Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic

X Schopenhauer and Herbart

Æsthetic mysticism in the opponents of Idealism.

Nothing, perhaps, shows more clearly how well this imaginative conception of art suited the spirit of the times (not only a particular fashion in philosophy, but the psychological conditions expressed by the Romantic movement) than the fact that the adversaries of the systems of Schelling, Solger and Hegel either agreed with this conception in general or, while believing themselves to be departing widely from it, actually returned to it involuntarily.

A. Schopenhauer.

Everybody knows with what lack, shall we say, of phlegma philosophicum Arthur Schopenhauer fought against Schelling, Hegel and all the “charlatans” and “professors” who had divided amongst themselves the heritage of Kant. But what was the artistic theory accepted and developed by Schopenhauer?

Ideas as the object of art.

His theory, like Hegel’s own, turns upon the distinction between the concept which is abstraction and the concept which is concrete, or Idea; although Schopenhauer’s Ideas are by himself likened to Plato’s, and in the particular form in which he presents them more nearly resemble those of Schelling than the Idea of Hegel. They have something in common with intellectual concepts, for like them they are unities representing a plurality of real things: but “the concept is abstract and discursive, entirely indeterminate in its sphere, rigorously precise within its own limits only; the intellect suffices to conceive and understand it, speech expresses it without need for other intermediary, and its own definition exhausts its whole nature; the idea, on the contrary (which may be defined clearly as the adequate representative of the concept) is absolutely intuitive, and although it represents an infinite number of individual things, it is not for that any the less determined in all its aspects. The individual, as individual, cannot know it; in order to conceive it he must strip himself of all will, of all individuality, and raise himself to the state of a pure knowing subject. The idea, therefore, is attained by genius only, or by one who finds himself in a genial disposition attained by that elevation of his cognitive powers inspired usually by genius.” “The idea is unity become plurality by means of space and time, forms of one intuitive apperception; the concept, on the contrary, is unity extracted from plurality by means of abstraction, which is the procedure of our intellect: the concept may be described as unitas post yewi the idea, unitas ante rem.”1 Schopenhauer is in the habit of calling ideas the genera of things; but on one occasion he remarks that ideas are of species, not genera; that genera are simply concepts, and that there are natural species, but only logical genera.2 This psychological illusion as to the existence of ideas for types originates (as we find elsewhere in Schopenhauer) in the habit of converting the empirical classifications of the natural sciences into living realities. “Do you wish to see ideas?” he asks; “look at the clouds which scud across the sky; look at a brooklet leaping over rocks; look at the crystallization of hoar-frost on a window-pane with its designs of trees and flowers. The shapes of the clouds, the ripples of the gushing brook, the configurations of the crystals exist for us individual observers, in themselves they are indifferent. The clouds in themselves are elastic vapour; the brook is an incompressible fluid, mobile, transparent, amorphous, the ice obeys the laws of crystallization: and in these determinations their ideas consist.”3 All these are the immediate objectification of will in its various degrees; and it is these, not their pale copies in real things, that art delineates; whence Plato was right in one sense and wrong in another, and is justified and condemned by Schopenhauer exactly in the same way as by Plotinus of old, as well as by Schopenhauer’s worst enemy, the modern Schelling.4 In consequence, each art has a special category of ideas for its own dominion. Architecture, and in some cases hydraulics, facilitate the clear intuition of those ideas which constitute the lower degrees of objectification—weight, cohesion, resistance, hardness, the general properties of stone and some combinations of light; gardening and (most curious association) landscape painting represent the ideas of vegetable nature; sculpture and animal painting those of zoology; historical painting and the higher forms of sculpture that of the human body; poetry the very idea of man himself.5 As for music, that (let him who can justify the logical discontinuity) is outside the hierarchy of the other arts. We have seen how Schelling considered it to be representative of the very rhythm of the universe;6 differing but slightly from this, Schopenhauer affirms that music does not express ideas but, parallel with ideas, Will itself. The analogies between music and the world, between the fundamental bass and crude matter, between the scale and the series of species, between melody and conscious will, led him to the conclusion that music was not, as Leibniz thought, an arithmetic but a metaphysic: exercitium metaphysices occultum nescientis se philosophari animi.7

Æsthetic catharsis.

To Schopenhauer, no less than his idealistic predecessors, art beatifies; it is the flower of life; he who contemplates art is no longer an individual but a pure knowing subject, at liberty, free from desire, from pain, from time.8

Signs of a better theory in Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer’s system no doubt contains here and there premonitions of a better and more profound treatment of art. Schopenhauer, who was capable on occasion of clear and keen analysis, constantly insists that the forms of space and time must not be applied to the idea or to artistic contemplation, which admits of the general form of representation only.9 From this he might have inferred that art, so far from being a superior and extraordinary level of consciousness, is actually its most immediate level, namely that which in its primitive simplicity precedes even common perception with its reference of objects to a position in the spatial and temporal series. To free oneself from common perception and to live in imagination does not mean rising to a Platonic contemplation of the ideas, but descending once more into the region of immediate intuition, becoming children again, as Vico had seen. On the other hand Schopenhauer had begun to examine the categories of Kant with an unprejudiced eye; he was not satisfied with the two forms of intuition, and wished to add to them a third, causality.10 In conclusion, we note that, like his predecessors, he makes a comparison between art and history, with this difference and advantage over the idealist authors of the philosophy of history, that for him history was irreducible to concepts; it was contemplation of the individual, and therefore not science. Had he persevered in his comparison between art and history, he would have arrived at a better solution than that at which he stopped; that is to say, that the matter of history is the particular in its particularity and contingency, while that of art is that which is, and is always identical.11 But instead of pursuing these happy ideas Schopenhauer preferred to play variations on the themes fashionable in his day.

J. F. Herbart.

Most astounding of all is the fact that a dry intellectualist, the avowed enemy of idealism, of dialectic and of speculative constructions, head of the school calling itself realistic or the school of exact philosophy, Johann Friedrich Herbart, when he turns his attention to Æsthetic, turns mystic too, though in a slightly different way. How weightily he speaks when expounding his philosophical method! Æsthetic must not bear the blame of the faults into which metaphysic has fallen; we must make it an independent study, and detach it from all hypothesis about the universe. Nor must it be confounded with psychology or asked to describe the emotions awakened by the content of works of art, such as the pathetic or the comic, sadness or joy; its duty is to determine the essential character of art and beauty. In the analysis of particular cases of beauty and in registering what they reveal lies the way of salvation. These proposals and promises have misled numbers of people as to the nature of Herbart’s Æsthetic. But ce sont là jeux de princes; by paying attention we shall see what Herbart meant by analysis of particular case; and how he held himself aloof from metaphysics.

Pure Beauty and relations of form.

Beauty, for him, consisted in relations: relations of tone, colour, line, thought and will; experience must decide which of these relations are beautiful, and æsthetic science consists solely in enumerating the fundamental concepts (Musterbegriffe) in which are summarized the particular cases of beauty. But these relations, Herbart thought, were not like physiological facts; they could not be empirically observed, e.g. in a psycho-physical laboratory. To correct this error it is only necessary to observe that these relations include not only tones, lines and colours, but also thoughts and will, and that they extend to moral facts no less than to objects of external intuition. He declares explicitly “No true beauty is sensible, although it frequently happens that sense-impressions precede and follow the intuition of beauty.”12 There is a profound distinction between the beautiful and the pleasant; for the pleasant needs no representation, while the beautiful consists in representation of relations, followed immediately in consciousness by a judgment, an appendix (Zusatz) which expresses unqualified approbation (“es gefällt!”). And while the pleasant and the unpleasant “in the progress of culture gradually become transient and unimportant, Beauty stands out more and more as something permanent and possessed of undeniable value.”13 The judgment of taste is universal, eternal, immutable: “the complete representation (vollendete Vorstellung) of the same relations is always followed by the same judgment; just as the same cause always produces the same effect. This happens at all times and in all circumstances, conditions and complications, which gives to the particularity of certain cases the appearance of a universal rule. Granted that the elements of a relation are universal concepts, it is plain that although in judging we think only of the content of these concepts, the judgment must have a sphere as large as that common to the two concepts.”14 Herbart considers æsthetic judgements as a general class comprising ethical judgements as a subdivision: “amongst other beauties is to be distinguished morality, as a thing not only of value in itself but as actually determining the unconditioned value of persons”; within morality in the narrowest sense is distinguished in turn justice.15 The five ethica ideas guiding moral life (internal liberty, perfection, benevolence, equity and justice) are five æsthetic ideas or rather æsthetic concepts applied to relations of will.

Art as sum of content and form.

Herbart looks on art as a complex fact, the combination of an extra-æsthetic element, content, which may have logical or psychological or any other kind of value, and a purely æsthetic element, form, which is an application of the fundamental æsthetic concepts. Man looks for that which is diverting, instructive, moving, majestic, ridiculous; and “all these are mingled with the beautiful in order to procure favour and interest for the work. The beautiful thus assumes various complexions, and becomes graceful, magnificent, tragic, or comic; it can become all these because the æsthetic judgement, in itself calmly serene, tolerates the company of the most diverse excitations of the soul which are no part of itself.”16 But all these things have nothing to do with beauty. In order to discover the objectively beautiful or ugly, one must make abstraction from every predicate concerning the content. “In order to recognize the objectively beautiful or ugly in poetry, one must show the difference between this and that thought, and the discussion will concern itself with thoughts; to recognize it in sculpture, one must show the difference between this and that outline, and the discussion will turn upon outlines; to recognize it in music, one should show the difference between this and that tone, and the discussion will turn upon tones. Now, such predicates as ‘magnificent, charming, graceful’ and so forth contain nothing whatever about tones, outlines or thoughts, and therefore tell us nothing about the objectively beautiful in poetry, sculpture, or music; indeed they rather lead us to believe in the existence of an objective beauty to which thought, outline, or tone are equally accidental, which may be approached by receiving impressions from poetry, sculpture, music and so forth, obliterating the object and giving oneself up to the pure emotion of mind.”17 Very different is the æsthetic judgement, the “cold judgement of the connoisseur” who considers exclusively form, i.e. objectively pleasant formal relations. This abstraction from the content in order to contemplate pure form is the catharsis produced by art. Content is transitory, relative, subject to moral law and liable to moral judgement: form is permanent, absolute, free.18 Concrete art may be the sum of two or more values; but the æsthetic fact is form alone.

Herbart and Kantian thought.

The reader who goes behind appearances and discounts diversities of terminology will not fail to observe the close similarity of the æsthetic doctrine of Herbart to that of Kant. In Herbart we again find the distinction between free and adherent beauty, and between form and the sensuous stimulus (Reiz) attached to form: we find an affirmation of the existence of pure beauty, the object of necessary and universal, but not discursive, judgements; lastly, we find a certain connexion between beauty and morality, between Æsthetic and Ethics. In these matters Herbart is perhaps the most faithful follower and propagator of the thought of Kant, whose doctrine contains the germ of his own. In one passage he describes himself as “a Kantian, but of the year 1828”; and he is quite right, even in pointing out the exact difference in date. Amidst the errors and uncertainties of his æsthetic thought, Kant is rich in suggestion and scatters fertile seed; he belongs to a period when philosophy was still young and impressionable. Herbart, coming later, is dry and one-sided; he takes whatever is false in Kant’s doctrine and hardens it into a system. If they had done little else, the Romanticists and idealists had at least united the theory of beauty to that of art, and destroyed the rhetorical and mechanical view; and they had brought into relief (frequently exaggerating, doubtless) various important characteristics of artistic activity. Herbart re-states the mechanical view, restores the duality, and presents a capricious, narrow, barren mysticism, devoid of all breath of artistic feeling.

Notes

1 Welt als Wille u. Vorstellung, 1819 (in Sämmtl. Werke, ed. Grisebach, vol. i.). bk. iii. § 49.

2 Ergänzungen (ed. Grisebach, vol. ii.), ch. 29.

3 Welt a. W. u. V. iii. § 35.

4 See above, p. 291.

5 Welt a. W. u. V. iii. §§ 42-51.

6 See above, p. 293.

7 Welt a. W. u. V. § 53.

8 Op. cit. § 34.

9 Welt a. W. u. V. § 32.

10 Kritik d. kantischen Philosophie, in append, to op. cit. pp. 558-576.

11 Ergänzungen, ch. 38.

12 Einleitung in die Philosophie, 1813, in Werke, ed. Hartenstein, vol. 1. p. 49.

13 Einleitung in die Philosophie, pp. 125-128.

14 Allgemeine praktische Philosophie, in Werke, viii. p. 25.

15 Einleitung, p. 128.

16 Einleitung, p. 162.

17 Op. cit. pp. 129-130.

18 Op. cit. p. 163.
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