Chapter XVII: Conclusion (6)

In his University lectures he distinguished æsthetic truth from logical truth in the style of Meier; even citing the example of the beautiful rosy face of a girl which, when seen distinctly, _i.e._ through a microscope, ceases to be beautiful.[3] It is æsthetically true (said he) that a man once dead cannot come to life again, although this is in opposition to logic and moral truth: it is æsthetically true that the sun plunges into the sea, but it is false logically and objectively. To what degree it is necessary to combine logical truth with æsthetic the learned have never yet been able to decide; not even the greatest æstheticians. In order to become accessible, logical concepts must assume æsthetic forms; a garb to be abandoned only in the rational sciences which seek profundity. Æsthetic certainty is subjective: it is content with authority, _i.e._ the citation of the opinions of great men. On account of our weakness, for we are strongly attached to the sensible, æsthetic perfection often helps us to render our thoughts distinct. In this, examples and images co-operate; æsthetic perfection is the vehicle for logical perfection; taste is the analogue of intellect. There are logical truths which are not æsthetic truths: and on the other hand we must exclude from abstract philosophy exclamations and other sentimental commotions proper to the other truth. Poetry is a harmonious play of thoughts and sensations. Poetry and eloquence differ in this: in the former, thoughts adapt themselves to sensations; in the latter the contrary is the case. In these lectures Kant sometimes taught that poetry is anterior to eloquence because sensations come before thoughts; and he observed (perhaps under Herder's influence) that the poetry of Eastern peoples, lacking concepts, is wanting in unity and taste although rich in imaginative detail. Poetry formed out of the pure play of sensibility is doubtless a possibility, _e.g._ love-poems: but true poetry disdains such productions, concerned as they are with sensations which every one knows ought to be expelled from our breasts. True poetry must strive to present virtue and intellectual truth in sensible form, as has been done by Pope in his _Essay on Man,_ in which he attempts to vivify poetry by means of reason. On other occasions Kant definitely says that logical perfection is the basis of every other, æsthetic perfection being merely an adornment of the logical; something of the latter may be omitted in order to appeal to the audience, but it must never be disguised or falsified.[4]

This is Baumgartenism pure and simple; unless we are prepared to look on these Lectures as representing a pre-critical period of thought, or an exoteric doctrine superseded eventually by Kant's own original esoteric ideas in his _Critique of the Judgment_ (1790). Not to open such a controversy, let us put these Lectures on one side (although they often throw no little light on the signification of Kantian phrases and formulæ), and refuse to raise the question what pages of the _Critique of the Judgment_ are derived from Baumgarten and Meier; he who reads the works of these disciples of Wolff and passes immediately to the _Critique of Judgment_ often has the impression that the atmosphere surrounding him is unchanged. But if the _Critique of Judgment_ itself be examined without prejudice it will be seen that Kant always adhered to Baumgarten's conception of art as the sensible and imaginative vesture of an intellectual concept.

[Sidenote: _Art in the "Critique of Judgment."_]

According to Kant, art is not pure beauty wholly detached from the concept, it is adherent beauty, which presupposes and attaches itself to a concept.[5] This is the work of genius, the faculty of representing æsthetic ideas. An æsthetic idea is "a representation of the imagination which accompanies a given concept: a representation conjoined with such truthful representation of particulars as to be unable to find for it any expression that may mark a determinate concept, thereby endowing the given concept with something of the ineffable; a feeling which stimulates the cognitive faculties and reinforcing the tongue, which is simply the letter, with the spirit." Genius, then, has two constitutive elements, imagination and intellect; it consists in "that happy disposition, which no science can teach or diligence attain, to find ideas for a given concept and, also, to select the expression by which the subjective commotion it excites as accompaniment to a concept may be communicated to others." No concept is adequate to the æsthetic idea, as no representation of the imagination can ever possibly be adequate to the concept. Examples of æsthetic attributes are found in the eagle of Jupiter with the thunderbolt in its claws, and the peacock of the proud Queen of Heaven: "they do not, like logical attributes, represent that which is contained in our concepts of the sublimity or majesty of creation, but something else which gives occasion to the imagination to run riot over a multitude of kindred representations which make us think more than we can express in a given concept by means of words, and give us an æsthetic idea, which serves to this rational idea instead of a logical representation, precisely with the aim of quickening our feelings by throwing open to them a view over a vast field of kindred representations." There are a _modus logicos_ and a _modus æstheticus_ of expressing our thoughts: the first consists in following determinate principles: the other in the mere feeling of the unity of the representation.[6] To imagination, to intellect and to spirit (_Geist_) we must add taste, the link between imagination and intellect.[7] Art may therefore represent natural ugliness: artistic beauty "is not a beautiful _thing_ but a beautiful representation of a thing": although the representation of ugliness has limits varying with the individual arts (a reminiscence of Lessing and Winckelmann), and an absolute limit at the disgusting and nauseating, which kill representation itself.[8] In natural things, too, there is adherent beauty which cannot be judged by the æsthetic judgement alone but demands a concept. Nature thus appears as a work of art, though superhuman art: "the teleological judgement is the basis and condition of the æsthetic." When we say "this is a beautiful woman," we merely mean that "nature beautifully represents in the form of this woman her purpose in the construction of the female body": it is necessary therefore, besides noting simple form, to aim at a concept, "so that the object may be apprehended through an æsthetic judgement logically conditioned."[9] By this means is formed the ideal of beauty in the human face, the expression of moral life.[10] Kant admits that there may also be artistic productions without a concept, comparable with the free beauties of nature, flowers and some birds (parrot, humming-bird, bird of paradise, etc.): ornamental drawings, cornice-mouldings, musical fantasies without words, represent nothing, no object reducible to a determined concept, and must be reckoned among free beauties.[11] But does not this necessitate their exclusion from true and proper art, from the operation of genius in which fancy and intellect must both, according to Kant, have a place?

[Sidenote: _Imagination in Kant's system._]

This is Baumgartenism transposed into a higher key, more concentrated, more elaborated, more suggestive, until from moment to moment it seems about to burst into a wholly different conception of art. But it is still Baumgartenism, from whose intellectualistic bonds it never escapes. Nor was escape possible. A profound concept of imagination was entirely lacking to Kant's system and his philosophy of the spirit. Glancing over the table of faculties of the spirit which precedes his _Critique of Judgment,_ we see that Kant co-ordinates with it the cognitive faculty, the feeling of pleasure and pain, and the appetitive faculty; to the first corresponds intellect, to the second, judgement (teleological and æsthetic), to the third, reason;[12] he finds no place for imagination amongst powers of the spirit but places it among the facts of sensation. He knows a reproductive imagination and an associative, but he knows nothing of a genuinely productive imagination, imagination in the proper sense.[13] We have seen that, in his doctrine, genius is the co-operation of several faculties.

[Sidenote: _The forms of intuition and the Transcendental Æsthetic._]

Yet sometimes Kant had an inkling that intellectual activity is preceded by something which is not mere sensational material, but is an independent non-intellectual theoretical form. He obtained a glimpse of this latter form not when he was reflecting on art in the strict sense but when he was examining the process of knowledge: he does not treat of it in his _Critique of Judgment,_ but in the first section of his _Critique of Pure Reason,_ in the first part of the _Transcendental Doctrine of Elements._ He says here that sensations only enter the spirit when the latter itself gives them form; a form not identical with that which intellect gives to sensations, but much simpler, namely pure intuition, the totality of the _a priori_ principles of sensibility. There must therefore be "a science which forms the first part of the transcendental doctrine of elements, distinct from that which contains the principles of pure thought and is named transcendental Logic." Now, what name does Kant confer upon this science whose existence he has deduced? None other than Transcendental Æsthetic (_die transcendentale Ästhetik_). In a note he even insists that this is the right name for the new science of which he treats, and censures the Germans for their habit of applying it to the Critique of Taste, which, as he thought at that time, could never become a science. Thus, he concludes, we approach more closely to the usage of the ancients, among whom the distinction between _αἰσθητὰ καὶ νοητά_[14] was well known.

Nevertheless, after having so rightly postulated the necessity for a science of the forms of sensation or pure intuition, purely intuitive knowledge, Kant went on, simply because he had no exact idea of the nature of the æsthetic faculty and of art, to fall into an intellectualistic error by reducing the form of sensibility or pure intuition into the two categories or functions of space and time, and by asserting that the spirit emerges from the chaos of sensation by organizing its sensations in space and time.[15] But space and time as such are very far from being primitive categories; they are relatively late and complex formations.[16] As examples of the matter of sensation Kant quoted hardness, impenetrability, colour and so forth. But the mind only recognizes colour and hardness in so far as it has already given form to its sensations; considered as brute matter, sensations fall outside the cognitive spirit, they are a limit; colour, hardness, impenetrability and so on, when recognized, are already intuitions, spiritual elaborations, the æsthetic activity in its rudimentary manifestation. The characterizing or qualifying imagination which is æsthetic activity ought to have occupied in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ the pages devoted to the discussion of space and time, and would thus have constituted a real Transcendental Æsthetic, a real prologue to the transcendental Logic. In this manner Kant would have achieved the truth aimed at by Leibniz and Baumgarten and would have joined hands with Vico.

[Sidenote: _Theory of Beauty distinguished by Kant from that of Art._]

His repeatedly announced opposition to the school of Wolff concerns not the concept of art but that of Beauty; two concepts for Kant entirely distinct. First of all, he did not admit that sensation could be called "confused knowledge," a confused form, that is, of intellectual cognition; rightly judging this to be a false account of sensibility, since a concept, however confused, is always a concept or a rough sketch of a concept, never an intuition.[17] But he further denied that pure beauty contained a concept, and therefore denied that it was a perfection sensibly apprehended. These reflexions have no doubt some connexion with those concerning the nature of art in the _Critique of Judgment;_ but the connexion is far from close, still less are they actually fused into a single whole. That Kant was minutely familiar with eighteenth-century writers who had discussed beauty and taste is shown by his Lectures, wherein they are all quoted and used.[18] Of these the greater part, especially the English, were sensationalists, others intellectualists; some few, as we have noted, were inclined towards mysticism. Kant began by tending towards sensationalism in æsthetic problems, then became the adversary of sensationalists and intellectualists alike. This development can be traced in his _Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime,_ as well as in his Lectures; its final expression is reached in the _Critique of Judgment._

Of the four moments, as he calls them, _i.e._ the four determinations, he accords to Beauty, the two negative are directed, one against the sensationalists, the other against the intellectualists. "That is beautiful which pleases _without interest_": "That is beautiful which pleases _without concepts_."[19] Here he asserts the existence of a spiritual region, distinct on one side from the pleasurable, the useful and the good, and on the other from truth. But this region, as we know very well, is not that of art, which Kant attaches to the concept: it is the region of a special activity of feeling which he calls judgement or, more exactly, æsthetic judgement.

[Sidenote: _Mystical features in Kant's theory of Beauty._]

The other two moments give some kind of a definition of this region: "That is beautiful which has the form of finality without the representation of an end": "That is beautiful which is the object of universal pleasure."[20] What is this mysterious sphere? What this disinterested pleasure we experience in pure colours and tones, in flowers, and even in adherent beauty when we make abstraction from the concept to which it adheres?

Our answer is: there is no such sphere; it does not exist; the examples given are instances either of pleasure in general or of facts of artistic expression. Kant, who so emphatically criticizes the sensationalists and the intellectualists, does not show the same severity towards the neo-Platonic line of thought whose revival we remarked in the eighteenth century. Winckelmann in particular exercised strong influence over his mind. In one course of his Lectures we find him making a curious distinction between form and matter: in music melody is matter and harmony form: in a flower the scent is material and the shape (_Gestalt)_ is form (_Form_).[21] This reappears slightly modified in the _Critique of Judgment._ "In painting, statuary and all the figurative arts in architecture and gardening, so far as they are fine arts, the drawing is the essential; in which the foundation of taste lies not in what gratifies (_vergnügt_) in sensation, but in that which pleases (_gefällt_) by its form. The colours which illuminate the drawing belong to sensuous stimulus (_Reiz_) and may bring the object more vividly before the senses, but do not render it worthy of contemplation as a thing of beauty; they are, moreover, often limited by the exigencies of the beautiful form, and even where their sensuous stimulus is legitimate, they are ennobled only by the beautiful form."[22] Continuing in pursuit of this phantasm of beauty which is not the beauty of art nor yet the pleasing, and is equally detached from expressiveness and pleasure, Kant loses himself in insoluble contradictions. Little inclined to submit himself to the charm of imagination, abhorring "poetic philosophers" like Herder,[23] he makes statements and refuses to commit himself to them, affirms and immediately criticizes his affirmations, and wraps up Beauty in a mystery which, at bottom, was nothing more than his own individual incertitude and inability to see clearly the existence of an activity of feeling which, in the spirit of his sane philosophy, represented a logical contradiction. "Necessary and universal pleasure" and "finality without the idea of an end" are the organized expression in words of this contradiction.

By way of clearing up the contradiction he arrives at the following thought: "The judgement of taste is founded on a concept (the concept of a general foundation of the subjective teleology of nature through judgement); but it is a concept by which it is impossible to know or demonstrate anything of the object, because the object in itself is indeterminable and unsuited to cognition; on the other hand, it has validity for every one (for every one, I say, in so far as it is an individual judgement, immediately accompanying intuition), since its determining reason reposes, perhaps, in the concept of that which may be regarded as the supersensible substrate of mankind." Beauty, then, is a symbol of morality. "The subjective principle alone, that is the indeterminate idea of the supersensible in us, can be considered the only key able to unlock this faculty springing from a source we cannot fathom: excepting by its aid, no comprehension of it can possibly be reached."[24] These cautious words, and all others here used by Kant to conceal his thoughts, do not hide his tendency to mysticism. A mysticism without conviction or enthusiasm, almost in spite of himself, but very evident nevertheless. His inadequate grasp of the æsthetic activity led him to see double, even triple, and caused the unnecessary multiplication of his explanatory principles. Although he was always ignorant of the genuine nature of the æsthetic activity, he was indebted to it for suggesting to him the pure categories of space and time as the Transcendental Æsthetic; it caused him to develop the theory of imaginative embellishment of intellectual concepts by the work of genius; finally it forced him to acknowledge a mysterious faculty of feeling, midway between theoretical and practical activity, cognitive and yet not cognitive, moral and indifferent to morality, pleasing yet wholly detached from the pleasure of the senses. Great use of this power was made by Kant's immediate successors in Germany who were delighted to find their daring speculations supported by that severe critic of experience, the philosopher of Königsberg.

[1] B. Spaventa, _Prolus. ed introd. alle lezioni di filosofia,_ Naples, 1862 pp. 83-102; _Scritti filosofici,_ ed. Gentile, pp. 139-145, 303-307.

[2] _Kritik d. rein. Vernunft_ (ed. Kirchmann), i. 1, § 1, note.

[3] See above, p. 244.

[4] Extract from Kant's lectures of 1764 and later, in O. Schlapp, _Kant's Lehre vom Genie, passim,_ esp. pp. 17, 58, 59, 79, 93, 96, 131-134, 136-137, 222, 225, 231-232, etc.

[5] _Kritik d. Urtheilskraft_ (ed. Kirchmann), § 16.

[6] _Kritik d. Urth._ § 49.

[7] _Op. cit._ § 50.

[8] _Op. cit._ § 48.

[9] _Krit. d. Urth._ § 48.

[10] _Op. cit._ § 17.

[11] _Op. cit._ § 16.

[12] For the historical genesis of this tripartition, cf. remarks in Schlapp, _op. cit._ pp. 150-153.

[13] See also _Anthropol._ (ed. Kirchmann), §§ 26-31; cf. Schlapp, _op. cit._ p. 296.

[14] _Kritik d. rein. Vernunft,_ i. I, § 1 and note.

[15] _Op. cit._ §§ 1-8.

[16] See above, pp. 4-5.

[17] _Krit. d. r. Vern._ § 8, and introd. to § ii.; cf. _Krit. d. Urth._ § 15.

[18] See catalogue in Schlapp, _op. cit._ pp. 403-404, and _passim._

[19] _Krit. d. Urth._ §§ 1-9.

[20] _Op. cit._ §§ 10-22.

[21] Schlapp, _op. cit._ p. 78.

[22] _Krit. d. Urth._ § 14.

[23] For Kant's judgement of Herder, see Schlapp, _op. cit._ pp. 320-327, note.

[24] _Kritik d. Orth._ §§ 57-59.

IX

THE ÆSTHETIC OF IDEALISM: SCHILLER, SCHELLING, SOLGER, HEGEL

[Sidenote: _The "Critique of Judgment" and metaphysical idealism._]

It is well known that Schelling held the _Critique of Judgment_ to be the most important of the three Kantian _Critiques,_ and that Hegel together with the great majority of the followers of metaphysical idealism had a special affection for the book. According to them the third _Critique_ was the attempt to bridge the gulf, to resolve the antitheses between liberty and necessity, teleology and mechanism, spirit and nature: it was the correction Kant was preparing for himself, the concrete vision which dispelled the last traces of his abstract subjectivism.

[Sidenote: _F. Schiller._]

The same admiration and an opinion even more favourable were extended by them to Friedrich Schiller, the first to elaborate that part of Kant's philosophy and to study the third sphere which united sensibility to reason. "It was the artistic sense dwelling in his also profoundly philosophical mind," says Hegel, "which, against the abstract infinity of Kant's thought, against his living for duty, against his conception of nature and reality, and of sense and feeling as utterly hostile to intellect, asserted the necessity and enunciated the principle of totality and reconciliation, even before it had been recognized by professed philosophers: to Schiller must be allowed the great merit of having been the first to oppose the subjectivity of Kant, and of having dared try to go beyond it."[1]

[Sidenote: _Relations between Schiller and Kant._]

Discussion has raged around the true relation between Schiller and Kant, and it has lately been maintained that his Æsthetic was not, as would seem to be the case, derived from Kant, but from the pandynamism which, starting from Leibniz, had propagated itself in Germany through Creuzens, Ploucket and Reimarus down to Herder, who had conceived a wholly animated nature.[2] There can be no doubt that Schiller shared Herder's conception, as may be seen from the theosophical tone of the fragment of correspondence between Julius and Raphæl and in other writings. It cannot be denied, however, that whatever personal feelings Kant may have had towards Herder, or Herder towards his former teacher (against whose _Critique of Judgment_ he published his _Kaligone,_ as he had replied to the _Critique of Pure Reason_ with his _Metacritica_), when Kant in a somewhat dubious manner made the first step towards a reconciliation, the breach was at all events partially healed. The dispute is therefore of small importance: we shall find it more useful to observe that Schiller introduced an important correction of Kant's views when he obliterated every trace of the double theory of art and the beautiful, giving no weight to the distinction drawn between pure and adherent beauty, and finally abandoning the mechanical conception of art as consisting in beauty joined to the intellectual concept. It was certainly his own experience of active artistic work that led him to this simplification.

[Sidenote: _The æsthetic sphere as the sphere of Play._]

Schiller defined the æsthetic sphere as the sphere of play (_Spiel_); the unfortunate term, suggested to him partly by some phrases of Kant, partly, perhaps, by an article on card-games by one Weisshuhn which he published in his review _The Hours_ (_Die Horen_),[3] has given rise to the belief that he anticipated certain modern doctrines of artistic activity as the overflow of exuberant spirits, analogous with the play of children and animals. Schiller did not fail to warn his readers against such a mistaken interpretation (to which, however, he lent himself) when he begged them not to think of "games in real life, which are usually concerned with wholly material things," nor yet of the idle dreaming of the imagination left to itself.[4] The activity of the play of which he treated held the mean between the material activity of the senses, of nature, of animal instinct or passion as it is called, and the formal activity of intellect and morality. The man who plays, _i.e._ contemplates nature æsthetically and produces art, sees all natural objects as animated; in such a phantasmagoria mere natural necessity gives place to the free determination of the faculties; spirit appears as spontaneously reconciled with nature, form with matter. Beauty is life, the living form (_lebende Gestalt)_; not life in the physiological sense, since beauty does not extend throughout all physiological life, nor is it restricted to that alone: marble when worked by an artist may have a living form; and a man, although possessed of life and form, need not be a living form.[5] Wherefore art must conquer nature with form: "in an artistic work of true beauty the content ought to be nil, the form everything: by form man is influenced in his entirety; by content in his separate faculties only. The true secret of great artists is that they cancel matter through form (_den Stoff durch die Form vertilgt)_; the more imposing, overwhelming or seductive the matter is in itself, the greater its obstinacy in striving to emphasize its own particular effect, the more the spectator inclines to lose himself immediately in the matter, so much the more triumphant is the art which brings it into subjection and enforces its own sovereign power. The mind of hearer or spectator should remain perfectly free and calm; from the magic circle of art it should issue as pure and perfect as when it left the hands of the Creator. The most frivolous object should be treated in such a manner as to enable us to pass at once to the most serious matters; and the most serious in such a way that we may pass from them to the lightest game." There is a fine art of passion; a passionate fine art would be a contradiction in terms.[6] "So long as man in his early physical state passively absorbs the world of senses and simply feels it, he is one with it; and precisely because he merely is a world there is for him as yet no world at all. Only when in his æsthetic state he places the world outside himself and contemplates it, does he detach his personality from the rest; then a world appears to him, since he is no longer one with the world."[7]

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic education._]

Schiller ascribed high educational value to art thus conceived as at once sensible and rational, material and formal. Not that it teaches moral precepts or excites to good actions; if it acted thus, or when it acted thus, it would at once cease, as we have seen, to be art. Determination in whatsoever direction, to the good or the bad, to pleasure or to duty, destroys the character of the æsthetic sphere, which is rather indeterminism. By means of art man frees himself from the yoke of the senses; but before putting himself spontaneously under that of reason and duty, he takes as it were a little breathing-space by staying in a region of indifference and serene contemplation. "While having no claim to promote exclusively any special human faculty, the æsthetic condition is favourable to each and all without favouritism; and the reason why it favours none in particular is that it is the foundation of the possibility of all alike. Every other exercise gives some inclination to the soul, and therefore presupposes a special limit; æsthetic activity alone is unlimited." This indifference, which if not yet pure form is not pure matter, confers its educational value on art; it opens a way to morality, not by preaching and persuading, that is to say, determining, but by making determination possible. Such is the fundamental concept of his celebrated _Letters on the Æsthetic Education of Man_ (1795), in which Schiller took his cue from the conditions of his times and from the necessity of finding a middle way between supine acquiescence in tyranny and savage rebellion as exemplified by the revolution then raging in France.

[Sidenote: _Vagueness and lack of precision in Schiller's Æsthetic._]

The defects of Schiller's æsthetic doctrine are its lack of precision and its generality. Who has given a better description of certain aspects of art, the catharsis produced by artistic activity, the serenity and calm resulting from the domination over natural impressions? Equally just is his remark that art, although wholly independent of morality, is in some way connected with it. But what precisely this connexion may be, or what the exact nature of æsthetic activity, Schiller does not succeed in explaining. Conceiving the moral and intellectual as the only formal activities (_Formtrieb)_ and denying as a convinced anti-sensationalist in opposition to Burke and philosophers of his type that art can belong to the passionate and sensuous nature (_Stofftrieb_), he cut himself off from the means of recognizing the general category to which artistic activity belongs. His own concept of the formal is too narrow: too narrow, also, his concept of the cognitive activity, in which he is able to see the logical or intellectual form, but not that of the imagination. What for him was this art he describes as an activity neither formal nor material, neither cognitive nor moral? Was it for him, as for Kant, an activity of feeling, a play of several faculties at once? It would seem so, since Schiller distinguishes four points of view or relations of man with things: the physical, in which these affect our senses: the logical, in which they excite knowledge: the moral, in which they appear to us as an object of rational volition: and the æsthetic "in which they refer to our powers in entirety without becoming the determinate object of any one faculty." For example, a man is pleased æsthetically when his feeling depends in no way on the pleasure of the senses and when he is not conscious of thinking about any law or end.[8] We look in vain for any more conclusive reply.

It must not be overlooked that Schiller delivered a course of lectures on Æsthetic in Jena University in 1792, and that his writings on the subject intended for reviews were couched in a popular style: no less popular, in his own opinion, was the style of the book quoted above, which grew out of a series of letters actually sent to his patron the Duke of Holstein-Augustenburg. But the great work to be entitled _Rallias,_ which he intended writing upon Æsthetic, was never completed; the only fragments which have reached us are contained in the correspondence with Körner (1793-1794). From the discussions between the two friends we gather that Körner was not satisfied with Schiller's formula and desired something objective, something more precise, a positive characteristic of the beautiful: and one day Schiller told him that he had definitely discovered such a characteristic. But what it was that he had discovered we do not know; no mention of it occurs in any further document, and we are left in doubt as to whether we have lost an integral part of his thought or merely the momentary illusion of a discovery.

[Sidenote: _Schiller's caution and the rashness of the Romanticists._]

The uncertainty and vagueness of Schiller's theory seem almost a merit in contrast with that which followed. He had constituted himself guardian of the teaching of Kant and refused to abandon the realm of criticism; faithful disciple of his master, he conceived the third sphere not as real but as an ideal, a concept not constitutive but regulative, an imperative. "From transcendental motives, reason here demands that communion be established between formal and material activity; that is to say, there must be an activity of play, since the concept of humanity can be complete only by the union of reality with form, the accidental with the necessary, passivity with liberty. This demand must be made because reason, in conformity with her essence, aims at perfection and at sweeping away all obstacles; and every exclusive operation of one or other activity leaves humanity incomplete and confined within limits."[9] Schiller's thought, as it appears in his correspondence with Körner, has been well represented as follows:" The union of sensibility with liberty in the Beautiful, which does not actually take place but is supposed to do so, suggests to man an intuition of the union of these elements within himself: a union which does not take place actually but ought to do so."[10] The times which followed had no such nice scruples. Kant had given new vigour to the production of works on æsthetic, and, as in the days following Baumgarten, every new year saw a number of new treatises. It was the fashion. "Nothing swarms like æstheticians" (wrote Jean Paul Richter in 1804 when preparing his own book on the subject for publication): "it is rare for a youth who has paid his fees for a course of lectures on Æsthetic not to produce a book on some point of the science in the hope that the public may refund him his expenses by buying his book: some there are indeed who pay their professor's fees out of their author's royalties."[11] It was hoped, not unreasonably, that the exploration of the obscure region of æsthetic might throw some light on metaphysics, and the procedure of artists seemed to offer a good example to philosophers seeking to create a world for themselves: so philosophy modelled itself upon art and, as though to render the transition easier, the concept of art was brought as close as possible to that of philosophy. Romanticism, gaining vogue daily, was a renewal or continuation of that "age of genius" in which the youth of Goethe and Schiller had been passed; and as the period of _Sturm und Drang_ had zealously worshipped the genius who breaks all rules and oversteps all limitations, so did Romanticism hail the domination of a faculty called Fancy, or more frequently Imagination, to which were attributed the most diverse characteristics and the most miraculous effects.

[Sidenote: _Ideas on Art: J. P. Richter._]

The Romantic theorists, artists themselves for the most part, abounded in truthful and subtle observations concerning artistic procedure. Jean Paul Richter makes many excellent remarks about productive imagination, which he distinguishes clearly from the reproductive and asserts to be shared by all men as soon as they are able to say "This is beautiful"; for "how could a genius be acclaimed or even tolerated for a single month, not to mention thousands of centuries, by the common herd, if he had not a strong connecting-link of relationship with the herd?" He also describes how imagination is variously divided among individuals: as simple talent, as passive or feminine genius, and in the highest degree as the active or masculine genius, formed by reflexion and instinct, in which "all faculties flourish simultaneously and fancy is no isolated flower, but the goddess Flora herself who, in order to produce new combinations, crosses with each other those blossoms whose conjunction is fertile, and is, so to speak, a faculty full of faculties."[12] This latter sentence betrays a tendency on Richter's part to exaggerate the functions of imagination and to construct upon it a kind of mythology.

[Sidenote: _Romantic Æsthetic and idealistic Æsthetic._]

Contemporary systems of philosophy are partly impregnated with, and partly the source of, such mythologies: the Romantic conception of art may be said to have found its most complete expression in German idealism, where this attained its most coherent and systematic form.

[Sidenote: _J. G. Fichte._]

It did not attain this form with Fichte, the first great pupil of Kant; for though Fichte regarded imagination as the activity which creates the universe, effects the synthesis of the ego and the non-ego, posits the object and therefore precedes consciousness, he does not connect it with art.[13] In his æsthetic notions Fichte is influenced by Schiller, with the addition of a moralism imposed upon him by the general character of his system; hence the ethical sphere, midway between the cognitive and the æsthetic, becomes from his point of view a mere appurtenance of morality, as being the representation of, and hence reverence for, the moral ideal.[14] His subjective idealism eventually produced an æsthetic doctrine through the work of Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck; the doctrine of Irony as the basis of art.

[Sidenote: _Irony: Schlegel, Tieck, Novalis._]

The ego which created the universe can also destroy it; the universe is an empty appearance at which the only true reality, the ego, can smile, holding itself aloof, like an artist or a creative god, from creatures of its own which it does not take seriously.[15] Friedrich Schlegel described art as a perpetual parody of itself and a "transcendental farce." Tieck defined irony as "a power which allows the poet to dominate the matter which he handles." Another Romantic Fichtian, Novalis, dreamed of a magical idealism, an art of creation by the instantaneous act of the ego and of realizing our dreams.

[Sidenote: _F. Schelling._]

But it is only to the _System of Transcendental Idealism_ (1800) of Schelling, to his _Bruno_ (1802), to his celebrated course of lectures on the _Philosophy of Art_ given at Jena in 1802-1803 (repeated at Würzburg, and distributed subsequently in manuscript notes all over Germany), to the no less celebrated lecture on the _Relation between the Figurative Arts and Nature_ (1807), as well as to other works of this eloquent and enthusiastic philosopher that we owe the first great philosophical affirmation of Romanticism, and of a renewed and conscious neo-Platonism in Æsthetic.

[Sidenote: _Beauty and character._]

Like all the other idealistic philosophers, Schelling held firmly to the fusion of the theories of art and the beautiful already effected by Schiller. From this point of view it is interesting to note his explanation of the condemnation of art by Plato: this condemnation, says Schelling, was directed against the art of his time, the natural and realistic art of antiquity in general, with its character of finitude: Plato could not have uttered such a condemnation (as we moderns are unable to utter it) if he had known Christian art, whose characteristic is infinity.[16] The pure abstract beauty of Winckelmann is not enough; no less inadequate, false and negative is that concept of the characteristic which would try to make art something dead, hard and ugly by imposing upon it the limitations of the individual. Art is beauty and characteristic in one; characteristic beauty, character from which beauty is evolved, according to Goethe's saying; it is therefore not the individual but the living concept of the individual. When the artist's eye recognizes the creative idea of the individual and draws it forth, he transforms the individual into a world in itself, into a species (_Gattung_), an eternal idea (_Urbild_), and fears no more the limitation or hardness which is the condition of life: characteristic beauty is that plenitude of form which kills form; it does not inflame passion, it regulates it, like the banks of a river which are filled but not overflowed by the waters.[17] In all of this we feel the influence of Schiller, with something added which Schiller could never have expressed.

[Sidenote: _Art and Philosophy._]

Indeed, whilst gratefully acknowledging the excellent contributions to the theory of art made by the writers who succeeded Kant, Schelling laments that in none of them can he find exact scientific method (_Wissenschaftlichkeit_),[18] The true point of departure in his theory is in the philosophy of nature, _i.e._ in that criticism of the teleological judgement which Kant places directly after that of the æsthetic judgement in his third _Critique._ Teleology is the union of theoretical and practical philosophy; but the system would be incomplete but for the possibility of demonstrating in the subject itself, in the ego, the identity of the two worlds, theoretical and practical; an activity which has, and at the same time has not, consciousness; unconscious as nature, conscious as spirit. This activity is precisely the æsthetic activity: "the general organ of philosophy, keystone of the whole edifice."[19] There are but two ways open to one who is desirous of escaping from common realities: poetry, which transports into the ideal world; and philosophy which annihilates the real world.[20] Strictly speaking, "there is but one sole absolute work of art; it may exist in various exemplars, but in itself it is one, although it may not yet possess existence in its original form." True art is not the impression of one moment, but the representation of infinite life;[21] it is transcendental intuition become objective, and is therefore not only the organ but the document of philosophy. A time will come when philosophy will return to poetry, from which she has detached herself; and from the new philosophy a new mythology will arise.[22] The Absolute is thus the object of art as well as of philosophy (as Schelling insists elsewhere in greater detail): the first represents it in idea (_Urbild_), the second in its reflexion (_Gegenbild)_: "philosophy portrays ideas, not realities: so is it with art: those same ideas of which real things, as philosophy demonstrates, are imperfect copies, themselves appear in the objective arts as ideas, _i.e._ in all their perfection, and represent the intellectual world in the world of reflexion."[23] Music is the "very ideal rhythm of Nature and the Universe, which by means of this art makes itself felt in the derivative world"; perfect creations of statuary are "the very ideas of organic nature represented objectively"; the Homeric epic, "the very identity constituting the foundation of history in the Absolute."[24] But while philosophy gives an immediate representation of the Divine, of absolute Identity, art can but give the immediate representation of Indifference; and "since the degree of perfection or reality in a thing becomes higher in proportion as it approaches nearer to the absolute Idea and the fulness of infinite affirmation and in proportion as it comprehends within itself other powers, it is clear that art, above everything else, is in closest relation with philosophy, from which it is distinguished merely by the character of its specification: in everything else it may be considered as the highest power in the ideal world."[25] To the three powers of the real and ideal world correspond in a rising scale the three ideas of Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Beauty is neither the mere universal (truth), nor mere reality (action), but the perfect interpenetration of both: "beauty exists when the particular (the real) is so adequate to its concept that the latter, as infinite, enters the finite and presents itself to our contemplation in concrete form. With the appearance of the concept, the real becomes truly similar and equal to the idea, wherein the universal and the particular find their absolute identity. Without ceasing to be rational, the rational becomes at the same time apparent and sensible."[26] But as above the three powers is poised God, their point of union, so Philosophy stands supreme over the three ideas; concerning itself not with truth or morality or even beauty alone, but with that which belongs to all the three in common, deduced from one common source. If philosophy assumes the character of science and truth, while yet remaining superior to truth, this is made possible by the fact that science and truth are its formal determination; "philosophy is science in the sense that truth, goodness and beauty, _i.e._ science, virtue and art, interpenetrate each other; therefore it is also not science but is that which is common to science, virtue and art." This interpenetration distinguishes philosophy from all other sciences; for instance, if mathematics can dispense with morality and beauty, philosophy cannot do so.[27]

[Sidenote: _Ideas and the gods. Art and mythology._]

In Beauty are contained truth and goodness, necessity and liberty. When beauty appears to be in conflict with truth, the truth in question is a finite truth with which beauty ought not to agree, because, as we have seen, the art of naturalism and of the merely characteristic is a false art.[28] The individual forms of art, being in themselves representatives of the infinite and the universe, are called Ideas.[29] Considered from the point of view of reality, Ideas are gods; their essence, their "in-itself," is in fact equivalent to God; every idea is an idea so far as it is God in a particular form; every idea, therefore, is equal to God, but to a particular god. Characteristic of all the gods is pure limitation and indivisible absoluteness: Minerva is the idea of wisdom united with strength, but she is lacking in womanly tenderness; Juno is power without wisdom and without the sweet attraction of love, for which she is forced to borrow the cestus of Venus; Venus again has not the weighty wisdom of Minerva. What would become of these ideas if deprived of their limitations? They would cease to be objects of Imagination.[30] Imagination is a faculty which has no connexion with pure intellect or with reason (_Vernunft_) and is distinct from fancy (_Einbildungskraft_) which collects and arranges the products of art, whereas imagination intuits them, forms them out of itself, represents them. Imagination is to fancy as intellectual intuition is to reason: it is therefore the intellectual intuition of art.[31] "Reason" no longer suffices in a philosophy such as this: intellectual intuition, which for Kant was a limiting concept, is now asserted as really existing: intellect sinks to a subordinate place: even the genuine imagination which operates in art is overshadowed by this new-fangled Imagination, twin with intellectual Intuition, who sometimes changes places with this sister of hers. Mythology is proclaimed a necessary condition of all art: mythology which is not allegory, for in the latter the particular signifies only the universal, while the former is already itself the universal; which explains how easy it is to allegorize, and how fascinating are such poems as those of Homer which lend themselves to such interpretations. Christian, as well as Hellenic, art has its mythology: Christ; the persons of the Trinity; the Virgin mother of God.[32] The fine between mythology and art is as shadowy as that between art and philosophy.

[Sidenote: _K. W. Solger._]

The year 1815 saw the publication of Solger's principal work, _Erwin,_ a long philosophical dialogue on the beautiful; subsequently in 1819 he gave a course of lectures on Æsthetic which were published posthumously. He was one of those who found but a glimpse of truth in Kant and held the post-Kantians in very slight estimation, particularly Fichte; in Schelling, who begins from the original unity of the subjective and the objective, he detects for the first time a speculative principle not adequately developed, since Schelling had never triumphed dialectically over the difficulties of intellectual intuition.[33]

[Sidenote: _Fancy and Imagination._]

Solger was one of those who conceived of Imagination as totally distinct from Fancy: fancy (says he) belongs to common cognition and is none other than "the human consciousness, in so far as it continues, in temporal succession, infinitely reasserting an original intuition"; it presupposes the distinctions between common cognition, abstraction and judgement, concept and representation, amongst which "it acts as mediator by giving to the general concept the form of individual representation; and to the latter the form of a general concept; in this manner it has its being among the antitheses of the ordinary understanding." Imagination is totally different; proceeding "from the original unity of the antitheses in the Idea, it acts so that the elements in opposition, separated as they are from the idea, find themselves united in the reality; by its means we are capable of apprehending objects higher than those of common cognition and of recognizing in them the idea itself as real: also, in art, it is the faculty of transforming the idea into reality." It presents itself in three modes or degrees: as Imagination of the Imagination, which conceives the whole as idea, and activity as nothing more than the development of the idea in reality; as Sensibility of the Imagination, in so far as it expresses the life of the idea in the real and reduces the one to the other; lastly (and here we have the highest grade of artistic activity, corresponding with Dialectic in philosophy) as Intellect of the Imagination or artistic Dialectic, conceiving idea and reality in such a way that one passes over into the other, that is to say, into reality. Other divisions and subdivisions are made on which it is not necessary to dwell. Imagination is said to produce the Irony essential to true art: this is the Irony of Tieck and Novalis, of whom Solger is in a sense a follower.[34]

[Sidenote: _Art, practice and religion._]

Solger joins Schelling in placing beauty in the region of the Idea, inaccessible to common consciousness. It is distinct from the idea of Truth, because instead of dissolving the appearances of common consciousness after the manner of truth, art accomplishes the miracle of making appearance dissolve itself while still remaining appearance; artistic thought, therefore, is practical, not theoretical. Furthermore, it is distinct from the idea of Goodness, with which at first sight it would seem to be closely related, because in the case of Goodness the union of ideal with real, of the simple with the multiple, of the infinite with the finite, is not real and complete, but remains ideal, a mere ought-to-be. It is related more closely to Religion, which thinks the Idea as the abyss of life where our individual conscience must lose itself in order to become "essential" (_wesentlich_), while in beauty and art the Idea manifests itself by gathering into itself the world of distinctions between universal and particular and placing itself in their place. Artistic activity is more than theoretical, it is of a practical nature, but realized and perfected; art, therefore, belongs not to theoretical philosophy (as Kant thought, according to Solger), but to practical. Necessarily attached on one side to infinity, it cannot have common nature as its object; for example, art is absent from a portrait, and the ancients showed their discrimination in selecting gods and heroes for objects in sculpture since every deity--even in limited and particular form--always signifies a determinate modification of the Idea.[35]

[Sidenote:_ G. W. F. Hegel_.]

The same concept of art appears in the philosophy of Hegel, whatever may be the minor differences which he felt to separate himself from his predecessors. Little concerned as we are with the shades and varieties of mystical Æsthetic exhibited by each of these thinkers, we are chiefly concerned to lay bare the substantial underlying identity, the mysticism of arbitrarism which gives them their historic place in Æsthetic.

[Sidenote: _Art in the sphere of absolute spirit._]

Opening the _Phenomenology_ and the _Philosophy of Spirit,_ one need not expect to find any discussion of art in the analysis of the forms of the theoretical Spirit, among definitions of sensibility and intuition, language and symbolism, and various grades of imagination and thought. Hegel places Art in the sphere of absolute Spirit, together with Religion and Philosophy,[36] and in this he regards Kant, Schiller, Schelling and Solger as his precursors, for like them he strongly denies that art has the function of representing the abstract concept, but not that it represents the concrete concept or Idea. Hegel's whole philosophy consists in the affirmation of a concrete concept, unknown to ordinary or scientific thought. "Indeed," says he, "no concept has in our day been more mishandled than the concept in itself and for itself; for by concept is generally meant the abstract determinateness or one-sidedness of representation and intellectualistic thought, with which it is naturally impossible to think either the entirety of truth or concrete beauty."[37] To the realm of the concrete concept belongs art, as one of the three forms wherein the freedom of the spirit is achieved; it is the first form, namely that of immediate, sensible, objective knowledge (the second is religion, a representative consciousness _plus_ worship, an element extraneous to mere art: the third is philosophy, free thought of the absolute spirit).[38]

[Sidenote: _Beauty as sensible appearance of the Idea._]

Beauty and truth are at the same time one yet distinct. "Truth is Idea as Idea, according to its being-in-itself and its universal principle, and so far as it is thought as such. There is no sensible or material existence in Truth; thought contemplates therein nothing but universal idea. But the Idea must also realize itself externally and attain an actual and determinate existence. Truth also as such has existence; but when in its determinate external existence it is immediately for consciousness, and the concept remains immediately one with the external appearance, the Idea is not only true but beautiful. In this way Beauty may be defined as the sensible appearance of the Idea."[39] The Idea is the content of art: its sensible and imaginative configuration; its form: two elements which must interpenetrate and form a whole, hence the necessity that a content destined to become a work of art should show itself capable of such transformation; otherwise we have but an imperfect union of poetic form with prosaic and incongruous content.[40] An ideal content must gleam through the sensible form; the form is spiritualized by this ideal light;[41] artistic imagination does not work in the same way as the passive or receptive fancy, it does not stop at the appearances of sensible reality but searches for the internal truth and rationality of the real. "The rationality of the object selected by him should not be alone in awakening the consciousness of the artist: he should have well meditated upon the essential and the true in all their extension and profundity, for without reflexion a man cannot become conscious of that which is within himself, and all great works of art show that their material has been thought again and again from every side. No successful work of art can issue from light and careless imagination."[42] It is a delusion to fancy that poet and painter need nothing beyond intuitions: "a true poet must reflect and meditate before and during the execution of his poem."[43] But it is always understood that the thought of the poet does not take the form of abstraction.

[Sidenote: _Æsthetic in metaphysical idealism and Baumgartenism._]