάθη)’.46 What becomes clearly visible from all of this is that – in contrast to disanthropomorphising apodeixis, which is directed purely towards objective truth – Aristotle draws the line of separation at the place where rhetoric has to do with the characters and attitudes of people and strives to influence these. At the same time, it is clear to us that this relationship in rhetoric is far more direct and abrupt than it is in art itself. For antiquity, this latter difference seemed to be much more negligible than it does for us; not only because rhetoric was considered an art but also because the relationships of art itself to the social praxis of people were (and were thought to be) much more immediate than in our time. (If an intensification in the latter regard facilitates the formulation of rhetoric as art, then it should not to be forgotten that, in such an exaggeratedness of its social references, this conception of art comprehends the essence of art in a far more profound way than does modern fetishised individualism.) In any case, Aristotle starts from two such fundamental forms of thought as induction and deduction and applies this insight to rhetoric thus: ‘for I call a rhetorical deduction an enthymeme, and a rhetorical induction an example. Everyone who effects persuasion through proof does in fact use either enthymemes or examples: there is no other way’.47 At the same time, for us what is above all important is the fact that it is a question of the fundamental forms of both fields, which in the explicit preser-

45

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Aristotle 1991, p. 85. It is interesting to note that – without particularly emphasising the relationship to aesthetics – Goethe also discerns as a specificity of this category the fact that it determines the universal as ‘what reminds us of many cases and links together individual items we have already realized’. See Goethe 1998, p. 146. Goethe thus likewise aims at the evocative functions of the synthesis carried out here. Prantl 1955, p. 103. Aristotle 1991, p. 7.

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vation of their common roots in objective being – the extent to which it is a matter of two different cases of the reflection of reality in the works of Aristotle is not critical – take up various forms depending on social needs. And it is particularly important that the transformation into the aesthetic in both cases is directed at the suitability for evoking feelings, passions, etc. In his marvelously practical matter-of-fact way, Aristotle gives an incisive description of this: ‘Thus we must not carry [enthymeme’s] reasoning too far back, or the length of our argument will cause obscurity; nor must we put in all the steps that lead to our conclusion, or we shall waste words in saying what is manifest’.48 The direct relationship to the aesthetic is even more perspicuous in the example (paradeigma). Here too, Aristotle takes as his starting point the fact that the example is an analogy to induction created for rhetoric. In dealing with it in concrete terms, however, he very soon goes beyond the somewhat analogous sort of example found in life and analyses the usefulness of literary forms that are already distinct, like the parable or the fable. One thus sees that even directly literary genres can represent something of induction in that which aesthetically corresponds to the process of cognition. At the same time, it is characteristic that the paradeigma exhibits a certain movement back to the analogy by cutting short the long path of induction in the interest of manifest concision; indeed, instead of the path of induction, instead of the inductive process, which picks out that which is lawfully common to different individual appearances, this commonality is reduced to and focused on one case. But it is nevertheless much more than an analogy. That which is typical of an appearance or a group of appearances is to be summed up in it, which by means of its immediate form is to make – directly or faintly or contrastingly – that which is typical of this appearance itself or of another figure evocatively perspicuous. Just as the Aristotelian exposition of the efficacy of the enthymeme quoted earlier illuminates the omission of logical mediations from the syllogism (the fact that a laconic compactness is aimed at), here as well it comes down to summing up that which is typical of a situation, of a case, of a relationship, etc. at one stroke, with immediate obviousness, thus evocatively. The pseudoaesthetic nature of the rhetorical, with which Aristotle, as he does in all the forms or fields of objects with which he deals at any given time, vigorously comes to grips and which he always considers from within (despite all the criticism), prevents him from drawing all the conclusions he can out of this turn (a turn that is already quietly noticeable in rhetoric) to the immediately appear-

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Aristotle 1991, p. 89.

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ing typical case from that which is discursively set apart, from the search for lawfulness. This caveat, which does not affect the intentions of Aristotle at all, since in this work he did not needlessly go beyond the rhetorical, was only necessary in order to substantiate the justification for our extending his analysis. For in rhetoric, paradeigma and enthymeme are only a means, even if critically important ones, for achieving certain concrete goals by means of an oration. Because of this, they cannot yet unfold all the way down to the final possibilities of their immanent kernel. That is only possible in literature, where they (as we will see later in different contexts) stand for themselves, where they are not made use of in the interest of a goal that is foreign to their constitution and hence are empowered and obliged to live out their own essence. Now this central aesthetic specificity is, as was shown, the urge for that which is immediately, obviously typical. In the aesthetic, this urge leads not only to an adequate perfection of each particular paradeigma or enthymeme but also to chains of connections and effects in which the one promotes and enhances the other. Under certain conditions, this can occur in the form of sharp contrasts, but we already know that contrasts can also turn into supporting aspects of a fundamentally unitary movement when this movement is aimed from the outset at such a reciprocal reliance upon each other, when it takes place in a homogeneous medium or rather when the homogeneous medium constitutes this movement. In a later chapter, we will discuss at length the necessary convergence of the typical with the transformation of categories in aesthetic reflection, and at the same time – in order to anticipate what is essential in a word – we will go into the convergence of the aesthetically pivotal category of particularity with the aesthetic version of the typical in detail. We must content ourselves here with emphasising the only decisive aspect of this complex without being able to demonstrate the importance of the category of particularity yet. At the same time, it is a question of the plurality of the typical in art, in which – in keeping with the basic structure of the aesthetic sphere – each work spontaneously reproduces the pluralistic character of the whole field in connection with this issue. The pluralism of the typical is a form of the reflection of reality, a kind of expression that sharply contrasts the aesthetic and the scientific. Lenin, who made what are to date the most radical advances in working out the reflective character of the categories and who – to cite a quite characteristic example – further developed the Hegelian presentiment of the objective character of the syllogism in ascertaining that the syllogism is a reflection of reality, also emphasises the distinction being dealt with here between the typical in science and art with great clarity and energy. Thus, in a letter to Zinoviev49 49

Grigory Zinoviev (1883–1936), prominent Bolshevik leader and first Chairman of the

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during the first imperialist World War, he highlights the idea that for science only one typical appearance can be given in each group of phenomena. He refers to the false views of many of his comrades-in-arms at that time concerning the impossibility of national wars in the imperialist period, and he adds, ‘It is an obvious error – historical and political and logical (for an epoch is a sum of varied appearances, in which in addition to the typical there is always something else)’.50 This fixing in place of the duality of a typical alongside the multitude of the atypical in empiricism clearly characterises the proper conception of science. Hegel already thus emphasised: ‘There is only one animal type and all the varieties are merely modifications of it’.51 And even in those places where the subject matter stipulates a certain, limited number of types for science (types of temperaments, illnesses, etc.), the antithesis between typical and atypical appearances formulated just now by Lenin persists for science. Things are entirely different in art! In those places where this conception of people and their modes of comportment are creatively expressed in it, we have to do in the best of cases with a tendentious naturalism and in most cases with simpleminded trash, in which – depending on social position – one’s own good characteristics are presented as typical and the bad ones as atypical; and in the case of one’s opponents, everything should be the other way round. By contrast, in genuine art everything that gets a place in the composition is of a more or less typifying character. Therefore, what cannot be scientifically regarded as typical appears in art as typical. In this, art is closer to everyday life than science is because praxis in everyday life even stipulates the necessity of continuous typification for people in their dealings with each other. Only in most cases this is carried out subsumptively and hence in most cases has a schematic character that violates individual specificity. That is why false tendencies in the conception of the artistically typical quite often rely upon these opposed tendencies that are equally hostile to art and were imposed on it as directly applied scientific principles or as views in keeping with everyday praxis. In strict contrast to many of his supposed disciples, Lenin refrained from such an unwarranted intermingling of heterogeneous fields. For instance, it is interesting to read that in the First World War he conducted an exhaustive discussion with his close friend Inessa Armand52 about a pamphlet she was planning that was to deal

50 51 52

Comintern’s Executive Committee who was purged during the Case of the TrotskyiteZinovievite Terrorist Centre. [Eds.] Lenin’s Letter to Zinoviev (August 1916), in Lenin 1966, p. 229, translation modified. Hegel 2004, p. 418. Inessa Armand (1874–1920), French-born Russian feminist and Bolshevik party organiser. [Eds.]

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with the issue of sex. He passionately insisted that the work should be focused on that which is typical in terms of class. And as Armand wanted to move the contrast between the dirty kisses to be found in many marriages and the pure ones in some fleeting relations into the centre of attention at all costs, he proposed that she write a novel. “[B] ecause there,” he explains, “the whole essence is in the individual circumstances, the analysis of the characters and psychology of particular types.”53 Contained herein is a clear recognition of aesthetic (in contrast to scientific) typification. Formally, all of this is related to the evocative nature of artistic composition. For the purely individual case remains mute in terms of any immediately manifest communication. An echo of what is shaped can only be awakened in receptive persons when an appeal to the world of their own representations, feelings, meaningful experiences, etc. takes place, no matter how widely mediated this appeal may yet be, no matter how much it may yet broaden this circle or deepen the intensity of subjective aspects beyond all measure. This formal will to effect – the direction and content of which is different depending on the art form – already presses for a composition that is ruled by the principle of the typical. Of course, these types are extraordinarily different – and herein the priority of the content-related comes into play – from each other in kind and degree, in the quality and intensity of their typicality. However, no matter how grotesquely or eccentrically a figure may behave in art, its eccentricity is invariably raised into the typical by evocatively rousing the lived experience that it represents certain tendencies in human coexistence at a certain level. Only in this way can it be understood – in the artistic sense – and only an understanding that has been called up in this way makes it relivable. As multiple figures link up with each other in this manner in each work of art, and as a hierarchy of types comes into being, from which their rank, their significance, and the affirmative or negative values of their existence become immediately evident, art gives a comprehensive picture of the world of man, presents a world of people that, on the one hand, is richer in the ascertainable determinations of human life than those perceived in the everyday of everyday man, and at the same time, on the other hand, these determinations are clearer, more orderly, and more lucid. Abundance and order are content-related determinations that are conditioned by the worldview of the artist that flows into the work, but they can constitute such a well-built hierarchy among themselves only by means of the homogeneous medium, brought

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Lenin’s Letter to Inessa Armand (January 24, 1915), in Lenin 1966, p. 184.

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down, as it were, to a common denominator, to a common quality. We have already identified the general principles of this transformation with the help of Leo Poppers’s analysis of Bruegel. If we now point to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and bear in mind the mutual complementarity of Hamlet, Horatio, Fortinbras, and Laertes that is often brought forth through stark contrasts, then we have before us such a synthesis of order and abundance that is determined in terms of form by the homogeneous medium and in terms of content by the plurality and universality of the typical; of course, on the basis of that pluralism of the work that constitutes a decisively essential characteristic of aesthetic positing. If we have thus far seemingly diverged from the deep and far-reaching suggestions of Aristotle, we are still invariably involved with his problem of the transformation of the objectivity of the categories of objective reality into a system of evocations in which the crucial meaningful content of objectivity remains preserved, albeit in a form that is continuously and immediately related to man, that reflects reality for him as his world. All of the pleasure that is felt in art ultimately has its roots in the fact that what is experienced in it is simply this world belonging to and adequate to man. This has – objectively considered – nothing to do with a direct pleasure in the content offered. In those places where art, deliberately or unavoidably, sets such a task, it is (minus very specific exceptional cases) doomed as art – regardless of whether the content is sifted in accordance with these demands or some random content is adapted to them. Aristotle already said elsewhere that artistic pleasure in an object, its joyful lived experience in receptivity, has nothing to do with the question of whether we would affirm its concrete realisation (man, situation, event, etc.) in life as reality.54 What accounts for that which is essential to aesthetic constructs and their effect is precisely the fact that in the artistic composition man unresistingly (indeed, enthusiastically) takes in things that he rejects in life, things from which he flees, for which he feels revulsion or before which he feels angst, etc. The transformation of categories recognised by Aristotle is the deepest cause for the capacity of works to guide those who are receptive. They launch a receptive person into a world, they let him move in this world with ostensible freedom, although each step of his lived experiences is directed by the homogeneous medium of the work. The adequacy of the shaped content to the form then appears to him as the adequacy of the world of the work to

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Aristotle 1996, pp. 6–7.

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itself, to the demands that man automatically and continuously raises vis-à-vis his surrounding world. From this arises the pleasure of being able to witness such a world, even a tragic one. The deepest problematic faced by the art of certain periods, including our own, consists in the fact that neither can the artist find something in the world whose aesthetic reflection emanates this pleasure in adequacy, this coziness of being able to witness, nor does the receptive person possess the readiness to surrender himself joyfully to such possibilities of lived experience. Now since this problematic is glorified by very many today as the psychologico-ideological basis of a radically new aesthetic outlook, since in this manner a new aesthetic virtue is to be made out of the social need for art, it is probably not without benefit to quote a self-critical remark made by Robert Musil, who is renowned as precisely such an innovator, in which this ever-honest writer, who deceives himself as little as possible, characterised the problematic indicated here for what it is, the artistic failure of ‘modern’ artistic means: ‘On technique: we have now almost completely forgotten something that former novelists were good at: creating tension! We merely capture our listeners. That is we try to write with wit and to avoid boring passages. Wherever we go, we pull the listener along with us. Creating tension, on the other hand, means making the listener anticipate what is coming. Making him think along with us, allowing him to go on his own down the way we point out for him. A certain cozy feeling of being there with us. The comic novel lives off this feeling. One points toward a situation that is about to arise and the thought emerges: what will good old X do now then? This requires a good deal of miniature painting with the various types. But, however antiquated it seems, it is still an instance of artistic effect in contrast to the effects produced by philosophers and essayists’.55 It is instructive from the standpoint of what is quoted here that Musil clearly sees the relationship between the proper guiding of receptivity and the lived experience of ‘coziness’ that consequently came into being and at the same time beholds in contemporary methods a falling off from the level of the aesthetic down to the effects of the essayistic. Only in the last chapter of this part we will be able to go more closely into the deeper reasons for this problematic, which, from the side of reflection, are likewise related to the problems of category. At the same time, it is a question of the effect that, for social reasons, the increasing expansion of the disanthropomorphising essence of scientific reflection exerts upon the view of art. At the outset of the previous century, Goethe struggled against

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Musil 1998, p. 61.

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the beginnings of such tendencies, as did the Romantics in their own way. In the present and recent past, a capitulation of many artists and art movements has taken place around this issue, a renouncing of the specificity and autonomy of aesthetic reflection for the sake of the phantom of contemporary scientificity.

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Issues of Mimesis v: The Defetishising Mission of Art In Capital Marx meticulously presented the process of commodity fetishism arising from necessary tendencies of social development and the social structures brought forth by them: ‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social …. It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.1 For our purposes, what is decisive here is the fact that defetishising knowledge changes something that by immediate semblance is thing-like back into what it is itself: into a relationship between people. The movement carried out here, restoring the true state of affairs in its rights, is therefore a double one. First, it is the exposure of a deceptive semblance that, although it necessarily came into being in a social way – here as a result of a highly developed economy, in other cases as a result of backwardness – nevertheless distorts the true essence of reality. Second, this rectification salvages the role of man in history at the same time. Semblance has diminished the significance of man: ‘Their own movement within society has for them the form of a movement made by things, and these things, far from being under their control, in fact control them’.2 The truth transforms the things that seemingly exist and hold sway in the relationships of people to each other, things that – in certain cases – they can be capable of controlling and mastering. Even if, however, that is not possible, a ‘fate’ seemingly resulting from the nature of things appears as the product of the development of mankind itself, thus from this standpoint as the self-generated fate of people. For scientific knowledge, both aspects of this movement of thought are equally

1 Marx 1990, pp. 164–5. 2 Marx 1990, pp. 167–8.

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important in the reflection of reality; if a supremacy could be claimed for one as universal and fundamental, then it would be the first. A somewhat modified situation comes into being for art. The first aspect indeed retains its fundamental character, for without a certain insight into this basic state of affairs all inferences would hang in air. However, it is the second aspect that receives the pivotal significance in aesthetic reflection. For the conception of man and the human, the vindication of the rights of man in society as in nature, invariably constitutes the centre of its reproductive movement in the reflection of reality. This movement can confine itself to the mere depicting of reality; even in this case, however, the what and the why of this depiction will take a position in this direction. Of course, taking this position can turn over into an open partisanship, and it does very often, precisely in the most outstanding works of art. Matthew Arnold is thus entirely right when he says that at bottom poetry is a ‘criticism of life’.3 Depending on the art form, period, nation, and class, this criticism has different contents and different modes of expression. But if one wants to encapsulate the most universal thing about it, then this person comes to the reclamation of the rights of man mentioned a moment ago. From this point of view, the Marxist discovery has a tremendous significance for the theory of art. Almost every major artist of the 19th and 20th centuries has grappled with this problem in some way, though – and this again is indicative of the relation of theory and art – almost always without even being acquainted with the first tendency for exposure in Marx and almost always grasping the second in its human consequences chiefly in a spontaneous way. There is nothing surprising in this; art here simply follows the normal course of life. Indeed, Marx says of the scientific knowledge of this phenomenon, ‘Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum, and therefore with the results of the process of development ready to hand’.4 Balzac and, in relation to certain areas of life, Tolstoy rank among the few in whom this tendency pervades their entire work. The struggle for the integrity of man, against any semblance and any modes of appearance of his deformation, constitutes the essential content of their works, as it of course also does in the case of other major artists. Only when a capitulation to fetishism comes into being, as happens in not unimportant parts of late bourgeois art of the imperialist period, must art relinquish its main meaningful content: this fight for the

3 Arnold 1905, p. 143. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] 4 Marx 1990, p. 168.

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integrity of man, the criticism of life from this standpoint. The taking of a position towards fetishism, regardless of whether this is recognised as such, turns into the watershed between progressive and reactionary art praxis. It is characteristic that T.S. Eliot says the following about Arnold’s determination of poetry that we quoted a moment ago: ‘If we mean life as a whole … from top to bottom, can anything that we can say of it ultimately, of that awful mystery, be called criticism?’5 The central problem with this capitulation consists in the fact that it stops at the immediacy of fetishised forms of life and, even when their inhumanity is completely evident, it does not head towards the essence in order to reveal the true relationships but unresistingly accepts the fetishised surface as ultimate truth. The subjective forms of response in this comportment can be extraordinarily diverse. Yet for the issue that is decisive here, whether nihilism, cynicism, despair, angst, mystification, complacency, etc. are expressed therein is only of secondary importance. The point is whether in the given case the direction of movement in the attempted reflection of reality is a defetishising one or whether it pseudo-artistically perpetuates that which is fetish-like in society.6 Already this applicability to aesthetic reflection shows that Marx’s recognition of fetishisation has universal significance. He expounded at length the universality of commodity fetishism for all forms of appearance of capitalist society as well. We do not need to dwell on this comprehensive application of his thoughts on the fetish, nor on the fact that Marx sharply delimits commodity fetishism’s socio-historical area of validity and, for instance, clearly demonstrates the non-fetishised character of feudal exploitation in this regard. Nevertheless, it would be false – above all from the standpoint of our investigations – to limit the general phenomenon of fetishisation to the economy of capitalist trade. Although in Capital Marx deals with only this issue, admittedly in its universality, he gives unmistakable indications that what is involved is a feature of the reflection of social reality, and that its incisive economic and ideological occurrence in capitalism represents no break from its efficacy in mankind’s history overall. From this standpoint, it is very interesting that, precisely in the chapter on fetishism, Marx speaks of the affinity of such a distortion of reality to religious representations. After identifying the relationship of its primitive stages to a conditioning ‘by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence 5 Eliot 1934, p. 111. [Eds.: Lukács cites this English-language edition.] 6 On the ambiguity of immediacy that comes into being here, cf. my correspondence with Anna Seghers in Lukács 1980, pp. 167 ff. Also see the first two chapters of Lukács 1969.

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also limited relations between man and nature’, Marx analyses the aggregate of these modes of comportment and the social preconditions of their withering away.7 In this case, therefore, from a certain standpoint that is rooted in the nature of things, primitive (pre-capitalist) and developed capitalist ideologies are lifted into a unitary synthesis of a historical rise and fall as phenomena that belong together despite all their differences. We thus intend to proceed in accordance with Marx’s method when in what follows we work out similar syntheses concerning important sets of categories involving the conception of the human world as problems of their fetishisation and defetishisation. In doing so, we will refer first and foremost to the spontaneous, rarely conscious tendency of the aesthetic reflection of reality: to liquidate fetishes and ensembles of fetishes that show up in the course of mankind’s development and become operative both in everyday praxis as well as in science and philosophy, to restore actual object-relations to the position befitting them in the world-image of man, and thereby to ideologically reconstitute the significance of man that has been repressed as a result of such distortions. Thereby comes into being for this view a broader concept of fetishisation: objectivities are posited that have become autonomous in general representations – for a variety of socio-historical reasons at any given time – that neither in themselves nor in relation to people really are such. Of course, we do not have to do here with this complex as a whole; that would certainly encompass large parts of the history of science, philosophy, and everyday thinking and would thereby go beyond the scope of these investigations. Here we are setting a far more modest task: we will attempt to show that a defetishising tendency – in the sense specified above – inheres within genuine art by its very nature, with which it must not dispense on pain of self-dissolution. At the same time, it can only come down to the demonstration of this main tendency; it suffices when the fact and mode of action of its aesthetic validity are shown in a few essential complexes that decisively determine the relationships of man to his surrounding world.

1

The Natural Surrounding World of Man (Space and Time)

Art therefore presents the ‘natural’ surrounding world of man in its ‘natural’ relationships to him. The word ‘natural’ had to be put in quotation marks here because it is clear that this function of art can and often does bring it into

7 Marx 1990, p. 173.

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conflict with the habits, representations, etc. of everyday life and that such antitheses can likewise crop up vis-à-vis science and philosophy. Therefore, if the concept of naturalness used here were to come to mean an accordance with some sort of ideal, a relapse of aesthetics into Platonism would occur; it would create a determination of form in it that Aristotle already persuasively refuted in the polemic against the Platonic theory of ideas. The natural – without quotation marks – must thus acquire a meaning that is capable of successfully sheltering it from such confusions and ambiguities. During the discussion of everyday reality, we already spoke of the spontaneous materialism of the man who lives in it. At the same time, we highlighted the fact that as yet absolutely no generalisation is contained within it in terms of worldview. What is expressed therein is merely that basic necessity of everyday praxis that, in order to be able to hold his own and act in his surrounding world successfully (indeed to not be destroyed in it and by means of it), a person must learn to distinguish as accurately as possible what is merely present in his imagination and what exists independently of his consciousness. This of course just bears on everyday life in the narrowest sense. As soon as generalisations are carried out, more distant or deeper causes are sought, and the meaning of life and the fate of man is explored, this spontaneous materialism of the everyday must break down, and a real existence be ascribed to the consciously aware attempt to solve such problems that seems to be just as solidly founded for everyday man as the existence of the objective outside world. How such representations harden into beliefs about reality, indeed are encompassed with the glory of a mystical transcendence, we partly touched upon during the discussion of the magical era, and we will partly concern ourselves with it in the final chapter. It is now clear that each artist is a son of his time, his class, and his nation, and hence only in entirely exceptional cases can he take a position that critically resolves these sets of issues. By no means does it mean here that art takes up a philosophical materialist position. It is merely that – within the limits of what is socio-historically possible at any given time – a spontaneous defetishising tendency is expressed in genuine art praxis that aims at recognising only the real, objectively existing outside world, dissolving the representations that are fetishistically projected into it, and presenting it in its reality. On the other hand, what is involved here is the fact that the mere (but consistent) artistic mode of presentation has the tendency – without it wanting to, indeed often against the conscious will underlying it – of projecting everything that is shaped to an earthly level and transforming all transcendence into a human immanence. Already in antiquity Homer’s epics were criticised by particular thinkers on account of this specificity of theirs. But even if one recalls Dante, the painting of the Trecento or the Quatrocento

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(even Simone Martini or Fra Angelico), this humanising orientation of art, which projects the heavens onto the earth, becomes plainly visible. Although the pre-Socratic philosophers frequently opposed the presentation of the gods in poetry, it is clear that that anthropomorphising tendency which Xenophanes most radically criticised is manifest with great concision and vividness precisely in their works and in that of the visual art of this era. Just as important as the spontaneous materialism of art is its spontaneously dialectical character. In order to understand it, one must again take everyday life as his starting point. We have seen that the situation here is, if possible, even more definitive, such that, as Engels occasionally said, people have continuously thought dialectically without knowing it, just as Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain spoke in prose his whole life without becoming conscious of it. As in the case we just analysed, however, here too artistic praxis is no simple continuation of the praxis of everyday life. Purely practical, particularly when he is confronted with a reality familiar to him, the man of everyday life often spontaneously makes use of the dialectic, even in those cases in which the science of his time is caught up in metaphysical biases. True, this spontaneity also has its limits in that it stops at the utilisation of dialectical states of affairs in a way that is focused primarily on practicality and via the same object often recognises the generalised theories of metaphysical thinking at the same time. (Let us recall the myriad of examples that Darwin cites about the modification of plants and animal species from the practical experience of breeders, the overwhelming majority of whom never thought about drawing some sort of general theoretical conclusion from the results they themselves achieved.) These limits of everyday thinking thereby become even more fixed in that, on the one hand, in certain circumstances the prevalence of the metaphysical way of thinking in certain sciences can – of course only on a temporary basis – serve progress. On the other hand – Engels points this out in relation to philosophy – what are essentially deformations of true objectivity (of true relationships) come into being by means of such a contemplation of things: ‘This method of work’, Engels argues, ‘has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constants, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life’.8 Here the praxis of art has a clear line of attack that is directed against this kind of conception of the world and of the surrounding world of man. The ingenuous ‘naturalness’ of everyday life, which spontaneously perceives

8 Engels 1987b, p. 22.

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things in context and in their movedness, even grows here into a ‘worldview’, the content of which is the salvaging of precisely these relationships and this movedness. Howsoever strongly the socially conditioned fetishisations may permeate the everyday itself, with its own means the praxis of art (not necessarily the conscious worldview of the artist) fights these tendencies, which threaten to schematise the sensuous and human surrounding world of man and thereby ossify it. If we call this specificity of art a spontaneous dialectic, then in doing so the word ‘spontaneous’ must be particularly underscored. For it is expressly a question here of the plain meaning of aesthetic reflection itself. As the intellectually approximate reflection of objective reality, the subjective dialectic has only partially prevailed in philosophy and in the concrete methodology of the sciences as well, despite a process of growing consciousness from Heraclitus to Lenin that has lasted for thousands of years, though this happens more often than is usually assumed in the concrete issues of particular sciences. However, since in most cases this latter takes place from a certain spontaneity dictated by the movement of matter, the consequences of even methodologically superior accomplishments themselves remain unknown or not understood in their most immediate neighboring regions and can thus rarely take a conscious path of generalisation. The structure of everyday thinking is repeated here, as it were, for science. The spontaneity of the dialectic implemented in praxis, however, has a different meaning for the sphere of art. Precisely because it is not a question here of transforming the objective dialectic of reality into a subjective dialectic of concepts, judgements, and syllogisms, but ‘merely’ one of depicting it as faithfully and completely as possible (even if the medium of reflection is language), the dialectic of objectivity, relationships, etc. that is achieved is not so much a method as it is a result of the effort to reflect reality truthfully. Precisely for that reason, art can go much further, can be much more radical in its naïve self-evdience, in dissolving the congealed, fetishised circumstances of life than may contemporary science or philosophy. In this view, the child in Andersen’s fairy tale who ingenuously exclaims with surprise, ‘The emperor has no clothes!’ is a symbol of art’s course of action. At the same time, it is of course possible that art’s spontaneously exposing and fetish-smashing gaze puts down something positive as a value in a place where the everyday way of looking at things, dazzled by fetishisation, is accustomed to perceive either nothing or even something contrary to value. The most conspicuous mode of appearance of such fetishisations is the separation of space and time that has become especially important in the more recent development of thought. Without our being able to go into the history of the issue here, all that is to be noted is that this fetishising metaphysical

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separation of space and time has become especially prevalent since the ‘transcendental aesthetics’ in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The fetishising in this separation attains a rigidity that overturns into something almost mythical, since Bergson (by means of a value emphasis) transformed this artificial distinction into cosmic powers inimically confronting each other at the turn of the century. For our issue, the details and modifications of this fetishising mythos do not matter. Whether time acts as Ormuzd and space as Ahriman in the works of Heidegger, Klages, and others, or whether this antithesis is reversed in those of Moeller van den Bruck9 and Hermann Broch10 means little. What is to be ascertained is merely that such views have also invaded everyday thinking and so-called avant-garde art. This separation is worthy of study for us as such a tendency of life. It should be noted that neither in life nor in philosophical thinking does this tendency ever achieve complete absolute power. After Kant, Schopenhauer indeed fetishised the separation even further beyond his master, but Hegelian philosophy always vigorously opposed it. It is characteristic for its position that the whole question of space and time is not dealt with as a universal epistemological issue – whereas in the works of Kant it constitutes the preface to epistemology – but rather constitutes the universal part of the philosophy of nature. It is of course not possible here to reproduce Hegel’s trains of thought, not even in just a preliminary way. All that is important for us is the fact that his basic motive is the dialectically contradictory unity of space and time and that this unity cannot become effective in an abstract separateness from reality (as a formal subjective a priori) but only in the inextricable interconnectedness to matter and motion, which are also not detachable from each other. Hegel says, ‘Matter is what is real in Space and Time. But these, being abstract, must present themselves here as the First, and then it must appear that Matter is their truth. Just as there is no Motion without Matter, so too, there is no Matter without Motion. Motion is the process, the transition of Time into Space and of Space into Time: Matter, on the other hand, is the relation of Space and Time as a peaceful identity’.11 This inextricable cohesiveness of space and time is dialectical. Of course, the possibility of the separate scientific treatment of issues of space and time resulting from the nature of things is by all means acknowledged therein. Hegel himself thus highlights geometry as such a case, at the

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Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876–1925), German translator of Dostoevsky and cultural historian who played a prominent role in the Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic. [Eds.] Hermann Broch (1886–1851), major Austrian author of modernist fiction. [Eds.] Hegel 2004, p. 44.

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same time stressing that ‘There is no science of time corresponding to the science of space, to geometry’,12 while Kant, consistently extending his fetishising separation even further, derives number (and with it arithmetic) from isolated time.13 The natural convergence of the spontaneous dialectic and the philosophically conscious dialectic is palpably within reach here. For it is readily apparent that everyday praxis and hence also the everyday thinking that remains closely linked to it are situated in a world of moving matter (of moved things) and, without particularly reflecting on it, accept its cohesiveness as a matter of course, as something that is evident without further ado. This could be easily proved by the simplest facts of everyday life. Let’s take such a process clearly described by Marx: If we confine our attention to some determinate quantity of raw material, to a heap of rags, for instance, in paper manufacture, or a length of wire in needle manufacture, we perceive that it passes successively through a series of stages in the hands of the various specialized workers, until it takes on its final shape. On the other hand, if we look at the workshop as a complete mechanism, we see the raw material in all stages of its production at the same time. The collective worker, formed from the combination of the many specialized workers, draws the wire with one set of tooled-up hands, straightens the wire with another set, armed with different tools, cuts it with another set, points it with another set, and so on. The different stages of the process, previously successive in time, have become simultaneous and contiguous in space. Hence a greater quantity of finished commodities is produced within the same period.14 One sees that the purpose of this presentation is by no means to prove the dialectical unity of space and time philosophically but rather to expound the intensification of production and the productivity of labour by means of the division of labour in manufacture. However, as such a process is reproduced and dissected in an intellectually accurate way, what comes into being of its own accord is the likeness of that dialectical cohesiveness of space and time that Hegel analysed philosophically. And it goes without saying that, for each participant of such a labour process, this state of affairs likewise spontaneously turns into the basis of his habitual actions, even if he is not able and 12 13 14

Hegel 2004, p. 37. Kant 1998, pp. 274 ff. Marx 1990, p. 464.

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does not at all feel the need to go quite so deeply into its conceptual clarification as Marx did. This constant coexistence of space and time (the habit of such a basis for being, becoming, and acting, even if it is very rarely made conscious) of course leaves behind the deepest traces in the emotional life of people. In turn, without consciousness of the most basic facts and interdependencies, this cohesiveness also pervades reflections on the phenomena of life and prompts people to broaden their conception of space and time, to confer upon them a more figurative sense without having to intellectually violate that which is essential and true in them as a result. Reflections of important facts of life thus already come into being in the everyday use of language and in the terminology of the social sciences that one – or so we believe – could best designate with the terms ‘quasi-space’ and ‘quasi-time’. Also permit us here to adduce such a situation in the phrasing of Marx: ‘Time is the space for human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of, whose whole lifetime, apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals, and so forth, is absorbed by his labour for the capitalist, is less than a beast of burden. He is a mere machine for producing Foreign Wealth, broken in body and brutalised in mind’.15 Is the word ‘space’ here a mere metaphor? It is certainly something much more. For the admittedly likewise figurative overall expression ‘the space for human development’ hits upon the single most essential objective determinations of time, though not time as it is artificially isolated in itself but rather as this in-itself has an effect in terms of the human world. Thus, no subjectivation of the concept of time is thereby carried out; not only because the in-itself remains undistorted by such an enrichment but also because the supplementation and expansion of it that is thus carried out is based on an objective state of affairs to be found in life. It is simply a matter of the concept of the motion of matter, the significance of which for the proper recognition of the objective essence of space and time we just now learned about in the works of Hegel, undergoing a contentrelated expansion when objectively applied to social man since the motion of matter taking place in society is of a much more complicated constitution than is the movement of matter in physics, for example. Such complications do not alter the essence of the in-itself. But it is nevertheless necessary and justified to take them into account in the presentation of socio-human conditions. It is important to highlight the objectivity in this case. For social life continuously and necessarily also produces subjective reflexes of the relationships of space and time that already more or less completely fail to hit upon the actual in-

15

Marx 1985, p. 142, translation modified.

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itself and whose truth can only lie in their human (in their subjective) necessity. A precise critical parting has to take place here in concrete cases because, on the basis of a – certainly socially conditioned – subjectivity, a fetishising tendency is just as possible as a defetishising one. This great range of distinctions must be meticulously taken into account when we pass to the field of the aesthetic and thereupon investigate the significance of categories like quasi-time and quasi-space and the roles they play in the reflection of reality that is being organised into a work. In the period in which the Kantian fetishising and metaphysical separation of space and time dominated philosophy, it was customary to classify the arts into spatial arts and temporal arts according to this schema. A polemic against this is unnecessary here; the issue had to be mentioned at all only because for a superficial view it might seem as if the importance that we attribute to the homogeneous medium in the process of the aesthetic reflection of reality turning into the work of art had something to do with such a principle for systematising the arts. It is certainly true that each homogeneous medium has – entirely or predominantly – either a spatial or a temporal character. Indeed, the purification process that it carries out in the immediate perceptions of the whole man of everyday reality acts – immediately and for the time being – in this direction. However, we have criticised Kantian representatives of such views (like Fiedler) precisely because they have stopped at this immediacy of the homogeneous medium and let its first immediacy congeal into an ultimate principle. When we polemicised against such views and spoke of an influx of the concrete possible totality of contents and categories into the homogeneous medium, we also intended this aspect; namely the fact that, for example, the spatio-visual homogeneity of the pictorial or the temporo-aural homogeneity of the musical medium does not comprise a rigid metaphysical juxtaposition of spatiality and temporality such that if the one is posited as the basis of homogeneity, then the other would have to be eliminated entirely from the sphere of what is shaped. On the contrary. The principal requirement for everything not based on abstract principles of form (thus, everything beyond the merely decorative arts) is the creation of a ‘world’, a fixing in place of reflected reality in such a way that the determinations building up and completing the work turn into a closed and rounded, concrete and manifest likeness of the totality of the objective determinations of reality. Of course, the homogeneous medium of each art form leads to a quantitative and qualitative selection that excludes the reproduction of certain determinations or assigns them different functions. (Bear in mind the different roles played by chance in novellas and drama.) But, on the one hand, this possibility of selection (of eliminating and highlighting) has a concrete room for manoeuvre that is different in the case of each

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art form; on the other, there are certain categories without which a ‘world’ could not be shaped at all, categories that hence cannot be completely eliminated from any homogeneous medium despite all the variety in emphasis, function, hierarchical position, etc. This also includes the spatio-temporal character of objective reality. It is therefore a fruitful dialectical contradiction that each homogeneous medium that is primarily and immediately spatio-visual has likewise inserted a quasi-time into the totality of its world, just as there is no temporal medium that is capable of building up its ‘world’ without traces of a quasi-space. In Laocoon Lessing raised this problem for painting and sculpture. There he takes as his starting point the fruitful contradiction of the visual arts: they can reproduce ‘but a single moment of ever-changing nature’.16 In the process he deals with – in keeping with his concrete task – two topics. The first is the rejection of the moment of fulfilment as the subject of presentation. This supremely interesting issue will still occupy us in other contexts; it is also much more general than the one with which we have to do with now. (Goethe deals with it as the subject of poetry, significantly in entirely the same sense as Lessing does for sculpture.) But the second topic is our present concern. Lessing says that ‘since this single moment receives from art an unchanging duration, it should express nothing essentially transitory’.17 The unity of contradictions that painting and sculpture actualise in their world-making is a sublation of time such that, within that exclusive present moment being given shape, what gets preserved is the concrete essence of temporality as the outcome of the past and as the starting point for the future. In philosophical thinking, this problem showed up in the works of the Eleatics and in Zeno’s paradoxes, and therein Hegel justifiably beheld the beginning of the dialectic (of the contradictoriness of motion). The problem did not receive a conceptually clear dialectic formulation until it was raised to a philosophical level by Zeno, and the history of philosophy shows how often it was later dragged down into something rigidly metaphysical. But, even from the viewpoint of immediate visuality, the issue is by no means as simple and selfevident as our practical everyday life conceives it to be in most cases. Because everywhere in everyday life one has to do with objects on the move and because one experiences the transition from past into future via the present moment second by second, one does not see the contradiction of the visible immediacy of the instant that emerges in the course of this. In earlier expositions,

16 17

Lessing 1968, p. 16. Lessing 1968, p. 17.

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already with the rejection of photographic reflection in the everyday, we pointed out how alien, rigid and lifeless (indeed, how unreal) most photographs appear, even though they – as well as the likenesses that are reflected on the retina – are mechanically faithful copies of the instant concerned. This becomes even more clearly apparent when one bears in mind the instantaneous photographs of rapid movements, the majority of which appear as nothing less than grotesquely ‘impossible’, although there can be no possible doubt as to their mechanical fidelity of reflection. This is the immediately sensuous, visual aspect of Zeno’s saying, ‘The flying arrow is at rest’. The abstract character of sensuous immediacy emphasised by Hegel over and over again is expressed here in the fact that the single instant that is merely perceived in an immediately visual way is not necessarily capable of revealing its essential objective determinations, its genesis out of the past, its genetic function for the future in this sensuously apparent immediacy it has. It is a matter of contingency whether these determinations stand out visually in its immediate appearance or remain concealed. As the reproduction of the totality of phenomena (this time, of the instant as the moment of movement), photography disperses precisely those objective components that are decisive, despite all of the mechanical fidelity and precision with which it fixes such instants in place. (So-called artistic photography endeavours to select and hold fast to those – more or less rare – instants in which this movement becomes sensuously apparent.) If visual art wants to arrive at a reflection of objective reality, then the totality of those determinations that constitute movement must be contained in the visible instant depicted; that is, a corresponding sublation of the contradiction must be found in the homogeneous medium of pure visibility. The movement must therefore be presented in such a way that its whence and its whither become manifest and immediately experienceable – evoking its quality, direction, and essence – without destroying the momentariness of the instant that alone is shapeable. Only when all of these determinations flow into the homogeneous medium of visibility and are worked up by it into its own organic components can it create – after the sublation of first immediacy – that second aesthetic immediacy in which all the fetishised forms of the everyday and of thinking are wiped out in relation to movement. The fact that Lessing works with epistemological and psychological categories from the 18th century in his description of this phenomenon does not diminish his merit in having clarified this issue; even his term ‘fruitful moment’ still remains useful and points the way ahead today.18 For the fruitfulness of the shaped moment 18

Lessing 1968, p. 17: ‘The more we see the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see’.

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is – for both the creator and those who are receptive in fact – only the subjective side of the objective totality of determinations to be achieved in the work. But as our analysis has shown, the conversion of quasi-time into the homogeneous medium of pure visibility plays a not inconsiderable role in this totality of determinations. This is the objective side of our problem. But the visual arts also exhibit a subjective aspect, which is so closely related to the structure of the work and its function of guiding evocation that we necessarily have to devote a few words to it here. Even Lessing refers to it when he says in the place already mentioned several times that works of visual art are not only beheld but also are regarded repeatedly and for long periods of time. Already the term ‘regarded’ brings an aspect of temporality into aesthetically necessary receptivity. Lessing’s contemporary Hemsterhuis analyses the psycho-physiological necessity of such a receptive mode of comportment involving temporality in works of visual art. ‘You know, sir’, he writes in his ‘Letter on Sculpture’, ‘that, as a result of the application of the laws of optics to the structure of our eye, in a given instant we can have a distinct idea almost only of a visible point that is clearly depicted on our retina; if I therefore want to have a distinct idea of a whole object, I must slide my eyes along the contour of the object concerned so that all the points that constitute this contour are perceived successively by my eyes with clarity; at the end the soul links together all of these basic points and acquires the idea of the overall contour. But now it is certain that this linkage is an act for which the soul uses time; in fact more time is used the less adept the eye is at thus perceiving objects’.19 That Hemsterhuis describes the process in a somewhat simplified manner (geometrically, as it were), that he acknowledges a synthesis only at the conclusion and neglects the ongoing synthesising that takes place during the act of seeing, etc. – all of this does not alter the fact that the basic phenomenon of which Lessing speaks is correctly described in keeping with its essential features. Yet long before both of them, Leonardo da Vinci was already engaged with this problem, though from the viewpoint of the creator and not that of the receptive person. He gives ‘young painters’ the following lesson: ‘We know well that sight is one of the quickest actions there is; in an instant it receives an infinity of forms and yet it grasps only one thing at a time …. And again, I say to you who are by nature inclined to this art, if you wish to have a true knowledge of the forms of things, begin by learning their details and do not go on to the second until you have committed the first to memory and have practiced

19

Hemsterhuis 1846, p. 17.

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it. If you do otherwise, you will waste time and very much prolong your studies’.20 Even though here it is a matter of the same problem of the relationship of human visuality to the fixed likeness of a moment, one could probably object that the work immortalises just such a moment, and aesthetically it does not matter whatsoever how it came to be. In fact, it is empirically ascertainable that the coming into being of any work requires time, though this has nothing to do with the aesthetic essence of the work. Such objections turn out to be invalid, however, when one takes into consideration that the same relationship of man to visible reality comes to expression in the creative process as in that of receptivity, that therefore the same fundamental state of affairs underlies the mutually complementary descriptions offered by da Vinci and Hemsterhuis from opposite aspects. That is why the composition of the work itself must not only take into account this process but also base its entire construction (its entire relational system) on it. We already touched on this problem when we spoke of the profound relationship between composition and its function of accordingly guiding the evocative effect in those who are receptive. Recall what was said at that time about architecture, namely that as a matter of principle the wholeness of an architectural work is not perceivable at a glance all at once, that therefore the artistic composition (and not the merely technical composition, which one can study in outlines, etc.) and the visual formation of an outer- and innerspace and their organic relationship to each other can only be composed of the continuity and synthesis of such temporally successive acts of reception. We repeat: that is why it is not an extrinsic or even accidental consequence of architectural composition that one can take it on only in this way, but its essential constitution is aimed precisely at evoking such a sequence of individual spatial lived experiences that merge into each other, strengthen and deepen each other; at guiding these lived experiences from each singular point so that the sensuous synthesis of the whole comes into being as the shape of an exterior and interior space in a certain visuo-emotional quality and uniqueness in those who are receptive. This knowledge of guidance must also be added to the observations of Lessing and Hemsterhuis regarding painting and sculpture in order to round off their properly foundational remarks. One can certainly say that, if anything, the function of guidance comes to light even more clearly in these arts than it does in architecture. For it is in the nature of architecture, which always unites the artistic formation of space with the creation of a real space for concrete social

20

da Vinci 2002, p. 204.

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purposes, that, beginning from a wide variety of starting points and sometimes confining themselves to various partial aspects, its constructs are nevertheless able to bring forth evocative effects. Yet painting and sculpture stipulate for the person who is receptive in a far more imperative way how he is to approach them. At the same time, this determination of the general aspect dictates a more determinate order of those individual acts of observation (even though this order is not summarisable into general rules) that are visually and synthetically raised into a unity in the overall lived experience of these works so as to arrive at the receptive aesthetic reproduction of the work’s objective composition. In our observations up to now, we have examined merely simple movement in its objective dialectical structure, though it is readily evident that in the more intricate complexes and systems of movements that are related to each other the same fruitful contradiction ultimately prevails, that therefore nothing essentially new philosophically comes about with a closer analysis of such more convoluted structures for the viewpoint that is alone of interest to us at the moment. Of course, out of this grows a central problem of concrete research for the visually shaped forms of art, for the specific distinctions between painting, statuary, relief, etc. in relation to the laws of guidance that are particularly valid for each; for our present problem, however, merely pointing out such differentiations will have to suffice. Just as an example of the content and orientation of analyses of this sort, recall Wöfflin’s observation regarding the left-right problem in painting, which we quoted in another context. Furthermore, this whole complex of viewpoints relates to visual art that reproduces objectivities and creates ‘worlds’. The subjective (but, as subjective, necessary) quasi-time that is founded in the objective structure of the work essentially belongs to this field. The abstract formations of visuality – geometrical or based on the further development of the geometrical – essentially aim at an effect that is more or less purely decorative. In such formations, the simultaneous grasp of the work in its totality is qualitatively more fully possible than in the case of a ‘world’ created out of objects and out of their real objective relationships. Therefore, the tracking of individual details, which naturally is necessary and justified here as well, has no quasi-temporal character in the case of geometric ornaments. Both the whole and the parts have already been lifted out of the river of time by their being essentially grounded in the geometric, by the decorative nature of their conjunction and totality. The fact that such a more or less pronounced tendency towards decorative effect also inheres within each construct of the visual arts admittedly complicates the issue of guidance in them, since the two aspects (the decorative and the creation of a ‘world’ of objects) have to converge into complete unity; however, the con-

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crete analysis of this relationship belongs in the theory of these forms of art and must be raised and solved specifically for each art there. Here it merely comes down to a general formulation of this issue, to the verification of the existence of objective and subjective quasi-time, to its function in the worldcreation of these arts, to their share – certainly that of objective quasi-time, first and foremost – in the defetishising efficacy of art. The issue of the guidance of receptivity raises the issue of quasi-space for those arts in which the homogeneous medium is temporal. A first impression would now suggest that, in contrast to the situation dealt with a moment ago, in which there was both an objective and a subjective quasi-time, we would now have to do only with a subjective quasi-space here. However, we believe that in such cases one should not be guided by analogising and equivalents must not be mechanically pushed too far, even if they are contrasts. Since contradictions of motion vis-à-vis time seemingly do not emerge, an equivalent to the objective quasi-time of the visual arts observed by us must be missing here. All that is to be noted by way of supplement here is that one cannot discover something analogous to geometrical ornamentation in any art whose homogeneous medium is essentially temporal. The quasi-space with which we have to do here can accordingly only possess a subjective character: it is a necessary consequence of that guiding of receptivity with which an artistic composition moving in the homogeneous movement of time must unconditionally work. However, this contradiction has still not completely vanished here. The immediate contradiction in motion between rest and motion that Zeno formulated is such a basic state of affairs that it must remain perceptible from its temporal aspect as well. The distinction is perhaps best understood in this way: regarded spatially, the moment of rest (persistence) seems to predominate, and the dialectical unity can acquire its truthful shape only through the artistic introduction of before and after. In contrast, movedness achieves an absolute, unlimited validity when regarded temporally. Here, in the aesthetic reflection of reality, one comes upon the contradiction of Heraclitus: ‘One can never step in the same river twice’. The task of aesthetic reflection here is to help moments of rest (of persistence, of continuity) in change to come to the fore. The distinction of aspects and the homogeneous media in which the aesthetic reflection brings the contradiction and its resolution into view entails that, regarded spatially, an objective quasi-time comes into being, whereas its mode of appearance receives a subjective character in temporality. With that said, however, the objective origin remains preserved: this subjectivity comes upon the ultimate objective principles of composition of the work itself, whereas that subjectivity is just a purely receptive appropriation of the finished structure of the work. The inner cohesiveness of subjective quasi-space and pure tempor-

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ality as objective quasi-time in the corresponding spatiality is based on the fact that the conflictingly formulated contradictions of Zeno and Heraclitus are – ultimately – targeted at the same material content, that they nevertheless dialectically resolve the same fetishisations of immediacy from conflicting points of view and with conflicting presuppositions. A similar task is – marching separately, striking together – posed for the spatial and temporal homogeneous medium in the aesthetic reflection of reality. The basic fact here is self-evident and was almost always highlighted accordingly: the receptivity of a temporal art – we take music first and foremost, but what is to be explicated in the course of this can also, mutatis mutandis, be applied to literature – cannot possibly consist of a mere succession of lived experiences. We simply recall our reference to Nicolai Hartmann’s views, which very accurately envisage the issue of guidance precisely for music and for this reason always correctly foreground the forward- and backward-looking constitution of its singular momentary elements at the same time. Of course, he also looks for the unity that necessarily comes into being in the process, but as we have seen, as an idealist he does not want to acknowledge that it might have something to do with sensuous hearing. Now when he says that ‘this unity is, to be sure, still temporal in nature, but not a simultaneity’, he has thus touched upon a determinate and important side of the phenomenon in the right way.21 He correctly recognises that the unity must remain a temporal one – the quasi-time of the visual arts also moves in the medium of spatiality and remain inherent to this, but the point-blank denial of simultaneity removes the life-infusing dialectic from his exposition: that is to say, it is a question of the unity of simultaneity and non-simultaneity at the same time. For the subject, who thus moves in time guided by the work, similar inconsistencies (admittedly with important modifications) come into being with every movement. As correspondences that indicate very deep parallelisms, they must continuously produce and make evocative a contradictory synthesis of succession and juxtaposition. The character of these correspondences can rise to prominence as intensification, attenuation, or qualification, as pathos or irony, etc. only in the most rigorous interrelatedness of temporally separated moments (in fact, such that the temporal separation, its succession, and the place of each thing in this succession belongs to its essence just as much as does the juxtaposition created by means of this intimate relatedness). The overarching role of succession in this unity of contradictions (that the beforehand and afterwards of aspects must – without destroying their essence – remain indissoluble and

21

Hartmann 2014, p. 126.

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irreplaceable) simply demonstrates that this juxtaposition cannot reflect a real space but merely a quasi-space within the temporal homogeneous medium of music. We thus believe that it is useful, if we are thereby going to illuminate this contradiction, that we consult a highly contrary attempt at resolving it. Hermann Broch considers it his intellectual task to destroy time, which he understands to be linked to death. Music also expresses this, which in his view is man’s most profound endeavour: ‘For whatever a man does, he does it in order to destroy time, in order to abolish it, and this abolishment is called space. Even music, which exists only in time and imbues time, converts time into space …’22 This abolishment of time ‘is the center of cognition in music. For the architecturisation of the passage of time, as it is carried out by music, this immediate abolishment of time rushing toward death, is also the immediate abolishment of death in the consciousness of mankind’.23 It is not our task here to dispute Broch’s worldview. We can merely note here that his tendency to philosophically interpret music as pure spatiality is a pinnacle of modern fetishising tendencies. For what we call the quasi-space of music wants precisely to highlight the universality of music in the reflection of reality; it wants to show that music aimed immediately at pure hearing and pure temporality is by its nature still a likeness of the totality of reality, a ‘world’ in the strict aesthetic sense. Therefore, already in the vestibule, where the unfolding of the overall artistic world takes place, in the aesthetic reproduction of conditions in which man sticks by his surrounding world with his senses and by its effects on his interiority, quasi-space in music (and literature) and quasi-time in the visual arts tear down the fetishistic separation of space and time, which is carried to an extreme in our own day precisely as a result of the tendencies of structure and movement in capitalist society. Broch’s ostensible profundity is only the avant-garde flipside of that academic formalism that wants to remove all meaningful content from music. To use Gottfried Keller’s words, just as sober and drunken philistines rove about in life – and neither is better than the other – so too do academicism and the avant-garde join up in contemporary art theory as objective allies to carry fetishisations into aesthetic thinking. The notion of quasi-space in music and literature thus has nothing to do with those age-old tendencies, proceeding from certain mathematical elements in the theory of music, to look for their essence in a mystical geometricising. For

22 23

Broch 1955, p. 10. Broch 1955, p. 99.

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the development from Pythagoras to Kepler, this was historically understandable based on the conditions of growth for theory at that time; for the objectivity of music, which was powerfully felt but philosophically unsubstantiatable, one looked for a cosmic foundation. As early as the works of Schelling, comparisons like ‘Architecture necessarily proceeds in its constructions according to arithmetical or, since it is music in space, geometric relationships’ are nothing more than an ingenious (but empty) intellectual game that culminates in the famous aphorism of architecture as ‘solidified music’.24 Hegel rightly showed that no geometry is possible for time as disanthropomorphising reflection, thereby eliminating the philosophical basis of such analogising. The fact that it shows up again and again today is due to the social reasons indicated above. And it is a great pleasure for the author to be able to point out that in Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann always used sovereign irony when dealing with such experiments quite often arising in the works of the protagonist (like, for example, the music of a ‘cosmic order’ audible to no one) as symptoms of such perverse modern tendencies. The quasi-space of music can therefore only obtain an aesthetic sense (can only fulfil the mission of the destruction of the fetish in its field) if the juxtaposition created by it now takes effect only as a moment of temporal succession. But such a constraint means incomparably more than the moment of position in the temporal sequence initially expected by us (the taking-effect of the irreversibility of time). In another context earlier, we quoted Marx as saying that ‘Time is the space for human development’, and we emphasised that what is concerned there is not merely a metaphor. The unequivocal direction that inheres within time already includes the irreversibility of certain processes for inorganic nature. For organic nature and all the more for the world of man, this tendency overturns into something qualitative: the temporally later contains within itself the determinations of that which precedes it, though in a reconditioned, enriched, and deepened manner, so that the contingent or memorial return of an earlier moment (the contrasting of the past with the present) receives the specific meaningful content of a development in contrast to a mere movement. This basic fact of the role of time in the life of people is reflected in the arts that have a temporal homogeneous medium, namely music and literature. In this development (thus in the temporal sequence) the overarching aspect of reflection persists, since it is indeed a determining factor of life. But in order to be able to make such a development conscious – and art certainly shapes its self-consciousness – the milestones and turning points of this path

24

Schelling 1989, pp. 165 and 177.

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must become clearly and evocatively manifest. As the quasi-space of these arts, which – we repeat – remains a mere moment of temporality (of the temporal course of development) and lets temporal succession appear as a juxtaposition within its purview, it creates those possibilities for comparison – those contrasts between beforehand, the present, and future perspectives – in which one can recognise and experience the essence of the new springing from development in a real and all-around way as such. Therefore, if a motif or a melody recurs in music, then it is never simply a recurrence. Rather, the becomingpresent of its earlier mode of appearance is just a springboard for unequivocally letting the radically new and altered appear in the newly created situation. Without using these terms, Adorno has described this character of quasi-space in music well: ‘But as long as music takes place entirely in time, it is dynamic in such a way that in the course of the music the identical becomes non-identical just as the non-identical can become the identical as, e.g., in an abbreviated reprise. What is referred to as the architecture of great traditional music rests precisely on these effects, not on musical relations defined by geometrical symmetry. The most powerful effects of Beethoven’s form depend on the recurrence of something which was once present simply as a theme that reveals itself as a result and thus acquires a completely transformed sense. Often the meaning of the preceding passage is only fully established by this later recurrence’.25 With this, that which is common to quasi-space and quasi-time – regardless of whether they are subjective or objective – becomes quite clear. For each world-creating art, an issue of fateful significance is that it really reflect the world as a whole, that its dialectical unity and diversity be expressed not only in the shaped content but also in the shaping forms; that the work that arises with the claim to be a ‘world’ not confine itself to a fetishised extract in terms of content or a fetishised aspect in terms of form. Although not expressly in relation to this problem, we have already discussed certain complicated categories whose aesthetic reworking guarantees such a function for the work, and in later observations we will speak of these categories in even more detail. All that is to be highlighted here is the fact that, just because art must be attuned to sensuous evocation in its world-creating tendencies, it is precisely basic categories such as space, time, and motion that are to be taken into account as indispensable preconditions of any possible effect. Each art is the likeness of human life, of the development of mankind. Since the spatio-temporal determinateness of being, the coexistence of both in each manifestation of life, is the objective foundation of any human existence, and since, on the other hand, the homo-

25

Adorno 2002, p. 188.

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geneous media of the arts imperatively stipulate a differentiation according to spatiality and temporality, these media must themselves ensure their differentiation does not again degenerate into a fetishised separation.

2

Indeterminate Objectivity

The far more determinate content-relatedness of literature makes the concrete mode of appearance of quasi-space in it much more complicated. However, since from a philosophical view no new issues turn up here as a matter of principle, we forego its analysis and turn to that problem which we have already indicated in the formulation of this difference, the problem of the determinacy or indeterminacy of objectivity in the aesthetic sphere. Here too, as in all important content-related cases, the problem, even in its most general version, is nothing specifically aesthetic. For everyday and even for scientific thinking, each determination has a dual character: on the one hand, it must accurately reflect in an approximate way the essential aspects of the object concerned and conceptualise it as unambiguously as possible. On the other, among the countless number of characteristics, etc. that the objects possess, a selection is made not just according to their material objective importance. The kind of selection is also determined by that practical or epistemological goal which the determination concerned has to serve. Of course, the accuracy of the determination depends first and foremost on fulfilling the first condition, but the praxis of the sciences repeatedly shows that they can be compelled to also rework objectively correct determinations partly because these determinations include traits, features, etc. that are superfluous for the science concerned and partly because they insufficiently delineate precisely those things that are decisive for the sets of problems that are important at any given time. In everyday thinking, which is only all too often forced to work with ad hoc determinations, this component understandably stands out even more plainly. In summary, all of this means that each correct determination must also have elements of indeterminacy as such, without forfeiting its clarity and unambiguity (indeed precisely as nothing less than a way of protecting this clarity and unambiguity). Overdeterminateness can very well turn into an impediment to theory and praxis, whereas a proper indeterminacy indeed cuts off wrong turns but with the same act creates a room for manoeuvre for future developments that would otherwise be attainable only with difficulty, preventing a fetishistic congealing into dogma and bias. In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Lenin discussed this kind of determination quite clearly. He summarises his observations on relative and absolute truth and draws method-

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ological conclusions from them that are important to us here: ‘In a word, every ideology is historically conditional, but it is unconditionally true that to every scientific ideology (as distinct, for instance, from religious ideology) there corresponds an objective truth, absolute nature. You will say that this distinction between relative and absolute truth is indefinite. And I shall reply: it is sufficiently “indefinite” to prevent science from becoming a dogma in the bad sense of the term, from becoming something dead, frozen, ossified; but at the same time it is sufficiently “definite” to enable us to dissociate ourselves in the most emphatic and irrevocable manner from fideism and agnosticism, from philosophical idealism and the sophistry of the followers of Hume and Kant’.26 One sees that it is a question here of a fundamental fact of the reflection of reality that results from the contradictoriness between the endless number of determinations of objectively existing objects and relationships and their relatedness to those constraints that dictate to people the limits of their own nature as well as the limitedness of their practical objectives. It is again selfevident that such a basic constellation also has to play a corresponding role in aesthetic reflection. Indeed, if anything it has to become even more significant because the sciences’ relative step beyond the anthropological conditionality of the human reflection of reality by means of disanthropomorphising methods is on principle barred to art. Actually, not merely as a weakness in actual fact, as is frequently the case in everyday life, but rather precisely as the source of the specific capability of art. The anthropological limits of man must turn into positive, fruitful forces in it; that development which has indubitably taken place in our aesthetically transformed sensorial nature always presents an intensification, etc. within its realm. As an important distinction with regard to science and the everyday, more must be pointed out as to the definite character of each work of art as a matter of principle. The determinations in science and everyday life are continuously controlled and corrected by means of praxis. Those things that get fixed in place therefore invariably have – likewise as a matter of principle – a provisional character, allowing for revolutionary or partial changes. Of course, the coming into being of works of art is likewise subjected to such a process, but that is a special issue of creative aesthetic comportment that we will examine at length in the second part. Once the work of art has come into being, however, it is by its nature something final, or it does not exist as a work of art at all. This means that the demand on the exact functioning of determinations is even more highly taut than in other fields. Finally, we also have to contemplate the whole issue from the viewpoint of the pluralism of the

26

Lenin 1972a, p. 136.

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forms and works of art. The qualitative variety of the homogeneous media in the forms of art, down to their individual constitution in each individual work of art, brings forth specific differentiations here. So as to briefly summarise in a new context what has already been explained: determinations in the aesthetic sphere certainly exhibit precisely formulable principles but acknowledge no general or generally applicable rule. Schiller quite clearly posed this question in relation to literature in a letter to Goethe: ‘For the present, it seems to me that we might with great advantage start from the idea of the absolute determinateness of the object. It would namely become apparent that all works of Art that have been failures through an unskillful choice of subject, are chargeable with such an indeterminateness, and the arbitrariness which is a consequence thereof …. If now, with this proposition, we combine the other, namely, that the selection of the object must always take place through the means that are peculiar to one class of Art, that it must be made within the particular limits of each species of Art, we should have, it seems to me, a sufficient criterion, not to be misled in the choice of objects’.27 The fact that Schiller speaks of the selection of an object here, which precedes both the process of creation and (all the more) the finished work, does not diminish that which is meritorious in his train of thought; on the contrary, it enhances it. For he thereby points out the truth that the accurate aesthetic reflection of reality must begin before artistic labour in the proper sense. It must already play an active role in the selection of material (indeed in the ‘pre-artistic’ lived experience of reality) so that the process of formation comes upon a semi-finished product that is usable. What is important and groundbreaking in Schiller’s remarks is, first and foremost, that he ties the ‘absolute determinateness of the object’ to the specific conditions of the separate forms of art. That is, according to his views, the ‘absolute determinateness of the object’ means something qualitatively different in drama than it does in the epic, in the novel than it does in the novella, etc. It is easy to realise that in this we again find the same structure of determinations that we could observe just now in the most general sense for each reflection and each praxis affiliated with it. By putting the possibilities and demands of individual forms of art in those places that the teleological aspect of action occupies in the everyday, Schiller has delineated precisely the specific methodology of determinations in the aesthetic sphere. True, Lessing preceded him in this issue. Nevertheless, an essential content of his Laocoon is the setting of boundaries between literature and visual art in

27

Schiller and Goethe 1877, pp. 330–1, translation modified.

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this regard. If the focus for Lessing is the issue of description and how to combat it as a means of expression in literature, then it is not difficult to discover the connections of interest to us now. If one takes the most famous examples from his argument – Agamemnon’s scepter, the shield of Achilles, Helen and the old Trojan men – he sees his main purpose perfectly clearly: an object of literature that in painting would have to appear with all the features of its immediate, thingly, and sensuous existence turns literarily into a mere element of a determinate action. First and foremost, this just means that the objects in literature must not be found in their simple in-themselves but rather as objective mediations of human relationships and of the actions that actualise them; this is especially conspicuous in the analysis of the scepter. Already it is clear here that Lessing, without yet being acquainted with our concept of the fetish, struggles against the fetishisation of literarily reflected reality. For in literature man and human relations are central in the world created by it. That which is essential to human existence and fate vanishes among the weeds of the fetishised objects of his deeds, of the events of his life – not only in that descriptive literature which has long since become outmoded and forgotten, against which Lessing directs his immediate attacks, but also in modern naturalism of the Zola school, in the works of Adalbert Stifter28 and up to the avant-garde champions of the montage of a reified world like Dos Passos and the very latest ‘thing novel’ of the Alain Robbe-Grillet type. This polemic also hits upon an artistic centre of the defetishising mission of literature. But at the same time this function is immediately related to the issue of the determinacy or indeterminacy of the shaped objectivity that is now being discussed by us. Going by its immediate sensuous objectivity, Agamemnon’s scepter remains indeterminate to a large extent. However, as a result of the story of its coming into being, its role in the life of society, etc. and just a few rays of light that imply its sensuous being, we also have an image of its objective constitution that is sufficiently clear for the evocative reproduction of the overall situation. Perhaps the dialectic of determinacy and indeterminacy comes to light even more clearly in the Helen scene analysed by Lessing. Here he particularly highlights the fact that nothing concrete is ever to be found about what Helen looks like in the works of Homer, who merely presents how her beauty affects the old Trojan men. Now if this is somewhat generalised – and we will see that we are completely justified in doing so – then we face the at first glance paradoxical situation that precisely a great piece of poetry, the enduring effect of which, in the first place, is certainly based on making manifest human interior life, can

28

Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868), popular Austrian bourgeois author. [Eds.]

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simply dispense with the composition of the outer mode of appearance of its figures, even in those cases like that of Helen, in which beauty is precisely the decisive factor of the fate being embodied in the plot. This seeming paradox loses some of its initial rigidity when one keeps in mind that, with the exception of the last fifty years, drama never gave descriptions of its figures, though these nevertheless stay alive in the consciousness of mankind over the millennia. Indeed, to say nothing at all of modern stage directions, in the rare cases in which the dialogue specifies the outer appearance of the heroes, this was not always able to gain acceptance with respect to that image which sprang from the plot itself. The queen says of Hamlet in the last act, ‘He’s fat, and scant of breath’, without thereby being able to have the slightest influence on the vivid image of Hamlet.29 The modern sort of epic, with its broad and detailed descriptions, has seemingly gone beyond the scope of Homer’s sort as depicted by Lessing. But if one examined the situation closely he would arrive at surprising results and find that, for example, the appeal of characters in a novel in which they are shaped in a truly vivid way frequently comes close to that of the Homeric Helen, though made somewhat more concretely manifest – and this does not contradict what we have just said – by means of a few sensuous flashes. But even a storyteller as consciously productive and powerfully sensualising as Thomas Mann rigorously rejected making the two main characters in his Faustus outwardly visible. He gives a very interesting theoretical explanation of this as well in his study on the genesis of this novel: ‘oddly enough, I scarcely gave [Adrian Leverkühn] any appearance, any physical body. My family was always wanting me to describe him. If the narrator had to be reduced to a mere figment, a kind heart and a hand trembling as it held the pen, well and good. But at least I should make his hero and mine visible, should give him a physical individuality, should make it possible for the reader to picture him. How easily that could have been done! And yet how mysteriously forbidden it was, how impossible, in a way I had never felt before! Impossible in a different sense from the impossibility of Zeitblom’s describing himself. Here there was a prohibition to be kept – or, at any rate, a commandment of maximum restraint. To depict Adrian’s outer appearance was instantly to threaten him with spiritual downfall, to undermine his symbolic dignity, to diminish and render banal his representativeness’.30 At the same time, it is worth noting that Thomas Mann admits to offering descriptions ‘in the picturesque sense’ for the minor characters in the same novel.31 29 30 31

Shakespeare 1966, p. 906. [Eds.] Mann 1961, p. 89. Ibid. [Eds.]

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Nothing would be falser than to conclude from such important facts that literature is unsensuous abstractness. The few examples from the most significant literature that are actually constituted in such a way (for instance, Alfieri32) cannot have any general evidentiary value. Today everyone is already aware that such a conception of Greek literature does not correspond to the aesthetic state of affairs. It would be ridiculous to impugn the power for sensuous composition in Homer or the tragedians. But then the question arises: from whence comes the liveliness of the characters if their sensuous appearance remains indeterminate? The negative side still does not give an answer to this, although by means of it the room for manoeuvre of such a liveliness becomes more concrete to a certain degree. The nineteenth century particularly elevated the literary presentation of the sensuous exterior to a high level of technical perfection. However, if we pose the counter-question as to which of Zola’s characters – Zola who was a genuine virtuoso in the description of the sensuous exterior – still lives in a vital way in human consciousness today, then we will certainly receive the answer: none at all, or at most, Nana is remembered as a flat picturesque allegory of Paris in the Second Empire. For the time being, it thus becomes apparent – which was already evident in Hamlet’s fatness and scantiness of breath – that in very many cases such a meticulous presentation is not actually a determination but is rather a superfluous overdetermination. Such things also certainly occur in science and the everyday. In these, they can turn into restraints or disruptions of further research. Even in the everyday, overdetermination has a negative effect, though in most cases as a simple superfluity that praxis often casts aside. The same thing certainly takes place in literature as well. However, since overdeterminacy (with all the ramifications of the superfluous) constitutes a set component of the work, indeed at times as a principle of its mode of composition, this issue is not nearly as simple as it is in the everyday. In most cases, that which is not necessary – admittedly in a quite broad sense – for the work of art is not simply superfluous but rather burdensome, indeed disruptive. Here too one must certainly not conceive of any metaphysically rigid antithesis. Earlier we spoke in reference to a self-critical remark made by Musil about the distinction between creating tension and capturing a listener’s attention in the function of the work of art in guiding those who are receptive. Musil himself accepts that merely capturing someone’s attention is capable of bringing about the guidance of the receptive person in a far weaker manner than is the creation of tension. Even here, it is

32

Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803), Italian dramatist who was foundational to modern Italian tragedy. [Eds.]

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not difficult to ascertain the reason: tension is the psychological form in which the homogeneous medium of the epic and dramatic kinds of literature moves the receptive person and which may convert his comportment as the whole man vis-à-vis objective reality into that of the man-made-whole of the concrete work of art. If merely his attention is captured by the work, he adheres to it as he does to a piece of reality that has been torn out. That is, he does not surrender himself to the current of literature – since such a thing is indeed not there at all – he does not experience a ‘world’ of the literary, a shaped likeness of reality in its totality (sub specie of the given homogeneous medium) and thus the central issue of the concrete work of art at the time. This instead decomposes into pieces that are merely more or less loosely connected causally, in which the receptive person is interested, depending on their intellectuo-artistic level, or to which he reacts indifferently or adversely. Therefore, at best the achievement of a Musil-like capturing of someone’s attention could attain an enduring interestedness but not the evocative continuity of genuine artistic effect. With these observations, we are still located within the realm of the problem of the determinacy or indeterminacy of the objects of literature. Only its concrete content must be generalised a bit more. We took as our starting point Lessing’s examples, in which this problem was conceived of as that of the sensuous presentation of objects’ outer mode of appearance. But it is readily apparent that the artistic findings that are achieved at the same time hold true for the overall object- and form-world of literature. With the generalisation that is carried out, it is a question of the philosophy of details in literature. In fact, both in a quantitative and in a qualitative regard. At the same time, we recall the function of indeterminacy highlighted by Lenin in a determination correctly conceived of in accordance with its essence: the avoidance of dogma or congealment (fetishisation) in the meticulous drawing of boundaries in those places where this stipulates the meaningful content of the determination concerned. Looked at in terms of art, this situation entails that all of those issues that are not organically related to the central purpose of the essential problem simply withdraw from the presentation, even if they were to belong to it when regarded in a purely logical or purely historical way. This finding gives us the possibility of drawing the perimeter of what is to be dealt with further than the Lessingian examples we have considered up to now do. Thus, as we have seen, Hegel censures Shakespeare for omitting Macbeth’s rightful claim to the throne, which is contained in the chronicles. Now in his great tragedies, Shakespeare shaped the dissolution of the feudal world. Not the facts, the events, the concrete causal relationships – that was the content of the cycle on the War of the Roses. Rather, the great types of downfall, their passions and fates, the great historical background and underground of decline, the con-

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tours of the coming new men: the philosophy of history and not the chronicle of the perishing feudalism. That is why subordinate personal reasons, which Hegel foists upon him, do not play a role in the fact that Macbeth’s legitimacy remains in the dark. What does instead is the important basis deriving from the philosophy of history, such that a petty consideration like legitimacy cannot be found at all from the observation point from which Shakespeare surveys this process. Hegel’s remark is interesting not so much as a concrete lapse of judgement but rather as a first emergence of a supremely problematical trend of thought in the nineteenth century: overmotivation. How and to what extent the tendencies being expressed therein could also become fruitful for science from time to time does not have to concern us here. It is certain that literature was burdened with overdetermined and literarily superfluous motivations that had to take slenderness away from the composition of wholes and parts without actually making the meaningful literary content weightier. We will again limit ourselves to one example. Romeo catches sight of Juliet, and tragedy is here; no one chimes in to pose the question of why he has fallen in love precisely with her. Yet as eminent a dramatist as Hebbel nevertheless brings up this question on a similar occasion. He squanders an entire act of Agnes Bernauer on ‘motivating’ the irresistible beauty of his heroine, even though – when looked at in dramatic terms – the simple fact that the Bavarian Herzog Albert is in love with the beautiful peasant girl and marries her would have completely sufficed as the basis for the conflict. This situation is even more obvious in Zola’s Germinal. When Étienne Lantier kills Chaval in the middle of the mine disaster, their rivalry and the destruction of Étienne’s happiness in life by Chaval would be a completely sufficient motivation for the act under these circumstances. The fact that Zola features Étienne’s inherited alcoholism as the decisive motive here transforms the tragedy into a textbook case of pathology, precisely on account of overdeterminacy. Literature has been full of such overmotivations and overdeterminacy of literary objectivity ever since. If we say that the slenderness of the line of artistic development is thereby disrupted, then we are expressing ourselves in a one-sidedly formal manner. The absence of this slenderness results from the fact that writers have lost the genuinely literary and defetishised view over the whole of life. Under the decisive organising principles of the worlds of their works they hence incorporate determinations that belong with the fetishised prejudices of their era – like the omnipotence of pathological heredity in the works of Zola – and repeatedly hamper or downright foreclose a consistent artistic shaping of the reflected world all the way to its end. Such fetishising prejudices of course differ depending on the period. At the time of their dominance and general prevalence, they

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are used as nothing less than surrogates for composition, as their simple existence inspires illusions about an aesthetic determinacy that often does not exist at all. But other fetishes more or less speedily come to the fore, and the ‘great’ or ‘avant-garde’ art of yesterday appears stiff, lifeless, and empty today. Needless to say, the opposite extreme is just as harmful. The complete lack of motivation as a matter of principle, as in Gide’s ‘action gratuite’, certainly yields a formal slenderness, but at the same time it results in a nihilistic indeterminacy of the overall ideological atmosphere of the work, a contourlessness of the characters and situations, etc. Determinacy and indeterminacy are therefore functions of the concrete intensive totality of the work (of the genre) at the time, and these functions are reducible to ‘rules’ just as little as other genuine aesthetic categories are without losing their clear lawfulness as a result. Alongside such qualitative aspects of determinacy and indeterminacy, the quantitative must now be briefly thought of as well. The issue of the detail comes even more blatantly to the fore, although it is clear that the examples cited up to now are likewise closely related to this question. For it suffices to bear in mind the earlier contrast between Shakespeare and Hebbel in order to realise that the manner in which each of them presents the coming into being of a great love in conflict with society has to exert the most powerful influence on the quantity and quality of details. If we now are going into the quantity of details, then it is likewise clear that we can never talk of a simple quantitative comparison. Style and artistic personalities differ in a supremely pronounced way when it comes to details, and there are cases in which a great wealth of details, such as in the works of Dickens or Gottfried Keller, can be regarded as properly weighed in the artistic sense, whereas in the case of others who are much more reserved with regard to details an excess in the sense of superfluity can be found, as with Hebbel and with Schiller from time to time. The leads back again to the philosophy of details in literature. A detail is only completely justified artistically if it illuminates a character, a situation, etc. from a new side that is related (no matter how much it may be mediated) to the main issue, if it causes something of its essence to appear that would otherwise remain veiled. Quantity thus only becomes aesthetically meaningful when related to the final intentions of the work. It can be very well dealt with in an aesthetically rational way in this relatedness, and the decision about correct proportionality, scanty determinacy or false abundance can be clearly deduced from principles at any given time. But – to repeat what has already been said – it is precisely the aesthetic rationality of the principles that includes the pluralism of styles and works and for that very reason excludes any abstract universal rule a priori.

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That these last findings hold completely true for painting and sculpture probably does not require any lengthy evidence. For instance, it is evident at first glance here that there are just as few superfluous details in a work by van Eyck as there are in one by Manet. It is just as clear that everywhere the general conception of time, style, and the artist decides on which details are regarded as determinative for objectivity in the work of art and, on the other hand, which real determinations of real objectivity for the work of art can (indeed ought to) remain in indeterminacy. In concrete cases, this general conception of objectivity, which is determined by the most disparate factors at any given time (its scale moves from worldview to the technical skill that has been achieved for the time being), excludes whole sets of details that are possible in the abstract. For instance, the modifying influence of momentary lighting effects on colouration that constitute visible objectivity, whereas at the same time according to the nature of the reigning conception, other complexes come to the fore. If with all of this a wider, differentiated room for manoeuvre among possible compositions of detail again and again offers itself to the artist, then what we have called the quantitative problem of detail only ever arises within such a real room for manoeuvre. Upon closer inspection, however, this immediately given set of problems reveals more general aspects of the problem of the determinacy and indeterminacy of objects in the visual arts. Formulated in an entirely general sense, the issue is this: whereas in literature the dialectic of outer and inner appears very complicated and convoluted and therefore can figure neither as determinant nor as criterion, we now catch sight of this relation in a manner that is supremely simplified by the matter itself. That is, the visual arts are immediately capable of only shaping the outer, though they have always done so in such a way that the artistic forming of the outer inevitably evokes the inner. That was already the case with depictions made for magical purposes, and the coming into being of visual arts emancipated from magical or religious objectives and from the evocation of magical or religious contents can alter nothing essential in this state of affairs when it is regarded in an abstract universal way. If the generalisation is certainly not carried out in a completely abstract manner, then the very essential distinction between allegorical and immanently formative (in the terminology of Goethe’s age: symbolic) presentation comes into view. This distinction depends on whether the inner meaningful content is immediately identical with the outer composition, with the system of figures, objects, etc. that have come into view in such a way that, according to Hegel’s words, ‘What is internal is also present externally, and vice versa’, or whether the inner lays claim to an autonomous existence, independent of its

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visual embodiment, more or less loosely linked to it.33 We always regard the first path here as normal for the aesthetic and allegorising as a deviation from its essential norms. Only the last chapter can offer a philosophical justification of this thesis. But no matter how closely and intimately the relation of outer to inner may be conceived, for the visual arts the situation persists in which their homogeneous medium is only able to give a completely determinate shape to the outer, in which this determinacy of all of the distinctions in their becoming-manifest that we indicated above and that are in themselves often profound must be lumped together as mere subspecies from this observation point. The inner can only be mediately expressed through the outer and thus must become subject to an irresolvable indeterminacy. If one wants to grasp this relation in a properly aesthetic way, then he must wake up to the fact that the complete aesthetic determinacy of the work of art thereby remains untouched. In equal measure, the Mona Lisa and a landscape by Ruisdael34 are utterly determined artistically, even though there exist entire libraries of different interpretations of the meaningful inner content of the former in particular. And it would be superficial and constrictively artistic to look down haughtily on all of these divergent interpretations and to suppose that visuo-pictorial determinacy alone would come into consideration aesthetically. True, a great part of such interpretations is feuilletonish drivel, full of false lyricism and vacuous ‘profundity’. But one must not forget that even this is an unavoidable consequence of the aesthetically necessary evocative effect of art. It is important to accurately distinguish, to find and work out, criteria that help us to determine those instances in which it is merely a question of the self-presentation of receptive individuality and those in which there is a legitimate attempt to intellectually approximate that room for manoeuvre of indeterminate determinations – which, as we have seen and yet will see, the mode of composition of each art necessarily brings about – thus the attempt to intellectually and emotionally comprehend the objectivity of the work (its real meaningful content) as completely as possible. It is inherent to art and its aesthetic effect that the latter is necessarily split with respect to determinacy. The visual determinacy of the outer must be in accordance with a human psychological indeterminacy of the inner, which is, as we have already expounded, of course in no way completely indeterminate in objective terms but rather moves within an artistic room for manoeuvre that is concretely circumscribed. It also has to be said that works which completely

33 34

Hegel 1991, p. 209. Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–1682), Dutch landscape painter. [Eds.]

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or largely lack the latter nevertheless have a vacuous effect, despite all of their possible technical perfection, whereas on the other hand it is characteristic for the greatest works that their room for manoeuvre for the indeterminacy of the inner reaches out further and points into the depths more forcefully than does that of average works. One need not think of Hamlet or Faust at all; even in the visual arts it is not in the least bit accidental that these tendencies are most clearly perceptible precisely in the works of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. If one wants to understand this relationship correctly, then he must have another look at the thoughts and feelings of the everyday. If the dialectical relation of outer and inner (their ultimate identity despite all the contradictoriness of their modes of appearance) were not an objective fact of life, then dealings among people would not be possible. Their reflection in human consciousness must naturally also include a more or less adequate likeness of the objective dialectical structure. The aspect of indeterminacy that exists for the relationships between people in the interpretation of the outer (deeds, expressions, etc. of course included here) and in the attempt to fathom the inner from it therefore remains indissoluble. What in the everyday gets called insight into human nature is in many cases something that is extremely uncertain, and in those places where it delivers results, its source is an individual ability in the handling of particular cases that has been synthetically achieved through the accumulation of meaningful experiences and observations. (We will talk in even more detail about the psychological side of this issue in other contexts.) Previous generalisations, from Lavater35 to Klages, have been quite unsuccessful, but even if a real scientific generalisation were to come into being, it could only restrict the room for manoeuvre of indeterminacy and indicate concrete points of orientation within it; the categorical predominance of singularities, however, would still be indissoluble. For the situation here is something different from the application of the results of biological and medical science to the individual case that is to be medically diagnosed. Here, where the individual patient is the object of a subsumption, his singularity more and more approximates a limit-value with the development of science. But although to some extent his personal singularity seems to play the role of a permanent source of error vis-à-vis general laws and the identification of types, it nevertheless remains the ultimate object of practical medicine. In the everyday, however, the singularity that is peculiar to a person is the subject of his deeds, in which he is

35

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), Swiss writer, Protestant pastor, and physiognomist. [Eds.]

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involved with his personality as a whole. And this singularity which is peculiar to him faces other people (who are similarly constituted and are reacting from the same sources), their deeds, their responses to the deeds of others, etc. It is therefore inevitable and indissoluble that such an indeterminacy of the inner come into being in life, in some cases even with respect to one’s own inner being. These are the rough outlines of the foundation of life from which the indeterminacy of the inner can be assessed in visual art. Of course, this basis in life incurs essential modifications by means of art. First, the outer is reduced to the purely visual; everything else that constitutes this externality in life is simply not present here. Second, that relation of outer to inner has an essentially generalised character. Everything there in life is tied up with concrete, practical objectives that are admittedly widely mediated from time to time – even when the talk is of the subtlest issues of friendship or love – but a suspension of such positings of a teleological character occurs with respect the work of art. The figures of the work can of course be dramatically related to each other, but in the sense of immediate praxis, the spectator nevertheless remains a mere spectator. As a result of this, that inner which is experienceable by means of the visually shaped outer already loses much of what is individually peculiar to it. It is elevated into the atmosphere of a certain generalisation, and the artistic labour of typifying finds a genuine willingness in this comportment of receptivity. Third, the receptive person also comes to the shaped object-world (landscape, animals, plants, interiors, etc.) in a relationship similar to how he comes to people in life. The anthropomorphising nature of art is most clearly expressed in the fact that it does not shape all of its objects in their pure beingin-themselves but rather in their relatedness to people. We already know that this in no way amounts to subjectivation. This is a hallmark of the atmospheres cropping up in the everyday. Such an atmosphere encompasses a landscape or a room, for instance, and it is of course partly occasioned by its own objective – in most cases momentary, transitory – constitution, though lived human experience gives it its decisive meaningful content, experience that takes place in or around it and whose prelude, epilogue or memory is tied up with these surroundings in a more or less accidental, occasional way. If we now say that the pictorial presentation of the nonhuman surrounding world appears humanised in art, then such a relationship in it is not infrequently a precondition of its genesis (even more often a consequence of its effect). However, it would be a vulgarising simplification to draw direct lines of connection here. For in strict contrast to the atmospheres of life, the human here is inherent to objects (to their linkage, their concrete ensemble). A considerable part of the artistic struggle to reproduce the object is fulfilled precisely by the effort to present this

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anthropomorphising relationship of man to the object-world, albeit in such a way that these relationships make an appearance purely as the visual characteristics of the objects being presented, as their visual relations to each other. Here too our motto applies: they do not know it, but they are doing it. Whether the conscious striving of the artist is aimed at the precise reproduction of objects or an atmosphere, whether it is aimed at the expression of his own personality, etc. does not immediately come into consideration for this issue. In this view, as a matter of principle there is no difference between an interior by Cima da Conegliano36 and one by Vuillard.37 All of this entails that what appears isolated and entangled in practical aspirations in life is raised to the level of universality in the visual arts and is thereby turned in each work into the presentation of a ‘world’ that is complete and self-contained. However, indeterminate objectivity thereby obtains for the concretely content-related a certain room for manoeuvre that is qualitatively different from that in life: a precisely determined objective world (indeed, a world of man) faces the receptive person in the form of pure visibility, and not only do the content-related constitution and above all the manner of its being visually shaped give rise to a different room for manoeuvre of the determinacy and indeterminacy of this content for each individual work, but also specific qualities of what must necessarily remain indeterminate spring from it at any given time. It is thus no longer indeterminate because the purposeful man engaged in the integral whole of life is unable, or is not completely able, to fathom its particular content. Instead, the indeterminacy has a very clear determinacy that is certainly always different in concrete cases: it is especially determined – even in the roughest content-relatedness – by the content-related essence of the set of objects being shaped. But the role of content far exceeds this abstract ponderous orientation. The determinacy of the indeterminate is something different in a landscape than it is in a still life or a religious scene. And the specific quality of the design constitutively overturns into content all the more precisely. It suffices to recall the Rilke quotation we called on earlier about how one could not eat Cézanne’s apples. The rough content-related determination of the apple still life is concretised into a thought and emotional value that is sharply delineated, although it is not to be forgotten that even this observation by Rilke still only impinges on an indeterminate objectivity. Of course, this issue is much more complicated when the concrete ‘sujet’ of what is visibly

36 37

Giovanni Battista Cima (1459–1517), Italian Renaissance painter. [Eds.] Jean-Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940), French post-impressionist painter and decorative artist. [Eds.]

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presented has a concrete and determinate content. An entire branch of art history (so-called iconography) is concerned with this problem; admittedly, in a supremely abstract manner. For if the iconographic content is separated from the real artistic composition, then the content that is thus gained – the indeterminate interiority rising to prominence in those works having an aesthetic effect – turns into an abstract externality. Hegel rightly says of such abstracting separations, ‘Hence, what is only something-internal, is also (by the same token) only something-external’.38 The abstracting that diverts us from the essence therefore consists here in the fact that iconography which has made itself far too autonomous forgets that the content handled by it only has meaning for art insofar as it turns into a concretely determining factor of the concrete design, as was the case in the developments of the visual arts, as in the Middle Ages, that were strongly determined in terms of content. Content then turns into a concrete compositional task. It splinters into aspects that are utterly adopted into the composition and into the system of evocative forms; it also splinters into such aspects that become subject to the thus determined indeterminacy as a result of such a composition (made into a concrete room for manoeuvre of the content-related experienceability of the work of art in a way that is in keeping with the composition’s scope, intensity, quality, etc.). But then this is no longer indeterminacy per se but rather the inner that is necessarily affiliated with the visually formed outer and attached to it in a dialectically contradictory way. Whether such a determinate indeterminacy of internalised content can ever come into being and how it does so depend exclusively on the force and the manner of what is shaped in the visual world of the determinate outer. A prevailing indeterminacy therein – which indeed betrays an artistic inaptitude, a dilettantism, etc. – also destroys nothing less than the sphere of the inner, lets it become subject to completely subjectivist vacuity or caprice as the capacity for guidance must thereby be lost. On the other hand, the indeterminacy of visual determinations likewise entails serious dangers for indeterminate interiority, above all the dangers of impoverishment and desiccation. Such an indeterminacy can have content- and form-related foundations, indeed ones that are closely linked to each other. In terms of content, by concretising far too much that life-content that the image as a whole expresses. The advantage of religious themes for visual art consisted not least in the fact that the tasks set for them – despite all iconographic prescriptions – were in the end nevertheless kept so vague and general that no overdeterminacy had to come into being:

38

Hegel 1991, p. 209.

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Michelangelo’s various pietas show what further room for manoeuvre in the indeterminacy of the inner stays open and takes effect in the course of this. Only later development, in which this content-relatedness becomes the object of a free choice, clearly shows where the paths part. For example, Giorgione’s Three Philosophers is an image whose iconographic content is not well known. Yet the composition not only results in a completely visual definiteness and self-containedness in terms of line, colour, etc. but also a tremendous abundance of poetry in the indeterminate at the same time. This is to be seen even more clearly in those places where the image-content is taken directly from everyday life. It suffices to refer to Vermeer in order to make this situation obvious. By contrast, in such themes the painting of the nineteenth century frequently exhibits an indeterminacy that gets closer to the payoff of novellas or anecdotes. The result is the impoverishment and desiccation identified above: the visible world turns into the mere illustration of a ‘theme’ that is literary by nature. If the significant painters of the era – it suffices to recall Leibl39 – do not participate in this false tendency, which is a shallow offshoot of allegorising, then their painterly superiority also becomes apparent in the indeterminacy of the ‘sujet’ in terms of content. Yet the transition to the formal is also visible therein. In relation to quasitime in the visual arts, we drew on Lessing’s concept of the fruitful moment. We also showed that a defetishising tendency underlies the selection of such moments: all at once, it is directed towards capturing motion instead of stasis and towards an animated totality of concrete determinations instead of singular isolated aspect. Now it turns out – as it does wherever we encounter the issue of defetishisation – that this tendency of composition also points in the direction of imparting such a kind of animated and lively determinacy to visible objectivity that makes the inner moments that necessarily remain indeterminate likewise rich, deep, and poetic. This relationship is perhaps most clearly visible in the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, in contrast to the scholastic variants of an extremely similar motif, where the pathetic moment of fulfilment in the movement of the whole transforms into a chilly allegory of that hollow pomposity that the monarchy of the nineteenth century exactly represented. We are – in a historically justified way – accustomed to look for allegorism in the primitive religious phases of art above all. But the transcendence of the content (independent of visual objectivity) and its intellectual, non-evocative character is, aesthetically considered, attached neither to a religious genesis nor to a speculative profundity (be it authentic or inauthentic).

39

Wilhelm Leibl (1844–1900), prominent German realist painter of the 1800s. [Eds.]

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In this regard, genre in general and decorative academicism are just as allegorical as many works of avant-garde art, the meaningful transcendent content of which is certainly a ‘nihilating’ – or not even nihilating – nothing. We will deal with the particular problems of allegory at length in the final chapter; we will have to content ourselves here with this indication of the historically and aesthetically ramified variability in allegorising. We have to do with a diametrically opposed situation in music. In it, the shaped world of sound, the inner grows into the highest determinacy conceivable, while that outer which was, as everywhere, the reason or at least the occasion for its coming into being must remain in supreme indeterminacy. The contrast that comes into being here is so blatant that it has repeatedly been the focus in discussions about the essence of music. Extreme formalists cut this Gordian knot by explaining that there is no such indeterminate aspect in music at all. This view was formulated at its most extreme by Eduard Hanslick:40 ‘As children, each of us probably delighted in the changing play of colours and forms in kaleidoscopes. Music is such a kaleidoscope at an incommensurably higher level of appearance. It brings a steadily evolving variety to beautiful forms and colours, gently merging, sharply contrasting, always symmetrical and fulfilled in itself. The chief difference is that such a kaleidoscope of sound performed for our ears is itself the immediate emanation of an artistically creative spirit, while a visual kaleidoscope is an ingenious mechanical toy’.41 The author of this book does not fancy himself competent to make a well-founded statement regarding the concrete aesthetic problems of music. One need not be an authority on music, however, in order to see the absurdity of such a view. Hanslick is thus not the least bit successful in delimiting that which is aesthetic in music from senseless accidental play. It would at the same time be futile to invoke the strict system of laws that are operative in music. Granted, in contrast to the musician, the child playing with a kaleidoscope neither knows nor controls the physical laws that bring forth the varied combinations coming into effect before him. A system of ‘laws’ (it would be better to call them rules of the game) that are more or less kept under control also constitute not a few games, yet it would be erroneous to compare them to an art in the aesthetic sense, in fact precisely because the rules of the game remain immanent to the game while it is being played, whereas in any art such a system of laws (perspective, proportion in the visual arts, prosody in poetry) is only a means for, on the one hand, approximating reality in the depiction of it and intensifying the specific

40 41

Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), influential German Bohemian music theorist. [Eds.] Qtd. in Pfrogner 1954, pp. 301–2.

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objectivity of the art form concerned, and, on the other, enhancing the evocative force of the work and making its guidance function more reliable and versatile. Whatever position one takes towards music as a variety of the reflection of reality as well (about which we will talk in a later chapter), the role of musical composition in guiding evocation is gainsaid by no one who possesses even only an inkling of the historical role of music. Even in the case of exponents as conflicting as Plato and Aristotle, ancient aesthetics resolutely focuses on its socio-pedagogic effect, and it is again no accident that in our epoch Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata points back to this view or that Thomas Mann’s Faustus culminates in the recognition of such a relationship that is decisive for the fate of music. However the essence of music may be conceived of in concrete terms, the fact of its aesthetically legitimate effect exceeding the purely formal is hardly seriously gainsaid, even if it is of course interpreted in very different ways. And that suffices as a clarification of our present problem-situation. If we hence construe the homogeneous medium of music, which is attuned to pure audibility, as a dynamic arranging, guiding, and hence the arranged living out of interiority (of feelings, sensations, of the thoughts dispersed in them, etc.), then an indeterminacy in terms of the object of this lived experience (an indeterminacy that likewise surpasses that of all other arts) is faced with the formal determinacy that is also far more exact than in any other art. The exceptionally high degree of this indeterminacy, which seems to overturn into nothing less than a qualitative antithesis to all other arts, is of course a product of socio-historical development. When Hanslick recognises its ‘pure’ appearance exclusively in instrumental music, he thus contrasts a few of its relatively late and admittedly aesthetically high-quality products of almost the entire past to important tendencies of the present in a metaphysically rigid and exclusive way. For the fact that music remained bound to mimetic tendencies of word and gesture not only at the time of its magically conditioned genesis but also for long periods that were already far removed from any primitiveness is indisputable. Wholly ‘pure’ music is a relatively late outcome of history. And no one will deny that modern music has also failed to radically break with this boundedness to the mimetic. Not even mentioning opera and the golden age of song in the nineteenth century, can simple happenstance or an individual whim be caught sight of in the conjunction of the pinnacles of symphonic compositions with a song text (from Mahler’s Ninth Symphony to The Song of the Earth) – clearly determined in terms of content and reacting by means of this determinacy upon music? The author would like to once again emphasise that he does not fancy himself competent to concretely analyse the often quite involved questions of musical aesthetics that show up here and to put forward

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solutions to them. However, one need not be a specialist in music theory to recognise the obvious historically given fact that music has never (or – to put it circumspectly – never completely) rid itself of its initial mimetically contentrelated boundedness, no matter how much it has wanted to. The fact that its earlier prevailing strictness has decidedly loosened in recent centuries is a general socio-historical fact of the overall development of art; notwithstanding, for example, that song composition since Schubert is much more dearly bound to the form and content of the text than it was in the works of Mozart and Beethoven. The emancipation from subject matter that is socially prescribed in a strict way is equally characteristic for all of the mimetic arts; as we have seen, veering away from a literarily circumscribed content-relatedness can also be discerned in the visual arts of modern times. However, we have likewise seen that such changes in the mode, scope, quality, etc. of the artistically processed content that are quite essential in themselves do not fundamentally revolutionise the decisive form-content problems and thus not those of determinate and indeterminate objectivity in the given cases. Though the potential dangers that are always present in artistic composition (the indeterminacy or overdeterminacy of sensuously determined spheres, with all the consequences for coordinated indeterminate objectivity) become ever more threatening since the socially underpinned instinctive resistance of the creator diminishes in the face of these dangers, parallel with the fact that the controlling and regulated willingness of the receptive person is also ever more disoriented. So-called program music is perhaps the most typical case of such an overdeterminacy. Even in those places where music emerges bound to the word (indeed to a work of verbal art), it relates far less to its singular moments reflecting reality in their singularity than it does – emphatically generalising at all times – to the whole. The generalisation that music carries out consists primarily in the fact that this whole (be it a song, a scene, etc.) is raised to those heights of feeling that completely affect one as something being currently experienced, heights that the verbal work of art (when it is actually such a work) can at most imply and lead over into the indeterminate objectivity befitting it, though it only receives its complete fulfilment in music. In such a context, very mediocre (indeed bad) texts can acquire an undreamt-of resonance of sensation, an aura of feeling. By contrast, performed program music can destroy the fragile determinacy of this marvelously indeterminate complex. If the individual moments of a piece of music are to be unconditionally placed into a direct relation of objective equivalence with individual facts of life, then partly a direct auditory imitation of individual life processes must turn into the basis of musical construction, then partly individual isolated motifs must be permanently assigned to individual figures,

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events, etc. (Richard Wagner), then partly the structure of the whole must be consistent with the sequence of the occurrences of the outside world in relatively autonomous parts, etc. With that said, of course, the lexicon and grammar of program music is by no means exhausted. However, the principle that rises to prominence everywhere here contains the danger of overdeterminacy. That sphere of life occasioning the most profound lived musical experiences (the sphere that music can merely imply in indeterminate reflection, in a reflection that represents this sphere to itself in its form and emotional determinacy) is to achieve a clarity, a definiteness. On its behalf, the river of life evoked by the homogeneous medium can be abandoned, and something that is indeterminable as a matter of principle can be converted into the prose of an amorphous, shallow conceptuality. As Adorno correctly discerns this in the works of Wagner, with different words and in concrete correspondence to the course of the visual arts and literature, what comes into being is an allegorising; of course, as previously expounded, in a specific, modern bourgeois variant.42 Analysis and demarcation must naturally be entrusted to competent aestheticians of music here. To clarify the principle that I am suggesting, let it be noted that the parting of the ways pointed out here is by no means identical with a metaphysical line of separation. The determinacy of the musical world of forms indeed lives in organic coexistence with a world of indeterminate objectivity associated with and evoked by it. It is also true that this is not indeterminacy as such but rather a concrete indeterminacy, one that is determinate to a certain degree; it goes without saying that this indeterminacy can accordingly have very different stages in its mode of appearance, without even grazing the allegorising of program music. Works like the Eroica or the Pastorale show the extent to which these boundaries can be pushed forward without overturning into that extreme. At the same time, however, what is evident from such works is how fluid the essence of this determinate indeterminacy is: there is no generally specifiable boundary that separates these works from those in which indeterminacy receives no such concrete determination whatsoever.43

3

Inherence and Substantiality

Our observations up to now aimed at revealing the defetishising effect of genuine art for the immediate sensuous inner-world and surrounding world of man 42 43

Adorno 2009, pp. 89–90 and 92. Debussy’s sharp rejection of the Pastorale as bad program music shows just how fluid these boundaries are. See Rufer 1956, pp. 135 ff.

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while showing at the same time that it is everywhere a matter of intensifications of the immediate sensuous universality of the homogeneous media of individual forms of art, each of which expresses an entire world of man that is complete in itself. What is to be struggled against is the replacement, or the attempt to replace, the sensuous universality of the aesthetic reflection of reality at the time with determinations that posit a direct conceptual relation in place of this universality. Idealist philosophy is generally in the habit of regarding the transformation into conceptuality as an enhancement of perceptions, representations, etc. In most cases, this is certainly right for everyday life and for the transition from meaningful experiences and observations into scientific thinking. But Pavlov already called attention to the fact that the word (and certainly the concept as well) can also remove us from reality. And it is in the nature of social life to bring about and preserve such fictitious and verbal ersatz-relationships between man and reality, relationships that are torn off from reality. It cannot be our task here to analyse and systematise in detail such tendencies towards increasing the distance between thinking and reality. It suffices if we point to individual commonplace groups of such a conceptuoverbal distortion in the reflection of reality. Thus to not yet coming to terms with reality in primitive and later in idealist, religious, etc. thinking, in which an incomplete or even false depiction can become dogma; thus to the different forms of modern scepticism, from so-called language criticism to semantics, which all assume that an unbridgeable abyss gapes between the everyday and scientific use of words and the actual signification of objects; thus to conventions of all sorts; to the conceptual (sometimes even scientific) fixing in place of facts, relationships, and structures as they present themselves in their mere immediacy, whereby the advance towards their essence is impeded and prevented by such an apparatus of thought (commodity fetish in the strict sense); etc., etc. No one can deny that the everyday thinking of people, and therefore their praxis, their mode of sensibility, etc., is constantly diverted from reality – certainly in different ways in different formations and periods – by such ‘idola’, to use Bacon’s term. Here is where the defetishising mission of the aesthetic sets in. We have already pointed out that works of art sensuously and manifestly confront people with their ‘natural’ surrounding world and inner-world and thereby – without a lengthy polemic against that which is fetish-like in the everyday being necessary, indeed without the contrariness of both conceptions having to be consciously contrasted – destroy the fetishisation of the everyday and thinking, reveal reality to man as it presents itself to him at any given time, and make it into a possession of his senses, sensations, and his thinking.

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As we did earlier, we have now also put the word ‘natural’ in quotation marks. And it must be repeated here as well that we are not talking of a return to nature, neither in the sense of uncovering that which nature is in itself – that is the task of science – nor as a revival of obsolete, less artificial social conditions. In art there can never be talk of a turning back anyway. If we just now spoke of a defetishising likeness of reality coming into being at any given time, then that was to thereby indicate the historical character of all art in this new context, which we have already often highlighted. An abstract juxtaposition, for example, of feeling and thinking is therefore not intended but rather the likeness of reality that is concretely determined in a socio-historical way at the time or at any given time; related to the concrete man of this place, this time, and this stage of development; and ‘natural’ for this man, which (even on account of its ‘naturalness’) organically entails the dissolution of concrete fetishisations. The ‘natural’ character of this world that is depicted by art and that turns into a self-contained ‘world’ which is complete in itself in the work therefore displays a threefold aspect: first, it defetishises the outside world surrounding man, which he forms and is formed by in life. What fall apart are the schemata that everyday thinking (and occasionally even science) thrusts in a falsifying way between world and depiction. Man perceives reality, in fact just as it can objectively present itself to him as man under the given socio-historical conditions. The ‘naturalness’ of this world-image is thus no absolute truth in itself; it remains inseparably bound to the stage of mankind’s development at the time, but within these concretely determined limits it achieves a maximal approximation to true objectivity. That is why there is nothing fetishised in Homer’s theotechny. The reader of later times no longer believes in the existence of such gods but experiences them as vital components of a stage in the growth of the human race, just as this has been in actual fact. Second, just by doing this the work of art shapes this world as the world of man at a certain stage of his inner development. The combined effect of both aspects can first bring about proper defetishisation. If the constitution of the world in which man lives is cut off from him, then the world receives the semblance of a completely autonomous existence in which man is only a fleeting guest, a traveler passing through. On the other hand, as a necessary counterpole to such a tendency, if the human subject becomes detached from his surrounding world and fancies he is able to lead a purely autotelic life (indeed, is even just capable of attempting to do this), then a dual fetishism comes into being, both in objectivity that has become soulless and in the ‘pure’ interiority divested of any meaningful content. By breaking with this fetish of the divisible outer and inner, by actualising Novalis’ view that fate and character are ultimately identical (a view that is

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deeply problematical for life but is just as deeply true for art), any genuine art creates this ‘natural’ world for man, his ‘natural’ homeland. Following from all of this – as a third aspect – is the content-related and therefore formal universality of art in this dialectical synthesis of outer and inner, in this depicting a world that is adequate to man. That is to say, were this adequacy to have a limit in terms of content, determined by the immediately hedonistic postulates of everyday man, then an arbiter function in the selection of contents and, mediated by this, of forming would devolve precisely upon the area of life most threatened by fetishised congealment and the thoughts, feelings, etc. dictated by it. (To a great extent, the spontaneous source of kitsch is to be found here.) Precisely the break with such immediate, hedonistic inclinations opens the path of this actually universal adequacy of the ‘world’ of art to the deepest needs of man. This adequacy thus also encompasses the most horrific catastrophes, the most profound tragedies, the most humiliating exposures of human existence. Only as this adequacy becomes visible and in the end affirmatively experienceable even in the cruelest indifference of the causal sequence of the outside world with regard to human wishes and representations (in the most indissoluble conflicts of socio-historical human being) can art tear down those masks that seemingly grow together with the lives of people, but are nevertheless disfiguring masks of his essence as human, and reveal his true essence as the ground and unitary principle of his existence. These determinations already come to the fore in unequivocal clarity in the works of Homer and have remained the foundations of any genuine artistic composition ever since. Defetishisation occurs uno acto with the artistic salvaging of the enduring essence of the human species that is worth holding in trust. Defetishisation is primarily something content-related, since it brings forth a selection from among the appearances of life, removes or exposes a few as distortions of the truth, and moves others to the place befitting them. The break between aesthetic and photographic reflection does not take place so much in the transformation of details as they are in themselves; rather it is selection which shifts the proportionality of the artistically appearing reflection in comparison to that of the immediacy of everyday life. This act already involves a change in the function of the decisive categories in which and through which each such reality is formed. However, this spontaneous overturning of the content-related into a formal issue still remains – aesthetically regarded – on the side of content. The artistic problem of forming first begins here. In no way does this amount to an aesthetic indifference as to this process of reshaping. On the contrary: the issue of whether the material to be artistically worked on (theme, motif, etc. included) will be a favourable or unfavourable one is

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decided precisely here, at a pre-artistic level as it were; the detailed discussion of this problem also belongs in the second part of this work. But it is already necessary here to note that the basic prosaic or poetic character of a work – the question of whether it is poetic through and through, in all of its pores, or whether in it a poetic (picturesque, etc.) cloak is merely put on a prosaic piece of life – depends precisely on the outcomes of this pre-artistic stage. For example, without having posed this problem quite in this way, Goethe and Schiller’s endeavours involving the aesthetic were aimed at this. They recognised that the tendencies of the era, the social collisions of their period, etc. that reached expression in everyday thinking and feeling were unfavourable in this regard, that hence a very conscious clarification of the principles of aesthetic composition (of the laws of art forms) was necessary in order to obtain from the spheres of life materials, motifs, etc. that did not go against artistic handling from the outset. In the art of even more powerfully developed capitalism, this inclemency – the fetishisation of the forms and contents of life – continues to increase, and parallel with it the vigilance of a sizable number of artists markedly decreases with respect to its pernicious consequences. A large part of the formal problems that are apparent in the latest art can thus also be attributed to the uncritical comportment of many artists vis-à-vis this pre-artistic level. The fact that the formal artistic problems of the final draft will become the centre of attention is the flipside of this constellation. This also explains why increasingly fictitious analyses of stylistic (indeed purely technical) issues arise together with a burgeoning indifference towards decisive formal issues in art. It goes without saying that these tendencies have socio-historical causes first and foremost. Their detailed analysis belongs in the historical materialist part of aesthetics. A systematically completed aesthetics would therefore have to deal at length with all of the categories that play a role in the reflection of reality at all and exhaustively examine their change in function as early as this pre-artistic level, their shifts in position that thereby come into being. We already explained in the preface that our objective is far more modest: the methodological path to the solution of this central question is to be laid open in a few of the most important cases by means of their concrete analysis. Accordingly, up to now we have examined important individual categorical problems and will also do so later. In this sense, we now take up again the discussion of the category of inherence we have already begun. We have seen that this category expresses in thought the determination, through the conceptual comprehension of reality, of the relations of independence within higher-order relationships, the dialectic of relative dissolution into these relationships as well as relative preserva-

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tion in them. This constitution of the category of inherence necessarily entails that, on the one hand, intellectual analysis urge on an ever-greater differentiation of the conditions that come into being here. For instance, if the modes of being are to be precisely determined in the relationship of substance and accident – in the typical case of the use of these categories – then in the works of Kant there comes into being the following formulation: ‘The determinations of a substance that are nothing other than particular ways for it to exist are called accidents. They are always real, since they concern the existence of the substance … Now if one ascribes a particular existence to this real in substance (e.g., motion, as an accident of matter), then this existence is called “inherence”, in contrast to the existence of the substance, which is called “subsistence”’.44 But Kant himself at once calls attention to the difficulties of a logical sort that follow from his definition. Rightly so, for he sees that something problematical must cling to all such categories (and their negation) with the alteration of conditions that the continuous motion of matter carries with it as it creates new qualities. Kant thus regards the differentiation of subsistence and inherence as necessary and as dubious in many cases. On the other hand, such necessary categorical juxtapositions of this sort result from all sorts of aspects, from which man – of necessity in both an objective and a subjective sense – intellectually reflects, interprets, and accounts for reality being-in-itself. For instance, it is inevitable that the juxtaposition of substance and accident must intersect in many cases with other contrasting categories that depict essential conditions (thus with those of essence and appearance, of wholes and parts). The intricacy or convolutedness of such conditions continuously produces the danger of fetishisation for thinking. In fact, in two directions. First, the danger persists that the category expressing the universal obtains an autonomous shape in – idealist – philosophy, is torn out of an inner attachment to particularity and singularity, and thereby is hypostasised into an essentiality that is for itself. (To speak in a somewhat disrespectful way, this term of the philosophy of late antiquity is only a hopeless synonym for fetishising.) Aristotle recognised this danger just in time and hence polemicised so passionately against Plato’s theory of ideas. Secondly, however, an opposite fetishisation is possible and typical as well, one that exclusively beholds a product of human thought in the generalisations that thus come into being, something that is by nature merely subjective, whereby the whole world of appearances now incurs an opposite fetishisation, as in the case of positivism in its different varieties. But once this or that concept is fetishistically posited, it is clear that

44

Kant 1998, p. 302.

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all conditions in which it determinedly figures must likewise thereby incur a fetishisation at the same time. It is not possible to hypostasise the idea into a fetish of the supreme reality that alone is true without thereby making a fetish-like cosmos of shadowy likenesses out of the real world of appearances at the same time. It is likewise impossible to abase the existing essence into a merely intellectuo-technical instrument of a subjective character and in the process still preserve the real constitution of appearances, to avoid dissolving them into a purely immediate subjectivity. The more the different aspects from which the categorical relationships are perceived are thus understood in a purely subjective-utilitarian way, the more powerful this fetishisation becomes. And whether a hierarchical congealment or utter pulverisation comes about as the basic quality in the process alters nothing crucial in the fundamental – fetishised – constellation that comes into being here. These observations referred to the world of categories overall. In relation to inherence, we already emphasised earlier that, as the reflection of relatively primitive conditions (in the material sense, not a historical one), it plays an ever-slighter role in the developed theory of science. This is partly related to the fact that in modern philosophy the category of substance, which as we have seen is closely related to inherence, is pushed more and more into the background. The philosophically unconscious use of dialectical categories in idealism leads in the direction of a dissolution of the concept of substance (not just in Machism, in fact, but even in the case of Kantians like Cassirer). This tendency also receives support in the methodology of the modern natural sciences; even in those places where inherence earlier appeared as supremely important (in the relationships of species, genus, etc.), it is supplanted ever more decisively by more dynamic categories in the course of the development of the sciences. We can observe a similar process of dynamisation in aesthetic reflection as well; however, this process does not take place in the form of the transition from one category to another here as it does in thinking but rather as the discovery of dynamic elements in the category itself. (A similar development can be observed in Hegel’s dialectical philosophy. Though merely in relation to substance, so that, as we have seen, the significance of inherence also shrivels up in his works.) The distinction naturally rests on the fact that both modes of reflection serve different but equally necessary human activities. The common determination of boundaries in both is based on the fact that none of these different modes of reflection may bring forth a distortion of objective reality in the likeness at the time. The distinction lies in the disanthropomorphising or the anthropomorphising mode of reflection. For each the mere relation of inherence can appear as an incipient approximation to a state of affairs existing independent of consciousness and therefore at a more developed stage of

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disanthropomorphisation as something to be overcome, as something to be superseded by more objective and at the same time more versatile categories that have more sharply withdrawn from immediacy. For anthropomorphising reflection, by contrast, it is precisely immediacy (the boundedness to the sensuously perceptible and experienceable, thus the ‘primitiveness’ of the category of inherence) that can reflect the true state of affairs in an – objectively considered – initial, ‘naïve’ approximation and constitute the starting point for immanently developing this category further in the sense of an approximation specifically in accordance with it. The common reality with which both ways of depicting are confronted accordingly does not prevail in a mechanically egalitarian way. At first, of course, when science was still in anthropomorphising infancy, the proximity (the immediate correlation) is quite strong, although even back then – as we will see in the case of such a decisive category as that of particularity – qualitative differences can already show up. With the unfolding of disanthropomorphising, however, the gulf grows ever larger. Categories gradually arise in scientific reflection that can no longer have an equivalent in the aesthetic, which is necessarily related to man. (It suffices if we recall the categories of mathematically apprehended statistical methods.) The fate of inherence lies in the midpoint between such extremes. Of course, the path towards the dynamism of inherence demonstrated above would not be passable if approaches to it were not present in the category itself, just as it appears in any reflection whatsoever. Aristotle, who of course concerned himself with it only from the standpoint of knowledge, already clearly saw this. Since his views only constitute a starting point for us to the aesthetic, permit us to quote just a good summary by Prantl instead of a series of Aristotle’s assorted statements on this topic. In the analysis of individual substance in the works of Aristotle, he speaks of the fact that ‘the making of distinctions between species vis-à-vis the individual determinacy of essence would have to be referred to as a qualitative one’. He continues his expositions in this way: ‘Apart from this, however, individual essentiality emerges even further in its determinate existence with multiple determinations, which are conditioned by essentiality but are not essentiality itself; that is to say, essentiality has inherences as such, which can only be understood by the concept of the essentiality of that that in which they occur but are never autonomous essence; and in this substantive nonautonomy, these inherences possess the possibility of transitioning all the way down to the accidental per se’.45 That is to say, Aristotle sees a possibility for movement in inherences, from determinations that are condi-

45

Prantl 1955, p. 253.

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tioned by essentiality down to what is peculiar and individual to someone or something in a purely accidental way. This scale of movements from essence to the accidental becomes decisive for aesthetic reflection. We know how long a path scientific and philosophical thinking had to cover before it was only somewhat capable of creating a conceptual order in this issue. From the outset, a rigid antinomy does not exist for aesthetic reflection. The accident (the great harasser of thinking) lives here from the outset in amicable and fruitful coexistence with all higher categories expressing constraint, order, and necessity. This too is an important aspect of the adequacy of the ‘worlds’ created by works of art to human needs, an aspect of their ‘naturalness’. We will shortly consider this concrete meaning of the accidental in the aesthetic reflection of reality more closely in the discussion of causality. This only had to be pointed out here because, as we could already ascertain, inherence is precisely that category in which the relation of the uniquely individual to those higher orders to which it belongs (species, genus, etc.) becomes visible; because in aesthetic reflection, as we have likewise seen, that which is accidentally peculiar to individuality (and with it the aspect of the accidental) must also never completely disappear in such conditions. For scientific reflection, this is either a limit-concept for the approximation to empirical reality or a source of error that needs to be factored into calculation. For artistic reflection, by contrast, the given individuality of the presented person, of the human relations, objects, etc. (an individuality that is inseparable from co-determinacy by accidents) is nothing less than the concrete fundament for any aesthetic generalisation. Just as it was correctly described by Aristotle, the category of inherence creates precisely that room for manoeuvre in which this sliding between the accidental and the determination of essence can unfold unimpeded, without having to dismember the unity and individuality of objects. Precisely that ‘primitiveness’ of the category of inherence, which forces science to go beyond it, makes it into a suitable starting point for the aesthetic reflection of reality. We now take a brief look at this necessity of contingency in the concept of the social personality of man. Since this generally constitutes the ‘model’ for the artistic manner of presentation – of course a model frequently used without any clear awareness – the basic principle of aesthetic objectivity is also determined with its analysis. In the works of Marx, we find detailed expositions of a relation that is decisive in this regard, that of individual and class in capitalist society. In general, what is kept hold of there is the fact that in history it is always a question of communities ‘to which these individuals belonged only as average individuals’. In capitalist society this relation undergoes an intensification into the qualitative: ‘But in the course of historical evolution, and precisely

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through the fact that within the division of labour social relationships inevitably take on an independent existence, there appears a cleavage in the life of each individual, insofar as it is personal and insofar as it is determined by some branch of labour and the conditions pertaining to it’. In this society a new – illusory – representation of the freedom of individuals hence comes to the fore because of ‘the accidental nature of the conditions of life’.46 In this field socio-historical development thus brings forth distinctions intensified into the qualitative that have become meaningful for artistic praxis and for the theoretical conception of the aesthetic. However, the basic dialectical situation (namely, the objectively justified contradictoriness between concrete personality and the average individual in terms of class, may it often remain ever so powerfully latent) remains in force in every change in history. Since by his nature each individual belongs to various supra-individual communities (clan, family, estate, nation, class, etc.); since the contradictoriness prevailing in this diversity – ever since emerging from primitive communism – is always operative (even if only in a latent way); since even in the case of the utmost sharpening of such contradictions the unity of the individuality of a person in art (as in life) cannot be abolished, the following inevitable problem comes into being for the aesthetic reflection of reality: to present this unity of contradictions as a sensuously manifest unity. Another side of importance already becomes apparent here that befits the category of inherence in the aesthetic sphere, namely its close bond with substantiality. The crucial aspect in the preserving sublation of contingency in the aesthetic is the persistence of substance, regardless of whether it is a question of a human figure or a thinglike objectivity. What becomes clearly visible here once again is the contrast between scientific and aesthetic reflection in the truthful depiction of the same reality. For science, this unity is in a certain sense a limit-concept. That is to say, depending on the cognitive goal of the science concerned, the unity of individuality is supposed to emerge following a precise analysis of the singular interrelated components and their interaction with each other as their concrete point of intersection at any given time. For art, in contrast, this unity is the alpha and omega of world-composition; that is why substantiality is so important here. For that very reason, all of the objective powers of life – the truthful portrayal of which is certainly just as significant in itself as the personal – may only be embodied in persons, in their personal characteristics, in the relationships of a concrete man to another who is just as concrete, etc., may only be presented as organic components of unitary individuals. To a large extent, this

46

Marx and Engels 1976, pp. 78 and 80.

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is also the method of ancient historiography, which for that reason was in many cases closer to art than science. It would be interesting to analyse the role that underdevelopment played there in the knowledge of the objective powers of social life and the still lacking consciousness of their objectivity and social constitution. Where this principle ceases to be the dominant one, there comes into being – aesthetically considered – a fetishisation that bursts open the composition, as in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, in which objective powers of life that are looked upon as autonomous (like milieu or heredity) congeal into such life-destroying fetishes. The category of inherence thus acquires its primary function in aesthetic reflection: to manifestly express this unity of the people who are being shaped and in the process to depict their being arranged – both objectively and in relation to individual characters – into social groups or relationships in the proper proportions. That is to say, in such a way that this insertion into such orders does not attenuate but rather intensifies the individual life of the single personality. It is precisely inherence which expresses such a relation. A person is therefore neither causally influenced nor completely determined by his ‘milieu’ as an external power; rather, his essential individual existence takes part in such a higher social order (or in several), and this taking part constitutes an essential (often absolutely decisive) aspect of the kernel (of the substance) of his personality. But this relation is relative and reversible, and a decisively dynamic modification is expressed therein that is carried out in the category of inherence by aesthetic reflection. In reality-existing-in-itself, of course, the relation of substance and accident can never be reversible. However often the conception of substance may turn true conditions on their head, the positing – true or false – nevertheless creates here a stable hierarchy that is indeed materially overcome by more developed thinking, though it is always replaced by a positing with a similar structure. By contrast, the anthropomorphising, anthropocentric character of aesthetic reflection creates a structure that is qualitatively modified in a powerful way. No matter how the artist grasps objective reality and finds – necessarily positing – an absolute substance within it, the essence of aesthetic reflection compels him to discover and posit a substance in man himself as well in order to construe as its accidents everything that is linked to him and that determines him and his fate. In this way, however, there does not come into being in aesthetic depiction any antagonistic dualism or pluralism of substances, as occurs in separate worldviews; on the contrary, it is the question of a constantly dynamic relativisation of substance and accident. The objective substance of reality itself must of course constitute the underground and background of the work as a totality, of course in that reflection and version which an artist’s time, his people, his class, and his personality require of him. Thus far,

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no essential difference would exist between the world-image of an artist and that of a philosopher. As the artist shapes man or at least that which is human, however, this relation is reversed. The kernel of man (of the human) turns into substance: it is less he who takes part in the objective substantiality (inheres in it); rather this objective substantiality appears as inherent to (partaking in) his being human, founded in itself. And it must be repeated that these two aspects of substantiality do not antinomically confront each other as the good and the bad world principle in dualistic worldviews. What comes into being in the work of art instead is a swinging between both aspects of the substantiality and inherence of accidents. The totality in which the objective substance is dominant thereby maintains a somewhat floating quality. The animated richness (the lively contradictoriness) of a world related to people thus turns precisely into the world proper to man, into a world adequate to him. This categorical analysis shifts our earlier expositions of the homogeneous medium into a new light. Categorically standing behind its formal unifying function is the unity of substance being discussed here. Behind its animated relativisation of the absolute unity of the whole and the living out of the singular objectivities that it completes is the relativisation of substantiality discussed just now. In order to express these thoughts clearly, we have unavoidably somewhat simplified that relation which we have called the relative in substantiality. The attentive reader will certainly have noticed that our observations do not merely delineate two substantialities in their interdependencies but rather each of them constitutes only the final link in a chain that is comprised of nothing but such substance-accident relations that are likewise relative to each other and substance-like. The main goal in our introduction of the category of inherence into the analysis of aesthetic reflection was indeed precisely the attempt to make the formative relation of individual and social order (class, nation, etc.) comprehensible. Because of this, the simplification that we have carried out in our discussions up to now was the temporary bypassing of the fact that in aesthetic reflection both of the pairs of relations (substance-accident and essenceappearance) transition into each other and converge into a dialectically contradictory unity. Also, this convergence is not at all an ‘invention’ of aesthetic reflecting. Rather, it is likewise a fact of life; substance and essence/accident and appearance appear to come quite close to each other here. Philosophical thinking must bring forth a more or less sharp distinction here. It cannot be our task, of course, to expound the history and methodology of this problem even in a preliminary fashion. We only note that many sharp distinctions in these categories arose out of the needs of philosophical idealism, which is very strongly interested in, for example, tearing open a deeply divisive rift between substance and essence. Other philosophical currents that subjectified essence

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(for instance, conferring upon substance a dignity of being separate from the rest of the cosmos) are only to be mentioned briefly, without any pretensions as to completeness. In addition, there are the necessary methodological considerations as thinking carries out both juxtapositions from different aspects, and the distinctions that are obtained in the course of this can also furnish materially valuable results, etc. Once again, it must be mentioned that a spontaneous convergence of these categories exists in everyday life, even if a fairly clear awareness of its constitution tends to emerge there only in the rarest of cases. Undoubtedly the root of the conscious convergence of these categories – thus artistically, according to the nature of the matter – in aesthetic reflection is embedded therein and in the magical objectivations of such reflections. If we bear in mind the often-highlighted naïve materialism of the artistic attitude towards reality, we must note that in it concepts of value always possess an ontological character. In those places where conflicts and collisions emerge, one reality always struggles against another, not merely a value-giving consciousness against something existent, as in idealist philosophy. The fact that in the works of all kinds of writers, from Shakespeare (the witches scene in Macbeth) through Goethe and Dostoevsky all the way to Thomas Mann (Faustus), moral temptation receives a human-demonic embodiment is clear proof of this spontaneous artistic need. With instinctive philosophical veracity, in aesthetic reflection that which is essential is thus conceived of as a being of a higher order (as a more existent being), and already this gives essence (as it figures in aesthetic reflection) the emphasis of something substantial. And vice versa: no artist is able to shape an entity without giving it a – positively or negatively valued – character of something essential. If its composition heads towards substantiality, then it draws nearer to the essence, often to the point of becoming one with it. This spontaneous materialism is supplemented and reinforced by means of the spontaneous dialectic in aesthetic reflection. In thinking it was reserved for Hegel to work out the dialectic in the higher unfolding of being (to reality by way of existence, etc). For art, this has always been something that is spontaneously self-evident. Think once again of the collision. We have seen that embodiments of being always clash in it, though in the composition never in such a way that the greater quantitative weightiness of an aspect of being would simply carry the day over an aspect of a similar being. Levels of being – not only of different quantitative power but also of different heights of being, which of course are not to be separated from their attachment to essence, their being replete with or deprived of essence – ever struggle with each other, and any genuine work of art gives in the composition a hierarchy of being that is properly experienceable. Very often, this does not coincide with quantitative

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power, and precisely this is indicative of the dialectical character of aesthetic reflection. (The fact that this dialectic is often already historical in Greek tragedies, like the Oresteia and Antigone, only heightens that which is dialectical in them; a discussion of this side of the dialectic does not belong here.) This dialectical staggeredness of being and of the essence that is closely attached to it first makes it possible to organically fuse in his personality the individual’s taking part in different orders of different existence and dignity, to internalise taking-part into an aspect of inner essentiality. Only by means of this spontaneous dialectic is aesthetic reflection comprised of nothing but such essential relationships of people to each other. On the other hand, with social formations appearing in people as their deepest passions, art can also remove any fetishisation in this field and break up the social into joyous and sorrowful, into positively or negatively essential human relationships. With that said, we have again arrived at the philosophy of the detail in art from a different side. Its complete discussion is only possible in the second part, in which the category of totality (the problem of the part and the whole) is at the centre of attention in the analysis of the structure of the work of art. But the convergence of substance and essence must also still be contemplated from the aspect of the convergence of accident and appearance, and it is readily apparent that we thereby come very close to the problem of artistic detail. In life too, any objectivity and any relationship of objects can only be immediately grasped from details. Already here, particularly but not only in labour (for instance, bear in mind the insight into human nature in the dealings that people have with each other), a sharp separation must be instantly made between details that are more or less accidental and such that for their part point more or less clearly towards the true constitution of the object concerned, etc. and are characteristic or symptomatic of its constitution. If this distinction is mostly of an empiricist character in life and therefore subject to great fluctuations, then for the scientific reflection of reality – and already for labour as the passage to it – what comes into being is the necessity of a very precise examination that is as systematised as possible in order to separate details that only emerge in a transitory, fleeting, and accidental way from those whose occurrence is strongly connected with the essence of the matter. It naturally belongs to the fact that noticing mere co-occurrence does not suffice, that even its causal reasons must be investigated as completely as possible. Viewed abstractly, a similar differentiation also occurs in aesthetic reflection. In two regards, however, it pursues a completely different path than scientific reflection does. On the one hand, selection is much more rigorous and definitive at the same time, for everything that proves to be unnecessary to the goal of the composition withdraws completely from the ‘world’ of the work of art. On

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the other hand, the composition wants to give the impression of life – that is to say, details sifted through with the greatest of care are to be offered in such a way, to be grouped in such a way, etc. that in them the randomness of life arrives at expression with all of its accidents at the same time. That this dearly intertwined dual tendency prevails in various art forms and styles and in the works of various artistic personalities in a variety of ways does not change the fact that in this universality it comprises the principle of any genuine artistic reproduction of the detail. Also expressed therein is the spontaneous materialism and spontaneous dialectic of artistic praxis. For expressed in a philosophical way, it amounts to an affirmation of the objectivity of appearance along with that of the objectivity of essence under the necessarily contradictory attachment of both to each other. The rigorous selection of details is again one of the most effective embodiments of that adequacy of art to mankind’s most profound needs of life, about which we have repeatedly talked. Here too, its specific constitution is reflected in the fact that the work of art takes the phenomena of life in their brutal facticity and vacuous contingency and does not just round the shaped piece of reality off into a whole formally but also (as a precondition of this tendency) arranges the presented phenomena as an organic component of a meaningful relationship. We have already shown that this meaningfulness is not simply identical to the satisfaction of hedonistic wishes. Here the convergence of inherence with the dialectic of appearances is now palpably comprehensible. Now in most cases doubts about the objectivity of appearance come into being because of its fleeting, transitory, insecure, and disjointed character, which Hegel expresses thus: in its relation to essence, appearance immediately presents itself as semblance and for that reason contains the ‘moment of nonexistence’ within itself.47 The inner dialectic of appearance and essence drives from this merely immediate starting point to the manifesting of the dearly related objectivity of both. The subjective likeness-making dialectic of science also follows this path. In the end, artistic praxis is in deep accordance with this situation and its reflection by means of science, but its method is an abbreviating and concentrating one. As we have seen, Aristotle already ascertained this during the discussion of enthymeme and syllogism, of paradeigma and induction. In the case of details, abridgment and concentration reside in the selection of the essential, of that which refers directly to essence, along with a manner of presentation that keeps hold of that which is scattered and unfixed in the normal world of appearance as an immediate surface. Each genuinely

47

Hegel 2010, p. 342.

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artistic detail is therefore a contradictory unity of essence and appearance, and it contains within itself in an intensive way all of the dialectical determinations and conditions that surface in objective reality in extensive endlessness. It is thus not real; it is super-real by exhibiting such a close and explicit attachment of essence and appearance as can occur only as an extremely rare limit-case in reality. However, it has the apparency of a complete reality as its mode of appearance preserves that of objective reality. This apparency is heightened even further due to the fact that in a genuine work of art details certainly possess this close and rigorous relatedness to essence without exception, though among themselves they are not at the same level of significance at all. Between them there exists an exact arrangement in relation to proximity to essence and intensity in the lightning-fast but likewise deep and comprehensive revealing of essence. Details therefore do not just reflect the structure of essence and appearance in objective reality separately; they also reflect this in their variety within this unitary level. They are extraordinarily different from each other in terms of stability or volatility, firmness or looseness, etc. In the animatedness of this differentiation, their unitary point (essence) now no longer appears as a static centre but rather as moving and moved substance. A moving and moved substance: that is perhaps the most universal expression of what the reflection of reality evocatively calls forth in the work of art. In another context we already pointed towards this unitary substance which underlies the whole work and determines the quality of the objectivity of each part of the whole within it, as well as towards the fact that in unities which take place in time something like intonation or exposition has the important function of awakening in the listener that quality of lived experience through which he is shifted into the situation in order to assimilate the unitary substance of the work. It is clear that each detail in the coming into being and becoming evocative of this unitary substance is allocated a precisely determined role, that the hierarchy of details mentioned above does not exist merely in its relationship to the concrete essence at the time, but also – admittedly inseparable from this – in the fact that each turns into a guiding link through which this substance can first be absorbed as an overall impression or incipient mood, then as a more developed meaningful content and formal complex of the work. This position in the series of guiding aspects first concretises the selection, emphasis, and rank of details; taken in isolation, they have no value at all, for neither the accuracy of observation nor a formedness that is in itself ever so perfect can raise them to this level. Only by unfolding them in the right place of their predetermination in accordance with the living out and revealing of the substance of the whole can their success (or failure) be seriously discussed. But this unitary substance is present everywhere and for that reason –

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in this uniformity – on hand nowhere. It consists precisely in the fact that the entirety of details coalesces into, but does not exist at all separate from, such a unity. It is precisely here that the substance-accident relation clearly comes to the fore in aesthetic reflection, and the convergence of essence and substance (and of appearance and accident) being emphasised by us takes on a new light. It will probably no longer sound paradoxical or factitious if we speak of a partaking of substance in details, of the fact that they are its inherencies. The category of inherence hence permeates the structure of the work of art in many ways. By means of it, the singular takes part in higher orders without losing its individuality; by means of it, these orders appear defetishised, as human relationships, as objects that mediate these relationships; finally, by means of it, the details receive their importance in the composition of the whole. In the coming into being of the aesthetic unity of the manifold of the work of art, the individuality of which consists in the substantive unity of supremely distinct and yet unified object-individualities, a decisive role is assigned precisely to the category of inherence. Where this is lacking, where perhaps it is replaced by merely causal conditionalities or mere interactions, the lively unity of the work of art vanishes and (as we could only indicate in a general way earlier) its evocative force degenerates into a mere arousing of content-related interests, into mere captivation. It therefore does not seize and jar the man-made-whole into making this convulsion into a new meaningful content of life of the whole man returning to everyday life but instead remains an isolated stimulus that he would have been able to receive without any art.

4

Causality, Accident, and Necessity

For contemporary habits of thought, it perhaps seems paradoxical that we sought to ascribe necessity (which is the most important component of what was referred to as the adequacy to the needs of mankind) to categories like substantiality and essentiality instead of following the normal course of these habits and regarding (here as everywhere) causality as the category which decides everything, indeed as the category which produces connections on its own. It is not possible here even just to hint at the problematic history of this category in philosophy. It must suffice to note that as great a dialectical thinker as Hegel never makes concessions to this intellectual custom. In his glosses on Hegel’s Logic, Lenin rightly notes, ‘When one reads Hegel on causality, it appears strange at first glance that he dwells so relatively lightly on this theme, beloved of the Kantians. Why? Because, indeed, for him causality is only one

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of the determinations of universal connection, which he had already covered earlier, in his entire exposition, much more deeply and all-sidedly; always and from the very outset emphasizing this connection, the reciprocal transitions, etc., etc.’.48 Already with Schopenhauer, bourgeois philosophy following Hegel then reinstated causality in its absolute rule among the categories. As a result, a – polarising – fetishisation was fixed in place. A purely causal, mechanical, fatalistic conception of necessity constitutes one pole and a variety of irrationalism in which this sort of necessity is denied or cast into doubt constitutes the other. In both cases the image of reality is fetishistically distorted. In the first because any boundary therein between the necessary and the accidental is razed since even each accident is indeed causally conditioned when looked at in the abstract. In the second case any rational relationship of facts is challenged with doubts about or denials of causal determination: the gates of thinking are wide open to irrationalism. This fetishised antinomy has certainly shown up in all kinds of forms in the course of history, though without ever being able to overcome this polarity. Even in this question, the development of art has clearly exhibited the spontaneously dialectical and defetishising tendency of aesthetic reflection. Since in literature the issue of causality plays the greatest and most visible role, it seems useful to start our analyses here with it and to come to refer to other arts only in those places where the categories specific to them come to the fore. If the talk is to be of a defetishising tendency of literature in this regard, then it goes without saying that this tendency must in no way set itself as a goal a denial of causality or an attempt at its elimination, for this would indeed only be one pole of the fetishised antinomy. Rather, it merely seeks to allot to this category the place befitting it in the totality of the aesthetically reflected world. Hegel also took this path in terms of philosophy. After criticising the ‘nullity and lack of content’ of those lines of thought that do their scholastic table-rapping with possibility and reality, he says in summary that it came down to ‘the totality of the moments of actuality, an actuality which, in the unfolding of its moments, proves to be Necessity’.49 This assessment of the situation (that is to say, the totality of moments) can also serve as a starting point for us, even though, as we have repeatedly emphasised, the constitution of totality and the concrete problems resulting from it in aesthetic reflection can only undergo a thorough treatment in the second part of this work, with the analysis of the structure of the work of art. Even so, the close convergence of different categories is inclined

48 49

Lenin 1972b, p. 162. Hegel 1991, p. 217.

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so powerfully towards the totality that, even without their detailed examination, we will be capable of illuminating our present problems with the concept of the totality of the moments; all the more, considering that the question of the intensive endlessness of moments was already repeatedly included in our observations. If we now turn towards the concrete problems of literature, then we must proceed from the well-known fact (one that is not acknowledged only by way of exception) that literature is a reflection of human actions and incidents in society along with the thoughts and feelings that accompany and are called forth by them. There can thus be no doubt that the conjunction of actions, incidents, feelings, etc. is immediately and also objectively causal in character. The question is merely: is even an unbroken causal linkage between these components of a literary work sufficient for its completion as a faithful and evocative reflection of reality? This question has occupied aesthetics (especially dramaturgy) for a long time, of course in most cases without the philosophical question as to the kind of validity causality has in literature being directly posed. Of course, this problem is often perceptible indirectly, as in Lessing’s critical analyses of Corneille or Voltaire, as in Schiller’s lament about the prosaic in the rigorous historical motivatedness of the Wallenstein material, as in the countless observations on the role of accident. To my knowledge, Schelling was the first who philosophically posed this question for motivation in drama, even if in his works only the negative side, the critique of empirical causality, as he characterised it, was clearly expressed. He says, ‘Since all empirical necessity itself is necessity only when viewed empirically – viewed in and for itself, however, fortuitousness – then genuine tragedy also cannot be based on empirical necessity. Everything empirically necessary depends on something else through which it is possible; yet even this something else is not necessary in and for itself, but rather only through yet something else. Empirical necessity would not, however, suspend fortuitousness. That particular necessity that appears in tragedy can accordingly only be of an absolute sort, and can only be one that empirically is sooner incomprehensible than comprehensible. So as not to neglect the perspective of understanding – to the extent that even an empirical necessity is introduced in the sequence of events – this sequence itself must not be comprehended empirically, but rather only absolutely. Empirical necessity must appear as the tool of higher, absolute necessity. It must serve only to elicit in actual appearance what has already occurred in absolute necessity’.50 The weak point in Schelling’s reasoning is easy to see;

50

Schelling 1989, pp. 255–6.

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it is the appeal to an ‘absolute causality’, thus a shifting of the problem into the transcendent and hence a mere doubling of the false question in place of an actually concrete answer. This deficiency is aggravated by the fact that Schelling’s transcendent pseudo-solution fluoresces over into the irrationalistic, since for him it is ‘much more incomprehensible than comprehensible’. Schelling’s compromise, his seemingly absolute necessity that is nevertheless merely empirical necessity made to appear as absolute, shirks the real question, the aesthetic rationality (necessity) of literary works. Even so, he properly establishes the identity of empirical necessity and contingency. Engels illustrated this identity in objective reality with humorous vividness. He shows how this kind of determinism passed into the natural sciences from French materialism (and later also points out that religious conceptions like those of Augustine or Calvin amount to the same thing): ‘According to this conception only simple, direct necessity prevails in nature. That a particular pea-pod contains five peas and not four or six … that last night I was bitten by a flea at four o’clock in the morning, and not at three or five o’clock, and on the right shoulder and not on the left calf – these are all facts which have been produced by an irrevocable concatenation of cause and effect, by an unshatterable necessity of such a nature indeed that the gaseous sphere, from which the solar system was derived, was already so constituted that these events had to happen thus and not otherwise’.51 It is clear that in such a way the relation of accident and necessity would be completely destroyed, objectively and above all for aesthetic reflection. For as was already shown, a hierarchy exists between all literarily reflected facts. We have discussed this in the context of the categories substance-accident and essence-appearance, though no detailed analysis is needed to see that for their part these converge into the antithetical pair of necessity-contingency for unavoidable compositional reasons, that their hierarchy must also have this for content. This hierarchical requirement is by no means formal in character; on the contrary, what comes to light in it is that which is the single most essential thing of meaningful literary content, namely the effort to faithfully depict life itself together with its intricacy and lawfulness. However, this faithfulness exists only in the relationship of the totality of the work to the wholeness of life, and this must, as a result of the pluralism of the forms of art that has already been emphasised, always be regarded within the needs of a certain genre. We recall the finding made by Schiller, who thought the determinacy of the object being presented was inseparably linked to the genre in which it appeared. However, a difference of meaningful liter-

51

Engels 1987c, p. 499.

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ary content (of the worldview arriving at expression in it) underlies the formal differentiation of genre. Without being able to dwell on the differentiation of genre, which is not yet ripe for discussion anyway, it must be briefly pointed out that by means of their forms lyric, drama, and epic already amount to something extremely different in terms of worldview; in fact, already in such a generalisation it is not senseless to speak of a worldview of drama, of the novel, etc. (The tremendous and primary differences of times, goals, personalities, and works are not to be thereby understated.) However, if we are speaking at such a generalised level of the worldviews of the different genres, then we stand at the centre of the issue to be discussed now. For these differences become most clearly apparent in how the relation of necessity and contingency is concretely grasped in each. In the end, the image of life in its wholeness cannot come about without its necessity becoming evident. It likewise cannot be realised if it does not also make clear those accidents in which concrete necessity concretely prevails over the – immediately, but only immediately – seeming chaos. Now since the different literary genres give aspects of this general constellation that are different from each other and stable even for a long time, this dialectic of necessity and contingency appears in a different form in each of them. But it still appears in each of them somehow nonetheless. And that is why there must be a method in literature for thrusting aside the fetishised equating of the necessary with the contingent in order – no matter at what stage of conscious awareness – to let their dialectical interpenetration and divergence take shape at the same time. An aesthetic criterion is therefore necessary that exhibits the necessity in one unbroken causal chain and the contingency in another equally unbroken one. Indeed, for a proper criterion, the mere bifurcation into the necessary and the accidental is far from sufficient. It must be able to make clear the infinitely many nuances and transitions that are operative in this relation in reality and that must of course be revealed even more clearly in art. Looked at in terms of form, the totality of a work of art at the time (and that of its art form) certainly yields this criterion, for each work indeed reproduces a concrete life-context, a concrete life-process and its specificity, in which the meaningful content decides what has to be considered to be necessary and what contingent. But without instantaneous concretisation, this determination – in its thus generalised formulation – could easily overturn into nonsense or a formalistic vacuity. For on the one hand, what he would like to construe as necessary and what he would like to construe as accidental is not dependent on the subjective discretion of the writer. Because his work is the reflection of reality from an aspect that the life-process objectively offers, he is – on pain of failure in the composition – bound to the great lines of objective development itself. In no way does

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this bond abolish the fact that these offer him a broad room for manoeuvre when it comes to selection and interpretation. On the other hand, and within the room for manoeuvre indicated a moment ago, the totality of the work at the time must be concretised further both categorically and in terms of content in order to be able to take effect as a criterion in the proper way. This takes place along the line of substantiality already indicated by us. In the concrete totality of each work there comes into being a unitary substance permeating all of its poles, within the homogeneity of which all persons, relationships, objects, etc. receive their specific substance. This complex of substances, taking part in the fundamental whole, now yields the criterion for the character of the causal chains traversing everywhere. At first sight, this already illuminates something very important: those causal connections that are suitable for throwing the substance of a figure into sharper relief or even for promoting its inner unfolding (its path to self-fulfilment) thereby lose the character of mere bare contingency. That is to say, they remain what they are in themselves, though as a result of this function of theirs within the dynamic of totality they no longer antagonistically clash with necessity, which expresses itself in the composition of the whole. The task of the writer therefore does not consist in attenuating or even abolishing the accidental character of such causal linkages by means of meticulous motivation. The role that they play at a stage of composition in this regard suffices for their just described abolishment, and more than this mere fact (in all its contingency) is a burden and no help. That is why it is the essential characteristic of great writers who are rich and deep in terms of the meaningful content of life that they wield accidents of this sort with sovereign insouciance. Bear in mind Tolstoy’s War and Peace. As the seriously wounded Andrei Bolkonsky is put on the operating table, he sees in the same room Anatole Kuragin, his rival, the destroyer of his life’s happiness, the very person whose leg is being amputated. In itself, this coincidence in terms of time and place is a brutal accident. But its abstractness is sublated as a result – and only as a result – of the fact that the sight of Kuragin triggers the start of Bolkonsky’s final catharsis, which constitutes the real meaningful literary content of the following part. As Kuragin’s presence is reduced to such a triggering occasion, the antithesis of necessity and accident is sublated in a literary way here. But along the human (and ultimately the literarily necessary) path of development taken by Andrei Bolkonsky, Tolstoy also does not shy away from calling on further accidents: during his transport into the hinterlands, Bolkonsky is accidentally brought precisely to the Rostovs’ house, in fact accidentally at the precise instant that they are preparing to depart. Again, this is literarily necessary for the culmination, for the ultimate clarification of the relationship between Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova. Now as

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Tolstoy leads the reader along this path to the ultimate clarification of the relations between two crucial protagonists, as the catharsis that comes into being here turns into an important aspect of the ultimate perspective of the whole work, these contingencies (and others mobilised with the same sovereignty) no longer literarily bear any antagonistic relation to the historical human necessity that emanates from the totality of the work. On the contrary: precisely such accidents take everything that is cold and artificial away from this necessity and impart to it the warmth of being close to life, of a depiction of the overall life-process with its confusion in the details and with its necessity and meaningfulness as a whole, but only as a whole. We had to analyse this example at some length so that it would become clearly apparent that it is precisely the substantiality of the whole work and the constitution of individual substances within it that make the decision as the principle of selection, as criterion in the conflict of necessity and contingency. In order to better clarify this situation, however, the relationship between substantiality (in fact, both in the whole and in the parts) and causality must also be grasped even more concretely in their highest forms as lawfulness. An important tendency towards defetishisation in the aesthetic consists in the fact that no lawfulness is presented in its pure objectivity, existing in itself; ‘the law presiding at your birth’, Goethe says, and what is clearly expressed therein is the duality of aesthetic reflection, appearing in ever new aspects.52 That is, on the one hand, the content, form, mode of validity, etc. of the objective law remain completely preserved, since the same reality is indeed reflected in the aesthetic with the claim to fidelity as in all spheres of human existence. On the other hand, this law refers to man, to human relations, to the objects mediating these relations. The approximately reproduced law does not appear in its full objective compass, in its full objective ramifications, etc.; the interests of scientific reflection are directed at that. Rather, it is incorporated as an effective power into the world of human destiny; only so much of this law will be expressed, and only in such a manner, as it becomes decisive for the immanent dialectic of human destiny and as this decisive role is achieved. As is the case wherever we observe such methodological deviations from scientific reflection in aesthetic reflection, here too it is never a deficit but always an important truth of life that is manifested. With its spontaneous dialectic, aesthetic reflection is hence not infrequently in the situation of expressing important dialectical issues that philosophical reflection on the methodology of the sciences only raises to conscious awareness later. So too in the case of

52

Goethe 1983, p. 231. [Eds.]

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lawfulness. The gradual discovery of this category and especially the discovery of concrete laws were such a crucial series of events in the further development of mankind that often the concept of law was made absolute (and thereby sometimes fetishised), even for extended periods. In contrast, it is already self-evident to us that opposing metaphysical and irrationalist currents only intensify this fetishising with inverted signs. Here too Hegel’s merit has been to break with the fetishisation of the concept of law in an intellectually dialectical way. In his view, ‘the kingdom of laws is the restful copy of the concretely existing or appearing world’. With respect to this ‘restful content’, Hegel highlights the significance that the world of appearance possesses in contrast to the ‘simple identity’ of law. It has the same content as law, ‘but displayed in restless flux and as reflection-into-other. It is the law as negative, relentlessly self-mutating concrete existence, the movement of the passing over into the opposite, of self-sublation and return into unity. This side of the restless form or of the negativity does not contain the law; as against the law, therefore, appearance is the totality, for it contains the law but more yet, namely the moment of the self-moving form’.53 Only on this basis is it possible for dialectical materialism to understand (in the correct – defetishised – proportions) lawfulness in the context of the worldexisting-in-itself and its scientific reflection. Under no circumstances does this amount to an underestimation of the real and epistemological significance of laws, even in those cases in which their ‘pure’ realisation cannot be possible at all, either in theory or practice. In a letter to Conrad Schmidt,54 Engels refers to feudalism. He shows that in no place and at no time in the course of history has it ever been realised in its pure form, except ‘in the ephemeral Kingdom of Jerusalem’. But at the same time he adds, ‘Was that order a fiction merely because it was in Palestine alone that it achieved a short-lived existence in fully classical form – and even then largely on paper?’55 Lenin examines the same situation for knowledge from the viewpoint of the mode of validity of such ‘purity’. In a polemical war essay, he writes: ‘There are no “pure” phenomena, nor can there be, either in Nature or in society – that is what Marxist dialectics teaches us, for dialectics shows that the very concept of purity indicates a certain narrowness, a one-sidedness of human cognition, which cannot embrace an object in all its totality and complexity’.56

53 54 55 56

Hegel 2010, pp. 441–2. Conrad Schmidt (1863–1932), German philosopher and economist with ties in his youth to Marx and Engels and later to the Social Democratic Party. [Eds.] Engels’ Letter to Conrad Schmidt (12 March 1895), in Marx and Engels 2004, pp. 465–6. Lenin 1974, p. 236.

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This insight into the real dialectical relation of law and appearance, which the scientific reflection of reality and its methodological consciousness in philosophy have arduously conquered through a struggle that has lasted millennia, is something self-evident for the spontaneous dialectic of great art from the beginning. If one were to analyse Homer or the Greek tragedians in terms of the depicting of these relationships, he would be able to find this dialectical relation everywhere – without theoretical justification, of course, and certainly without theoretical conscious awareness of their own praxis. But here too, ‘They do not know it, but they are doing it’ must not tempt us to stop at this state of affairs as one would at a ‘je ne sais quoi’ inaccessible to reason. Instead, we must strive to conceptualise what aesthetic reflection realises in works of art. We must therefore add one more dialectical statement to the ones quoted so far. In connection with the passages cited earlier, Hegel calls law the ‘positive essentiality of appearance’ and supplies this determination with the addendum that it be ‘only’ this. From this it follows for him that ‘Law, therefore, is indeed essential form, but not as yet real form which is reflected into its sides as content’.57 All of this results in a dual aspect for us. On the one hand, what we have expounded in connection with Hegel and Lenin is confirmed once more, namely the fact that the causal determinacy of things, relationships, and events only constitutes a part of the true determinations of reality, that they can therefore receive their true significance (their unadulterated meaning) only in the total relationship of contents and forms. On the other hand, the Hegelian discovery that law is that which is essential in appearance (or, as he says elsewhere in the same remarks, is the essential appearance) must be brought closer to our earlier observations. Earlier we discussed the convergence of substance and essence in aesthetic reflection. Now we see that the subordination of individual causal chains under substantiality – be it of the whole work or of one of its parts – not only fails to contradict the relations of lawfulness but also confirms one of its decisive aspects. For as essential appearance (aesthetically, ‘the law presiding at your birth’), law both converges by its innermost objective nature with the categories of substantiality and essentiality and has a contradictory (but for that very reason an inextricable) relationship to appearances and thereby possesses this as its own meaningful inner content. Causality in the artistically shaped world-image of aesthetic reflection is thus allotted the position objectively due to it in the context of reality. The important role that substantiality plays in this order leads away from any fetishised congealment or absolutisation. We have indeed already pointed out

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Hegel 2010, p. 443.

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that the convergence of substance towards essence (and with it towards law) is suited for breaking up possible tendencies towards rigidity by putting them into perspective, even though substantiality that has been adopted into aesthetic depiction preserves as such its perennial character within the concrete totality at the time. The mobility that comes into being here is twofold: first of all, substance is necessarily revealed only gradually, in the course of that process which constitutes the content of literature at the time. But under certain circumstances this revelation can be very intricate. While in many cases it simply concerns the fact that the qualitatively abstract contours atmospherically evoked by means of intonation are imbued with real content step by step and become ever richer and richer in the determinations inhering within them, for other no less numerous cases it may be that such a revelation is one in the literal sense; that is to say, the substantiality exposed as a first impression is debunked as untrue, and true substantiality is put in its place. This wavering and dithering can also form a distinct midpoint, a transition to the confirmation of the substantiality of the beginning (the fear of death scene in The Prince of Homburg). With that said, what is given is the transition to the second type, which is characterised by the direction of animatedness, by the developability of substance, certainly by a development that at the same time contains within itself the retention and higher formation of certain basic qualities of substance, indeed is founded precisely on its solidity and persistence. All causal positings that promote or inhibit revelations or transformations of this sort receive their necessity or contingency from the manner of their bond with this main issue; the extent to which, in themselves, looked at immanently, a rigorous cohesion or the semblance of a loose accidental arbitrariness becomes visible is something quite secondary for their constitution. As a result of the fact that causality in the world of literature is shifted to the place befitting it, those tendencies towards fetishisation that can bring about its absolute rule in life and science have become surmountable. The necessity demanded by Schelling and others that is deeper than that of mere causal chains can therefore be comprehensibly conveyed without flights into any transcendence or mysticism. On the contrary: precisely by means of the categorical arrangement of the meaningful content of life that literature spontaneously makes use of (only with aesthetic conscious awareness) there comes into being a necessity that does not exclude the accident but rather incorporates it into its realm; a necessity that is hence completely far removed from the arid inhumanity of a fatalism, however it be conceived; a necessity that unifies the warmth of being close to real life with the presence of great relationships and perspectives; a necessity that does not prevail mechanically but rather, as Lenin is in the habit of saying, with cunning and for that reason depicts the world-image in an

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enriched way. That is precisely why the defetishising nature of genuine literature can spontaneously and unpolemically overcome the mechanical absolute rule of causality along with its antipole, irrationalism. All of these problems of uniformity and the rich variability of meaningful content are expressed from the viewpoint of the stylistic uniformity of individual works in such a way that the quality of the guiding relationships possesses a unitary rhythm, even if that rhythm admittedly entails many ups and downs. The close-meshedness or loose interconnectedness of causal chains at the time thus turns into a mere component of this unity. It should also be noted that this stylistic uniformity is nothing but the formal summarisation of the guidance function of the work, that it would therefore have to remain completely ineffective if the essence of the meaningful artistic content (its culmination and climax, its overturning into completion of form) were not contained in its intrinsic specificity, in its specific qualities. This relationship first puts us in the position to generalise further about what has been explained up to now regarding literature. It is clear that causality immediately plays a much more minor role in painting or sculpture than it does in literature. Already as a result of the fact that causal chains almost completely disappear from immediacy because of the qualitative constitution of the visual homogeneous medium, that merely the movements which are fixed in place visually must also exhibit a causal determinacy. What we have demonstrated about the hierarchical relation of specific substantiality and individual causal connections for literature now obviously applies to this: the necessity or contingency of a motion depends upon the extent to which it supports or undermines or perhaps reacts neutrally to substantiality, to the essence of the whole shape. It is precisely the example of the very greatest artists, like Michelangelo, which shows that movements which would have to be considered ‘exaggerated’ (thus, accidental) from the standpoint of everyday life receive an overwhelmingly deep necessity from this source, whereas the ‘meticulously justified’ movements of academic art can never rise above the level of the accidental. The fact that even at the other extreme, in the case of eccentrics, accident is likewise rampant through lack of a genuine substantiality of the overall shape only confirms this finding. This situation is even clearer in music, where the interconnectedness of sounds with each other is never simply or empirically causal but is immediately determined by precisely formulatable laws. Nevertheless, or (better still) for that very reason, being justified as precisely as possible can never create a musical necessity by means of such laws or rules alone. Only as a result of the fact that their fulfilment is put into the service of the substantiality of the concrete work concerned can that contingency which clings to an ever so correct immanent musical sequence of notes be artistically sublated. And,

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on the other hand, the history of music exhibits countless examples of sound combinations which absolutely contradict certain given rules, and which one would hence have to regard as accidental, that not only are raised to necessities as aspects of the substantiality of a work by a completely new attitude as their bearer but can even form the basis for new laws. The situation is more complicated, but even more instructive, in painterly composition (relief and the sculptural group also aesthetically belong here). We do not want to speak about so-called iconographic issues that we have dealt with in connection with the problem of indeterminate objectivity, since the subordination of merely causal connections to the substantiality of the whole work obviously already follows from the situation that exists there. In each genuine work of art, however, the determinations of such a form of objectivity overturn into formal-compositional determinations, and for their part these introduce new aspects of the problem to be addressed now. That is, each visuoevocative composition posits a system of intertwined movements. But this mutual blending of shaped movements into each other is extremely intricate and especially introduces many complications into causality that apply to the work. The situation is relatively simple when the movements of different figures include the content-related psychological responses of their bearers to each other, like in Giotto’s fresco The Resurrection of Drusilla (Santa Croce, Florence), for example. In such works, one could conceive of the movements of the different figures relative to one another in the image as the causal sequence of the drama that has been visually depicted and given in the theme. But such an interpretation would be narrow – like in the case discussed just now of the fulfilment of musical lawfulness – and for that reason would pass the problem by. For out of the host of movements that are dramatically or causally possible and that are even rigorously justified at this level, those that form a dual system among themselves are chosen by genuine artists: that, on the one hand, a system of the two-dimensional decorative relationships of the image surface; on the other hand, a system of the linear, colouristic, valeur-like, etc. within the spatial composition of the painting. In genuine works of art, both syntheses of relatedness coincide or at the very least markedly converge with each other in such a way that they seem to form a tense unity, a unity of the image-substance. Each movement of a painted figure first becomes aesthetically meaningful when it fulfils all of the conditions set up this way that go far beyond the scope of merely causal accuracy. Such a drama, taken in the broad painterly sense, of course encompasses at the same time all of the objects to be found in the image. Thus, in the fresco by Giotto that we mentioned, the architecture which forms the background repeats and reinforces the rhythmic movement of the actually dramatic scene in the foreground.

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We deliberately selected the simplest possible composition as an example. What begins in pictorial forms with the cartoons of da Vinci and Michelangelo are systems of movement that represent something qualitatively new vis-à-vis Giotto in the intricate systems of image relationships, even if they are guided by the same aesthetic principles in the end. It would suffice to analyse a large composition by Rubens in order to thereupon clearly behold how the individual causal justification of movements is exceeded in an aesthetic way. The rightness of certain movements is justified here by means of compositional relationships to other movements that have nothing at all to do with them in terms of immediate content. Then the colourism of the late Renaissance and the Baroque period brings still new aspects. For instance, the objectivity of a thing or a shape in the foreground can be pictorially justified by a certain harmony of colours with the background (or a spot of colour in it), etc., etc. It would take too long if, going back to literature, we now investigated in more detail the operative role of such parallelisms, correspondences, contrasts, etc. in it. Needless to say, its compositional significance can never be as decisive as it is in painting; this is due to the difference between real space in the one and quasi-space in the other art. However, one can clearly observe this method of composition precisely in the works of the greatest writers, within the limits drawn for the specificity of the genre. Just think of how Shakespeare not only highlights that which is specific to Hamlet’s or Lear’s character through parallelisms and contrasts but also characterises his heroes more deeply precisely through them in a few places. Similar devices of art can be discerned in the works of great narrative writers like Tolstoy or Keller, of course with genre-like and personal variations. What is also philosophically critical to artistic praxis of this sort here is the fact that aesthetic justification exceeds mere causality and creates its forces out of the total meaningful content of the composition, out of the substantiality of the whole and the parts. To refer back to visual art once more: making the existence of their objects obvious seemingly contradicts the knowledge gained just now of their other noticeable methods. Again, this is not to deny the fact that the simple placement of a painterly or sculptural object must, if we disregard the movement that has already been discussed, contain countless aspects of causal relationships. But it also includes another aspect, such a one as far exceeds a being that is merely justifiable in a causal way. Take any pictorially shaped object; let’s say a tree. Without a doubt, its roots in the earth, its type of trunk, the relation of this trunk to the branches, etc. are causally determined. Without repeating the limitations of these causal relationships that we just mentioned, however, we must once again emphasise that a truly pictorially shaped tree is different from and more than the sum and system of such relationships. It is, it exists

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and imposes upon the viewer the particular lived experience of the specificity of an existence that makes its being just so obvious with its existence at all and makes its existence come alive with this being just so. This power of actuality is a truth of life, an important vehicle of the outer progress and inner development of mankind. In life and science, the shock caused by becoming aware of such actuality constitutes the starting point in many cases for the discovery of new truths or for the revision, extension, or restriction of old ones. This progress naturally presupposes the disassembling of the phenomenon forced upon consciousness as something existing; the conditions, relationships, etc. (among them even those that are causal, of course) must be explored and brought into line with the applicable system of knowledge. In the aesthetic reflection of reality, by contrast, this unity of existence (this being just so of the phenomenon) is not disassembled. In no way, however, does this mean that art would have to stand still at the bare immediacy of a factum brutum. The new, reconstituted immediacy of art consists precisely in the fact that the intensive endlessness of objects, the totality of their essential determinations, becomes experienceable in the form of internalised immediacy that brings forth the guiding of evocation by means of artistic composition. Being (simple existence) thereby acquires a meaning that it can achieve, at most, in the utmost limit cases in life itself. Yet as is also the case with all the ‘miracles’ of art, nothing irrational is contained in this. Philosophically speaking, this means the following: the dialectic has made it possible for Hegel to comprehend these varying heights of being – after the different gradations of being were metaphysically separated from each other, indeed were brought into a metaphysical antithesis to each other previously – in their true relationship, as the identity of identity and non-identity. Hegel thus expounded in dialectical logic the ascent from being – in itself abstract – by way of thereness, existence, and actuality to reality that has been concretely suffused with content and saturated with determinations, in which each of these categories that came into being by means of multiple mediations always appears in the form of immediacy. The genuine scientific reflection of reality reproduces this series of categories time and again, even if it does not always do so in a philosophically conscious way. As a result of its fabrication of a new, higher immediacy, aesthetic reflection in the visual arts concentrates this process, which is necessarily taken apart in thinking, purely in the visible image of the object so that that being which appears in this is no longer abstract, nor is it a merely immediate (and therefore abstract as well) being just so of a singularity but is instead the aesthetically immediate emergence of the relationality of its determinations (that is: its reality). That is why the relationships that link such an object with its surrounding world are no longer external to it – as in abstract being or in immediate being just so –

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but rather are absorbed by its objectivity and incorporated into it. It so happens that in visual art these realities which are complete in themselves do not exist shut off from each other, that they can instead organically combine with each other into a genuine composition. That is why a genuine composition presupposes precisely this reality, this immediate autotelism of the individual objects that form it. That is why, also in Hegel’s words, it is a circle, the circumference of which is comprised of nothing but circles.58 We have presented this phenomenon in the visual arts because it is manifested here in its purest form. But it is clear that an artistic composition would also not be possible in literature without such (or at least similar) categorical relations. But temporally uncompressed and therefore in a development that necessarily unfolds in stages, the reality of the whole and its parts portrayed here cannot possibly possess such a concentratedness of the instantaneous penetrating power of substantiality. However, if we once more contemplate the concept of intonation that we have already considered in various contexts and already applied to literature as well – admittedly in a somewhat modified form – from this viewpoint, then clear elements of what was analysed just now about its reality in the visual arts manifest themselves in it. This sudden, sensuously immediate placement and evocation of the acceptance of a qualitative being just so is undoubtedly contained in intonation as we have understood it in literature. The force with which the specific substantiality asserts itself in a literary exposition – we refer once more to the opening scenes of Hamlet – without any (or at least quite negligible) justification has a profound aesthetic similarity to those painterly phenomena that were described a moment ago. Here too a figure, a situation, etc. appears in the form of immediacy in its being just so, and the effect of intonation is immediately based on its substantive penetrating power, on the evocation of a qualitatively unique determinate being. But this type of effect is far from being exhausted with intonation. We recall earlier remarks in other contexts in which we called attention to the shock that comes into being by means of the correct, uniquely apt naming of an object, situation, etc. What one frequently calls the ‘magic’ of lyric poetry is based on this, although this ‘magic’ of course has nothing to do with actual magic. In the latter case, the – imaginary – effect was simply based on names; in the former, it is always a linguistic relationship that evokes a complex in its plain obvious substantiality. The power of language to inspire objectivity makes something here that is in accordance with the proven lived experience of reality in the visual arts that we analysed, of course within those differences that are pos-

58

Hegel 1995b, p. 52.

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ited by means of the specificity of the various arts. Difference (and similarity) is expressed in what we earlier called the quasi-space of literature. As the substantiality evoked by intonation, etc. asserts itself as identical in its unfolding, which the temporal sequence of literature entails, as each temporal moment of evolution not only points and guides forward but also conserves and enriches what has elapsed at the same time and makes new sides of it experienceable, something comes into being in the totality of the written work that – for all the differences conditioned by the varieties of homogeneous media – comes quite close to the visual arts in the ultimate, most universal aesthetic principles of composition (of course only in these). What is specific to literature here is the fact that in this way a retroactive justification (a motivation) of the beginning comes into view by means of the ending. It is also not simply a question here of the reversed lived experience of a causal chain. This is of course also contained in it but does not suffice for an understanding of the phenomenon. First of all, taken on its own it would be a supremely prosaic insight, the merely intellectual ascertainment of a causal linkage. What is far more likely to come into being, however, is a Platonic astonishment not only that is posited as a subjective response simultaneous with the work, as in the visual arts, but also that can only be completed at the conclusion and that exhibits its object and the necessary response to it in a twofold manner. It exhibits it as a shockedness about the unforeseeable endless abundance of a world (an abundance that is not even accessible to presentiment or imagination) that arose from the linkages of people, their deeds, and the events touching them, and at the same time as an inseparable unity of substance in which the end is already contained in the beginning by nature, though in the end some new unforeseen thing reveals itself. In life, the wholeness of the historical world can offer similar doubled outlooks in great changes and the conclusion of fateful periods. But astonishment is only a starting point, an approach to analysis for the purpose of promoting knowledge and praxis. In aesthetic reflection, this doubling appears as something that could – by principle – be inherent to each phenomenon of life; however, it is raised out of an abstract possibility into concrete reality only by means of the aesthetic reflection of this same life. The varied role that the category of substantiality plays in scientific and aesthetic reflection is conspicuous here. It is the starting point for certain investigations in the former, and it is the unity of the intoning start and the crowning conclusion in the latter. (In the visual arts, these two aspects form an immediate unity in which they can only be set apart – subjectively – by retroactive analysis.)

chapter 10

Issues of Mimesis vi: Universal Features of the Subject-Object Relationship in Aesthetics 1

Man as Kernel or Man as Shell

Literature is all at once the discovery of life’s kernel and the critique of life. This duality cannot be emphasised forcefully enough. For the phenomenon described by us is certainly common knowledge and shows up time and again in aesthetic considerations. Under the particular ideological conditions of different periods, however, the only proper whole truth (adherence to the dynamic totality of all essential determinations) is frequently distorted into a half-truth; that is to say, into a whole falsity. For irrespective of whether one eliminates objectivity (the approximately accurate reflection of reality as it is in itself) from this complex, or whether one attempts to free the aesthetic likeness of the world from its relatedness to people (to mankind), distortion is equally inevitable. In various studies I have tried to show that the ideological decay of a class, which we call decadence, tends to be most concisely expressed in a derangement of the subject-object relationship, in fact as a false subjectivism and false objectivism often occurring at the same time.1 The first tendency was rampant in the period of the First World War. It received its perhaps most vivid expression in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s now famous letter from Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon. As is well known, the letter writer complains that any capacity for coherent thinking (for the coherent apperception of the outside world) has been lost to him. As a replacement for this, he receives the gift of rare lived experiences: ‘For what makes its presence felt to me at such times, filling any mundane object around me with a swelling tide of higher life as if it were a vessel, in fact has no name and is no doubt hardly nameable. I cannot expect you to understand me without an illustration, and I must ask you to forgive the silliness of my examples. A watering can, a harrow in a field, a dog in the sun, a shabby churchyard, a cripple, a small farmhouse – any of these can become the vessel of my revelation. Any of these things and the thousand similar ones past which the eye ordinarily glides with natural indifference can at any moment – which I am completely unable to elicit – suddenly take on for me

1 Lukács 1952a, pp. 110 ff.

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a sublime and moving aura which words seem too weak to describe’.2 It is clear that it is primarily not a question here of the mere inexpressibility of such lived experiences. From the outset, their object is torn out of all relationalities; it is also not its objective wholeness that calls forth the lived experience. Instead, a disoriented, world-forsaken psyche gets into a singular contingent relationship (one that is purely peculiar to itself) with a contingent aspect of a contingent object, and for this reason this relationship must – as a matter of principle and not merely on the basis of individual psychology – remain inexpressible. As early as after the end of the First World War, this false subjectivity, which is hypertrophied and therefore oriented towards nothingness, is later superseded by an objectivity that is just as hypertrophied and therefore just as false. The French author Alain Robbe-Grillet writes in a programmatic article on the novel of the future: ‘Instead of this universe of “signification” (psychological, social, functional), we must try, then, to construct a world both more solid and more immediate. Let it be first of all by their presence that objects and gestures establish themselves, and let this presence continue to prevail over whatever explanatory theory that may try to enclose them in a system of references, whether emotional, sociological, Freudian or metaphysical. In this future universe of the novel, gestures and objects will be there before being something; and they will still be there afterwards, hard, unalterable, eternally present, mocking their own “meaning”, that meaning which vainly tries to reduce them to the role of precarious tools, between a formless past and an indeterminate future’.3 One clearly sees here the counterpole to the fetishisation of the subject-object relation in the case of Hofmannsthal. In the works of the latter, everything turned into a purely contingent occasion for releasing irrational mental forces, and in those of Robbe-Grillet, objects and even human modes of expression (gestures) shed any attachment to social life (indeed, even to the interior life of man as a whole). It is a tendency towards the total dehumanisation of reality that already cropped up earlier in the works of famous authors (think of the central place of the ‘phallic’ in the works of D.H. Lawrence). In order to come back (following this necessary excursus) to the thing itself, to a precise determination of our phenomenon, to its pure separation from such determinations that only seem analogous to it in an abstract immediate (almost a verbal) way, as a transition it is especially worth recalling Goethe’s lived experience of nature during his Italian journey. In Venice he looks upon various sea animals, sea snails, and crabs and enthusiastically exclaims, ‘What

2 Hofmannsthal 2005, p. 123. 3 Robbe-Grillet 1989, p. 23, translation modified.

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an exquisite, splendid thing a living creature is! How adapted to its condition, how genuine, how existent!’4 Of course, in keeping with his personality, this Goethean ‘astonishment’ has a twofold aspect: it can be construed as a starting point for research in the natural sciences – and certainly the comportment being expressed here (the vision that becomes apparent here) plays a large role for the methodology of Goethe’s studies – though at the same time it reveals his literary-artistic attitude to reality. It is a commonly known fact (even one proven by many of Goethe’s own professions) that both features converge very strongly in his works. Our task here is not that of investigating his scientific methodology; the only thing that is important for us is that, with such a seemingly negligible opportunity for a point of unity between life, art, and science, the identity of the world reflected by these becomes visible, in fact in a state of ‘astonishment’ in which the paths of science and art have not yet parted. What is of the utmost importance for artistic reflection is the fact that the triggering object already appears in a clear determinacy and its fetishisation is accordingly a distortion of the phenomenon if – as in the polar opposite examples pointed out a moment ago – further artistic labour endeavours to expunge the abundance of relationships either subjectivistically or objectivistically. Precisely this abundance of relationships, however, constitutes the basis not only for apprehending the object in its whole concreteness but also for the genuine and fruitful unfolding of the subject, who turns into the bearer, organiser, and summariser of the perceived objectivity into a ‘world’. In Goethe’s statement, this unity still exists at a pre-scientific and pre-artistic level. That is why he is so instructive when it comes to dealing with the similarities and differences between science and art. Unconditional surrender to the objectivity of the object remains decisive for scientific comportment; the fact that a lot more than this appertains to its truthful operationalising (namely, a talent for discovery striving beyond any such subjectivity, which allows the manifest richness of the object to come forth in a clear and articulated lawfulness) changes nothing essential in the basis of this state of affairs. But the objectivity that is also prominent in the works of Goethe in a pre-artistic way has a completely different character in terms of art: in order to be a mirror in which all the important determinations of the object appear in an unadulterated way, subjectivity must – simultaneously – sublate itself up to the point of completely disappearing, and internally it must likewise be heightened to an utmost extreme if this likeness is not to remain petrified and deadened. The doubledness of the aesthetic object (to be existent in itself and at the same time, inseparable from it,

4 Goethe 1994, p. 78.

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existing only for man) is carried through by this duality of the subject associated with it. This inseparable bond between the sublating and the heightening of subjectivity in such a concentration upon one act is indeed something specifically aesthetic, yet the comportment, based upon its content, which can of course be expressed as a retroactive unification, as the reciprocal supplementation of acts that are oriented in opposite directions, also plays an important, if frequently underestimated, role in everyday life. In the most general sense, what underlies this is an unsurpassable state of affairs in which real development of human personality is only possible in the world and in continuous interdependencies with it, a state of affairs in which both a man who tends to close himself up entirely within himself and he who delivers himself over helplessly to his environment and adapts himself to it unconditionally must in the end become a mental cripple. There lives, more or less consciously in most men, a drive towards human completeness, provided that the social structure of their time has not disfigured them internally to such a degree that they feel their own distortedness to be an indispensable precondition of any existence. Having said this, this drive and the capacity to actualise it varies quite widely even in different persons from the same time or the same class. The gamut runs from the struggle to actually realise this drive, it extends over powerless revolts, and it goes all the way to a jaded, indeed even a complacent, adaptation to one of the false extremes. By its nature, art is invariably a counterforce to such degenerative tendencies, invariably the model for the revolt against their influences, the ideal of an inner healthiness. The fact that in a certain respect its individual compositions almost always also possess a concrete – positive or negative – exemplarity does not diminish its universal effect. Indeed, it reinforces it: as a model for a comportment worthy of humanity, to apprehend and to shape the objectivity of the world so that such a subject-object relationship reaches expression in it. For the creating subject, however, this amounts to the necessity of forming a corresponding comportment towards the world in itself. An endless concrete variability is also possible, indeed indispensable, therein – depending on period, class, nation, individuality – but the most universal form indicated above in the formation of the creative subjectivity is the only way to validly bring to life such an aesthetic construct. What one justifiably calls an artistic personality is based precisely on such relationships to reality. It is of course formally possible to bring forth works of art on other psychological bases. But the excessive preponderance of a worldless subjectivity or the soulless inhuman suppression of subjectivity inevitably transfers the human dubiousness of such a state to the work and brings forth an irresolvable problematic in it. Of course, the real connection between work and creative personality is supremely intric-

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ate and exhibits all kinds of forms of dialectical overturning. In this change, however, there always persists – when it is a question of genuine works of art – an ever-recurring centre: simply the relation being portrayed here to reality itself, a relation whose directions of movement we have already potrayed in other contexts as the externalisation of the subject in the object-world and as the subject’s taking that which is thus acquired back into himself. The current descriptions go beyond the earlier ones only insofar as, on the one hand, the substantiality of the creating subject appears as the inalienable precondition for the solid substantiality of the work and, on the other, that substantiality is based on a relationship to reality in which the subject finds, enriches, and deepens himself as substance by means of the surrender to the outside world, by reflecting its most important determinations. Again, the absolute necessity for aesthetic posting results from all of this: to find the relationship to reality on the basis of its dialectical reflection. Of course, as we were already able to see in many cases, this dialectic is also clearly visible in everyday praxis. Even in this, it would be impossible to exist and to act successfully if the reflection mentally coming into consideration for man had a merely photographic character. The subject’s active involvement in the mode and outcome of reflection, however, is corrected in a more or less spontaneous way in labour and in the other immediate praxis of the everyday, and in a conscious way in science, mediated by the disanthropomorphising comportment. But one must not forget that two elements of the relationship to reality in its immediacy are inseparably contained in this subjective factor of reflection: first, those aspects of the world of appearance that constitute the simple subjective ingredients for reflection (the effect of specific human sense organs, etc.); second, the objective share of the human species (and the individuals constituting it) in the constitution, structure, etc. of reality itself, its relatedness to the humanity of people resulting from the nature of things. This immediate unity is sublated by disanthropomorphising reflection and broken up into its true objective components in order to be able to apprehend and hold fast to a new synthesis of purely objective relationalities existing in themselves. The second motif plays an important role in the ethical comportment of people. That is to say, a human resolution cannot be singled out of the causal nexus of the socio-historical sequence, but when considered ethically it nevertheless possesses a particular accent in reality, that of the accountability of the individual containing it. This of course can also arise for the engendering causes as well as out of the engendered consequences. Yet a qualitative distinction of actual responsibility exists therein. In the case of the latter, the decision itself becomes its own object; in that of the former, the subjective commitment,

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having recognised certain tendencies of reality, must foresee certain of their consequences. Needless to say, this is not the place to pursue more closely the dialectic that thus comes into being. But it is certain that the false extremes demonstrated above are – mutatis mutandis – also of critical significance in the field of ethics: completely ignoring the objective outside world can transform the purest and most selfless moral dispositions into the quixotic, whereas the unresisting acquiescence to events in the surrounding world presses the subject down into philistinism. Whether this takes place as a haphazard adaptation to the preexisting outside world at any given time or as a passive temperamental reaction that under certain circumstances can grow into an inner indignation without being translated into deeds does not make any crucial difference in terms of ethics. Within philistinism there is a great range running from insubstantial refinement to barbarism, from aimless sentimentality to unfeeling induration, etc. A real ethical substance comes into being in man (or, rather, man grows up into ethical substantiality) only if he succeeds in realising the correct proportion of inner and outer (of object-world and subjectivity, of necessity and freedom) in his decisions and deeds. The exposition of the place that this substantiality of personality occupies in the overall field of ethics would go beyond the scope of these observations. Even so, these general outlines already show that ethical and aesthetic comportments bear a dear, although complex and contradictory, relationship to each other. The basis for their differences (indeed, their antitheses) resides in their fundamental character: ethics is practically directed at human reality itself; aesthetics contemplatively strives for a reflection of the world that is essential for man. The dialectic of aesthetic reflection, which decides on fidelity and profundity, truth and abundance, worldedness and the evocative power of works of art, primarily takes as its starting point the interdependency being analysed here of objectivity and subjectivity. Only when the creative subject is capable of apprehending the relatedness of objects to people (to the human species) as their own inherent determinations and, on the other hand, letting the responses of people to their surrounding world grow out of a unitarily operative substance that encompasses both of them can this tense equilibrium of subjectivity and objectivity come into being as a new aesthetic synthesis that is uniform and immediate, substantive and evocative. Howsoever convoluted its genesis out of the creative subject may be, however much a qualitative leap links and separates creation and the work at the same time, there must be tendencies in the subjective preconditions that are largely in keeping with the structure of the work and that converge with it for the leap to lead to a genuine work of art. This correspondence or communion is based precisely on the correct relationship of the subject to the object-world in reality as in art. The

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non-mechanical, dialectical character of aesthetic reflection comes into play in the fact that it critically depends on the constitution of its subject. Genuine and rich art can only arise out of a rich life, Gorki said now and again. This richness, of course, need not reveal itself in an extrinsic animatendess of life, but it must be vividly presented in the lived experiencing of the world; it must form something substantive out of the subject as a result of the proper proportionality of subjectivity and objectivity such that the work possesses the substance that is indispensable to its authenticity. As a matter of principle, the question, ‘Who reflects reality?’ cannot be separated at all from the question, ‘What is being reflected, and how so?’ The seemingly most fantastical or most remote work can – in this sense – be a genuine reflection of reality; and the world constituted by the work of art must also become insubstantial if the relationship of subjectivity and objectivity dims and confuses socio-historical reality. For the most part, the confusion of which we talked just now becomes apparent as a complete or partial denial of art’s reflective character. Admittedly, this has old traditions in the history of philosophy. Up to the time of Marx, materialism only knew of a mechanical reflection; the more complicated questions of aesthetics could thus not possibly be solved by it. Important materialists like Diderot helped by smuggling – per nefas – dialectical aspects into the mechanical theory of reflection in their individual observations; in conceptions like the identical subject-object, idealist dialecticians such as Hegel integrated – likewise per nefas – unconscious applications of the dialectical theory of reflection that were often correctly conceived as assorted elements. However, this only bears upon the most outstanding thinkers. According to such conditions, it is understandable that a rejection of the theory of reflection was prevalent in the last few decades of development. Trends like expressionism and surrealism try to deduce the whole of art from the enigmatic self-activity of the worldless subject, and even astute thinkers like Caudwell, whom we have already criticised, want to salvage (for lyric at least) such a pure subjectivity harking back to allegedly magical remnants. With regards to all of this, it is striking that when major artists reflect on their trade, again and again they end up with a return to the reflection of reality. We will not speak of Tolstoy, who, when trying to think philosophically, always falls under the influence of subjective idealists, although in those places where he shapes a genuine artist (as, for example, in the case of the artist Mikhailov in Anna Karenina), his theory and praxis always lead back simply to the theory of reflection. But even an author like Proust cannot help but fall back on reflection when he tries to elucidate the lyric poetry of as modern and subjectivist a poet as Mallarmé, who in modern theories represents a model of ‘pure’ (and thus non-reflecting) subjectivity. In

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a letter from his youth, he writes of Mallarmé: ‘I will say, speaking of this poet in general, that in all likelihood his obscure and brilliant images are still images of things, since we cannot conceive of anything else, but reflected as it were in a dark polished mirror of black marble’.5 What is important in this case is not merely the recognition of the theory of reflection that is imposed by the logic of things but rather the brilliantly and aptly arranged image of the subjective medium of reflection. And we are thereby in the heart of our present problem. Just like any other of its applications to fields in which man figures as subject, the theory of reflection in dialectical materialism is a world away from disparaging the role and significance of subjectivity, much less denying it. Indeed, one can on the contrary calmly assert that it is precisely dialectical materialism which is capable of grasping this role and significance far more concretely than any extremely subjectivistic modern theory. For in these theories subjectivity appears as something that is abstractly immediate to such an extent that all genuine determinations and distinctions must disappear or waste away within it, to such an extent that a tremendous weightiness neither due to nor to be borne by it is abstractly and emphatically attributed to subjectivity, such that subjectivity – in the singularity peculiar to it – declaratively rises to the level of sole demiurge for all that is creative. According to the nature of things, nothing concrete can thus be claimed about subjectivity. In contrast, precisely because it proceeds from the real function of subjectivity in aesthetic reflection (and in ethics, in historical praxis, etc.), dialectical materialism can elucidate subjectivity with a far richer and more profound differentiation than these modern theories do. If we now stick with aesthetic reflection but consider the great and complex tasks this imposes on the creative subject, then it becomes clear that an analysis on this basis raises issues of differentiation, in which the aesthetic suitability of the subject to such a reflection of reality comprises the creative man in his animated totality, in his whole personality, thus even his intellect, his morality, etc. Gorki posed this question in this way not too long after Proust. In his essay ‘The Destruction of Personality’, he writes: ‘Our old writers had broad conceptions, a consistent philosophy, and an intense feeling for life; and their field of vision comprised the entire boundless universe. The “personality” of our contemporary writers is merely their manner of writing; the real personality, the complex of thoughts and feelings we call by that name, is growing ever more elusive, vague, and to tell the truth, pitiable. Such a writer is no longer a mirror of the world, but merely of a small fragment of it. The social backing that gave it its reflecting power has been rubbed

5 Proust 1985, p. 138.

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off as it lay in the dust of city streets; it is no longer capable of reflecting the life of the world, only fragments of street scenes, little fragments of broken souls’.6 It does not take all that much perspicacity to behold a certain principled affinity between both ways of posing the question: the fact of reflection accepted as such, both authors are interested in how that mirror had to be procured in which a literary likeness of the world could appear. But whereas Proust stops at the brilliant identification of a bizarre fact (namely that the surface of black marble allows only an interestingly hazy, atmospheric but featureless and dismembered reproduction of the surrounding world in the human subject), Gorki charges directly at the central problem and shows that the destruction of the subjective bond of his era’s people to social life and its problems shatters the instrument of aesthetic reflection in the subject and flings the broken pieces into the dust of the street. But this difference in their conceptions does not diminish in the least the significance of the fact that two such outstanding representatives of extremely opposing conceptions about literature not only agree with regard to the fact of its reflective character but also agree that the intrinsic specificity of the literary subject decisively affects the quality of reflection. As we have seen, the social substratum of this quality also becomes clear in the works of Gorki. Yet the conscious bond with society or the conceit of the autotelism of the subject are not merely ‘sociological’ distinctions – as most bourgeois thinkers fancy – but on the contrary strike precisely the essence of man and thereby his aesthetic capacities. We have already touched upon this issue in other contexts and in the process pledged ourselves philosophically, with Aristotle, to the primarily social constitution of man. The importance of such a decision resides in the fact that if this distinction were merely a ‘sociological’ one, then man could isolate himself at will from the social problems of his time and could live as an ‘atom’ without damaging or distorting his essence and with it his capacity to properly reproduce the outer- and innerworld. By contrast, if man is social by his ‘ontological’ nature, then this existence as ‘atom’ is merely an imaginary one, inwardly untrue and contradicting its own objective basis, and such a discrepancy cannot possibly persist for long without gravely damaging the subject as such.7 Robert Musil, who advantageously distinguishes himself from the majority of avant-garde authors by means of an often unflinching candor with respect to his own personality and his own

6 Gorki 1946, p. 124. 7 In The Holy Family, Marx very clearly points out the falsehood and unsoundness of such representations about man as an ‘atom’. See Marx and Engels 1975, pp. 120–1.

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production, writes of himself, ‘Zarathustra, the lonely man in the mountains, somehow runs counter to my sentiments. But what position must one adopt in order to come to terms with a world that has no fixed point? “I do not understand it,” that’s the way to do it!’8 The contradictoriness that is expressed here for the whole sphere of aesthetic reflection can be summarily stated thusly: on the one hand, any detailed analysis of its categorical structure reveals an extraordinarily great – looked at immediate terms, even a limitless – room for manoeuvre when it comes to the possibilities for expression. Precisely the proper conception of the place of causality in the system of categories releases aesthetic reflection from slavish dependency both on given reality construed as immediate semblance and on that – likewise immediate – manner of explanation that transforms it into a finished network made out of causal chains. The aesthetic advance towards the essence, towards the laws of human life, and towards the substance of humanity can thereby obtain an unlimited variability, both in terms of content and form. It can deviate ever so radically from the immediately perceived surface of everyday life, and it can seem to be ever so fantastical or grotesque in comparison to it, without hence having to forfeit its essence as a true likeness of reality. On the other hand, however, it is precisely this freedom, this rejection of any rule ready in advance, which accomplishes an extraordinarily rigorous selection that sweeps a great multitude of aesthetically intended efforts out of the realm of art. It is of the essence of aesthetic reflection that in it all categories decide on success or failure only in the entirety of their interdependencies. Whether the work can be counted as art or not depends on the character of the artistic structure of the individual works, which emerges out of the totality of the meaningful content and its specific formation. All of the questions that spring from this constellation indicate (and this is something their detailed study can demonstrate) that the primacy of unity and totality over the analysis of details in no way abolishes aesthetic rationality; indeed, this primacy turns into nothing less than the fundament of what specifically constitutes aesthetic rationality. These questions can only be concretely posed and answered in the second part of this work. By way of anticipating ourselves here, we must and can only briefly touch upon the role of subjectivity as the idiosyncratic mediating link between an aesthetically neutral objective reality and a work based purely and exclusively on aesthetically transformed categories. Needless to say, the subject has an often similar mediating role in everyday life and in science as well;

8 Musil 1998, p. 341.

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ascribing the denial of such mediations to materialism ranks among the common (but completely unfounded) prejudices towards it. The scope, intensity, significance, etc. of such a mediation in the various fields of human activity are indeed extraordinarily diverse, and it cannot be our task to discuss the multiplicity of problems accruing here even in a provisional way. Only this much is to be noted: the subject has to play a mediating role in the literal sense of the word both in a large part of everyday life (wherever it comes down to accomplishing something) and in science. That is to say, although neither the product of labour nor scientific reflection could come about without the commitment of the whole man, this is effaced to a large extent in the completed objectivation that functions in life. In other words, we can for instance know – and it is important to know – what enormous intellectual, moral, etc. energies were necessary to bring about Galileo’s or Newton’s scientific work; these works themselves, however, fulfil their mission in the life of mankind without our having to refer back to how they came to be. (When we make use of differential calculus, for instance, it does not matter to us whether Newton or Leibniz was its discoverer.) However, the work of art (the result of aesthetic reflection) is also the work of something personal, a work-individuality. Even if we may not know its author (or authors), this character of the personality is indelibly imprinted on the work. The question of the creative subject thus cannot be eliminated from even the most material analysis of the work of art. This most general finding has already been confirmed previously in the analysis of reflection; Proust’s and especially Gorki’s answers show how widely such a posing of the question opens up the horizons for understanding the objective issues surrounding the work in aesthetics and even for its social genesis. But it leads back again and again to what we expounded previously as the issue of substantiality in the work and as its inevitable foundedness in the human substantiality of the creators. Only in this way can art fulfil its human mission, as each work with a genuine substance turns into an exhortation on behalf of those who are receptive that appeals to their own substantiality or evocatively raises into consciousness their inner distance from such a substantiality. As is the case everywhere, here too the specific aesthetic issue is the – admittedly qualitatively emphasised – culmination of a universal phenomenon of life. Goethe aptly revealed this as the centre of this set of issues in his poem ‘Ultimatum’: So for the last time mark it well: Nature has neither kernel Nor shell;

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Now test yourself most carefully Whether kernel or shell you be.9 These lines bear immediately on the knowledge of nature, and hence the personal admonition of the final lines is likewise aimed directly at the natural scientist. Given, on the one hand, the intimate relationship between Goethe’s natural research and artistic praxis and, on the other, his conception of the natural sciences that, as we have shown, was a rearguard action (when looked at historically) against the triumphant ascension of disanthropomorphising methods, we believe we have the right to apply the epigram especially to our issue of the aesthetic subject. We are all the more justified, considering that the conclusion of the poem indeed contains the credo for Goethe’s philosophy of nature, though objectively it can only refer to the aesthetic (not the natural scientific) reflection of nature. These final words of Goethe’s read, ‘Does nature’s kernel not lie / In mankind’s breast?’10 Here Goethe’s thought soberly turns – against his ideological will – away from nature existing in itself and decidedly towards the aesthetic. For this nature, the kernel of which is in the heart of man, could be philosophically attainable only by means of an idealist construction, which was completely foreign to Goethe. By contrast, as has been frequently shown, it is precisely the conjunction of objectivity and the centredness on that which is most essential and internal to man which is the decisive hallmark of the aesthetic reflection of reality. The justified and fruitful share of human subjectivity in this mimesis consists precisely in the positing of this relatedness, not of course as a subjective addition to an object-world that is in itself alien to the subject but rather in such a way that this orientation towards man emerges as the inherent property of the reflected objects existing in itself. It is exactly for this purpose that the Goethean distinction between kernel and shell takes on a decisive significance. Earlier, we pointed out both the relationships to ethics in the development of man towards substantiality and the role that the right relation plays in the reception and reprocessing of the outside world within it. Now, in the sense of the Goethean dichotomy of people according to their constitution as kernel or shell, the recourse to ethics appears in a clearer light: it is not so much a question of ethical categories in their own sense – these are, broadly speaking as a matter of principle, binding for all people in the same way – but rather of a result that brings forth in the people concerned both ethics that have turned

9 10

Goethe 1957, p. 99. [Eds.] Ibid. [Eds.]

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into flesh and blood and lives that have been led in rich interaction with the world. It is a question of their general modes of comportment, of their inner constitution as whole men. In Wilhelm Meister and in Goethe and Schiller’s letters regarding this novel, this conception is quite clearly expressed as an ethics of people according to their own being, in contrast to Kant’s strict moral postulates. And if in the process the kernelness of man is sometimes too narrowly linked to that which is harmonious in individuality, the centre of this determinacy it has is nevertheless thereby hit. Without also being able here to pursue further the ethical ramifications of this problem area, the following can be said regarding the aesthetic facet that is primarily of interest to us: the question of whether man be a kernel or a shell is whether he – humanly speaking – be worthy and therefore capable of an adequate reflection of the world, whether his personality be fit to be the ‘mirror of the world’ (Heine on Goethe). We will concern ourselves at once in detail with the receptive comportment towards works of art. All that need be said here in anticipation is that even he who is receptive necessarily faces the issue of the kernelness of man and his capacity to adequately reflect the world; this belongs, admittedly in modified forms, to the essence of his lived aesthetic experience. With this, a new theory of genius is pronounced, the essence of which is immediately expressed – negatively for now – in the fact that it widely rejects any irrationalism in genius. Here too, of course, an explanation that would circumscribe the necessary hallmarks of genius, enumerate its critical attributes, realise their indispensable proportion, etc. is impossible from the outset. Each genius (even each talented person) presents an unparalleled relationship (one that cannot possibly recur even in remote similarity) between man and his age, man and social reality, man and fellow man, man and nature. But such a completely indissoluble matchlessness can nevertheless be conceptualised when it is not, as often happens, considered merely in its isolated occurrence but rather, as is being proposed here, in the interdependency with its surrounding sociohistorical world that we mentioned above. The incomparable matchlessness of genius (and talent) appears through a concrete historical nexus within it, in which it becomes possible to discover and express entirely universal determinations – ones that only recur with variation in this universality. This issue cannot be dealt with in its actual breadth and depth here; it is clear, however, that what was referred to as the kernelness of man in these contexts is an important (indeed, an indispensable) basis for genius (and talent) in people. We know what broad and ramified mediations must come into operation between individuals and the human species such that the level of mankind’s development at the time becomes evident in works of art in an unadulteratedly evocative and genuine way. Our arguments up to this point have shown that what was

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here called the kernel in man is precisely the most important mediating link between the human personality and the humanity in him, between its inner and outer emanations, whereas the tendencies referred to as the shell in man necessarily push, by means of the dominance of false extremes in subjectivity and objectivity, from the centre to the periphery, to that which is merely peculiar to one and to the polar abstractness that supplements it. With all of this we are merely falling into line with our earlier observations by admittedly raising these to a higher and – in keeping with the essence of the aesthetic – more human level. We have already linked this to externalisation and its being taken back into the subject, and currently we can catch sight of a similar relationship to the defetishising mission. In this regard, therefore, one can sum up the meaning of the Goethean verses thus: the kernel-being of man is posited simultaneously with a defetishising look at the world; the shell-being of man is posited with a bowing down to fetishising biases. Goethe thereby brings us into the centre of this entire set of issues. The more deeply we learn to understand that aesthetic reflection is capable of comprehending and reproducing the world of man free of fetishised biases, and the more we learn that this act need not occur attached to a conscious intellectual insight into the scientific or philosophical aspects of this set of issues, then the more essential the ingenious advice given by Goethe here appears to be. With that said, however, Goethe’s view is concretised even further. In his denominations of his own view of nature, what increasingly comes to the fore besides the subjective antithesis of kernel and shell is that of inner and outer, the view of the subject being consistently supplemented by the facet of the structure of the object, by the subject-object relationship. He thus says, ‘There’s nought outside and nought within, / For [nature] is inside out and outside in’.11 And referring back to the subject: ‘We think: in every place / We’re at the center’.12 And finally he traces this issue back again to the starting point, to the poles of kernel and shell, when, as already quoted, he says, ‘Does nature’s kernel not lie / In mankind’s breast?’13 Only Goethe’s last dictum refers – inadvertently, but in an emphatically matter-of-fact way – to the aesthetic. The ultimate unity of thinking and being in the relation of man to nature, of which he is simply a product and part, may have immediately been intended in the Spinozistic sense. The inner is aesthetically concretised insofar as nature steeped in the activity of the human race – nature in metabolism with society – actualises a

11 12 13

Goethe 1983, p. 159. [Eds.] Goethe 1983, p. 237. [Eds.] Goethe 1957, p. 99. [Eds.]

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relation of inner and outer such that all the appearances of nature are profoundly connected to the existence of man, that hence (quite literally and no longer metaphorically) its kernel immediately touches the mind of man and inheres within it. The genuine artist must ‘merely’ heighten this unity of inner and outer, which objectively exists everywhere, to the level of aesthetic substantiality and must make their absolute unity evocatively conscious. It is from here that Goethe’s standpoint (‘Nature has neither kernel nor shell’) first receives its proper meaning in retrospect: the unity of inner and outer in nature signifies the invalidity of a distinction between kernel and shell for nature itself; such a distinction is purely a human problem that can indeed only be solved in the comportment of man towards his world, towards nature. The kernelness of man is expressed in his capacity to perceive, think, and feel inner and outer in their unity; his kernelness is at the same time the precondition and consequence of such a vision, whereas vice versa the constitution of man as shell bears a similarly necessary relationship to the tearing apart of the bonds between inner and outer. Even though, as has been repeatedly emphasised, we can only deal in detail with the more intricate relationships of content and form in the second part, the aesthetic convergence of this pair of categories with that of inner and outer must already be pointed out here anew. The absolute cohesiveness of inner and outer (their tendency towards identity) is a fact of life, as is their relative divergence, indeed – in borderline cases – their sharpening to the point of dichotomy. But if the first aspect were not the dialectically comprehensive one, then dealings between people would be impossible from the outset. As the implicit axiom of social life, so to speak, this presupposes an essential relationship between inner and outer. Moreover, in many cases the mere semblance of a tension exists between them because the subject at the time does not recognise their essential objective unity and beholds a discrepancy between the falsely interpreted outer and an inner that therefore has remained unelucidated. In general, this form of self-contradiction only comes into consideration in relation to the world of nature. Hegel says, ‘The outer, in this determination, is not only equal to the inner according to content but the two are rather only one fact …. the fact is itself nothing other than the unity of the two’.14 This is such a basic fact of life that doubts about it have little justification; in fact, one is driven to investigate the social grounds of such a glaring error when this relationship of outer and inner is doubted or denied. This is supremely easy in science. Because when, for example, subjective idealism posits an unknowable

14

Hegel 2010, p. 460.

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‘inner’, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, but reality itself retains the proper relation of inner and outer (it’s just that – intellectually – an unrelated inner is simply projected behind this totality), this remains completely meaningless for real concrete knowledge; we do not need to examine the ideological consequences of this position. For aesthetics, the denial of the ultimate identity of inner and outer is far more important because the relationship of man and the human race is thereby obscured. Because the unity of inner and outer is such a basic fact of human life that it affects the level of that which is peculiar to someone only tendentially. The more powerfully the essential forms urging universality (class, nation, etc.) become visibly effective in society at the time, the more clearly this tendency stands out. The growing significance of individuality does not abolish this relation, though it does become increasingly complicated as a result. Particular social conditions have to emerge so that the development of personal life also receives a direction towards exclusivity, so that the connection of man to the universal powers of life darkens and there is thereby the semblance that the things which are peculiar to someone are the all-determining potency of any human existence. This tendency thus breaks into modern thinking as Kierkegaard’s theory of the irresolvable incognito of man, which is based on a sophistical polemic with Hegel’s conception that has been given here. The aesthetic importance of this theory (a theory that is objectively untenable in terms of philosophy because it contradicts all of the objective facts of human life) resides in the fact that the same social being that Kierkegaardian philosophy pioneeringly sent forward turned ever more broadly and deeply into the ideological foundation for the artistic praxis of gifted personalities and influential trends. The fetishisation of the surrounding human world into an irrational ‘system’ of meaningless anti-human powers, of human interiority into a hermetically self-contained and pent-up windowless monad, the expression of which is necessarily misunderstood by other people and which for its part cannot understand any other person’s expression, impoverishes the meaningful content and distorts form to such a degree that it even becomes impossible to artistically depict the misanthropy of contemporary capitalism and the total meaninglessness of human life in it. For as in objective social reality man can grow lonely only in society, so too the concrete inexpressibility of a mental condition even objectively presupposes the normal relationship of inner and outer, notwithstanding that in the given case it be ever so deranged. This distinguishes Kafka’s The Trial, say, from Beckett’s Molloy; in the case of the former, the absolute incognito peculiar to the person appears as an outrageous and outrageevoking abnormality of human existence (thus still on the basis – albeit negatively – of the fate of the species), whereas the latter complacently ensconces

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itself in a fetishised peculiarity that has been turned into an absolute. Since the spontaneous recognition of the identity of inner and outer is a basic precondition of human life and of human coexistence at all, this antithesis again confirms the Goethean conception of kernel and shell. The ostensible profundity of a Beckett is nothing more than a glomming on to certain symptoms of an immediate surface that the capitalism of our day offers. And what is this if not the very thing Goethe referred to as the shell? Content and the inner do not just converge aesthetically; the aesthetic relation expresses something objective here as well, of course invariably as it bears upon man. In the trains of thought cited a moment ago, Hegel calls the identity of inner and outer the ‘content and totality, a totality which is an inner that has equally become an outer’.15 This identity receives a further intensification in aesthetic reflection as a result of the function of artistic form in guiding receptive lived experience and evoking them. At the time of the emergence of the aesthetic from the still undifferentiated and chaotic uniformity of the magical manifestations of life and out of the confrontations with their surrounding world, that which is artistic in any content still has a completely spontaneous mode of appearance. People intended to actualise magical objectives by bringing already high art into being in many a field and in many respects. It goes without saying that a conceptual division of content and form (a separate reflection on artistic form) could in no way enter into their consciousness in this period. At that time, of course, the creators also gave thought to the technical perfection of their achievements, and the logic of the matter had to transfer this to problems of aesthetic form as well, without their having to (or even being able to) become conscious as such. Our meaningful experiences from much later stages of development show how often major artists formulated supremely important knowledge about formal issues merely as technical innovations, misgivings, etc. The flowing together of technique and form into each other belongs to the essence of creative comportment – somewhat less decidedly in literature than in the visual arts and music – and their precise conceptual distinction remains a task of aesthetics. This tendency is reinforced even further by virtue of the fact that, as we have already repeatedly demonstrated, aesthetic form is always the form of a determinate content. This specificity which it possesses has decidedly hampered our becoming aesthetically conscious of it. For the creator, technique and form (from the side of his activity) and material, content, subject matter, etc. (from the side of the concrete task at the time) blur hazily into each

15

Ibid.

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other as objects of the process of formation. And especially as long as the social structure gives the work of art very determinate instructions both in terms of content and form, it is natural that no aesthetico-philosophical reflection upon the relation of form and content develops, even if art has long since turned into an autonomous social phenomenon. The primitive materialism and spontaneous dialectic in early thinking merge here with these tendencies that are likewise necessarily operative in aesthetic praxis. The dominance of idealist philosophy first presses for more precise distinctions, for the taking of a more decided position. Plato’s militant anti-materialism and especially the development of his line of thought into the mystico-theological in the works of his followers lead to a sharp isolation of content from form. The more that form (abolishing itself upon the mythical peaks of the system) is dematerialised, the more it bears the relation of a sharply delimiting duality to the concrete – the material and earthly – content. Since these conceptions of form (and their theoretical consequences) are most closely related to allegory, we will deal with them in greater detail in the final chapter. In any case, the new variety of philosophical idealism, which has propagated under Kant’s influence in particular, is more important for the current state of the problem. As strongly as he otherwise distinguishes himself from ancient and medieval idealism, Kant nevertheless shares with them the tendency to rip open a deep rift between form and content. Schiller, who, as the author has attempted to show in other studies, was so little an orthodox Kantian that his aesthetics already paves the way to Schelling and Hegel, says of transcendental philosophy that in it ‘everything depends on clearing the form of content’, wherein he significantly catches sight of the separation of necessity from contingency at the same time; he clearly sees that connected to this is the tendency of ‘thinking of material things as nothing but an obstacle’ and of ‘imagining that our sensuous nature … must of necessity be in conflict with reason’.16 The fact that according to Schiller taking this position conforms only to the letter, not the spirit, of the Kantian system does not eliminate that system’s quite far-reaching influence – even on Schiller’s aesthetics. It is thus very instructive to have a look at Schiller’s position on the formcontent relationship and to see what kinds of theoretical aberrations philosophical idealism can bring about in this issue even in the case of a thinker who is at the same time a great poet and for that reason – in spite of his basic theoretical conceptions – can also obtain quite deep theoretical insights into the heart of the problem. Schiller says the following about the relationship of

16

Schiller 1967, p. 87. On the Kant-Schiller view, cf. Lukács 1954, pp. 11ff.

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form and content in poetic works: ‘In a truly beautiful work of art the content should effect nothing, the form everything; for only through the form is the whole man affected, through the content, by contrast, only one or the other of his functions. Content, then, however sublime and all-embracing it may be, always has a limiting effect upon the spirit, and it is only from form that true aesthetic freedom can be looked for. Herein, then, resides the real secret of the master in any art: that he can make his form consume his subject matter; and the more pretentious, the more seductive this subject matter is in itself, the more it seeks to impose itself upon us, the more high-handedly it thrusts itself forward with effects of its own, or the more the beholder is inclined to get directly involved with it, then the more triumphant the art which forces it back and asserts its own kind of dominion over him. The psyche of the listener or spectator must remain completely free and inviolate; it must go forth from the magic circle of the artist pure and perfect as it came from the hands of the Creator’.17 Schiller’s reasoning clearly shows his bias in transcendental philosophy and, even at critical points in it, what he himself called its mere letter in contrast to its spirit. When he says that only the form affects the whole man, but the content just inspires one or the other of his functions, or that any content (even the most comprehensive) would affect the spirit in a limiting way, he thus takes refuge in the Kantian separation of form and content because he experienced with a visionary intensity, rare for his time, how the fetishised contents and the fetishistically congealed forms of bourgeois society act to hack the inner lives of people into pieces. The illusions of a cure for this affliction, which Schiller cherished as a result of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary upswing of German literature, were understandably focused on the educational mission of artistic form and receive philosophical support – admittedly highly problematical in substance – in the thinking of Kant and the young Fichte. This accounts for the position that Schiller takes to the form-content problem only in terms of history, however; it conveys nothing as to the material correctness or falsity of his answer. It is not difficult for us to see that the whole man is not hacked to pieces in everyday life as a result of the fact that he internalises primary contents (of course – contrary to Kant – always formed, if not, of course, artistically formed) and responds to these in a practical way. Instead, this hacking to pieces occurs by means of the specific structure of certain social formations, which have a disfiguring influence upon the form-content relationship in the immediacy of everyday life. It is just as obvi-

17

Schiller 1967, pp. 155–7, translation modified.

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ous – beyond the realm of transcendental philosophy – that the everyday and art do not differ from each other as the dominions of content or form but rather as a result of the qualitative difference in the form-content relation in both. Schiller also feels that something is not right in this deduction, for without any mediation he leaps from the universal antithesis between form and content to the particular one between form and subject matter in art. But now subject matter is an already strongly specified and differentiated mode of appearance of the all-embracing universal content: subject matter is that part of the content of life that is experienced and sensed which a poet singles out in order to reshape it into the content of his work at the time. In the case of genuine poets, such a selection never takes place by chance; the subject matter must contain something that corresponds to his determinate poetic objectives, moods, etc. in some sort of way, which is why a kind of artistic preformedness is already jointly contained in the mere fact of the choice of subject matter as well. Indeed, poetic labour essentially consists in developing the meaningful content that is essential for the poet out of the subject matter, in forming this as if its contents, their sequence, proportions and escalations would grow organically out of it, as if the form selected and implemented by the poet had been inherent to the subject matter from the beginning. The Tolstoyan painter Mikhailov from Anna Karenina, who is certainly a mouthpiece for his author, expresses this thus: the painter must remove from his figures the wrappings still covering them, but he must do this in such a way that he does not damage the figures themselves in the process; mistakes would come into being if one were to remove these wrappings carelessly.18 Schiller himself was also much too conscious and violent a poet to make use of such an organic method. His letters from the time in which he was working on Wallenstein, however, are a testament to the fact that the most universal, ultimate principle of his creative method nevertheless showed a similar orientation. The ambit of what is true and what is false in Schiller’s famous phrase is thus already identified. What is false is easiest to point out: if Schiller were to have only intended the literal sense of what he proposes, then he would be the theorist of a ‘pure’ forming of art, a progenitor of l’art pour l’art, as has frequently been claimed as well. This false semblance arises from Schiller’s transcendental philosophical terminology, from which he is also not able to extricate himself. If the world of contents were actually something amorphous in itself, to which form was exclusively able to impart a distinct objectivity, and hence if any

18

Tolstoy 2000, p. 474. [Eds.]

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actual meaning – may it be theoretical, ethical, or aesthetic – were contained only in the forms, then this famous phrase would also be correct. But since in objective reality, and therefore in any of its correct reflections, what prevails is an indivisible unity of content and form (their continuous overturning into each other), Schiller’s proposition untenably collapses in on itself, just as the other statements about reality in transcendental philosophy do. Viewed in real terms, the subject matter of poetry is, as is the case with any content, already formed, though of course not yet in an aesthetic sense. Poetic achievement therefore does not consist in raising something that is in itself formless to the level of formedness but rather in rupturing the animate and immediate formation of the subject matter and finding for its kernel extracted in this labour an aesthetic form that is specifically appropriate to it, the form of this determinate content, the form of a new evocative immediacy. A decisive meaning is hence naturally assigned to the meaningful content of the subject matter in the determination of this form; not in an abstract objectivity, though, but rather in the sense of the intention of the poet in the selection of the subject matter and the objective intentionality of the subject matter towards such a process. (That is what the Tolstoyan Mikhailov means by the careful removing of husks.) The forming labour of the creator is hence a contradictory one. On the one hand, he must destroy these forms in a certain sense because reality itself is aesthetically neutral; the arrangement and hierarchy of its categories is utterly foreign to that of the aesthetic; the objectivity of objects, their relational system, etc. is something completely different from what the laws of individual forms of art require with respect to objectivity, its connections, etc. On the other hand, aesthetic reflection is still a reproduction of reality as it objectively is in itself, in fact as it appears determinately and concretely in that piece of reality that has turned into subject matter. The shattering of the immediately given forms of reality therefore also intrinsically possesses the aspect of fidelity to reality. Even this shattering is also a dialectical sublation, which courts failure if it neglects to preserve and raise to a higher level. Only the very intricate interplay of these opposed tendencies (only their utmost sharpening) can lead to the identity of content and form in the completed work. That is why, in order to actually hit upon the truth, Schiller’s proposition that the subject matter is ‘consumed’ by the form would have to be supplemented by its polar opposite (the subject matter that is being shaped ‘consumes’ the form). Indeed, one can even say that, in the originary aesthetic sense, the second contrasting proposition, even taken by itself, comes closer to the genuine state of affairs in aesthetics than does the first, which in its isolatedness leads away from this. For as the form of a determinate content, artistic form invariably creates a ‘world’ existing for itself, which is called upon to evoke its own being-for-itself automatically. What necessarily

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appears in the evocative effect on the receptive person is hence a ‘world’, that is to say the cohesive, self-contained, organised, and organic unity of contents. Such a concrete ‘world’ that is meaningful in itself and for the receptive person is immediately experienced by that person in the genuinely overwhelming effect it has on him. This total merging of form into the content shaped by it is based not least on the convergence of both of the antithetical pairs (contentform and inner-outer) analysed by us. For the intensively endless worldedness of the work also presupposes such an identifying of inner and outer with each other: their merely tendential unity in life itself comes into play here as the complete transparency of each object, each figure, each situation, etc.; each of them completely emanates in an immediate and evocative way their adequate inner precisely by means of their outer appearance. The knowledge that this ‘world’ owes its aesthetic existence to the triumphant power of forms is a ratiocination that takes place subsequently, of course built upon this power and presupposing it. Schiller reaches the correct relationship of the categories insofar as the creative process is actually a path from the given subject matter to its becoming completely formed; more precisely, the merely lifelike content-form relation of the subject matter is transformed by means of artistic labour in that a form is found and shaped for the pure and essential meaningful content of the subject matter that is really the form of this unique determinate content. But this is only the determination of the creative process. Its success is expressed precisely in the fact that a complete self-contained work comes into being, though one whose evocative effect on the receptive person already has a contentrelated character, as we have repeatedly seen. The spectator spellbound by Wallenstein does not immediately marvel at Schiller’s wisdom, through which he has accordingly structured, built up, enhanced, etc. this austere subject matter; instead, the spectator is impressed by Wallenstein’s fate, by the historical and human substrata of his tragedy. The fact that this kind of effect is even more powerful in the works of Shakespeare is a hint for determining the aesthetic rank of both writers. One can generally observe that this kind of effect tends to crop up precisely in the works of the very greatest authors – Homer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Tolstoy – and that in most cases an instantaneous, spontaneously overwhelming formal effect – think of Hofmannsthal and Valéry, for instance – is a sign of the lesser world-encompassing substantiality of the literary personality. This analysis also leads to a confirmation of the Goethean classifying of people as kernel or shell according to their nature; the fact that there is and must be an inexhaustible variability in the intermediate stages between these poles as well alters nothing in the basic significance of this determination.

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Catharsis as a Universal Category of Aesthetics

The effect of the work takes a contrary path. It is of course also impossible here to analytically dissect the very complicated image of receptivity and to typologically demonstrate its various nuances, distinctions in levels, etc., from the plain reception of the work to the higher degrees of aesthetic conscious awareness; this too belongs to the domain of the second part. These remarks, which unavoidably come first, must therefore be limited to the effect of the work in the most immediate sense. Only so as to prevent potential misunderstandings, it should already be noted here by way of anticipation that the aesthetic conscious awareness that comes into being in receptivity also possesses a conceptual character: in immediate terms, reflecting upon the reasons and preconditions of the necessity of lived aesthetic experience. In any case, the nature, development, etc. of these reflections can only be expounded later. But one can already claim this much: in such immediate reflections, the identity of form and content in the work cannot itself possibly be aesthetically reproduced, indeed not even the path to such an identity which is manifested as the task of the creative process. Rather, all that is possible is a mere intellectual, conceptual clarification of the relation of form to content. Therefore, if we now are talking of the identity of content with form at this level, then their genuine identity in the work here is only the object of ratiocination; the real actualisation can only take place in the shaped work itself. (Criticism as art is a modern bias.) In the observations that follow, therefore, we will only be talking of the plain immediate effect of the work. All developments that result from this and all the complications that ensue in the course of this have to be left for a later analysis. With this qualification, it can now be repeated that the effect of the work takes a path contrary to that of the process of creation. The latter leads the aesthetically purified contents of life that have been made aesthetically homogeneous into the perfection of form, into the identity of content and form, into the culmination of the content in the concrete form of the work. The former guides the receptive person into the world of the work with the help of the homogeneous medium underpinning and making possible the formal system: form overturns into content here. If one wants to properly grasp this simplest and most immediate relationship of receptivity in a conceptual way, then its dual determinacy must be kept hold of. On the one hand, the purely or predominantly content-related character of lived experience. Whether it be literature or painting, architecture or music, the receptive person is brought into into a world that is new and yet quickly familiar to him. If this familiarisation with the world of the work does not come about, then no genuine aesthetic effect

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comes into being. To echo Musil’s phrase, merely having your attention captured creates a predominantly intellectual relationship to the content – indeed, even primarily to the content here – and an admiration for technical perfection; this only becomes aesthetic if it consciously grows out of what is being evoked in the content. One cannot aesthetically disregard these lived experiences of a new world that are called forth by the work, and their main content is this: the acquisition of a determinate content. On the other hand, this lived experience can only become aesthetic if it is evoked by the forms of the work of art. Without such a mediatory-evocative role for form, the mere communication of a content, even if it is ever so powerfully laden with feeling, remains a content of life, which naturally can inspire emotions, thoughts, etc. as it does in life, though without the duality that is specific to the aesthetic. This duality is a being lifted out of everyday life, though without having to forfeit contact with reality as a result. What we have called the worldedness of works of art consists in just such a confronting of the receptive person with the essence of reality itself, which is exactly why it cannot possibly be immediate life itself but rather ‘merely’ its artistic reflection. Just as the content becomes more and more saturated with form in the process of creation, up to the point of actualising the identity of form and content as the structure of the work, so too that content, that ‘world’ which constitutes the object of the plain lived receptive experience, is from the outset and all the way down into all of its pores the product of that particular form which has stamped the concrete content of the work at the time. The formal determinacy of ‘naïve’ lived receptive experience as it essentially relates to content is explained from that constitution of the aesthetic reflection of reality that was already expounded earlier: from the specificity of the homogeneous medium which underlies any art form or work of art and from the artistic formation’s function of guiding lived experiences that is inseparably connected to it. Howsoever diverse the various homogenous media may be, not only according to the forms of art but also to the personalities of the artists, and even according to the work-individualities created by the same artist, they nevertheless have the common trait of shifting the receptive person into the particular ‘world’ of the work at the time – bear in mind formal elements like intonation, exposition, etc. – and holding onto this person by means of their homogeneity, by means of their being aimed at a well-planned guiding of the lived experiences being therein evoked. The only reasonable way of understanding the breakdown of the act of forming is this: the artist is not successful in imparting to his work the world-encompassing homogeneity intended by him and therefore the power of guidance immanent and inherent to this homogeneity. It does not matter whether the artist himself or the expert, critic, etc.

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formulates this based on artistic intent, the unity of the Kunstwollen, etc., since the objective meaning of such assertions is invariably the failure of the intention towards such a content-suffused homogeneity. As was already accounted for in other contexts, this would be a meaningless bauble if no such tendency constructive of a homogeneous ‘world’ were inherent to it. Cézanne was certainly an artist little troubled by immediate success. Yet it becomes very apparent in his case that his ever-repeated concept of ‘realisation’ means precisely what we have been indicating. We quote a few remarks from his conversation with the museum director Osthaus: ‘The principal thing in a painting’, he said, ‘is finding the correct distance …. That’s how to recognize talent in a painter’. And having said this, he traced with his finger the edges of the painting’s various planes. He showed exactly where he had succeeded at suggesting depth and where he had not quite succeeded, where color simply remained color without having become the expression of distance.19 The fact that Cézanne refers to the shaping of a concrete space as the pivotal aim of his landscapes already shows how little the talk here can be of a purely artistic effort; his saying that the ‘color simply remained color’ is clear evidence against an ostensible preponderance of such velleities. How comprehensively and intellectually this tendency towards ‘realisation’ is intended is clearly discernible from his judgement on Courbet in the same conversation. From other comments, it is obvious how much Cézanne marvels at Courbet’s power of realisation. Also in this conversation he says of him, ‘He admired in him the boundless talent for which no difficulty existed. “As great as Michelangelo”, he said, but with this one condition, “he lacks ‘intellectuality’ ” ’.20 For the Cézanne who is thinking purely of painting, intellectuality in this context can mean nothing but a reference to universality in the object-creation of forms. The guiding function of the homogeneous medium therefore focuses lived receptive experience not only on a qualitatively determinate area in the experienceability of the world (on pure visuality here) but also on determinate aspects of its concrete experienceability within the realm of this homogeneous medium (on space here, as expressed by means of colouration). And what is to be depicted by means of all of this is a ‘world’, a concrete qualitative likeness of universality in the relationship of man to reality, which unites and focuses all of the capacities of man

19 20

Doran 2001, p. 96. Doran 2001, p. 97, translation modified.

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in his intensive endlessness (as an issue of intellectuality here, which Cézanne hence apparently regrets the absence of in the works of Courbet – it is immaterial here whether he does so justly or unjustly – because he strives for it himself in his own works.) Now if one regards this situation from the standpoint of lived receptive experience, then he returns to the already discussed issue of the transformation of the whole man into a man-made-whole (directed at the universality of a homogeneous medium). The meaningful human content of this transformation can be expressed thus: man departs (is detached) from the immediate and mediated context of life – to a relative degree, as we will presently see – in order to temporarily turn exclusively towards the contemplation of a concrete aspect of life that depicts the world as an intensive totality – arising from a certain vantage point – of its decisive determinations. The difference from the corresponding mode of comportment in the process of creation results from the matter itself: in the latter the active principle is the dominant aspect of this mode of comportment, one that is indeed continuously operative and objectively is utterly indispensable vis-à-vis the receptivity of the world. At the same time, the aspect of activity (of the gradual transformation of the content of life into the content-form identity of the work) must nevertheless be and remain the overarching one. The aspect of acceptance likewise naturally predominates in reception that is immediately confronted with the completed work; indeed, this comportment is immediately and for the time being exclusively receptive, it is a taking in. If, in the course of this, something like imagination becomes active or behaves in a supplementary or interpretive way, then this does not abolish the basic attitude of reception. Indeed, what is expressed in an entirely pure way in this auxiliary role of any mental activity is the primacy of contemplation. As was already shown earlier, even in everyday thinking such a suspension of the active tendencies in people (of the will to intervene effectively into the concrete conditions of the surrounding world) is also an often indispensable mediating stage between the objective itself and its concrete realisation. Needless to say, scientific research likewise cannot do without this comportment as an aspect. Aesthetic receptivity qualitatively differs from both the everyday and science. It differs from the first above all in the fact that it is precisely the selfdefined and concretely determined purpose which is missing as a motivation for the suspension of activity. Furthermore, it differs in that the suspension of concrete activities in life does not abolish the intention towards activity for the reasons given. It is nothing more than a reculer pour mieux sauter so that the subject (the whole man) remains inalterably the same before, after, and during this suspension. (We do not need to go more closely into the difference from the

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situation in scientific reflection; it is determined by the antithesis of disanthropomorphising tendencies to anthropomorphising ones.) As the suspension of activity and objective is consciously transitory and absolute at the same time for aesthetic receptivity, the necessity of the transformation of the whole man into the man-made-whole is what comes into being. The guiding and evoking power of the homogeneous medium breaks into the inner life of the receptive person, subjugates his customary way of regarding the world, imposes upon him a new ‘world’ first and foremost, imbues this world with new or newly seen contents, and it is precisely in this way that he is prompted to internalise this ‘world’ with renewed (with rejuvenated) organs of perception and ways of thinking. The transformation of the whole man into the man-madewhole thus induces an expansion and enrichment of his psyche here in terms of both content and form, both effectively and potentially. New contents pour into him to enlarge his hoard of lived experiences. As he is guided by the homogeneous medium of the work to receive these contents and take possession of that which is substantially new in them, what thereby develops at the same time is his perceptual capacity to recognise and enjoy new object-forms, relationships, etc. as such. In itself, such a conception of receptive comportment contains little that is new. But if we really want to understand and value it properly, then we have to contemplate it – and this is something that seldom happens in modern aesthetics – in the context of the whole human life. That is to say, one misjudges it when he (and this happens a lot) views the receptive person as a mental tabula rasa when it comes to the effect of the work, as a still unused gramophone record upon which any desired effect could imprint itself. On the other hand, it is just as inadequate and causes confusion when one simply equates aesthetic effect with its own immediacy without thinking about how it lingers and continues to have an effect in the receptive person after it stops. We believe that without this beforehand and afterwards of a real aesthetic impression, one cannot describe that impression’s own essence in full and therefore in keeping with the facts. First and foremost, this should be emphasised: in the face of the work of art, the receptive person is never a blank sheet of paper upon which any ciphers one wishes would be traced. He instead comes from life, even as a child: more or less laden with impressions, lived experiences, thoughts, and meaningful experiences that have more or less solidified in him as the result of the influence of time, nature, class, etc. and that under certain circumstances can certainly be in a critical state of transition for the individual or society. In our view, it was right earlier to say that the homogeneous medium must break into the inner life of the whole man who at the time has turned into a receptive person if it wants to make a real aesthetically receptive person out of him, one who

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in the midst of suspending his other concrete endeavours surrenders wholly to the effect of the work. The conflicts that thus come into being are so diverse both in the personal sense and within the scope of things directly determined by society and class that we could not possibly give time to attempting even a provisional typology. Suffice it to note that an absolute social limitation of possibilities for the effect of works of art (for example, in such a way that a work which came into being on a proletarian class basis could not have any effect at all on the bourgeoisie and vice versa) is shallow and erroneous; many examples (Beaumarchais’ Figaro; in the present, there are the works of Gorki, Battleship Potemkin, Brecht, etc.) bear witness against it in a lively way. But it would also be an impermissible simplification if we were to assume that simply an anti-artistic tendency is expressed in such personally and socially conditioned resistances to receptive surrender. On the contrary, it is quite possible that precisely a lifelike (indeed a passionate) sense of art and the anticipation of its unfailingly taking effect comes into conflict with the life tasks of the whole man of reality. In his reminiscences of Lenin, Gorki describes such a conflict in a supremely vivid way. He recounts how Lenin heard some Beethoven sonatas among company and expressed himself as follows: ‘ “I know nothing which is greater than the Appassionata; I would like to listen to it every day. It is marvelous superhuman music. I always think with pride – perhaps it is naïve of me – what marvelous things human beings can do!” Then screwing up his eyes and smiling, he added, rather sadly: “But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you mustn’t stroke any one’s head – you might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them on the head, without any mercy, although our ideal is not to use force against any one. H’m, h’m, our duty is infernally hard!”’21 This case, which is a borderline one only by means of the supreme intensity of both poles and the clear conscious awareness of the conflict, gives a clear image of those resistances that the transformation of the whole man into the man-made-whole now and then has to overcome. At the same time, it certainly also gives a clear image of the fact that genuine art has at its command – as a matter of principle – an irresistible power to compel people to receptivity, who submit wholly as people facing it. (Of course, collisions of a similar nature also show up in the process of creation. But since these do not relate to the work that is having an effect as something that is complete – insofar as the artist himself is confronted with such a work, he is essentially a receptive person, albeit one with some

21

Gorki 1932, p. 52.

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not unimportant modifications – but rather are directed at a work that is situated in statu nascendi, since a crucial role is accorded to artistic activity here, we must leave its discussion for the second part.) No less important and no less theoretically neglected is the relationship of aesthetic receptivity to the afterwards of effect. The suspension of concrete activity (of the concrete objectives of the whole man) in the aesthetic distinguishes it from the everyday primarily in the fact that in the everyday precisely that goal is concretely pursued and resumed at a higher level for the sake of which the suspension took place, whereas the return from aesthetic suspension into life is a return to those activities whose continuity the lived artistic experience interrupted. In the rarest of cases, this even bears an immediate relationship to such activities, and even then, the relationship as seen from the aesthetic character of the lived experience is at most accidental or at the very least a more or less mediated one. In many idealist aesthetics, this nature of lived artistic experience, seemingly isolated from life, leads to marking it off completely (or almost completely) from man’s normal existence. This tendency appears at its most incisive in Kant’s theory of the ‘disinterestedness’ of aesthetic comportment, which we have already touched upon in other contexts. What seems to result from this is an essential severance of the aesthetic from active life, which can then only be constructed in an abstract way, however, if one completely misjudges the concrete afterwards of aesthetic effect. Vibrant and progressive trends in aesthetics, like those of antiquity, the Enlightenment, the revolutionary democrats in Russia, etc., have always foregrounded the great social role of art, which is not only proven by thousands of years of praxis but is also convincingly deducible in theory from the essence of art, provided that the relationship between lived aesthetic experience and its afterwards in life is unbiased and sufficiently explained. Ancient aesthetics saw this problem very clearly by beholding public matters and questions of social pedagogy in all issues of art. Compared to this, modern aesthetics represents – with a few exceptions – a step backwards. In part, this manner of artistic effect is completely, and even on principle, disregarded, and the reception of art is essentially reduced to atelier connoisseurship; in part, one indeed recognises such a social influence in it, though presents it in a far too direct, far too concretely content-related way, almost as if art were there to immediately facilitate the carrying out of certain concrete social tasks. Compared to both false extremes, ancient aesthetics (and its few worthy successors in modernity) takes a position which by and large does justice to the actual social role of art. It recognises the power of lived aesthetic experiences to powerfully influence people (indeed, even to transform them under certain circumstances) insofar as it rejects in advance any such theory that intends to

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isolate the aesthetic from social life. However, ancient aesthetics does not see this social function as a rendering of services for this or that current concrete objective. Instead, it beholds its significance in the fact that a certain practice of certain arts belongs to the formative forces of human, and thereby of social, life; in the fact that art is fit to influence people in that direction which acts to promote or inhibit the formation of certain types of people. That is why Aristotle distinguishes the effect of music that merely brings sensuous enjoyment from its ethical effect (one that is admittedly deeply connected to sensuous enjoyment), whereby it ‘contributes in some way to character and soul’. He regards this ethical effect (the calling forth of ethical feelings in the soul by means of ecstasy) as the central problem: ecstasy is an attribute connected to the character of the soul. Further, everyone who listens to imitations comes to have the corresponding feelings, even in separation from the rhythms and melodies of these imitations. But since music happens to be one of the pleasures, and virtue is concerned with enjoying, loving, and hating in the correct way, it is clear that one should learn and become habituated to nothing so much as correctly discerning and enjoying decent characters and noble actions. And in rhythms and melodies there are the greatest likenesses to the true natures of anger and gentleness, and furthermore of courage and temperance, and of all the contraries of these, and of the other [components of] characters. And this is clear from the facts, since we are altered in our souls when we listen to such things. But someone who is habituated to being pained or being pleased in the case of likenesses is close to being the same way in relation to the true things.22 In the observations that then follow, he establishes the same thing for visual art, and the fact that he thinks similarly in relation to literature is far too familiar to have to be attested to in more detail here. The social effect that ancient philosophy expects of art may perhaps be summarised best in the already cited words of Lessing, who not only strove to renew this basic tendency in a contemporary way but was also guided everywhere by the meaningful experiences of antiquity, chiefly by Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. Lessing now formulates the fundamental social objective as the ‘transformation of passions into virtuous habits’.23 Lessing says this in a polemic against false interpretations of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis. It is a general custom in aesthetic literature to apply this exclusively to tragedy (to the affects of fear and pity) as it is in fact 22 23

Aristotle 2017, pp. 195–6. Lessing 1889, p. 421.

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set down in the works of Aristotle. We believe, however, that the concept of catharsis is much more expansive. As is the case with all important categories of aesthetics, this has come primarily not from art into life but rather from life into art. Because catharsis was and is a constant and significant aspect of social life, not only must its reflection become a motive of artistic composition that is ever being received anew but also it even appears among the formative forces of the aesthetic depiction of reality. In my essay on Makarenko,24 I delineated at length this interdependency between the realities of life, depiction, and the conscious application to life in relation to his pedagogy.25 There, I also attempted to show that the phenomenon of catharsis in life itself indeed already exhibits a certain affinity to the tragic and for that reason is objectivated most incisively there, but in terms of content it involves a broader ambit than just the tragic. If we are now faced with the question of whether this finding permits still another generalisation, we must recall our earlier expositions about the defetishising character of the aesthetic and its positive content in that context as well: all art (all artistic effect) contains an evocation of the human kernel of life – wherein for each receptive person the Goethean question is raised of whether he himself be kernel or shell – and brings it together with a critique of life (of society, of the relationships to nature created by it) inseparable from this at the same time. Since, as has been shown, lived receptive experience must immediately be a content-related one, it reveals this set of problems as the central meaningful content of that ‘world’ which the work of art calls up into self-evidence in him. Since each work of art reveals itself to the receptive person as a unique work-individuality (as a unique concrete content), this set of problems only directly comes to the fore in the rarest of cases. It is ubiquitous in an indiscernible way, however. The manner in which aesthetic form works on its content and lets it take effect in and through the homogeneous medium is what displays this most universal meaningful content of all genuine works of art and creates an intention that is targeted at this centre in the power of forms to guide the lived experience of receptive people. The transformation of the whole man of the everyday into the man-made-whole of the person receptive to a concrete work of art at the time strives towards just such a catharsis: one that is utterly individualised and the single most universal all at once. The right to generalise the concept of catharsis to this extent thus did not simply arise from the constitution of the work of art regarded for itself. This

24 25

Anton Makarenko (1888–1939), Soviet educational theorist and writer. [Eds.] Lukács 1952b, pp. 423 ff.

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brings into focus two important sets of relationships in its form-content identity: that of itself to objective reality as totality (to which it owes its coming into being) and that of a possibility of effect on the mind of the receptive person. The more that artistic form brings deeper and more comprehensive contents into identity with itself, the more broadly drawn and profoundly sweeping these circles of relationships are. That the ability to do so is intimately related to the critique of life probably does not require an elaborate explanation. At the most, what would have to be established is why we speak of a critique of life instead of a critique of society, even though both expressions are nearly synonymous and even though the concrete form of life’s appearance at the time – and art shapes precisely this concreity and particularity – evidently has its real basis in the historical state of society at the time. Substituting ‘life’ for the word ‘society’ will not shake this connectedness and its being well-founded. With that said, our attention ought to be directed merely at the fact that what immediately appears in the work of art does so in the form of life. The social conditionality of a landscape, say, or a feeling of love, of a melody or a cupola, can in very many cases only be disclosed by means of often widely mediated and complicated analyses, whereas its artistic effect takes place without the conscious and intellectually perceivable (but nevertheless quite real) mediation of social determinations. That is why the universality of the contents that art evokes can be intelligibly paraphrased – without henceforth calling up any misunderstandings – with the term ‘life’. It must be added that art, as has been repeatedly explained, already contains within itself a position taken towards life (and thus the critique of its content as well) as the primary act of positing. The affirmation or negation of certain facets, forms, modes of appearance, etc. of life that inheres within this act can thus exert a startling effect, even if the social fundament dawns on neither the creator nor the receiver. Owing to the objectively social character of its substantiality, however, this effect necessarily radiates into the social. In order to understand effects of this sort better still, we must recall another important character of the aesthetic sphere, one already widely known to us: its pluralism as a matter of principle. So far, we have regarded this issue from the side of the conditions in which art comes into being and has an effect. What now comes to the fore in the process is its social (its human) function in the overall existence of people. The original (but for that very reasons extremely narrow) unity of man (his immediate existence as whole man) must be more or less undermined – admittedly only to a relative extent – by the development of civilisation. Without accepting the Romantic critique as to the morcellation of man (his being parceled up into various specialties), there is no denying that tendencies in such directions become operative in many developed soci-

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eties, above all in capitalist ones. If we have grappled with the defetishising mission of art in such detail, then we have already shown that what befits it in this process is the role of a regulator, of a doctor of certain maladies of progress. The normal condition (the health of people) is the possibility of their all-round development, which individual periods of development have realised at least for a part of the ruling classes, and which revolutionary democratic and socialist schools of thought demand for all of mankind and are also capable of actualising according to principle. Now, from the standpoint of the individual, this all-roundness in the unfolding of all of one’s abilities (of all the possible lively relationships to life) is an ideal; also equally co-intended therein are both the value of the effort and the condition of being a mere striving. As we know, each work of art and each art form appeals to the man-madewhole, in which it already clearly comes into view that the unity and wholeness being actualised here are capable of letting only a facet of the all-round man become actual, even though this unity and this wholeness are genuine and intensive to a degree they otherwise never and nowhere are in life. The true unity and wholeness of the all-round man is objectivated in the plurality of the art forms and work-individualities. Their existence and their potentially always present efficacy show that this ideal has indeed not yet been completely actualised anywhere, though nothing transcendent (not even a transcendent ought) is contained in it. Instead, this ideal is the reflection of real existence, of the real development of mankind. On the one hand, the plurality of art forms and work-individualities expresses the inner completion of singular relationships to reality of this sort, their intensive endlessness and thereby their being directed at the totality of man, even in the form of the man-made-whole. On the other hand, and at the same time, this plurality expresses the fact that at any given time man can actualise only such a relationship, that the general manner of its actualisation is extraordinarily variegated and by contrast the concrete manner of its actualisation is simply open-ended. Therefore, as much as each work of art is completed as the realisation of the ideal, as much as a total fulfilment becomes possible in its reception – with which the concept of the ideal seems sublated – as much as the actual realisation of the all-round man is never completely attainable in the fullness of such acts, his own all-roundness must in a certain sense still remain an ideal (concretely: the goal of an endless process of approximation) for people. Formally, what results from the pluralism of the aesthetic sphere delineated a moment ago is the fact that the transformation of the whole man of the everyday into the man-made-whole in the reception of the work-individuality signifies a step in the direction of the all-roundness of man each time it is a matter of the genuine reception of a genuine work of art. But it is clear that

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this process can never be sufficiently characterised from the side of form. If we want to approach it from its meaningful content, then what is to be contemplated first of all is the concurrence of the critique of life in works of art with the Goethean dilemma of the kernel and the shell. As is the case everywhere, here too their relation is not primarily aesthetic. Art merely brings forth an intensification that exists in life, though one that overturns into something qualitative in art. The social, philosophical, or anthropological fact underlying this situation seems surprising only to those modern schools of thought that behold the essence of man in an absolute and solitary autotelism. By contrast, if man is construed as social by human nature (as has always happened here), then it is readily apparent that the Goethean dilemma of personal being as kernel or as shell is most intimately connected to his social lifestyle, to the presence of a critique of life in that lifestyle, to the orientation and force of this critique. One could say that life itself continuously asks this question in each instant of action or reflection upon action before or after it takes place. For the time being, the essential content of the interactions that come into being here may be best summarised in the fact that a kernelness of the individual can only arise from genuine subjective relationships to reality; if these are mendacious, then even as a personality the person must abase himself into a mere sum of shells. Modern literature has materially depicted such degradations countless times. In a scene offering a comprehensive look back at the protagonist’s whole life, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt gives an inadvertent confirmation of Goethe’s proposition, and perhaps for that reason this confirmation is all the more persuasive. Immediately (but only immediately), this honest subjective attitude is absolutely crucial, in itself completely independent of how the subjective relation to the world that is meant to be correct is objectively constituted: bear in mind the ‘kernelness’ of Don Quixote’s figure. A closer look, however, shows that the objective correctness of the relationship to the outside world (the correctness of the critique of life) remains a motive that cannot possibly be eliminated. Needless to say, in the case of Don Quixote as opposed to that of Peer Gynt, subjective honesty drops weightily in the scale; however, if his critique of life did not also contain a great degree of objective truth, however, his kernel would also have to reduce to a layering of shells. Furthermore, all of these subjective factors – and not only ethos – can indeed salvage the kernel in general, but in this case, it is far from being the starting point or impetus for turning into an approximation of the all-round man. It is much more a dungeon that confines Don Quixote in an untrue world that he himself has fetishised. We were able shed some light on this set of problems just with the help of a few examples. Its role in life is far broader, more ramified and comprehensive than could be systematically dealt with in an aesthetics; it is certainly far

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more ethical in character than it is aesthetic. It only had to be pointed out in order to indicate, in crudest outline at least, the basis in life out of which social demands on art rise and the stream of life into which they flow. A few additional remarks may yet be permitted to concretise things a bit further within these limits. Just as in ethical comportment, a quite intricate relation also prevails in the extent to which man can develop intellectually and culturally. Here too – in contrast to the irrationalistic aristocratism that is so often prevalent today – Goethe occupies a democratic point of view that is far advanced. He says, ‘The least gifted man can be complete if he works within the limits of his capacities and skills’.26 First and foremost, this assessment is not misunderstandable, because it derives from Goethe, because it therefore cannot include any tendency to idealise primitive conditions in a Romantic way or to set them against even more developed ones as paragons in a critico-polemical way. Goethe only wants to point out this possibility here as a possibility, without the necessity of hence going beyond this level (indeed, of casting doubts on it). On the contrary, for him precisely that mission of art is most important which leads to the kernelness of man demanded by him at highly developed cultural levels, that mission which makes conscious, strengthens, and promotes the tendencies of life towards this end and which is capable of hindering (indeed, of suppressing) those which are opposed to this. For that reason, the correct relation to the outside world is crucial time and time again in his works, and for his own conditions of development he very often formulates the aesthetico-ethical postulates emergent here in the context of the methodology of natural research, the close relationship of which to aesthetics we have already discussed in his case. Thus, in the poem ‘Epirrhema’ this is thematically quite close to ‘Ultimatum’, which we have already quoted: You must, when contemplating nature, Attend to this, in each and every feature: There’s nought outside and nought within, For she is inside out and outside in. Thus will you grasp, with no delay, The holy secret, clear as day.27 The notion of the identity of inner and outer is something that has long been familiar in our expositions. And the implication that that relation to the world which aids people in developing a true kernel in their personality is intimately related to precisely their considerations of this sort now no longer surprises 26 27

Goethe 1998, p. 62. Goethe 1983, p. 159. [Eds.]

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anyone. Still less surprising will be the statement that this way of looking at the world aims at the aesthetic, that the work of art offers precisely that reflection of reality in which these tendencies alone can flourish into concrete perfection. Goethe himself repeatedly expresses this relatedness to man, this focusing of the object-world on him, in a way that goes beyond the aesthetic, though in this respect, and only in this respect, not always in a completely sound philosophical manner. Thus, for example: ‘We know of no world except that in relation to human beings; we want for no art except that which is the imprint of that relationship’.28 The mere statement of this anthropomorphising way of looking at things – important for art, more than problematic for the relationship to the world and to nature, for the reflection of their genuine being-in-themselves – Goethe rightly finds to be insufficient. He says, ‘Plastic art has to rely entirely on what is visible, on the outer appearance of what is natural’.29 But he at once realises that what is contained in the concept of the natural is not only something that is visually objective but also something human, in fact ethical (that is to say, socially moral), at the same time. If we now bear in mind the conception of ethical life in this period (from the critique of Kantian subjectivist ethics in the works of Goethe and Schiller during the time of Wilhelm Meister’s origin, for example, all the way to the completion of this tendency in the juxtaposition of morality and ethical life in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right), then we clearly see that what is meant is the socially active agency of man. That is why, in supplementing the aphorism just quoted, Goethe’s remark that each object of art is judged according to its suitability to be ‘an ethical expression of the natural’ gains a particular importance.30 With that said, Goethe set down the philosophical fundament for our generalisation of catharsis for art altogether and for visual art specifically. That is to say, if the visual relationship of man to natural objects and to their ensemble is an ethical one – we again recall what we have explained about the reflection of the metabolism of society with nature – then a shock that is justifiably characterisable as ethical also breaks into the effect that the artistic likeness of this visual relationship calls forth. An accompanying negative feeling immediately mixes into the emotion of the receptive person about the new thing that the work-individuality at the time triggers in him: a regret (indeed, a kind of shame) over the fact that something which is offered so ‘naturally’ in the composition has never been perceived in reality, in his own life. The fact that a previous fetishising contemplation of the world, its destruction through its 28 29 30

Goethe 1998, p. 137. Goethe 1998, p. 8. Ibid. [Eds.]

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defetishised image in the work of art, and the self-critique of subjectivity are contained in this contrasting and shock need not, we believe, be explained in any more detail. Rilke once gave the poetic description of an archaic torso of Apollo. The poem culminates – entirely in keeping with our preceding expositions – in the plea of the statue to the observer: ‘You must change your life’.31 The enrichment and absorption that every genuine work of visual art calls forth, whereby – this is said in passing – man’s sense of art is awakened and developed, is hardly conceivable without such a comparison and may only be a hardly conscious accompanying feeling; its emotional demonstrativeness may act more strongly or weakly. (What becomes apparent here again is the fact that the lived receptive experience of art cannot be grasped without taking into account what happens beforehand.) Reproach of the beforehand and advancement on behalf of the afterwards – and both may even appear almost effaced in the immediacy of lived experience – constitute an essential content of what we early referred to as the single most universal form of catharsis: such a jarring of the subjectivity of the receptive person that his passions which are active in life receive new contents and a new orientation, that they are purged to such an extent that they turn into a mental foundation of ‘virtuous habits’. Now without wanting to debate Aristotle’s concrete theses regarding fear and pity as the contents of tragic catharsis, let it be noted here that, on the one hand, man’s most exaggerated relationships to his surrounding world constitute the content of tragedy, that the contradictoriness of his existence that is revealing itself therein impacts his self-consciousness with a vehemence and intensity that are in keeping with this content and accordingly brings forth the classical form of catharsis. It is thus not at all surprising that at first this theory was intellectually dissected and interpreted in detail, that in the face of its force all other modes of expression were more or less pushed into the background. However, if we bear in mind Aristotle’s social pedagogic remarks about music which we cited earlier – and from the standpoint of the methodological approach to this issue, one can (for all their other differences) by all means construe those made by Plato as similarly intended – then we see that cathartic effects directed at the development of other ‘virtuous habits’ are meant here as well, although with other contents, with different depth, intensity, etc.; according to clear indications from the aesthetics of antiquity, the same also relates to the visual arts. On the other hand, in the analysis of tragedy one must not also disregard the fact that its content and specific formation are founded precisely on the unity

31

Rilke 2009, p. 222. [Eds.]

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of outer and inner. By bursting forth from the soul as an irresistible force, tragic passion turns into something ‘outer’ from the standpoint of the normal everyday consciousness across from it, while at the same time the fate that gathers together out of the surrounding world evolves into an own necessity for the person concerned (into his own fate) over the course of the tragic entanglement. If no such intimate affinity comes into being between hero and fortune, then the most profound tragic shock must also be missing; as happens so often in the course of history, the tragic is distorted into the senselessly horrible or flattened out into everyday mawkishness. And it is clear that the aesthetic significance of tragedy – and, inseparable from this, its ethical and social significance – lies precisely here, in that truth of life which art reflects in a purged and enhanced way. It follows that the authenticity of individuality can only prove itself by testing it to the utmost, that the question of whether it be kernel or shell can only get its ultimately adequate answer here. That is why tragedy calls forth the most incisive (the most proper) form of catharsis. However, since the resolution of the dilemma of outer and inner shows up as a life problem everywhere – and in the closest connection to the kernelness of the person everywhere – and since as a result of the pluralistic structure of the aesthetic sphere a type of artistic response to every type of question of life came into being and newly comes into being again and again with social necessity, we believe that our generalisation of the concept of catharsis is not a mere construction on our part but rather helps to express the essence of the aesthetic from a certain side. With such a (we believe) completely justified expansion of the lived experience of catharsis to the truly profound effects of any genuine art, restrictive qualifications must be made at once so that no undialectical generalisation of the aesthetico-ethical concreity of this concept obliterates or at any rate blunts its acuity and determinacy. First of all, it must be assumed that all aesthetic catharsis is a consciously produced concentrative reflection of shocks, the original of which can always be found in life itself, here of course spontaneously growing out of the course of actions and events. It is therefore necessary to establish that the cathartic crisis called forth by art in the receptive person reflects the most essential features of such constellations of life. At the same time, in life it is always a question of an ethical problem, which must hence also constitute the kernel of the meaningful content in lived aesthetic experience. Now it is clear that in the regulation of human life by means of ethics the cathartic turn comprises only one specific limit case in the system of possible ethical decisions; completely emotionless resolutions are possible besides that call forth exactly the same ethical attitudes, indeed in many cases ones that are more powerful, durable, and steadfast than cathartic shocks. It certainly is a part of the essence of the ethical that in it precisely a consistent

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perserverance is hierarchically superior to any enthusiasm, however passionate and however sincere and deeply felt. In ethics, therefore, a permanently critical distrust persists of what Dostoevsky has aptly phrased with the expression, ‘quick heroic action’.32 Literature also repeatedly expresses such an ethical distrust; it suffices to recall the marvelous description that Tolstoy devotes to the figures of Karenin, Anna, and Vronsky, who all experience a profoundly felt genuine catharsis at Anna’s sickbed and are sincerely convinced that they are able to revolutionise the foundations of their very way of life, only to be gradually and irresistibly washed back by the current of their mental everyday into their old forms of existence. If ethical suspicion vis-à-vis the cathartically triggered ‘quick heroic actions’ is thus already quite justified in the ethical life of people, even though it goes without saying that real ethical rebirths my result from such crises, this ambiguity in artistic depictions of reality is even more conspicuous. In later expositions we will respond at length to the fact that in life man is necessarily directed towards certain individual actions, resolutions, etc., whereas in his attitude towards the work of art it is precisely this boundedness of lived experiences to such concrete appearances of reality that is temporarily suspended so that he surrenders himself to the aesthetic impression at the time with his overall personality, and the ethical consequences of these effects can only become apparent in the afterwards of receptivity. This is why they must also be even more ambiguous (even more multi-layered) than the impacts that practical life itself triggers. This ambiguity undergoes yet a further intensification in that – again in many regards – catharsis can also be negative. We are not referring at all to the fact that its effect from time to time is intentionally one that reveals or deters evil, as happens especially in the great comedies. In The Government Inspector Gogol shaped this negative cathartic effect of laughing and laughing at as the police constable, in the midst of his unmasking by means of the unraveled plot, addresses himself to the audience with the words, ‘What are you laughing at? You are laughing at yourselves’.33 But beyond this, the cathartic effect – independent not only of the author’s intention but also of the meaningful content of the work – can head in an ethically problematical (indeed, a negative) 32

33

Lukács quotes the expression ‘schnelle Heldentat’, which is repeated twice in the E.K. Rahsin (pseudonym used by Elisabeth Kaerrick) German-language translation of The Brothers Karamazov that was originally published in 1906. This expression is rendered as ‘swift achievement’ and ‘immediate action’ in the Constance Garnett English-language translation. See Dostoevsky 1912, pp. 22 and 55. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translate it as ‘immediate deed’ and ‘immediate action’. See Dostoevsky 1990, pp. 26 and 58. The Russian original in Dostoevksy’s text is ‘скорого подвига’. [Eds.] Gogol 1964, p. 673. [Eds.]

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direction. It is still a relatively simple case when receptivity clings to certain immediate forms of appearance and disregards the totality of what is intended and actualised. This can often occur precisely with works that have violent and resounding effects, that lead catharsis up aberrant, morally dubious paths. Goethe noticed this tendency quite soon after the publication of his Werther. His short poem outlining, with a light touch, the basis of the popularity of the work ends with words that the beloved and often emulated hero addresses to the reader: ‘Be a man, do not follow me’.34 However, the overturning of cathartic effect can also be raised to the point of purely moral negativity. It is not possible within the framework of these observations to follow the problems that thus come into being all the way into their quite intricate ramifications in real life, because for that the ethical categories that are decisive here would have to be determined in detail and proportioned with respect to each other. Here, we can merely highlight two important conditions, and even then, only in an extremely cursory manner. First, historicity and thereby historical relativity and contradictoriness in the concrete modes of appearance of such categories. Thus, very often that which is socio-historical novel and progressive is expressed as a break with the dominant ethical views and therefore as evils, which is yet complemented by the fact that the new and the progressive themselves can arrive at expression in quite contradictory forms and even be deeply contradictory from the human point of view. Of course, this is primarily a question of life itself. Bear in mind, for instance, the figure of Napoleon and the influence of his personality on different characters like Rastignac, Julien Sorel, or Raskolnikov (these were picked here as types of concrete and real social situations). It is readily apparent that the cathartic effect that emanates from the reflection of their fates can very easily overturn into the morally ambivalent, indeed into the purely negative; be mindful of the mirroring of the Raskolnikov tragedy in the work of the later social revolutionary writer Savinkov-Ropshin.35 If anything, the possibility of such effects is – secondly – consolidated and reinforced by the fact that the morally reprehensible must by no means always be a ‘creaturely’ failure of people in the face of the majesty of moral norms but rather can be heightened all the way to the positing of evil maxims. In such cases it is not a matter of a human shying away from moral precepts nor of their degeneration into a chaos of the merely immediate, customary, instinctive, etc. Instead, on the contrary, it is a matter of soaring above this level; a matter of a – formally – similar self-processing of that which 34 35

Goethe 2004, p. 204. [Eds.] Boris Savinkov (1879–1925), Socialist Revolutionary terrorist who was anti-Tsarist and antiSoviet, and who also wrote under the pseudonym V. Ropshin. [Eds.]

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is peculiar to oneself; a matter of a self-escalation of the human, as is to be achieved in moral action. The content of the maxims, and not their force of modeling humans, distinguishes between good and evil here. Now since aesthetic catharsis immediately brings forth an elevation of man beyond his own everydayness above all, a turn towards such a comportment is by no means precluded as a matter of principle, and the historical dialectic and contradictoriness indicated earlier facilitates its realisation in some cases. Therefore, as plausible – in the world-historical sense – as the Lessingian interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis may be, an analysis of praxis can very easily trigger doubt and misgivings concerning its ethical unambiguity in its repercussions. In his old age, Goethe expressed as much in his late ‘On Interpreting Aristotle’s Poetics’: ‘Whoever is in pursuit of truly moral education of the mind knows and will concede that tragedy and tragic novels do not soothe the spirit, but rather unsettle the emotions and what we call the heart. The result is a vague, uncertain mood, cherished by young people who, therefore, are passionately fond of literature of that kind’.36 This is not the place to go into great detail about Goethe’s interpretation of the whole conception of catharsis, especially not into his extremely problematic thesis that catharsis does not take place as an effect of the work in the receptive person but rather, as reconciliation, comprises the conclusion (the culmination) of the work itself. The doubt cited above in relation to the possibility of ethical cathartic effects is linked in this way to doubt about the moral influence of art in general. The inner self-containedness of the work of art (its all-encompassing totality that is rounded off in itself) thus implies here a rending of the necessary connection between aesthetics and ethics, their restriction to a ‘contingency’ in which the essential accent is put on a ‘softening of manners’ that can likewise degenerate into ‘effeminacy’.37 We refrain from a polemic most of all because the conception that is being expressed here only appears episodically in the system of Goethe’s overall views – even that of the old Goethe – with this degree of exaggeratedness; the only thing that organically fits into this system is the vindication of the self-containedness of the work, the rejection of immediately moralising influences. Goethe’s misgivings about a direct and clearly moral effect of catharsis are all the weightier considering that they also crop up time and time again in various forms in the course of later development. His observations are primarily directed at tragedy, but in his works they already have a relatedness to all arts, espe-

36 37

Goethe 1986, p. 199. Ibid. [Eds.]

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cially music. That is to say, in the case of music – as well as in that of the visual arts, albeit in different forms – indeterminacy and ambiguity in the intellectual and moral sense are heightened far beyond the indeterminacy and ambiguity portrayed by us for literature. From Tristan to Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann gives a very detailed presentation of this set of problems, but even the much milder and less intellectually sharp Hermann Hesse, for instance, takes up the dubiousness of the ethical effect of music in his Steppenwolf. His hero connects these ratiocinations to a meditation on German development and says in a passionately self-critical monologue, ‘We intellectuals, instead of fighting this tendency like men and rendering obedience to the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining hearing for it, are all dreaming of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the formless. Instead of playing his part truly and honestly as he could, the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music. And so the German spirit, carousing in music, in wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its practical gifts to decay’.38 Here the overturning into the opposite is clearly visible. One may pass by the presentation of Richard Wagner in Heinrich Mann’s Man of Straw, since a critique of Wagner’s art itself is also co-intended here at the very least, but in order to keep this ambiguity clearly before your eyes, think of the beautiful Soviet film about the life of the partisan leader Chapaev, in which there appears a cruel, bloodthirsty White general who delights in his leisure hours and does not play Beethoven badly at all. When one places all of these misgivings next to each other, then in tragedy – to say nothing at all of music – the essence of catharsis itself seems to be heading for a self-dissolution. This antithesis is particularly acute when one once again remembers the supremely unambiguous position taken by ancient aesthetics in the works of Plato and Aristotle. At the same time, this is already an appearance of the disintegration of the polis, in the prime of which the connection between aesthetics and ethics was certainly much more straightforward and inalienable. (Plato’s rejection of art is itself certainly a product of this crisis of the disintegration of the polis.) The close connection between citizenship and ethics (and thereby that of aesthetics and ethics) in the prime of the polis was an unparalleled constellation in world history. The weight of individual private life that is already clearly felt in the Stoics and the works of Epicurus becomes more and more valued in the course of socio-historical development

38

Hesse 1963, p. 152. [Eds.]

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and makes the connectedness between individual personality and the human species more and more complicated with all of the mediations binding them, of course without abolishing this connectedness (if anything, in order to enrich it with new contents more and more). The almost ancient position that Lessing takes already belongs to the period of ‘heroic illusions’ regarding a polis that is to be rekindled, which culminated in the great French Revolution. The scattering of these illusions creates that state of society, individual, and ideology (understood in the broadest sense of the word) that brings forth the intricate and ambiguous phenomena being analysed by us. With that said, however, the connection between aesthetic catharsis and ethical comportment has merely become more complicated, but it has by no means ceased to exist. Renouncing it would be a renouncing of any high art whatsoever. Such a thing of course frequently occurs in our own day and is one of the forces that debases genuine art to pleasing or engrossing belles lettres. In the works of a great artist-moralist like Brecht, the adherence to the kernel of catharsis is clearly visible in the deep mistrust vis-à-vis any merely emotional efficacy of art. The alienation effect, the aesthetic problematic of which will come up for discussion in other places in this work, wants to eliminate merely immediate, sensational catharsis in order to create a space for a catharsis that compels an actual reversal by means of a rational shock to the whole everyday man. For all his polar dichotomy to Rilke, therefore, ‘You must change your life’ is also the axiom for Brecht’s artistic volition. Although we are thus convinced that the generalisation of the concept of catharsis we have carried out is justified, we must still add one caveat in order to present the aesthetic character of our argument in the proper light as well. Similar shocks essentially take place in a genuinely aesthetic way in the case of all reception of authentic works of art. However, they are qualitatively different from each other at the same time. Not only in the sense that, as is self-evident, each work of art triggers different emotions, that these must diverge even in the case of different people receptive to the same work, but also at a more general level: the various arts and forms of art evoke the heterogeneous as a matter of principle so that the infinite variability of the individual emotions takes place in a pluralistically structured universe. One may be fully justified in calling some of Beethoven, Rembrandt, or Michelangelo tragic, but if one compares them with Sophocles or Shakespeare within their most universal and ultimate unity, then what becomes apparent all at once is their just as profound, specific, and qualitative otherness. Despite this caveat, we think that the highlighting of what is also common to them all was justified. For only the tension of these poles (their simultaneous existence and efficacy) results in genuine meaningful aesthetic content.

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The immediacy of aesthetic reflection had to be emphasised in comparison to the sublation of immediacy in scientific reflection, though aesthetic reflection is likewise sublimated in relation to the immediacy of everyday life. That this sublating consists in the producing of a new immediacy that can otherwise be found nowhere else constitutes precisely the particularity of aesthetic positing. In the immediacy of everyday life, essence (the universal) indeed latently exist everywhere but must – precisely with the aid of immediacy’s sublation – be dug out of concealment. In the immediacy of the work of art, essence (universality) is concealed and manifest all at once. In the work of art, there thus comes into being a ‘world’ that is, on the one hand, qualitatively distinct from existing (and from the scientifically recognised) reality as a matter of principle in its form of appearance but which, on the other, maintains reality’s essential structure, its categorical construction. In this, it only carries out that rearrangement (only that change in function) in this that is appropriate for human receptivity, for human requirements of lived experience. This issue has also already been touched upon repeatedly, not only in those places where we have spoken expressly of such an adequacy and rejected its immediate hedonistic abolishment but also in those where the naturalness of this ‘world’ came up in connection with Goethe. Both circumlocutions refer to the same thing: to the tension of immediacy and fullness of meaning indicated here, to the becoming aware of the essence in appearance, to an immanent perfection and genuine completeness of the artistic world that in this regard – but exclusively in it – goes beyond the scope of the objective reality given to man, which precisely by means of such a transcending of the customary limits of its this-worldiness confirms the sole reality of its existence. As we have seen, Gottfried Keller gives a good description of Shakespeare’s world that incisively casts some light onto this situation. The position that Keller takes is significant to us only in that he also adds the description of an erroneous position taken to the correct description of the state of affairs and for this reason inadvertently gives a good critique of a false conception of the reality of aesthetic reflection. We are alluding to the so-called theory of illusion. In particular, Keller’s Pankraz says, ‘Now because everything else appeared so splendidly real and whole and I thought it was the proper and actual world, I relied on it entirely …’39 Similar to how Don Quixote does chivalric romance, Pankraz thus transforms the true Shakespearean reflection of reality into an illusion, and in many ways he suffers a similar fate. With that said, a critique of the theory of illusion is already given. The great period of

39

Keller 1898, p. 48. [Eds.]

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the emergence of modern philosophy was quite tough when it came to evaluating illusions. One simply called them errors, dreams, failures of the goals and methods of knowledge of the world; complete agreement prevailed between Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza in this regard. If the practical consequences of illusions were also thereby frequently overlooked, then the great revolutions between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries brought important meaningful experiences, first and foremost about the difference between illusions that are progressive on a world-historical scale and those empty ones that remain subjective; Marx is the one who has worked on this theory of revolutions most incisively. Also, only as this period was finished, as the illusions were already turning into merely idle reveries, as Quixotism transformed into Oblomovism, did one attempt to track down the secret of the aesthetically reflected world in a – ‘conscious’ – illusion. Our expositions up to this point demonstrate the untenability of this viewpoint without further polemics. We mentioned these theories at all here only because they shine a contrasting light on the relation between reality and aesthetic reflection being demonstrated by us. Firstly, the illusion is purely subjective in character; secondly, it wants to correct objective reality by this subjectivity, or rather to contrast it against a ‘better’ reality woven out of subjective dreams. Modern subjectivist epistemology likewise aids in the formation of such conceptions. This alters nothing in their groundlessness. The fact that, as reflections of reality, aesthetic constructs neither want to nor can eliminate subjectivity does not dispose of the specific objectivity that comes into being with the help of its mediation. The fact that creators and receivers are aware of the reflective character of aesthetic acts and constructs has nothing in common with the nature of illusion. True, not in the sense that these acts would be performable without some relationship to social activity. We will speak in greater detail about the issues that come into being here as soon as we begin discussing the afterwards of aesthetic receptivity. But it can already be said here that, by its nature, aesthetic reflection cannot become the immediate basis of social activity like the illusion whose essence consists precisely in the fact that it is – erroneously – mistaken for a true and practically usable likeness of reality. The so-called conscious illusion abases art to the level of a daydream and removes from its range of possible effects precisely that thing whose most incisive form is that of the catharsis portrayed by us just now: that is, the effect that triggers the collision of aesthetically reflected objective reality with the mere subjectivity of the everyday. This general validation of catharsis and the rejection of any theory of illusion point towards the same basic aesthetic phenomenon from different sides: towards the simultaneity of an utterly complete this-worldliness in its constructs with their surpassing of immediate everyday reality in intensity, in

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the manifest endlessness of essential determinations, in the convergence of appearance and essence to the point of closest contact, in the absolute identity of content and form. This duality and unity of tendencies that diverge and are indeed opposite when looked at in the abstract is expressed in the lived experience of catharsis, the arrival and fulfilment of which hence likewise exhibits a unified duality: it is a crucial criterion of the artistic completion of the work at the time and the determining principle for the important social function of art at the same time, for the constitution of the afterwards of its effects, of its propagation into life, of the return of the whole man into life once he has surrendered himself to the effect of a work of art as the man-madewhole and experienced the cathartic shock. By nature, both issues belong to the set of problems addressed in the second part; here, we can only touch upon a few of these indispensable principles briefly. The priority of content vis-à-vis form has been repeatedly pointed out up to now. Even if we now just go into those things that are most a matter of principle, it will once more become apparent in broad outlines that this priority of content by no means diminishes the significance of forms; on the contrary, it highlights it even more sharply than a one-sided formalism would be capable of doing. For only from here can one properly appreciate their specific functions or clearly distinguish their actual masters from mere virtuosos. These specific functions of forms are focused on making a content that is meaningful to mankind come alive universally. The paths of great trueborn artists primarily part from those of lesser artists in that with infallible certitude the former recognise and actualise this genuine meaningful content and its affinity to certain forms – and if necessary, to their concrete renewal – in the life-material being offered to them, whereas the latter more or less wander around adrift and are often at the mercy of the accidental in the encounter with a truly genuine meaningful content. Now if such a conjunction of meaningful content and form does not take place – we are speaking here of actual artists – then what comes into being is something that in literature one quite rightly tends to refer as mere belles lettres; similar appearances are likewise of course to be observed in the visual arts and music. Belles lettres can stand at a respectable level in a purely formal way – in style, structure, psychology, etc. – but in its permanent effects it will never go beyond the scope of mere captivation or entertainment, perhaps of an unrealised tension. It often has a pleasant effect because it confirms meaningful experiences that are already present in receptive people, or perhaps it quantitatively broadens these by means of novelty in terms of subject matter, though it never brings about that true expansion and consolidation of the human horizon that we could observe in the lived experience of catharsis

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a moment ago. If one is mindful of the entirety of the works by really outstanding writers like Theodor Fontane, Joseph Conrad, or Sinclair Lewis, then he can very clearly observe this descending of high art to mere belles lettres in a part of what they produced, in contrast to their masterpieces. With this lesser part of what they produced, they touch upon that great mass of writing whose realm extends all the way down to completely hollow amusement. The clear view of this sphere is clouded again and again by tendencies of the time. Under the influence of present events, belles lettres that reproduce these events well or skillfully can even conceivably trigger profound shocks every now and then. Only historical development reveals, sometimes even quite rapidly, that it was nevertheless just a matter of belles lettres. From time to time, such effects can even bring forth products that are artistically worthless when they come towards an exceedingly important social task. Bear in mind, for example, the period of the emergence of bourgeois drama and with it Lillo’s The London Merchant. It is precisely here that the significance of the genuine identity of form and content is clearly visible: only meaningful content that is somehow dearly linked to the fate of mankind can trigger a really profound formation since indeed, as we know, artistic form is invariably the form of a certain content, whereas when this relationship is missing, even the most virtuoso handling of form or the most faithful fulfilment of a social task does not lead to this identity, and all that can be triggered is an ephemeral effect that quickly becomes obsolete in terms of subject matter. We repeat: the phenomenon of belles lettres is by no means only literary but is instead common to all of the arts.40 Another type of this sort is what we are accustomed to calling kitsch. But whereas the phenomenon referred to as belles lettres is something that is always more or less with us, even though it can have very different modes of appearance in different social formations, kitsch is the specialty of later stages of development and is as good as completely unknown for long periods of time; it has come to the fore in a particularly obtrusive way over the last two centuries. It is therefore a sociohistorical appearance that is obvious and well recognised and hence belongs in the historical materialism part of aesthetics. Only those of its aspects are to be dealt with here that are closely related to our present issue. Its immediate and decidedly social determinacy is only mentioned at the outset, primarily because even those circles that tend to reject the social conditionality of art have recourse here to precisely this cause. Hermann Broch thus gives a proper introduction to the social analysis of kitsch:

40

Alban Berg has clearly referred to this phenomenon in terms of music. Cf. Berg 2014, pp. 199–202.

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Kitsch could not, in fact, either emerge or prosper without the existence of kitsch-man, the lover of kitsch; as a producer of art he produces kitsch, and as a consumer of art is prepared to acquire it and pay quite handsomely for it. In a broad sense art always reflects the image of contemporary man, and if kitsch represents falsehood (it is often so defined, and rightly so), this falsehood falls back on the person in need of it, on the person who uses this highly considerate mirror so as to be able to recognize himself in the counterfeit image it throws back of him and to confess his own lies (with a delight which is to certain extent sincere).41 What Broch calls ‘kitsch-man’ is, as he rightly sees, founded in falsehoods: a mostly unconscious, mendacious, and illusion-based representation of the relationship of man to social reality, of the stance towards his class and his fate within it, and accordingly of the constitution and appropriate fortune of his own personality. (What appears here with palpable self-evidence is the fact that conscious awareness of the reflective character of aesthetic constructs has nothing in common with illusions.) Therefore, what is involved when it comes to kitsch is the fact that the approach to the reflection of reality and its formation – regardless of the extent to which this is subjectively conscious – takes place on the basis of an objectively mendacious ‘worldview’ such that the intention of creation is not directed at finding a way back to the essence of man by means of the faithful reproduction of the world; rather, on the contrary, it aims at manipulating this, at twisting and distorting its contents and proportions so that it will be in keeping with and illustrate wishes and illusions that are materially spurious. The aesthetic specificity of form (that it is only the particular form of a particular content) is strikingly put to the test in such negative constellations: it likewise becomes mendacious and distorted, entirely apart from the extent to which technical ability, formalistic invention, etc. are accumulated in the subject of the producers and lavished on the production. The class terms on which is based the mendacity of the endless concrete variability of kitsch (for example, whether it is made in a vulgar or refined way, in a ‘healthy’ or decadent way, in a good or bad way in terms of form, with or without talent; what basis its falsehood possess in terms of class) cannot even be indicated here. It also need not be because it is clear that from our viewpoint of the aesthetic reflection of reality there is no difference at all as a matter of principle between a tenement building disguised as a Renaissance or Baroque

41

Broch 1969, p. 49.

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palace and the novels of a Courths-Mahler42 or a film in which the son of a millionaire marries the shorthand typist. The third type of deviation from the aesthetic principle with which we briefly have to concern ourselves here is something that accompanies the development of art from its beginnings down to our own day: the incursion of rhetorico-journalistic tendencies into art. The fact that rhetoric and journalism very often make use of the aid of particular aesthetic means is a part of those social vibrancies of art in general with which we do not need to preoccupy ourselves here. We have already mentioned antiquity’s conception of rhetoric and historiography as art in other contexts. We have also seen that Aristotle even discovered important aesthetic categories in the pseudo-aesthetic element of rhetoric. In the prime of antiquity, this classification also did not bring about the intrusion of tendencies alien to art into the realm of the aesthetic. This was reserved for modernity. This of course does not mean that the first utopians, for example, used certain extrinsic characteristics of narrative forms in a literary way. One only has to put More’s Utopia next to Gulliver’s Travels in order to see how in the latter the – positive and negative – utopian descriptions only yield a subject matter for its literarily satirical and aesthetic world, whereas in the case of the former the narrative elements are only a technically and journalistically suitable garb for the intelligible and popular journalistico-scientific communication of knowledge. Needless to say, works have also spontaneously come into being time and time again – just as they did in antiquity, beginning with Aeschylus’ Persians and Aristophanes’ comedies – that wanted to immediately intervene into the class struggles of their day; it suffices to call to mind Milton or Bunyan. For these and related reasons, of course, the rhetorical element has often very powerfully found its way into art. In fact, not as in the works of Shakespeare, where the rhetorical turns into a mere means of characterisation, as in the case of Brutus and Antony, for example; rather, in the works of significant writers like Schiller or Victor Hugo, it even constitutes nothing less than the homogeneous medium of their mode of composition or at the very least one of its important components, without hence abolishing the aesthetic character of their works. When this nevertheless occurs, the reason is that the rhetorical bursts open the homogenous medium and as such arrives at its own effect. With that, the moment of transition is already indicated. From the nineteenth century onwards, there are works in ever increasing number whose aesthetic level at best achieves that which we

42

Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867–1950), German author of popular romance novels. [Eds.]

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referred to earlier as belles lettres and in which directly effective rhetorical or journalistic elements make up for the absence of artistic substance by being inorganically integrated into those works. In the twentieth century there even grew out of this a distinct ‘creative method’ (called montage). If we now look for the unitary principle of such efforts from the viewpoint of the aesthetic, then we come up against the fact that the specifically aesthetic mode of reflection is shoved aside everywhere or in the best of cases is debased to the role of expedient. The homogeneous medium ceases to hold the presented ‘world’ together, to unify, to guide the lived experiences of receptivity (at the time of the advent of montage, this shortcoming was pronounced to be a new aesthetic principle). The effect accordingly does not appeal to the receptive person who is being aesthetically directed (to the man-made-whole) nor does it attempt to evoke lived aesthetic experiences in him but instead is simply oriented towards the whole man still involved in practical everyday life, in order to directly induce him to take an immediately practical position for or against a current appearance in life. With this juxtaposition we already find ourselves in the middle of the set of problems involving the afterwards of aesthetic effect. However, so as not to come to a rash decision, it must be noted preliminarily that what has been said up to now and what is to be said from now on relate exclusively to the works. The subjective assertions of authors and their critics, however, remain beyond our observations. That is, it can happen that either the overrunning of the artistic by the rhetorical and journalistic as described by us is accompanied by a consciousness of the initiating of a new genuinely aesthetic era or the whole of aesthetics hitherto is shoved aside at a theoretical level, though in the process – in spite of new theories – aesthetically significant works of art come into being (bear in mind the mature output of Bertolt Brecht). Therefore, in what follows, only the works themselves will be occupying us. The analysis of these three types shows us that one cannot apprehend the concept of catharsis (of the shock to the receptive person by the work, by the new, by the broadening and intensifying of what has been perceived to be up to now) concretely enough. That is to say, if the meaningful content becomes flat, as in the case of belles lettres, or if the feeling being expressed is a false one, or indeed a mendacious one, as in that of kitsch, then at most the receptive impression can resemble the genuinely aesthetic in its formal outer appearances. Things are more complicated when it comes to the last type with which we dealt. That is to say, both the emotional world underlying the work can be genuine and sincere, and the image of reality offered can be faithful as well, and still an aesthetic effect – predetermined by the meaningful content and the structure of the work – would not eventuate. In order to come closer to this phenomenon,

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let us consider two extreme examples for the time being. The French dramatist Brieux,43 who was famous in his day, took up themes that were current and helpful for everyday social use, like abuses involving wet nurses in the household or the pernicious effect of syphilis on marriage. The extent to which such a production is essentially beneficial in a practical regard need not concern us here. In any case, the lived experiences that it achieves are not aesthetic by nature. Any fact of life that would be experienced here, any view of facts that have been neglected up to now, is to be attained far better (more clearly, accurately, lucidly, comprehensively, and at the same time more universally and more substantiated in terms of details) in other ways. It is not for nothing that advocates of montage of this sort incorporate individual facts that have been proven in a statistical, documentary manner, etc. into their works. Accumulated facts are to stand in for that which is literarily compelling. The only advantage that the literary form can have is that it may compel an audience (as a result of theatrical effects, for example) that would otherwise not be reachable just by journalism. But these are extreme cases, from which only the pedants of academicism could attempt to deduce a rejection of the issues of the day in art. If we take the other extreme for better illumination – be mindful of the poems of Petőfi,44 Mayakovsky, or Éluard,45 the images and prints of Goya and Daumier – one sees at once that immediately intervening into the most topical struggles can turn into the bearer of a high art. And one must not underestimate the role of the triggering occasion at the same time nor construe it as a mere occasion that would have brought something aesthetically detachable from it into the world. Such works have grown – precisely in the aesthetic sense – inseparably together with those ‘demands of the day’ that bring them into being. Simply because they catch hold of and shape this instant of history in its unparalleled nature and uniqueness at the same time with its typical, social, and human significance, they can acquire an instantaneous effect of a force and intensity that is otherwise inconceivable, though one that must lose nothing of its powerful intensity with the passing, the fading, or indeed the falling into oblivion of the fertile instant. The aesthetic principle expresses doubledness in genesis and shaped being as well as in the effect and after-effect, in contrast to any journalism in the

43 44 45

Eugène Brieux (1858–1932), French realist dramatist whose plays were often concerned with topical social problems. [Eds.] Sándor Petőfi (1823–1849), Hungary’s most important revolutionary poet of the nineteenth century. [Eds] Paul Éluard (1895–1952), French poet and co-founder of Surrealism. [Eds.]

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extrinsic garb of art. On the one hand, the latter sticks to those things that are peculiar to scattered or abstractly related facts, and on the other it leaps from there directly to universalities that in themselves may be true or false (deep or shallow) abstractions, but in no case do they bear upon the humanity of man. Therefore, as we have repeatedly said, the difference does not lie in the fact that such a presentation, arrangement, or generalisation of facts would be unable to trigger any emotions. Under certain conditions, the most abstract, purely scientific theories are capable of doing that, without grazing the sphere of art, even from a distance. Bear in mind the worldwide crisis that the Copernican theory triggered and that had its martyrs and hangmen; the effect of The Social Contract on the French Revolution; that of Marxism on the labour movement and its enemies. Still less will one be able to deny that the facts of life can also bring about quite vehement outbursts of feeling, independent of a journalistic handling, even in the case of a very poor one. We are thus not talking of emotion in general nor of its antithesis to merely rational apperception but rather of the relationship of the particular aesthetic emotion to both. This can of course also come into being with the integration and use of journalistic expressive means in an aesthetic arrangement; with regard to rhetoric, we referred earlier to Schiller and Victor Hugo, and let it suffice here that we mention Chernyshevsky’s novels.46 Therefore, not even the presentational means used are decisive. Instead, the affiliation with aesthetics subsequently decides on how comprehensive and intensive the reference of the work to the humanity of man is. Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? distinguishes itself from other journalistic novels and dramas precisely in the fact that in it the untenability and inhumanity of the Tsarist reaction and the customs prevailing in it together with the countermovement of the revolutionaries are embodied in individual human types; pro and contra are focused in their most deeply personal and determined fates. The same holds when one compares one of Daumier’s pamphlet drawings to a purely journalistic caricature, be it ever so progressively minded. In the latter there is a peculiar negation, in fact one that is often merely distortedly photographic, whereas in the artistic lines and composition of the former the contempt for an entire epoch is expressed in the human and social unworthiness of its typical composition.

46

On this, cf. my study of the novel What Is To Be Done? in which I have also pointed out other similar appearances in world literature. See Lukács 1964a, pp. 126–60.

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The Afterwards of Lived Receptive Experience

What already comes to the fore somewhat more clearly from all of this are the universal contours of the afterwards of aesthetic effect. At the same time, of course, what is to be highlighted is the objective character of aesthetic reflection that is shaped in the work, which we thoroughly analysed earlier from different aspects and a moment ago negatively distinguished from formally or supposedly similar modes of reflection. The afterwards necessarily joins immediately with the lived aesthetic experience of the reception of the work. We have also already highlighted a crucial aspect in this earlier, namely the specificity of the aesthetic in the suspension of the concrete objectives of everyday life. We recall that in contrast to such suspensions in the everyday itself, where the current practical objective itself is not left in abeyance (merely its actual realisation for the time being is), and where the suspension is to be nothing more than a technical preparation for the better accomplishing of an unaltered concrete intention, the lived aesthetic experience of receptivity carries with it a temporary suspension of all actual everyday objectives. In fact, these are – as a matter of principle – deferred only for the duration of this act and acquire their former rights again with its termination – as a matter of principle and also, for the overwhelming majority of cases, in actual fact – without undergoing a change that could come into consideration in practical terms. From this situation, the general accuracy of which is not to be doubted, the advocates of the various shades of l’art pour l’art, academicism, etc. infer that lived art experiences have no impact on the practical everyday life of people. This is a grave error, the real reason for which is certainly to be sought in class positions and class interests but the line of argument of which is based on the fact that one halts at an entirely general description of the phenomenon, only takes into account the negative side of the antithesis between lived aesthetic experience and the everyday, and in contrast does not take note of the positive side or its particularity. In themselves, the limit cases adduced earlier (Petőfi, Mayakovsky, etc.) would already be a refutation of such metaphysical constructions. For when immediate practical effects can come from a genuine work of art at all without abolishing its aesthetic character (indeed, when they constitute precisely its intrinsic specificity and are inseparable from it in terms of aesthetics), it becomes apparent that the utter inconsequentiality of aesthetic effect for life is an abstract construction and is not even partially correct as an intellectual reproduction of the real state of affairs. A poem by Petőfi, a lithograph by Daumier, etc. would also not be purely artistic (which they are) if their deepest intentions, their structure, their design and technique were not aiming at such an effect.

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Of course, the cited examples are limit cases. No one will argue that immediate and concretely practical actions could result from the aesthetic essence of a fresco by Raphael, a love poem by Goethe, or a concerto grosso by Vivaldi in those receiving it. However, the limit cases lose their exaggerated oppugnancy – at least to a certain degree – when one bears in mind their permanent effects. Petőfi’s poems or Daumier’s lithography have preserved their fresh punch for over a century, albeit without reproducing unchanged their initial immediately and practically explosive efficacy. For this was linked to a certain historical instant, to the concrete matchlessness of its problems, to the concrete uniqueness of the concrete actions arising from these problems. In this respect, the permanent effect entails – as always in art – that the meaningful artistic content fits in as an aspect in the developmental history of mankind, as an aspect in the unfolding of its self-consciousness. Not for one moment, however, does this mean a leveling or projecting of all works of art to the same level. Daumier takes into this historical ‘eternity’ the provocative aggressivity of his call-to-action satire just as Raphael does the well-rounded calm and solemnity of his frescoes. Regarded in this way – and we believe this is the way in which they must be regarded aesthetically – the limit cases lose much of their extremity, smoothly fit into the endless polyphonic chorus of artworks, and underscore the principled pluralism of the aesthetic sphere precisely by means of the preservation of their original character. If inner uniformity is thereby produced between the most extreme poles as well, then a further step in the direction of concretising is yet needed to determine the meaningful content of commonality more closely. Here too, we can and must fall back on the finding we made earlier: we have construed art as the self-consciousness of mankind’s development and referred to the human as the most universal concept of its meaningful content that inheres in immediate immanence within every work, immediately as the likeness of its present or as that of the past as seen from the present. Now when we contemplate this immanence in its intrinsic aesthetic specificity, what becomes apparent, as has already happened in many cases, is the fact that aesthetic reflection invariably expresses a truth of life. Its particular essence consists in relating this truth and its objective structure to people (that is to say, in thus arranging what exists in it as such and is important for mankind’s development). This aspect turns into the dominant aspect both in terms of meaningful content, which brings that which is scattered in life into focus and condenses the play of chance and necessity (of facticity and significance), which in the details of life appear unorganised, into a concretely contradictory – perhaps tragic – harmony, and in terms of form, which grows into the guiding principle of each such concretely total and unique microcosm.

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What also constitutes an immediately indivisible unity in life are those layers of essence that scientific knowledge can only arrange on top of or behind each other conceptually because in the immediate appearances themselves they are objectively joined together into a concealed hierarchy that only reveals itself in certain circumstances. Aesthetic reflection makes both this unity of unity and difference and its immediacy into its guiding principle. However, as has been presented over and over, its immediacy is a newly created immediacy, a second immediacy in which the emerging of hierarchical layers of essence (the interplay of contingency and necessity) surfaces more or less as it does in life, depending on the laws of the genre and on artistic personalities. Therefore, this emergence of hierarchical layers of essence preserves its immediacy at this higher level of being consciously organised, although precisely in and by this state of being organised it carries out a guiding function of lived receptive experience through which the deepest and most concealed of life’s meaningful content manifestly comes to the surface. Only from such insights can the process of lived receptive experience be grasped in its dynamic unity and wholeness. We have already discussed the fact that the homogeneous medium – owing exactly to the force of its homogeneity – breaks into the whole man’s world of lived experience, in a certain sense compels him into receiving the ‘world’ that is shaped in the work, and precisely by means of this compulsion (uno actu with it) transforms – in a way directed at the particularity at the time of the particular work at the time – the whole man of the everyday into the man-made-whole of receptivity. What appeared above as the inner, immanent structure of the work now comes to the fore as a change, as an expansion and consolidation of the lived experiences of the receptive person and his capacity for lived experiences in their wake. The catharsis that the work brings about in him is thus not limited to disclosing new facts of life or well-known (but hitherto unconscious) facts in a completely new light. Rather, the qualitative novelty of the sight that thus came into being alters perception and capacity, making them able to apperceive new things and familiar objects in a new light, new contexts and the new relationships of these contexts to himself. At the same time, as was likewise already established, his earlier decisions, objectives, etc. remain unchanged – as a matter of principle – and are suspended only for the duration of the effect of the work. (We have already touched on the fact that this beforehand is not without influence on receptivity. Many times, an antithesis between earlier meaningful experiences and the world-image of the work, or between its inner orientation and a person’s earlier objectives, can prevent the effect altogether. It has to be emphasised once again, however, that it is a question of can, not of must; there are often cases in which such resistance is run down by the force of the homo-

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geneous medium. It can even happen that precisely this contrast between the beforehand and the world of the work brings about a particularly profound shock.) The question now is how the relation of the beforehand to the afterwards of effect is constituted. Generally speaking, man comes back into life with unchanged concrete objectives after experiencing the work. The particular manner in which these objectives are suspended with the transformation of the whole man of the everyday into the man-made-whole of a specific receptivity certainly does not bear upon those efforts directly. True, this unrelatedness is only so in immediate terms. Since the ‘world’ of artworks is a reflection of reality, it is inevitable that countless threads of subjective and objective analogies, correlations, etc. run here and there between both worlds. The work of art is certainly not just its own ‘world’ in and for itself but is rather supremely and concretely a ‘world’ that, precisely in its ownness and self-containedness, affects the receptive person as one that is related to him, as, in a certain sense, his own. Under certain circumstances this receptive recognition of himself and his own world in the work of art can be something that is immediate, though as a rule it is more or less widely mediated. The deeper and more universal the work is, the richer these lines of connection are, and of course the more broadly and intricately mediated they are at the same time. In the case of works that hail from the past, these mediations are, on the one hand, even more convoluted because the immediate lived experience of a world that is lost for good, as seen from a vantage point that has vanished for good as well, confronts the receptive person as a postulate of lived experience. On the other hand – admittedly only in the most significant of cases – the human kernel reveals itself even more purely, in that the concrete social determinations necessarily fade away owing to the historical development lying between then and now (these determinations must forfeit much of the immediate concreity with which they affected contemporaries of the work). Bear in mind the effect that Homer, Sophocles’ Anitgone, etc. have on us. The last-mentioned shift touches on one of the most important problems for understanding the afterwards of lived receptive experience. We recall our treatment of the category of inherence at the same time. Scientific reflection and its conceptual analysis can and must distinguish different ‘layers’ in each person: ‘layers’ of the personality innate to him and those modeled from life, of his affiliation to a certain class or group of his society, of his determinacy by means of the relatively enduring or ephemeral tendencies of the time, etc. (The same thing also applies, with necessary modifications, to the object-world that mediates the social relationships of people.) Objectively accurate facts underlie such an analysis. It is indispensable for science because these ‘layers’ constitute a unity that is immediately inseparable in life, out of which on different occa-

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sions different components (discretely or collectively) assert themselves all of a sudden, sometimes unexpectedly. Out of this seemingly disorganised plenitude and this unity that is likewise seemingly put together in a mechanical and violent way, the second immediacy of aesthetic reflection makes that which it is in itself, that which is most often only tendentially realised in life itself. It is an organic microcosm in which the own inner laws of motion and those of the surrounding social world that guide and model them rationally converge, even if this rationality is also one that moves in contradictions, that encompasses within itself the possibility of an intensification to the point of tragic dichotomy. By means of such a genuinely manifest rationality, by means of this positedness as microcosm, forming the microcom of the work from similarly rational complexes and monads of a similar nature, a catharsis occurs in the receptive person, the shock of which makes him prick up his ears and clear his eyes with respect to that ‘world’ whose entrance into his psyche the homogeneous medium compels and holds fast to therein. What is necessarily contained in all of this is a meaningful experience of the surrounding world of man and above all a meaningful experience of himself; an important meaningful experience, but an idiosyncratic one. For the receptive person is dull-witted if all of these meaningful experiences get bogged down in lived aesthetic experience and do not emanate to his afterwards in a transformative way at all; he is a doctrinaire or a pedant, however, if he always tries to apply such meaningful experiences directly to life. The midpoint between such extremes is by no means a ‘golden mean’, a blunting of extremes, but rather a newly opened entryway to reality, to the essentiality of the existence appearing within him, of the appearing manifestness of its kernel. It is a synthetic way of seeing things together for unity that dissects more sharp-sightedly and condenses more boldly than is possible for everyday man. The unity of such a well-organised diversity that has been made homogeneous enables each genuine work of art to be accessible from all kinds of angles. The naïve and genuinely aesthetic lived experience is a content-related one. The omnipotence of forms is expressed precisely in the fact that they seem to completely disappear as such in the cathartic shock of the receptive person. Their omnipotence, however, thus especially revealed itself precisely in the fact that they have brought into existence such an infinitely manifold yet homogeneously unitary ‘world’, a ‘world’ fully objectivated with its own life yet related in part and whole to the receptive subject – which as world, thus as content, can be effective. (The gateway from form to content is a more complicated type of receptivity that we will first be able to discuss in the second part.) The preceding observations have shown, however, that the shaped meaningful content of the completed, actually formed work of art is extraordinar-

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ily multilayered and therefore is accessible from all kinds of sides. To a large extent, it depends on the beforehand of the receptive person which ‘layer’ of the work will exert the most direct effect on him. In turn, it depends on the universality and intensity of the composition how many other ‘layers’ resonate – possibly in ways that remain unconscious – in this immediate impression. The weakness of the journalistic or rhetorical mode of composition – even when it comes from important artists – has to do precisely with the one-track nature that is necessarily conditioned by this comportment. For example, in order to keep this distinction clearly in mind, it suffices if one now compares Schiller with Shakespeare or Upton Sinclair with Gorki from the standpoint of this straightforward or diverse accessibility. Needless to say, one must not also simply reduce such contrasting examples to identity. For all of his rhetorical propensities, Schiller is a great poet whom one can indeed perceive as onetrack and simplistic compared to Shakespeare, but whose works nevertheless tend towards a genuinely artistic diversity and intensive endlessness at their peaks (with varying success depending on the drama, sometimes depending on the scene). By contrast, the Upton Sinclair-type truly only has one layer. He has a certain problem that – looked at from the standpoint of social praxis – can have a more or less current significance, though he confines himself to tailoring people, situations, events, etc. exclusively to it. Composition here means arranging everything that directly comes about in connection with this complex in the most effective way possible in order to prompt the reader to support the values being affirmed and to oppose the worthiness of those being negated. Characters, situations, etc. include exactly as much individuality as is needed to be generally recognisable and to be able to bear this content. Human relationships are completely absent, at least in a literary regard; in order to emphasise the importance of the case, they are possibly expressed in conceptual terms. With that said, a construct comes into being whose purpose is to guide the reader towards the taking of a current concrete social position; a construct that neither digs down into the depths of personal life in order to let the problem grow out of that nor links the current position taken to the great human questions of species development in a literary way. With full conscious awareness, this tendency may proclaim itself to be the ‘new’, as often happened in the case of naturalism or ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’. Their advocates may promulgate the view that characters are ‘also’ supposed to have individual features, fates, etc. ‘besides’ their social functions, but the whole attitude objectively implies a renunciation of the specific universality and intensive endlessness of aesthetic reflection. Putting this in positive terms, what is implied is their complete incorporation into the system of everyday praxis with its current immediate

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objectives. Influential artistic positions taken in our time have attempted to justify this tendency and give it an aesthetic foundation. Thus, Stalin’s famous dictum, raised to the level of dogma, that the writer is to be the ‘engineer of the soul’. Now engineering is precisely that product of the social division of labour in which the specific suspension of the current everyday goal is most incisively embodied: all the results of science and meaningful labour experience are consciously focused on finding the technically and economically optimal solution to a given concrete practical task. As an ideal is made out of this for the attitude of the artist towards his work and its efficacy, what comes into being as an objective for the work is exclusively serving a determinate and current task in life; the sway of art over the souls of people is likewise confined to this immediate topicality. Just as the engineer invents a machine or lets it operate so that certain performances can function better, more practically, in a more energy efficient manner, etc., so too art is supposed to optimally ‘repurpose’ the souls of people for certain current and practical social objective. Undoubtedly this formulation exceedingly constrains art’s sphere of influence and takes from it its limitlessness and its universality; it certainly includes – consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally – the tendency to make art into a mere maidservant of current practical tasks and thereby to integrate it unreservedly and totally into the system of social daily praxis without concerning oneself much with its particularity. Needless to say, a certain pointed emphasis is contained in our counterformulation: Stalin certainly does not want to make an engineer out of the artist at all but rather an engineer of the human soul. And in the interpretation of his dictum, there was also frequently a lively effort to understand what was meant by him in such a way that would not thereby overly constrain the essence of art. The correct impulse is contained in such trains of thought as such: that embedded in socialist society is the capacity to put the consciously social element of art back to rights, the social element that the art of antiquity possessed in its own way, for example, and that is nearly lost in developed bourgeois society. This takes place at a higher level, however, because society in socialism embraces all people, not just a relatively thin stratum of free citizens. The worldview of dialectical materialism provides the possibility of actualising this connection between society and art on the basis of a proper consciousness and no longer – as was still generally the case in antiquity and in class societies – on that of a false one. But precisely because the objective social conditions are so favourable, the paths leading from possibility to actualisation must be scrutinised with all the more precision so that the new aspects act to facilitate rather than to inhibit the social relationships of art and, mediated in this way, art itself. Notionally, the theory of the artist as an ‘engineer of the soul’ contains

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this danger within itself, and its translation into praxis has also often exhibited such consequences. The conspicuous relationship of the sociality of art and the possibility of a proper consciousness of it naturally does not yet imply any compulsion to simplify the specificity of aesthetic reflection inadmissibly. Only in the Stalinist formulation does there inhere the tendency to apply the structure of praxis in everyday life and the mode of reflection underlying it directly to art without reservation. What is lost most of all in the course of this is the work’s universality (multilayeredness), which at any rate is at the gravest of risks or is even damaged. The bourgeois critique of Stalin’s theory and praxis suffers from the fact that it confronts his constrictive conception with one of a similar nature that before long is avant-garde or academic. One wants to limit artistic presentation either to the merely peculiar individual or to an abstract ‘universal human’, whereas in the case of Stalin that which is currently social is raised to the level of an autocracy that ties art up. Now it is a fact – and this is to be said against Stalin’s bourgeois critics – that there has not yet been genuine art that failed to take its starting point from the great (and in the end always) social problems of the epoch nor has there been genuine art in which the position taken towards these problems failed to spark the pathos of the presentation. Shakespeare’s dramas, Dutch landscapes or still lifes, and Beethoven’s symphonies are at the same level in this regard. On the one hand, however, the question is always to what extent does the work of art, in its intention towards universality, go down into the depths of individuality as it organically develops something socially universal upward out of the quirks, fortunes, etc. of the individual as its immanently necessary outcome, rather than seeking social universality, like the uncompromising adherents of Stalinist theory, in individual ‘evidence’, examples, illustrative material, etc. On the other hand, all social conflict is connected in itself to the great questions of mankind’s development as a species – many times, however, in a broadly and intricately mediated way – and this connection can likewise inhere as an ‘indeterminate objectivity’ of the composition, can be completely absent in it, or can just be attached to it conceptually. The real universality of art can only be actualised in an organically evolved unity of this diversity, in such a ‘multilayeredness’. The social starting point preserves the central significance of this ‘layer’ in the structure and effect of the work in the process, which is why it is certainly by no means necessary to focus on it directly with extreme exclusivity. These determinations can by all means maintain their overwhelmingly central role even if they are not dominant in all details, even if they attain their validity by indirect paths. Schiller demonstrated such an aesthetic nature in the case of Shakespeare’s Richard iii, wherefore it would still have to be noted that the late dramas like Hamlet and

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King Lear express this conflict (the self-destruction and dissolution of feudalism as totality) in a far more indirect manner.47 In any tendency that dissolves this universality, that makes any ‘layer’ – be it that which is peculiar to the individual in an isolated way or be it the artistically abstract, practical exclusivity of the social – into the sole substance of the work, what is expressed is a nuance of the fetishism that is dominant today, the tearing apart of that which is unitary in reality, the unity of concrete contradictions, the carrying through of which into the self-consciousness of people as a unity beyond the everyday real is precisely the mission of art. Only from this universality of the work can the afterwards of effect on the receptive person be comprehended in a more concrete way than up to now. We have established that the cathartic effect triggered by the work is precisely the consequence of such a perfectly shaped universality, of such an intensive totality. The work brings forth a ‘world’ that, depending on the work-individuality, not only is a particular one as a matter of principle but also one that from the lawfulness of each art or form of art aesthetically depicts qualitatively different sides of the real world as a matter of principle, such that human allsidedness in the manner being offered by art is only actualised in the totality of all arts and work-individualities. (As seen from here, what results from the pseudoaesthetic interpretation of Stalinist theory is that what is abstractly demanded of each individual work of art – constricted as a matter of principle – is something only the totality of art is concretely capable of achieving, thus further constricting the aesthetic essence of individual works.) In this sense, as was already shown, allsidedness is just an ideal for the individual person, one that allows just for approximation but not complete fulfilment. What rises to prominence in this is one side of the pluralistic structure of the aesthetic sphere. Its other side likewise results from this pluralism: the fact that, in the process of approximating the ideal of human allsidedness, the arts and workindividualities do not add up, do not complement one another in an immediate literal sense. Instead, each is a self-contained ‘world’, an intensive totality complete in itself that cannot be abolished as such. The approximation process takes place – as a matter of principle – in such a way that the aesthetic shock in the afterwards of a lived receptive experience at the time turns into the possession of a reconstituted whole man in life, whose psyche is enriched, broadened, and deepened, and with all of these transformative effects turns into a firm component of life and thereby the beforehand for the lived art experiences that follow.

47

Schiller and Goethe 1877, pp. 363 ff.

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The afterwards of lived receptive experience is to be described – in a simplified way – thusly: the incursion of the homogeneous medium of the workindividuality into the lived experiences of the whole man makes him first into an actually receptive person and directs his focused receptiveness on what is being offered to him at any given time; he thus turns into the man-made-whole of receptivity. The evocative power of forms, mediated by the homogeneous medium, keeps hold of this person in the enchantment of the new ‘world’, imprinting its essence on him as a new and distinct content-relatedness. The afterwards now consists in how the whole man (henceforth free from this suggestion) comes to terms with what he has thus acquired. This is the immediate content and hence sets the person the task of integrating this content into his previous world-image or accordingly modifying this world-image in a way that is adapted to the content. Only in the immediate sense, however, is it simply a question of content; since in itself this content constitutes the side of a formcontent identity turned towards the receptive person, not only does its formal component come into play in its high tension and intensity, which is already something with which we are familiar, but also its novelty acts in a formal way, insofar as each content conveys to the receptive person something of the method of its perceptibility, of access to the content itself, insofar as becoming aware of new contents is at the same time a guide on how to recognise and adopt that which is analogous to them in life as well. It is along such paths that the crossover of the receptive man-made-whole into the whole man of the everyday occurs. Of course, in the case of different people faced with different works of art, these shocks and transitions differ extraordinarily in terms of content, scope, depth, duration, etc. The pluralism of the aesthetic sphere certainly has an effect precisely in the diversity that thus comes into being. Oftentimes the effect of a work on the afterwards of person remains as good as completely imperceptible, and only a whole host of similar encroachments displays a visible change with regard to comportment, culture, etc.; in fact, oftentimes a single work-individuality can amount to a complete reversal in the life of a person. In all of this limitless variability in the relationship of lived aesthetic experience to its afterwards, however, there is nevertheless something shared: namely, the fact that the immediate practical objectives of man that were suspended during the lived aesthetic experience mostly do not change by nature. In particular, the alteration – visibly or in a completely subterranean way, consciously or unconsciously – affects the whole man, his relation and comportment towards the world, towards life, and towards society, and only once this effect is sufficiently strengthened do there ensue from this altered concrete objectives that can indeed be the mediated, contributory consequences of a certain lived

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experience of the work in the immediate content-related sense, though by no means must they be so in a directly unconditional way. Even if for a long time the influence of a work was predominantly politico-journalistic in character, as in the already highlighted example of Chernyshevsky’s novels, its effect consists not so much in a simple intellectual, emotional, and action-oriented reproduction of the work’s meaningful content but rather in the more mediated aftereffect of typical human modes of comportment and in the extension of these tendencies towards the formation of a human type. These novels were certainly the anticipatory and perhaps exemplary occasion for this type, though in accordance with its essential meaningful content, the type is rooted in the concrete struggles of the era in which the people concerned are concretely entangled as the whole man of life. The limit cases examined by us (Petöfi, etc.) in no way contradict such a conception. Not only because, as was already shown, an accurate analysis shows their features in common with other lived aesthetic experiences; not only on account of the laws of permanent effect, according to which the occasion triggering the pathos of such a work must fade away in terms of its original topical strength over the course of history and give way to a more universal evocation that more closely approximates the universal impact of art; but also (and primarily) because in genuine works of art the original appeal is also predominantly directed at the modification of the general comportment of people. The specialty of such works consists in the fact that in acutely pointed moments of crisis the change in human social comportment and the attempt to actualise certain concrete goals converge more powerfully than in the ‘normal’ course of history. Indeed, they can even directly coincide in certain circumstances. All of this clearly highlights the characteristic common to all genuine works of art in the afterwards of aesthetic effect: the changing influence is mainly directed at the general comportment of the whole man in life. All the quirks of the work that act upon the man-made-whole by means of the homogeneous medium (the identity of form and content, the unity of essence and appearance, universality and the intensive endlessness of meaningful content, art as the critique of life, the pluralism of the arts and works of art, the cathartic transformation of the whole man from the beforehand into the man-made-whole of receptivity) make an impact in this direction by exerting effects (ones that are sometimes quiet or hardly noticeable, and others that sometimes visibly unsettle that which is most essential) on the centre and periphery of the whole man. This sentence is in need of a correction insofar as the alternative of centre and periphery is reduced here to a character that is immediate and therefore merely formal: impressions that seem to affect only peripheral expressions of life can easily accumulate into the single most essential expressions of life, and

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the human centre that is aesthetically stimulated never loses its dear bond with the periphery of life. It is precisely in this way that the power of the aesthetic to transform man is invariably directed towards the whole man, in which the already emphasised caveat regarding the plurality of the arts and the ideal of the all-round man by no means amounts to a limitation in this regard but rather just to a closer concretisation. As the whole man’s centre of essence, which constantly emanates to the periphery, is touched and its at once concrete and universal comportment towards life as a whole is thereby set in motion, two extreme – and, in their extremity, equally false – views come into being: that art is the decisive transformative force of social development on the one hand, and that it has no real influence at all on the social praxis of people on the other. The truth here is a ‘midpoint’ only in the sense of a tertium datur: without transforming the comportment of people towards life, no serious change of society or real social progress can come into being. However, this is accomplished primarily by the modification of the relations of production caused by the growth of the forces of production. Each change in the relations of production creates new living conditions for people, in fact in their overall everyday life, even in those relationships that are possibly related to the actual sphere of production in widely and intricately mediated ways. By means of becoming correctly or falsely conscious of the new, science and practical activity (the political included here first and foremost) can accelerate or retard the process of the adjustment and habituation to the new living conditions, can even help bring about their creation directly or indirectly. As art is directly involved in this process only by way of exception, what can come into being is the semblance (quite widespread in bourgeois circles today) of its lack of social influence. (Which tendencies of late bourgeois art that support this false judgement in practice cannot be analysed more closely here.) The social role of art is thus ‘merely’ – as the Greeks rightly saw – a psychological preparation for the new forms of life, while stored up in it are all the human values of the past in a form that can be experienced. It is thus capable of most clearly showing in their human totality characters utterly changing themselves on the historical stage, and for this reason, one can declare which of them develops human values, which deserves to be preserved and perhaps encouraged further, and which justifiably belong to an underworld of the forgotten. One cannot highlight the term ‘totality’ forcefully enough in this assessment. For in its immediate actualisation, each real historical transformation must be focused on a crucial point or at most on a few points of economic, social, and political life. (Equality of rights in the bourgeois revolution, nationalisation of production in the socialist.) The situation is similar in the case of revolutions that are predominantly economic (the Industrial Revolution). Object-

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ively, human life overall thereby indeed invariably receives a new physiognomy. On the one hand, however, it takes decades (sometimes centuries) before that which was objectively and implicitly contained in such decisively focused acts also turns into the psychological possession of all people in a subjective and explicit way. On the other hand, the social act which brings the revolution is certainly never limited to such a simple singleness. In the Phenomenology Hegel rightly speaks of the abstract character of that which arises at the beginning in any such change in the life of the human species. The system of new human relationships that results from the new relations of production are built up in a revolutionary or evolutionary way depending on the conditions, until it extends to all the relations of life. Science, journalism, etc. play an important role in convincing people that all of this serves progress. However, it is in the nature of things that, regarded as whole men, those who carry out all of this in practice for a long time do not always represent that which is actually new in the totality of their intellectual life, their world-image, their mode of perception and way of feeling, etc. They actualise it but at the same time remain rooted with a considerable portion of their essence in the reality that has passed away. (This state is to be sharply distinguished from the one mentioned earlier, from the capacity to single out that which is viable from the old culture and to harness it for the present and future.) Not until we keep such an outline of social activities in mind, even if in their most abstract features, does the room for manoeuvre for the afterwards of aesthetic receptivity become concretely graspable. Although it is always most strongly influenced by the objective and subjective tendencies of the era, art cannot (if it does not want to give itself up) dispense with its universalist humanism, which the most sharply class-based decision can certainly underlie. That is, regardless of the breadth and depth of these influences (if anything, building on them, carrying them forward, criticising them, etc.), art expands man’s circle of thoughts and feelings by bringing everything that is objectively contained in a historical situation to the surface of what can be experienced. Whether it is a love poem or a still life, a melody or the façade of a building, it expresses that which is related to man in history. Such a thing would probably have otherwise been and remained a mute occurrence, a dully accepted facticity, but by means of art it receives its plainly audible vox humana: the truth of the historical moment speaks for the life of people. Indeed, this exclamation has something even more directly propulsive beyond this. In other contexts we discussed how art is capable of productively responding to that which is present only in an embryonic way in a given socio-historical moment, and since it is in its aesthetic nature to introduce the perfection of form to that which is taken up by it, this thing which is situated merely in statu nascendi in the

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composition acts more powerfully and convincingly than the original in life reflected by it would be able to do. There is an endlessly widely ramified capillary system of relationships here that lead out of life into art and out of art into life; a capillary system whose significance for the conscious development of people, classes, and nations we have still barely gotten to know in the crudest outlines. Only the dialectical theory of aesthetic reflection is able to at least adumbrate the principled direction in which these complicated and variegated movements have an effect in the life process of the human species. It is thus a long and convoluted path from the meaningful pre-artistic experiences of the creator (from which life directs its questions to and demands on art) to this afterwards of receptivity, where that which is achieved by means of the aesthetic reflection of reality (by the artistic composition) flows back again into the life of people. In contrast to scientific reflection, in which the closest possible approximation to the in-itself constitutes the only criterion for validity or falsehood, in aesthetic reflection this circuit from life to life must be taken into account. Of course, such a thing also exists for science: for example, it is well known how important the needs of production have become for the development of the natural sciences and still more what a great role their findings play in the everyday life of people. The ambit that comes into being here, however, leaves the basic structure of reflection unaltered. This remains the transformation of the in-itself into a for-us. Even if along the way various new points of view and criteria may crop up (economy in the technical implementation of the findings in the natural sciences), and even if the truths may undergo a differentiation that is often simplified in everyday use, though adequate to the concrete objectives in the industrial process, the basic structure can and must not be shaken. Of course, aesthetic reflection is likewise a likeness of the same objective reality, but it is a human truth for people, and hence the problem of the initself and the for-us must receive a new physiognomy. We will later occupy ourselves with the essence of the aesthetically mirrored and registered in-itself in a chapter specifically devoted to it. We need only note here that the circuit depicted a moment ago draws its necessity out of the anthropocentric nature of aesthetic reflection. As the start- and endpoint of this circuit, the life of people is therefore established in the essence of the aesthetic transformation of the in-itself into a for-us. The objectivity of the in-itself becomes apparent in the fact that not every disappearance or every appearance of the effect of a work must unconditionally give evidence for or against its value. But only with its actualisation in practice can that which is aesthetic in itself come into its own. For as has already been repeatedly stated, art is not simply the consciousness of man regarding something that exists in itself independent of him. This aspect is

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certainly likewise contained in aesthetic reflection. But it nevertheless remains just an aspect here, and that which is specifically aesthetic in this reflection consists in its being the self-consciousness of mankind. This is prepared for from the lived pre-artistic experiences of the creator all the way to the coming into being of the work. It is completed in the shaped work-individualities, and it contains its social fulfilment in the lived aesthetic experience of receptivity and in its afterwards. The conquest of objective reality, which was likewise repeatedly expounded as the indispensable fundament of all art; the intensive endlessness of meaningful content; the critique of life; the universality of the aesthetic that manifests in the pluralism of the arts and works: all of these aspects are paths to such a self-consciousness of people. The world that is in itself mute for people (its own muteness vis-à-vis them and itself) only resolves itself into a new expressiveness in this self-consciousness. It encompasses everything that man can sense and experience of joys and sorrows with respect to the world, and in works of art it receives that voice which raises and arranges this specific muteness into the language of self-consciousness. Goethe was indeed only directly talking about poetry and the suffering of people, but this universality of all art constitutes the content of his motto to ‘The Marienbad Elegy’: And when in all his torture man grows mute, A god gave me the strength to tell what I am suffering.48 48

Goethe 1957, p. 101, translation modified. [Eds.]

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Index Adorno, Theodor ix–x, xl, 628, 648 Aeschylus 430, 531, 545, 661, 728 aesthetic(s) 157, 179–180, 184–191, 193–204, 206–213, 214, 218–223, 226, 228–230, 234–245, 249–256, 259–263, 265–269, 271–279, 281–284, 287–288, 290–291, 293–297, 299–300, 302–305, 308, 315, 317, 328–33, 336, 339, 341–343, 345, 348–351, 354, 357–364, 367–370, 372– 374, 376–378, 380, 381, 384–391, 393– 394, 396–398, 402–403, 405, 407–411, 413–416, 418–422, 427–428, 432–434, 436–437, 439–444, 448–452, 454, 457, 459–461, 462–464, 466–467, 471–479, 481–492, 494–497, 501–508, 510–513, 515, 520, 523–532, 534–535, 539–552, 554–557, 559–579, 582, 584–594, 596– 602, 604–606, 609–612, 614–615, 618, 620–631, 634, 637–639, 643–646, 649, 651–652, 654–661, 664–668, 670, 672– 673, 677–679, 680, 682–698, 700–703, 705–718, 720–724, 726–734, 736– 746 beforehand and afterwards of effect in xxiv, 364, 370, 443, 460, 571, 595, 706–708, 716, 718, 724–725, 729, 732, 734–737, 740–742, 744–746 catharsis viii, xxiv–xxv, xxviii, xxx– xxxi, 370, 571–572, 669–670, 709–710, 715–722, 724–725, 729, 734, 736, 740, 742 evocation xiv, xvii–xviii, xxi, xxiii, xxv, xxviii, xxx, 201, 239–241, 253–256, 258, 260–261, 266, 268, 276–278, 282, 291, 293, 317–318, 324, 327, 329, 331– 332, 343–344, 360, 362–372, 375–376, 380, 383–384, 387–389, 391, 413, 417– 420, 422, 424–426, 431, 433, 438–439, 441–442, 446, 448, 451, 456–457, 459, 485–486, 491, 507, 515–516, 526, 531– 532, 537, 548–549, 555, 564, 570–571, 581, 584–585, 591, 593–594, 598, 601– 602, 604–605, 620–623, 625, 627–628, 632, 635, 638–639, 646, 648, 663–664, 666, 675, 677–678, 685, 692, 694, 696, 700–701, 703, 706, 710

immediacy 200–201, 208, 210, 223, 252– 255, 282–284, 291, 364, 415–417, 420, 440–441, 443–445, 456–457, 461, 497, 524, 540, 700, 706, 716, 723 objectivity 16, 182, 253, 256, 265, 482– 486, 490–497, 505–508, 519–521, 525–528, 533–534, 537, 541, 560–561, 568–570, 572–573, 575–578, 580– 582, 587–594, 599, 605, 621, 627, 636, 638–639, 644, 646, 670, 678, 682–693, 699–700, 724, 732 particularity 14, 280, 348–349, 451, 549– 551, 602, 655, 711, 723, 732 second immediacy xxii, 441, 443, 445, 620, 734, 736 subjectivity xxi, xxiii, xxxv, 193, 209, 212, 463–466, 468, 475, 478–479, 483– 486, 489–491, 493, 495–498, 501–508, 510, 512, 519–521, 524–534, 537, 538, 541, 549, 555–557, 561–562, 571–573, 575–578, 580–582, 587–591, 604–605, 620–621, 624–625, 682–693, 716, 724, 732, 734–736, 740–741 this-worldliness xxii, 17–19, 115, 207– 208, 330, 332, 463, 470–471, 484, 612–613, 723–724 typical(ity) xiii, 16, 41, 54, 60, 112, 156, 172–173, 184–185, 194, 201, 207, 210, 212, 341–343, 354, 357, 365, 399, 404–405, 439–441, 447–449, 451, 457, 475, 531, 534, 601–605, 641, 647, 653, 719, 730– 731, 742 affect xxix–xxxi, 100–101, 146, 149–151, 163, 313, 375, 513, 709 angst 113, 145, 151, 165, 298, 446, 605, 610 fear 100–101, 149–151, 168, 224, 297–299, 304, 709, 716 hope 100–101, 149–151, 416 pity xxiv, 709, 716 Alfieri, Vittorio 634 alienation xix, 51–53, 55, 57, 138, 360, 479– 482, 722 Alighieri, Dante 183, 289, 612 allegory 18, 244, 278, 284–288, 329n, 346– 348, 389–390, 416, 634, 638–639, 644–645, 648, 697

index Ampère, Jean-Jacques 516n47 analogy 37–43, 81–82, 84–85, 90, 96, 158, 161–162, 189, 221–222, 228, 318–320, 345–346, 419, 451–452, 551, 591–592, 601, 624, 627, 681, 735, 741 Anaxagoras 119 Andersen, Hans Christian 61–62 animism 82–84, 90–91, 93–94, 96–97, 109– 110 Anselm of Canterbury 102 anthropomorphisation 93, 97, 116–117, 121– 130, 135, 139–145, 156–157, 161, 163–164, 168, 180–182, 187, 204–207, 238–240, 243, 249–250, 258–261, 263–265, 296, 313–314, 324, 328–329, 331, 442, 463, 482, 489, 497, 559, 600, 613, 641–642, 658, 706, 715 artistic viii, xviii, xxiii, 114–115, 172, 180, 182 pseudo- 132–134 religious 100–103, 110–115, 117, 119, 123– 124 Aquinas, Thomas 106 Archimedes 120 Aristophanes 495, 728 Aristotle viiin2, xvii, xxiv, 9, 11, 18, 118, 135, 148, 179, 183, 186, 233, 303, 371, 478n, 518, 550, 593, 599–602, 605, 612, 646, 653, 655–656, 662, 688, 716, 720–721, 728 Metaphysics 126–129 Nichomachean Ethics 262 Poetics 215n2, 261–262, 338, 340, 448, 477, 605, 720 Politics 233n, 709 Rhetoric 600–601 Armand, Inessa 603–604 Arnold, Matthew 609–610 art and ethics xxiv, xxx–xxxi, 262, 370, 448– 451, 459–460, 468, 496, 501–503, 507, 520, 572, 685, 691–692, 709, 713, 715, 717–722 and everyday vii–ix, xiv–xv, xvii, xix– xxv, xxviii–xxxi, xxxviii, xl–xlii, 5–6, 24–25, 29–30, 33, 42–44, 47–48, 56– 58, 60–65, 71, 77–78, 83–84, 86, 89, 151, 169, 171, 174–175, 178–180, 182, 184–186, 199, 205–206, 214–215, 255–256, 277,

765 281–282, 327, 351–358, 362–366, 369– 371, 378, 383–384, 404–405, 407–408, 411–413, 415–416, 419–422, 425, 427– 431, 437, 443–446, 448–454, 457–460, 463–464, 468, 474, 478, 482, 491–494, 496–497, 505–506, 515, 525, 535–536, 565–569, 572–573, 576, 578–580, 584– 585, 589, 594–595, 603–604, 612–614, 620, 629–631, 634–635, 640–642, 649– 651, 673, 677, 683–684, 689–690, 699, 703, 705–706, 708, 723–724, 732, 736– 741, 744–745 and magic vii, xi, 87, 93, 115, 173–174, 179, 183, 187, 202, 206, 214, 221, 233–235, 237–239, 277, 324, 328–335, 338–343, 345–349, 357–359, 361–362, 366–370, 372–374, 377–378, 380, 384, 387–389, 393–394, 456–457, 459 and religion vii, xxii, 6, 12–13, 18–19, 50, 64, 87, 93, 103, 110, 114–115, 205–207, 243, 277, 324, 328–329, 380, 431, 459, 470–473, 536 and science vii, xiii, xvii, xx–xxi, xxiii, xxviii, 5, 13–16, 24–25, 27, 29–30, 42–44, 47, 56–57, 60–65, 71, 77, 83–84, 86–87, 89, 103–104, 115, 123, 152, 157, 172–173, 186–188, 193, 201–202, 206–213, 221, 240, 242–243, 245, 250, 255, 291, 294– 295, 448, 457–458, 478, 536, 542–543, 548, 554–555, 559–560, 567–570, 580– 581, 584, 591–593, 600, 602–604, 606, 609, 629–630, 650, 655–658, 661–662, 670–673, 677, 679, 682, 689–690, 705– 706, 723, 731, 745–746 architecture 14, 187, 192, 232, 244, 248, 250, 258–259, 265, 268, 273, 275, 277– 278, 282–283, 289, 408, 415, 436, 545, 548, 595–596, 622–623, 627, 702, 711, 727–728, 744 beauty ix, 11, 134, 189, 191, 248, 251–254, 257, 262–263, 265, 269–273, 279, 284, 290, 293–294, 327, 356, 416, 461, 474, 476, 489, 543, 546, 572, 586, 591, 645 causality 666–670, 672–676, 679, 689 collision 93, 156, 330, 341–342, 514–515, 523, 531, 589, 652, 660, 707, 724 content xiii, xxii–xxiv, xxxv, xxxviii, 6, 15–16, 43, 79, 114, 152, 180, 182–183, 199, 201, 210, 212, 224–225, 227, 229–230,

766 content (cont.) 233, 235–238, 240– 241, 250, 252–253, 255, 263, 266–267, 283–288, 290, 293, 295, 300–301, 313, 318, 324, 326, 329–331, 337–339, 342– 343, 346, 349, 357, 360–368, 370–371, 378, 380, 381, 384, 386–387, 389–390, 395–396, 403–404, 407–408, 410, 413, 416–418, 420, 422, 424–426, 430, 431–443, 448–450, 454, 456–458, 470– 471, 474–475, 477–478, 491–492, 494, 511–512, 525, 528, 531–532, 536, 547, 563–564, 569, 573, 576–77, 581–582, 584, 588, 592–594, 597–599, 604–605, 609–610, 627–628, 635–636, 638–639, 641–644, 646–647, 651, 667–668, 671, 673–676, 689, 694–706, 708, 710–713, 716–717, 722, 725–727, 729, 733, 736, 741–742, 746 dance 63, 87, 189, 206, 214, 217, 223, 226, 234, 239, 333, 335–336, 338–341, 344– 345, 359, 362, 366, 368–370, 372–373, 381, 383–385, 388–391, 393, 395, 457, 545, 574, 597 depth 289, 409 details 637–638, 661–664, 689 drama 20, 184, 201, 212, 227, 236, 240, 261, 264, 340–341, 363, 369–370, 372, 375–377, 385, 430, 448–449, 453, 457, 459, 478, 489, 514–518, 521n51, 523, 531, 541–542, 545–546, 558, 561, 569, 571, 577, 587, 593, 595, 605, 618, 631, 633– 637, 661, 666, 668, 672–673, 676, 699, 701, 707, 709–710, 713, 716–717, 720, 722–723, 726, 728, 730–731, 735, 737, 739 epic 212, 227, 234, 240, 264, 385, 430, 521n51, 544, 546–547, 558, 561, 577, 612, 631–633, 635, 668, 735 film 262, 313–314, 545, 597, 707, 721, 728 form vii–viii, x, xiii, xv, xvii, xx–xxii, xxiv, xxvi, xxxiv, 5–6, 14–15, 47, 79, 114, 152, 178, 180, 182–184, 191, 198–200, 206, 208, 210, 212–213, 214–301, 302, 314–315, 320, 329, 331, 337–339, 342– 343, 346, 356, 360–370, 376–378, 380, 381, 384, 386, 389–390, 395, 404, 408, 410, 417–418, 420–421, 424–427, 430– 439, 441–443, 446, 450, 454, 456–458, 471, 473–475, 491, 504, 510, 524, 531– 532, 536, 563–564, 569, 573, 576–77,

index 582, 584–585, 588, 592–594, 597– 599, 604–605, 618, 628, 635, 643–644, 646–647, 651, 668, 671, 689, 694–706, 710–712, 725–727, 730, 733, 736, 741– 744 guidance xxi, 293, 352, 365, 434, 463, 528, 531, 536, 591, 593–594, 597–598, 605–606, 621–625, 634, 643, 646, 663, 674, 677, 696, 702–704, 706, 729, 733– 734, 737 indeterminate objectivity xxvi, 87, 630– 636, 638–648, 675, 739 intonation 363–364, 598, 663, 673, 678– 679, 703 literature 47, 173, 180, 229, 264, 314–315, 340–341, 437, 439, 476, 498, 508–509, 515, 545, 548–549, 563, 597, 602, 625– 627, 629, 631–632, 634–638, 648, 658, 665–666, 668, 673–674, 676, 678–679, 680, 688, 696, 698, 702, 709, 713, 718, 720–721, 725 music xlii, 14, 63, 187, 191–192, 214, 223– 226, 232, 234, 288, 342, 355–356, 363, 368, 376, 386–387, 439, 443, 511, 532, 545–546, 548–549, 562, 570, 585–586, 593, 595–597, 618, 625–628, 645–648, 674–675, 696, 702, 707, 709, 711, 716, 721–722, 725–726n, 733, 739, 744 novel xxi, xxviin30, 184, 212, 234, 448, 512, 515, 517, 519, 521n51, 540, 544, 547, 570, 595, 606, 609, 631, 633–634, 636– 637, 668, 692, 695, 713, 719–720–721, 726, 728, 731, 737, 742 novella 509, 618, 631, 644, 721 ornamentation vii, 174, 176, 187, 214, 222, 235, 241–242, 245, 247, 256, 265– 301, 326, 348, 384, 386–387, 389–390, 395–398, 408–409, 414–415, 418, 422, 425–429, 431–436, 439, 441, 623–624 painting xxiv, xxvi, 79, 173–174, 189, 201, 209, 240, 244, 248, 261, 265, 268, 292– 293, 356, 369, 386–390, 392, 396–404, 406, 408–415, 417–419, 422, 425, 430– 441, 443, 449, 494, 512, 518, 531–532, 540, 544–545, 549, 556, 558, 580–582, 586–590, 592, 597, 605, 612–613, 618– 622, 632, 638–639, 641–644, 674–678, 699, 702–703, 711, 722, 730, 733, 739, 744

index plot 339–340, 357, 595, 633, 718 poetry ix, xxiv–xxv, 43, 78–79, 81, 97, 114, 119, 123, 183, 186, 189, 214, 226–227, 231– 232, 234–235, 264, 267, 287, 293, 319, 363, 370, 376, 385, 410, 419–420, 430, 443, 447, 460–461, 464–465, 475, 477, 488, 511, 516, 518, 521n51, 524, 558, 576– 577, 580, 590, 592, 594–595, 597, 609, 612–613, 619, 633, 652, 668, 678, 686– 687, 690–691, 698–700, 714, 716, 719, 728, 730–733, 737, 744, 746 proportion vii, 6, 14–15, 214, 241, 247– 250, 253–266, 276, 278, 309, 352, 363–364, 382, 386, 395, 429, 434, 437, 449, 464, 467, 513–514, 527, 592, 599, 637, 645, 651, 658, 671, 685–686, 692, 699, 719, 727 realism ix–x, xxvi–xxvii, xxxvi, 296, 306, 314–315, 387, 397–399, 404–405, 419n, 428, 492, 494 rhythm vii, 214–242, 246, 248, 256, 260, 265–266, 268, 278–279, 293, 320, 363, 385, 420–422, 429, 434, 439, 574, 674– 675, 709 sculpture 193, 248, 265, 369, 386, 427, 439, 545, 558, 574, 597, 619–622, 638, 644, 674–676 social task 374, 377, 408, 417–418, 422– 423, 425–426, 430–431, 437–438, 445, 544, 708, 726 substantiality xiii, xxxvii, 439, 463, 519–520, 553, 555, 653–565, 657–661, 663–664, 667, 669–670, 672–673, 675, 679, 684–686, 689–690, 729, 740 symmetry vii, 213, 241–249, 256–258, 260, 265–266, 278, 421–422, 429, 434, 628, 645 astrology 106–107 Augier, Émile 571 Augustine of Hippo 667 avant-garde xxix, 499, 615, 626, 632, 637, 645, 688, 739 Baader, Franz von 472 Bacon, Francis xln70, 11, 123, 157–164, 259, 475, 649, 680, 724 Balzac, Honoré de 448, 499, 509, 534, 609, 719 Bayle, Pierre 48

767 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de 707 Beckett, Samuel 695–696 Becque, Henry 367n Beethoven, Ludwig van 289, 511, 532, 591, 628, 647–648, 707, 721–722, 739 belief xxii, 16, 91–92, 94–106, 110, 149, 171, 207, 215, 325, 327, 329, 333, 339, 358, 401, 470, 472, 612 Belinsky, Vissarion 599 Benseler, Frank 21 Berenson, Bernard 436, 494 Berg, Alban 726 Bergson, Henri 141, 615 Berkeley, George 17, 303 Bernal, John Desmond 30–31, 62, 107 Bernstein, Eduard 516 Blake, William 511 Bloch, Ernst x, 20, 504–505 Boas, Franz 81, 175, 222–223, 243, 274, 286, 404–405 Bolingbroke, Henry Saint-John 190 Bonaparte, Napoleon 719 Botticelli, Sandro 435 Brecht, Bertolt x, 545, 592, 707, 722, 729 Brieux, Eugène 730 Broch, Hermann 615, 626, 726–727 Bruck, Moeller van den 615 Bruegel [the Elder], Pieter 438, 494, 586– 589, 605 Bruno, Giordano 120, 164 Bücher, Karl 215, 217–218, 223–226, 232 Bunyan, John 728 Burckhardt, Jacob 118, 120, 165, 181, 232n33, 258–260 Calvin, John 667 capitalism x, xix–xx, xxix, 17, 43, 51–52, 137, 141–144, 149, 165–169, 171, 188, 198, 299, 304, 360, 374n, 379, 397, 403, 464–465, 481, 509, 516, 578, 610–611, 617, 626, 652, 656, 695–696, 711 Romantic anti- 53–56, 64, 392, 464 Carnap, Rudolf 17 Cases, Cesare 563n15 Cassirer, Ernst 35–37, 654 catharsis xxiv–xxv, xxx Caudwell, Christopher 81, 226–228, 234, 520–521n51, 554, 686

768 Celsus, Aulus Cornelius 158 Cervantes, Miguel de 701 Don Quixote 229, 713, 723–724 Cézanne, Paul 580–581, 642, 704–705 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 428 Chardin, Jean Siméon 581 Chekhov, Anton 545 Chernyshevsky, Nikolay 61, 263, 476–478, 731, 742 Childe, Gordon 18, 65, 67, 79–80, 83, 221, 227, 378–379, 388, 393–394, 397, 398, 402, 427, 429 Cima, Giovanni Battista 642 Claudius, Matthias 371 Clement of Alexandria 285 common sense 60–62, 125, 159, 235, 525 communism xxxviii–xxxix, 171 primitive 91–92, 109, 117, 171, 224, 233, 341–342, 394, 429, 466, 468, 657 comportment aesthetic vii, xxix, 57–58, 74, 182, 201n, 252, 263, 327, 341, 355, 358, 366, 368– 371, 373–378, 424–425, 451, 460, 524, 526, 528, 539–540, 545–548, 560– 562, 564, 566, 571–573, 579, 594, 621, 630, 641, 683, 685, 692, 705–708, 741– 743 artistic 204, 212, 314, 374–375, 377–378, 547, 705 creative 374, 377, 696 disanthropomorphising 153, 172, 684 ethical 147–148, 503, 684–685, 714, 722 everyday 32, 56, 145, 171, 204, 369–370, 705 magical 80–81, 84 religious 101–102 scientific 58, 111, 169–170, 308, 374, 505, 568, 682, 705 Condivi, Ascanio 580 Conrad, Joseph 726 Corneille, Pierre 666 Courbet, Gustave 704–705 Courths-Mahler, Hedwig 728 Critias 124 Curel, François de 46, 150 Darwin, Charles 26, 188, 219, 243, 268–273, 303, 613 Darwinism 90, 171, 226, 268, 270

index Daumier, Honoré 449, 518, 713, 731–733 da Vinci, Leonardo 248, 257, 410–411, 435, 440, 580, 621–622, 640, 676 Debussy, Claude 648n44 decadence 296, 298–299, 350, 511, 680, 727 Defoe, Daniel 540 democracy xxxv–xxxix, 118, 169, 448, 467, 516, 712, 714 Democritus 18, 37, 121, 139 Descartes, René 36, 149, 158, 724 Dewey, John ix, xl, 75 dialectic(s) negation in 126, 288, 432, 469–470, 489, 583–585, 598 objective 48, 315, 317, 320, 477, 503, 551, 577, 614, 623, 640 of appearance and essence 45, 309–314, 317, 320–321, 339–340, 350, 363–364, 491, 555, 577, 662–663 of continuity and discontinuity xl, 10, 538–542, 544–545 of form and content 564, 598, 700 of inner and outer 638–643, 645, 693– 696, 701, 714, 717 of necessity and contingency 668–670 of space and time 615–629 subjective 48, 315, 415, 531, 577, 614 Dickens, Charles 637 Diderot, Denis 11, 375–377, 478n, 494, 686 Dilthey, Wilhelm 554 disanthropomorphisation vii, 103, 119, 121– 124, 126–127, 129–137, 139–142, 144–159, 163–173, 180, 182, 185–187, 202–204, 206, 208, 221, 238, 240, 250, 282, 294, 297–299, 308–309, 312–314, 323, 328, 353, 407, 442, 444, 466, 475–476, 483, 489–491, 497, 505, 507, 521, 542, 550, 552, 554–555, 560, 568, 600, 606, 630, 654–655, 691, 706 Dos Passos, John 632 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 512, 660, 718–719 Dumas, Alexandre ( fils) 571 Dürer, Albrecht 248, 257–259, 261–262 Einstein, Albert 592 Eliot, T.S. 524, 577, 610 Éluard, Paul 730 empiricism 94–95, 106–107, 127, 157–158, 213, 249, 257, 259, 309, 603, 661

index Engels, Friedrich 8, 65–67, 74, 88, 176, 314, 509–510, 519 Anti-Dühring 52, 68n, 199, 312, 432, 583, 613 Dialectics of Nature 26, 66, 78, 90, 106, 136, 176, 179, 243, 308, 311–312, 667 German Ideology 148, 455, 656–657 Holy Family 52, 424n, 688n7 Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy 31, 38, 177, 289 Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State 92, 270, 275 ‘Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring’ 116, 197 Epicurus 11, 18–19, 121, 135, 139, 467, 721–722 epistemology xxxiv, 6, 11, 22, 33–34, 36, 53, 62, 73, 96, 109, 126–127, 139–141, 159– 162, 164, 168, 196, 241, 302–303, 306, 308–309, 311, 315, 382, 444, 484–486, 489, 521, 615, 620, 629, 671, 724 Ernst, Paul 297 ethics xxiv, xxx, xlii, 6, 17–18, 21, 82, 85, 91– 93, 97–100, 109, 112, 121, 133, 145–151, 165, 181, 190, 233, 262, 333, 370, 372, 424, 443, 448–451, 459–460, 465–469, 472, 496, 501–503, 505–507, 510, 520, 571–572, 584, 588, 590, 684–685, 687, 691–692, 700, 709, 713–715, 717–722 Euripides xviii, 180, 448, 534 everyday and evocation 349–357 capitalist 51–53, 55–56, 143, 453 thinking 22, 24, 27, 30, 32, 35, 37, 39–40, 42–44, 47, 53, 59–62, 68, 72, 80, 83, 93, 95–97, 105, 107–112, 119–121, 124–126, 131, 145–146, 153, 156–159, 161–164, 169– 170, 174, 255, 318–320, 347, 354, 448, 451, 480, 535, 567, 576, 611, 613–616, 629, 649–650, 652, 705 evolution 18 existentialism 17, 465, 502, 563 expressionism 296, 298, 511, 686 false consciousness 74–77, 271, 329, 404, 425, 454, 458, 471n, 484, 508, 514, 578, 743 Farrington, Benjamin 157 fetish(isation) 73, 173, 195, 222–223, 422, 445, 513–514, 553, 600, 608–612, 614–

769 616, 618, 620, 625–626, 628–629, 632, 635–637, 649–654, 658, 661, 665, 668, 671–673, 681–682, 693, 695–696, 698, 713, 715, 740 de- viii, 10, 513–514, 608, 610–612, 618, 624, 632, 636, 644, 648–651, 664–665, 670–671, 674, 693, 710–711, 716 Feuerbach, Ludwig 18, 110, 114, 289, 308– 309, 311, 487, 499 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 698 Fiedler, Konrad 57, 177, 195–197, 208, 441, 543, 546, 562–563, 573, 618 Fischer, Ernst 68–69, 246, 279, 284 Flaubert, Gustave 229, 494, 508 Fludd, Robert 123 Fontane, Theodore 508–509, 726 Fourier, Charles 304, 510 Fra Angelico 473, 613 France, Anatole 515, 517 Francesca, Piero della 494, 580 Frazer, James George xviii, 80–85, 87, 91– 93, 215, 325, 345–346, 358–59, 390, 393, 468 French Revolution 151, 244, 515, 517, 527, 547, 722, 731 Freud, Sigmund 73, 227 Galilei, Galileo 120, 123, 156–158, 162, 164, 281, 592, 690 Gassendi, Pierre 123, 164 Gehlen, Arnold xviii, xl, 54, 67, 75–76, 86, 147, 176–178, 181, 222–223, 228, 321, 333– 334, 390–393 Geibel, Emanuel 594 George, Stefan 267, 287 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 440 Gibbon, Edward 154 Gide, André 637 Gillen, Francis James 400 Giorgione 540, 644 Giotto 440, 473, 531, 675–676 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 11, 18–19, 230–231, 235, 360, 367, 375, 389, 420, 467, 473–474, 478n, 506, 508, 522, 545– 547, 592, 606, 619, 631, 634, 652, 660, 681–682, 692–694, 696, 701, 710, 713– 715, 723, 733 Conversations with Eckermann 203–204 ‘Epirrhema’ 714

770 ‘Euphrosyne’ 447 Faust 46, 150, 229, 259, 447–448, 458, 518 Hermann and Dorothea 231 Iphigenia in Tauris 421 Italian Journey 681–682 ‘Marienbad Elegy’ 516, 746 Maxims and Reflections 40–42, 204– 205, 217, 234, 347, 600n45, 714–715 Natural Daughter 310 ‘On Interpreting Aristotle’s Poetics’ 720 ‘Proverbs in Rhyme’ 150 Sorrows of Young Werther 516, 719 Theory of Colours 416–418 Torquato Tasso 516n47 ‘Ultimatum’ 690–691 Wilhelm Meister 692, 715 Gogol, Nikolai 718 Gorki, Maxim 508, 517, 519, 686–688, 690, 707, 737 Goya, Francisco 518, 730 Groos, Karl 86, 303 Grünewald, Matthias 473 habit(uation) xx, xxiv, xxxi, xxxvii–xxxix, 29–31, 33, 41, 45, 47, 60, 65, 67, 70–71, 75–78, 82, 92, 96, 107–108, 112, 117, 156, 161–162, 178, 216, 219, 222, 249, 270, 321, 381, 394, 402, 407, 417–418, 422, 424, 446, 452, 459, 572, 612–613, 616–617, 649, 664, 673, 709, 716, 743 Hamann, Johann Georg 189–190 Hambidge, Edward John 281 Hanslick, Eduard 645–646 Hartmann, Nicolai 102–103, 352n, 595–597, 625 Hauptmann, Gerhart 367n Hebbel, Christian Friedrich 290, 636–637 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich viii, xiv– xvii, xxxii, 6–7, 9–12, 20, 40, 50, 62, 104, 157, 159, 176, 188, 213, 281–282, 289, 292– 293, 309–310–311, 345, 355–356, 364, 449, 476–477, 478n, 479–481, 484–485, 488, 490, 504, 517, 519–521, 526–528, 531, 538, 546, 549–551, 555, 589, 599, 602, 617, 619–620, 627, 635–636, 654, 660, 677–678, 686, 694–696 Encyclopaedia Logic 39, 68n, 293, 323, 338, 485, 638–639, 643, 664–665 Faith and Knowledge 496

index Jenenser Realphilosophie 28 Lectures on Aesthetics viii, xv, 348, 359, 514, 517, 521 Lectures on the History of Philosophy 126, 135, 565, 585–586, 678, 722 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 414 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History 423 ‘On the Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy’ 125 Phenomenology of Spirit 39, 74, 190–191, 280, 488, 490, 495–496, 519, 526–527, 744 Philosophical Propaedeutic 549–550, 552 Philosophy of Nature 243, 551, 557, 603, 615–616 Philosophy of Right 715 Science of Logic 100, 129, 211, 280, 310, 319–320, 489, 550, 552, 583, 662, 671– 672, 694, 696 System of Ethical Life 412–413 Heidegger, Martin ix, xvn18, 54–56, 81, 141, 412n, 563, 615 Heine, Heinrich 506, 527, 692 Heller, Ágnes xxxiv–xxxv, xxxix–xl, 21 Hemsterhuis, François 255, 473–474, 478, 621–622 Heraclitus 125, 180, 522, 585, 614, 624–625 Herder, Johann Gottfried 44, 251 Hero of Alexandria 120 Herodotus 185 Hesse, Hermann 721 Hildebrand, Adolf von 546, 563 Hitler, Adolf 81, 234, 453 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 146, 149, 151 Hoernes, Moritz 268, 275, 388, 394, 397, 421–422 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 469, 680–681, 701 Homer 97, 300, 335, 405–406, 430, 453, 495, 534, 540, 612, 632–634, 650–651, 672, 701, 735 homogeneous medium xxi–xxii, 151–154, 413–414, 440–442, 445–446, 460, 473–474, 557–567, 572–576, 578–586, 588–591, 595, 597–599, 602, 605–606, 618–621, 624–628, 635, 639, 646, 648, 659, 674, 702–707, 710, 728–729, 734, 736, 741–742

index Hugo, Victor 728, 731 humanisation xiv, xvii, xxiii, xxxi, 132, 166, 178, 181, 188, 190–191, 458, 465–466, 503–504, 509, 613, 641 de- 147, 149, 298, 681 in- 165 humanism x–xiii, xviii, xxxvi, 148–150, 167, 304, 330, 460, 581, 744 anti- xxxi, 298 Hume, David 303, 486, 630 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 350 Ibsen, Henrik 20, 173, 374, 713 idealism xiv, 61, 82–85, 89–90, 99–100, 122, 127–129, 164, 176–177, 190–191, 213, 308–311, 391, 400, 413, 423, 432, 436, 480–482, 485, 523, 538, 554, 566, 568, 596, 625, 660, 686, 691 absolute 519–520 aesthetics of 11, 14–16, 187, 194–197, 520– 521, 543, 708 objective 7, 129, 139, 188, 303, 452, 476, 488–489, 506–507 philosophical 11–16, 21, 37–38, 64, 109, 129, 177, 193–194, 228, 303, 305, 499, 649, 653, 659, 697 religious 125 subjective xvi, 24, 34–36, 42, 139–141, 165, 173, 188, 251, 284, 303, 452, 476, 484, 486, 488, 525, 543, 571, 686, 695 Ignatius of Loyola 333 immanence 17–18, 148, 297, 329, 333, 365, 458–459, 467, 612, 733 impressionism 296, 315, 452, 524 inherence xxvi, xxviii–xxix, 549–558, 652– 659, 662, 664, 735 intuition 73 Joachim of Fiore 113 Jung, Carl 73 Kafka, Franz 578, 695 Kant, Immanuel 6, 20, 91, 95, 97, 109, 159, 188, 197, 283–284, 287, 303, 415–416, 435, 448–449, 463, 467, 483–484, 502, 528, 566–567, 570–572, 596, 618, 630, 692, 695, 697–698, 708, 715 Critique of the Power of Judgement 8, 251–254, 284, 415, 524–525, 571–572

771 Critique of Pure Reason 99, 615–616, 653 Keats, John 460–461 Keller, Gottfried 230, 487, 626, 637, 676, 723 Kepler, Johannes 123, 627 Kerr, Alfred 367n, 524 Kierkegaard, Søren 19, 54, 104, 106, 140, 151, 590–591, 695 kitsch 651, 726–727, 729 Klages, Ludwig 36, 81, 523, 615, 640 Kleist, Heinrich von 673 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 231, 463–467, 473, 478 Kott, Jan 264 Kühn, Herbert 388, 399 labour vii, xii, xix, xxxii–xxxiii, 12–13, 15–16, 24, 26–33, 35, 37–38, 45, 50–51, 57–58, 64–71, 76–77, 81–86, 89–90, 93, 98–100, 115, 116–118, 120, 127–129, 132, 135, 138, 141, 146, 153, 158, 165–171, 175–178, 182, 190–191, 193, 196, 198–203, 214–228, 230, 232–233, 237–240, 246, 248–251, 253– 255, 268–270, 273, 279, 281–282, 290, 303–305, 307–308, 311–313, 316, 318, 320, 323, 325–327, 349–350, 353, 360, 368, 375, 378–379, 381–382–383, 401, 406–407, 412–413, 426, 429, 435, 445, 465, 472, 479–484, 486, 491, 497–498, 500–502, 507, 516–517, 521, 535–536, 562, 565, 567, 574, 608, 610, 616, 631, 641, 657, 661, 682–683, 690, 699–701, 738 language xxi, xxix, xxxiv, 26, 64–65, 70– 73, 77–80, 86, 160, 176, 195–196, 224, 235, 317–318, 401, 406, 521–522, 614, 617, 649 everyday 48, 160 literary 47, 78, 183, 235, 419–421 scientific 46–47 Lask, Emil 20 Lassalle, Ferdinand 8 Lavater, Johann Kaspar 640 Lawrence, D.H. 681 Leibl, Wilhelm 644 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 48–50, 238, 284, 308–309, 311, 462, 690 Lenin, Vladimir xxxv, 8, 10, 19, 45, 62, 346, 510, 533, 546, 602–603, 614, 635, 671– 672, 707

772 ‘Collapse of the Second International’ 671 Materialism and Empirio-criticism 36, 629–630 Philosophical Notebooks 50, 114, 213, 228, 305, 309n–311, 323, 363, 484–485, 489, 565, 664–665 State and Revolution xxxix ‘Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution’ 62 What Is to Be Done? 59, 322 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 11, 477, 478n, 522, 542, 569, 572, 619–622, 631–633, 635, 644, 666, 709, 720, 722 Leucippus 37 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien xviii, 44, 64, 71–72, 80, 108, 215, 552 Lewis, Sinclair 726 Liebermann, Max 313 Lifshitz, Mikhail 8, 563n15 Lillo, George 726 Linnaeus, Carl 548 Linton, Ralph xviii, 91 Lipps, Theodor 296 Lorrain, Claude 512 Lucian 372–373 Lucretius 135, 183 Lukács, Georg ‘Chernyshevsky’s Novel What Is To Be Done?’ 731 Contributions to the History of Aesthetics 478n, 697n Destruction of Reason 298n120 Essays on Realism 315n, 452n German Realists in the Nineteenth Century 508n43 Goethe and His Age 150n44, 478n Historical Novel 213n37 History and Class Consciousness xxii, xxxiv–xxxv Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as Literary Historians 680n Meaning of Contemporary Realism 315n, 578n, 610n6 ‘On Particularity as an Aesthetic Category’ 484n19 Prolegomena to a Marxist Aesthetic 484n19 Russian Realism in World Literature 61n58, 263n, 710

index Theory of the Novel 21 Thomas Mann 374n Twist of Fate 577n25 Young Hegel 190n, 479n14, 488n26, 506n Lysippos 477 Mach, Ernst 17, 654 Machiavelli, Niccolò 154 magic vii, xi, 17, 79–85, 87–94, 96–100, 102, 108–111, 113, 115, 123, 172, 174, 179– 183, 187, 202, 206–207, 215, 221, 225, 233–235, 237–240, 277, 281, 299, 318, 323–326, 328–334, 336, 338–343, 345– 346, 349, 357–359, 361–362, 366–368, 370, 372–374, 377–380, 381, 383, 387– 395, 398, 401, 405–406, 411, 427, 453, 456–457, 459, 466–468, 470, 473, 519, 535–536, 552, 554, 574, 612, 638, 646, 660, 678, 686, 696 Mahler, Gustav 646 Makarenko, Anton 710 Mallarmé, Stéphane 686–687 Malraux, André 297 Manet, Édouard 581, 638 man-made-whole (der Mensch ganz) xix, xxiii, xxxv, xlii, 57–58, 151, 153–155, 460, 574, 576–582, 595, 635, 664, 705–707, 710, 712, 729, 734–735, 741–742 Mann, Heinrich 721 Mann, Thomas 186, 300 Death in Venice 508 ‘Disorder and Early Sorrow’ 155 Doctor Faustus 374, 627, 633, 646, 660, 721 Joseph and His Brothers 271 Magic Mountain 143–144, 509, 515 Story of a Novel 95, 633 Tonio Kröger 374 Tristan 721 Martini, Simone 613 Marx, Karl x, xii, xxxi, 8–9, 19, 38, 43, 53, 64, 117, 154, 165, 167–168, 186, 192–193, 198–199, 258, 273, 276, 295, 299, 405, 429–430, 457, 483, 489, 515, 546, 627, 686, 724 Capital 15, 27–28, 144, 165–167, 192–193, 247, 479n15, 513, 608–611, 616 Critique of the Gotha Programme 510 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 xii, xxxi, 31, 51–52, 167n,

index 190–192, 194, 269, 279, 480–481, 498– 500, 504 Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 25, 53, 118, 137–138, 166 German Ideology 148, 455, 656– 657 Grundrisse 304–305, 406, 534–535 Holy Family 52, 424n, 688n7 Poverty of Philosophy 137 ‘Revolutionary Spain’ 527 Theories of Surplus Value 52, 118 Value, Price and Profit 112, 617 Marxism xxviin30, xxxii, xxxiv–xxxv, xxxviii, 7–11, 21, 52, 109, 150n44, 179, 188, 191–193, 234, 479n14, 481, 498, 515, 520, 533, 546, 609, 671, 731 aesthetics of vii, x–xi, 8–9 materialism xxvii, xxxiv, 11–13, 82, 128, 303, 568, 660, 662, 689, 697 dialectical ix, xix, xxvii, 7–9, 19–20, 22, 24, 26, 42–43, 50, 136, 168, 176, 197, 213, 228, 305, 403, 421, 477, 478n, 484, 546, 667, 671, 687, 738 historical xvi, 7–8, 12, 22, 60, 62, 136, 155, 168, 213, 300–301, 314, 341, 348, 359, 374, 389, 403, 407, 423, 426, 475, 546, 652, 726 mechanical 24, 38, 188, 305, 308, 476, 498, 686 metaphysical 50, 228 philosophical 37–38, 110, 122, 612 spontaneous 33–38, 61, 82, 87, 122, 145, 612–613, 660, 662 mathematics 16, 57, 107, 117, 119, 127, 132, 152–154, 158, 168, 173, 208, 279, 281, 283, 298–299, 379, 521, 559–561, 626, 655 Mayakovsky, Vladimir 730, 732 Mehring, Franz 8, 74, 188 Meyer, Eduard 181 Meyerson, Émile 264 Michelangelo 433, 449, 580–581, 591, 640, 644, 674, 676, 704, 722 Milton, John 728 mimesis vii, xi, xxiv, 225, 302–325, 338–339, 493–494 aesthetic 152, 390, 407, 484, 503, 505– 506, 511, 513, 515, 525–526, 691

773 and ecstasy 333–337, 391, 395 and frenzy 452–454 artistic 303, 324, 332, 407–410, 421, 425– 437, 439–441, 445, 448, 459–460, 473, 476, 482, 484–486, 491–492, 494–495, 646–647, 691 magical 324, 330, 341, 358–359, 368, 373, 456–457 Molière 61, 312, 448–449, 518, 613 More, Thomas 510, 728 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 647 Münzer, Thomas 113 Musil, Robert 147, 606, 634–635, 688–689, 703 naturalism 226, 306, 314–315, 373, 397–399, 452, 482, 603, 632, 737 Neue Sachlichkeit 298, 737 Newton, Isaac 690 Nexø, Andersen 517 Nietzsche, Friedrich 336, 452–453, 487 Nievo, Ippolito 527 Novalis 443, 650 O’Neill, Eugene 545 ontology xin13, xxv, xxxiv, 14–15, 54–55, 91, 129, 188, 299, 429, 454, 465, 594, 660, 688 opinion 11, 34, 75, 91–92, 95–99, 101–102, 105, 445, 543, 591–593 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 592 Origen 285 Ortega y Gasset, José 141, 297–298 Pareto, Vilfredo 28, 83 Pascal, Blaise 132, 140, 142, 165, 298 Pavlov, Ivan xxxix, 23, 26, 44, 46–47, 50, 71, 215–216, 218, 302, 381–383, 401–402, 555, 649 Petőfi, Sándor 730, 732–733, 742 phenomenology 53, 55 photography 312–313, 620 Planck, Max 144–145 Plato viiin2, 12, 100, 120, 123, 126–128, 130– 134, 139, 142, 157, 160, 162, 183, 281–282, 291, 303, 462, 477, 487, 523, 646, 653, 697, 716, 721 Cratylus 79 Euthydemus 40

774 Laws 234 Seventh Letter 126 Symposium 585 Platonism 127, 552, 612, 679 Neo- 127, 130, 132–133, 523 Plekhanov, Georgi 8, 271 Pliny the Elder 477 Plotinus 100, 127–131, 134, 139, 262, 333, 467 Plutarch 120, 232 Poe, Edgar Allan 231–232, 596–597 Popper, Leo 586–588, 605 positivism 17, 81, 140, 309, 554, 653 Prantl, Carl 40, 550, 600, 655 Preetorius, Emil 581 proletariat xxxiv–xxxv, xxxvii, 52, 137, 424n, 456, 516 Protagoras 119, 124, 126 Proust, Marcel 686–688, 690 Pythagoras 162, 281, 627 Raabe, Wilhelm 527 Ranke, Leopold von 272 Raphael 244, 433, 540, 733 Rathenau, Walther 523 Read, Herbert , 82–83 reflection of reality aesthetic xxi, 14, 16, 22–23, 42, 47, 87, 169, 172, 174, 183, 199–201, 208–212, 229, 236, 245, 250–253, 256, 259–263, 266– 267, 282, 284, 294–295, 328–329, 331, 351, 357, 359–361, 364–365, 367–368, 373–374, 377, 386, 407, 422, 432, 442, 476–477, 489–492, 530–531–532, 535– 537, 538, 551, 554, 559–562, 565, 567, 570, 573–574, 579, 582, 584–585, 591, 593, 598–599, 602, 605–607, 609–611, 614, 618, 624–625, 630–631, 649, 651– 652, 654–661, 664–667, 670–672, 677, 679, 685–691, 693, 696, 700, 703, 723– 724, 727–728, 732–734, 736–737, 739, 745–746 anthropomorphising 164, 180– 182, 187, 204, 208, 263–264, 654– 655 artistic 14, 16, 18, 22–25, 42–44, 47, 87– 88, 152, 171, 173, 179–180, 200, 208, 237–238, 241–243, 247–248, 258, 280, 282–283, 289, 296, 300–301, 306–307, 312, 314, 320, 328, 375–376, 394, 410,

index 425, 466, 553–554, 568–569, 577, 656, 703, 715, 717, 735 disanthropomorphising viii, 119, 122, 135, 140, 142, 150–151, 154–155, 157–158, 164, 168–169, 172, 180–181, 187, 202–203, 308, 466, 542, 550, 554–555, 560, 573, 579, 627, 684, 573, 579, 627, 654, 684 everyday 23–25, 27–39, 62, 93–94, 113, 118, 180, 316–317, 326, 331–332, 351, 353– 354, 357, 365, 529, 617, 739 magical 88–89, 329, 336–337, 349, 359 photographic 13, 24, 305, 312–313, 315, 319, 492, 620, 651, 684 religious 93–94, 111–113, 118, 329 scientific 16–17, 22–25, 39, 44, 87–88, 112–114, 116–121, 134, 136–137, 139, 141, 145, 151–152, 156, 159, 164, 171–173, 174, 180, 183, 185–186, 192–193, 200–202, 204, 208–211, 242–243, 250, 255, 280, 282, 294–295, 307–308, 330, 349, 368, 401–402, 407, 442, 466–467, 475, 478, 490, 497, 506, 521, 526, 529, 532, 535– 536, 539, 559–561, 565, 567–569, 573, 584, 586, 593, 599, 602, 609, 655–657, 661, 670–672, 677, 679, 690, 706, 723, 736, 745 theory of 126–127, 135, 226, 228–229, 242, 303, 305–306, 315, 477, 686–687 reification xxii, xxxiv–xxxv, 452, 632 religion vii, xi, xxii, 6, 12–13, 17–19, 24, 34– 36, 38, 50, 63–64, 80, 82–85, 87, 90–125, 127, 129–135, 137, 140, 142–146, 151, 164– 165, 168, 171, 174, 179–182, 186–187, 205–207, 221, 243, 250, 265, 277, 281, 285, 324, 328–329, 334, 336, 343, 357, 373, 378–380, 390–391, 394, 411, 427, 431, 446, 453, 459, 462, 465–467, 470– 473, 487, 496, 498, 536, 579, 610, 630, 638, 642–644, 649, 667 Rembrandt 244, 289, 433, 435, 438, 532, 590, 592, 640, 722 Rensch, Bernhard 219–220 rhetoric 40, 183–185, 349, 352, 354, 466, 599–602, 728–729, 731, 737 Ricardo, David 52, 198 Rickert, Heinrich 34, 543 Riegl, Alois 245, 274, 285, 290, 419n, 436– 438 Rilke, Rainer Maria 581, 642, 716, 722

index Rimbaud, Arthur 580 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 632, 681 Rohde, Erwin 335–336, 452–453 Rosenberg, Alfred 81 Rothacker, Erich xviii, 34 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 572, 731 Ruben, Walter 106–107 Rubens, Peter Paul 676 Rubens, Peter Paul 676 Ruisdael, Jacob van 639 Sappho 580 Sarasin, Paul 246 Sardou, Victorien 571 Savinkov, Boris 719 Scheler, Max 141 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 12, 39, 106, 462, 487–488, 490, 627, 666–667, 673, 697 Scheltema, Frederik Adama van 215, 272– 273, 275, 286, 387–388, 396, 427–429 Schiller, Friedrich 51, 61, 183, 235–237, 439, 467, 508, 511–512, 522–523, 545–546, 572, 592, 631, 637, 652, 666–667, 692, 697–701, 715, 728, 731, 737, 739–740 Don Carlos 523 ‘Ideal and Life’ 293–294 On the Aesthetic Education of Man 304, 697–698 Wallenstein 235, 523, 666, 699, 701 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 140, 487, 496, 502 Schmidt, Conrad 671 Schmidt, Max 88, 108, 316 Schopenhauer, Arthur 412n, 453, 487, 615, 665 Schubert, Franz 647 science(s) xxviii, 13, 15–16, 24–25, 28–33, 36, 39–43, 46–47, 51, 56–65, 71, 77, 80, 83–84, 86–88, 94–95, 99, 101–103, 106–114, 135–136, 138–142, 144–146, 148, 151–153, 155–158, 160, 165–173, 174–175, 179–180, 183–188, 200, 202, 206–213, 221, 223, 228, 238, 241, 250, 254, 256, 279–283, 291, 294, 298–299, 305, 311, 315, 318, 323–325, 328, 334, 340, 349, 363–364, 368, 372, 374, 378– 380, 411–412, 423–424, 426, 444, 448, 450–451, 453, 457–459, 467, 472, 476,

775 483, 486, 489, 497–498, 501–502, 505, 507, 510, 527, 533–534–536, 541–543, 545, 548, 550–556, 559–561, 565, 567– 570, 573, 580, 584, 589, 591–592, 599, 602–603, 606–607, 608–609, 611–616, 629, 634, 636, 640, 649–650, 654–658, 662, 670–671, 673, 677, 684, 689–690, 693–694, 705, 731, 734, 736, 738, 743– 745 ancient Greek 116–126, 129–132, 135 anthropology vii, xviii, xxvi, xxxii– xxxiii, 14–16, 22, 26–27, 34, 51, 65, 75, 131, 145–146, 150, 159–160, 165, 176, 178, 191, 194, 228, 272–273, 303, 326n, 330, 406–407, 416, 465–466, 499, 509, 630, 713 astronomy 60, 106–107, 112, 117, 119, 139, 156, 171, 190, 221 biology 15, 26, 43, 208 chemistry 166, 379, 543 geometry 108, 117, 120, 126–127, 132, 158, 172, 223, 248–249, 280–282, 284, 294, 299, 411, 426, 431, 435, 521, 545, 615–616, 627 medicine 221, 640 natural 16, 36, 90, 94, 106, 121, 147, 179, 197, 298, 308, 312, 411, 539, 542, 548, 654, 667, 682, 691, 745 physics xxxviii, 142, 145, 164, 173, 190, 208, 543, 617 psychology xxi, xxxix, 6, 14, 30, 41, 51, 73–75, 77, 96, 127, 146, 186, 191, 196, 204, 259, 270, 273, 321, 326, 334, 341, 373, 375, 386, 431, 471, 498, 523, 547, 553–555, 557, 574, 604, 606, 620, 635, 639–640, 675, 681, 683, 725, 743–744 social 16, 152–154, 168, 171, 183, 186, 192, 539, 542, 617 statistics 43, 168 Seghers, Anna 610n6 self-consciousness viii, xiii–xv, xviii–xix, 70, 203–206, 208, 210, 219–222, 225–227, 233–234, 238–239, 254–256, 330, 368, 413, 459, 488–490, 520, 526–527, 530– 532, 534–537, 538, 541, 582, 585, 588, 592, 627, 716, 733, 740, 746 Semper, Gottfried 274, 290 Senior, Nassau 118 Sextus Empiricus 124–125, 521

776 Shakespeare, William 61, 289, 363, 371, 377, 385, 423, 448–449, 517, 542, 605, 635– 637, 660, 676, 701, 722–723, 728, 737 Antony and Cleopatra 728 Coriolanus 514–515 Hamlet 229, 449, 605, 633, 640, 676, 678, 739 Julius Caesar 449, 728 King Lear 517, 676, 740 Macbeth 514, 517, 635–636, 660 Othello 369, 448, 587 Richard iii 448, 739 Romeo and Juliet 369, 636 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 511 Sidney, Philip 392, 475–476 Silesius, Angelus 487 Simmel, Georg 24, 104–105 Sinclair, Upton 564, 737 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de 167 socialism x, xxix, xxxv–xxxviii, 10, 52–53, 109, 151, 169, 171–172, 304, 403, 509–510, 567, 712, 738, 743 Socrates 148, 467 Sophocles 180, 448, 495, 722 Antigone 330, 457, 517, 661, 735 Oedipus Rex 453, 457 species-being xxvi, xxviii, xxxi–xxxii, xxxvii, 269, 481, 500–501 Spencer, Walter Baldwin 400 Spengler, Oswald 428 Spinoza, Baruch 11, 18, 146, 149–151, 158, 162– 164, 179, 281, 470, 513, 583, 693, 724 Ethics 146, 149–150 ‘Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect’ 162–163 sport 31, 58, 76, 313, 321, 327 Staiger, Emil 516n Stalin, Joseph xxxvi, 10, 517, 738–740 Stalinism x, xxix, xxxv–xxxvii, 7n, 9–10, 171, 739–740 Stendhal 392, 527, 719 Stifter, Adalbert 632 Stirner, Max 148 Storm, Theodor 594 Stowe, Harriet Beecher xxiii–xxiv, 570 Strindberg, August 489 surrealism 173, 315, 511, 686 Swift, Jonathan 264, 512, 728 Szabolcsi, Bence 21

index Tacitus 189 Tertullian 19 Thales of Miletus 121 Thierry, Augustin 154 Thomson, George Derwent 84, 339 Thucydides 185n Tintoretto 440 Titian 253, 292, 473, 540, 591 Tolstoy, Leo 61–62, 508–509, 609, 676, 701 Anna Karenina 79, 253, 686, 699–700, 718 Fruits of Enlightenment 61 Kreutzer Sonata 646 War and Peace 669–670 transcendence 17–19, 97–102, 109–110, 148– 149, 164, 239, 262, 286, 297, 329, 333, 337, 348, 389–390, 453–454, 459, 463, 487, 612, 644–645, 666, 673, 712 magical 332–335, 343, 358–359 otherworldly 132–133, 207–207, 470–472 this-worldly xxii, 19, 98, 115 Tylor, Edward Burnett 2, 81, 84, 91 Uexküll, Jacob von 34–35 unconscious 13, 45, 48, 55, 68, 72–77, 83, 89, 96, 133, 1443, 146, 152, 175, 186, 202, 206, 218, 229, 239, 259, 263, 283, 318, 321, 333, 339, 342–343, 361, 377, 389, 399, 422– 423, 456, 481, 483, 487, 489, 496, 514, 531, 533, 537, 557, 571, 591, 654, 686, 727, 734, 737–738, 741 utopia(n) xxvn23, xxviin30, xxxiv, 51, 443, 477, 509–513, 537, 577, 728 Valéry, Paul 701 van Eyck, Jan 638 van Gogh, Vincent 540 Vanini, Lucilio 164 Vermeer, Johannes 644 Verworn, Max 397, 400, 402 Vico, Giovanni Battista 11, 90, 92, 113, 171– 172, 189–190, 192 Virgil xviii, 534 Vischer, Friedrich Theodor viii, 476 Vischer, Robert 296 Vivaldi, Antonio 733 Voltaire 371, 666 Voss, Johann Heinrich 231 Vuillard, Jean-Édouard 642

777

index Wagner, Richard 453, 648, 721 Wallace, Alfred Russel 86 Weber, Max 20, 170 Wedekind, Frank 367n Weyl, Hermann 243, 246, 283, 294 whole man (der ganze Mensch) xix–xiv, xxx, xlii, 49–51, 56–58, 97–99, 101, 105, 143, 151, 153–155, 165, 197–199, 204–207, 252, 311–313, 324–325, 349, 351, 395, 400, 424, 451, 460, 464–465, 497, 503, 565–566, 571–580, 582, 595, 618, 635, 690, 692, 698, 705–707, 710–711, 722, 725, 729, 734–735, 740–744 Wickhoff, Franz 408–410, 415 Wilde, Oscar 524 Windelband, Wilhelm 543 Wingert, Paul Stover 91 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 227–228 Woermann, Karl 259 Wölfflin, Heinrich 232, 244–246, 258, 435, 440 world(edness) xviii, xxi, xxv–xxviii, xxx, xxxii, xxxvii–xxxviii, xl, 152–153, 205, 253, 258, 260–261, 277–278, 384–387, 390, 394–396, 402, 405, 408–409,

412–414, 417–418, 420–421, 429–431, 434, 436, 440–443, 450–451, 455–460, 476, 478n, 491, 494, 504, 506, 520, 537, 540, 543, 545, 559–560, 568–571, 574, 578, 581–582, 584–585, 597, 604–606, 618–619, 623–624, 626–628, 635–637, 642, 649–651, 655, 657, 659, 661, 682, 685–686, 692, 700–706, 710, 723, 729, 734–736, 740–741, 746 worldless(ness) 239–241, 253–254, 258, 265, 267, 277–279, 283, 291, 293, 295, 300, 326, 384, 386, 395, 397–398, 404–405, 414–415, 429, 433, 439, 683, 686 Worringer, Wilhelm 235, 248, 296–301, 396, 428–429, 554 Xenophanes 110, 123, 487, 613 Xenophon 226 Zeno of Elea 565, 619–620, 624–625 Zeuxis 358 Zhdanov, Andrei 9 Zinoviev, Grigory 602 Zola, Émile 173, 632, 634, 636–637