Edith Landmann-Kalischer: Essays on Art, Aesthetics, and Value (Oxford New Histories of Philosophy) 0197682057, 9780197682050

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Edith Landmann-​Kalischer

OX F O R D N EW H I ST O R I E S O F P H I L O S O P H Y Series Editors Christia Mercer, Melvin Rogers, and Eileen O’Neill (1953–​2017) * Advisory Board Lawrie Balfour, Jacqueline Broad, Marguerite Deslauriers, Karen Detlefsen, Bachir Diagne, Don Garrett, Robert Gooding-​Williams, Andrew Janiak, Marcy Lascano, Lisa Shapiro, Tommie Shelby * Oxford New Histories of Philosophy provides essential resources for those aiming to diversify the content of their philosophy courses, revisit traditional narratives about the history of philosophy, or better understand the richness of philosophy’s past. Examining previously neglected or understudied philosophical figures, movements, and traditions, the series includes both innovative new scholarship and new primary sources. * Published in the series Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century: Essential Readings Edited by Carlos Alberto Sánchez and Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Engagement with Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments Edited by Sandrine Bergès and Eric Schliesser. Translated by Sandrine Bergès Margaret Cavendish: Essential Writings Edited by David Cunning Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-​Century England: Selected Correspondence Edited by Jacqueline Broad The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay Edited by Karen Green Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an External Universe Edited by Antonia Lolordo Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-​Century England: Selected Correspondence Edited by Jacqueline Broad Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-​Century Feminist Philosopher Edited by Alison Stone Korean Women Philosophers and the Ideal of a Female Sage: Essential Writings of Im Yungjidang and Gang Jeongildang Edited and Translated by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Hwa Yeong Wang Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections Edited and Translated by Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin Edith Landmann-​Kalischer: Essays on Art, Aesthetics, and Value Edited by Samantha Matherne. Translated by Daniel O. Dahlstrom

Edith Landmann-​Kalischer Essays on Art, Aesthetics, and Value Edited and with an Introduction by

S A M A N T HA M AT H E R N E Translated by DA N I E L O. DA H L ST R OM

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2024 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress ISBN 978–​0–​19–​768205–​0 (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​768204–​3 (hbk.) DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197682043.001.0001 Paperback printed by Marquis Book Printing, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

Contents Series Editors’ Foreword  Translator’s Acknowledgments  Notes on the Text and Translation  Introduction by Samantha Matherne  Chronology  Primary and Secondary Sources 

vii ix xi xiii lxi lxiii

T H E T H R E E E S S AYS  n the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments  O On Artistic Truth  Philosophy of Values 

3 64 115

Translator’s Afterword  Lexicon  Bibliography  Index 

199 203 213 221

Series Editors’ Foreword Oxford New Histories of Philosophy (ONHP) speaks to a new climate in philosophy. There is a growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer and more diverse than previously understood. It has become clear that canonical figures are best studied in a broad context. More exciting still is the recognition that our philosophical heritage contains long-​forgotten innovative ideas, movements, and thinkers. Sometimes these thinkers warrant serious study in their own right; sometimes their importance resides in the conversations they helped reframe or problems they devised; often their philosophical proposals force us to rethink long-​held assumptions about a period or genre; and frequently they cast well-​known philosophical discussions in a fresh light. There is also a mounting sense among philosophers that our discipline benefits from a diversity of perspectives and a commitment to inclusiveness. In a time when questions about justice, inequality, dignity, education, discrimination, and climate (to name a few) are especially vivid, it is appropriate to mine historical texts for insights that can shift conversations and reframe solutions. Given that philosophy’s very long history contains astute discussions of a vast array of topics, the time is right to cast a broad historical net. Lastly, there is increasing interest among philosophy instructors in speaking to the diversity and concerns of their students. Although historical discussions and texts can serve as a powerful means of doing so, finding the necessary time and tools to excavate long-buried historical materials is challenging. Oxford New Histories of Philosophy is designed to address all these needs. It contains new editions and translations of significant historical texts. These primary materials make available, often for the first time, ideas and works by women, people of color, and movements in philosophy’s past that were groundbreaking in their day, but left out of traditional accounts. Informative introductions help instructors and students navigate the new material. Alongside its primary texts, ONHP also publishes monographs and collections of essays that offer philosophically subtle analyses of understudied

viii  Series Editors’ Foreword topics, movements, and figures. In combining primary materials and astute philosophical analyses, ONHP makes it easier for philosophers, historians, and instructors to include in their courses and research exciting new materials drawn from philosophy’s past. ONHP’s range is wide, both historically and culturally. The series includes, for example, the writings of African American philosophers, twentiethcentury Mexican philosophers, early modern and late medieval women, Islamic and Jewish authors, and non-western thinkers. It excavates and analyses problems and ideas that were prominent in their day, but forgotten by later historians. And it serves as a significant aid to philosophers in teaching and researching this material. As we expand the range of philosophical voices, it is important to acknowledge one voice responsible for this series. Eileen O’Neill was a series editor until her death, December 1, 2017. She was instrumental in motivating and conceptualizing ONHP. Her brilliant scholarship, advocacy, and generosity made all the difference to the efforts that this series is meant to represent. She will be deeply missed, as a scholar and a friend. We are proud to contribute to philosophy’s present and to a richer understanding of its past. Christia Mercer and Melvin Rogers Series Editors

Translator’s Acknowledgments For originally suggesting the project of translating these essays and for her cheerful encouragement, critical eyes, and valuable suggestions during the process, I am immensely grateful to Samantha Matherne. For support for this translation, Samantha and I would like to thank Harvard University and the Dean’s Competitive Funds for Promising Scholarship. For help with the translation, we would also like to thank master stylist Ian Dunkle and Eugenie Schleberger Dahlstrom. For assistance with the lexicon, we would like to thank Maximillian Dahlstrom. For her careful reading of a penultimate draft and for her suggestions, we would also like to thank the Oxford University Press Series Editor Christia Mercer. We are also grateful to Senior Editor Peter Ohlin for his advice and encouragement and for the assistance of Paloma Escovedo, Alex Rouch, Madison Zickgraf, and other members of the production staff at Oxford University Press. We are also grateful to Andrew Butler and Jordan Kokot for their help with the index and final editing.

Notes on the Text and Translation What follows is our policy on the use of brackets and our manner of citing the original pagination within the translation. Brackets: With one exception, all brackets and wording in them have been provided by the editor or translator. Brackets are used to identify German words that have been translated, for example, “fading [Abklingen]” or “paradigm [Typus],” and, very sparingly, to provide supplementary wording for purposes of readability, for example, “Modern grownups seldom succeed in retrieving in its pristine state the world of children and of peoples more at home in nature, a world that is also still in them [modern grownups]” or “But it [what is psychologically true] may not be sheer phantasy either.” Brackets are also used to provide translations of Greek, Latin, French, and German titles, phrases, and passages, for example, “Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums [History of the Art of Antiquity]” or “veritas est norma sui et falsi [truth is the norm of itself and the false].” Yet another use of brackets, confined to footnotes, is to supply otherwise undocumented references or commentary on a passage’s context, for example, “[Landmann-​Kalischer is likely referring to the work of Karl Rohwedder-​Ruge (1865–​1940)]” or “[A biblia pauperum [Paupers’ Bible] was a late medieval picture book of biblical events].” The sole exception here, that is, the only place where the translator or editor is not the source of the wording in brackets, is Landmann-​Kalischer’s own introduction of brackets within a passage from Kant (the cited passage precedes footnotes 37 and 38 in “On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments” (p. 19), where we call attention to the fact that the brackets are in the original). Original Pagination: Embedded throughout the translation are numbers surrounded by vertical lines, referring to the original German pagination of the respective essay. Thus, for example, “|264|” on the opening page of the Introduction to “On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments” refers to Edith Landmann-​Kalischer (1905), “Über den Erkenntniswert ästhetischer Urteile. Ein Vergleich zwischen Sinnes-​und Werturteilen,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, p. 264. Similarly, “|458|” on the first page of the second essay, “On Artistic Truth,” refers to Edith Landmann-​Kalischer (1906), “Über künstlerische Wahrheit.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, p. 458. And so on.

Introduction Samantha Matherne

Beauty should be considered a property of things. —​“On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments” Just as we would never see our face were it not for a mirror, so, too, we would never see our own inner life opposite us—​were it not for the mirror of art. —​“On Artistic Truth” Just as objects have a determinate, physical weight, independent of how light or heavy they seem to one or the other person today or tomorrow, so, too, they have a determinate inner weight, an objectively determinable value, independent of how light or heavy they may be found to be by X or Y in the 9th or 19th century. —​“Philosophy of Values” We have to determine logic, ethics, and aesthetics very simply as sciences of the true, good, and beautiful. —​“Philosophy of Values”

Reading these words may well mark the first time you have encountered the ideas of the German philosopher Edith Landmann-​Kalischer (1877–​1951).1 In fact, picking up this volume may be the first time you have even seen the name “Edith Landmann-​Kalischer.” Though lamentable, the story of her neglect is familiar: as a Jewish woman, she was marginalized in the German philosophical scene of the early twentieth century. She had to leave Germany to pursue her PhD in Zurich because German universities did not grant PhDs to women at the time. She spent most of her adult life in Switzerland, 1 Although her given name is “Kalischer” and married name is “Landmann,” she uses “Landmann-​ Kalischer” to refer to herself in the three essays included in this volume, and I follow suit.

xiv Introduction geographically isolated from the philosophical communities in Germany and Austria, because that is where her husband’s job was. And though she returned to Germany after her husband’s suicide in 1931, Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 foreclosed the possibility of her remaining there, and she returned to Switzerland for the remainder of her life. Yet, happily, as is also becoming a familiar story,2 in spite of these barriers, Landmann-​Kalischer published an extraordinary body of philosophical work. Indeed, she developed one of the most original and wide-​ranging programs in aesthetics and value theory in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Navigating between the trends toward psychology, phenomenology, and Neo-​ Kantianism, she offered innovative analyses of beauty, art, goodness, and truth. In so doing, she defended a picture of our world as one that is replete with aesthetic, moral, and epistemic values, and of our lived experience as animated by the apprehension of those values. Long overdue, Landmann-​Kalischer deserves recognition alongside more familiar names like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Cassirer, as an early twentieth-​century German philosopher who merits our attention still today. This volume represents a landmark step in the effort to recover the philosophy of Landmann-​Kalischer: it is the first time that her work has been translated into English. It includes a translation of three of her early essays: “On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments: A Comparison of Sensory Judgments and Value Judgments” [“Über den Erkenntniswert ästhetischer Urteile. Ein Vergleich zwischen Sinnes-​und Werturteilen”] (1905), “On Artistic Truth” [“Über künstlerische Wahrheit”] (1906), and “Philosophy of Values” [“Philosophie der Werte”] (1910).3 These essays serve as a cohesive and accessible introduction to the systematic view of aesthetic, moral, and epistemic value that she develops in the first decade of the 1900s.

2 See, for example, the work of the philosophers collected in Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition, ed. Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); the new translation of Gerda Walther’s Toward an Ontology of Social Communities (1923), ed. and trans. Sebastian Luft and Rodney Parker (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming); the essays in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-​Century Women Philosophers in the German Tradition, ed. Dalia Nassar and Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and the essays in the Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lydia Moland and Alison Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 3 Citations are to the pagination of the translation/​original. CV: “On the Cognitive Value of Aesthetic Judgments”; AT: “On Artistic Truth”; and PV: “Philosophy of Values.”

Introduction  xv And in them, we find an innovative intervention in aesthetics and value theory that speaks as much to the concerns of her day as it speaks to us now. But what were the concerns of her day? The philosophical discussions at the turn of the twentieth century in Germany were animated by perennial philosophical questions about the nature of mind, reality, knowledge, and value. However, the answers to these questions were steeped in philosophical trends that emerged over the course of the nineteenth century. Looming large in the background was the revolutionary philosophy of Immanuel Kant.4 Wary of unfounded metaphysical claims, Kant developed a ‘critical’ philosophy, which was meant to determine the boundaries of what we can and cannot know. To this end, Kant drew a distinction between two realms: the realm of appearances (phenomena), which we can cognize, and the realm of things in themselves (noumena), which we cannot cognize. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/​87), he argued that instead of setting its sights on metaphysical knowledge of noumena, philosophy should set its sights on ‘transcendental’ insight into the a priori conditions that make appearances and our experience of them possible. He then broadened this transcendental program in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), offering an account of the a priori insight we can have into the nature of morality and freedom, in the former, and into beauty and teleology, in the latter. Though influential, at the turn of the nineteenth century, two major schools of philosophy emerged that challenged the Kantian approach: Romanticism and German idealism. Contrary to the Kantian account of knowledge as bounded, these philosophers argued that it is possible for us to arrive at absolute knowledge. And contrary to the Kantian picture of reality as divided between appearances and things in themselves, they defended a unified view of reality as one. In this spirit, the Romantics, like Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Hölderlin, and the Schlegels (August, Friedrich, and Dorothea), offered a grand vision of art as holding the key to our most profound knowledge of reality.5 Meanwhile German idealists, like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and G. W. F. Hegel, defended ambitious 4 For an introduction to Kant’s philosophy, see Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. James Haden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), and Paul Guyer, Kant (London: Routledge, 2006). 5 For an introduction to German Romanticism, see Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and Keren Gorodeisky, “19th century Romantic Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://​plato.stanf​ord. edu/​archi​ves/​fall2​016/​entr​ies/​aes​thet​ics-​19th-​roman​tic/​, 2016.

xvi Introduction metaphysical systems of the absolute, in which art, religion, and philosophy figured as our path to absolute knowing. For all their grandeur, these Romantic and idealist ideas were met by much skepticism in Germany. This skepticism was motivated, in part, by a comparison with the natural sciences: whereas the natural sciences appeared to be advancing knowledge by remaining anchored in facts and experience, these philosophical systems seemed to be epistemically adrift in speculation. Challenging the Kantian, Romantic, and idealist precedents, toward the middle of the nineteenth century, so-​called positivists, such as Richard Avenarius and Ernst Mach, called for a new empiricist approach to knowledge. According to the positivist program, we need to relinquish the idea that knowledge can be derived a priori and embrace the insight from the natural sciences that knowledge is derived a posteriori on the basis of facts and experience.6 While the positivists sought to put philosophy methodologically on a par with natural science, many worried that doing so lost sight of the distinctive contribution that philosophy, and philosophy alone, can make. In order to recover this distinctive philosophical contribution, in the 1870s a set of philosophers declared the need to go “back to Kant!”7 This rejoinder to Kant coalesced into the Neo-​Kantian movement that would dominate much of German academic philosophy until 1920. Though the Neo-​Kantians were sympathetic to the idea that philosophical knowledge should be grounded in facts and experience, and hence wary of metaphysical speculation, they were equally wary of positivism and called for a return to Kant’s transcendental method. According to the Kantian transcendental method, though philosophy should take facts and experience as its starting point, philosophy has the distinctive task of elucidating the a priori conditions that make these facts and experience possible. Over the next decades, the so-​called Marburg School of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer, and the so-​ called Southwest School of Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, would carry this program forward, offering a transcendental analysis of the facts and experience of nature, culture, and value. 6 For an introduction to Avenarius, see Norman Kemp Smith, “Avenarius’ Philosophy of Pure Experience: I,” Mind XV, no. 57 (1906a): pp. 13–​31 and “Avenarius’ Philosophy of Pure Experience: II,” Mind XV, no. 58 (1906b): pp. 149–​160, and to Mach, see Paul Poljman, “Ernst Mach,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta,