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.
XI
FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER
[Sidenote: _Æsthetic of content and Æsthetic of form: meaning of the
contrast._]
We have now reached a point when we are able to give ourselves an exact
account of the signification and importance of the celebrated war
waged for over a century in Germany between the Æsthetic of content
(_Gehaltsästhetik)_ and the Æsthetic of form (_Formästhetik_); a war
which gave birth to vast works on the history of Æsthetic undertaken
from one or other point of view, and sprang from Herbart's opposition
to the idealism of Schelling, Hegel, and their contemporaries and
followers. "Form" and "Content" are among the most equivocal words
in the whole philosophical vocabulary, particularly in Æsthetic;
sometimes, indeed, what one calls form, others call content. The
Herbartians were specially given to quoting in their own defence
Schiller's dictum, that the secret of art consists in "cancelling
content by form." But what is there in common between Schiller's
concept of "form," which placed the æsthetic activity side by side
with the moral and intellectual, and Herbart's "form," which does not
penetrate or enliven, but clothes and adorns a content? Hegel, on
the other hand, often gives the name "form" to what Schiller would
call "matter" (_Stoff_), that is, the sensible matter which it is
the business of spiritual energy to dominate. Hegel's "content" is
the idea, the metaphysical truth, the constituent element of beauty:
Herbart's "content" is the emotional and intellectual element which
falls outside beauty. The Æsthetic of "form" in Italy is an æsthetic of
expressive activity; the form is neither a clothing nor a metaphysical
idea nor sensible matter, but a representative or imaginative faculty
with the power of framing impressions; yet there have been attempts
to confute this Italian æsthetic formalism with the same arguments
that are used against German æsthetic formalism, a totally different
thing in every respect. And so forth. Having given a plain account of
the thoughts of the post-Kantian æstheticians, we shall be able to
appreciate their opponents without seeking light from their obscure
terminology or allowing ourselves to be misled by the banners they
wave. The antithesis between the Æsthetic of content and that of
form, the Æsthetic of idealism and that of realism, the Æsthetic of
Schelling, Solger, Hegel and Schopenhauer and that of Herbart, will
appear in its true light, as the lamily quarrel between two conceptions
of art united by a common mysticism, although one is destined almost to
meet with truth during its long journey, while the other wanders ever
further away.
The first half of the nineteenth century was for Germany a period of
many fine-sounding philosophical formulæ: subjectivism, objectivism,
subjective--objectivism; abstract, concrete, abstract-concrete;
idealism, realism, idealism--realism; between pantheism and theism
Krause inserted his pan-en-theism. In the midst of this uproar, in
which the second-rate men shouted down the first-rate and made good
their claim to their only true property, namely words, it is not
surprising that a few modest clear thinkers, philosophers who preferred
to think about realities, should have the worst of it and remain
unheard and unnoticed, lost among the roaring crowd or labelled with a
false ticket.
[Sidenote: _Friedrich Schleiermacher._]
This, at least, seems to have been the lot of Friedrich Schleiermacher,
whose æsthetic doctrine is amongst the least known although it is
perhaps the most noteworthy of the day.
[Sidenote: _Wrong judgements concerning him._]
Schleiermacher delivered his first lectures on Æsthetic at Berlin
University in 1819, and from that date he began to study the subject
seriously with a view to writing a book on it. He repeated his
lectures on two occasions, in 1825 and 1832-1833; but his death,
which occurred in the following year, prevented him from carrying
out his plan, and all we know of his thoughts on Æsthetic comes from
his lectures, as collected by his pupils and published in 1842.[1] A
Herbartian historian of Æsthetic, Zimmermann, attacks the posthumous
work of Schleiermacher with real ferocity; after twenty pages of
invective and sarcasm he concludes by asking, how could his pupils
so dishonour their great master by publishing such a mass of waste
paper, "all play upon words, sophistical conceits and dialectical
subtleties"?[2] Nor was the idealistic historian Hartmann much more
benevolent when he describes the work as "a confused mess in which,
among much that is merely trivial, many half-truths and exaggerations,
one can detect a few acute observations"; and says that, in order
to make bearable "such unctuous afternoon sermons delivered by a
preacher in his dotage," it must be shortened by three-quarters; and
that, "as regards fundamental principles," it is simply useless,
offering no innovations upon concrete idealism as presented by Hegel
and others; and that, in any case, it seems impossible "to attach it
to any line of thought except the Hegelian, to which Schleiermacher's
contribution is only of second-rate importance." He further observes
that Schleiermacher was primarily a theologian, and in philosophy more
or less an amateur.[3] Now it cannot be denied that Schleiermacher's
doctrine has reached us in a hazy form, by no means free from
uncertainties and contradictions; and, which is more important,
it is here and there affected for the worse by the influence of
contemporary metaphysics. But, side by side with these defects, what
excellent method, really scientific and philosophical; what a number of
cornerstones well and truly laid; what wealth of new truths, and of
difficulties and problems not suspected or discussed before his day!
[Sidenote: _Schleiermacher contrasted with his predecessors._]
Schleiermacher considered Æsthetic as an essentially modern line
of thought, and drew a sharp distinction between the _Poetics_ of
Aristotle, which never shakes itself free from the empirical standpoint
of the maker of rules, and what Baumgarten tried to do in the
eighteenth century. He praised Kant for having been the first truly
to include Æsthetic among the philosophical sciences, and recognized
that in Hegel artistic activity had attained the highest elevation by
being brought into connexion and almost into equality with religion
and philosophy. But he was not satisfied either with the followers of
Baumgarten when they degenerated into the absurd attempt to construct
a science or theory of sensuous pleasure, or with the Kantian point of
view which made its principal aim the consideration of taste; or with
the philosophy of Fichte, in which art became a means of education; or
with the more widely received opinion which placed at the centre of
Æsthetic the vague and equivocal concept of Beauty. Schiller pleased
him by having called attention to the moment of artistic spontaneity or
productiveness, and he praised Schelling for having laid stress on the
importance of the figurative arts, which lend themselves less easily
than poetry to facile and illusory moralistic interpretations.[4]
Having with the utmost clearness excluded from Æsthetic the study of
practical rules as empirical, and therefore irreducible to a science,
he assigned to Æsthetic the task of determining the proper position of
artistic activity in the scheme of ethics.[5]
[Sidenote: _Place assigned to Æsthetic in his Ethics._]
To avoid falling into error over this terminology, we must call to
mind that the philosophy of Schleiermacher followed the ancient
traditions in its tripartite division into Dialectic, Ethics and
Physics. Dialectic corresponds with ontology; Physics embraces all
the sciences of natural facts; Ethics includes the study of all free
activities of mankind (language, thought, art, religion and morality).
Ethics represented to him not only the science of morality but what
others name Psychology or, better still, the Science or Philosophy of
the Spirit. This explanation once given, Schleiermacher's point of
departure seems to be the only one just and permissible, and we shall
not be surprised when he talks of will, of voluntary acts and so on,
where others would have simply spoken of activity or spiritual energy;
he even endows such expressions with a broader meaning than that
conferred upon them by practical philosophy.
[Sidenote: _Æsthetic activity as immanent and individual._]
A double distinction may be made amongst human activities. In the
first place, there are activities which we presume to be constituted
in the same manner in all men (such as the logical activity) and are
called activities of identity; and others whose diversity is presumed,
which are called activities of difference or individual activities.
Secondly, there are activities which exhaust themselves in the
internal life, and others which actualize themselves in the external
world: immanent activities and practical activities. To which of the
two classes in each of the two orders does artistic activity belong?
There can be no doubt of its different modes of development, if not
actually in each individual person, at least in different peoples and
nations; therefore it belongs properly to activities of difference or
individual activities.[6] As for the other distinction, it is true
that art does realize itself in the external world, but this fact is
something superadded ("_ein später Hinzukommendes_") "which stands to
the internal fact as the communication of thought by means of speech
or writing stands to thought itself": art's true work is the internal
image ("_das innere Bild ist das eigentliche Kunstwerk_"). Exceptions
to this might be adduced, such as mimicry; but they would be apparent
only. Between a really angry man and the actor who plays the part of
an angry man on the stage there is this difference: in the second case
anger appears as controlled and therefore beautiful; that is, the
internal image is in the actor's soul interposed between the fact of
passion and its physical manifestation.[7] Artistic activity "belongs
to those human activities in which we presuppose the individual in its
differentiation; it belongs equally to those activities developing
essentially within themselves and not completing themselves in any
external world. Art, therefore, is an immanent activity in which we
presuppose differentiation." Internal, not practical: individual, not
universal or logical.
[Sidenote: _Artistic truth and intellectual truth._]
But if art be one form of thought, there must be one form of thought
in which identity is presupposed, and another in which difference is
presupposed. We do not look for truth in poetry; or, rather, we do look
for truth, but for one that is totally different from that objective
truth to which there must correspond some being, either universal or
individual (scientific and historical truth). "When a character in a
poem is said to be devoid of truth, a slur is cast on the given poem;
but if the character is said to be a pure invention, corresponding with
no reality, that is quite a different matter." The truth of a poetic
character consists in the coherence with which a single person's divers
modes of thinking and acting are represented: even in portraits it is
not an exact correspondence with an objective reality that makes the
thing a work of art. From art and poetry "springs no iota of knowledge"
(_das Geringste vom Wissen_); "it expresses but the truth of the single
consciousness." There are then "productions of thought and of sensible
intuitions, opposed to the other productions because they do not
presuppose identity, and they express the singular as such."[8]
[Sidenote: _Difference of artistic consciousness from feeling and
religion._]
The domain of art is immediate self-consciousness (_unmittelbare
Selbstbewusstsein_), which must be carefully distinguished from the
thought or concept of the ego or of the determinate ego. This latter is
the consciousness of identity in the diversity of moments; immediate
self-consciousness is "diversity itself, of which one must be aware,
since life in its entirety is but the development of consciousness." In
this domain art has often been confused with two facts which accompany
it: sensuous consciousness (the feeling of pleasure and pain), and
religion. A double confusion, of which the sensationalists fall into
the first half and Hegel into the second; Schleiermacher clears it up
by proving that art is free productivity, whereas sensuous pleasure and
religious feeling, however different in other ways, are both determined
by an objective fact (_äussere Sein_).[9]
[Sidenote: _Dreams and art: inspiration and deliberation._]
The better to understand this free productivity, we must further
circumscribe the domain of immediate consciousness. In this we can
find nothing more helpful than comparing it with the images produced
by dreams. The artist has his own dreams: he dreams with open eyes,
and from among the thick-thronging images of this dream-state those
having sufficient energy alone become works of art, the rest remaining
a mere background from which the others stand out. All the essential
elements of art are found in the dream-state, which is the production
of free thoughts and sensuous intuitions consisting of mere images.
Certainly something is lacking in dreams, and they differ from art not
only in their absence of technique, which has already been excluded as
irrelevant to art, but in another way, viz. that a dream is a chaotic
fact, without stability, order, connexion or measure. But when some
sort of order is introduced into the chaos the difference at once
disappears, and the likeness to art merges in identity. This internal
activity which introduces order and measure, fixes and determines the
image, is that which distinguishes art from a dream or transforms a
dream into art. It often involves struggle, labour, the obligation to
stem the involuntary flood of internal images; in a word, it means
reflexion or deliberation. But the dream and the cessation of dreaming
are equally indispensable elements of art. There must be production of
thoughts and images and, together with such production, there must
be measure, determination and unity, "otherwise each image would be
confused with its neighbour and have no definiteness." The instant of
inspiration (_Begeisterung_) is as essential as that of deliberation
(_Besonnenheit)_.[10]
[Sidenote: _Art and the typical._]
But in order to arrive at artistic truth it is also I necessary (here
Schleiermacher's thought becomes less clear and accurate) that the
singular be accompanied by consciousness of the species; consciousness
of the self as individual man is impossible without consciousness of
mankind; nor is a single object true unless referred to its universal.
In a pictured landscape "every tree must possess natural truth, that
is to say, it must be contemplated as a specimen of a given kind;
similarly, the whole complex of natural and individual life must have
effective truth of nature and constitute a single harmony. Just because
in art we do not strive after the production of individual figures
in themselves and for themselves, but their internal truth as well,
we commonly assign to them a high place as being a free realization
of that in which all cognition has its value, that is to say, in the
principle that all forms of being are inherent in the human spirit.
If this principle fails, truth is no longer possible; scepticism only
remains." The productions of art are the ideal or typical figures
which real nature would create were it not impeded by external
influences.[11] "The artist creates a figure on the basis of a general
scheme, rejecting whatever may hinder or impede the play of the living
forces of reality; such a production, founded on a general scheme, is
what we call the Ideal."[12]
In spite of all these determinations, Schleiermacher did not apparently
intend to limit the artist's scope. He remarks, "When an artist
represents something really given, whether portrait, landscape or
single human figure, he renounces the freedom of productivity and
adheres to the real."[13] There is a twofold tendency at work in the
artist: towards perfection of type, and towards representation of
natural reality. An artist must not fall into the abstractness of
the type or into the unmeaningness of empirical reality.[14] If in
flower-painting it is necessary to bring out the specific type, a much
more complete individualisation is demanded when representing man,
owing to the lofty position which he occupies.[15] Representation
of the ideal in the real does not exclude "an infinite variety,
such as is found in actual reality." "For instance, the human face
wavers between the ideal and caricature, in its moral conformation
no less than in its physical. Every human face contains elements of
disfigurement (_Verbildung,_) but it has also something by which it
is a determinate modification of human nature; this does not appear
openly, but a practised eye can seize it and ideally complete the face
in question."[16] Schleiermacher is keenly aware of the difficulties
and perplexities of' such problems as the question whether there exists
one or many ideals of the human face.[17] He observes that the two
views which strive for mastery in the field of poetry may be extended
to art as a whole. Some assert that poetry and art should represent the
perfect, the ideal, that which would have been produced by nature, had
she not been prevented by mechanical forces; others reject the ideal as
incapable of realisation and prefer that the artist should depict man
as he really is, with those perturbing elements which in reality belong
to him no less than his ideal qualities. Each view is a half-truth:
it is the duty of art to represent the ideal as well as the real, the
subjective as well as the objective.[18] The comic element, that is the
unideal and the faulty ideal, is included in the circle of art.[19]
[Sidenote: _Independence of art._]
In respect to morality, art is free just as philosophical speculation
is free: its essence excludes practical and moral effects. This leads
to the proposition that "there is no difference between various
works of art, except in so far as they can be compared in respect
of artistic perfection" (_Vollkommenheit in der Kunst._) "Given an
artistic object perfect of its kind, it has an absolute value which
cannot be increased or diminished by anything else. If motions of
the will could truly be described as consequences of works of art, a
different standard of values would apply to works of art: and since
the objects which an artist may depict are not all equally adapted to
influence volition, a scale of values would exist which did not depend
on artistic perfection." Nor must we confound the judgement passed
upon the varied and complex personality of the artist himself with the
strictly æsthetic judgement passed upon his work. "In this respect
the biggest, most complicated canvas is on a level with the smallest
arabesque, the longest poem with the shortest: the value of a work of
art depends on the perfect manner in which the external corresponds to
the internal."[20]
Schleiermacher rejects the doctrine of Schiller because in his opinion
it makes art a sort of game or pastime in contrast to the serious
affairs of life: a view, he says, for business men to whom their
business is the only serious thing. Artistic activity is universally
human, a man devoid of it is inconceivable; although, of course, there
are in this respect great differences betwixt man and man, running from
the mere desire to enjoy art to real taste, and from this again to
productive genius.[21]
[Sidenote: _Art and language._]
The artist makes use of instruments which, by their nature, are framed
not for the individual but for the universal; of this kind is language.
But it is the business of poetry to extract the individual from
language which is universal without giving to its productions the form
of the antithesis between individual and universal which is proper to
science. Of the two elements of language, the musical and the logical,
the poet claims the first for his own ends and constrains the other
to awaken individual images. In comparison with pure science as in
comparison with the individual image, there is something irrational
about language: but the tendencies of speculation and of poetry are
always contrary, even in their use of language; the former tends to
make language approximate to mathematical formulæ; the latter to
imagery (_Bild_)[22]
[Sidenote: _Schleiermacher's defects._]
Leaving out many details which will be touched on in their
proper places, the foregoing is a fair summary of the heads of
Schleiermacher's æsthetic thought. Adding up the accounts of the
whole statement of views, on the side of error and oversight we
find: first, ideas or types are not wholly excluded, in spite
of all Schleiermacher's care and anxiety to safeguard artistic
individualisation and to make the ideas and types superfluous.
Secondly, there is still, undefeated and unexpelled, a certain residue
of abstract formalism, visible at various points of his theories.[23]
Thirdly, the definition of art as an activity of mere difference may be
diluted but is not destroyed by making art a difference of complexes
of individuals, a national difference. A closer reflexion on the
history of art, a recognition of the possibility of appreciating the
art of various nations and various times, a more patient investigation
into the moment of artistic reproduction, even an examination of the
relation between science and art, would have led Schleiermacher to
treat this difference as empirical and surmountable, still holding
firmly to the distinctive character (individual as opposed to
universal) he assigned to art in comparison with science. Fourthly, he
did not recognize the identity of æsthetic activity with linguistic,
and failed to make it the basis of all other theoretic activity. It
would seem, moreover, that Schleiermacher had no clear ideas concerning
that artistic element which enters into the constitution of historic
narrative and is indispensable as the concrete form of science; or
concerning language, taken not as a complex of abstract means of
expression but as expressive activity.
[Sidenote: _Schleiermacher's services to Æsthetic._]