Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism 9780804769983

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EXEMPLARITY AND MEDIOCRITY

Exemplarity and Mediocrity The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism

PAUL FLEMING

stanford university press stanford, california 2009

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fleming, Paul Exemplarity and mediocrity : the art of the average from bourgeois tragedy to realism / Paul Fleming. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5890-1 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. German literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. German literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Aesthetics in literature. I. Title. PT289.F58 2008 830.9'384—dc22 2008007443 Typeset by Thompson Type in 10/12.5 Palatino

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

vii

1

The Prose of the World, 1 The Werther Complex, 3 Literature, Exemplarity, and Mediocrity, 7 From Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism, 11

1. Exemplarity and Mediocrity

15

Exorbitant or Not at All, 15 Living the “Mean” Life (Aristotle), 19 The Rule of Mediocrity (Horace), 21 Exemplary Originality (Kant), 28 Exemplary Averageness (Kant/Schiller), 33 Higher Criticism: Appreciating Mediocrity (Kleist), 39

2. The Average Audience (Lessing on Bourgeois Tragedy)

42

How to Avoid a Tragic Fate, 42 Middle Heroes, 48 The Great Commonizer: Compassion, 54 Art Without Admiration, or, the End of the Age of Great Men, 58 How Many Tears Should the “Best Human” Shed?, 62 The Politics of Compassion, 68 Paving the Way for Mediocre Minds, 70 When Applause Becomes Suspicious, 72

3. The Average Artist (Goethe and Schiller on Dilettantism)

76

The Stamp of the Dilettante, 76 The Age of Dilettantism, 81 The Imitation Drive, 85 “Much I have tried . . . and neither learned nor achieved anything” (Goethe), 91 The Problem of Popularity, 94 Art School for Nonartists, 102 The Art of Renunciation, 106 The Eternal Return of the Dilettante, 113

vi Contents

4. Average Life (Grillparzer, Stifter, and the Art of Prosaic Reality) 120 The Museum of Spirit, 120 Lives of the Nonfamous (Grillparzer), 128 The Insight of the Obscure, 132 The Sublimity of Regularity (Stifter), 139 Perceptions of the Unperceivable, 144 The Statistical Law, 146 How Gentle Is the Gentle Law?, 149 The Art of Prosaic Reality, 154

Conclusion Notes

175

Bibliography Index

163

223

211

Acknowledgments

For their support, encouragement, friendship, criticisms, suggestions, and simply being there in many ways, I would like to thank the following people, without whom this book would never have been completed: My family, Eric Downing, Peter Fenves, Eva Geulen, Eckart Goebel, Paul Greenlaw, Werner Hamacher, Sam Lipsyte, Michèle Lowrie, Dorothea von Mücke, Rainer Nägele, Ulrich Peltzer, Avital Ronell, Arthur Salvo, Martin Schäfer, Richard Sieburth, Gary Weissman, Kirk Wetters, the editors at Stanford, particularly Emily-Jane Cohen, the undergraduate students in my course “Introduction to Mediocrity,” and—above and beyond all—Elke Siegel. I would also like to express my gratitude to New York University’s Research Challenge Fund, which generously supported the early stages of this project; to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which made possible an indispensable year of research and writing in Germany, as well as to Anselm Haverkamp, who sponsored my stay; and finally to Sina Najafi and everybody at Cabinet magazine for the opportunity to work with them on the Average issue. Various versions of chapters were presented as talks at Northwestern University, New York University, Erfurt University, Columbia University, Regensburg University, and Rutgers University. I would like to thank the organizers as well as the participants for invaluable questions, comments, and insights. If there are moments of exemplarity in this book, it is due to the above people and many others. For the mediocrity, the full responsibility is mine.

EXEMPLARITY AND MEDIOCRITY

Introduction

What I am up against are commonplace situations and trivial dialogue. To write the mediocre well and to see that it maintains at the same time its appearance, rhythm, its words is really a diabolical task. Flaubert to Louise Colet, on writing Madame Bovary1

The Prose of the World If there is one thing art cannot be and still be art, it is quotidian or common. From its cultic origins through the imperative of originality and up to the provocation of anti-art, art by definition differs from everyday life—whether by idealizing the world, distinguishing itself from craftsmanship, refusing to participate in the logic of exchange or, at its extreme, by so approximating the everyday that the question “is this art?” becomes the paradoxical mode of art’s continuation. “The purpose of art,” writes Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, “is precisely to strip away both the content and the mode of appearance of the everyday.”2 As simple as this task may sound, Hegel goes to great lengths to underscore the increasing difficulty of excising the quotidian from art’s content and form. This is the case because prosaic reality—the nonheroic, unexceptional world of ordinary life with its ever-expanding network of utilitarian relations—has begun to define all elements of thought and expression. Art must, according to Hegel, perform the double and oppositional movement of simultaneously extricating itself from the everyday while stepping into the middle of life. The

2

Introduction

middle of life since the eighteenth century, however, is nothing but the “present prosaic conditions,” in which prosaic consciousness has assumed two dominant forms: either it reduces the world to mere relations of cause-effect, means-end, and “other such categories of confined thought,” or in the form of “ordinary consciousness,” it doesn’t look for inner connections or reasons at all, “but is satisfied to perceive what is and occurs as merely an isolated thing, i.e., according to its insignificant capriciousness.”3 While Hegel traces the ascent of prosaic consciousness to Rome and the Christian world,4 it is particularly with the rise of the bourgeois subject and the modern state—when “prose has absorbed the entire content of Spirit and impressed its stamp upon it”—that art truly becomes “enmeshed in multiple difficulties.”5 In the post-heroic age of bourgeois relations, art not only has to tear itself free from the “ordinary perspective of indifference and capriciousness” but also must convert the “usual mode of expression of prosaic consciousness into a poetic one.”6 The more the world becomes prose (i.e., the antithesis of art), the more art is forced to address this reality (which is its conditioning world) and still survive as art. Leaving aside his famous, controversial thesis on the end of art,7 Hegel’s diagnosis of prosaic reality delineates one of the fundamental questions of art in modernity: how “to integrate the prose of real life” into artistic depictions without “thereby remaining stalled in the prosaic and everyday.”8 Long before Duchamp’s Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes drove the question of the relation between art and the everyday to the extreme—enacting the capitulation of art to prosaic reality, recasting art as the very question of art— artistic practice in the age of prosaic reality had begun to develop ever new strategies for transforming everyday life into poetry. Art turns to the ordinary and unspectacular not out of capriciousness, lack of imagination, or external factors, but due to an inner necessity. As in Adorno’s canon of the forbidden, there can be no return to earlier, more poetic, more heroic days. When a mode, a figure, a style, a content, a genre, or a movement is exhausted, art moves on—and ever more rapidly since the eighteenth century’s imperative of originality. In Hegel, after the first historical stages of poetic reality are eclipsed and the age of exceptional, world-historical heroes is over, Spirit must confront the reality of its present manifestation: a demythologized, prosaic world. German literature from bourgeois tragedy to Realism has, therefore, not surprisingly shown a persistent fascination for common life, aver-

Introduction

3

age situations, and rather mediocre protagonists, whether in the form of Lessing’s “middle characters,” the Bildungsroman’s average heroes, or Realism’s decidedly ordinary existence.9 This study explores the strategies employed by German-language literature from 1750 to 1850 for increasingly attuning itself to prosaic life while trying to escape prosaic quality. In other words, it examines the diabolical dilemma articulated by Flaubert: how to write the mediocre well, that is, how to write the commonplace in such a way that it “maintains its appearance and rhythm,” while also being more than merely common. This paradox of faithful yet exceptional models of mediocrity will be investigated along three interrelated aesthetic axes: the average audience, the average artist, and average life. In each case, the question is: how can something that by definition is “nothing out of the ordinary” be ordinary and extraordinary at once? In other words, how can there be an art of the average? The title of this study, Exemplarity and Mediocrity, describes then both a disjunctive and conjunctive relation. Read disjunctively, modern art must display the “exemplary originality” (Kant) that only a genius can provide and, thus, is fundamentally opposed to the world of mediocrity understood as the average, the prosaic, the unexceptional, the common, and the unspectacular. In the conjunctive sense, modern art increasingly turns to average life and tries to transform it so as to produce exemplary forms of mediocrity, an averageness that both maintains and transfigures itself.

The Werther Complex As if at once a résumé of the state of affairs and a harbinger of things to come, the first great work of German literature, Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther), manifests one of the tensions between exemplarity and mediocrity that will be the subject of this study and the fate of modern German letters: the unequivocal demand for artistic genius coupled with a decided affection for everyday life. After producing, in his own words, “a well-ordered, very interesting drawing” (not exactly the lexicon of original art), Werther continues in his famous letter dated May 26, 1771, to his friend Wilhelm: Nature alone is infinitely rich, it alone forms the great artist. One can say much in favor of rules, about the same things that one can say in praise of bourgeois society. A person who cultivates and forms himself according to rules will never produce something distasteful and bad, just as one who allows himself

4

Introduction

to be modeled through laws and prosperity can never be an unbearable neighbor, never a remarkable villain. On the other hand, all rules will destroy— regardless of what one says—the true feeling of nature and the true expression of the same! You say “That is too harsh! Rules merely set limits, trim the rank vines.” Good friend, should I provide you with a simile? It is with art as it is with love. A young heart hangs on a girl, spends every hour of his day with her, wastes all his energy, all his money in order to express to her in every moment that he gives himself completely to her. And a philistine comes along, a person who holds public office, and says to him: “Fine young man! To love is human, only you must love in a human way! Divide up your hours, some to work and the remaining hours of leisure you can dedicate to your girl. Count your money, and what remains after your needs are met you can use to give a gift to her—only not too often, like for her birthday or her saint’s name day,” etc. If a person follows this advice, it will produce a useful young person. And I myself would advise every prince to place such a person in a committee. But if he follows this advice in his love, it is over; and if he is an artist, it is over with his art.10

Werther is a member of the new educated middle class in Germany, who, as an aspiring young artist, straddles two worlds: normal bourgeois life and the exceptional demands of art. In language that Hegel will assume as his own in the Aesthetics, Werther explicitly declares that bourgeois life (prosaic reality) has nothing to offer art (poetry). In fact, everything that defines and enables the bourgeoisie—rules of conduct, laws, a measured economy of restraint, the cultivation of usefulness—contradicts and, indeed, destroys artistic production. Art, on the other hand, produces as nature does; it doesn’t imitate nature but competes with it. Art knows no measure but aspires to offer a measure, a model itself. Therefore, nature alone possesses the manifold richness to form an artist, who is called by nature to be a genius. The task of the artist is not to become “a useful young person” but to reject the very notion of usefulness, conformity, and measured restraint. The choice is simple—a good bourgeoisie or a good artist—and apparently without a middle ground.11 At this early moment in the epistolary novel, Werther makes his decision and places all his bets on art. Taking leave of both normative aesthetics and bourgeois life (which he implicitly identifies through their common admiration of rules), Werther decides to follow the one rule of modern, genial art—namely, its freedom from rules12—and therefore to assume a position antithetical to everyday life and its norms and laws. Art and everyday life cannot be integrated, for to compromise with the demands of bourgeois life—although rendering

Introduction

5

a person “useful” and a “good neighbor”—spells the end of art. Art is excess, an economy without limit; the regiment of bourgeois life (calculating, dividing up, partitioning) refuses exhaustion in the name of longevity. A good citizen rations his or her capacities (love, energy, and money) at the expense of passion. The comparison between art and love in this passage is significant for Werther as a whole, since it also explicates the novel’s solution to the dilemma between the fundamental opposition between art and everyday life: art has to fall in love with the quotidian. Werther, an aspiring young visual artist, possesses a decided, indeed insatiable affection for the quotidian life that stands in opposition to art. The “Werther complex”—as one could call it—is to view bourgeois life as the antithesis of art and yet to fall in love with it (madly, limitlessly) all the same and thus transfigure its prosaic structure into poetry. Werther’s amorous fantasy is set aflame not by an exceptional person, a like-minded artist desiring extremely and desiring extremes. Rather, the “most stimulating play” he “has ever seen”13 is the mundane image of a mother figure slicing bread for children—an unexceptional scene repeated daily in almost every domestic milieu.14 Werther, however, is enraptured. His erotic fate is sealed when, a few minutes later, Charlotte delineates her rather ordinary taste in literature: “My favorite author is the one who allows me to rediscover my world, in which things happen like they happen to me, and whose story is as interesting and dear as my own domestic life, which, of course, is not a paradise but all in all a source of unspeakable happiness.”15 Werther, his heart racing, comments upon Lotte’s literary taste with a line that, for an aspiring young “genius,” could be read as ambivalent but is solely positive: “I struggled to conceal my emotions about these words.”16 Charlotte’s criteria for good literature are notable insofar as they reflect the (rather prosaic) taste of the new bourgeoisie that will reappear throughout this study: the desire, first, to identify with a familiar milieu, with a world that is ultimately one’s own and, second, to place a premium on domestic life, which is not paradise but nevertheless constitutes the very concept of the world. In this scene’s triangulation of desire, Werther looks to Lotte with an inexhaustible passion while Lotte looks to literature to find a language, a mirroring representation that gives a voice to her world. Werther’s desire knows no limits, while Lotte’s desires are limited to the repetition of her experience of the world. Roland Barthes rather unflatteringly calls Charlotte “quite insipid” and “a colorless object [. . .]

6

Introduction

placed in the center of the stage and there adored, idolized, taken to task, covered with discourse, with prayers.”17 But this is the point of the novel viewed from the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity: the original art of the genius is to transfigure mediocrity, just as Werther’s desire transfigures the bourgeois life that runs counter to art. Although Werther, in his unbridled and uncontainable passion, assumes a position opposite bourgeois life, what he ultimately desires is to take the bourgeois Albert’s place. Werther doesn’t desire something other than the bourgeois order; he wants his place in it, at Lotte’s side. He doesn’t want to elope with Charlotte and “leave it all behind” or find a utopia of “another condition” (Musil); rather, in Barthes’s words, he wants to be “pigeonholed,” “to enter into a system.”18 Therefore, as excessive and uncommon—or uncommonly common19—as Werther’s desire is, what he desires is utterly common. Charlotte, however, ultimately decides for a life that reflects her taste in literature: the domesticity and bourgeois world embodied by Albert, who constitutes the antithesis of art in Werther’s sense. One could say, then, that the ultimate test of the modern artist is to lend an aesthetic nimbus to what resists and opposes art the most— everyday, mediocre life. Goethe, the author of Werther, passes the test with flying colors. The novel is a tour de force in showing how literature can transfigure ordinary life and thus, as Barthes has shown, offer a paradigm of the lover’s solitary discourse. The literary figure Werther, however, fails. Or rather, he succeeds as a genial lover (in his ability to adorn a “colorless object” with the most vibrant colors) but not as an artist. Werther, it seems, loves like an artist, but produces art like a bourgeois.20 If the first Werther complex is to abhor the banality of bourgeois life and fall in love with it all the same, the second Werther complex describes the “artist” himself and illustrates a further dilemma of mediocrity and exemplarity: If the genius is an exceptional and rare figure, most artists in the age of the prosaic bourgeoisie are, in fact, not artists, precisely because they were not born geniuses. They may make “art” and may even make good money from it, but without the spark of genius their products, from a strict aesthetic perspective, do not belong to art. Werther dedicates himself to the exceptional state of art—in opposition to bourgeois life and its norms, laws, and contained economy— without perhaps fully realizing that he is not a genius. By his own delineation of the strictures of art, Werther ’s self-assessment of his

Introduction

7

drawing (“well-organized, very interesting”) belongs more properly to the bourgeois economy’s lexicon than to the expression of aesthetic singularity. And after he falls for Charlotte, his drawing falters even further. In a letter to Wilhelm from July 24, 1771, Werther admits that “little is happening” with his drawing skills: “I don’t know how I should express myself. My powers of representation are so weak; everything is swimming and hovering in front of my soul so that I can’t achieve a basic sketch.”21 An unbridgeable divide lies between Werther’s artistic aspiration and its execution. As Thomas Mann wrote, Werther is just like the young Goethe—“minus the creative talent that nature bestowed to the latter.”22 Werther himself thematizes this very problem. In one of his first letters (May 17, 1771), he comments on the apparent death of a childhood friend, a young woman with whom he seems to have shared his first intense bond. Werther writes: “Wasn’t our relation an eternal weaving of the finest feelings, the sharpest wit and its modification to the point of bad habit [Unart]—everything marked with the stamp of genius?”23 Werther’s choice of words—“stamp of genius”—is symptomatic of his artistic production as a whole. The word genius only appears twice in Werther, the second instance a few days later in the previously mentioned letter to Wilhelm dated May 26, 1771, where Werther resolves to listen only to nature as his artistic mentor, for it “alone forms the great artist.” After declaring his allegiance to an aesthetics of genius and disparaging norms as good for bourgeois society but destructive for the “great artist,” Werther references “the stream of genius” and laments that this subterranean force “rarely” manifests itself.24 The fact that Werther feels only the “stamp of genius”—that is, only calls this stamp his own—and despairs the rarity of the genuine “stream of genius” is telling. As a singular talent to produce what others cannot, genius is precisely that which defies any notion of a type or mold, is something that cannot be repeated and mass produced. What Werther—ultimately a mediocre artist—experiences is the bane of not being blessed by genius but merely sensing its stamp, which ultimately doesn’t belong to genius at all.25

Literature, Exemplarity, and Mediocrity One of the premises of this study is that the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity is a particular problem of literature (as opposed to, say, sculpture or music)26 in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

8

Introduction

and, moreover, that Germany and German letters occupy a special position within this dynamic. Goethe and Schiller comment on literature’s almost singular attraction for nongeniuses on the level of production, when they—both writers—note that “in all ages it is clear that the conditions for the visual artist are desirable and enviable.”27 Because of costs, materials, and training that exceed a typical (university) education centered on letters, the visual and musical arts require a process of specialization that, to put it somewhat crassly, presupposes more than the mere qualification of literacy and “a story to tell.” This problem increases astronomically in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the rise of the educated middle class. Between 1750 and 1810, a mere sixty years, an unprecedented boom in literary and dramatic publications occurs: Germany went from averaging 12.5 dramas and 7.3 novels per year (1750–60) to a remarkable 102 dramas and 170 novels per year (1800–10).28 One can quite properly speak of a revolution of the literary sphere that is conditioned, on the one hand, by the educated middle class as consumers and producers and, on the other, by the advances in printing that allowed such production at lower costs.29 One of the particular instigators of the massive expansion of the literary market is what Goethe and Schiller dub dilettantism, which is a form of the second Werther complex: to be passionate about art, to actively participate in it, but ultimately to lack the spark of genius that would first allow one to be an artist. Among the primary causes for the explosion of dilettantism around 1800, observe Goethe and Schiller, is the “immediate transition from the school class and university to attempts at writing [Schriftstellerei].”30 The proliferation of literary texts has two interrelated consequences: on the one hand, the world of artistic letters assumes a new importance for the cultivation and definition of the educated middle class (which is its predominant audience). In fact, the very identity of the ascendant bourgeoisie was tied not only to education but also to its appreciation of the fine arts. On the other hand, the man of average talents (i.e., nongenius) is not limiting his passion for literature solely to its reception or consumption but is taking an active role in its production. This is not to say that (following Jochen Schulte-Sasse’s study on trivial literature) a second, parallel literary form of adventure, romance, and entertainment literature isn’t also responsible for this enormous explosion of the literary market; this is clearly the case. However, as Goethe and Schiller argue in their notes on dilettantism, high art in the age of the bourgeoisie and market-

Introduction

9

place is equally experiencing an influx of “artists” à la Werther—that is, those who want to be artists but, lacking genius, aren’t artists at all. It is therefore not an exaggeration to maintain that literature more than any other art form both constituted and carried the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Prior to the development of the modern mass media in the twentieth century, literature alone allowed the common person to consume and produce art on a historically unheard-of level: every educated person could try his or her hand at writing, and, as already seen with Charlotte, literature was consumed to offer a language, a mirror of the world that one inhabited, a reflection of one’s domestic life. Therefore, literature occupied a privileged role for both representing and educating the common person in the age of prose. Only in the twentieth century did the visual arts, followed by the mass media of radio, film, television, and the Internet, overtake literature as the embodiment of the dilemma of mediocrity, both as a question of quality and as the main vehicle for representing ordinary life. While literature as the bearer of the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries certainly applies to other nations, Germany occupies a unique position vis-à-vis other European countries and traditions. Whereas England and France were even more dramatically experiencing the emergence of the bourgeoisie, their middle classes were bound largely to commerce; the German middle class, in contradistinction, had little but education, government positions, and art to hold onto, which renders the art world particularly important in Germany for the bourgeoisie’s selfdefinition. This is compounded by the fact that Germany is a “belated nation” (Plessner) not only in political terms but also in literary ones, since it is the one European nation not to have experienced a golden age prior to the rise of the middle class and the market in its modern form: Italy had Dante and Petrarch, Spain had Calderon and Cervantes, France had Molière and Racine, and England had Shakespeare and Milton. German letters were therefore faced with the unique task of trying to establish something like a “classical literature” during the very age when prosaic reality and market forces began to exert a previously unheard-of influence on literature. With the emergence of middle-class society, the marketplace, and the growing dependence of artists on the public, one notices an emphatic and irreversible entrance of the average person into the art world. Despite the aesthetics of

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Introduction

genius, the modern art system is largely determined not by the naturally exceptional person, but by the interests, proclivities, and taste of the average, middle-class recipient. Artists may have freed themselves from the patronage of the court, but this new independence is countered by the exposure of art to the dictates of public taste and the marketplace.31 Germany, in other words, confronted a double task: to establish itself as a literary nation of European quality at the very time when success began to be measured in sales.32 Goethe and Schiller underscore this particular German dilemma in the collection of notes and charts on dilettantism that will be the main focus of this book’s third chapter: “The fact that the German language began to be used as a poetic language not through the work of a poetic genius but merely through mediocre minds must encourage dilettantism to also try its hand at art.”33 Goethe and Schiller, of course, ignore the influence of Luther in forming the German language as a literary language (and as a unified language), but their point is well taken: Until the 1760s there was no attempt at a German national theater (a project that failed until the nineteenth century); and, in fact, the courts generally performed French plays and Italian operas. When it came to appealing to a tradition, the only models were French and English. The great poetic debates up to 1775 were, therefore, dominated by the question of whether French Classicism (Gottsched) or Shakespeare (Breitinger, Bodmer, and then Herder and Goethe) should be the model for a “German” drama. Until Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther there was nothing in German literature that could be said to have reached the status of “world literature.”34 Therefore, it is not surprising that one of the Werther effects—in addition to the new dress code (blue coat, yellow vest, and boots with brown sheaths) and a European-wide rash of suicides à la Werther— was a third Werther complex, torn between exemplarity and mediocrity. Werther spurred the immediate proliferation of literary imitations, from those that wanted to profit from its success (including the 1775 The Sorrows of the Young Wertheress, a record of Lotte’s otherwise unrecorded and equally emotional letters to Werther) to parodies that sought to beat back its popularity and provide an alternative, happy ending (e.g., Nicolai’s The Joys of Young Werther).35 As a language without a literary tradition of European repute, German letters as a whole can be described as suffering from what Werther himself diagnoses: the “stamp of genius.” The attempt to continue, copy, or adhere to the tradition of exemplary models runs, however, diametrically opposed

Introduction

11

to the demand of artistic originality that begins in Germany around the time of Werther’s publication.36 Following Kant (as will be delineated in chapter 1), original art is only exemplary as a model of judgment not of production. Therefore, the century-old tradition of exemplarity, in which great works of art are to serve as standards for production (since they offer norms and maintain tradition), is ruptured in the eighteenth century. In the age of innovation, the exemplarity of a work of art lies in its originality, and only this imperative of innovation is to be followed, not the exemplum itself.

From Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism This study focuses on German-language literature from 1750 to 1850, a period in which the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity in art was played out primarily in the world of letters. Chapter 1, “Exemplarity and Mediocrity,” begins by explicating aesthetics’ long-standing abhorrence of mediocre quality, in which average art is in many ways worse than artistic failure (which can still be sublime). It then differentiates this universal rejection of mediocrity by investigating a key reversal in aesthetic thought that takes place with the break from normative aesthetics (Aristotle, Horace) in the eighteenth century and the development of a genial notion of art (Kant). Whereas art in the wake of Aristotle’s and Horace’s respective Poetics was largely conceived as a series of rules and exempla to be followed (i.e., exemplarity served as the basis for artistic production and the maintenance of tradition), modern art is defined by originality, which reinscribes exemplarity solely as an effect of original art and decidedly not its presupposition. Therefore, while normative aesthetics strictly circumscribes the procedures, genre distinctions, and subject matter of art and thus locates mediocrity partially in the inability to follow the existing standards and genre determinations, modern art under the imperative of originality reverses this criterion: mediocre art is now imitative, derivative production. Modern exemplarity no longer consists in adhering to canonical texts and established procedure but in establishing a new rule for aesthetic judgment via originality. Chapter 2, “The Average Audience (Lessing on Bourgeois Tragedy),” examines the first great entrance of the common person into the heart of the “highest” art form, tragedy. Breaking from the tragic tradition, in which only world-historical figures are worthy of a tragic fate, bourgeois tragedy stages “completely common” heroes (Lessing)

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Introduction

to provide a maximum of identification for the average viewer. The main focus of this chapter is Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy and his correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn, in which he rejects sublime heroic tragedy and its affect of admiration in favor of common figures and the affect of compassion [Mitleid]. Two crucial reversals are at stake in Lessing’s conception of bourgeois tragedy: first, in rejecting sublime, public heroes in favor of common, domestic protagonists, bourgeois tragedy aesthetically enacts the end of the age of heroes and the advent of the age of the common man. Second, in delineating the sole tragic effect as compassion and defining the “best human” as the most compassionate, Lessing establishes theater as the educative arena for converting an average audience into an exemplary public. Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy ultimately concerns less the staging of common life and more decisively the production of an exemplary audience precisely through its affective identification with other nonheroic types. For Lessing, it is not the exceptional but the common hero who becomes the instigator of exemplarity. Chapter 3, “The Average Artist (Goethe and Schiller on Dilettantism),” investigates the aesthetics of the genius through the lens of Goethe’s and Schiller’s literary and theoretical writings. Not only does their work continually reflect on questions of genius and mediocrity— particularly in Goethe’s Werther and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as well as their fragmentary, collective project on the dilettante (which has received scant attention in English)—but they also recognize that the modern art system demands in equal parts an aesthetics of genius and an aesthetics of dilettantism. Recognizing the growing suffusion of the bourgeoisie’s self-definition and the world of art, Goethe and Schiller view the rise of the amateurish artist not only as a new threat to art but also as a previously unheard-of possibility: the genuine aesthetic education of society. The nongenius’s investment in art allows for a hands-on education that should ideally lead to a renunciation of artistic practice and a resulting refinement of taste that first creates the conditions for encouraging and supporting the production of “great” or “classical” literature. For Goethe, the genius is no longer a solitary Prometheus who creates in defiance of god and man alike, but rather a figure of exception that nonetheless is dependent on the taste and cultivation of the average citizen. The common, nontalented person is therefore excluded from artistic production, but is included as a connoisseur who is essential for the development of the genius. In the end,

Introduction

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the fate of modern art lies not only with the artistic genius but more decisively with the dilettante. Chapter 4, “Average Life (Grillparzer, Stifter, and the Art of Prosaic Reality),” addresses realist attempts to redefine greatness by inverting aesthetics’ traditional hierarchies. After juxtaposing Hegel’s thesis on the “end of art” together with Heine’s declaration of the “end of the Goethean artistic period,” this chapter examines how Realism surrenders the demand for genius and embraces an age of epigones, of those who come too late. The realist artist is not defined as a genial exception, but as an observer and quasi-scientific investigator of the ordinary, the everyday, and the small. Franz Grillparzer’s aesthetichermeneutic project posits an invisible, unbroken thread from the lives of the nonfamous to the great mythological figures and claims that one can only understand the famous on the basis of the ordinary. Grillparzer’s goal is no longer to transform or excise the everyday, but to examine it in its particularity so that up close one rediscovers the quotidian as the hermeneutic key to understanding the human as such. For Adalbert Stifter, it is precisely the small and mundane in their collected and collective force that provide an insight into true greatness, which is found only in the regularity of natural and moral law. Appealing to a statistical sense of the normal distribution, Stifter views the momentous as smaller than the small, since an overwhelming experience deviates from the norm and thus only serves to distract one from what he calls “the gentle law,” the law of regularity that lies at the base of the common and exceptional alike. Developing a statistically inflected poetics of the ordinary, Stifter attempts to reorient the poles of aesthetic thought by placing the utterly common as a figure of normality at the center of art. Such a realist immersion in average life constitutes a unique aesthetic attempt at poeticizing prosaic reality by declaring the prose of the world to be poetry itself, since only the nonexceptional rhythm of average life can reveal what is always there—“the gentle law” of sublime regularity—but otherwise cannot be perceived.

CHAPTER

Exemplarity and Mediocrity

1

Among all mediocre things, the mediocre poet is certainly the worst. Goethe1

Exorbitant or Not at All While there has certainly been mediocre art since time immemorial, it is questionable whether mediocre art is in fact art and thus whether a mediocre artist is actually an artist. This possibility may sound extreme, but in the case of mediocrity—which, by definition, should offer a middle ground—aesthetics has repeatedly taken an extreme position. When it comes to average quality, art differs from perhaps all other human activities: an average teacher, craftsman, lawyer, or politician remains a professional within a respective field and, as average, could be doing better but isn’t doing too badly either. The judgment “mediocre” or “average,” while certainly not flattering, in no way strips the recipients of their status in their designated field, nor does it declare their achievements to be worthless. A mediocre student is just that: a student with average abilities, just as a mediocre lawyer remains a lawyer and, all things considered, a relatively decent one. In both cases, there are many better than average but also many worse. Not so for the artist. As a judgment of value, “mediocre” or “average” possesses a different and decidedly more damning valence in art. The poet Gottfried Benn brings the extreme standards of lyric poetry

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to the fore in his lecture “Probleme der Lyrik” (1951, “Problems of Lyric Poetry”): May I add at this point the remark that mediocrity is simply not allowed and is unbearable in lyric poetry. Poetry’s field is narrow, its means very subtle, its substance the ens realissimum of substances. Thus, its standards must be extreme. Mediocre novels are not so unbearable; they can entertain, teach, and be exciting, but lyric poetry must be either exorbitant or not at all. This belongs to its essence. And to its essence belongs something else, a tragic experience of the poet: No poet, even the greatest poets of our time, has left behind more than six to eight complete poems. The remaining poems may be interesting from the perspective of the author’s biography or development, but those that rest in themselves, shine forth from themselves, and are replete with long fascination are few—thus, for the sake of these six poems the thirty to fifty years of asceticism, suffering, and battle.2

If all art is an extreme, a form of expression that necessarily deviates from any sense of averageness—and therefore demands extreme criteria—then poetry constitutes for Benn the pinnacle of artistic exceptionality. With respect to aesthetic taste, poetry simply cannot endure middling quality; a poem must be “complete,” at once maximizing its narrow field and exercising exacting subtlety. By “resting in” and “shining forth” from itself, a complete poem for Benn forms what one could call a monadic totality with neither superfluity nor lack, which thus holds its fascination for generations. As the “most real of all substances,” poetry acknowledges a solitary, binary aesthetic standard: perfection or nothing. While such strict aesthetic demands may have sounded anachronistic or even elitist in the mid-twentieth century (much like the reproach against Adorno), Benn’s reflections are in line with a distinct notion of aesthetic judgment since Kant: there are no gradations of taste, no exceptions, only the uncompromising demand for universality. Benn interestingly reduces the effects of lyric poetry’s aesthetic absolutism to the “personal tragedy” of even the greatest poet, who spends a lifetime of renunciation and suffering for a handful of complete poems. One senses here, of course, the self-stylized artist at once lamenting and masochistically reveling in the “six to eight” poems that constitute the lasting oeuvre of a great poet (including, presumably, Benn himself). But even if Benn is aestheticizing the agony of the artist, the consequences of his strict aesthetic stance are enormous for poetry as a whole: if only a few poems per great author stand the test of per-

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fection, then the vast majority of poetry that one reads is mediocre or worse, which means that most poetry is ultimately not what it claims to be: poetry. This is not to say that mediocre and failed poems are not worth reading. Benn is clear: such work (which, in fact, constitutes the brunt of an author’s lifetime output) remains “interesting” and can reveal much about the author and his or her development, but these are literary-historical, psychological, or philological categories, not aesthetic ones. This difference between aesthetic and other categories also helps explain why Benn exempts the mediocre novel—the always somewhat suspect “genre” of modernity—from this absolute standard. What a mediocre novel offers (e.g., entertainment, information, and excitement) may have been part of the novel as such from the beginning and thus perhaps excludes this bourgeois genre from high art. Therefore, just as mediocre novels provide an escape from everyday life, mediocre poetry is fodder for philologists and literary historians, not for aesthetic judgment, which demands something exorbitant. From Benn’s perspective, one could say that the university is the place where one processes, studies, and tries to render mediocre poetry “interesting”—for an author’s work or for a tradition’s development. That aesthetics should be considered an extreme discipline is further developed by the German author Jean Paul in 1796: “Completely miserable poetry is better than every mediocre poetry.”3 In art it is better to fail miserably than to succeed mildly. While this insight may apply to other areas and endeavors, this is the case only when life is viewed, in Nietzsche’s words, “as an aesthetic phenomenon” (as opposed to, say, an economic, ethical, or political one). The scale of aesthetic judgment is not a horizontal line with “failure” on one end and “perfection” or “beauty” on the other, whereby “mediocre” splits the difference. Rather, the spectrum of aesthetic valuation forms a circle with “success” and “failure” next to each other at the top and “mediocre” on the distant, bottom half. For this reason, the aesthetic judgment “mediocre” or “average” is more damning than failure. Like greatness, failure marks an extreme and, therefore, still announces itself as remarkable: One tried something spectacular and failed spectacularly, which has its own aesthetic pleasure. Failure, in fact, is akin to the sublime. There can be sublime failure but no beautiful failure. Sublime failure can be understood as a certain formless or malformed monstrosity that overpowers the imagination and yet achieves pleasure in displeasure. Aesthetic failure additionally harbors the possibility of being misunderstood by the contemporary audience and thus

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before its time. A central topos of the artist is the belated genius, the one who came too early, was too inventive and original, and hence is only posthumously given the proper recognition and admiration.4 Great art often awaits a future, adequate reception. Average art, on the other hand, fits comfortably into the current art scene; it may possess a certain proficiency, it may sell well, but by not achieving an extreme, mediocrity, unlike sublime failure, is ultimately forgettable. While the abhorrence of mediocrity may sound like a modern proclivity or obsession, the singular status of mediocrity in art is as old as Western aesthetics and expressed just as forcefully by Horace in a text that would be the foundation of poetics until the mid-eighteenth century, the Ars Poetica. Horace’s virulent critique of mediocre poetry is significant for two reasons: first, Horace’s rejection of poetic mediocrity will proceed from different—indeed, polar opposite—reasons than modern aesthetics. As one of the quasi-lawgivers of normative aesthetics, Horace offers a rather rule-based notion of art that implicitly equates mediocrity with excessive deviation from exemplary models and authorizing judges of taste. The function of exemplarity in normative aesthetics is to collect and canonize great works that codify norms, offer models for imitation, and enable an unbroken tradition. Therefore, while mediocrity has always been taboo in art, everything changes regarding its criteria with the advent of the aesthetics of genius and the imperative of originality. Until the eighteenth century, poetics operated under the authorizing influence of normative aesthetics, in which to defy established exemplary texts was to risk mediocrity. With the rise of the genius and originality, the opposite holds true: to imitate is to be mediocre. The second reason for Horace’s significance regarding the issue of mediocrity is that he is also famous for coining the phrase “auream mediocritatem,” which is regularly translated as “the golden mean” or “the golden middle” but can be literally rendered as “golden mediocrity”5—the ethical ideal of a middle road between extremes. Horace thus offers two distinct conceptions of mediocrity, one that relies on external standards and exempla to determine aesthetic quality (normative aesthetics) and another (the golden mean) that does not proceed from a rule and, in fact, rejects the very notion of a universal standard but nevertheless offers a measure without a guiding norm—a determination of the middle that bears affinities to Kant’s notion of original exemplarity. This chapter examines and differentiates the grounds for aesthetics’ rejection of mediocrity by investigating the key reversal that takes

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place with the break from normative aesthetics (Aristotle, Horace) in the eighteenth century and the development of a genial notion of art (Kant). It then looks at how Kant and Schiller negotiate the representability of the average and common under the auspices of originality and concludes with a discussion of Kleist’s text “A Principle of Higher Criticism,” in which he argues contra Kant (and most aesthetic thought) that mediocre art, in fact, serves as the basis of aesthetic judgment and aesthetic community, since mediocre art by nature demands an argumentative engagement.

Living the “Mean” Life (Aristotle) As is well known, Horace’s notion of the golden mean is derived from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s entire ethical apparatus is premised on the contention that extremes, whether of deficiency or excess (i.e., too little or too much), are always destructive, while the “middle” or the “mean” both nourishes and preserves and thereby paves the path to “arete,” which is often translated as “virtue” but is more akin to “excellence.” Aristotle’s good life, his ethical and happy life, requires avoiding extremes and choosing the mean. Although such a philosophy sounds like the blueprint for taking the mediocre road in life, Classical ethics had a completely different notion of the average. Unlike Christianity or Kant’s categorical imperative, Aristotle rejects the notion of an absolute law or universal principle. “Matters concerned with conduct and questions of what is good,” writes Aristotle, “have for us no fixity, [. . .] they do not fall under any art or precept but the agents themselves must in each case consider what is appropriate to the occasion.”6 If ethical questions have neither fixity nor objective precepts, the extremes to be navigated are not fixed mathematical points against which all are measured and judged, but rather particular excesses relative only to one person. The contingencies of individual constitution demand the mobilization of a mean relative to the individual, a mean that “is not one, nor the same for all.”7 Every person has a different character with certain inclinations and weaknesses. Within these idiosyncratic parameters one must locate one’s individual extremes and thereby determine the measure particular to oneself. The Classical golden mean differs, however, not only from person to person but also from situation to situation. One does not have a fixed, lifelong average; rather, the mean constitutes a moving target that shifts in each new context:

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For instance, fear and confidence and appetite and anger and pity and in general pleasure and pain may be felt both too much and too little, and in either case not properly; but to feel them at the right times, toward the right objects, toward the right people, with the right motive, and in the right way, is what is both intermediate and best, and this is characteristic of excellence. Similarly with regard to actions, there is excess, defect, and the intermediate.8

Every ethical decision is contextual and thus demands a recalibration of one’s mean. What is the object? The motivation? The particular constellation of factors? Only in finding one’s individual “intermediate” or “middle” does one avoid extremes and embody excellence. For Aristotle, locating the middle—much less choosing and acting on it—is not the easiest but most difficult, the path of greatest resistance: “For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle. [. . .] Any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money.”9 In this version of finding one’s own private average, if one succeeds in living the mean, one can never be average or mediocre, because there is no better or worse in relation to others. Whereas mediocrity in its now standard sense is a relational, comparative term, defined vis-à-vis the rest and especially the best, the middle in Aristotle is always mine, mine alone and, in fact, never the same for me. That is, there is no one golden mean, but a mean for every person in every new situation and thus the demand to repeatedly recalculate such an idiosyncratic measure. Despite the emphatic differentiation between being average and finding one’s average, one senses Aristotle’s own slight suspicion that the middle may ultimately be of middling quality: “Hence, in respect to its substance and the definition which states its essence, excellence is a mean; with regard to what is best and right, excellence is an extreme.”10 Aristotle acknowledges here the somewhat paradoxical logic underpinning what Horace will call the “golden mean” or “golden mediocrity”: What is by definition (and, therefore, essentially and literally) a middle state must at the same time be considered an extreme with respect to excellence. The “best” (an extreme) is not an extreme, but the mean; Aristotle’s slight hesitation toward the mean—maybe living the mean is a bit mediocre—is symptomatic of the ambivalence that will surround the terms average, mean, and mediocre throughout this study. The key factor that separates Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean from the usual understanding of the middle as mediocre is, however, that his sense of the average rejects any notion of comparison. This concept of a singular mean, which proceeds from neither a rule nor a principle yet offers one in turn, will be decisive for a notion of original

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exemplarity that arrives with Kant, in which exemplarity is at once an effect of originality and decoupled from imitation.

The Rule of Mediocrity (Horace) If the golden mean is always an individual measurement that ideally has nothing to do with being average (since it is a singular calculation free from comparison), this does not mean that antiquity had no notion of the mediocre as a judgment of relative ability and quality. In the Ars Poetica, Horace again utilizes the word “mediocris,” now as a relational category denoting its established sense of middling quality or average ability. Here the middle is not an idiosyncratic deduction of a personal mean, but a judgment of relative value. Horace, however, does not simply dismiss mediocrity as being of no worth. Rather, he already pinpoints the roots of mediocrity as a double-edged sword, in which art deviates from other professions and forms of expression: Take to heart and remember this dictum; there are only some things in which we rightly allow what is middling [medium] and tolerable. A mediocre [mediocris] lawyer or pleader falls short of the merit of eloquent Messala and doesn’t know as much as Aulus Cascellius, yet nevertheless he has a value; but neither men nor gods nor booksellers allow mediocre [mediocribus] poets.11

With this imperative— “remember this dictum”— one encounters a fundamental dilemma of mediocrity that persists until today. Already with Horace, mediocrity as a judgment of relative ability possesses a qualitative difference in art as opposed to all other professions. In most areas of life (e.g., in the practical arts such as law), averageness has its place, function, and value; in the fine arts, however, mediocrity is absolutely taboo. In both of Horace’s examples, the lawyer and the artist, the word “mediocrity” marks a judgment of relative ability. In both cases, “mediocrity” means that compared with others one is simply not the best. But for Horace a mediocre lawyer is not only “tolerable” but also has a “value”—an allowance not granted to the mediocre poet. If one adds the politician to Horace’s lawyer and pleader—and this is not out of place, since we are talking about the practical art of persuasion—one finds perhaps the first clear elucidation of the deep ambivalence surrounding the average and the mediocre. Politics, particularly when viewed in its majority-rule form, is unthinkable without recourse to some notion of the average, while average art is simply unthinkable. One doesn’t have to be the most eloquent,

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talented, and skillful politician or lawyer to be successful. In fact, when the goal is to win the immediate approval of the majority, it can be advantageous to not be too intelligent or too eloquent. The point is not first and foremost to be the most eloquent and most intelligent (though this can help) but to secure the immediate approval of the crowd. And here, a light touch of mediocrity is allowable and even valued.12 Horace grants the mediocre poet no such allowance. The crucial rule in Ars Poetica is the absolute prohibition of average art; for Horace, neither heaven nor earth will allow it. This isn’t to say that Homer cannot nod and let a few lines of doggerel slip through,13 but artists must always be on their toes and ward off the demons of mediocrity. For Horace, if poetry “falls but a little below the highest, it sinks to the bottom.”14 This last remark is telling and underscores the similar thought made by Benn almost two thousand years later: Art is an all or nothing game. If an artwork doesn’t achieve the highest, if it is not an extreme of perfection, it falls below repute. Unlike every other profession, which allows for degrees of success, accomplishment, and perfection, art knows no such gradation. In his treatise on orators, Brutus, Cicero further elucidates this fundamental difference between the orator/lawyer and the poet with respect to the average and, in fact, provides a mathematical formula for calculating it: Once upon a time he [Antimachus] was reading to a select company that lengthy poem of his, and before he finished everybody left except Plato. “I shall proceed nevertheless,” he said. “To me Plato is worth a hundred thousand.” He was right, of course: a difficult and involved poem cannot be expected to make a wide appeal, but an oration which is to be delivered to the public must merit the applause of the public. Now if [the orator] Demosthenes had found himself abandoned by his audience, with Plato alone sitting before him, he would have been speechless.15

In democratic situations in which the majority decides, all that matters is the immediate effect on the greatest number of people. The math is easy: add it up and see who gets the greater approval. In art, opinion is weighted. Ergo, the math of art is not “one man one vote,” but rather one Plato equals one hundred thousand others. Art, in other words, resists simple majority-rule democracy and requires taste as an educated, critical criterion for judgment. The artist only needs an audience of one—if it is the right one, one who knows, a Plato. A lawyer, orator, or politician, on the other hand, must necessarily win over the crowd.

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Long before modern democratic politics, Cicero knew that a critic didn’t even need to listen to a politician’s speech to judge its quality. One only needs to observe the audience; if the majority is moved, the speaker is good—at least in appealing to the majority: “The orator’s mastery of his art may be judged by the emotions he is able to evoke as he plays upon the hearts of men. And the expert can generally form his opinion of a speaker by a glance, as he passes by; it is not necessary for him to sit and listen attentively.”16 Therefore, a lawyer or politician, whose speech is so involved and complicated that it pleases Plato alone, is a catastrophe; he would be rendered “speechless.” For the artist, the inverse seems to be true: An artist’s problems begin when Plato hits the exit and everyone else stays. Successful art immediately raises the suspicion of mediocre art, since a difficult poem “cannot be expected to make a wide appeal.” If one sense of artistic mediocrity is anything that fails to achieve completion and perfection (Horace/ Benn), a second sense is implied in Cicero: Instead of reaching the highest, one reaches the masses. In the world of fine art, the judgments “average” and “mediocre” are often reserved for works that have an immediate resonance by appealing to the majority irrespective of their level of taste. The judgment “mediocre” says: yes, it is successful, precisely because it appeases popular standards. Mediocre art is the art of the politician: made to please. In Ars Poetica, Horace continues his delineation of the differences between mediocrity in the fine arts and in other professions and wonders in amazement: Whoever cannot play a game abstains from the weapons of the Campus Martius and, if unskilled with the ball, discus, or ring, remains aloof so that the crowded circle does not rightfully laugh; and yet the person who knows not how dares to create poetry. [. . .] The flute-player who plays at the Pythian games first learned from a feared master. But now it is enough to say: “I fashion wondrous poetry; may the devil take the hindmost. It’s a disgrace for me to be left behind and to confess that I really do not know what I never learned.”17

Horace underscores here a difference not only between art and other professions, but more importantly (as noted by Goethe and Schiller much later) between literature and other art forms. In other professions and artistic fields (sculpture, painting, music), it is clear that one needs the proper training and a command of the techniques before going public with one’s “art.” In athletics and music, one doesn’t

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simply enter the ring or jump onstage and assume that one is ready to take on the best. On the contrary, one proceeds methodically: one trains, hones skills, seeks out instruction, listens to authority, and slowly progresses from amateur to professional—and possibly gives up when one realizes that the necessary talent is lacking. The seduction of literature—and this is its particular relevance for mediocrity— is the assumption (somewhat crudely expressed, but Horace implies this) that as long as one can read and write, one has acquired all the skills to become a writer.18 Unlike music or sculpture, literature seems to demand no special training beyond an education in letters. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell, a feeling fit for a poem. To avoid the pitfall of mediocre poetry, Horace advises the addressee of his treatise that, if he were to try his hand at poetry, he should first seek out the criticism of Metius (i.e., one of the judges established to examine the works of poetry), of Horace himself, and of the young man’s father; and, second, he should withhold his poetic attempts from the public “until the ninth year”: “What you have not published you can destroy; a word once sent forth can never come back.”19 Horace makes here two crucial claims for avoiding mediocrity: first, art must be authorized—an aspiring poet must seek out those who are in the know and can judge; second, Horace demands a form of personal posterity or belatedness, not in the name of awaiting a future adequate reception, but to avoid the embarrassment of circulating mediocrity. With time, sobriety may set in, and one may realize it is best to make the desk the permanent home of one’s poems. But what exactly does Horace mean when he rejects mediocre poetry as “falling below contempt”? What constitutes mediocre poetry for Horace? In contradistinction to the golden mean, which denotes a singular measure immune to a general standard, poetic mediocrity is a term of relation and comparison. The mediocre poet doesn’t measure up, first, to the abilities of other poets and, second, to the rules that determine good poetry. As one of the “founding fathers” of normative or rule-based aesthetics, which dominated aesthetic discourse until the mid-eighteenth century in Germany,20 Horace implies that mediocrity arises to a large extent through the inability to listen to the advice of masters, to follow the correct examples, and thereby to master the technical rules of art, whether in the proper imitation of nature (vv. 1–23), genre-specific employment of poetic meter (vv. 73–85, 251–62), consistency of lexicon and character (vv. 99–118), the advantages of beginning “in medias res” (v. 148), tragedy’s five-act structure and the

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avoidance of deus ex machina (v. 189–92), or his famous imperative that art should “please and educate” (v. 333). This last rule is perhaps the most important, not only because of its enormous influence (up to and including bourgeois tragedy) but also because art as edification places art’s telos outside of the aesthetic itself. The educative or improving aspect of art is to be judged in nonaesthetic, ethical terms. Horace’s emphasis on guidelines—as opposed to creativity or originality—is reflected in his appeal to seek out the advice and criticism of authority figures. Poetry depends on the authority of rules and those who know them.21 More importantly, it is Horace (together with Aristotle) who will be cited again and again as “lawgivers” providing the measure and standard for production.22 From the perspective of normative aesthetics, to be mediocre is to deviate too far from poetry’s existing exempla in meter, genre distinction, subject matter, and so forth. This is not to say that Horace (or Aristotle) advocates a form of paintby-number poetry; innovation is clearly allowed and to a certain extent encouraged, but only within strict parameters. Neologisms, for example, are readily encouraged “if used with modesty,” and new figures can be introduced into established stories as long as they are consistent in their character.23 Moreover, Horace remains a bit unresolved about the role of ingenium or natura for the poet; after criticizing Democritius for valorizing “native talent” [ingenium] over “wretched art” [misera arte] and counting himself among those whose failure as a poet refutes this thesis,24 Horace later claims that both nature [natura] and art [ars, in the sense of learnable skills] are necessary in tandem for the true poet.25 Nevertheless, the accent throughout the treatise—amply reflected in the repeated use of imperatives—falls on rules and authorizing judges as the formative force for poetry. The crucial point is that genial originality does not belong to Horace’s central concerns and certainly does not provide his defining criterion of poetry. The poet is not required to be innovative and offer nova, but largely is required to observe the established subject matter and genres—epic, lyric, tragedy, and comedy—as well as the guidelines and exempla that constitute them. This point becomes abundantly clear when, in his discussion of poetic meter, he notes that not every critic has an ear for “unmusical verses” and continues: “Because of that should I run loose and write without restraint? Or, supposing that all will see my faults, shall I play it safe and remain within the hope of pardon? I have then, in short, avoided blame, but I have not earned praise.”26 While recognizing that a conservative strategy may bring freedom from reproach, Horace also

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warns that it will not bring praise. His answer to this dilemma of whether to write without restraint or to play it safe lies paradoxically, but not surprisingly, in adhering to good exempla. Shifting from the rhetorical “I” back to the addressed “you” of the letter, Horace writes: “You should handle Greek models [exemplaria] by night, handle them by day.”27 For Horace, the way not only to avoid blame but also to win praise lies in internalizing the great exempla of the established tradition.28 Therefore, rule-based, normative aesthetics created, in the words of Ernst Robert Curtius, “the tradition of mediocrity” (in a positive sense of adhering to a mean or standard) that not only formed an “unbreakable chain” but also provided “perhaps the strongest support of literary continuity” between antiquity and the Middle Ages.29 What Curtius calls the “tradition of mediocrity” can equally be called “the tradition of exemplarity.” Until the eighteenth century and particularly Kant’s Third Critique, exemplarity functioned as a collection or canon of works that codified norms and maintained standards (e.g., rules of composition, meter, genre, etc., as well as models of behavior). Moreover, exemplarity was inseparable from imitation. Embodying normative force, the exemplum existed as a model to be copied—not slavishly but in the tendencies and parameters it prescribes. The exemplarity of canonical works served two ends: ethical excellence (virtutes) and artistic precision (ars), including grammatical correctness, style, and literary forms.30 On the level of content (i.e., the narration of exemplary deeds or virtutes), exemplary discourse links four features that also apply to poetic production (ars): action, audience, commemoration, and imitation.31 Action denotes the deed that embodies (or drastically fails to embody)32 crucial social values; audience consists in the narrated witnesses who judge and confer value on the deed; commemoration marks the memory not only of the action but also of its value for the community (commemorative monuments include narratives, statues, rituals, etc.); finally, and most crucially, exempla enjoin others to replicate or even surpass the achievement. “The imitator,” writes Matthew Roller, “typically seeks to become ‘the new X’ or ‘another X,’ or at least something comparable to X.”33 Such emulation, it goes without saying, presupposes the exceptional standard set by the exemplum and, since it is predicated upon comparison and imitation (i.e., the desire to become the new or next “X”), runs antithetical to any emphatic concept of originality. These same fourfold, interwoven features of exemplarity equally apply to poetic production: the action is the writing itself; the audience consists in critics who deem a text ex-

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cellent; its commemoration occurs through its repeated recommendation and citation; and imitation is the goal of such exemplary works. Quintilian, for example, prescribes that the student of eloquence practice writing, and this begins with reading canonical works, since “without the model [exemplum] supplied by reading, the whole effort [of writing] will be adrift.”34 Only on the basis of imitation [imitatio] can one write. Therefore, “for a long time, the only authors to be read should be the best and the least likely to betray our trust.”35 His list of such authors—Homer, Virgil, Horace, and so forth—serves as their commemoration, and the end result should be their imitation. Quintilian warns, however, that not everything of the “best authors is necessarily perfect,”36 since as Horace (and again Quintilian) points out, even Homer can nod. The danger lies in “imitat[ing] their less good features” and mistakenly believing that one is on par with the great. Quintilian, however, grants “such men of stature” the benefit of the doubt and prefers “readers to approve of everything in the masters.”37 Therefore, rule-based, normative aesthetics goes hand in hand with a notion of exemplarity that serves to uphold and maintain the standards, criteria, and forms authorized by such rules in the first place. It is precisely this emphasis on prescriptive rules and exemplarity in the name of imitation that renders Horace’s golden mean—which rejects any universal principle—inapplicable for a normative aesthetics. If normative aesthetics depends upon rules and exempla to guide composition and, in turn, to provide an external, “objective” standard for judgment, then the golden mean offers a structural analogy to Kant’s notion of exemplary originality (discussed below), which proceeds without a rule but offers a rule in turn. Only when normative universality is dismissed in the mid-eighteenth century can the golden mean—as a singular, noncomparative average—assume an important, if ex negativo, function within aesthetics and thus replace the Poetics (of Aristotle and Horace) as a mode of artistic production.38 The goal is no longer to follow exempla via imitation but through originality to establish a new mode of exemplarity, not of products but of a process— namely, the imperative to be original. With Kant, one does not imitate exempla but is inspired by them to be original oneself. The notion of mediocrity thus undergoes a profound change, indeed, a reversal with the aesthetics of originality in the eighteenth century. Whereas mediocrity for Horace implies the inability to observe rules and thus to maintain tradition, for the eighteenth-century genius, mediocrity arises from the reliance on imitation that makes such a conservative tradition

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possible. Furthermore, the demand for originality equally encouraged and led artists to abandon normative aesthetics’ strict genre determinations, particularly with respect to subject matter. While traditionally epic and tragedy featured world-historical heroes and comedy all other ranks of society as exempla of vices to be ridiculed, the expansion of genres beginning with sentimental comedy and bourgeois tragedy in the eighteenth century enabled common types to be ennobled and idealized as exemplary forms of averageness. There is, then, a double reversal that occurs between normative aesthetics and the aesthetics of genius: Originality replaces rules on the level of form, which in turn frees up common life as the content of high art.

Exemplary Originality (Kant) Although the notion of genius as an original creator receives one of its earliest articulations by Shaftesbury in 1711, when he defines the artist as an “alter deus” and “second Prometheus,” Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) marks the foundational text for the modern aesthetics of genial originality. While the poetics of Aristotle and Horace offer a kind of introduction to the rules for producing a work of poetry, Kant emphatically denies that such an introduction could ever be written, much less be valid as a criterion for judgment. In describing a hypothetical attendance at a drama, in which Kant dislikes the play and his friend appeals to “rules established by the most famous critics of taste” to convince him the work is beautiful, Kant declares in defiance: “I plug my ears and don’t want to hear any reasons and any reasoning, and will rather accept that the rules of the critics are false or at least don’t apply in this case.”39 Against Horace and the normative tradition, Kant rejects the possibility of true aesthetic judgment being determined by objective, authoritative rules and exempla. Kant famously defines genius as “the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art.”40 Genius is an innate predisposition that is located within the subject but doesn’t belong to it as a conscious force, since genius is precisely nature speaking and acting through the artist. As a genius, the artist is merely nature’s vessel, through which it—nature, not the conscious, cognizing subject—gives the rule to art but only for its judgment, not for its production. As a “natural gift,” genius itself is nothing one can develop, cultivate, or work on. Genius is by definition a state of exception: one is either “gifted”—or not. The aesthetics of genius marks a decisive shift in the issues of exemplarity and mediocrity

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and thereby lays the groundwork for two crucial aesthetic criteria: autonomy and originality. By declaring the autonomy of aesthetic judgment (i.e., by divorcing the aesthetic from the good and the useful) and thus paving the way for the declaration of art’s autonomy, Kant theoretically grounds the exceptional status of art as a whole. Art is precisely that which deviates from all other human activities by being purposive without having a purpose. By freeing art from means-ends relations, the notion of autonomous art solidifies it as the antipode to common, everyday life. In fact, by radically divorcing art from utility, genial aesthetics participates in the construction of the quotidian or everyday as a concept and counterrealm to art. Taken at its extreme, autonomous art declares its “refusal” (Adorno) to participate in the logic of exchange and usefulness that determines the quotidian world of prose. With Kant, in other words, art undergoes a definitive break from the second half of Horace’s famous rule of “pleasing and educating.” In the wake of Kant, art is to be judged solely in aesthetic (as opposed to ethical) categories. By declaring that “the beautiful arts must be considered as the arts of the genius”41 and distinguishing artistic production from all other forms of human activity (particularly science and handicraft, insofar as art does not proceed from a rule), Kant at once makes the genius a figure of absolute exception and a figure of permanent dispute. A scientist can and must, by definition, be able to explain all the steps leading up to his or her conclusions. The artistic genius, on the contrary, must not be able communicate to others the rules to produce similar products: “Beautiful art cannot think up the rules according to which its product is made.”42 In short, genius knows no rules for new ideas and their artistic realization and therefore, unlike in Horace, knows no exempla or authorizing procedures for its original inspirations. Aesthetic judgment as reflective judgment (as opposed to determining judgment) recognizes that “there can be no objective rules for taste.”43 Because aesthetic judgment doesn’t proceed from a concept, the search for a universal criterion of the beautiful is a fruitless endeavor. Rather, taste can only stake a “claim to subjective universality.”44 In judging an artwork as beautiful (and thus as the work of genius), one “demands” or “solicits” [ansinnen] the agreement of all others: nothing more, nothing less. As “one favored by nature” and a “rare appearance,”45 genius is therefore an exclusive club, but no one can verify with certainty who belongs to it.

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Kant’s four criteria for genius are originality, exemplarity, incommunicability of precepts of production, and that genius only describes the artist, not the scientist, whose work must be teachable and demonstrable. With respect to the question of mediocre art, the first two criteria—originality and exemplarity—are particularly significant. The dilemma of a notion of art based on the idea of genius is that if the artist follows a rule or immediately fits into the existing canon, the work will not be an expression of genius but of imitation and will therefore not be a work of beautiful art. It may display good technique and a mastery of material but doesn’t further art (i.e., is not original or new). It indicates the “mere art of industriousness” but not the “originality of talent.”46 On the other hand, Kant recognizes that there can be “original nonsense.”47 Therefore, the work of genius must not simply be new and innovative—which in itself is not necessarily a rare talent—but must also offer a model for judging other works, that is, be exemplary. While not following any standard or rule (i.e., originality), the work itself must embody a new standard, an innovative rule for judging art (i.e., exemplarity). The idea and inspiration for the work (as process) knows no rules, but the work itself embodies and offers a rule (as a product): “[T]he rule must be deduced from the deed, i.e., from the product.”48 Aesthetic judgment therefore stakes a claim to being an “example of a universal rule that cannot be given.”49 Kant’s notion of “exemplary originality” sunders exemplarity from the tradition of aesthetic imitation and, thus, bears a structural similarity to Aristotle’s “golden mean” without being identical to it: both proceed without a rule (in fact, in defiance of the very notion of a rule) and only first produce a measure. Both, in short, produce the standard for their own judgment. Kant’s exemplarity, however, also entails the claim to a standard for judging (not producing) other works, which doesn’t apply to the golden mean. Both, however, offer a concept of measure and judgment that is free from comparison (since it is the standard for itself) and thus elude mediocrity as a judgment of relative value. Kant’s genius is defined by original exemplarity, “which no science can teach and no industriousness can learn,” and thus is “entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation.”50 The relation between genial artists, therefore, is not one of imitation but of emulation or inspiration; the work of one genius awakens in another “the feeling of his own originality to exercise freedom from the coercion of rules in his art so that art receives a new rule.”51 For the rest of the art world, which consti-

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tutes the vast majority of artists (since genius is so rare), there only remains the possibility of imitation. This nongenial following of the genius’s example can take two forms: a nongenius can either imitate [nachahmen] or ape [nachäffen] the work of genius. The first form characterizes those “good minds” that possess the necessary technical mastery and insight but lack the creative innate spark that defines true (i.e., genial) art. For these skilled but noninnovative producers, the genius “produces a school, that is, a methodological instruction according to rules, insofar as one can draw such instruction from his products of spirit and their peculiarity; and for these people, beautiful art is to that extent imitation of what nature gave a rule through a genius.”52 The other, lower form of imitation (aping) consists either in imitating everything the genius does, including his mistakes, or copying the gesture of originality itself, which Kant calls “mannerism”: “To produce by mannerism is another form of aping, namely, aping mere peculiarity (originality) in general, in order to distance oneself as far as possible from imitators without possessing the talent to be exemplary [musterhaft].”53 Summing up this section on imitation versus genial originality, Kant describes two modes of aesthetic presentation: manner (“modus aestheticus”), which knows no measure other than “the feeling of unity in presentation,” and method (“modus logicus”), which follows certain principles. Only the former characterizes the genius and “is valid for beautiful art,”54 which means that not only aping is excluded from beautiful art, but also the imitative work of “good minds” produced in the school founded by a genius. It is not only despite but also because of the emphasis on originality (which, as cited above, can lead to “original nonsense”) that Kant prescribes a certain containment of genial innovation. The true artist is composed of two halves, two propensities: genius (which inspires and offers original ideas and material) and taste (which bestows form on the material through execution and technique—skills, as Kant underscores, that can be learned and academically trained). These two properties, genius and taste, need not go hand in hand: “One can often perceive genius without taste,” Kant writes, and “taste without genius.” If one side is lacking, one produces what Kant calls a “would-be [seinsollende] work of beautiful art.”55 A complete artist finds a proper balance between genius (innate) and taste (acquired skills), but if one half is to have the upper hand, Kant is unequivocal as to which of these dispositions should prevail: “If anything must be sacrificed in the

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conflict of the two properties in one product, it must rather be on the side of genius.”56 Therefore, despite the emphasis that Kant bestows upon genius as the crux of beautiful art, it is ultimately subordinated to taste (i.e., an educable proficiency) for two interrelated reasons: first, an unrestrained faculty of imagination “produces, in its lawless freedom, nothing but nonsense”;57 second, genius without taste can tend toward individual, idiosyncratic, “private” productions, whose originality does not enact the harmonious free play of faculties in others. In other words, without taste genius runs the risk of creating would-be art for one—the genial creator—that excludes an appeal to all so that all people, in turn, can appeal to and demand universal agreement. The importance that Kant places on art’s claim to universality through the genius’s taste does not, however, amount to the resulting aesthetic judgment proffering grounds or reasons for why one believes something is beautiful; since aesthetic judgment proceeds without a concept, it is only the “state of the soul” [Gemütszustand]—the feeling and claim of beauty—that is universally communicable. Within the artistic economy and negotiation between genius and taste, Kant therefore calls the latter a conditio sine qua non of a beautiful artwork, because taste brings genius in line with the understanding. Clearly Kant does not intend to imply that genius is not as well a conditio sine qua non of art, for otherwise he would be pulling the rug out from under his own feet. Rather, the true artist demands two ineluctable traits: one that is a rare gift of nature (genius) and another that can be worked on, developed, trained, and learned (taste). Both are indispensable, but if one must rule, it is taste. How taste assumes authority is of particular interest: “Taste, like the power of judgment in general,” writes Kant, “is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved and polished.”58 Kant does not offer a model of gentle Bildung or mentoring, but of “discipline” and a certain castrating of genius by “clipping its wings.” If unregulated genius merely produces “original nonsense,” taste is the taskmaster that enables sense and, thus, the possibility for a claim to universality to emerge from potential nonsense. Kant depicts the battle between genius and taste, between unbounded creativity and its regulating force, as internal to the working of the artist. Within this internal economy, it is imperative that genius be educated, mentored, and even disciplined. The original exceptionality of genius must be moderated and given a measure by taste. This measured or contained notion of genius brings originality in line with a rule (as a rule-giving

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force) without subsuming it to a rule. That is, exemplary originality possesses authority without adhering to a previous authorizing rule or procedure. This regulation of genius does not, however, extinguish the demand of genius and originality. If there is no genius, no originality, no innovation, there is no beautiful art, since imitation still fails to meet the criteria of originality and exemplarity. The notion of originality excludes, by definition, all comparison; a work produced via imitation is grounded, however, precisely upon such comparison. A genial artwork necessarily avoids being average, because it stakes a claim to being the standard according to which other works are to be measured. If the aesthetic judgment “this poem is beautiful” is always singular, always only in respect to this one particular poem and not poetry in general (which requires a concept), then “this poem is mediocre” falls outside the parameters of aesthetic taste. Whereas originality is immune to comparison, mediocrity only exists as a relational, comparative category, and therefore “this work is mediocre” is not an aesthetic judgment, but the judgment that condemns a work to “would-be” art.

Exemplary Averageness (Kant/Schiller) While Kant excludes mediocrity as an aesthetic judgment of quality through the demand of exemplary originality, his discussion of the “normal idea of the beautiful” in paragraph seventeen of The Critique of Judgment offers a remarkable example of the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity in terms of the “common” or “communal” measure [gemeinschaftlichen Maß] that is to serve as an example of sensus communis. Because every aesthetic judgment proceeds from a subjective principle and, therefore, necessarily only demands or solicits the agreement of all others, taste cannot exist without the presupposition of sensus communis, for otherwise people would not make aesthetic judgments (i.e., claims to universal agreement) at all. But Kant also recognizes the duplicity of the word “common” [gemein] in sensus communis: “With the word ‘common’ one understands (not only in our language, which here truly contains an ambivalence, but also in many others) what amounts to the ‘vulgar,’ which one encounters everywhere and is simply neither a merit nor an excellence to be in possession of.”59 Kant thus seeks to distinguish between the common as vulgar and the common as communal or aspiring to universality by translating the term sensus communis as “communal sense” [gemeinschaftlichen

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Sinn].60 Kant’s highlighting of this internal ambivalence and contamination of the word common as at once “vulgar” and “shared” mirrors, however, the problem of common types in general. Because art must be not only exemplary but also original, Kant bars imitation from genuine, genial artistic production while maintaining the exemplary stature of great art as definitive for aesthetic judgment. Taste, for Kant, rests not on a concept of the object but on the feeling of the subject. Therefore, one can only provide exemplary models of taste, examples of rules that cannot be defined or given. In trying to arrive at a model or exemplum of the perfect human form, which is to serve as “a prototype of taste” [Urbild des Geschmacks],61 Kant mentions what he considers to be one of the notable capacities of imagination, namely its ability, as it were to superimpose one image on another and by means of the congruence of several of the same kind to arrive at an average [ein Mittleres] that can serve all of them as a common measure [gemeinschaftlichen Maß]. Someone has seen a thousand grown men. Now if he would judge what should be estimated as their comparatively normal size, then (in my opinion) the imagination allows a great number of images (perhaps all thousand) to be superimposed on one another, and, if I may here apply the analogy of optical presentation, in the space where the greatest number of them coincide and within the outline of the place that is illuminated by the most concentrated colors, there the average size [mittlere Größe] becomes recognizable, which is in both height and breadth equidistant from the most extreme boundaries of the largest and smallest stature; and this is the stature for a beautiful man.62

Kant’s notion of the beautiful human form would be unthinkable without the advances in statistical thought going back to the seventeenth century; what Kant rather speculatively lays out here will be theoretically grounded by Quetelet’s “average man” in the 1830s and photomechanically attempted by Lambroso and Galton in the 1880s.63 The ideal form is produced when the imagination superimposes all the images of people it has seen and then discerns the points of coincidence between them. The resulting “average size” is not a model or Platonic idea that exists outside and above the human, but is the aggregate of the totality of (seen) humanity. That is, the measure is not external to but dependent upon the group itself and, thus, first arrives after the averaging has taken place. This avoidance of extremes and embracing of the middle as beautiful is, of course, similar to Aristotle’s golden mean and offers, for Kant, a “measuring rod” [Richtmaß] of beauty.

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Kant’s “beautiful man” is at once “the average man” [mittlerer Mann], but only as an idea (i.e., a concept of reason) and not as an ideal (i.e., the representation of an individual as adequate to an idea). While the imagination can superimpose all the images of people ever seen, average them, and find a measure for the beautiful human form, this image pleases not because of its beauty, but because it is “academically correct.” In fact, if an artist were to realize this form, it would be anything but beautiful. What is exemplary for taste as a form that offers “the indispensable condition of all beauty” does not apply to artistic production. In a footnote to this passage, Kant writes: One will find that a perfectly regular face, which a painter might ask to sit for him as a model, commonly [gemeiniglich] says nothing, since it contains nothing characteristic and thus expresses more the idea of the species than what is specific to a person. [. . .] Experience also shows that such completely regular faces commonly [gemeiniglich] betray an inwardly only mediocre human being, presumably (if it can be accepted that nature expresses the inner proportions on the exterior) for the following reason: If none of the mental dispositions stand out beyond those proportions that are required merely to constitute a faultless human being, then nothing may be expected of what one calls genius, in which nature seems to depart from its ordinary relations [gewöhnliche Verhältnisse] among the powers of the mind in favor of a particular one.64

The “normal idea of the beautiful” is only a guide for judgment and not a rule for its execution. Between the idea of the “common” and its realization as an ideal erupts an enormous divide akin to the internal contamination of the word common as at once shared and vulgar. Kant’s pejorative use of the adverb commonly [gemeiniglich] makes this abundantly clear: the perfectly regular face may offer a model for judging beauty, but its realization “commonly says nothing” and (in Kant’s adherence to Lavater’s physiognomy, in which the soul imprints itself on the surface of the body) “commonly” betrays a “mediocre human being.” This gap between the idea of the perfectly average and its embodiment is decisive: in order for the common as an averaged mean to maintain its aesthetic force—that is, to remain beautiful—the figure must at once embody what is common to all and something that deviates from such “ordinary relations.” To be simply average betrays a commonality that verges on the vulgar or mediocre, while a slight deviation from the average, a genial singularity can make the common man beautiful. The realized beautiful human must at once reveal traces of genius (singularity) and adhere to the common, universal form. Kant, in other words, strictly distinguishes between the idea of the

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average man as an exemplum for judgment and the realized average man, which no longer bears any exemplary force. One could say that the idea of the average (“the normal idea of the beautiful”) is common in the positive sense of “shared,” whereas the aesthetically embodied average tends toward the common as “vulgar,” since it “says nothing.” In “Gedanken über den Gebrauch des Gemeinen und Niedrigen in der Kunst” (“Thoughts on the Use of the Common and Low in Art”), which was most likely written around 1793 and first published in 1802, Schiller examines the question of the common in art in terms similar to Kant, while also prefiguring Hegel’s thoughts on poeticizing prosaic reality. For Schiller, the unadorned common type, in which nothing stands out as exceptional, amounts to being vulgar. Schiller gladly creates representational space for common objects and people in art— since “there are thousands of things that are common through their subject matter or content”65—but the common cannot enter art without transfiguration. Common content, to be worthy of art, must assume an elevated form; or, in Hegel’s terms, the prose of the world must be excised to become poetry. Therefore, for Schiller (like Hegel) the task of art is “to ennoble” or “refine” [veredeln] the common, to lend it an aura that separates it from its otherwise unspectacular and, indeed, lacking milieu. One can thus only speak of commonness in art with respect to form; a common artwork is not one that treats everyday, quotidian affairs, but rather one that does so in a common manner. The artist must “discover a grand side”66 to the common. Therefore, the common can paradoxically only enter art by not being or not only being what it is: common. Only when the artist discovers something great in the common, when he or she links it up with something spiritual, can the everyday be separated from that which defines it. The common, in a word, must become exemplary: the representative of a class that nevertheless, via its very power of representation, stands apart from the class of the common. As in Kant, it must display elements of genial exceptionality and universality. Yet, whereas Kant delineates an average derived from the proportions of all humans and then particularizes this “normal idea of the beautiful” by adding idiosyncratic, genial traits for the implied possibility of an ideal, realized form (i.e., if it is to be an object of art and not just a model for judgment), Schiller, like Hegel, begins with the individual, common person and then idealizes him or her by stripping away common (vulgar) traits.

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Schiller declares Dutch paintings, both their portraitures and still lifes, to be the most powerful example of common taste (in the negative sense, because merely material and everyday) and goes on to delineate the difference between unadorned common life and its ennobled form in art: A portrait artist can treat his object either commonly or grandly. Commonly, when he presents the capricious just as diligently as the necessary, when he neglects the great and meticulously realizes the small: grandly, when he knows how to locate the interesting, separates the capricious from the necessary, only hints at the small and realizes the great. Grand, however, is nothing but the expression of the soul in actions, gestures, and positions.67

A common presentation results from not distinguishing between the superfluous and the essential, the insignificant and the significant. The task of the artist is to distill the common, to reduce it, and thus to extract the great from it or find a connection between the everyday and the extraordinary. To present the small on par with the great—regardless of the object—is to fail art’s idealizing mission. Schiller is only interested in the ideal and the noble (i.e., that which strips away all particularity and can become universal to humanity) and thus criticizes the historian who “reports the most insignificant activities of a hero as carefully as his most sublime deeds.”68 Because the capricious must be elided, the common only serves as the launching pad for uncovering the great hidden within. It should be noted, however, that despite their similarities, Hegel doesn’t share Schiller’s view of Dutch still lifes. While admitting that at first glance such paintings seem to merely reproduce the nonexceptional, common world, Hegel insists that Dutch still lifes “may not simply be placed aside and dismissed under the rubric of common nature [gemeine Natur]. If one investigates it more closely, the proper subject-matter of these paintings is not so common [gemein] as one ordinarily thinks.”69 Unlike Schiller, Hegel reads in these paintings the Dutch’s historic-poetic achievement of securing their world from a hostile nature (the sea) as well as from Spanish colonization: To a great extent, the Dutch have themselves made the land on which they dwell and live, and are compelled to continually defend and maintain it against the storms of the sea. With courage, endurance, and bravery, the citybourgeoisie and the peasants threw off the Spanish domination of Philip II [. . .] they owe everything to their own activity, and this is what constitutes the general content of their paintings. But this is not common subject-matter and content.70

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Where Schiller merely sees unadorned common life that doesn’t differentiate the capricious from the essential, Hegel sees necessity (i.e., the path of Spirit) in Dutch still lifes; they embody for him not static, common nature, but the act of winning everyday, common life from natural forces and political domination, which, as Moretti points out, marks for Hegel “a milestone of World History.”71 Crucial to Schiller’s argument is that although he places the “low” or “base” [das Niedrige] below the common, the “base” is not merely negative in art (as is the case with the common) but also has positive elements that the common lacks: “A step below the common is the low, which differs from the former in that it is not merely something negative, not merely the lack of the spiritual and noble, but also displays something positive, namely the rawness of feeling, bad morals, and despicable intentions.”72 While this list of “positive” characteristics in a base person may seem to run counter to Schiller’s otherwise somewhat moralizing aesthetics, his reasoning can be elucidated as follows: the common is simply a diminished form of excellence; the “base,” on the other hand, completely lacks an excellent quality. This total negation has, as Schiller explicitly says, “something positive,” since—much like Jean Paul’s preference for the miserable over the mediocre—absolute privation lies closer to the genial or noble soul than the common person: “The common merely bears witness to a lacking excellence that remains desirable; the low bears witness to the absence of a property that can be demanded from everyone.”73 Schiller introduces an interesting notion of universality here: Since the common is merely a diminished form of excellence, its mediocrity fails to offer an extreme whose advocation or rejection can be demanded of all. The truly common, in other words, offers no exemplary force, either for emulation or avoidance. The base, on the other hand, lacks something so essential to the human that it can serve as an exemplum of a universal demand and, thus, is more fitting for art than common mediocrity is. Therefore, the one thing for Schiller that cannot enter art without undergoing transfiguration is common life. This demand doesn’t hold for the “noble” or even the “low,” which play crucial roles in both tragedy and comedy. From an aesthetic perspective, the low-down is, in fact, closer to the noble than the common, since the base, like the noble, requires neither idealization nor refinement for its artistic presentation. Schiller’s unspoken conclusion is that the low-down soul provides the negative image of the great soul, just as for Jean Paul a completely miserable poem is always better than a mediocre one.

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Higher Criticism: Appreciating Mediocrity (Kleist) In Schiller’s aesthetics, common life belongs to and enters art only when it is lent a grand presentation and thereby eludes all notions of mediocrity and averageness. But what if mediocre art is not only art but also the foundation and the measure of refined taste? Heinrich von Kleist comes to this remarkable thesis in “Ein Satz aus der höheren Kritik: An ***” (1811, “A Principle of Higher Criticism: To ***”), which is quoted here in its entirety: It requires more genius to appreciate a mediocre work of art than an excellent one. Beauty and truth are evident to human nature from the very first instant; and just as the most sublime sentences are the easiest to understand (only the minute detail is difficult to grasp), so, too, does the beautiful easily please. Only the defective and mannered is enjoyed with difficulty. In a splendid artwork, the beautiful is so purely contained that it is immediately clear to the senses of every healthy power of comprehension as such. In a mediocre work of art, on the other hand, the beautiful is mixed with so many capricious and even contradictory elements that a far sharper judgment, a more delicate sensitivity, and a more practiced and livelier imagination—in short, more genius— is necessary in order to cleanse it of these elements. Opinions about excellent artworks are therefore never divided (I am not considering here the difference of opinion that arises out of passion). People only argue and squabble about artworks that are not entirely excellent. The inventiveness of many a poem is so touching and moving, but also so disfigured by diction, images, and turns of phrase that one must often have an infallible sensorium in order to discover it. This is indeed so true that the notion [Gedanke] of our most perfect works of art (e.g., of a great part of Shakespeare) has emerged from the reading of bad brochures and other trash long since consigned to oblivion. Therefore, whoever praises Schiller and Goethe still does not at all prove to me (as he thinks) an excellent and extraordinary sense of the beautiful. But whoever is content here and there with Gellert and Cronegk leads me to suspect—if he is right in other aspects of his discourse [Rede]—that he possesses understanding and sensitivity, and both to a degree that is seldom found.74

In opposition to Kant, Kleist ascribes genius not only to the productive capacities of the artist but also to the critic’s sense of judgment. Kleist, therefore, seems to mobilize genius not in the strict sense of an exceptional gift of nature, but rather as a skill that can be developed and more importantly communicated. The necessity that the aesthetic judgment of mediocrity offers grounds and persuasive argumentation allows Kleist not only to recognize mediocre art as art (and thus as a crucial aesthetic category) but also to emphasize mediocrity as the greatest test of taste and the basis of aesthetic community as an

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argumentative procedure.75 Kleist discerns no special, refined skill in the ability to judge the beautiful; a Kantian demand for universality vis-à-vis excellent art is for Kleist a fait accompli for all those with a “healthy power of comprehension.” Such an appeal to sensus communis is the easiest task for aesthetic judgment. Far more difficult—and thus that which truly requires a solicitation of universality based upon discourse—is the aesthetic judgment “this work is mediocre.” Here, according to Kleist, begins the true conflict of taste that demands elaboration and a protracted appeal to assent: the ability to enjoy with difficulty and, more importantly, the ability to critically rescue the excellent aspects from an otherwise average artwork. For Kleist, the mediocre artwork can only be enjoyed when it is purged or cleansed of its disfiguring traits, its capricious and contradictory elements, a skill that demands a discursive ability to name, explain, and sort out the middling elements. Thus, to praise Goethe or Schiller proves nothing at all. Only in the face of mediocre art—a work mixing disfiguration and beauty—can one display exemplary taste. Equally important in this text is Kleist’s claim that without mediocre art, one would never know beauty. The mediocre artwork is the measuring rod for excellence. Without “bad brochures and other trash long since consigned to oblivion,” there would be no (negative) standard of excellence that makes a Shakespeare, Shakespeare or a Goethe, Goethe. Therefore, aesthetic judgment in its full spectrum seems to require a justification—argumentation and dissection—that can only be realized vis-à-vis mediocre art. Through the mediocre, one first gains a negative insight into aesthetic perfection. In other words, there is no refined taste without mediocre art; taste is neither developed nor proven in the face of the beautiful or sublime. Kleist, in a word, turns Kant’s Third Critique on its head, for the entire edifice of aesthetic categories and aesthetic taste is grounded in mediocre, derivative, and defective art. Throughout its history, art has maintained an unbroken distaste for works of middling quality. From antiquity to the mid-eighteenth century, however, mediocrity was in part an effect of failing to imitate the ruling exempla (as well as the norms they embodied). Under the auspices of normative aesthetics, average art largely resulted from not properly locating exempla and imitating them. This model of exemplum and imitation undergoes a fundamental change with the genial aesthetics of originality. Art must still be exemplary, but now as an effect of originality, whereby art’s exemplary force only holds sway belatedly with respect to aesthetic judgment, not artistic production.

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Kleist enters the scene of genial, original aesthetics as a largely singular irritant: If taste for the beautiful can only solicit or demand universality and, by definition, not provide criteria, then mediocre works of art (which at least can be discussed in terms of their disfigurations and capricious elements) offer a negative standard, a negative exemplum of what constitutes beauty. The goal for Kleist remains beauty or perfection, but mediocrity alone provides the ground for an insight into it. Moreover, because of the necessarily argumentative nature of dissecting mediocrity as well as the conflict of opinion it implies, average art offers a truer model of the sensus communis—a community discussing and perhaps agreeing on what is mediocre and why—that aesthetic judgment presupposes. It is this goal of an aesthetic sensus communis that bourgeois tragedy aims to realize, not, however, in the argumentative sense outlined by Kleist, but rather in the tears of compassion that the average spectator sheds for his or her theatrical doppelgänger. In the common heroes that storm the tragic stage in the eighteenth century, bourgeois tragedy aspires not merely to reproduce common life but more importantly to produce an exemplary public out of an average audience.

CHAPTER

The Average Audience (Lessing on Bourgeois Tragedy)

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The person of sense ought never to have his children Brought up to be cleverer than average. For, apart from cleverness bringing them no profit, It will make them objects of envy and ill-will. Euripides, Medea1 Bourgeois tragedies have in general the advantage that they get closer to the heart. We are, so to speak, among our own kind and participate all the more in the play the more we see that it could happen to our relatives, to our friends—to us. Theodor Hippel on Miß Sara Sampson2 I must be a very good person if I can be so saddened. Diderot, “Commentaries on the Natural Son” 3

How to Avoid a Tragic Fate For a long time, there seemed to be only one sure antidote to a tragic fate: leading the life of an average man. Only great, powerful, and world-historical personages held an important and public enough station in life to be exposed to a fall that one could call “tragic.” Thus, the surest shelter from such a demise was an ordinary existence. With witty precision, Heinrich Heine elucidates the consequences of the necessarily superior stature of true tragic figures: “Yes, my old teacher was right,” writes Heine in 1838, “it is extremely dangerous to enter into an

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intimate relation with a person like Cleopatra. A hero can meet his demise—but only a hero. For dear mediocrity, there is in this situation, and all others, no threat of danger.”4 At the first glance, Heine’s witticism could be read as a rewriting of Hegel’s famous interpretation of Antigone as the perfect tragic conflict between two equally justified powers—Antigone embodying the law of the hearth (the private, domestic sphere) and Creon the law of the state (the public, political sphere). Only when both figures possess an equally justified claim and, thus, form an irresolvable conflict can one speak of a tragic confrontation that demands a heroic demise. Following Hegel’s understanding of the tragic, Heine’s “dear mediocrity” would simply not provide a power, a claim on par with Cleopatra’s. The final qualifier in Heine’s sentence (“and in all other situations”) precludes, however, the possibility that the mediocre man only in this particular constellation lacks the necessary stature. Rather, and more emphatically, “dear mediocrity” never has anything to fear when it comes to a tragic end. Its cares and conflicts, great as they may be, can never warrant the title “tragic.” The ordinary life of an ordinary person is simply not the stuff that tragedy is made of. If mediocrity offers the surest inoculation to a tragic end, then a tragedy that stages the common man seems to spell doom for tragedy as an art form. This, at least, is the conclusion that the young Nietzsche delineates in The Birth of Tragedy (1872). When the “man of everyday life” assumes the tragic stage, tragedy—and with it great art—ends: Through him [Euripides] the man of everyday life forced his way from the spectators’ seats onto the stage; the mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits were expressed now showed an embarrassing fidelity that even conscientiously reproduces nature’s failed outlines. [. . .] In essence, the spectator now saw and heard his doppelgänger on the Euripidean stage and was happy that his double knew how to speak so well.5

For Nietzsche, all great tragedies (such as those of Aeschylus and Sophocles) know only one tragic hero—the god Dionysus—who is concealed behind every individual tragic mask, whether in the form of Prometheus, Oedipus, or any other. Euripides subverts this tragic necessity by removing the heroic-mythic tragic mask and supplanting it with “the faithful mask of reality,”6 which no longer conceals Dionysus but doubles what lies beneath and in the seats: the man of everyday life. For Nietzsche, the “embarrassing fidelity” required to portray everyday life—blemishes and all—dispels the boldness and grandeur

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required for a true tragic effect: the loss of self into the overpowering force of Dionysian oneness coupled with Apollonian visions of this very loss. Instead of experiencing “art as the joyful hope that the curse of individuation can be broken, as the intuition of a restored unity,”7 the Euripidean spectator—who has usurped the stage—sees himself in his individuality and is pleasantly surprised at how well the tragic stage suits him. The self is not annihilated but recognized and affirmed in its quotidian form. With Euripides, “bourgeois mediocrity, upon which he placed all his political hopes, now had its say.”8 In Nietzsche’s interpretation, a historical-aesthetic caesura already takes place in Greece: Art begins to be ruled and defined not by the exception or extreme, but by the democratic mediocrity of everyday life. By holding up a mirror to the audience, Euripidean tragedy embraces the average man as both its model and judge. The triumph of mediocrity is, therefore, at once aesthetic and democratic-political, since “everyday life could [now] be represented onstage,” and the audience—defined by “strength in numbers”—is granted authority as “competent to judge the drama.”9 By singling out the work of Euripides (and Socrates’ influence upon him), Nietzsche not only predates Hegel’s famous declaration of art’s demise by some two thousand years but also claims that great art ends when the average man and “general, well-known, quotidian life and activities”10 become the focus of artistic energy as well as its most competent critic. For Nietzsche, when art turns to and affirms common life, no amount of idealization can prevent its end. Against this background, in which averageness and everyday life embody the antithesis of a tragic nimbus (Heine) and the ruin of tragic art (Nietzsche), it is not surprising that the rise of bourgeois, middleclass, or domestic tragedy (all these terms can serve as interpretive translations for the German term bürgerliches Trauerspiel) in the eighteenth century—that is, almost a full century before Heine and Nietzsche—amounted to what Peter Szondi calls a “scandal.”11 Therefore, although Nietzsche diagnoses a form of bourgeois tragedy already in Euripides, the fact remains that until the eighteenth century tragedy (unlike comedy) was largely reserved for personages of high rank. If there was a historical point when “the man of everyday life” truly usurped the tragic stage, when “quotidian life” became the scene of tragedy, and when “all are qualified to pass judgment,” it was the mideighteenth century, when the modern bourgeois subject and the prose of the world walked hand in hand into the theater.

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Bourgeois tragedy begins with George Lillo’s The London Merchant, or, the History of George Barnwell (1731), which was exceptionally successful in England and soon translated into French and German, where it equally took the stage by storm. In the wake of Lillo, bourgeois tragedy was taken up and developed in France by Denis Diderot with Le Fils naturel (1757, The Natural Son) and Père de famille (1758, The Family Father) and in Germany through Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Miß Sara Sampson (1755) and Emilia Galotti (1772) as well as Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (1784, Love and Intrigue). Both Diderot and Lessing additionally composed extensive theoretical reflections on the subject: Diderot wrote “Commentaries on The Natural Son” (1757) and “Discourse on Dramatic Poetry” (1758)—both of which Lessing translated together with Diderot’s two bourgeois tragedies in 1760—while Lessing engaged his friends Nicolai and Mendelssohn in an extensive correspondence (1756–57, published 1794) and later composed the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–68).12 With bourgeois tragedy, one can properly speak of a European phenomenon, a period of intense cross-cultural translation and engagement, all centered on a similar aesthetic constellation: shifting the scene of tragedy from the public-political world to the domestic-private sphere, in which common life becomes the privileged—because most effective—site of tragedy. The rise of bourgeois tragedy can be read in part as a response to the prevailing normative aesthetics and its so-called “class clause,” in which the genre distinction between tragedy and comedy is determined in part by the societal rank of the figures represented. The notion that tragedy features heroes, nobility, or royalty and that comedy concerns itself with lower ranks can be traced to (a particular interpretation of) Aristotle’s Poetics, where he writes that comedy represents “inferior people” and tragedy “people better than ourselves.”13 Aristotle most likely intended this genre differentiation to be guided by different modes of artistic representation, that is, the exaggeration of characteristics to make a figure appear (ethically) better or worse than normal. Beginning in the fourth century with Diomedes’ Ars Grammatica14 and continuing to the eighteenth century and beyond, this aesthetic decision of how to represent was generally reduced to what the object of representation should be. Thus, social rank almost universally determined the status of “better” or “worse”; the “better” characters of tragedy were to be drawn from the nobility and royalty, while the “worse” sort came from all other classes.15 This notion of “people

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better than ourselves” is inseparable from the supposed necessity of a certain “height of the fall,” which can be gauged by how much is at stake in the demise of the hero or heroine. If a king or warrior falls, an entire political structure or nation may equally be at stake; the demise of the little guy, as sad as it may be, happens everyday—and the world goes on. In bourgeois tragedy, both the class clause and the height of the fall are redefined through an aesthetics of identification: the standard of tragic representability is no longer an objective one based on social-political status, but a subjective one based on affective identification. It is well known, however, that bourgeois tragedy doesn’t invert the class clause (i.e., it is not the expression of a newfound bourgeois selfconsciousness against the nobility and aristocracy) but suspends it, so that now all classes are seen as fit for tragic representation; the class of the dramatis personae is simply no longer an issue.16 In fact, the majority of German bourgeois tragedies didn’t feature protagonists from the middle class but from the aristocracy or even royalty.17 What bourgeois tragedy announces, however, is a shift of the scene of tragedy: from the public, world-historical stage to private, often familial concerns.18 The theory of bourgeois tragedy consistently emphasizes the need to represent “common life” [gemeines Leben]. For Johann Pfeil, the author of “Vom bürgerlichen Trauerspiele” (1755, “On Bourgeois Tragedy”), the first significant German-language investigation of the topic, the plot of bourgeois tragedy should represent events “that could take place in common life,” and its characters should be “villains and honest men as we perceive them daily in common life.”19 With this emphasis on everyday life, the material for bourgeois tragedy can, according to Pfeil, theoretically be found in every domestic milieu—in every living room and on every street corner: “[A]nd so we only need to copy ourselves and people we know and encounter on a daily basis.”20 Against Heine’s “dear mediocrity,” the concerns and dilemmas of an ordinary existence more than suffice here for producing tragic effects. The term bourgeois tragedy, therefore, doesn’t designate a class but a milieu, one that is putatively common to all: the relations and interactions of private life. Hence, royalty and nobility are not excluded; rather, they are to appear “like us,” in familiar roles intimate to all, as Lessing makes abundantly clear in his Hamburg Dramaturgy: The names of princes and heroes can lend a play pomp and majesty, but they add nothing to moving [Rührung] the audience. The misfortune of those whose circumstances are closest to our own must naturally penetrate our soul; and if

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we feel compassion for kings, then we feel it for them as humans and not as kings. If their rank often renders their misfortunes more important, this doesn’t mean that it makes them more interesting. Even though entire peoples may be involved, our sympathy demands a single object, and a nation is a much too abstract concept for our emotions.21

Five crucial points of Lessing’s notion of tragedy are found in this passage: first, tragedy’s goal consists in moving, in emotionally affecting the audience, and this without any explicit notion of catharsis; second, the one affect that matters is compassion [Mitleiden]; third, this end is best achieved through identification, when the circumstances onstage “are closest to our own,” since similarity “naturally” moves us more; fourth, the social rank of the personages is secondary to the effect, which means that royalty and nobility are not categorically excluded from bourgeois tragedy as long as they appear as private persons in common, familial roles; fifth, because the sole goal of tragedy is to arouse compassion, bourgeois tragedy is not overtly concerned with the political sphere, which is “too abstract” to produce emotion, but rather domestic life, which is concrete and common to all.22 These five points can be reduced to the three intertwined axes of Lessing’s theory of bourgeois tragedy: similarity, identification, and compassion. Scenes “closest to our own” foster identification, which in turn incites compassion that further solidifies the bond of identification and sense of shared commonality, indeed, of community, whereby common (everyday) life is to become common (shared) life.23 This chapter in no way attempts a comprehensive examination of bourgeois tragedy; rather, it focuses on the theoretical underpinnings of lending “dear mediocrity” a tragic nimbus as well as the aestheticethical stakes of wanting to move an audience to feel compassion. It is Lessing who pursues this constellation of common life and compassion with a singular intensity and, therefore, his theory—in particular his correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn (1756–57, published 1794) and the Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–68)—forms the focus of what follows. While all theorists of bourgeois tragedy advocate the shift of milieu from the public-political to the private-domestic sphere, Lessing stands alone in positing compassion as the sole desired effect of tragedy. Lessing encapsulates his notion of tragedy in a succinct definition from Hamburg Dramaturgy: “Tragedy is, simply put, a poem that awakens compassion.”24 This definition, which Lessing calls “an utterly precise explanation,” bears wide-reaching implications for his aesthetic program for two interrelated reasons: First, it locates the

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determining element of tragedy exterior to the stage, because only the spectator’s affective reaction counts. As Max Kommerell emphasizes throughout his study Lessing und Aristoteles, essence and efficacy are one for Lessing.25 Lessing thus views tragedy (and all genres) from the perspective of the audience, and this for reception-aesthetic reasons; if tragedy’s definition lies in its particular effect, its success (in fulfilling the genre) and excellence (as art) can only be measured in the spectator’s response. Therefore, the audience is central to Lessing’s notion of tragedy; in fact, it takes center stage. A “good” tragedy must resonate with the audience, who judge according to Nietzsche’s “strength in numbers,” that is, the strength and number of compassionate tears shed. Second, in defining tragedy as the compassion-producing genre, Lessing raises it to the highest art form, since nothing less than the production of the best human being is at stake: “The most compassionate human is the best human, the one most disposed to all social virtues, to all types of magnanimity. Whoever makes us compassionate, makes us better and more virtuous, and the tragedy that does the former achieves the latter as well.”26 If the purpose of tragedy is to elicit compassion, and if the most compassionate person is the best one, then the ultimate aim of bourgeois tragedy is—paradoxically enough—to lower the stakes of the stage (from entire nations to domestic life) so as to maximize both the possibility for identification and the desired improvement: to make the average audience exemplary through its increased capacity for compassion. Lessing thus strives to transform the tragic stage into an ethical-political arena, a form of Schiller’s “moral institution” avant la lettre. As such, he stands at the beginning of a long German tradition, in which art becomes an ideal educator of society, and the average viewer’s aesthetic edification becomes the hope for a democratic future. In feeling compassion for common life, the true exemplary hero of bourgeois tragedy is not onstage but watching with tears in his or her eyes.

Middle Heroes Bourgeois tragedy marks a twofold change of scene: first, it moves the tragic from the public-political sphere to the private-domestic; and, second, the character role shifts from the heroic-sublime to the common; even if world-historical personages occupy center stage, it is not in the role of statespersons, but in domestic guise. Lessing’s disagreement with his friends Nicolai and especially Mendelssohn in their

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correspondence lies precisely on the fault line between exceptional heroes and common characters as well as their correlated effects, admiration and compassion, respectively. If heroic tragedy features protagonists whose “unshakeable staunchness, relentless steadfastness, unwavering courage, and heroic disdain for danger and death”27 inspire admiration in the audience, then bourgeois tragedy prefers “middle characters”28 that elicit compassion. The perfect tragic (non)hero is someone who, as Lessing writes in Nathan the Wise, is “middle good, like us.”29 That is, for bourgeois tragedy to be effective, the protagonist has to be of the same ilk, the same moral and social fiber, or, in the words of Lessing, has to be of the “same grist and grain”30 as the spectator; the playwright has to let the figure “completely think and act as we would have thought and acted in his situation.”31 The form of identification proposed by Lessing is therefore grounded neither in the wish for heroic greatness nor even in the desire to be different from what one already is.32 Rather, the gap between spectacle and spectator is already overcome. The “middle hero” is to act and think just as the spectator would or, at least, could. Bourgeois tragedy, in other words, knows no heroes to be emulated, only protagonists already like the audience.33 Precisely because these ordinary “heroes” in no way stand above one’s own self-estimation, one can identify with them and be moved all the more. That which moves us— following bourgeois tragedy’s essential premise—is like us. Identification is everything. Lessing provides a paradigmatic delineation of a “middle character” in his attack on Corneille’s Cleopatra in the Hamburg Dramaturgy: Cleopatra, in the story, kills her husband out of jealousy. “Out of jealousy?” thought Corneille, “no, that would be a completely common woman; no, my Cleopatra must be a heroine who would gladly lose her husband but not the throne; that her husband loves Rodogune must not pain her as much as the fact that Rodogune wants to be queen, just like her; that is far more sublime.” Entirely correct, much more sublime and—much more unnatural. First, pride is in general a more unnatural, more artificial vice than jealousy. Second, the pride of a woman is more unnatural than the pride of a man. Nature equips the female sex for love not for violence; she should awaken tenderness not fear; only her charms should make her powerful; she should only rule through tenderness and should only want to rule as long as she can enjoy it. A woman who likes to rule merely for the sake of ruling, who subordinates all inclinations to ambition, who knows no other pleasures other than to command, to tyrannize, and to place her foot on the throats of entire peoples—such a woman can indeed once, and even more than once, have really existed, but she is

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nevertheless an exception, and whoever portrays an exception displays without a doubt the less natural.34

Lessing clearly defines the difference between a “heroine” and a “completely common woman,” both of which can be versions of Cleopatra. Corneille, in Lessing’s interpretation, was not satisfied with a common woman, one who would be motivated merely by jealousy, and instead defines his exceptional Cleopatra through a lust for power. One sees jealousy every day; a woman who would gladly sacrifice her husband so as to not lose political power is for Lessing extraordinary. Corneille wants a sublime “heroine” and not an ordinary person. Lessing’s argument against Corneille is telling: in declaring pride “unnatural,” particularly in a woman (the gender politics of bourgeois tragedy are generally abyssal),35 and thereby appealing to nature as the measure for the “common woman,” Lessing points to a natural ideology underlying his middle characters. The difference between the two Cleopatras comes down to a question of character, of motivation, and this in turn relies on supposedly natural gender differences. Lessing, however, offers two competing notions of nature in this passage: one a rather essentialist ideology about the substance of gender (“nature equips . . .”) and the other a more interesting one that depends on probability. Lessing first calls Corneille’s Cleopatra “more unnatural” and “more artificial” because she violates a natural concept of femininity that nature appears to have “intended.” But he then appeals to a second, different notion of nature as the relation between the exception and the norm. In so doing, he replaces a fixed ideology of nature that operates on a binary system of natural-unnatural with a notion of probability that first became possible in the seventeenth century.36 In this second sense of nature, Lessing readily admits that Corneille’s Cleopatra, who lusts for power, can and has existed. Therefore, there is nothing about her that runs counter to how things are in the world. Both Cleopatras are “natural” insofar as both are believable characters (i.e., both can and have occurred in history), but Lessing claims his Cleopatra is “more natural” because she is more common and, thus, more representative of the majority. A Cleopatra motivated simply (and only) by jealousy adheres to the law of large numbers: The common is the majority and, therefore, is more “natural” on a simple numerical level. The sublime (a woman lusting for political power), while equally occurring in nature, is “unnatural” to the extent that it represents an exception, a rarity. Lessing’s use of “common” here is to be understood

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then as an explicit rejection of the extreme; although the exception may occur in history, it is in the minority and, therefore, a lesser form of nature, not because it is unnatural but because it occurs less frequently. For Lessing, bourgeois tragedy is “natural” tragedy, a form of realism on the stage where extremes (e.g., sublime heroines) are excised in favor of regular, ordinary characters, who occupy what one would today call the meaty part of the bell curve. In bourgeois tragedy one sees the beginnings of a democratic-majoritarian aesthetic project premised on a mimetic relationship not to “what is” but more decidedly to “what is the majority.” Lessing’s everyday Cleopatra is, however, only one part of the equation; as a figure of frequency, she offers the greatest possible screen for identification with the “grist and grain.” But as discussed in the introduction, unadorned ordinary life is not enough for art, much less tragedy. In order to enter art and to fulfill tragedy’s definition of inciting compassion, everyday heroes demand a proper aesthetic form. A comprehensive image of Lessing’s common tragic figure arises when one adds Lessing’s equally famous description of the beggar in his correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn. In his letter to Nicolai from November 29, 1756, Lessing uses the example of a beggar to differentiate three gradations of compassion: touched compassion, teary compassion, and stifled compassion. Touched compassion forms the beginning of the emotive movement, the presentiment to being moved to tears by the sight of a beggar; teary compassion constitutes the high point of this affective movement by becoming fully acquainted with both the beggar’s good properties and his misfortune at the same time, a simultaneity that for Lessing is “the true trick for producing tears”;37 finally, stifled compassion is when the tears stop flowing either due to admiration or horror. The highest of the three and, thus, the goal of tragedy is the golden mean, teary compassion, which avoids the deficiencies of too little affect (simply being moved) and too much (stifled). Lessing begins his example of the beggar by separately delineating the beggar’s misfortune and his good character. His misfortune is that he has been unemployed for three years, sick until a few days ago, his wife as well, and his children are too young to work; his good character is evinced by his refusal to be the “creature of a minister” and perform his boss’s underhanded dealings. He would rather be “an honest man” than sell his soul to his corrupt employer. Lessing then explicates: No one can shed tears at such a story. Rather, if the misfortunate man wants to have my tears, he has to combine both halves. He has to say “I lost my job,

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because I was too honest and thereby made myself hated by the minister; I am starving, and with me my sickly, beloved wife, and with us are starving our otherwise hopeful children who are now rotting in poverty. And we will certainly have to starve a long time. But I would rather starve than be low down.” [. . .] For such a story I always have tears ready. Misfortune and merit are in balance here.38

Neither the beggar’s misfortunes (unemployed, starving, etc.) nor his uprightness (refusal to do his boss’s dirty work) in isolation can call forth the necessary tears for Lessing. Each separate story can cause the spectator to be moved, but not moved to tears, the sign of complete compassion. In other words, tragedy is not simply a case of “bad things happening to good people.” The true tragic effect of tears and, thus, the essential tragic construction only comes when the two stories are brought together in a causal relationship: “I lost my job, because I was too honest.” As Lessing emphasizes throughout the correspondence, only where merit leads to misfortune can one speak of a tragic conflict that, coupled with the familiar domestic milieu (i.e., identification), calls forth tears of compassion. In other words, domestic life only assumes aesthetic (i.e., tragic) qualities when the road to redemption is at once the road to ruin—an eminently dialectic understanding of tragedy.39 Lessing therefore conceives of Aristotle’s hamartia not as a “tragic flaw” per se, but rather as a causality between character and demise; hamartia is that which “draws misfortune upon” the figure, and this “flaw” can equally be located in the protagonist’s unchecked goodness. In explicating J. E. Schlegel’s Canut (1746), Lessing describes the tragic hero’s hamartia “as not allowing his goodness to be ruled by wisdom.” Instead of merely forgiving his adversary, Ulfo, Canut displays “misused goodness” and piles “dangerous benevolent deeds” at the foot of his enemy—a persistence of goodness that leads to his own ruin.40 Essential to Lessing’s thoughts on tragedy is that misfortune cannot arrive from the outside as a contingent event but must be grounded in the character of the figure itself. This point is not insignificant for Lessing, since it constitutes a defining difference between tragedy and epic, a genre distinction that Lessing goes to great lengths to preserve. In both genres, Lessing maintains, the hero suffers misfortune. However, in tragedy there is a causal relationship between merit and misfortune; in epic, the misfortune arises external to the character: “The misfortune of the epic hero must not be a consequence of his character, for otherwise he would incite compassion; rather, his misfortune must be

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one of fate and chance, in which his good or evil properties do not participate.”41 Suffering is not enough for tragedy; neither is representing common life. The real “trick for tears,” and thus the recipe for tragedy, is a completely common good person who suffers because of his or her goodness. Lessing’s delineation of the artistic structure underlying the real “trick for tears” bears important implications for his project as a whole. In both the letter correspondence and the Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing is very strict in his genre determinations, and since he defines each genre by its mode of improvement (i.e., its proper effect and affect), he relies on what one could call a psychological-anthropological aesthetics: the psychological insight into the importance of identification coupled with a rigorously defined aesthetic construction can produce, according to Lessing, the anthropological constant of a desired effect (e.g., tears). With the beggar he couldn’t be clearer: “no one weeps” at the separate enumeration of suffering and good character. In other words, with psychological insight and artistic skill, it seems that an author can create constructions and conflicts that program tears as a necessary emotive response, which is ultimately an ethical-social one, since the tears equally produce and signify the “best human.” It is important to note, however, that Lessing does not view the beggar as an idealized figure. If the beggar were exceptionally good (i.e., if he “excels, as it were, human nature”42) he would awaken admiration, which in this case Lessing calls “stifled compassion.” This possibility would arise if the beggar continued by saying that he will give up his government position in order to live “from the work of our hands,” since “for the honest man all means of earning one’s daily bread are equally reputable.” Only at this point does Lessing claim that “my tears now stop; admiration stifles them.”43 Lessing therefore clearly demands a “good” tragic hero or heroine, whose goodness—as with Canut—leads to his demise. “A great compassion,” writes Lessing, “cannot exist without great perfections in the object of compassion.”44 However, this goodness is not to be understood as a capacity that excels the capacity of the average spectator, since what goes beyond the grist and grain belongs to heroic epic; the goodness of a tragic figure “must be a good property that I consider humanity in general and, thus, also myself capable of.”45 Therefore, the sole measurement for the tragic hero’s character is the average audience, a word Lessing doesn’t use but clearly implies throughout. Everything stands and falls with the estimation of a common spectator, which, like a

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completely common Cleopatra, marks an explicit rejection of the exception (no matter how realistic) in favor of the norm. But precisely because the average is assumed to be everywhere—on the stage and in the seats—Lessing sees the possibility of creating an exemplary audience.

The Great Commonizer: Compassion The starting point for the letter exchange is Nicolai’s résumé of his justcompleted essay “Abhandlung vom Trauerspiele” (1757, “Treatise on Tragedy”), in which he sets out to refute Aristotle’s claim that “the purpose of tragedy is to purge the passions or to cultivate morals.”46 Following Dubos, Nicolai rejects any essential element of improvement or edification in art and argues instead solely for the pleasurable excitation of passions as an end in itself, whereby art functions largely as a form of enjoyable diversion. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, Lessing wants nothing to do with a notion of art where, in Monica Fick’s precise formulation, “the price of aesthetic pleasure is its meaninglessness.”47 Therefore, in demanding that art “improve,” Lessing remains within the poetic tradition since Aristotle—a tradition, one could say, that ends with Lessing himself.48 An intimate link between tragedy and compassion is, of course, as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. But whereas Aristotle viewed fear and compassion as harmful to the polis, disturbances of the soul that tragedy should incite in order to purge, Lessing reduces tragedy to the sole affect of compassion in order to hold onto it as the character of the “best human.” “Tragedy,” writes Lessing to Nicolai “should awaken as much compassion as it can.”49 For the Lessing of the correspondence, the arousing of compassion is necessarily immune to any notion of catharsis (a point he modifies with philological difficulty in the Hamburg Dramaturgy—more on this later) for the simple reason that he creates an identity between feeling compassion and improvement; the excitation of compassion already constitutes the desired moral betterment. Lessing can create this (tenuous) identification between compassion and improvement because he views compassion as grounded in the intense identification with the other. In feeling compassion, one recognizes one’s commonality, one’s equality with the suffering other. Compassion, for Lessing, is the great commonizer. The more compassion, the greater the improvement; ergo, the superfluity (here) of any notion of catharsis.

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This elevation of tragic compassion is indebted to Lessing’s reading of Moral Sense philosophy (Lessing translated Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy in 1756) and his engagement with Rousseau’s Second Discourse (which Mendelssohn translated in the same year and which the friends discussed in the letters preceding the correspondence that has been canonized as the corpus on tragedy).50 Leaving aside the question of who influenced Lessing more, as well as the differences between Rousseau and Moral Sense thought, both sources share a few crucial premises regarding compassion that help elucidate Lessing’s insistence on this passion as at once universal and exemplary. For both, compassion marks an innate, spontaneous reaction to the suffering of others, a kind of inborn solidarity pact with fellow, finite creatures. The human is naturally good, hardwired with an element of altruism that manifests itself in a “natural repugnance to see his kind suffer” (Rousseau)51 or in an innate moral compass akin to the five senses (Shaftesbury, Hutcheson). Therefore, the two crucial elements concerning compassion that Lessing adopts from Rousseau and Moral Sense thought are its innateness and its status as the primal source of altruistic sociality. Compassion is the natural, prerational manner in which humans recognize one another, assist one another, and form community. This innateness should not be understood as compassion for all people, but rather as a universal capacity for compassion in all people. Since both Rousseau and Moral Sense philosophy posit compassion as innate to the human, it possesses universality, and because it is prerational, it presupposes nothing (i.e., nothing determined by civilization, social rank, or education). The core idea of Lessing’s thoughts on compassion comes, however, clearly from Rousseau, who claims in words that Lessing will make his own: “From this single attribute flow all social virtues.”52 The question of the exact status of such “natural” compassion in modern civil society ruled by law is, however, not clear. Rousseau, for one, does not derive civilization’s notion of rights and law from compassion; as the product of reason, they are built “on different foundations.”53 For Rousseau, civil right and the right of nations fully replace “natural commiseration,” with the result that in modern civil society such commiseration “no longer dwells but in a few great Cosmopolitan Souls who cross the imaginary barriers that separate peoples and [. . .] embrace the whole of mankind in their benevolence.”54 For Rousseau, there is no relation between modern, civil society and the first community of compassion. Rousseau’s drastic reduction in the

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number of compassionate people in modernity becomes, one could say, Lessing’s motivation, since it is precisely such “great Cosmopolitan Souls” (i.e., “best” people) that he aims to produce as the norm. Lessing’s exclusive focus on compassion as the sole tragic effect fundamentally reorganizes the contemporary understanding of tragedy and brings into focus the aesthetic-ethical stakes of his notion of bourgeois tragedy. Neither fear nor admiration (a European addition to the discourse of tragedy, largely through Corneille) are for Lessing true tragic passions; at best they are rungs on the ladder of the one tragic passion—compassion—whereby fear forms the first step and admiration the last. In one grand move, Lessing reduces Aristotle’s emphasis on fear and Mendelssohn’s advocation of admiration [Bewunderung] to gradations or permutations of compassion, both in turn intimately tied to Lessing’s insistence on common, middle characters for the sake of empathetic identification. Lessing describes tragic fear as “the sudden surprise of compassion,” a definition he then clarifies as “surprised and undeveloped compassion.”55 Fear, in other words, is compassion in its moment of first expressing itself, compassion that has not yet ripened into its full form. Even when Lessing returns to the question of tragic fear in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, he modifies but does not essentially change his stance. With reference to Aristotle, Lessing attempts to clarify the function of fear as a mode of compassion: Aristotle’s fear is certainly not the fear that an other’s imminent misfortune awakens in us for this other; rather, it is the fear for ourselves that arises from our similarity with the suffering person; it is the fear that the unfortunate circumstances that we see imposed upon these others could just as well befall us. It is the fear that we, too, could become the object of compassion. In a word: fear is compassion applied to ourselves.56

What Nietzsche views as the seductive danger of Euripidean tragedy— the man of everyday life being taken in by his double—becomes the key to Lessing’s reinterpretation of Aristotle. Tragic fear for Lessing is decidedly not fear for the fate of the one onstage; unlike in Aristotle, it is not the anticipatory shudder about what awaits the hero or heroine, since this would allow for a distance and difference between stage and spectator.57 Rather, the identification is so total, so all-encompassing that the fear has already passed through the tragedy and returned to the spectator. One fears that all the misfortune on the stage could equally occur to oneself, and such fear as “compassion applied to ourselves” only “arises from our similarity with the suffering person.”

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Therefore, Lessing’s tragic fear as autocompassion constitutes a step beyond putting oneself in the shoes of the other; or, rather, it forms the logical consequence of such an identification based on similarity; by fully identifying with the tragic protagonist, the fear for the other becomes the compassion for oneself. The purpose of Lessing’s fear is to solidify the identificatory component of compassion. Only on the basis of fear does compassion reach its full affective intensity; without fear there can be no compassion in the emphatic sense. Fear as a permutation of compassion constitutes the essential element that differentiates compassion (an immediate and all-consuming passion) from philanthropy (a distant, general love of humanity that does not personally move a person), which is a lower, because more distant, form of feeling. Even the misfortune of a villain such as Richard III or Corneille’s power-hungry Cleopatra—because he or she is “still a human”—can awaken “something like compassion,” that is, philanthropy. Since the average viewer, however, can seldom or never imagine being in the shoes of the villain, such philanthropy is a general sense of being moved, one whose identification is broken and, thereby, far removed from “the flame of compassion.”58 The spectator’s compassion is thus divided between the fate of the one onstage and the shared, potential fate of oneself. The tears, in a way, are twofold—one shed for the other, one for oneself—since in weeping for the figure onstage, one equally weeps for oneself. In his foundational text on bourgeois tragedy from 1755, Pfeil highlights this dual economy of teary compassion: “In the unfortunate person we often feel sorry for ourselves. We are therefore more wasteful with our compassion for them, since we think it is only fair [billig] that one doesn’t hold back their compassion for us, if we were to truly experience the same unfortunate situation.”59 What may sound like an exaggeration is a necessary consequence of the posited similarity—and thus exchangeability—between average hero and average audience. For Pfeil, spectators can be so generous with their tears precisely because they see themselves in the same situation and bemoan their own possible suffering. The main reason one feels for the other is that one expects and in a way demands that one would receive the same compassion were one in the same situation.60 In fact, because tragic compassion is premised on complete identification, its demand for suspending the space between stage and seats already places the viewer, so to speak, onstage; tragic fate is now common fate. Therefore, to awaken compassionate identification, the protagonists have to be as ordinary

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as the people in the seats. In bourgeois tragedy, there is no space for great heroes, just for people like us.

Art Without Admiration, or, the End of the Age of Great Men Equally if not more decisive in Lessing’s reflection on tragedy is his incessant return to admiration and the absolute importance he places on dismantling it—despite Mendelssohn’s objections61—as a tragic affect and as a means of edification in general. Lessing’s grounds for rejecting admiration and heroism help explain the full stakes of the common protagonist, for what appears to be a dispute concerning poetic genres becomes on closer examination a discussion of how best to educate the average person. With Lessing’s rejection of admiration—and thus exceptional heroes—the question of art and Bildung comes to the fore, which is ultimately the heart of the correspondence between Lessing and his friends. Lessing revisits the question of admiration throughout the letters to Nicolai and Mendelssohn and, in essence, makes two arguments against admiration: the first is limited to its efficacy for tragedy as a genre, the second strikes at admiration as such. Assuming his definition of tragedy as the compassion-producing genre, Lessing first argues that admiration is “connected to insensitivity [. . .] which weakens compassion.”62 This argument only holds if one shares Lessing’s exclusive relation between tragedy and compassion, whereby admiration would function as an antitragic element because it offers the same problem as philanthropy in inverted form. If philanthropy entails a necessary distance because one cannot fully identify with the villainous traits of the tragic figure, then admiration equally mutes the immediacy and intensity of feeling, since the exceptional character of the hero ruptures any possible identification for the average spectator. Akin to philanthropy, admiration is predicated upon distance—here, the distance of the viewer from the perfection of the hero—and thereby constitutes, according to Lessing in Laokoon, a “cold affect.”63 Lessing is emphatic: if tragedy as a genre should elicit compassion, then “admiration is to be banned from tragedy.”64 The second, related reason for Lessing’s rejection of admiration extends beyond genre debates to admiration’s pedagogical value as such. Because admiration is a response to heroic greatness, the distance be-

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tween exemplum and imitator is so great that most people are not in a position to admire the right things, much less emulate what they admire. Mendelssohn describes admiration as producing the wish “to be equally capable of such a sublime disposition” and, therefore, posits the “desire to emulate” as often having the best effects.65 For Lessing, this “wish” and “desire” to aspire to such heroic greatness isn’t enough, precisely because it demands too much and, therefore, more than will be realized. Lessing does create a small allowance for admiration, insofar as it is grounded in “a good property which I consider mankind in general and myself capable of”;66 but, as with the beggar and the difference between teary and stifled compassion, this isn’t admiration per se, since such properties already lie within reach of the average human. What Lessing wants to categorically exclude are “those great properties that we can grasp under the general name of heroism,”67 which Mendelssohn describes as valuing “moral goods” over “physical ones”68 (even to the point of death), the ability to conquer “both nature and fate,” or a display of fearlessness “where we expected a sighing man bowed beneath the weight of his burdens.” 69 For Lessing, the ability to emulate such heroic greatness belongs to the select few: Admiration in its general understanding (in which it is nothing other than the particular pleasure in a rare perfection) improves via emulation, and emulation presupposes a clear cognition of the perfection I want to emulate. How many have this cognition? And for those who don’t possess it, doesn’t admiration remain infertile? Compassion, on the other hand, improves immediately; it improves without us having to add anything to the process; it improves the man of reason as well as the idiot.70

Lessing, it must be emphasized, doesn’t mention tragedy in this passage; these are general statements regarding the pedagogical efficacy of admiration and compassion as such. Because it responds to a “rare perfection,” admiration falls more often than not on fallow soil; it may be aesthetically pleasing, but for Lessing’s necessary improvement, admiration requires more than just immediate feeling and relies instead on both a preexisting “clear cognition” (or developed rational judgment) and an ensuing emulation. Because of this double demand, admiration is not complete in itself. By requiring a select precondition as well as an extra step, it thus demands more than can be expected of the majority. Without the addition of sound judgment (which is programmatically not assumed by Lessing),71 admiration remains

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“infertile” among the “grist and grain” watching the play. An admirable hero offers a sublime model, which the average person could only “achieve” via false imitation, while compassion—as an immediate effect—breaks through the problems of imitation because one doesn’t emulate anyone onstage, but rather merely identifies with the one suffering; in this affective identification, the education of the spectator is already complete. Everything in Lessing’s theory comes down to the proper pedagogy of the people [Volk]. Admiration is “a less skilled teacher of the people than compassion,”72 because compassion’s effects are immediate and, more importantly, do not require that one already be educated or that one emulate anything. Without further ado, compassion according to Lessing improves one and all, the genius and the idiot alike. Compassion thus possesses a double pedagogical advantage for Lessing: it is learnable by all and yields the “best” effect— at once egalitarian and excellent. Throughout the correspondence, Lessing also makes a slightly different and more fundamental argument against admiration. To emphasize his point, Lessing addresses Mendelssohn directly and writes concerning admirable heroes: “You admire them rightly so, but precisely because you admire them, you will not emulate them.”73 Lessing’s argument here is decisive: Even if one has a “clear cognition” (as we can assume Mendelssohn does), one still would not try to imitate the “rare perfection.” One admires what one never hopes to become, in fact, never even aspires to realize. Mendelssohn, who is not afraid to counter Lessing, concedes this very point. Although Cato is “a preeminently virtuous person,” writes Mendelssohn, “I admire a Cato or an Essex, etc., due to their uncommon heroic virtues, and yet it never occurred to me to emulate them in this respect.”74 If one admires an exceptional figure, one does so precisely because one knows one will never attempt to emulate such heroic greatness. And this is exactly Lessing’s point: heroes exist to be just that—exceptions to the norm. They are, therefore, pedagogically impotent for the average person. Although the main dispute between Lessing and Mendelssohn seems to be a question of poetic genre, much more is at stake. In arguing against heroic tragedy—the stories of martyrs and exceptional persons—Lessing not only rejects that such tragedies are, in fact, tragedies (since they don’t fulfill his genre criterion of eliciting compassion) but more importantly announces the end to the age of heroes, precisely because they have no edifying value for the average person.75 Heroic greatness can never be exemplary because it doesn’t lead to imitation—

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nor should it. The school for producing the “best human” breaks with the pedagogical principle of imitating what is great and proposes instead simply identifying with and feeling for one’s own ilk. This is Lessing’s radical aesthetic-pedagogical thesis: heroes do not make an exemplary public, other average people do. Therefore, a model education in civic virtue, which best occurs in the space of the theater, does not consist in exemplarity followed by imitation, but rather in affective identification fueled by compassion, which is exemplary in itself. Bourgeois tragedy is to be the educator and first art form of the postheroic age. Lessing thus departs from the long tradition in which exemplarity and imitation go hand in hand: from Classical rhetoric through the imitatio Christi up to the prevailing notion of bourgeois tragedy.76 Even Lillo’s pathbreaking The London Merchant justifies the inclusion of the middle class in order to expand the field of identification for negative exempla. In his “Dedication,” appended to the play, Lillo argues for the necessity of bourgeois tragedy precisely because it is “accommodated to the circumstances of the generality of mankind” and can thereby increase tragedy’s “influence and the numbers that are properly affected by it.”77 Like Lessing, Lillo understands the stage as an “instrument of good”; however, Lillo’s theatrical project of identification and improvement functions by offering exempla of lives that are to be avoided: “If princes, etc. were alone liable to misfortunes, arising from vice, or weakness in themselves or others, there wou’d be good reason for confining the characters in tragedy to these of superior rank; but, since the contrary is evident, nothing can be more reasonable than to proportion the remedy to the disease.”78 For Lillo, the exemplary force of the common protagonist lies in exposing the vices and weaknesses that the average spectator could also fall prey to and thus must avoid.79 Although Lessing sunders exemplarity from imitation, this does not preclude the possibility that the stage still offers an ideal of sorts. Lessing’s desired tragic hero clearly fulfills the role of the beggar and not, say, Richard III. In fact, his characters burst into tears and discuss the value of compassion in nearly every scene of Miß Sara Sampson. Moreover, there is a clear coding of virtuousness and vice according to a character’s (in)ability to weep.80 Therefore, Szondi correctly remarks with respect to Diderot: “On the stage, the spectator should meet people with whom he would like to live.”81 The stage, however, only offers an ideal insofar as it presents a world that is or could be just like the average viewer’s. More importantly, one doesn’t need to imitate

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the stage; in shedding tears of compassion, one already enters and participates in it. Tears realize the ideal. In his letter to Mendelssohn from February 2, 1757, Lessing elucidates this nonmimetic model of participation between stage and seats through the analogy of playing a stringed instrument: When one string is plucked (i.e., the fear, pain, or suffering onstage), the other string, that of the spectator, vibrates in turn, which Lessing calls coresounding [Mitertönen]. Teary compassion is, then, the immediate “co-,” the “with” of the spectator that simply resonates as a spontaneous response to a fellow string (i.e., human) being struck. While the audience’s tears may appear to be mimetic responses to a character weeping onstage, ultimately they can only be the accompanying, harmonious key to whatever affect is staged: fear, pain, dread, and so forth. Therefore, the audience does not in the first instance imitate the characters or their tears, but rather spontaneously participates in their suffering by cosuffering. Lessing’s exemplary, affective community realizes itself not via imitation but by weeping and suffering in harmony.

How Many Tears Should the “Best Human” Shed? Because the sole effect of tragedy should be an increased capacity for compassion, Lessing complains that the French and “mediocre poets” tend to save the tear-jerking scenes for the last act, thereby failing to fully exploit the genre to its full extent: “The true poet,” writes Lessing to Mendelssohn on December 18, 1756, “distributes compassion throughout the whole tragedy. He finds opportunities everywhere for passages, in which he shows his hero’s perfections and misfortunes connected in a moving fashion, in which, that is, he awakens tears.”82 Lessing, in effect, defines the proper effect of a proper tragedy (i.e., where “perfections and misfortunes” are “connected”) as a maximization of tear production. He does recognize that the spectator cannot be expected—if only because of physical limitations—to weep throughout the whole tragedy. He therefore reserves a place for scenes of admiration, in which the viewer can pause and simply admire the hero’s perfections. Such moments are dubbed, however, “empty scenes,” and such admiration is merely the “resting place” for compassion, not in the sense of the final fruition but in the literal sense of a pause, an intermission to dry one’s eyes: “What are these scenes [of admiration] other than resting places, in which the spectator should recuperate for a new bout of compassion?”83 The intermission for admiration, in

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which the incessant tragic conflict comes to a standstill, “should be nothing other than preparations for future compassion.”84 The goal of eliciting as much compassion as possible remains a constant through the correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn. One of the astonishing elements of Lessing’s concept of compassion here lies in the fact that it contains no judgment regarding the worthiness of the object for this passion. As the great commonizer and affective equalizer, there seems to be no limit to (or at least no need to limit) compassion. Tragedy’s aim is not to evoke compassion for this figure on the stage here and now, but to train the spectator’s capacity for compassion in general. To this end, Lessing even condones poetic dissimulation—which amounts to feeling compassion for a false object—as long as it produces the proper affective intensity. In other words, the tears are always genuine, even if the instigator isn’t: In general, tragedy should only practice [üben] our capacity for compassion, and not determine us to feel compassion in this or that case. Even if the poet makes me feel compassion for an unworthy object, namely by means of false perfections, by which he seduces my insight in order to win my heart—this all means nothing, as long as my compassion is activated and, as it were, gets used to becoming more and more easily activated. I allow myself to be moved to feel compassion in a tragedy in order to develop a capacity for compassion. Does this also take place with admiration? Can one say: I want to admire in tragedy in order to develop a skill in admiring? I think the one who has the greatest skill in admiration is the biggest fool [Geck]; and without a doubt the one who has the greatest ability in feeling compassion is the best human.85

Tragedy is an affective fitness studio, a public training center for developing compassionate souls. Compassion should not be prejudicial— “in this or that case”—for this would require the intervention of reason or judgment; rather, it can and should also be activated with respect to “an unworthy object” and “false perfections.” But if compassion is impervious to deception, if it has no criteria for good or bad excitations, compassion is an empty category: it commands nothing other than the ability to feel compassion, and as often as possible. Tragedy doesn’t develop compassion’s judgment—for it has none—just its ability to assert itself. With admiration, the case is different; to admire too much or without qualification is to be a fool. Admiration, Lessing argues, demands limits, and where there are limits, there must also be criteria, the ability to discern who or what is worthy of admiration. This ability would again presuppose that the audience is already in possession of such skills. Compassion, on the other hand, knows no such limits and

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presupposes nothing. The ideal audience for compassion is as average as can be. The ability to suffer along with another requires no guiding principle, in fact, no principle at all. In many ways, compassion’s universality—and thus its ability to forge community—comes from its lack of all criteria. Compassion can therefore putatively “improve” without risk: “How infinitely better and more certain are the effects of my feeling compassion.”86 Because compassion requires nothing other than feeling it (i.e., it neither presupposes anything nor demands any further action, as is the case in admiration), the practice [Üben] of compassion is already its practical fulfillment [Praxis]. The fact that Lessing doesn’t problematize the efficacy of compassion in the face of being duped means that compassion is not only impervious to false identification (the reproach against emulation) but also that compassion can apparently overcome its own broken relationship to its object. The sense of similarity and equality among (co)sufferers is to persist even when the identification is shown to be false. Lessing’s avowed lack of measure in compassion and tears—even at the price of deception—raises the somewhat banal but crucial set of questions: Do all tears possess the same value (since they are clearly coded as value markers)? Can there be misplaced compassion? A false sense of community? False tears? In other words, when should one cry and thus demonstrate compassionate community? Lessing clearly states that no one should weep while reading a properly composed epic (for otherwise it would be tragedy), nor should one cry at the separate enumeration of the beggar’s good character and his misfortune. In fact, Lessing claims with anthropological-psychological certainty that no one does weep in this case. Throughout the correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn, Lessing’s genre argument against epic—that the hero indeed suffers, but this alone cannot be cause for compassion—runs up against his considerations regarding compassion as the defining trait of the best human. Lessing himself is not clear as to when compassion is the proper response and hence the mark of the best person. In the correspondence, there are three possible candidates for the best, because most compassionate, person. First, the one who weeps in the face of any and all suffering (“the misfortunate person must at all times and in all forms move us and take us in”).87 This unqualified appropriateness of compassion for the other’s suffering would line up with Rousseau’s natural man and with Moral Sense thought but would subvert his distinction between philanthropy and true compassion as well as his arguments

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against epic and heroic exceptionality in general. Second, Lessing slightly restricts compassion to being felt for the undeserved suffering of a good person (“All sadness accompanied by tears is a sadness about a lost good [Gut]. [. . .] With the tears of compassion this is clearly the case”).88 This version of compassion could characterize the separate enumeration of the beggar’s merit and misfortune. Finally, Lessing allows teary compassion, its genuine form, only under the most stringent circumstances, when merit and misfortune are in a causal relationship. The “trick for tears” that characterizes a good tragedy excludes, however, tears simply shed for suffering or even for a good person suffering undeservedly. The question of how discriminating one should be with one’s compassion is never clarified in the letters, which admittedly weren’t intended for publication. But since nothing less than the determination of the best human and the aesthetic education of the average audience is at stake, the question is not moot. The spectrum ranges from a maximum of compassion to only shedding tears for a proper tragic conflict—and always without a word about catharsis. Only in the Hamburg Dramaturgy does Lessing introduce Aristotle’s crucial notion of catharsis. Lessing always understood himself as an Aristotle exegete (though, he admits, Aristotle “can err and often has”)89 and therefore attempts here to bring his understanding of tragedy in line with Aristotelian catharsis as well as to perhaps clarify the question of how many tears constitute the “best human.” The difficulty of reconciling his own insistence that tragedy evoke as much compassion as possible and Aristotle’s theory of awakening fear and compassion in order to purge them is achieved with a philological sleight of hand, but one that does modify his previous unqualified approval of compassion as always good: To put it briefly: this catharsis consists in nothing other than the transformation [Verwandlung] of passions into virtuous capacities [Fertigkeiten]. Since, however, according to our philosopher there is an extreme on both sides of every virtue, between which the virtue abides, then tragedy must, if it should transform our compassion into a virtue, purify us from both extremes of compassion. The same is to be understood of fear. With respect to compassion, tragic compassion must not only purify the soul of the one who feels too much compassion but also of the one who feels too little.90

If Lessing were to strictly follow Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis, in which tragedy elicits fear and compassion so as to cleanse them in the spectator, his entire theory of tragedy would be equally wiped away.

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Therefore, even though Lessing rather freely transcribes catharsis as transformation, he recognizes that he still needs—if his theory is to bear any affinity to Aristotle (which also displays Lessing’s adherence to the poetic tradition)—some notion of purging. He achieves this with the rather creative application of the Nicomachean Ethics’ doctrine of the mean. By redefining catharsis as the process of finding a mean between extremes, Lessing does not aim to cleanse compassion plain and simple, but to remove only that amount tending toward an extreme, whether of excess or deficiency. Lessing thereby attempts to rescue compassion as a lasting effect of tragic spectatorship while also reconciling his theory with Aristotle, albeit the Aristotle of the Ethics and not of the Poetics. In so doing, Lessing now differentiates between the proper amount of compassion inside and external to the theater; in the space of the theater one is still to feel as much as possible, however not for the sake of its maximization in everyday life, but rather for finding a golden mean, a proper measure once one leaves the theater.91 It goes without saying that Lessing’s rather bold exegesis of Aristotle produces its own problems in turn. One can imagine that tragic compassion can, via its very intensity, result in the purging of an excess (akin to “blowing off some steam”), but if one feels “too little” compassion, what remains to be purged? Nothing. Yet, if one recalls the correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn, tragedy can make manifest a latent potential for compassion in all people; in this light, such purging qua transformation can be seen as enabling the otherwise compassionless spectator to realize (in the dual sense of “become aware of” and “actualize”) his or her own latent capacity for commiseration. Even Diderot claims that upon watching a tragedy “a bad person leaves the theater less inclined to do bad.”92 While Lessing’s two diverging theories of compassion—to have as much as possible or to find a mean—cannot be easily reconciled, both maintain compassion as the sole tragic effect and celebrate its beneficent effects. While Lessing doesn’t mention the “best human” in the Hamburg Dramaturgy, one could imagine that now the “best” person is the one who in Aristotelian fashion (and the Dramaturgy is written almost as a treatise “with constant reference to Aristotle”) has located and acts on a golden mean of compassion. The crucial difference is that while tragedy is still designed to awaken as much compassion as possible, this maximum capacity for compassion no longer applies outside of the space of the theater. Tragedy should restore a proper measure, in which extremes— including feeling too much compassion—are to be avoided.

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Tears, however, remain the physical-legible sign of compassion. With tears, the common spectators express their commonality, their community, their sense of shared fate. As already discussed with the beggar, teary compassion belongs to and marks tragedy alone. In “Pro comoedia commovente” (which Lessing translated into German in 1754), Christian Gellert calls tears the “witnesses to being moved.”93 Tears of compassion constitute the authentication of bourgeois tragedy as a simultaneously aesthetic and ethical-political arena. On the one hand, tears replace applause as the proper response to art; on the other, the audience is edified only insofar as it weeps.94 Not only does shedding tears demonstrate good aesthetic taste but not to do so additionally implies a social-ethical shortcoming. Therefore, one’s capacity for compassion can only be measured in a tangible sign. One cannot just claim or state that one feels compassion; one has to prove it. Tom McCall underscores that tears in bourgeois tragedy are presented as the infallible sign, the liquid transcription of the soul’s good essence pouring forth: “Tears appear as the liquid signs of the literal truth. When faces glisten with tears, reading them (especially when accompanied by sobs) becomes nearly foolproof. Tears are meant to reveal the internal state completely—even when this state proves difficult to interpret precisely.”95 Tears, then, are doubly coded, as simultaneously aesthetic and ethical. They are the definitive mark not only that the tragedy works as art but more importantly that a community of common people bound by affective identification is being realized. As the certificate of ethical betterment, tears form the foundation of Lessing’s aesthetic-democratic state. Teary compassion serves as the affective lingua franca, the emotive mode of the being together of humanity as a whole. Without tears as “witnesses to being moved,” both drama and humanity itself fail. It is for this reason that Lessing writes in his introduction to Jacob Thomson’s tragedies in 1756: “And only these tears of compassion, these tears of humanity feeling itself, are the intention of tragedy, or it can have none.”96 For Lessing, humanity first comes to itself, first becomes human, in tears of compassion, which bear witness to an affective ability to feel similarity with an other. Tears are for Lessing the entrance into and the membership card for humanity itself, the physical enactment of a sensus communis, of humanity coming to itself as human. This form of sensus communis differs, however, from Kant’s, which only demands universal agreement and necessarily remains a mere, if emphatic, claim; here, the tears prove

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that one has already begun to realize the community of humanity “feeling itself.”

The Politics of Compassion It goes without saying that Lessing occupies a rather solitary position on compassion. Mandeville, Hobbes, Kant, Nietzsche, and Arendt—to name just a few—have little good to say about it. Hobbes even comes to the exact opposite conclusion regarding the “best man”: “The best men have the least pity.”97 And Nietzsche’s invective against compassion as the defining force of herd mentality and slave morality knows no end. Without delineating the plethora of arguments against compassion, one contemporaneous response from Kant suffices in questioning the central premise of Lessing’s project, in which the average person can simultaneously be exemplary through compassion. Everything that Lessing praises in compassion—its particularity, its lack of abstraction, its community founded on identification—Kant turns against it, going so far as to question whether compassion is a virtue at all. In a footnote to Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (1764, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime), Kant writes: Upon closer consideration, one finds that regardless of how amiable the compassionate property may be, it does not possess the dignity of a virtue. A suffering child, a misfortunate and good young lady will fill our hearts with this plaintiveness, while we simultaneously receive the news of a great battle with coldness—a battle in which we can easily guess that a considerable part of humanity must suffer innocently from horrible ill. Many a prince who turned his face in plaintiveness from the sight of a single misfortunate person gave at the same time the command to go to war, the motivation for which was often vain. There is absolutely no proportion in the effect: how can one say, then, the universal love of humanity is the cause [of compassion]?98

Kant’s criticism of compassion as a virtue takes a different course than most contemporary critics who, like Johann Georg Sulzer, worry about compassion’s ability to result in action.99 Kant goes a step further and offers a far more fundamental rejection. For Kant, an individual case of suffering or injustice leaves one in tears, while a war—with countless dead and even more lives ruined—is too abstract, too impersonal to awaken the same affective intensity. Lessing, it should be noted, would agree with Kant up to this point and, in fact, makes these criteria his

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justification for bourgeois tragedy, as quoted earlier: “Even though entire peoples may be involved, our sympathy demands a single object, and a nation is a much too abstract concept for our emotions.” Applied solely to Lessing’s genre theory, this statement is completely appropriate for describing the means for achieving a particular theory and form of tragedy. When this sentence is read together with the claim that “the most compassionate human is the best,” however, it becomes clear that Lessing doesn’t merely shift the scene of tragedy (from the public to the private milieu) but also the scene of the ethical-political. Because the purpose of art lies not only outside the artwork proper—in its effect on the audience—but also in engendering the “best human,” Lessing unequivocally aspires toward an ethical-political effect: the optimal social education of the public at large, which only the tragic stage can provide. For Kant, however, Lessing’s desired goal of arousing compassion produces an intensity that, when viewed as a virtue, is disproportionate to reality, to the vast extent of suffering in the world.100 Kant’s examples of compassionate objects—a suffering child, a young woman in dire straits—are notable, for they belong to the repertoire of common life mobilized by bourgeois tragedy for eliciting tears of compassion. Following Kant, compassion will bemoan one lost child but proffer a cold or indifferent glance at suffering and loss on a grand scale. Compassion, in a word, can warp one’s worldview, for it situates the private on the place of the world historical and privileges small (if personally significant) tragedies over world catastrophes. The particularity of compassion—especially when viewed as the highest virtue— creates an inverted ethical world, for the intensity of feeling is disproportionate to the object.101 In defining the compassionate person as the “best person,” the young Lessing, one could say, doesn’t leave politics behind; he simply transfers its sphere. If compassion has no relation to abstract concepts but nonetheless is to be the foundation of the social through the identification with the other (as, essentially, oneself), then politics sneaks into compassion through the back door. This sleight of hand, in which bourgeois tragedy seems to depoliticize the tragic stage (by moving it into the domestic interior), serves as its ultimate repoliticization. By mobilizing common heroes to elicit a maximum amount of compassion, Lessing transfers the seat of the social from the public to the private sphere and thereby advocates Kant’s inverted ethical world, in which

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the small, if intense tragedy renders one cold to the large, worldhistorical ones.102 Hegel’s exemplary tragic conflict between Creon and Antigone, between the law of the state and the law of the hearth, is reduced to just one side of the equation, to the domestic sphere alone. Lessing, therefore, inverts Heine’s dictum cited at the beginning of this chapter; in the coming age of the bourgeoisie, it is the public, political sphere that has been rendered mediocre, because it does not embody the affective power of ordinary life. In a way, bourgeois tragedy attempts a domestication of politics by tying it to individual tales of hardship, the forerunner of today’s human interest stories and melodramas, to which one often responds like Diderot’s self-congratulatory “I” in the dialogue on the Natural Son: “I must be a very good person if I can be so saddened.”

Paving the Way for Mediocre Minds What Lessing perhaps didn’t anticipate in his aesthetics of compassion is that such a theory lends itself to mediocre art (in the sense of appealing to common taste). This is the case for the simple reason that Lessing’s audience must neither demonstrate refined aesthetic taste nor exercise a Brechtian form of critical reflection; rather, it simply has to possess the ability to be moved by what resembles itself. For bourgeois tragedy to be “good” theater, it must be popular; when essence and efficacy are one, success is measured in the number of tears shed. This is essential to its Enlightenment, educative purpose. Mendelssohn, however, turns this premise of Lessing’s thought against him. Mendelssohn grants that aesthetic attempts at awakening compassion “can more easily create an intuitive illusion [illudieren],” but the ease with which an audience can be taken in by realistic images of common suffering doesn’t mean it is great art. Quite the contrary; in defending the artistic difficulty of composing a heroic tragedy of admiration, Mendelssohn criticizes Lessing’s tragedy of compassion as the easiest to achieve: “But when has my Lessing paved the way for mediocre minds to succeed?”103 Mendelssohn’s point is almost a mere aside, but it is devastating all the same: moving an audience to tears via identification may belong to the more mediocre forms of art—easy to achieve, easy to please. In his standard work on aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–74, Universal Theory of the

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Beautiful Arts), Sulzer provides a similar delineation of the problems underlying bourgeois tragedy and affective poetics in general: Only a few people can find nourishment for the mind or the heart in truth, perfection, and greatness. Almost everyone finds such nourishment in that which moves [rührenden]. One perceives all the time that the touching scenes in dramatic plays move all the loges and the seats, while during many other scenes of great beauty a part of the audience remains rather cold and calm. In addition to the advantage of receiving the most universal applause, touching plays also have the advantage that such affect is the easiest to achieve, since it is often the case that even mediocre artists can be successful.104

While still operating with somewhat undeveloped aesthetic concepts, Sulzer nevertheless differentiates between the “few” who possess what one can call refined judgment and “almost everyone,” who are easily enraptured by emotive scenes and whose taste lies in the salt of their tears. Touching moments of melodrama have the greatest effect, but their popular success doesn’t speak to their artistic excellence. Mendelssohn and Sulzer thereby implicitly raise an issue that the young Lessing doesn’t question: the aesthetic value of compassion. With the best of intentions, Lessing is invested in the social, ethical, and political effects that he thinks tragedy offers to the average audience. He presupposes an average audience, an audience of common, “good” people who can identify with other common, good people on the stage; via this very identification and resulting compassion, the audience can be elevated, educated to the best humans precisely due to (and without surrendering) their lack of heroic exceptionality. In so doing, Lessing avoids the issue of aesthetic taste by identifying compassion as the source of all virtues; when the audience weeps, it demonstrates all the taste necessary. In measuring success by the number of tears shed, Lessing calls for a democratic notion of taste, in which one simultaneously expresses aesthetic approval and moral betterment with one’s tears. Mendelssohn and Sulzer, however, argue—in a long aesthetic tradition—that what pleases the majority may not necessarily be the best. In fact, for both authors, the drama of compassion belongs to the métier of the mediocre poet, who places “universal applause” above the properly artistic categories of “perfection and greatness.” If the purpose of art is to move people, then to move the majority to tears may be “the easiest to achieve.” In addition to being the commonizing passion, compassion as an aesthetic effect may simply be common in Kant’s pejorative sense.

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When Applause Becomes Suspicious As presented at the beginning of this chapter, there may be no greater disparity concerning the essence of tragedy and thus no greater opposition between two projects than between Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Everything that Nietzsche rejects as destructive to great art—staging the man of everyday life, celebrating bourgeois individuality, elevating the average audience to judge; in short, affirming common life—Lessing employs and heralds as the premise of tragedy. This should come as no surprise, since in the Hamburg Dramaturgy Lessing praises none other than Euripides as the model for tragedy and the purveyor of the greatest insights into humanity, all thanks to Socrates: “To know man and oneself; to be attentive to our feelings; [. . .] to judge everything according to its own purpose—this is what we learn in dealing with Euripides; that is what Euripides learned from Socrates and what made him the best in his art. Happy the poet who has such a friend and can seek his advice every day and at all hours!”105 When one adds Nietzsche’s ensuing critique of compassion as “the practice of nihilism” that “negates life, makes life all the more worthy of negation”106—a force so destructive that even the gods died of compassion—then Nietzsche could be viewed as trying to undo everything that Lessing wanted to achieve in bourgeois tragedy. Despite this polar opposition, the early projects of Nietzsche and Lessing do share one key premise: both authors believed that art, particularly the tragic stage, could effect a renewal of society. In this respect, Lessing can be seen as the first in a line of German thinkers, including Nietzsche, who posit art as the means for a regeneration of society through aesthetic education. For Lessing, this aesthetic-social project consists, of course, in the production of exemplary—because most compassionate—citizens, who do not need to escape their averageness, but embrace it by identifying and feeling for other common people. One can be common and exceptional at once, precisely because of one’s capacity for compassion. In the case of the young Nietzsche, it is not the average viewer but the genius in the guise of Wagner who can enact a resurgence of tragic Greece that shatters both bourgeois individuality and everyday life. Both Lessing and Nietzsche, therefore, presupposed, if only for a time, the possibility of great art that was popular (for how else can one renew society through art?) without succumbing to mediocrity. And both projects end at the same, perhaps in-

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surmountable, roadblock: the dilemma of artistic success in the age of the bourgeoisie. The ultimate demise of Nietzsche’s hope expressed in The Birth of Tragedy should have been its fulfillment: the founding of Bayreuth. Upon its opening in 1876, this new Athens ended up being the Athens of Euripides, not Sophocles. Bayreuth was a catastrophe for Nietzsche because it was a commercial, bourgeois success. In many ways Nietzsche’s disappointment and disgust with Bayreuth can be seen as a repetition of the failure of Lessing’s aesthetic Enlightenment. Nietzsche only witnessed a large-scale version of what was beginning to form during Lessing’s time. As one of the first author’s to try to live solely by the pen, Lessing experienced firsthand the consequences of the exposure of art to the marketplace, public taste, the compulsion of sales, and the bourgeoisie’s growing identification with the art world. As an Enlightenment thinker, however, Lessing still believed that artistic success and mass edification were reconcilable; and thus his goal that art elicit a maximum of compassion runs up against its own success. By the end of the eighteenth century, an addiction to tears, a phenomenon akin to chain smoking that one scholar has nicely dubbed “chain crying,”107 had taken over the German reading and theater public. Tears were everywhere, humanity was “feeling itself,” and yet everything was eerily the same—or worse. Referring to the exploding book market, Schulte-Sasse succinctly summarizes the dialectic in which the desire for affective universality leads to its own demise: “The development of the book market leads in the late eighteenth century to the fact that Lessing’s sentimentality, which was intended as a criticalutopian force, degenerates to a banality.”108 The blind spot of the Enlightenment, writes Schulte-Sasse, was the failure to see the always potential contradiction between universal edification and commodity culture: “The literary, popular-pedagogical undertakings of the Enlightenment presuppose the rapid capitalization of the book market to an extent that is scarcely to be underestimated, so that the movement led finally to its own demise. The Enlightenment did not perceive the latent contradiction between its idealistic-pedagogical interests and its economic ones; it did not see the double-existence of the book as both intellect and commodity as a problem.”109 One of the clearest consequences of this problem, in which Enlightenment idealism reverts to commercial “banality,” was the development of autonomous art and the sundering of beautiful art from a purpose external to its own perfection.

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In Lessing’s Enlightenment aesthetics, the purpose of art lies outside of the artwork proper: essence and effect are one. As Martha Woodmansee has shown, even before Kant’s canonization of autonomous aesthetic judgment in the Third Critique, Goethe’s fellow traveler to Italy, Karl Phillip Moritz, had laid out the premises of autonomous art in “Versuch einer Vereinigung aller Schönen Künste und Wissenschaften unter dem Begriff des in sich selbst Vollendeten” (1785, “Attempt at a Unification of All the Beautiful Arts and Sciences under the Concept of Complete-in-Itself”).110 At stake in this essay are the different forms of pleasure afforded by the useful and the beautiful arts. By strictly circumscribing the unique sphere of beautiful art, Moritz simultaneously plays his part in the construction of the everyday as the sphere of utility and means-ends relations that Hegel will call prosaic reality. In the useful arts, the object only becomes complete when it fulfills its purpose; a means to an end, it exists to be utilized. With the beautiful arts, the case is the exact opposite. The beautiful work of art is complete in itself. It doesn’t exist for the recipient (for his edification, use, etc.) but for itself. Moritz thus defines beauty in terms that will become utterly familiar a few years later in Kant: “What is pleasurable to us without being useful we call beautiful.”111 This autonomous notion of art, divorced from a functional logic, radically reinscribes the task of the artist. The artist who thinks functionally registers artistic success external to the work: “But if my work pleases, then I have achieved my purpose.” Moritz answers this causal argument, in which popularity provides the measure of success, in unequivocal terms: “The other way around! Because you achieved your purpose, your work pleases, or: the fact that your work pleases can perhaps be a sign that you have achieved your purpose.”112 For Moritz, the artist no longer aspires to educate (as in Horace, as in Lessing), but to create a work that is perfect in itself. In one of the earliest articulations of what will become a mantra of the art world, Moritz declares that if one puts the success of a work above its inner perfection “then the applause is already very suspicious to me.”113 Applause—or tears—can no longer be the purpose of art, for an artwork’s success is now measured only in the work itself: its own perfection. This is not to say that Moritz excludes the possibility of art that is simultaneously perfect and popular. It can and should happen, but never as art’s intention or purpose. The “true artist”—and note the explicit reference to the “true artist,” which implies the growing preponderance of “false” artists—“will be happy

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when his work finds applause, but he already achieved his actual purpose with the perfection of the work.”114 In the wake of this turn to autonomous aesthetics, in which art is decoupled from an immediate relationship to the good and useful, Schiller—who himself was not immune to theater as a “moral institution”115—looks back in 1791 and recognizes the tendency to mediocrity that prevails when art is viewed as an edifying institution: “The well-intended goal of pursuing the morally good everywhere as the highest purpose, which has produced and protected so much mediocrity in art, has caused similar damage in theory.”116 The question that Schiller and Goethe pose when they get together in the 1790s is how to achieve simultaneously great and popular art, where success in the marketplace does not raise the suspicion of mediocrity but rather signals a realized aesthetic state—a project outlined in their engagement with the new phenomenon of the dilettante.

CHAPTER

The Average Artist (Goethe and Schiller on Dilettantism)

3

For the dilettante, the proximity to the artist is indispensable, since he sees in the artist the complement to his own being; the wishes of the amateur are fulfilled in the artist. Goethe, Poetry and Truth1 There remains the question for whom the last artist will play in a meaningful way, when the last dilettante—the one who lives from the dream of being an artist himself—is dead. No community choir will replace him. Adorno, Impromptus2

The Stamp of the Dilettante Goethe’s young artist Werther suffers an all-too-common fate: Werther is at the height of his artistic energy, most enamored with being an artist, and most certain of his artistic skill when he is not producing art. Without a pencil and drawing pad in hand, it seems that Werther could create something of the highest, most exceptional quality. As discussed in the introduction, Werther feels the “stamp of genius,” the mark of being called to be an artist, but precisely because genius eludes all notions of a type, model, or mechanical reproducibility, such a “stamp” seems to seal Werther’s fate. In the second letter (May 10, 1771) of the epistolary novel, Werther describes the cheerfulness of his soul and how it harmonizes with the landscape surrounding him. It is in the midst of greatest feeling that his paradoxical situation as an artist comes to the fore: “I am so happy, my friend, so immersed in the feel-

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ing of a peaceful being that my art suffers. I could not draw right now, not a mark, and never have I been a greater painter than in such moments.”3 At the very moment when he is incapacitated as an artist— when he can’t even make a mark on the page—Werther, by his own admission, has never been a “greater painter.” Between his enthusiasm for art and its execution falls the shadow. This is not to say that Werther, in Goethe’s fiction, is not a great letter writer; the ensuing literary description of the landscape belongs to the high points of German prose, but in the artistic métier he chooses—drawing, painting— Goethe conceptualizes him as an artistic dilettante, one whose aspirations can never compensate for his innate lack of genius. Werther seems to recognize this inborn incapacity for art at the end of this letter to Wilhelm: When it grows dark around my eyes, and the world around me and the heavens rest in my soul like the figure of a beloved—then I often desire and think: ah, if you could express this, if you could breath onto the page what lives so fully and so warmly in you that it would become the mirror of your soul, just as your soul is the mirror of the infinite god!4

At precisely the moment when the world takes up residence in Werther’s soul as a living artwork, Werther gains an insight into the unbridgeable gap between his artistic aspirations and his artistic talents. Unfortunately, his hand cannot transcribe his soul and therefore the desired immediate relationship between felt reality and realized art breaks down. Werther’s passion for art remains unquestioned, but the ability to translate that enthusiasm into a realized work is lacking.5 Werther is an unparalleled “feeler,” but feeling alone is not enough for art. In fact, for the Goethe and Schiller of Weimar Classicism, such unbridled passion will constitute one of the dividing lines between the true artist and the dilettante. In “Über die notwendige Grenzen beim Gebrauch schöner Formen” (1795/1800, “On the Necessary Limits in Using Beautiful Forms”), Schiller examines the difference between “genuine artistic genius” and the “mere dilettante.”6 The very fact that Schiller emphasizes the necessity of “genuine genius,” thereby implying a tendency to “false” genius, speaks volumes. The notion of genius, it seems, is being falsely appropriated, and the dilettante is one such form of nongenuine genius. In words that could provide an analysis of Werther, Schiller writes of the dilettante: The seductive stimulation of the great and beautiful; the fire that sets the youthful imagination aflame; and the semblance of ease with which he

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deceives his senses—all of these have convinced many an inexperienced person to grab the palette or the harp and to pour out in shapes or sound what came to life in him. Obscure ideas work their way through his head like a world coming into being, ideas that make him believe that he is enthused. He takes obscurity for depth, wildness for power, indeterminateness for the infinite, meaninglessness for the supersensuous—and how he enjoys himself in giving birth! But the judgment of the connoisseur will not confirm this document of warm self-love.7

Dilettantes are seduced by the great and beautiful; giving into their imagination, they surrender to enthusiasm and believe that they, too, can give artistic form to the obscure ideas in their heads. Dilettantes, however, are doubly deceived: first, about their artistic ability and, second, that they are really enthused. They ultimately mistake enthusiasm for the necessity of study. Schiller describes the unmistakable touchstone separating the dilettante from the genuine artist to be the artist’s patience, diligence, and serious study of his or her material and objects. True artists and poets “can only reach the point where their works playfully enthrall us through a strenuous and nothing less than stimulating study.”8 The unique talent of the true artist is then to “dive into the deepest depths in order to be true upon the surface.”9 Dilettantes remain on the surface—mostly of their own passion—and therefore miss both: the depths and the surface. What they produce is not art but “a document of warm self-love,” that is, the documentation of the desire to be an artist. Schiller’s criterion of talent would seem to come down to “hard work”—the true artist commits him or herself to the métier in its full complexity and manifoldness, while dilettantes remain enthralled by the hazy images in their heads and the idea of being an artist. But industriousness is not enough. Schiller is unequivocal: one is either “born to be a poet” (and part of this natural gift appears to be the ability to “subject the exuberant fantasy to the discipline of taste”)10 or “nature has stamped one to be a dilettante.”11 With this idiom Schiller returns to Werther’s feeling the “stamp of genius” and corrects his lexicon: a poet is born; it is the dilettante who is “stamped.”12 While much of this chapter will be dedicated to delineating both the definition and stakes of the dilettante for Goethe and Schiller, a provisional explication of this modern phenomenon is provided by Hans Vaget, whose work on the problem of dilettantism and, in particular, Goethe’s relationship to it is particularly astute:13 “The dilettante assumes a middle position within the richly articulated typology of artistic and half-artistic forms of existence that span the broad spectrum

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from genius and Meister to bohemian, dandy, and bungler. The dilettante stands halfway between the often transfigured and mystified figure of the great artist and the person capable of nothing, who is laughed at and mocked.”14 While Goethe and Schiller will define the dilettante as one who has decidedly not been bestowed the gift of genius by nature and therefore possesses no natural talent, the fact remains that the dilettante does not constitute a marginal or insignificant figure in the art world; nor are dilettantes completely lacking in all artistic proficiency. If dilettantes were laughing stocks, they would pose no threat and certainly not deserve Goethe and Schiller’s critical attention. Nor do they represent the emergence of trivial literature and popular culture in opposition to “serious” art. While the division between high and low culture was certainly first beginning to develop in the last decades of the eighteenth century,15 this is not the primary focus of Goethe and Schiller’s critical energies. The fact that one has to develop criteria that distinguish the work of artistic genius from that of enthusiastic dilettantism demonstrates how close the dilettante can encroach on what Goethe and Schiller deem to be art. Rather, as Schiller’s insistence on the difference between genuine talent and mere dilettantism already underscores, the dilettante aspires to a position in the world of “high art” and thus intrudes on the domain that should be reserved for the genial Meister (i.e., the naturally born genius who has developed his or her talent to the fullest). This also implies that Goethe and Schiller are not focusing on the “dabbler” who pens a few poems and fantasizes on the piano in the privacy of his or her home. The dilettante is a public figure who aspires to make art a profession. Therefore, just as the genius is the figure of exception, an absolute rarity, dilettantes embody the world of nonexceptional artists—perhaps they have mastered the rules, perhaps they show moments of enthusiastic insight, but they ultimately lack the conditio sine qua non of the true artist: the spark of genius. Rather, like Werther, they feel the “stamp of genius,” which Schiller interprets as “the stamp of the dilettante.” Schiller and in particular Goethe use two words to denote this modern phenomenon in the art world. The first is Liebhaber, a word that accompanies, determines, and to a certain extent haunts Goethe’s thought from his early review of Sulzer, through his essay on imitation, manner, and style, to the collector essay and beyond. At times throughout Goethe’s oeuvre, Liebhaber is used in the passive sense of the recipient and admirer of art and can be translated as an “art lover”

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or “aficionado”; at times, it is mobilized in the active signification of one producing as an artist and means “amateur.” In this active sense, Liebhaber is synonymous with the word dilettante, which forms the terminological core of Goethe and Schiller’s collective, short-lived project on dilettantism from 1799. It should be emphasized, however, that any difference between the active and passive Liebhaber collapses in Goethe and Schiller’s dilettante project, since here the art lover only properly shows a love for art by trying to produce it. The art lover must become active, that is, must become a dilettante—one who dreams of being an artist. Therefore, the terms amateur and dilettante will be employed interchangeably throughout this chapter; in the few cases where it seems that the receptive sense of Liebhaber is more appropriate, “art lover” or “aficionado” will be used. The main focus of this chapter is the 1790s and in particular the high point of German Classicism: Schiller’s critique of Bürger (1792), Goethe’s essay on literary sansculottism (1795), the founding of the journal Propyläen (1798), and most importantly Goethe and Schiller’s collective project on dilettantism, which was announced for publication in Propyläen under the title “Über den Dilettantismus, seinen Nutzen und Schaden. Rat an Dilettanten und Künstler” (1799, “On Dilettantism, Its Uses and Detriment. Advice for Dilettantes and Artists”). As the title for this ultimately unwritten essay makes clear, the structure and purpose of this project will find its continuation in Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” As with Nietzsche’s attempt to delimit the proper measure of recollection and oblivion in furthering life, creation, and action, Schiller and Goethe wanted to explore the ways in which dilettantism is not only destructive but also necessary and productive for art. Goethe and Schiller’s notes and charts on dilettantism from 1799 mark, in a way, a twenty-fifth anniversary of Werther, a revisiting and reconsideration of this famous artistic amateur, now under the conditions of a rapidly expanding art market, the suffusion of bourgeois identity with culture (i.e., Bildungsbürgertum), and the multiplication of a new Werther effect—not of copycat suicides but of dilettantes aspiring to be artists.16 For Schiller and Goethe, the greatest issue facing art is not the potential lawlessness and unbound exertions of the genius’s productive faculty (as Kant implies in the Third Critique), but the infiltration of the art world by the mediocre artist. As an active, producing “artist,” who in fact will never become an artist, the dilettante offers a decidedly new threat to art and, in fact, embodies a founding paradox

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of the modern art world: “Dilettantes are of little use to themselves, to the artist, and to art. Indeed, they cause a lot of damage. And yet man, the artist, and art cannot do without an enjoying, insightful, and to a certain extent practical participation. This is the intention of the present writing.”17 The dilemma posed by dilettantism is abundantly clear here: it is a destructive force that nevertheless is indispensable to art. Art and the artist “cannot do without” the dilettante. At stake, then, in Goethe and Schiller’s project is delimiting the exact “extent” of such “practical participation”—how amateurs are to participate and to what end. In granting an essential if deeply ambivalent place to the dilettante, Goethe and Schiller acknowledge that the modern art world is largely determined not only by those gifted by nature (i.e., geniuses) but also by those with less talent or bereft of talent (i.e., amateurs). Goethe and Schiller’s great insight is that insofar as the genius aesthetics arises with the bourgeoisie, the art market, and the ever-expanding prose of the world, one equally needs a dilettante aesthetics. It is precisely the new, active participation of the public that not only threatens to corrupt the sphere of fine art but also offers a previously unheard-of possibility: genuine aesthetic education on a wide scale. Schiller and Goethe are two of the earliest thinkers to offer a theoretical engagement that examines aesthetics from the perspective of nonart and conclude that not only does the genius need to be “disciplined” (Kant) but, more urgently, so does the nongenius.18 In this light, the dilettante project marks a crucial document in the attempt to establish art as an institution as well as the tastemakers who can dictate who is a genius and who isn’t. However, it is precisely the proficiency of the artistic amateur, his or her almost “genial” ability to imitate, that continually threatens to unsettle Goethe and Schiller’s fundamental distinction between genius and nongenius and thus the desired coordinated movement between the exceptional and nonexceptional.

The Age of Dilettantism The term dilettante first appeared in German in 1753, just as the book and art markets began their rapid expansion due to the ascendant bourgeoisie.19 Goethe and Schiller therefore identify the dilettante as a new phenomenon, concomitant with the rise of the bourgeois subject, its notion of identity, and its relation to art in general. In the notes to the dilettante project, one finds the following: “Origin of dilettantism. Not exactly a universal, widespread, high regard for the arts, but rather

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a universal, widespread mixture of the arts with bourgeois existence and a form of legitimization of bourgeois existence.”20 The advance of dilettantism is part and parcel of art’s emancipation from the court and the exposure of art not only to the marketplace but also to the bourgeoisie’s self-definition. To be a member of the educated middle class around 1800 meant to be educated in the arts, to show an interest and investment in culture. Art, in other words, belongs to Bildung, to cultivation. In discussing one of the causes for dilettantism, Goethe and Schiller write: “Artistic activities proceed into education as one of its main demands.”21 The implicit consequence of their thesis is that Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum—its cultivated, educated middle class—is not a bulwark against poor taste and the bearer of “high art,” but a central source of aesthetic mediocrity; only with an educated, increasingly powerful middle class (if only in the realm of culture) does mediocrity become a crucial issue in art. This is not to say that the other option—a philistine indifference to the arts—would be preferable.22 Goethe and Schiller clearly favor the amateur’s “complex interest in the humanities [Humanioribus] as opposed to the rawness of uneducated people or the pedantic limitedness of the mere businessman and of the bookishly erudite [Schulgelehrten].”23 Noteworthy here is the preference of the dilettante not only over the uneducated person and the businessman but also over the “pedantic” knowledge of those who merely accumulate information from books and school. As we will see, it is not a problem but a prerequisite that the art lover try a hand at art. Therefore, a deep ambivalence toward the confluence of art with bourgeois existence runs throughout the project. Even in the above passage, bourgeois life does not exactly accord art “high regard.” Rather, its very existence, its identity and being, is intertwined with art, an admixture that simultaneously produces dilettantism and offers the possibility for a new, foundational role of art in society. The saturation of the art world in amateurism can either lead to art being a commodity like any other or to a discerning, aesthetic public.24 By locating the origin of dilettantism in the universal mixture of art and bourgeois existence, Goethe and Schiller recognize that the establishment of the modern art world introduces social, economic, and psychological forces that impinge upon and influence art on a previously unknown scale. The mixture is total; modern art cannot be separated from bourgeois life or, therefore, from dilettantism. This is Hegel’s prosaic reality coming to fruition. Art and aesthetics, therefore, have no choice but to address this new middle-class phenomenon. On June 22,

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1799—toward the end of the dilettante project and as an attempt to jump-start it—Goethe writes to Schiller that the project “is of the greatest importance” and proceeds to delineate the reasons: “The extent to which artists, entrepreneurs, buyers and sellers, and aficionados [Liebhaber] of all art forms have drowned in dilettantism—this I see with horror only now, since we thought through the situation so thoroughly and have given the child a name.”25 Goethe underscores here a watershed moment in the history of art; the very notion of art and the artist is undergoing a profound redefinition, in which new, powerful actors are determining art from within. In its dependence on buyers, sellers, popularity, and market forces in general, art in the so-called age of genius is faced with a threat that is constitutive of art in the modern, early capitalist, and protodemocratic world. No element of the art system is immune to the infiltration of dilettantism. Notable is the fact that in this letter (unlike in the project notes) dilettantism designates not only amateurish artistic attempts but also the critique, consumption, and discussion of art. Dilettantism in the reception of art is, however, a necessary consequence and amplifier of dilettantish art itself, especially because even “true” artists have been infected and fallen prey to it. This demise of the artist means two interrelated things: dilettantes are aspiring to be artists, and true artists are becoming dilettantish through their complicity with mediocre taste. Goethe and Schiller make this same point in their notes to the project: “When the Meister follows false taste in art, then the dilettante believes all the quicker to be at the level of art.”26 This remarkable line (which we will return to later) underscores that even the Meister—the one who not only possesses raw genial talent but has developed it to completion—can always lapse into and encourage dilettantism. Because nothing in the art world remains immune to it, dilettantism can be called a “complex” or the name for a problem—namely, the watering down (i.e., drowning), mediocritization, and marketing of high art from all sides—as well as a possible solution. Dilettantism, in a word, marks both a plight and the answer to what real aesthetic education might look like. The key point for Goethe is that by giving the child a name—by baptizing it as “dilettantism”—the problem has been identified and can be engaged. The solution Goethe offers in this letter to Schiller, however, is surprising and seems to deny any possibility of educating or improving the dilettante. If all art is drowning in dilettantism, Goethe—in a rather

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uncharacteristic moment—believes that one should respond in kind and unleash a flood upon it, as is clear from the letter’s continuation: When we someday open our floodgates, there will be the worst kinds of hostilities [Händel], for we will flood the beloved valley in which bungling [Pfuscherei] has so happily settled down. Since the main characteristic of the bungler is his incorrigibility, [. . .] they will scream that one has ruined their camp. And when the water has subsided, they will put everything back in its place like ants after a downpour. But nothing else can be done; judgment must be passed upon them. We must allow our ponds to swell up and then suddenly pierce the dams. There should ensue a violent flood.27

In this attempt to reignite the dilettante project, Goethe proposes a counterattack of biblical proportions. Goethe and Schiller generally reserve the word bungler for craftsmanship, whereby the dilettante relates to the beautiful arts as the bungler to handicraft. The difference between craftsmanship and art follows Kant’s thoughts in the Third Critique. Because the rules of craftsmanship can be communicated and taught, they are “bourgeois” for Goethe and Schiller; genial art, on the contrary, knows no such communicability, and therefore its rules are “spiritual.”28 Following this distinction, the bungler-craftsman is technically corrigible, since hard work and study should lead to skilled proficiency, a road barred to the artistic dilettante, whose lack of original genius renders him or her a permanent or professional amateur. Although Goethe doesn’t hold fast to this fundamental distinction in this letter to Schiller, the point is that bunglers or dilettantes are characterized by two traits that render them particularly difficult to combat: first, they are incorrigible—which would seem to render any pedagogical approach useless and to demand permanent warfare— and, second, the claim that they cannot be eradicated, since, like an army of ants, they will immediately resume their formation and activity. The key questions are then: what does Goethe mean by incorrigible? If the dilettante is incorrigible, in what aspects and why? On the other hand, if the amateur can be educated, how and to what end? This issue of education forms the crux of Goethe’s reflections on dilettantism; and, as we will see, from his perspective both positions hold true: although dilettantes can never be educated into artists (since they lack genius), this doesn’t mean they can’t be educated at all. For now, it should be emphasized that Goethe describes the battle against dilettantism as an infinite task; as long as art and bourgeois society are inextricably interfused, the art world will be saturated with dilettantism.

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Schiller welcomes the battle and, following Goethe’s lead, declares war in his response from June 25, 1799: “Since one cannot have much hope for building and planting, it is at least something if one can flood and tear down. The only relation toward the public that one can’t regret is war. And I am all for attacking dilettantism with every weapon possible.”29 This is of course a rather different notion of aesthetic education than Schiller is known for: Aesthetic Education’s hope for art as the bridge and support during the transition to a culture of reason succumbs here to a sense of hopelessness. If one cannot build and plant, one can at least attack. With this declaration of war and the explicit desire to use every critical weapon, the table seems to be set for what promises to be a crucial aesthetic doctrine of Classicism: a Titanic battle between genial artists and permanent amateurs. But then the call to arms dies out, the fighting words cease, and by September 1799, a mere seven months after the project began, no further mention is made of the dilettante in the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller. The project stalls and is surrendered to the desk drawer. The reader is left with a truly fragmentary and incomplete record: some thirty pages of charts and notes—the schemata in Schiller’s handwriting, the notes in both with some additions by the art historian Heinrich Meyer. In many ways, the project on the dilettante comes to a dilettantish conclusion: a declaration of war followed by a bit of planning and then silence. The extant schema and notes provide, however, enough insight into the general trajectory of the project to deduce its stakes for Classicism’s aesthetic project: there can be no great art without dilettantism. The dilettante and the Meister are structurally dependent on each other.30

The Imitation Drive In June 1799, in the midst of the project, Goethe wrote to his friend, the Italian scholar Johann Christian Jagemann, the author of a GermanItalian dictionary, for a history and etymology of the word dilettante. Jagemann reported that “dilettante” had been in use since the seventeenth century in Italy and that whereas the Italians reserve the word maestro for the artist—a word not foreign to Goethe’s lexicon—they describe a person who produces art without making a profession of it with the phrase si diletta, “he is enjoying himself.” Jagemann then clarifies the precise use of the word as he sees it: the dilettante is “an

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aficionado [Liebhaber] of the arts who not only wants to observe and enjoy art but also wants to participate in its execution.”31 Jagemann doesn’t mention the fact that “dilettante” was initially used to describe the nobility who produced poems, paintings, drawings, or music yet due to their financial security didn’t need to make a profession out of such artistic activities. The designation “dilettante,” therefore, initially carried no negative connotations and, in fact, was a certain badge of honor that one was privileged enough to not have to produce art for money.32 Therefore, one needs to add to Jagemann’s definition—a point that Goethe and Schiller immediately grasp—that the term dilettante only falls into ambivalence and disrepute when the artist begins to rely on public support and when the ascendant middle class begins to participate in art as an expression of their new cultural capital and as a “career” choice. This professionalization of the artist paradoxically frees up and renders him or her dependent on sales and success. If dilettantism is the name for a problem—the marketing and mediocritization of the art world—it is precisely the art lover’s passionate attachment to art and identification with the cultured world that produces a new nadir and begins to provide an answer, for this investment leads him or her in Jagemann’s definition to actively engage in artistic production. This inclination of the art lover to want to create art constitutes the central paradox at the heart of Goethe and Schiller’s examination. In trying to produce art, the aficionado is doing exactly what is expected—which is also his or her downfall. In a series of oneline notes, Goethe and Schiller write: The artwork invites [ fordert auf ] humanity to pleasure. And to diverse forms of participation. All people have an unspeakable inclination toward the pleasure of artworks. The closer participant would be the true art lover [wäre der rechte Liebhaber], who would enjoy [genösse] in a lively and full manner. As strongly as others, indeed more than others. Because he would sense [empfände] the cause and effect simultaneously. Transition to practical dilettantism. Humans experience and enjoy nothing without immediately becoming productive. This is the innermost property of human nature. Yes, one can say without exaggeration that this is human nature itself.

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An insurmountable drive to do the same. The imitation drive [Nachahmungstrieb] does not at all point toward innate, genial talent for something.33 Art is an invitation to pleasure and participation, a summons to an “unspeakable inclination” in all people. True pleasure, however, only arrives when one becomes productive. In order to enjoy art, one must want to become productive, which means here to imitate, to want “to do the same.” This “imitation drive” or “drive to imitate”—the flip side of the genius’s natural creativity—is “without exaggeration” an insurmountable drive, the very nature of human nature. One could say that by imitating art, the dilettante not only expresses passion but also does nothing less than perform humanity and, in a way, become fully human. Therefore, by producing “art,” the dilettante not only responds properly and fully to aesthetic experience but also satisfies the definitive human drive: imitation. One difficult question in this series of notes is how the “true art lover” relates to the dilettante. Vaget rightly notes that the “lively” pleasure of the true art lover is equally characteristic of the dilettante, but then describes the dilettante as being “seduced to self-deception” by “risking the ‘transition to practical dilettantism,’”34 as if the step toward active, amateurish, imitative production were a mistake. But this passage clearly states that humans “enjoy nothing without immediately becoming productive”—which necessarily includes the enjoyment of the true art lover—and, moreover, that such “becoming productive” consists in imitation, which is not merely one mode of activity among others “but an insurmountable drive” and “the innermost property of human nature.” Therefore, the notes here seem to be constructed in two parts: first, general statements about art’s effect on humans and their proper response, in which the true art lover is described in hypothetical, subjunctive statements, followed by (under the rubric “Transition”) how one can achieve the status of the true art lover written in the indicative mode. As a goal and ideal of dilettantism, the true art lover must also initially satisfy the drive to imitation. The dilettante, in other words, is not a deviation from, but the proper path to, becoming a true art lover (which will also be called a “connoisseur”).35 By following the natural inclination to imitate, dilettantes reveal, however, the sticking point with their artistic production: the imitation drive has nothing to do with innate genius. “When we speak of

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the dilettante, we are excluding the case of someone who is born with true artistic talent and through circumstances was hindered in his education as an artist. We are only speaking of those who do not possess a particular talent for this or that art and merely allow the universal imitation drive to prevail.”36 Goethe and Schiller make a crucial distinction here, one already announced in Schiller’s “On the Necessary Limits”: the dilettante only refers to the naturally unexceptional person, not to the one who is talented by nature. Everything in their project stands and falls with this distinction, which is the necessary flip side to the aesthetics of genius: A true artist is born; so is a true dilettante— born not to be an artist. In many ways, the project comes down to the power to decide who possesses innate talent and who doesn’t (a point we will return to). Dilettantism is therefore not a phase prior to becoming a professional artist; rather, it is a permanent state of artistic being and producing. This is not to say that the development of the true artist doesn’t go astray; indeed, it often does. There are cases where genius cannot be reined in, where strenuous study is avoided, or where the epoch simply does not provide the proper circumstances for the genius’s unfolding.37 Therefore, the Meister or maestro replaces the genius in Goethe and Schiller’s hierarchy of artistic production: the Meister requires the gift of genius (as well as study, training, development), while genius alone does not make the Meister. Although geniuses can succumb to producing middling art, their natural talent allows for the possibility that exceptional, innovative works could be produced. For the dilettante, there is no such hope. The best the dilettante can aspire to is mediocrity, and this in art is never enough. If one isn’t born with a creative disposition, no amount of industriousness, education, or training will help. The crucial difference between the permanent amateur and the hindered artist is potential: for those born with “true artistic talent,” there is always possibility; for the dilettante there is none. In their notes for the project, Goethe and Schiller describe two types of dilettantism in the domain of lyric poetry and, thus, two modes of imitation: “Dilettantism can be of a double nature. Either it neglects the (indispensable) mechanical element and believes it has done enough when it displays spirit and feeling. Or it searches for poetry merely in the mechanical side, where it can achieve a technical [handwerkmäßig] proficiency but is without spirit and content.”38 Goethe and especially Schiller were, of course, students of Kant.39 The double form

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of dilettantish one-sidedness described here adheres to Kant’s two forms of imitation delineated in chapter 1: the imitation of originality and the imitation of mechanical rules. Dilettantes thus go astray in one of two directions: either they rely solely on “spirit and feeling” (e.g., Werther) or they mechanically follow the rules of production. What the dilettante creates is, by definition, one-sided, halfway, and mediocre. Goethe and Schiller, therefore, repeatedly bring together dilettantism and mediocrity in their project: the one word that describes the damages of dilettantish lyric poetry for the genre as a whole is “mediocrity,” and, as already discussed in the introduction to this study, the dilettante is encouraged in his half measures by German letters’ rather middling beginnings: “The fact that the German language began to be used as a poetic language not through the work of a poetic genius but merely through mediocre minds must encourage dilettantism to also try its hand at art.”40 As imitation, dilettantism finds both its determination and demise in the temporality of belatedness. “Dilettantism is derived,” write Goethe and Schiller, “the artist is born.”41 The dilettante comes to art through art, as an effect of its affective power. Taking art itself as inspiration, the art lover responds to art’s invitation and is moved both figuratively and literally—emotively moved and then compelled to produce in and out of such emotion. And herein lies the dilettante’s mistake. Personal passion or the desire to be an artist is not, for Goethe and Schiller, the force that lies behind artistic production. The true, genial artist is called by nature, the dilettante by art, by its pleasure and invitation. The dilettante mistakes the proper effect of art—the pleasure of being moved—for a gift of nature, and thus confuses what is common to all (aesthetic pleasure) with a special gift intended only for a few (artistic talent): Because the dilettante first receives his calling [Beruf ] to self-production from the effects of artworks on him, he mistakes these effects for objective causes and motivations and thinks that his new state of feeling [Empfindungszustand] can also be made productive and practical, as if one could produce a flower from a flower’s aroma. [. . .] Because he suffers [art’s] effect in a lively manner, the dilettante believes that on the basis of these felt effects he, too, can have an effect, can be effective.42

This psychological interpretation of the dilettante who is almost narcissistically entranced by his or her own feelings is indebted to Karl Phillip Moritz’s pathbreaking essay from 1788, “On the Formative

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Imitation of the Beautiful” (“Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen”), which is perhaps the first work to address the phenomenon of the dilettante (without using this word) and which both Schiller and Goethe knew intimately.43 In Moritz’s view, dilettantes mistake their receptive capacities (the ability to be moved) for productive ones (the ability to create). Due to this confusion, they don’t produce art but, in Schiller’s words, “a document of warm self-love.” Thus, the word that Moritz repeatedly uses to describe such misguided artistic attempts is self-serving [Eigennutz]. Dilettantes are not invested in art, but in themselves, their feelings, and their self-stylization as artists. They experience art—its power, its ability to move—and want to be artists; the true artist, however, sees the world and must become an artist, simply by virtue of a natural capacity for seeing.44 Therefore, while the artist is called by nature to produce a second nature, the dilettante is called by art to produce an imitation of art. Driven by affective energy, the dilettante, like Werther, is all enthusiasm and believes that such emotional commitment constitutes genial production. “The dilettante,” write Goethe and Schiller, “will never portray the object, but always only his feelings about the object.”45 From the perspective of Goethe’s and Schiller’s Classical aesthetics, art aspires to objectivity and universality. The true artist maintains distance, sobriety, and coldness even while passionate.46 In his text “Kallias oder über die Schönheit” (1793, “Kallias, or, On Beauty”), Schiller offers a succinct differentiation between the genius, the mediocre artist, and the bad artist that lines up perfectly with the thoughts from his later collaborative project with Goethe: “The great artist, one could say, shows us the object (his representation has pure objectivity); the mediocre artist shows himself (his representation has subjectivity); the bad artist shows his material (the representation is determined by the nature of the medium and the limitations of the artist).”47 For Schiller, the great artist preserves distance even in the midst of enthusiasm. Even when the artist sinks down into the depths of the object, he does so only in order to soberly represent the object itself. The mediocre artist, on the other hand, “shows himself”(i.e., his work consists in “self-production”) and thereby ignores the objectivity, the necessary distance of the artist from the object. Mediocre art documents the desire to be an artist, the entwinement of the bourgeoisie with the art world as a locus of identity. The dilettante, in sum, is invited by art to pleasure and participation and, in accepting this invitation, rightfully tries a hand at production.

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In so doing, the artistic amateur satisfies the imitation drive, which only heightens his or her pleasure. At this juncture, the profound paradox of dilettantism takes full shape: in doing everything right, by doing all that art asks—accepting the invitation, being pleased, heightening pleasure by producing—the dilettante gets it all wrong. Following the aporias of being “called” developed by Avital Ronell, one could say that art, as an invitation to participation, necessarily calls all, but not all are endowed by nature to be artists; the number is correct but one still cannot answer the call.48 Despite the passion, pleasure, and identification, the dilettante’s work will remain imitation. Art, then, has an almost sadistic relation to the passionate amateur: it stimulates a drive that has to be defused; it invites but never lets in; and it compels the amateur to do something he or she can never do. The paradox of dilettantism is that art, by inviting pleasure and participation, necessarily activates the dilettante’s drive to imitate, which art then has to contain or defuse. Art, in other words, must produce the demon it has to exorcize. Whereas Moritz as well as Schiller and Goethe (to a lesser extent) describe the dilettante as a narcissist who not only succumbs to artistic failure (a failure to know what art is) but also a certain moral failure (a failure to know oneself), Goethe seems to have not wholly shared this view. If amateurs are not simply passionate in their attachment to art but also narcissistic, they are not absorbed in art at all but in themselves. Consequently, their artistic attempts would be utterly mistaken from the get-go: dead ends, petrified images of self-love. Although it is difficult to separate authorship in this collective project, it appears that, on the whole, Goethe more than Schiller wants to emphasize the pedagogical purposiveness of the dilettante and, thus, rescue this figure as a central factor in the modern art world—and for good reason. The issue of the dilettante lay close to Goethe’s heart; one could say that he felt its prevalence in the core of his being.

“Much I have tried . . . and neither learned nor achieved anything” (Goethe) Throughout their notes for the dilettante project, Goethe and Schiller make the task of identifying dilettantism sound rather easy: either one has talent or not. End of story. The difficulty of separating the genius from the dilettante, the exceptional from the mediocre, can be found, however, in Goethe’s letter to Meyer from April 1, 1799, in which he

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discusses John Flaxmann’s engravings: “Through fortuitous chance I have seen all of Flaxmann’s copper engravings and now clearly understand how he can be the idol of dilettantes; his merits are utterly graspable, and one must possess more knowledge in order to gain an insight into his shortcomings and judge them.”49 The model for dilettantism is not hackneyed efforts at art that one can immediately identify as lacking; on the contrary, as the example of Flaxmann attests, dilettantes produce and are drawn to solid, technically advanced works, whose shortcomings only become visible after intense study—not only of the particular artwork but of art in general. Flaxmann clearly has achieved something “good,” but this does not mean it possesses the additional and necessary element of genius and mastery (at least in Goethe’s judgment). As Vaget emphasizes in the quotation cited at the beginning of this chapter, the dilettante is a middle figure between the genius and the laughing stock; his imitation, whether of rules or creativity, can and does display proficiency. It is solidly mediocre. Therefore, despite the excellent analysis found in Schulte-Sasse’s study on trivial literature, which includes a lengthy discussion of Goethe and Schiller’s dilettante project, dilettantism here is not to be understood primarily as kitsch or trivial literature, which, in the words of Schulte-Sasse, offer “a counter-realm to art, which is subject to its own lawfulness.”50 While the dilettante project can be read as also including a critique of these phenomena, its main critical thrust—differentiating the genius/Meister from those who could be confused with them—is directed not against the emergence of a parallel cultural track as a precursor to today’s entertainment industry, but against the difficulties of separating the true artists from “false” talent in the age of the marketplace. That their focus is high art is clear from the few authors’ names listed in the project itself. Under instances of dilettantism in contemporary Germany, Goethe and Schiller include “Geßner, poetic prose,” “Klopstockian Odes,” and “Wieland’s laxity.”51 If kitsch or trivial literature were the main focus, one would expect to find names other than Geßner, Wieland, and the adjectival use of Klopstock (which mostly likely refers to odes written under the spell of Klopstock). These now canonical names make it clear that amateurism has taken up residence in and staked a claim to high art itself. Indeed, as we will see, it haunts the work of great artists themselves. As Vaget underscores through Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft, there is another reason to bring dilettantism together with mediocrity in the “serious arts” and in serious attempts to be such an artist: Goethe’s

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own dilettantism. Goethe’s self-diagnosis and autocritique of his own amateurish artistic attempts is significant not only for biographical reasons, but more importantly because it is the one place in Goethe’s and Schiller’s writings where the amateur is allowed to speak for himself and thus, at least from Goethe’s perspective, to offer a model of what a good dilettante should be. If there is one thing Goethe was ambivalent about becoming—at least exclusively—it was what he became: a poet. His first love and greatest wish was to be a graphic artist and painter. During his journey to Italy (1787–89), Goethe retreated almost completely from writing and dedicated himself one last time to develop himself as a visual artist. Here, he studied with the landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert, who took Goethe under his wing and encouraged him with the rather ambivalent words that Goethe reports in his Italian Travels: “If only it were as easy as it seems. Hackert said to me: ‘You have disposition [Anlage], but you can’t make anything. Remain with me for eighteen months, and then you will produce something that will bring you and others joy.’” The goal Hackert sets for Goethe’s drawing— something he and others will enjoy—isn’t exactly the lexicon of genial art, a point the older Goethe doesn’t miss, for he continues this passage with a touch of self-effacement: “Isn’t that a text about which one should give an eternal sermon to all dilettantes? We shall soon see the fruit it bore for me.”52 The fruit such study bore was soon clear to Goethe; after studying with Hackert and filling numerous notebooks with sketches, Goethe returned to Weimar—with a firm conviction that his artistic fate lay exclusively in writing. The visual arts demanded renunciation. A quasi-autobiographical Venetian epigram from 1790 offers a rather sober résumé of Goethe’s artistic aspirations: Vieles hab’ ich versucht, gezeichnet, in Kupfer gestochen Öl gemalt, in Ton hab’ ich auch manches gedrückt, Unbeständig jedoch, und nichts gelernt noch geleistet; Nur ein einzig Talent bracht’ ich der Meisterschaft nah: Deutsch zu schreiben. Und so verderb’ ich unglücklicher Dichter In dem schlechtesten Stoff leider nun Leben und Kunst. Much I have tried: drawn, made copper engravings, Painted in oil, even pressed many things into clay, Inconstant, however, and neither learned nor achieved anything; Only one talent did I develop close to mastery: Writing in German. And so I, unhappy poet, ruin Unfortunately both life and art in the worst material.53

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It may be going too far to read this epigram as an unadulterated autobiographical insight, in which Goethe bears his heart—and, like Werther, almost weeps at how aspirations fall short of reality. But the general tenor of this epigram adheres to Goethe’s own self-estimation in all artistic media other than writing (a fate Goethe shares with Stifter, Keller, Nietzsche, and Adorno, to name just a few). The one word that Goethe doesn’t refrain from using to describe his attempts at painting and drawing (as well as his scientific endeavors) is dilettante. When it comes to this modern phenomenon of bourgeois existence, Goethe knows what he is talking about. He has lived it. As Vaget has argued in his seminal work on Goethe’s relation to dilettantism, the key text in Goethe’s documentation of his own artistic dilettantism is his “Selbstschilderung” (1797, “Self-Portrait”), in which he speaks of himself in the third person (as if to take distance from the results of his self-examination) and lays bare the consequences of his work in drawing and painting: “He worked so long in the visual arts until he appropriated a concept of both the objects and their treatment and thus reached the point where he could survey the objects and could recognize his own incapacity in the plastic arts: his participatory gaze thereby became purer.”54 With the hint of a wry smile, Goethe delineates his years of study and practice in the visual arts, only to arrive at the sobering insight into “his own incapacity” in these media. But Goethe underscores—and this is the crucial element—that his dedication to a failed endeavor and his recognition of his lack of talent did indeed bear some fruit, if not the one he was hoping for. Although he saw from his drawings that he would, in fact, never become a draughtsman or painter, Goethe also learned the skills to observe the visual arts with the eye of an artist even when he lacks the hands for their execution. Goethe, in a word, sees himself as a model for dilettantism—and, more importantly, for overcoming it.

The Problem of Popularity As Goethe’s description and critique of Flaxmann attests, the dilettante can be an influential producer, who in turn fosters amateurish taste among the public. One of the central issues of dilettantism is, then, the issue of popular art. Can art in the age of the marketplace be popular and not succumb to mediocrity? When one has to explicitly distinguish between “true” and “false” artists, can one be successful as a “genuine” artist among a public tending toward dilettantish taste? Both Goethe

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and Schiller engaged the problem of popularity in art before their collective project on dilettantism from 1799. Schiller’s most developed critique of this phenomenon is his anonymous (and scathing) 1792 review of Gottfried August Bürger’s Gedichte (1789, Poems), in which he castigates this not insignificant poet for propagating the necessity of popular art at the expense of striving for the ideal.55 Goethe’s essay on “Literary Sansculottism” (1795) addresses the issue of popularity from another perspective: the task of the public in creating a culture for genius to thrive. In criticizing one of the most successful contemporary poets, Schiller responds at once to Bürger’s poetry and their underlying poetics. Bürger defines “folk poetry” as identical to popular poetry, that is, poetry for the people [Volkspoesie], whose finest examples are Homer and Shakespeare. Bürger is explicit that popular or folk poetry is not poetry by the people, but produced by the educated (Gelehrten, not genius) for the people. Its proper receptive circle consists in “the marketplace of life,”56 the sphere of life in which the majority live and abide. Using Homer and Shakespeare as his models, Bürger appeals to popularity as the sole criterion for “timeless” art; the purpose of literature is to please and move people, and anything short of this is to miscalculate its mission. Therefore, Bürger proposes a democratic model of taste in “Von der Popularität der Poesie” (1784, “On the Popularity of Poetry”): “Taste is a thousand-voiced moral person. The most votes decide.”57 While this notion of taste as simply tallying opinion may seem foreign to the dictates of aesthetic judgment (even Cicero repudiates it in Brutus), Bürger expresses here an Enlightenment position first articulated by the French author Dubos in his 1719 study Critical Observations on Poetry and Painting: “Since poetry and painting have the intention of moving and pleasing, everyone who is not dumb or insensitive must be able to feel the effects of good verse and portraiture. Consequently, everyone must also have the right to give his vote in answer to the question whether paintings and poems fulfill their proper effects.”58 This notion of majority opinion as the measuring rod for art expresses a great optimism in the public—a truly democratic notion of taste—while also perhaps failing to question the foundations of this taste, much less to differentiate between common sense and aesthetic sense. But both Dubos and Bürger insist that if art is to fulfill its mission, it must have an effect on people, and therefore the more people it pleases, the better the poetry, a thought not inimical to the young Lessing.

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While Bürger, as is typical for the time, excludes the plebian [Pöbel]—“By people I do not understand plebian”59—he nevertheless insists that poets only display proper taste when their work meets the test of main street, that is, of those who are interested in art and are its regular readers: “But for the poet it is an incapacity or a lack of judgment if he can’t hold his own on main street [Heerstraße].”60 This line says it all for Bürger: aesthetic judgment lies foremost in the artist’s ability to gauge what pleases the majority (i.e., main street) and to attune his or her work to this sounding board. Therefore, true popularity “harmonizes best with the representational and emotional capacities of the people as a whole.”61 Bürger never questions the taste of the “people as a whole.” Rather, they, as the majority, are simply posited as the measuring rod, to which poets have to adjust their work. The people’s prevailing taste is not to be challenged but satisfied. Popularity is therefore not a problem for Bürger but the conditio sine qua non of poetry. In the introduction to Gedichte (1798, Poems), Bürger writes his famous and for Schiller fatal line: “The popularity of a poetic work is the seal of its perfection. Whoever denies this principle both in theory and practice falsely guides the entire business of poetry and works against its true final purpose.”62 Schiller’s anonymous review of Bürger performs a deconstruction of the notion of popularity and what would constitute a “people.” Schiller declares the age of Homer to be over; one cannot speak of popularity in ancient Greece and contemporary Germany in the same sense, because the conditions of modernity have radically changed: “Our world is no longer the world of Homer, in which all members of society assumed approximately the same level of feeling and opining and, thus, could recognize themselves in the same portrayals and encounter one another in the same feelings. A great distance has now become visible between the select and the masses of a nation.”63 As Woodmansee has argued, Schiller provides here in 1792 a first glimpse and a “prospectus” of the arguments he will make in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humanity (1795) and On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry (1796), in which modernity is defined by fragmentation, compartmentalization, and specialization.64 After the sundering of the “naïve” Greek world, society is not only alienated from nature but also from itself. One can no longer speak of popularity, since such a term would require a unified, coherent people. Rather, Schiller asks: Popular for whom? Success with which segment of society?65 The modern world

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for Schiller is not only composed of heterogeneous groups but also corresponding heterogeneous degrees of feeling and thinking. Without a single, cohesive population, there emerges a marked gap between the “select” (educated, with refined taste) and the “masses” (generally uneducated, with little taste; or educated, with poor taste). For Schiller, Bürger’s mistake is to ignore this fundamental divide in the modern world and therefore “to capriciously throw together into one concept what for a long time is no longer a unity.”66 In other words, without a unified society, the notion of popularity tends to engage just one half of the people, a form of one-sidedness that is endemic for the times. If there is not a single people to appeal to, a poet who aims for popularity as the seal of perfection is faced with a fundamental choice: to choose between the easiest and the most difficult. The easiest is to please and curry favor with the masses at the expense of the educated people; the hardest—and this would be the only form of true popularity acceptable to Schiller—is “to overcome the monstrous distance between the two through the greatness of one’s art and thus to attempt to pursue both goals at once.”67 Schiller interestingly leaves out the “select” as a possibility for popular poetry; the “select,” it seems, are so small in number that they cannot constitute a critical mass. The choice, therefore, is between appeasing the majority or somehow bringing together both halves into a whole, into a truly unified population. In Schiller’s critique, Bürger’s notion of popular poetry takes the easy path—satisfying the one half, the masses—and thereby refuses to assume the challenge of first creating a unified people through art. Genuine popularity is predicated on overcoming the fragmentation that defines modern society. The poet should not simply please the ruling taste, but create a new public with a new, refined sense of taste. In Schiller’s estimation, Bürger’s mistake is that he “too often mixes himself with the people, to which he should only lower himself, and instead of jokingly and playfully pulling the people up, he is often pleased to make himself their equal.”68 Poets can and indeed must lower themselves down to the majority, but they are not allowed to abide there, get mixed up with the crowd, and thus declare their equality, for this would constitute absolutely “common goals”69 in the pejorative sense of vulgar popularity; rather, for Schiller, poets must lower themselves in order to raise the taste of the masses, the majority. Schiller therefore places the onus on the poet to produce a popular poetry that first founds a single, coherent people. The primary goal of

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poetry lies not in popularity, but in “idealization, refinement, without which the poet ceases to earn his name as poet.”70 In language remarkably akin to Lessing’s, Schiller defines such idealization as the stripping away of all traces of individuality so that particularity can be elevated to universality. The truly popular poet (in Schiller’s positive sense) should present “what in the human is solely human, to call forth, as it were, the lost state of nature.”71 All poetry must idealize, that is, express what is accessible to all people, “what all people irrespective of differences must feel.”72 Schiller, in other words, answers Bürger’s “false” notion of popularity (i.e., appeasing the prevailing taste of main street) with an insistence on “universal” humanity similar to that proposed by Lessing with his “completely common Cleopatra.” In other words, while Bürger aims for popularity gauged by the spirit and taste of the times, Schiller stakes a claim to “true”—because universal—popularity attuned to the human as such, the human defined as an emotive being. One can argue, however, that Schiller replaces one form of superficial popularity for another, subtler one: Bürger’s harmonizing of poetry with the chorus of main street becomes art’s evocation of a supposedly latent or lost universality that only needs to be activated. This measuring of art’s success through its ability to produce or call forth certain affective responses (“what all people . . . must feel”) not only repeats the problems (both aesthetic and political) that plague bourgeois tragedy but also makes clear that such a notion of universal humanity only holds at the expense of effacing all cultural, historical, and social-economic differences. In appealing to a putatively deeper sense of humanity and popularity (i.e., to all of humanity as one people, as one population), Schiller’s ideal poetry would elide the differences that first make a recognition of the other and thus “humanity” possible.73 In his 1795 essay “Literary Sansculottism,” Goethe assumes a different tactic. He addresses the issue of popularity by appealing neither to prevailing taste (Bürger) nor to a “deeper” notion of humanity (Schiller), but to a coordinated movement between artists and audience that ultimately requires both a different artist and a different audience—and thus a historical process of dual development. Goethe begins the essay by taking issue with an anonymous author who laments “the poverty of the Germans in excellent, classical prose works.”74 For Goethe, art indeed demands excellence and genius, but genius in turn requires a cultivated environment both to develop its artistic skills and to receive adequate motivation and appreciation. The necessary conditions for a classical author and a classical work, according to

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Goethe, include the artist finding “his nation at a high level of culture so that his own cultivation is easy.”75 Therefore, one cannot assume that there is something latent or lost and that only needs to be called forth; rather, one must work with what is at hand, if only in rudimentary form. If the public isn’t cultivated, one cannot expect the artist to produce something beyond the general conditions provided by society. Goethe argues that even the genius, as a figure of exception, is dependent upon the average level of cultivation. Like Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, Goethe insists that all people, including the genial artist, do not create the conditions into which they are born and, therefore, are subject to the spirit of the times: “Everyone, even the greatest genius, suffers from his century in some areas just as he or she draws advantages from others, and one can only demand an excellent national writer from the nation.”76 If the rising tide lifts all boats, from the yacht to the dinghy, the same applies to the genius: only when the level of cultivation of the “dinghies” has been raised will genius reach its full potential. Therefore, the onus of artistic excellence lies not only on the poet to produce a golden age;77 on the contrary, the burden lies equally if not more emphatically on the nation itself. One cannot complain about a lack of great literature and simply demand “Write better!” or “Appeal to what all people must feel!”; the entire art system—education, critical discourse, financial support, and developed judgment—must first be in place or at least under way before classical literature will emerge. In Goethe’s dialectic of the exceptional and the ordinary, the genius is structurally dependent on his or her environment; if the nation as a whole isn’t cultivated, a genius will either fail or not achieve his or her potential. Great art arises through the coordinated movement of artist and nonartist, the exception and the norm toward the same goal. If the goal is to produce “excellent, classical prose works,” then such a program presupposes an aesthetic education that goes beyond the artist and incorporates society as a whole. Considering the great demands that form the bare necessity of “classical” literature, Goethe not only doesn’t wonder that Germany has yet to experience a golden age but also claims that one “can admire with reverence what the Germans have achieved.”78 Although there is no German nation, no center of social and cultural (much less political) life, and although the aspiring artist is “constantly led astray by the public, which has no taste and devours with the same pleasure the bad right after the good,”79 great progress has been made in Germany since 1750 according to Goethe:

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“Young men of talent are now fortunate insofar as they are educated at an earlier age and can thus more quickly achieve a pure style that is adequate to the object.”80 The rise of the middle class, the advances in education, the development of a literary sphere—all the things that account for the advance of dilettantism also enable German letters to have a future. And this is possible through what Goethe calls “a type of invisible school,”81 namely, the progress already made by previous artists. It is not hard to find, according to Goethe, “a good novel” or “a successful story”82—not necessarily beautiful nor perfect, but on the way. German literature, in Goethe’s rather optimistic assessment, cannot be deterred: “The half-critic, the one who wants to light the way for us with his little lamp, comes much too late; the day has dawned, and we will not close up shop again.”83 By evoking the “half-critic,” Goethe lays the brunt of the blame for Germany’s lack of great literature on the critic’s inability to recognize the full extent of the reading public’s role in shaping art. Half critics only concern themselves with half the situation of the modern art world—the writers, to which Goethe of course accounts himself—and leave out the equally fundamental half of the art world: the public and their criteria of taste. Such onesidedness constitutes one of the chief criteria of dilettantism, now viewed from the perspective of reception and criticism. Half critics display an “uneducated insolence”84 in demanding excellent, classical prose works without accounting for the full machinery of the modern art system, in which sales, taste, and critics alike play a decisive role. By placing the onus for excellence only on the writers, the amateurish half critic ignores the interdependence between the Meister and society as a whole. Goethe again emphasizes this dual dependence between the true artist and the public in his introduction to the Propyläen, the organ in which the dilettante project was to appear: In the arts and sciences, however, a limited circle of close friends is not enough; rather, a relationship to the public at large is as beneficial as it is necessary. [. . .] The wish for acclaim that a writer feels is a drive [Trieb] that nature has implanted in him in order to lure him [anlocken] toward something loftier. The writer thinks he has already earned his laurels, but soon realizes that a more arduous training of his innate capacity is necessary in order to retain the public’s favor [die öffentliche Gunst] that, indeed, can also be captured temporarily through chance.85

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Goethe’s Classicist notion of the artist is no longer the solitary Prometheus of the Storm and Stress period, who creates in defiance of gods and man alike; rather, the artist’s appeal to the audience is both a need and a drive. The effect of art—pleasure and participation—cannot be limited to an intimate sphere, to friends or the court. Modern art needs the “public at large” [das Publikum]. Not only does the public place demands on the artist, but the artist is dependent on the public in a twofold manner: First, Goethe posits a second drive alongside the universal, human drive to imitate: the author’s drive for acclaim. And, second, this drive to please and be appreciated by the “public” is precisely what spurs the artist on to create more and better work. In its ideal constellation, when both the genius artist and the public are coordinated and equally cultivated, it is the public that will be the artist’s muse, the alluring and motivating voice toward ever greater production. Due to this relation of dependence, the artist’s striving for the highest is derived from the wish to wear the laurels that only society can bestow. The flip side to this symbiosis between artist and audience, however, is that every artist is and has to be susceptible to the desire for popularity—irrespective of the public’s sense of taste. Therefore, the artist’s drive for acclaim is complicit in the ascent of dilettantism and its ability to infiltrate every aspect of the art world: “The public naturally has a great influence on art by demanding a work that pleases it for its applause, for its money. The public demands an artwork that is to be immediately enjoyed, and most of the time the artist will acquiesce [sich bequemen].”86 It is important to note that Goethe doesn’t criticize the modern art world and particularly the art market; there is neither an attempt to reidealize the artist nor to change the constellation. The public “naturally” influences artistic production, and one form of its influence is granting or withholding financial success. The reason the artist plays along with the demands of the public is not only to satisfy the drive for approval, but also—as Goethe explains—because the artist is part of the public sphere, is a child of the age, and therefore experiences the same needs as the public. Goethe thus concludes: “And so the artist moves along happily with the crowd that bears him and that he animates.”87 The innate drive structure of the artist plays into the audience’s hands. The artist is driven to receive applause and fame—in order to spur him or her on—and the audience, in exchange for its applause and money, wants a work that “immediately” pleases it. With this emphasis on the temporality of such

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satisfaction, Goethe underscores one of the biggest problems for art in the age of the marketplace. The satisfaction of the artist’s drive for success, which should spur him or her on to greatness, potentially leads to success measured merely in financial reward or name recognition. The question, then, is how to please and to please immediately— as opposed to merely producing for posterity—and not fall prey to mediocrity?

Art School for Nonartists In his essay “David Strauss, Bekenner und Schriftsteller” (1873, “David Strauss, Confessor and Writer”), Nietzsche sees no way out of the trap of popularity. Almost seventy-five years after Goethe and Schiller’s project, dilettantish taste reigns supreme—as the bedrock of high culture. The standard-bearer of this universal mediocrity is the “cultivated philistine,” the educated, cultured bourgeois who considers himself “a son of the muses,”88 visits operas and museums, and reads Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. What Goethe and Schiller feared in Bildungsbürgertum has, for Nietzsche, been fully realized: “The Straussian philistine dwells in the works of our great poets and composers like a worm that lives by destroying, admires by consuming, and worships by digesting.”89 Like the dilettante, the cultivated philistine is not drawn to inferior or trivial culture, but to high art; unlike Goethe and Schiller’s dilettante, Nietzsche’s cultivated philistine only refers to artistic reception. For Nietzsche, what cultivated philistines do not realize is that now canonical geniuses created not for but despite them: “They created despite you; against you they turned their attacks, and thanks to you they died too early, broken and benumbed in incomplete daily labor. And you should now be allowed to praise such men!”90 Nietzsche defines art in this essay as an eternal and painful searching and not, as the cultivated philistine believes, a finding—as if the work were done, the canon complete, the striving over, and “great art” can now simply be appreciated. The cultivated philistine holds onto past works of art and, via this stalled taste, functions as the enemy of innovation. Nietzsche, on the contrary, defines art as a pushing of limits, a challenging that never comes to rest, never allows a settled canon—or rather, the only allowable tradition is the ongoing tradition of always challenging the tradition anew. He therefore asks how it is possible— given the unlimited experimentation in language now open to all au-

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thors—that a contemporary author can have universal appeal. And the answer is simple: one appeals to all by offending none. Therefore, Nietzsche’s maxim for artistic production is: “Everything truly productive is offensive.”91 Like Schiller in his letter to Goethe, war is the only engagement that one cannot regret. The consequence Nietzsche draws is that only by not achieving popularity, by not gaining the laurels, by not even wanting them, can one hope to achieve great art. Nietzsche’s paradox for modern letters is then: The only way to be successful as an author is not to be successful with the contemporary audience. Any artwork that pleases the majority cannot be good, because it is not offensive and doesn’t cause the discomfort that leads to further seeking. For Nietzsche, only the public’s disapproval can be the artist’s muse. If Nietzsche prescribes that art must defy the majority and be exclusive for the sake of great art, then Rousseau pursues a different tact in the Second Discourse. He attacks those who encourage the average man to enter the “Temple of the Muses,” when in fact he has nothing to find there: What are we to think of that crowd of Popularizers who have removed the difficulties which protected the approaches to the Temple of the Muses and which nature had placed there as a trial of the strength of those who might be tempted to know? What are we to think of those Anthologizers of works which have indiscreetly broken down the gates of the Sciences and introduced into their Sanctuary a populace unworthy of coming near it; whereas what would have been desirable is to have had all those who could not go far in a career in letters deterred from the outset, and become involved in Arts useful to society? Someone who his whole life long will remain a bad versifier or an inferior Geometer, might perhaps have become a great clothier.92

Rousseau turns the tables and mourns not the artist or scholar who could have been, but the tailor who missed his calling precisely because he aspired to be an artist or scholar. The potentially great clothier runs aground by heeding the alluring seduction of the “popularizers” who, by rendering art and science accessible, made him believe that he, too, could be an artist or a scientist. By enticing so-called “unworthy” people, such popularizers do not explicitly damage or water down creativity and knowledge (though this is certainly implied); rather, they go astray by giving false hope to the hopeless. By not deterring those who have no talent (and Rousseau is clearly employing the lexicon of “genius,” even for the natural sciences), popularizers imply that the arts and sciences are open to all. And the result is not

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only bad poetry but also the failed life of one who could have been a great tailor. The way out is renunciation before one ever starts: “As for ourselves, common men, to whom Heaven has not vouchsafed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity.”93 For Rousseau, one must possess an admirable sobriety about his or her talents (or, rather, lack thereof) and refuse to aspire to anything higher than one is destined. The best solution for all—artists, would-be clothiers, and society as a whole—would be if those who are supposedly “unworthy” never tried at all. Schiller, in calling dilettantish art a “document of warm self-love,” tends more strongly than Goethe toward this Rousseauian position. If dilettantism is a mistake from the get-go, it may be better never to try. As Vaget persuasively argues, Goethe seems on the whole to want to rescue a pedagogical purpose for dilettantism, as his own failed artistic attempts in the visual arts and his “Self-Portrait” attest.94 Therefore, although it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate what thoughts belong to whom in their collective project, it appears that Goethe pushed more for a position running counter to those represented by Rousseau and Nietzsche. The point is neither to offend the public and thereby to measure artistic success by popular failure (Nietzsche) nor to lament the wasted energy of the dilettantes (Rousseau), but to educate them so that offensiveness isn’t necessary and genuine popularity can indeed become the seal of perfection. It is precisely the amateur’s passionate engagement and identification with the world art that—while remaining a threat—offers a previously unheard-of possibility: true aesthetic education. The logic is similar to Hölderlin’s famous lines from Patmos: “But where danger is, grows/Also that which redeems.” Dilettantism poses the threat of popularism and mediocre art and offers the way out. The solution to the damage of dilettantism are the dilettantes themselves: to channel their investment in art into the most rigorous schooling, a form of “discipline” and “clipping of the wings” that Kant reserves for the genius: The general principle, under which dilettantism is to be allowed, is when the dilettante wants to subject himself to the strictest rules of the first steps and accomplish all stages with the greatest exactness, which he can do all the more because 1) the goal is not demanded from him, and 2) because if he wants to stop, he will have paved the most secure way to connoisseurship. Precisely against the general maxims, the dilettante will thus be subjected to a more rigorous judgment than the artist himself, who—because he rests upon a more se-

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cure artistic basis—can distance himself from the rules and thereby expand the realm of art itself.95

This notion of an art school for nonartists is found in a paragraph in Goethe’s handwriting and most likely expresses more his pedagogical concerns than Schiller’s polemical ones. Dilettantism is “allowed” under one, severe condition: the dilettante must be schooled. One needs, then, not only an art school for the truly talented but also an art school for those bereft of talent, a military-like academy that subjects them to the most rigorous, rule-bound training in the arts, progressing with an exacting measure, step-by-step, to the ultimate goal: the dilettante realizing that the goal—being an artist—will never be expected. It is a school in which failure is success; or, rather, success lies in recognizing one’s failure. Dilettantes, in other words, must learn that, regardless of what they produce, it will never be art and thus that their natural capacity is to have no artistic capacity. And in this respect Goethe’s letter to Schiller is correct. The dilettante is incorrigible; nothing can supplement this original lack of talent. In the ideal case dilettantes will surrender all artistic ambitions and thus be poised to achieve their true calling: to be connoisseurs, Kenner—those who know art inside and out. The goal and delicate balance of this special art school is to disabuse the amateur of all artistic aspirations while not crushing all interest in art. The school of the dilettantes is premised on the conviction that the lifelong amateur can only serve art by knowing its intricacies and techniques and then using this knowledge not to produce but to judge art works. And this, too, has its enjoyments (albeit, perhaps, a bit more muted): “To distinguish between a restoration and the original piece, the copy from the original, and to see the destroyed grandeur in the smallest of fragments becomes the pleasure of the complete connoisseur.”96 The art school for nonartists is, then, a hands-on school for learning aesthetic judgment, in which amateur artistic practice ends in renunciation, a refined sense of taste, and a knowledge of art history. In the end, by training dilettantes in the rigors of artistic production and ultimately turning them into connoisseurs, one will have, in Goethe’s vision, an educated, discerning public as outlined in “Literary Sansculottism”—the condition of possibility for an aesthetic state, in which bourgeois life is productively entwined with art and the artist escapes the fate of belated genius. Moreover, since genius is rare, and since it is even rarer still that the genius develop into a Meister, a

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society of enlightened dilettantes serves an equally crucial—if only implicit—function: the maintenance of tradition when there is no Meister expanding the rules and realm of art. It is precisely in Hölderlin’s “times of need,” times when the Meister doesn’t appear, that one needs the dilettante qua connoisseur to conserve what has already been established. The advanced dilettante with refined taste is the ideal audience and muse for great art as well as a force of preservation when no new Meister arrives. This model of education in and through dilettantism is not unique to Goethe. Nietzsche himself locates the particular excellence of Greek and Roman orators not simply in rare talent but in the saturation of an entire culture in the skills of oratory, in which the excellence of the few rests upon the accomplishments of the dilettantes. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “The Ancients were on the whole dilettantes in oratory, consequently connoisseurs, consequently critics. They thereby compelled their orators to the extreme; in the same way in the last [eighteenth] century, when all Italians, male and female, knew how to sing, the virtuosity in song (and thereby the art of melody) reached its high point.”97 Nietzsche’s analysis of the excellence of classical oratory or Italian song comes straight from Goethe’s art school for nonartists, for only when a whole society is saturated in dilettantism and then proceeds step-by-step to connoisseurship and criticism can a pinnacle of expression be reached. It is the advanced dilettante (who has assumed the status of connoisseur and critic) that drives the genius to strive for the extreme, which is the effect of a coherent, balanced movement of society as a whole.

The Art of Renunciation Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) bears the entire imprimatur of the work on dilettantism that followed a few years later. In fact, one can read the project as the theoretical accompaniment to the novel as well as the explication of its stakes. Dilettantism begins with the mixture of bourgeois society and art, in which the bourgeoisie’s commitment to the art world functions as part of its education, identity, and justification. This amateurish enthusiasm for art properly leads one to try one’s own hand. Ultimately and ideally this passion for art is disciplined, with the result that one learns that one has no talent and renounces artistic practice. In short: the very story of Wilhelm Meister.98

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In light of Hegel’s analysis of ever-ascendant prosaic reality, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship provides both an exemplum and a dilemma. Goethe’s “unique contribution” to modern art, writes Franco Moretti on Wilhelm Meister, lies “in having ‘activated’—made narratively interesting—the bland rhythm of everyday reality.”99 For Moretti, Goethe’s novel is the first to tarry in the face of the world of prose and wrestle poetry from it, without, however, losing quotidian life’s “bland rhythm.” In other words, Wilhelm Meister fulfills art’s double demand: to engage the common and still not fall prey to it. Novalis agrees but is much more ambivalent about what such success ultimately means. Using the lexicon that Hegel makes his own, Novalis notes: “Goethe has, without a doubt, taken on a resistant subject matter,” and the name of this subject matter as well as Goethe’s achievement is clear enough: “to reach a poetic effect with prosaic, trite [wohlfeil] subject matter.”100 One senses here something approaching a mixture of awe in and repugnance at Goethe’s talent to perform the artistic trick of turning water into wine, prose into poetry. Goethe’s novel, writes Novalis, “concerns merely ordinary, human things. [. . .] It is a poeticized bourgeois and domestic story. [. . .] Artistic atheism is the spirit of the book.” Artistic atheism is the key term here, since Goethe uses the finest art to delineate the path of an aspiring “artist” who must renounce art, since he has no talent. The unadorned ordinary fate of Wilhelm, in which artistic desires are surrendered for what amounts to a business career, stands in marked opposition to Novalis’s own Bildungsroman Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800, published posthumously 1802), in which the aspiring young poet achieves his dreams. The first half of Novalis’s novel is aptly called “Expectation,” the second half “Fulfillment.” Therefore, despite the praise Novalis gives to Goethe’s “melody of style” and the “magic of his presentation,” Goethe’s poetic affirmation of prosaic reality amounts to art’s autocapitulation: Against Wilhelm Meister. At its base, it is a fatal and silly book—so pretentious and precious—unpoetic in the highest degree with respect to its spirit, even while so poetic in its presentation. It is a satire on poetry, religion, etc. [. . .] At the end, one fully feels the joy that it is finally over. [. . .] Whoever takes this story to heart will never read a novel again.

Novalis’s argument here is decisive for the question of art’s ability to successfully transfigure the mediocre prose of the world and offer exemplary forms of ordinariness: Novalis does not deny Wilhelm Meister’s poetic presentation, but this artistic form contradicts so strongly

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the prosaic spirit that Novalis labels the novel an unconscious “satire on poetry.” For Novalis, this is the paradox and ultimate demise of all attempts to transfigure prosaic reality yet leave its validity untouched: even when one succeeds, as Goethe does, such an “art” mocks its own power, because it affirms what art is supposed to strip away. For Novalis, art cannot be attuned to bourgeois life or, rather, cannot affirm it and still be art.101 Such a work is not merely “fatal” but—anticipating Nietzsche’s critique of Euripides—the very end of art. Either one rejects Wilhelm Meister and “feels the joy that it is finally over,” or one embraces its prosaic message and “never reads a novel again.” It would be a mistake, however, to read Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as a complete capitulation; much more is at stake, stakes that, on the one hand, are in line with Novalis’s concerns and, on the other, call into question Goethe’s “softer,” more pedagogical approach toward dilettantism. In Wilhelm Meister, Goethe attempts to rescue the exceptional, artistic Meister in the face of the ascending “bourgeois relations.” For Goethe, the greatest tendency of the times—at least in art—is for the world of “artists” to be overrun by prosaic tendencies. With the emancipation of the artist from the court, the “professionalization” of the artist as a career choice, and the resulting dependence of the artist on the marketplace—all this leads to the nongenial “artist” mistaking his prosaic abilities for poetic ones. Goethe himself writes about Wilhelm Meister: The beginnings of Wilhelm Meister had rested for a long time. They arose out of a dark presentiment of the great truth—that a person often wants to attempt something for which nature has denied him the proper talent, wants to undertake and execute something that cannot become a skill for him. [. . .] To this everything can be counted what one has called false tendency, dilettantism, etc.102

At the heart of Wilhelm Meister lies a “great truth”: there is often a disjunction between artistic aspiration and artistic talent. One wants to produce poetry but only has prose in the bones. Therefore, one’s greatest desire reveals itself to be a “false tendency”—false, because this tendency is not grounded in natural capacities. One must realize that one is ordinary, with ordinary talents, and in the case of art this means having no talent. Thus, the model of Bildung, especially in the age of prose, consists not only in integrating oneself into society and its “bourgeois relations” but first having the sober recognition that one does not belong to the exceptional. Integration into prosaic society is preconditioned by a primary renunciation of false poetic tendencies.

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The irony of Wilhelm Meister—but this is the very point—is that Wilhelm is not a Meister, not an artistic maestro. According to Karl Viëtor, Goethe initially named his protagonist not Wilhelm Meister but “Wilhelm Student” [“Wilhelm Schüler”] and was himself not sure where the family name Meister came from.103 The more proper name may have been Wilhelm Dilettante. Wilhelm is a Meister in only one sense: he masters his own dilettantism. In so doing, Wilhelm performs (at least for Goethe) a semiartistic feat: the true art of the nonartist is to recognize that one is prosaic, and such recognition is the greatest service one can offer poetry in the age of prose. This is clear from the novel itself. Wilhelm’s path to the theater begins on a low note; after the debacle with the actress Marianne, Wilhelm devotes himself to poetry and acting, both, however, being initially marked by “a spiritless imitation of some conventional forms without inner value.”104 Eventually, Wilhelm trains his acting skills to the point “that he saw himself imperceptibly developed into a complete actor.”105 This moment is crucial, since at this juncture Wilhelm seems to be on the way to becoming a Meister, a true artist unfolding before the reader’s eyes—or it could be dilettantish self-delusion. The reader, who does not witness his stage performances, cannot know. Wilhelm’s faith in his artistic talent is, however, slowly dismantled by the literal haunting (in the form of the ghost of Hamlet’s father) perpetrated by the Tower Society, whose sole mission, it seems, is to drive Wilhelm from the stage and disabuse the apprentice of his supposed artistic ability. Jarno doesn’t mince his words when he flatly tells Wilhelm: “In general I think you should renounce the theater entirely, for which you don’t have the least bit of talent.”106 In Goethe’s lexicon of genius, this line is a deathblow to a young “artist.” Wilhelm, however, responds as a good apprentice should: “If you convince me of this, you will do me a service, even if it is a melancholic service, when one is awoken from a beloved dream.”107 Such is the response of exemplary mediocrity: distraught but grateful. Wilhelm’s “certificate of apprenticeship” [Lehrbrief ] can be read, then, as a certificate of surmounted dilettantism. That is, his apprenticeship only ends when he surrenders his dilettantism. The Abbé begins the pomp and circumstance by declaring: “Here is your certificate of apprenticeship, take it to heart; it holds the most important content.”108 And the gnomic first line says it all about Wilhelm: “Art is long, life is short.”109 For those who can only imitate, no amount of finite time, of “life,” can compensate for the original lack of genius. Art

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adheres to a “long,” perhaps infinite measure, and for Wilhelm, the untalented one, life is too short for art’s criteria. Therefore, when the Abbé breaks off Wilhelm’s reading of the Lehrbrief and declares “Your apprentice years are over; nature has absolved you!” this absolution is the rather perverse absolution from all natural talent. Thus does nature “absolve” the dilettante: Wilhelm need not worry about becoming an actor, for nature has made sure he never will. In this respect, Goethe can be seen as participating in a project not entirely at odds with Novalis: he wants to preserve the ability to aesthetically idealize the world by ensuring that only those with true genial talent pursue art to the end; the rest, the dilettantes, the Wilhelm Meisters of the world, should renounce their aspirations. At this juncture, the second element of Goethe’s supposedly more empathetic and pedagogic view of the dilettante comes into fuller relief: even from an educative perspective, the issue of dilettantism is still fundamentally about dictating and determining genius. Essential to an understanding of the novel and Goethe’s pedagogical view of dilettantism in general is that the judgment of the connoisseur (here Jarno, the Abbé, and the Tower Society) should possess an authoritative quality. In other words, the novel circumscribes who has the power to decide which people have natural talent. The art school for nonartists delineated above relies on the premise that some have genius but most do not, and upon this judgment, the majority are subjected to the “strictest rules,” while the select few are given the freedom and training to “expand the realm of art.” More importantly, the ideal student heeds and is willing to be formed by the dictates of the determining judge, as Schiller underscores in his letter to Goethe from November 28, 1796: Wilhelm Meister is indeed the most necessary but not the most important person; precisely this fact belongs to the peculiarities of your novel: that it neither has nor needs a most important person. Everything occurs to him and around him but not actually because of him. Precisely because the things around him represent and express the energies while he only represents and expresses pliancy [Bildsamkeit], he must have an entirely different relation to the other characters as the hero in other novels has.110

As Moretti underscores in reading this passage, the crucial word here is pliancy. Wilhelm is the novel’s hero because he is no hero; nothing happens “because of him.” He is passive, willing, and eager to be formed by the Tower Society, including its judgment about his artistic abilities. For Moretti, Wilhelm is a necessary—but not the most important—per-

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son because “the classical Bildungsroman seeks to put forward as exemplary the trajectory of a hero who [. . .] leaves to others the task of shaping his life.”111 The importance of Wilhelm lies in his lack of importance, his willingness not to try to determine his own fate, but rather to allow others to shape it for him. In Goethe’s desire to have the connoisseur’s judgment be determinate, Bildung does not consist in self-cultivation but in (freely) allowing others to mold oneself—in willfully renouncing one’s will. Everything in the dilettantism project and Wilhelm Meister rests upon the unquestioned premise of natural genius. As in Kant, a select few have it, but the vast majority do not. But whereas Kant describes this distinction as a mere demand, a claim to universal agreement expressed in aesthetic judgment, Goethe and Schiller—without explicitly saying so—proceed as if one could ascertain this difference with certainty or, at least, as if such judgment possesses an authority one must heed. In the case of Wilhelm Meister, the judgment of a connoisseur—as Jarno is stylized—should carry such overwhelming persuasive force that one would truly be an incorrigible dilettante not to heed his word. Goethe, in other words, clearly wants to dictate what constitutes true talent and thereby to establish a clean separation between the genius and the rest. The fragility of aesthetic judgment, however, is already hinted at in the dilettante project when the two authors declare without further explanation that even the Meister can “follow false taste.” The one consequence that Goethe and Schiller draw from this is that “the dilettante believes all the quicker to be at the level of art.”112 That the status of the Meister—as putatively developed, perfected genius—must also necessarily be called into question is not mentioned, nor that the Meister (or connoisseur) can thereby hinder true genial talent by mistakenly dubbing it dilettantish or promoting a dilettante as the next genius. As in the case of embracing his own dilettantism, here, too, Goethe should know better. No author in the German tradition has been more assailed for his poor taste than Goethe himself. Heinrich Heine is one of the first to criticize Goethe’s inability to recognize genius and instead to support lesser talents: “That was repulsive,” writes Heine, “Goethe was afraid of every independent, original writer and thus praised and rewarded every insignificant small spirit. Indeed, he went so far that, in the end, to be praised by Goethe counted as a certificate of mediocrity.”113 If Goethe’s praise, his putatively discerning aesthetic judgment, amounted to a “certificate of mediocrity,” then this

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one paradigmatic example shows how the entire edifice of the dilettantism project is necessarily destabilized by the Meister’s and the connoisseur’s always potentially faulty judgment; aesthetic judgment is a claim to authority that can never be authorized. In Heine’s view, Goethe was the embodiment of genius who, as a connoisseur and cultural politician, effaced the very genius he wanted to promote in a coordinated movement of the artist and the dilettante. Goethe’s fear of every “original author” resulted in the mass production and distribution of the Werther complex: Goethe rewarding “small spirits” with “the stamp of genius,” which in the end amounted to declarations of mediocrity. The difference between Kant’s mere demand for universality (without ever knowing for sure) and Goethe’s desire to actually command authority is decisive. In his later years, Goethe, who seems to anticipate and thus parry every eventual criticism, comes to the same sad conclusion. In 1832 Goethe writes in his diary: “Careless, passionate, preferential treatment of problematic talent was a mistake of mine from the early years that I could never quite get rid of.”114 Goethe would perhaps defend the desire to dictate genius by taking recourse to a modified version of Aristotle’s golden mean that runs throughout his thought. For Goethe, renunciation—especially in the case of the dilettante—is never simply the surrendering of desire but of finding one’s golden mean. As opposed to Novalis, there is something poetic, something exemplary for Goethe in renunciation—perhaps the only form of poetry open to the prosaic subject. Capturing the spirit if not the letter of Aristotle, Jarno says: “Man isn’t happy until his unconditional striving determines for itself its own limits.”115 For Goethe, the definition of an “incomplete person” is one “whose desire and striving are not proportional to his deeds and achievement.”116 Every person, according to Goethe, “must move within his limits and his capacities” and thereby maintain a “balanced measure” [Ebenmaß].117 As Eckart Goebel argues throughout Charis und Charisma, such an emphasis on balance already became an aesthetic-existential ideal with Winckelmann, a path open to all, the talented and nontalented, the graceful and the nongraceful alike. The dilettante, then, is out of proportion, out of balance with himself; his “striving” is not “proportional to his deeds.” Because dilettantes are not born with innate talent, they can never find proportion and balance as artists. In renouncing art like Wilhelm, they recognize their limits, become balanced and thus exemplary—or so Goethe would like to see it. From this perspective, the

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Tower Society does Wilhelm—and art—a favor. The ideal dilettante is thus held up as an exemplum of renunciation: a glimmer of poetry in an otherwise prosaic life.

The Eternal Return of the Dilettante The question often arises as to why Goethe and Schiller did not or could not complete their dilettantism project. Many reasons are given: whether it be the fact that the journal Propyläen ended up being a failure and was soon discontinued or that Schiller was more engaged with his own work on Maria Stuart. Vaget traces the failure of the project to the irreconcilable differences between Schiller’s more polemical and Goethe’s more “pedagogical” intentions (though, as just delineated, Goethe still wants to dictate genius, albeit more subtlety) as well as to the massive and perhaps unmanageable size of the undertaking, since the design was to address dilettantism in all individual forms of art: poetry (lyric, epic, and drama), painting (as well as drawing and sculpture), music, dance, architecture, landscaping, and acting.118 But there may be another reason why Goethe and Schiller abandoned the project: its internal contradictions, which threatened to dismantle its own premises and to expose even further the difficulty in separating genial talent from mere dilettantism. Even if one grants that genius can be determined and that the aesthetic education of the amateur leads to happy renunciation and connoisseurship—failure recoded as success—such a cultivation of taste always remains a potentially oppositional and hostile force to the artist. In learning the tools and techniques of art, the dilettante masters the tradition (its forms, modalities, and execution) and becomes a connoisseur—as well as a force of conservation. Precisely because connoisseurs can add nothing new to art (for they have no innate creative talent), they will never expand art’s realm, which is the task Goethe, following Kant, assigns to the artist. The artist needs to “distance himself from the rules,” the very rules that the connoisseur has learned and seeks to maintain via taste. Therefore, the true artist must constantly challenge the connoisseur, who, in turn, tends to demand art that conforms to a refined yet stalled taste. Thus, while Goethe repeatedly imagines a coordinated movement between artist and dilettante, in which the wishes of each are fulfilled in the other, the imperative of originality necessarily problematizes such mutual satisfaction. Without being creative and

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expanding the realm of art, the connoisseur—much like Nietzsche’s cultivated philistine as the enemy of innovation—tends to believe that good art has been found and thus should be preserved. There will always be a structural antagonism between connoisseur and artist, a belatedness between innovation and its appreciation, which relegates the connoisseur always and again to a dilettante who has to learn the (new) rules of judgment. This lack of coordination between artist and connoisseur is, however, only a necessary structural problem, one that is inherent to a genius aesthetics, in which taste is a belated comprehension of the rule that genial art establishes. The deeper contradiction arises when one looks more closely at Goethe and Schiller’s delineation of the supposed differences between the true artist and the dilettante. In their analysis of dilettantism in lyric poetry—not surprisingly, the most detailed and extensive series of notes—the irresolvable contradictory demands placed on the amateur come to the fore, contradictions that threaten to subvert the clean distinction Goethe and Schiller want to draw between the artist and the dilettante. The dilettantism schema is divided between its uses and detriment. Under the benefits of poetry, Goethe and Schiller write that “every educated person must be able to poetically express his or her emotions and, consequently, be able to compose a good (lyrical) poem.”119 The expectations placed upon dilettantism are notably high but also clear: a person educated in poetry must display proficiency in poetic composition. Goethe and Schiller proceed to delineate how such “good” poetry is to be achieved: “Since there are no objective laws for the internal or external element of a poem, amateurs [Liebhaber] must stick even closer than the Meister to the recognized good examples; thus they must imitate the good that is already achieved [in lyric poetry] rather than strive for originality.”120 It is clear that poetry poses a particular problem for dilettantism not only because of the exploding book market and resulting opportunities for publication but equally because it possesses fewer strictures and thus has less need for technical training. These looser standards, in turn, mean that poetry (and literature in general) has the most subjective and labile criteria. Therefore, as in the description of the school of the dilettantes, the amateur poet is to be educated by adhering to the strictest rules and examples. While the genius follows the imperative of originality (together with training), the dilettante is relegated to the “old school” of normative aesthetics and established models. The tradition of exem-

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plarity—following canonical paradigms and texts—is necessary for the naturally nongifted; in the best case, the result is good poetry, in the worst, mediocrity (terms that, from the perspective of exceptional mastery, are not too far apart). In the very next column, which lists the “damages” of amateurish lyric poetry, dilettantes are chastised for the very imitation that is to be their education. Here one finds the most detailed and apparently most destructive critique in the entire project: All dilettantes are plagiarists. They enervate and destroy everything that is original-beautiful in language and thought by imitating and aping the original-beautiful, thus filling in their own emptiness. Language is thereby slowly filled up with stolen and collected phrases and formulas that no longer say anything. One can read entire books that are beautifully stylized and contain nothing. In short, everything truly beautiful and good in genuine poetry is profaned, dragged along, and debased by the dilettantism that is gaining the upper hand.121

This passage is astonishing not only because of the sadistic double bind placed on the dilettante—the imperative to imitate coupled with the reproach for the same—but also because the critique simultaneously puts the dilettante all but on a par with the exceptional Meister. Yes, following Goethe and Schiller, all dilettantes may be plagiarists, but as this passage makes clear: They are very good ones, with very good taste, so that their work is all but indistinguishable from that of the true Meister.122 This isn’t to suggest that all amateurish poetry achieves such perfection; rather, just as there is a path of development from the genius to the Meister, one could say there is a progression from the nonexceptional to the exceptional dilettante. The main critique of what one could call “exceptional dilettantism” lies, then, in the effects of its purported repetition of genius. The dilettante here is described as a genius repeater, a copier not of drivel but of what is great. Clearly, then, the lifelong amateur is not producing doggerel or trivial or simply “bad” literature. The case is quite the opposite: by collecting “everything that is original-beautiful in language and thought,” the dilettante produces “beautifully stylized” work that threatens to rob genial originality of that which sets it apart from the nongenius: originality itself. Because the amateur wants to say something and thus follows (as instructed) the example of masters, language “no longer says anything.” By repeating and thus—as paradoxical as it seems—mass-producing originality, dilettantism undoes the work of genius. The dilettante is at once the copy machine and the inkblotter of genius; by “imitating” the

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“original-beautiful,” dilettantism reproduces, dilutes, and obscures genius, since its products can easily be mistaken for those of the Meister. At the extreme—and this is certainly not Goethe and Schiller’s intention, but it can be read between the lines here—one could call such exceptional dilettantes “maestros of imitation”; they may lack the innate gift for genius, may not belong to the select few, but in their sense for “the original-beautiful,” in their attunement to what is great in the contemporary art scene, and in their corresponding ability to reproduce it with such insight, they have, paradoxically enough, mastered genius.123 In Human All-too-Human, Nietzsche describes a remarkably similar paradigm to Goethe and Schiller, yet he arrives at a different set of consequences: Select Thoughts.—The chosen style of a significant age chooses not only the words but also the thoughts—and both come from the usual and the ruling elements: the bold and all-too-fresh smelling thoughts are no less repulsive to the ripe taste as the new, audacious images and expressions. Later, both—the select thought and the select word—smell a bit like mediocrity, because the aroma of the select quickly retreats and only its usual and everyday aspect can be tasted.124

There is no purely genial mode of expression: every style of word and thought is composed from both the “usual” and the “ruling,” which one could transcribe into Goethe and Schiller’s lexicon of the imitative and the original-beautiful. The ruling thought in its newness will always strike the palette of prevailing taste as a bit too strong, a bit too bold. But with time, as the audaciousness becomes normal or comfortable—that is, as it enters the “usual”—all that remains is the taste of mediocrity. For Nietzsche, this is the fate of all innovation and originality: not to remain “timeless,” but to become simply usual and everyday. That is, in becoming historically significant, a work necessarily surrenders its original, immediate, audacious effect. An original work never remains just that; as soon as it is canonized and admired, it becomes the standard, and thus somewhat ordinary, since what was once shocking becomes the tradition itself. Goethe and Schiller seem to want to prevent this process and—expressed somewhat crudely—to find someone to blame, to have a scapegoat for the decline of the individual artwork, a process that for Nietzsche belongs to the fate of finite art itself. The one difference in their respective arguments is the temporality: Goethe and Schiller imply that the immediate imitation of the original-beautiful obscures and subverts genius from the beginning,

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while Nietzsche allows for a belatedness in this process, a temporal delay in the transition from the “ruling” to the “usual” that one can see as the process of canon formation itself. Goethe and Schiller’s reflections on the dilettante hinge, therefore, on an anxiety of influence—however, in the opposite direction of Bloom’s famous study: not the anxiety of the great artist falling under the spell of previous work, but rather the anxiety that the great artist influences others who are so good (albeit as imitators) that they render the Meister unrecognizable and ultimately call into question mastery itself. The dilettante steals the thunder of genius and problematizes the strict differentiation between the naturally talented and those who only have a talent for imitation. If this is the case, then not only does Goethe and Schiller’s attempt to rescue genial art fail, but the categories of genius/nongenius, poetry/prose, and original/derivative begin to blur and fade into one another. The potential for such a blurring of what Goethe otherwise wants to strictly differentiate can be seen in his gnomic line from 1810, reported by Fredrich Wilhelm Riemer: “Dilettantism negates the Meister.”125 This enigmatic line can be interpreted in several ways: first, and in the most direct manner, it can mean that the preponderance of mediocre, nongenial art has assumed such a status that dilettantism has simply won the battle and now rules the art world; a second reading would follow the above argument concerning the anxiety of influence, in which the dilettante as a virtuoso of imitation has become so advanced in (re)producing the “original-beautiful” that one is pressed to draw the line between what is the work of a Meister and that of a “genial” imitator. There is, however, also a third possible exegesis: the Meister succumbs to his own always latent dilettantism. This third interpretive possibility is indicated in Goethe and Schiller’s notes to the project itself, since even the Meister can display “false taste” (calling into question the strict differentiation not only between dilettante and Meister but also between genius and Meister) and thus tends all too often toward dilettantism. As cited earlier, Goethe and Schiller’s inclusion of “Wieland’s laxity” under the dilettantism of the time clearly implies that amateurism isn’t limited to those bereft of innate talent, but can also haunt the work of writers whom Goethe and Schiller would clearly count among people with genius. In “Classical and Modern” from 1818, Goethe highlights this very point: And so it is with the merits of a writer. The concrete will always grab us first and completely satisfy us; indeed, when we perceive the works of one and the

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same poet, we find many that point to a certain embarrassing labor, while other works, on the contrary, step forth like free products of nature because the talent entirely lives up to the content and form.126

Even granting Goethe and Schiller’s strict differentiation between the naturally talented and those without any natural gifts, genius alone guarantees nothing—a point the two authors insist upon. Genius, too, must work hard, study, refine, try new things—and always run the risk of producing dilettantish work in the pejorative sense. As with “Wieland’s laxity,” one always finds, even among the greatest artists, passages or even whole works that display “a certain embarrassing labor” and others that “step forth like free products of nature”—the very definition of masterful art as a second nature. This potential threat of a constant admixture of dilettantism and genius belongs to the imperative of originality; the previous work no longer counts, only the next. Everything new in art is attributable to deviation from the existing norms or standards; an artist must continually challenge, press, and establish new rules. Given the limits of such originality, a final possible interpretation of Goethe’s reported dictum “Dilettantism negates the Meister” is that even the Meister becomes his own dilettante, the copier and repeater of his previous work. Sooner or later, one becomes one’s own derivative artist. In “Literature and the Right to Death,” Maurice Blanchot offers one final spin on the relation between dilettantism and potential mastery, whereby all writing begins with a form of radical amateurism in which no writer is ever actually a writer when writing: “The writer only finds himself, only realizes himself, through his work; before his work exists, not only does he not know who he is, but he is nothing. He exists only as a function of the work. [. . .] The same is true for each new work, because everything begins again from nothing.”127 At the heart of Blanchot’s paradox of the writer, who is nothing before the work and only becomes a writer once he stops writing, lies Nietzsche’s notion of subjectivity, which does not serve as the source or substratum of the deed: “But there is no such substratum; there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, effecting, becoming; the ‘doer’ is merely poetically added to the doing—the doing is everything.”128 In the case of art, one could say that the artwork proceeds and produces the artist, or in the lexicon of Goethe and Schiller: the Meister doesn’t produce the work, but rather the work the Meister. This notion of the artist defined as an effect of his or her work bears, however, two possible valences: the first tendency could reappropriate

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such “beginning again from nothing” as the modified expression of the heroic artist, the one who—like Benn as quoted in chapter 1—heroically manages (even as an effect of this process) to have six to eight poems that escape mediocrity attached to his name. The second, less heroic interpretation displaces genial mastery altogether. All art is a testing, a trying, a starting over; at its heart, all art is dilettantism itself; it doesn’t really know what it is doing. It seems to be this milder version of the preponderance of dilettantism that Elfriede Jelinek evokes when she stakes a claim to the absolute dilettantism of all authors: “We are all dilettantes. One can scarcely learn to write. One has nothing to hold onto, no solid ground as a basis.”129 This eternal return of dilettantism might be the lasting rule of Bildung, one that exceeds the demands of artistic production: with every new situation, with every new project, one is always and again a dilettante.

CHAPTER

Average Life (Grillparzer, Stifter, and the Art of Prosaic Reality)

4

The masses seem to me worthy of notice in three respects: first, as fading copies of great men produced on bad paper with worn-out plates; second, as resistance to the great; and finally, as instruments of the great. Beyond that let the devil and statistics take them! What? But it is said that statistics prove that there are laws in history. Laws? Yes, statistics prove how common and disgustingly uniform the mass is. [. . .] Insofar as there are laws in history, the laws are worthless and history as well. Nietzsche, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life1

The Museum of Spirit In his Lectures on Aesthetics (delivered in 1817–29 and published posthumously), Hegel famously announces his thesis on the end of art: “With respect to its highest determination, art is and remains for us a thing of the past.”2 In declaring art’s admission to the dustbin of history, Hegel qualifies art’s obsolescence in a twofold manner: first, it is “for us” that art belongs to the past, a qualification that offers the possibility that for another—perhaps another people or another time—art may still have a significance, a significant future. Second, and more importantly, it is only “with respect to its highest determination” that art has become obsolete. Following Hegel’s definition of art as the “sensible shining forth of the Idea,”3 post-Romantic art simply no longer serves as a significant mode of revealing Spirit. In condemning art to

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the past, Hegel does not explicitly declare or demand the end of artistic production: there can be and probably will still be art, but it will no longer fulfill art’s “highest determination”—for the simple reason that all art after Romanticism comes too late. Spirit has moved on and no longer appears in sensuous form.4 Nor does Hegel entirely strip art of its dignity: its time may have passed, but art played its role in the development of Spirit and ultimately gave way to something higher, loftier: thought. Spirit has extricated itself from art’s materiality and has now taken up residence in philosophy.5 Whereas Goethe and Schiller understand art as an invitation to active participation, whether as genial creator or dilettante, Hegel describes art as extending a different invitation: “Art invites us to thoughtful consideration—not, however, to call forth art again, but to recognize scientifically what art is.”6 Art no longer embodies the sensuous presence of Spirit, but rather prompts one to stop and reflect on the history of art as the path Spirit has already traversed. This, then, is the meaning of art being “a thing of the past”: art no longer makes history (i.e., it is no longer the productive unfolding of Spirit) but rather has become history (i.e., a jettisoned casing of Spirit). Art is now solely to be considered as a document of where Spirit once was, how it once appeared; as a historical artifact, art has not only yielded to philosophy but also to the museum, archive, and library—mementos and memorials of Spirit’s past. As discussed in the introduction, art in its highest (now superceded) determination “is called to present the ideal state of the world in opposition to prosaic reality.”7 When it fulfills this determination (which Hegel identifies with Greek sculpture as the perfect congruence of matter and spirit), art stands opposite the “world of the everyday and of prose”8 and thus reveals images of an ideal world. When art no longer idealizes the world, it has succumbed to the prosaic reality it once opposed. Post-Romantic art, for Hegel, no longer possesses a poetic (productive, revealing) power but rather has become a mere prosaic (i.e., historical) presence. Art belongs to the everyday; it can be collected and displayed, pondered and reflected upon, but it is no longer significant in and for the present. With its poetic power exhausted, art is relegated to “prosaic reality.” History, for Hegel, is the epitome and residence of the prosaic: “It is not only the manner in which history is written but also the nature of its content that makes it prosaic.”9 Hegel aligns the advent of history as a discipline with the end of art’s highpoint (Classical Greek sculpture) and the ascent of Rome, where the “prose of life” penetrates not only

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the “real conditions” but also its “representation.”10 The prose that characterizes both the content and manner of historical writing demands a restraint from poetically transfiguring one’s subject matter: prose concerns and describes the nontransfigured, nonennobled world, while poetry forms its idealized counterpart. Thus, the historian may only “relate what is at hand and how it is at hand, without reinterpreting or poetically elaborating it.”11 Viewed as prose, art no longer transfigures and ennobles the common (à la Schiller) but has become part and parcel of common life. It offers no oppositional power but has been engulfed by history. Therefore, if there is post-Romantic “art,” it exists in the manner of the everyday: art that doesn’t adorn, doesn’t idealize, but collects and records the “prose of the world” as history does. The sense of art having reached a historical end is not simply Hegel’s private, if influential, proclivity. Heinrich Heine also notes an end of art in the 1820s and 1830s, but he delineates this end in crucially different terms. In Die romantische Schule (1835, The Romantic School), Heine announces “the end of the Goethean artistic period,”12 which one could equally call the end of the age of genius. By defining an age and an artistic period through the name “Goethe” (who died in 1832), Heine at once pays homage to the Meister (an homage tinged with “sadness”) and breathes a sigh of relief that his time is over. This linking of a period and a name also highlights that Heine does not declare the total demise of artistic production, but only of a particular form: idealized and idealizing art. Heine, like so many other authors, has an ambivalent relationship to Goethe, at once admiring his genius and lamenting his suffocating effects. This sense of suffocation and the resulting preparation for the end of the “artistic period” begins even before Goethe’s death. In his 1828 review of Wolfgang Menzel’s Die deutsche Literatur (a book that grants Goethe talent but not genius), Heine quite properly speaks of an “insurrection” of young authors against Goethe, an Oedipal battle launched by the sons against the father figure of German literature. Heine both shares and resists this attack and thus wonders where the hardness toward Goethe comes from, even among the “great minds” of the time. Heine answers this question as follows: “Perhaps many great minds view Goethe with a secret rancor because he, who was to be nothing other than Primus inter pares, succeeded in becoming the tyrant in the republic of spirits. They see in him a Ludwig XI, who oppresses the spiritually high nobility by lifting up the spiritual tiers état, the beloved mediocrity.”13 For Heine, Goethe is the “greatest represen-

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tative of this period,” a period that bears his name and that “began in Goethe’s crib and will end with his coffin.”14 In the republic of letters that first commences with Goethe, the name of the tastemaker and cultural power broker is clear; his address is in Weimar. From the perspective of the great minds not recognized by the Meister, Goethe functions not as an enabler of genius, but as a tyrant who, despite his own genial production, is less than discerning in judging the talent of others. Heine implies that Goethe’s fellow writers would have been content to allow him the paradoxical status of “first among equals”; yet, ironically or tragically, Goethe—especially given his desire for a coordinated movement of Meister and masses—chose to oppose the literary nobility in favor of the literary third estate, beloved mediocrity. By promoting mediocrity, Goethe ensured that he would be primus but not inter pares. As discussed at the end of chapter 3, perhaps no author has been more assailed for his poor judgment than Goethe. The list of authors dismissed by Goethe includes pretty much a “who’s who” of German literature in the Age of Goethe: Hölderlin, Kleist, Jean Paul, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, to name just a few.15 Goethe’s genius did not extend to his taste or cultural politics; rather, he promoted the very dilettantism that he wanted to contain, if only to guarantee that his own genius and aesthetic direction wouldn’t be challenged. Goethe’s predilection for mediocre talents constitutes only part of Heine’s critique of the Goethean artistic period, an individual if powerful (because tyrannical) foible. More important than Goethe being the patron of beloved mediocrity is his notion of art, which for Heine amounts to a recipe for impotent mediocrity.16 The entire idea of art promoted by Goethe and idealist aesthetics in general adhered in Heine’s eyes to a false concept of art, precisely because its emphasis on genial originality ignored the present world, that is, Hegel’s “prosaic reality.” Goethe and his followers, writes Heine, view “art as an independent second world, which they place so high that all human activity, its religion and morality, moves along changing and wandering beneath it. I cannot, however, subscribe unconditionally to this viewpoint. The Goetheans allowed themselves to be led astray into proclaiming art itself as the highest and to turn away from the first, real world, which nevertheless deserves precedence.”17 In announcing the end of the Goethean artistic period, Heine simultaneously declares its entire project to have been a failure; the task of art is not to idealize the world (and in the process, art itself as “the highest”) but to engage the “first, real world.” Heine, in other words, shares Hegel’s thoughts

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regarding post-Romantic art, yet inverts its significance: yes, art belongs to the “prose of the world,” but only as such can art (again) be significant. Heine’s advocation of an anti-idealizing, “prosaic” art becomes clear in The Romantic School, when he describes a visit to the Louvre and his response to its impressive sculpture collection: “Strange!” writes Heine. “These antiquities remind me of Goethe’s poetry.”18 With this simple exclamation, Heine marks the museum as the location for all art that aspires for a “second, independent world.” The problem of Goethe’s genial work is that it belonged in the museum from the very beginning. When art is only concerned with producing a second world, it has always already programmed itself for its archival collection. Referring to his earlier review of Menzel’s Die deutsche Literatur, Heine writes in The Romantic School: In no way did I deny the intrinsic value of Goethe’s masterpieces. They decorate our dear fatherland just as beautiful statues decorate a garden. But they are statues. One can fall in love with them but they are impotent: Goethe’s writings don’t produce the deed that Schiller’s do. The deed is the child of the word, and Goethe’s beautiful words are childless. That is the curse of everything that arises merely through art.19

In Heine’s ingenious reversal of Hegel’s declaration of the end of art, Goethe’s idealistic aesthetics guarantees the condemnation of art as a “thing of the past” precisely because the only place for art that turns away from the existing prosaic world is the museum from the very beginning. Heine explicitly does not want to dispute the beauty and excellence of Goethe’s work—Goethe remains “the greatest artist of our literature”20—but his art enters the world as “statues”: cold, hard, and most of all sterile, because it is just art. The best that may emerge from such idealist art is more work immediately destined for the museum, but nothing beyond it. For Heine, art should not merely adorn the world but change it. Heine is, of course, forging a political argument akin to the aspirations of the Young Germany movement, in which art must engage the world in order to become more than “mere” art; art must lead to action. Heine’s intellectual career, however, can be characterized by his being torn between hope and despair regarding the future of art and its (political) possibilities. On the one hand, Heine articulates the hope that “the new age [. . .] can give birth to a new art [. . .] indeed to a new technique”;21 on the other hand, Heine is skeptical that such a transformation can take place, in part because he himself never entirely surrenders the idea of genius as a mode of natural exceptionality and

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original creativity. Therefore, the name for the duality of hope and despair is “Goethe.” Goethe’s death is at once a blessing and a curse: a blessing because of the hope for “new art” and “new technique,” a curse because with him the age of genius potentially yields to the mediocrity of the world. Ultimately, Heine’s engagement for democratic, revolutionary politics as well as for a new political significance for art runs counter to his desire for poetic genius.22 In 1840, Heine writes: “For beauty and genius are, indeed, a type of kingdom, and they do not fit into a society in which everyone, in the ill-feeling of his or her own mediocrity, attempts to debase every form of loftier talent, to reduce it to a banal level. The kings move on, and with them the last poets leave.”23 By Heine’s own admission, beautiful art now requires a type of natural aristocracy, a court of geniuses. The desire to democratize society runs counter to the conditions of beautiful art, which presupposes something aristocratic, elitist. In the world of art, when royalty departs, it takes the poets with it. The implicit critique that Heine launches against art in a society now determined by the middle class as well as the ascendant fourth estate amounts to John Stuart Mill’s libertarian reservations concerning the leveling and homogenizing effects of democracy in general: when the average man assumes political power, society (from politics to artistic production) begins to be defined by a love of equality that at best prefers that no one be exceptional and at worst understands equality as the lowest common denominator—to reduce everything to the same mediocre level in the name of democracy.24 Goethe may have been the genial tyrant who foolishly elevated mediocrity, but the growing tyranny of mediocrity lowers everything to its level. The belatedness of post-Romantic art tends initially toward a melancholic acceptance of coming too late to be genius and, thus, of being a “thing of the past.” With his epochal novel Die Epigonen (1825–36, The Epigones), written during the last years of Goethe’s life and completed after his death, Karl Immermann gave voice to this belatedness of the post-Goethe generation, explicating the dilemma of those born too late: We are, to express the entire misery in one word, epigones, and bear part of the burden that tends to stick to every generation that is born late and lives from its inheritance. The great movement in the realm of spirit, which our fathers undertook from their cottages and little huts, has provided us with many treasures that now lay upon the market tables. Without particular effort, even the least ability can at least acquire the token coins of every form of art and

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science. But it proceeds with borrowed ideas as it does with borrowed money: the one who carelessly does business with other ’s possessions only gets poorer.25

From Immermann’s perspective, the Goethean artistic period had indeed succeeded in achieving what one can call an imposing legacy. This cultural inheritance simultaneously enriches and impoverishes the epigone; the treasures of the past are readily available, but such riches equally hinder the ability to produce something new, something original. All that remains are “borrowed ideas” and accumulated capital, whose frivolous use can lead to further impoverishment. The only way, then, to turn epigonism to one’s advantage is to not compete with what went before and certainly not to try to rival the age of genius, but to redefine the artist and art’s relation to prosaic reality. Heine’s despair in the face of the irreconcilable divide between genius and mediocrity persists, therefore, only as long as one maintains the necessity of genius. In fact, Heine’s reflections on the sterility of Goethe’s idealizing art already sketch a way out of the abyss of originality as well as offer a possible “new art,” one that will be adopted by the Realism of Grillparzer and Stifter: to accept that one is an epigone and thus to discard both genial originality and idealizing common life. Georg Büchner already lays the framework for such an anti-idealist aesthetics in the so-called “conversation on art” [Kunstgespräch] in his novella Lenz (written 1835, published 1839).26 Büchner’s Lenz (based on Goethe’s early friend) takes an idealist aesthetics to task, declaring the desire to transfigure reality to be unbearable. The end result of idealist art is not a heightened, second reality but—like Heine’s statues— “wooden puppets.” “This idealism,” explains Lenz, “represents the most disgraceful contempt for human nature.”27 As a counteraesthetic program, Büchner’s Lenz proposes not idealization but an adherence to common life: “Let them [the idealist artists] just once try to descend into the life of the lowliest person [des Geringsten] and reproduce the twitches, the winks, the subtle, barely noticed play of facial features.”28 Büchner’s Lenz thus suggests a dialectic of geniality: when the demand for genius has exhausted itself, the next mode of innovation lies in imitating or reproducing individual, yet ordinary persons. This demand to “reproduce” [wiedergeben] the “lowliest person” (whom Lenz also calls “the most prosaic people”) alters the notion of both the artist and art. Like Schiller in his critique of Bürger, the artist must descend to the common level, but unlike Schiller he must abide there and refrain from idealizing. And unlike Bürger, the writer’s task is not to attune his or

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her work to the sounding board of the majority’s taste but to present what is otherwise “barely noticed”—because it is so common, so prosaic. Büchner’s artist is, then, less a creator and more an archivist, and what he or she attempts to capture is everyday life in its diversity of twitches, gestures, and expressions. Only thus does the common and seemingly insignificant become singular: One has to love mankind in order to penetrate into the unique existence of each being. Nobody can be too lowly, too ugly. Only then can you understand them; the most insignificant face makes a deeper impression than the mere sensation of beauty, and one can allow the figures to emerge without copying anything into them from the outside, where no life, no muscle, no pulse surges or swells.29

The anti-idealist aesthetic program outlined by Büchner’s Lenz no longer concerns beauty, nor does it strive to simply capture “what is.” Rather, its goal lies in penetrating the underlying essence, the unique creatureliness subtending each being; here alone can one unearth the significance embedded in the seemingly insignificant. Such art is achieved by refraining from adding anything “from the outside” (including, presumably, the outside of art’s tradition) and simply abiding by and delving into each “insignificant face” to reveal its deeper underlying impression, its muscles and pulses. While rooted in a similar aesthetics of common life as Lessing’s bourgeois tragedy, Büchner’s artist doesn’t mobilize the common as the universal—as similar for all people—but explores the common in its particularity so that the everyday or “insignificant,” when presented in detail, assumes its own exceptional status.30 If one no longer worries about genius and originality as art’s defining criteria, one can embrace one’s own epigonism: in coming too late, one is right on time. Defined as an epigone, the realist artist is no longer a natural exception and thus no longer competes with nature (i.e., no longer tries to produce an ideal world). Rather, by relegating the notion of genius, the artist becomes a pseudoscientific investigator, collector, and appropriator, whose subject is common, prosaic reality in its unadorned “insignificance.” However, as Büchner’s Lenz implies, the artist’s task lies not merely in recording and archiving the ordinary but also in penetrating its essence. Realism neither idealizes the common nor posits it as universal, but rather shows how the small and seemingly insignificant can serve as a privileged access to greatness itself. Unlike its English and French counterparts, German-language Realism strives less to address social reality and more to reveal the

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essence that underlies reality.31 In the aesthetics of German-language Realism, the relationship between exemplarity and mediocrity takes on a different form: when studied and presented in its particularity, prosaic reality is to be seen as poetry itself.

Lives of the Nonfamous (Grillparzer) If the fate of art in Hegel’s analysis is to belong to the museum of Spirit’s past, Franz Grillparzer’s short story Der arme Spielmann (1847, The Poor Musician)32 offers a programmatic response to how art in the age of epigones can combat its supposed obsolescence: by archiving and investigating the ordinary. As a dramatist, the narrator of the story describes himself as “a passionate aficionado of humanity, particularly of the common people [Volk],” one who is driven by his “anthropological ravenousness.”33 The artist is not an original genius but an observer and collector, whose passion for common types reaches its peak in carnival atmospheres, when “class differences have disappeared” and the people “feel themselves as part of the whole, in which the divine ultimately lies.”34 In the frame to the story, the narrator famously explicates the epigonic artist and the new relation between the extraordinary and the ordinary: As if from an unfurled, monstrous Plutarch that has broken its binding, I collect the biographies of nonfamous people from their cheerful and secretly troubled faces, from their lively or halting step, from the behavior between family members, and from their half involuntary expressions. And truly! One cannot understand the famous if one has not penetrated the feelings [durchgefühlt] of the obscure. An invisible but unbroken thread stretches from the scuffle between two tipsy cart-pushers to the strife between the gods’ sons; and the young girl, who half-unwillingly follows her lover away from the throng of dancers, contains in embryo the Juliets, Didos, and Medeas.35

Plutarch’s Lives belongs squarely to the tradition of exemplarity; the book couples the biographies of notable Greek and Roman figures to sketch exempla of extraordinary greatness as well as common fallibility. The strategy of such pairing lends weight to their parallel fates and the transnational nature of such exemplarity. The narrator of Grillparzer’s story, however, is interested in another version of Plutarch, in other lives, ones long overlooked and still in need of collection. Strolling among the Viennese crowd on St. Bridget’s Day, the narrator imagines a version of Plutarch’s Lives that has burst its binding and consists in individual, still unwritten pages of common lives scattered

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about him. The “biographies of nonfamous people” that he collects from the crowd have not found their way into a canonical text, nor do they at first sight offer exempla of any sort. The narrator seeks out lives that haven’t been written, but rather must first be deduced from the faces, manner, and behavior of the people in the crowd. The narrator’s physiognomic gaze scours the crowd for fly sheets from an unwritten book, which can only be read from the body and its gestures. The corporal language of the common person becomes the text, the transcription of the soul, which the narrator collects in order to read as the very form of his art. By distinguishing between the famous and the nonfamous, Grillparzer’s narrator still holds onto a difference between the great and the small, the extraordinary and the ordinary, but it is not an essential difference. Rather, this distinction consists solely in a question of degree not kind. More decisively, the nonfamous person becomes the precondition for all insight into exceptionality: “One cannot understand the famous if one has not penetrated the feelings [durchgefühlt] of the obscure.” This line announces one of Realism’s programmatic statements: the only hermeneutic access to greatness is through the obscure. By intimately putting oneself into the emotive state of the ordinary, both—the ordinary and extraordinary—can be understood. Grillparzer, therefore, doesn’t merely differentiate the famous and nonfamous solely by degree; he inverts their rank of priority. That is, the narrator goes beyond the aesthetic claim that “the obscure of his age are just as worthy of literary representation as the famous of all time,”36 since his hermeneutic claim posits the nonfamous as the conditio sine qua non of all understanding of humanity. All roads to the famous begin with the nonfamous. The first crucial metaphor for expressing the relation between the famous and nonfamous is the “invisible but unbroken thread” winding its way from street corner scuffles to disputes on Mount Olympus. If the thread is “unbroken,” the seemingly loose and strewn sheets of paper are actually still connected (albeit imperceptibly) to the canonical text, to the world-historical or mythological figures. Not only does continuity exist between the famous and nonfamous, but their lives are connected like the parallel lives that Plutarch delineates. This intimate relation between the ordinary and the extraordinary is at once further explicated and modified in the second metaphor that the narrator uses: an embryonic relation. If the young girl who follows her lover away from the throng is a Juliet “in embryo,” then this common

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occurrence contains all the information, the entire structure of the Romeo and Juliet story (a project Gottfried Keller will undertake in “A Village Romeo and Juliet”). As with Goethe’s entelechy, a teleological principle determines the relation between embryo and its stages. The substance remains the same; only the accidents vary. These two metaphoric registers, therefore, are not entirely compatible: a thread solely expresses a relationship of continuity; an embryo expresses a relation of shared essence, in which all the defining information persists through the different stages of development and permutation. With an embryo, everything is directed toward an end, while a thread doesn’t require or necessarily imply an overarching, guiding principle. If the goal of Realism is not to simply reproduce reality but to arrive at its essence, the metaphor of the embryo lies closer to encapsulating this endeavor. But as will become clear in The Poor Musician, the narrator’s hermeneutic task lies in following the thread of the poor fiddler to see if it is indeed unbroken. In the case of both metaphors, however, there is no need to transfigure and ennoble the common in order to make it exemplary. Rather, the common is—without idealization and in its particularity—already exemplary: the privileged access to and the origin of what putatively excels it. Because the famous are incomprehensible without first “penetrating the feelings” of the obscure, there can be no greatness (i.e., an understanding of greatness) without the ordinary. In other words, until the lives of the nonfamous are collected, written, and read, one actually has not yet understood Plutarch. Therefore, the realist artist is not only required to follow the thread, assemble the pages, and demonstrate that they in fact belong to the book (as its key to its understanding), but also to penetrate the essence of the real in the process of collecting and reading. Since everything comes down to understanding, the artist is at heart a hermeneutist, whose goal consists in reading what lies in plain sight so that it can, in fact, be understood for the first time. If such an artist is original, it is not in the sense of producing something new, but allowing one to see the world in a new way. Realist literature, one could say, is a poetics of the purloined letter of the everyday. The realist project outlined by the narrator within the frame of The Poor Musician is not, however, without its contradictions. The first concerns the inversion of the hierarchy between literature and life: If the faces, gestures, and gait of the common people not only constitute an unwritten text that needs to be collected but also assume the status of

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true greatness, then common life becomes the very text that literature can only aspire to be. The “ruse of realism”—that is, “to make readers think that they are viewing an unmediated social reality”37—also constitutes Realism’s dilemma, since the true text of literature lies outside of the text. In attempting to assemble and write about everyday life, literature becomes a diminished form of an art it cannot be, precisely because it is art—hence, its need to deny its art so as to be something higher than art. The collecting, writing, and updating of an expanded version of Plutarch’s Lives can never compete with the original—not of Plutarch but of the lives of the nonfamous that can only be found in their “pure” form on the street. The second problem of Realism’s aesthetics of the common concerns the redefinition of the artist in terms of the scientist or observer. This problem can be seen in both of Grillparzer’s metaphors, the “invisible but unbroken thread” and the “embryo.” Everything hinges upon the thread being unbroken; if the thread is torn or nonexistent, the entire premise of a fundamental relation between the famous and the ordinary collapses. And yet the thread cannot be seen and, thus, is not subject to empirical observation, to the very skill that the narrator as “aficionado of common people” and “anthropologist” elevates to his art. This same problem inheres in the metaphor of the embryo—only when the embryo as a teleological figure develops into a Juliet can one be sure that the young girl indeed contains her in embryonic form. Goethe seems to realize this hermeneutic problem of entelechy (at least when it comes to humans) when he concludes his digression on childhood in Poetry and Truth by noting that one can never know how a particular human’s development will end—until it ends: “Even if human dispositions [Anlagen] in general possess a decisive direction, it will be difficult for the greatest and most experienced connoisseur [of humanity] to predict them with any reliability; yet, after the fact, one can indeed note which trait had pointed toward something in the future.”38 One can only read the embryo and be certain that it indeed contained in nuce a Juliet or Dido, after it has arrived at this telos. Until then, even the most adept connoisseur of humanity can’t really say what the embryo entails. In other words, one can only read backward, from the unfolded form back to the embryo; the embryo is, then, never fully readable, because one cannot deduce the future from the seed. Yet Grillparzer’s mythologization of the nonfamous depends on these metaphors and the methods for understanding them being valid; the relation between famous and nonfamous must hold for the realist

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project to function. Therefore, everything in Grillparzer’s Realism comes down to relationality and reading: if one cannot read the great in the common, the whole—which Grillparzer identifies with the “divine”—breaks apart or becomes dissonant. And it is precisely such dissonance that characterizes the nonfamous life that the narrator collects and studies in The Poor Musician.

The Insight of the Obscure Before turning to the actual story of The Poor Musician, an obscure passage needs to be discussed, namely, the central passage on obscurity itself: “One cannot understand the famous if one has not penetrated the feelings of the obscure.” This early articulation of what will become a motto of much German-language Realism poses its own hermeneutic difficulties: What exactly does “obscure” mean and how do “obscure” people relate to both the “nonfamous” and “famous”? One can readily differentiate the obscure from the famous, since the understanding of the first enables that of the latter, but are the nonfamous and obscure the same? While Grimm has no entry for “obscure,” Zedler’s famous dictionary from the eighteenth century defines “obscurae personae” as a category of Roman law and a term that Latin authors employ to designate “people who are either from a bad or lower background or about whom one has nothing particular to say or to praise.”39 In this sense, the “obscure” can be read as identical to the “nonfamous”: the type of people about whom a Plutarch has nothing to say or praise. However, as will be clear, the narrator’s desired and privileged obscurity is not limited to “the praise of nonfamous men” but also entails an element of hermeneutic obscurity: a fascination for hermetic persons. Within the logic of Grillparzer’s text, obscurity functions doubly: the poor musician clearly belongs to the nonfamous, but his hermetic nature renders him (at least for the narrator) exemplary among the crowd. He is common, but different: a darker shade of the everyday. After delineating his theory of exemplarity based not on idealizing but on penetrating the essence of the obscure, the narrator discovers the nonfamous life that will become the new entry in his expanded version of Plutarch’s Lives. Scouring a crowd of motley street musicians on the edge of the festival (including a harpist with a repellant gaze, a crippled veteran on a barrel organ, and a lame and deformed boy wrapped around a violin), the anthropological gaze of the narrator lands upon an old fiddler:

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Finally—and he drew my entire attention—an old man around seventy dressed in a threadbare but not unclean heavy wool overcoat with a smiling and self-approving countenance. [. . .] As he worked away on his old and very cracked violin, he marked time not only by raising and lowering his foot but also by the harmonious movement of his entire bent body. But all the trouble he took to lend his performance unity was fruitless, since what he played seemed to be a disconnected [unzusammenhängend] sequence of sounds with neither measure nor melody. Nevertheless, he was completely absorbed in his work: his lips quivered and his eyes were fixed on the score before him—yes, a score! For while all other musicians who played more for gratitude relied on memory, the old man, in the midst of the tumult, had placed a small, easily portable stand in front of him, which held the dirty and dog-eared sheet music that most likely held in the most beautiful order what he rendered so completely without connection [Zusammenhang]. It was precisely the uncommonness of this equipment that had drawn my attention to him.40

While the narrator mentions an array of other possible nonfamous musicians to choose from, it is only the poor musician that attracts his “entire attention.” And the reason is that everything about him is out of joint. His obscurity differs from that of the other musicians because he is truly and doubly obscure: nonfamous and impenetrable at once. He is just like all other nonfamous street musicians yet different from the rest. His capacity pales in comparison to his passion; his fitful, corporeal marking of the measure results in no discernable measure in the music; he plays from notes but doesn’t hit a right note; the score is held in “the most beautiful order” but what he plays has no order, no connection. Either Jakob—the name of the poor musician, which the reader first learns late in the story—cannot read the measure or he lacks the ability to translate it into practice. There is an essential disconnect between his passion and his practice, his desire and his ability. Indeed, his very judgment of what he is playing lacks. When the street urchins implore him to play a waltz and leave disgusted at his noncompliance, the fiddler is mystified: “I was playing a waltz,” he says in explanation, even though the narrator’s ear agrees with the children.41 Jakob is, in a word, dissonance personified. Despite all his passion and dedication, the fiddler’s art is a fruitless art, constantly out of step with itself. Despite the narrator’s professed love for humanity in carnival situations, when class differences disappear and all are one, he seeks out the one who, in fact, stands out from the crowd. This process of selection—the fact that there is a selection process—is crucial.42 Apparently, not all nonfamous or obscure people are equal, at least not for the narrator’s aesthetic-hermeneutic ends. Some people, it seems, are more

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ordinary (i.e., less interesting) than others, and only the one whose obscurity is equally hermetic whets his anthropological ravenousness. Unlike Schiller and Hegel, the aesthetic representability of the common is not a question of stripping away or idealizing the everyday; and unlike Büchner’s Lenz, who advocates for every insignificant face in its particularity, one could say Grillparzer’s narrator establishes an “elite” among the obscure, a privileged status determined by the nonfamous needing to additionally embody a hermeneutic riddle. One must be common, but in an uncommon way. This privileging the uncommonly common allows the narrator to elude the aesthetic dilemma of how ordinary life can also be art, since the poor musician immediately stands both for and apart from the obscure. It is the disjunction between the common sight of such a street musician and his utterly uncommon performance that attracts the narrator’s “anthropological ravenousness.” What ultimately “seals the deal” and, in fact, determines the poor street musician as an exemplary case of nonfamous obscurity is Jakob’s perfect Latin rendering of a line from Horace’s First Satire: “Sunt certi denique fines”—“ultimately there are fixed limits.” While the narrator only emphasizes the flawless Latin, more is at stake in this quotation, which comprises the full riddle of the street performer. This citation is truncated and therefore an incomplete or even nonconnected rendering of the standard, full quotation: “[E]st modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines” [There is a measure in all things, and ultimately there are fixed limits].43 Horace is of course referring to what he calls “the golden mean.” By leaving out the need for a measure, indeed, the certainty that “there is a measure in all things,” Jakob only sees the limits and has no concept of the mean that lies in between. The thread that the narrator will pursue in the hope of finding it “unbroken” is then a textual thread, one beginning with and contextualized by Horace and the golden mean. He will read Jakob like a text, whose lack of coherence compels the narrator qua hermeneutist to want to learn more and decipher the riddle so as to discern the whole, the divine: “I shook with desire to hear the connection [Zusammenhang].”44 Jakob presents a hermeneutic challenge of the first order; his obscurity lies not only in his insignificance as a musician but also in the impenetrability of his “art.” Relating part to whole in a constant back-and-forth movement constitutes the hermeneutic method since Schleiermacher, and with Dilthey it becomes the structure of the sub-

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ject (the life-nexus) and the humanities in one. With the poor fiddler, however, such a nexus is apparently lacking. Following the narrator’s inversion of the relation between the nonfamous and the famous, there are two enigmas that need to be unraveled: first, what is the connection holding together the poor musician’s music and life (both individually and in relation to each other) and, more importantly, how do the nonfamous not only relate to but also enable the understanding of the famous, since this is the premise of the narrator’s literary project? If Jakob is to contain, say, a Mozart or a Bach in embryo, what is the substantial, teleological relation? Or to use the narrator’s other metaphor: what is the “invisible unbroken thread” that connects the world of the measureless fiddler and the genius? The narrator comes to see the logic lurking behind the dissonant music when he visits Jakob a few mornings later. The narrator describes the music as a “demonic concert,” which only reveals its measureless measure to an attentive ear. Unlike Goethe’s Jarno or the Tower Society in general, the narrator does not descend upon the musician to dissuade him from his art, much less to enlighten him about his inability as an artist. The poor musician awakens the narrator’s interest not as a case to be improved or corrected; rather, the narrator withdraws explicit judgment and critique,45 remains in the anthropologicalhermeneutic mode, and aspires to understand the nonfamous in its obscurity. Together with Büchner’s Lenz, which also emphasizes “understanding,” Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician enacts a paradigm shift from aesthetic judgment to hermeneutic understanding, which also marks a difference between Classical and Realist aesthetics: the task isn’t to judge art (or life) but to understand it, how it works, its logic. If Wilhelm Meister is an exemplary dilettante insofar as he surrenders art, the exemplary status of the poor musician, who surrenders nothing and cannot be seen as having achieved a “balanced measure,” must be arrived at via a different strategy: After I had listened for some time, I finally recognized the thread—the method in the madness, as it were—running through this labyrinth. The old man took pleasure in playing. His conception [of music] differentiated simply between two things: euphony and cacophony. The first filled him with joy, indeed, rapture, whereas he avoided the second as far as possible, even when it had a harmonic basis. Rather than emphasize sense and rhythm in a piece of music, he stressed and prolonged the notes and intervals that were pleasing to the ear. In fact, he did not hesitate to repeat them capriciously, while his face often assumed an expression of ecstasy. He rid himself of the dissonances as quickly as

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possible, whereas, out of conscientiousness, he did not exclude a note from the passages that were too difficult for him, but rendered them in a measure far too slow when set against the entire piece. One can thus easily imagine the confusion that resulted. For me it was well-nigh too much.46

The metaphor of the “thread” returns here, and since the thread leads through a labyrinth and offers a “method to the madness,” one can speak of an “invisible thread”—or “obscure” thread—determining Jakob’s playing. Each piece of music is measured and evaluated according to its moments of euphony and cacophony: the first produces rapture in the poor musician; the second is avoided as much as possible. The aesthetic principle tying together the old fiddler’s musical practice is, then, foremost his pleasure itself. And the cost of such absolutely subjective pleasure is high: neither sense nor rhythm but the simple joy of euphony guides his execution. Jakob remains faithful to the whole, insofar as he plays every note of the composition, but the dissonant passages are quickly dispelled, while the harmonious ones can be repeated at will. Every note is there—the whole remains untouched—but the whole is executed at times with repetitions, at times too quickly, and at times in “a measure far too slow” to make the piece intelligible. Jakob reads all the notes, but his timing, his connecting tact, is always off. The whole—which is also the “divine”—exists, but it is dissonant, fractured. And yet, the poor musician clearly possesses and displays aesthetic principles, albeit rather idiosyncratic ones. His music is only chaotic when judged via comparison with general principles of musical interpretation and execution; taken on its own, in its particularity, his music has a logic, a coherency. It may not be beautiful (for the narrator it is “well-nigh too much”), but this artistic lack only makes it all the more hermeneutically interesting. As a collector who strives to penetrate the essence of the obscure, the narrator recognizes the musician’s dissonance not to dismiss it but to understand it. Everything—and nothing—changes when the narrator cedes the word and encourages Jakob to relate his life. Although the poor fiddler begins by denying having a story to tell—”I have no story”—as soon as he gets going, he assumes “the position of one who comfortably narrates.”47 The missing connection in his music is matched by his inverse and equally great ability to narrate his life in perfect coherence. Everything Jakob lacks as a musician he possesses in abundance as a narrator. After announcing that he is the son of a powerful court advisor and statesman, the poor musician “spun, visibly pleased, the thread of his narration further.”48 Despite the “unbroken thread” of Jakob’s auto-

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biographical narration, the determining feature of his life’s key episodes remains, as in his music, a failure of connection, a missed context. As Roland Heine aptly sums it up, “without recognizing it as his life problem, the poor musician has run aground on connection in his life.”49 A slow learner compared to two brothers, the first crucial moment in Jakob’s life (the event that, in his words, derails him from the right path) is a Latin exam with his father present. Despite being given all the answers in advance by the teacher, the poor musician struggles to recall one word from Horace: “But I, looking for the word inside me and in connection [Zusammenhang] with the others, couldn’t hear it.”50 Just as the narrator’s “anthropological ravenousness” is whetted by a (fragmentary) Horace citation, the decisive scene in the musician’s life is a failed or forgotten context in Horace’s Ars Poetica. The author of the golden mean both awakens the narrator’s ravenous interest and provides the answer to the connection—namely, the poor musician’s constant failure to see the connection. Jakob’s deafness to the nexus between things causes his downfall as his father shouts the missing word: “Cachinnum” (i.e., “guffaw,” “derisive laughter”). In The Poor Musician, context is everything, and here as well. As Roland Heine points out, the context that Jakob cannot recall concerns the necessity of a poet using words in the proper context.51 The passage from Horace addresses what one could call the golden mean of dramatic character: “If the words are discordant [absona] with the speaker’s fortunes / The Romans, in the boxes and pit alike, will raise a loud guffaw [cachinnum].”52 While Heine rightly highlights Jakob’s Freudian repression of the word demarcating “what he secretly fears: the derisive laughter about his failure,”53 more is at stake, since this passage designates dissonance or discordance—Jakob’s métier—as precisely that which dismantles the possibility of connection. What attracts the narrator to Jakob—the discordance between his (Latin) words and his station in life—can equally be a cause for laughter. Therefore, this passage (which is also Jakob’s lapsus) thematizes not only the disconnect between the musician’s elegant words and his dissonant music but more importantly the narrator’s larger hermeneutic project of connecting the famous and nonfamous via an unbroken thread. If the poor musician is the narrator’s test case, how then can discordance articulate a harmonious whole? Subsequently debarred from the family house and living with the servants, Jakob is given a job as copyist [Abschreiber]. Here again he falters due to a lacking sense of context and connection: “An incorrect

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punctuation mark, a missing word in the concept—even if it could be deduced from the sense—caused me bitter hours.”54 Even when the context is clear or can be clearly deduced, the very fact that a word is missing prompts the poor musician’s inability to decide what the proper context is and, thus, what the whole is or should be: “In doubt whether I should exactly cling to the original or add from my own [knowledge], the time passed in fear, and I gained the reputation of being careless although I tortured myself at the job like no one else.”55 Jakob’s problem is a hermeneutic one: How do the parts connect to provide a coherent whole? Moreover, what is the whole? His inability to recognize whether the original whole (since it is apparently missing a part and thus is not whole) or the assumed whole (i.e., one supplemented via a deduction of the relation of parts to whole) should have priority marks him as one condemned to miss the nexus between part and whole. In this key hermeneutic scene of this literary text about hermeneutics, the poor musician not only is “confronted with a hermeneutic problem that mirrors his existential problem,”56 but more decisively, he becomes the narrator’s doppelgänger, since he has to decipher the ultimate form of obscurity: a missing word in a text. In a way, Jakob has to read himself and, by extension, the place of the obscure in the book that previously had been dedicated only to the lives of the famous. That is, in being confronted with the question of the whole, Jakob equally has to decide the status of the text, of the book itself, its completion and coherency. This scene offers, therefore, a moment of insight that doubles and disrupts the narrator’s parallel aesthetic-hermeneutic project of the invisible or obscure thread. As a copyist whose task is to faithfully reproduce what lies before him, Jakob’s hermeneutic question of what constitutes the “whole” text is justified: if he supplements the original, he no longer copies—and thus no longer preserves—the whole but creates what amounts to a second or para-whole; and if he leaves out the assumed missing word, the whole, while remaining faithful to the original, remains incomplete. Even when he penetrates the obscure, Jakob is faced with an inextricable dilemma, for regardless of how he proceeds, the whole may not, in fact, be whole.57 The constant threat of a missing word announces an always possible lacuna, a permanent obscurity disrupting the relation between part and part, part and whole, small and great, nonfamous and famous. In positing the obscure—in the double sense of ordinary and hermetic—as the key to understanding the great, the narrator implies that

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one has not yet read, not yet understood, Plutarch’s Lives. Until the lives of the obscure are elucidated, the lives of the famous remain obscure as well. If the nonfamous of world history cannot be understood, not only does the narrator’s hermeneutic project—which is also the coming foundation of the humanities—break down but so does humanity itself, at least as something legible and held together by a common thread. If the “thread” that holds the musician’s life together is a broken or failed connection, then the relationship constructed between nonfamous and famous cannot be one of continuity (and certainly not of embryonic teleology) but must be one of repetition: What “holds together” the famous and nonfamous is a repeatedly broken thread that, in its very repetition as broken, creates a dis/continuity between all, a relation of repeated difference. Jakob, one could say, does not miss the nexus, but marks it as always missing. This is the insight of the obscure. In this light, The Poor Musician offers not only an updated and expanded version of Plutarch’s Lives based upon the biographies of the nonfamous but also a new notion of the book: one that has always already burst its binding.

The Sublimity of Regularity (Stifter) Perhaps no German-language author felt the weight of being an epigone more than Grillparzer’s fellow Austrian Adalbert Stifter, who programmatically renounces genius in favor of an artist modeled on the researcher and collector. And perhaps no writer has placed the small, ordinary, and common at the center of his work with more insistence than Stifter. Responding to Friedrich Hebbel’s 1849 reproach that he rejoices in “bugs and buttercups,”58 Stifter does not dispute but affirms this preference. In the preface to his collection Bunte Steine (1853, Multi-Colored Stones), Stifter admits his predilection for “the small” and for “ordinary people” and promises to offer something slightly different: something “even smaller and more insignificant.”59 This emphasis on the small forms the crux of Stifter’s aesthetics, in which the seemingly insignificant, precisely through its unassuming nature, can reveal the remarkable. In elevating the small over the great, Stifter, like Grillparzer (whose The Poor Musician Stifter admired greatly),60 inverts the hierarchy of greatness, but unlike Grillparzer, his theoretical method of arriving at the truly great—what Stifter will also call the “whole” as well as the “universal” and “world-maintaining,” all of

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which can be summarized in his famous phrase “the gentle law”— does not consist in a hermeneutics of particularity; rather, Stifter advocates a quasi-scientific procedure for answering the dilemma of vision, of how to see the “invisible,” by collecting the everyday and ordinary in order to abstract from them toward something higher: The flowing of air, the rippling of water, the growing of grain, the waves of the sea, the greening of the earth, the gleaming of the heavens, the twinkling of the stars, I consider to be great; the splendidly approaching storm, the lightning that splits houses, the tempest that drives the surf, the fire-spewing mountain, the earthquake that buries whole countries, I do not consider to be greater than the former phenomena. Indeed, I think they are smaller, since they are only effects of much higher laws. They appear at isolated places and are the results of one-sided causes. The force that causes the milk in the poor woman’s little pot to surge up and overflow is the same one that drives up the lava in the firespewing mountain and makes it flow down the mountainsides. These phenomena are only more conspicuous and compel the gaze of the ignorant and inattentive toward themselves, while the mental process of the researcher tends primarily to the whole and the general and can recognize magnificence only in them, for they alone sustain the world. The details pass away and in a short time their effects can hardly still be recognized.61

In this often cited passage, Stifter performs a crucial inversion of the categories of the great and the small, the extraordinary and the ordinary, and does so by relating them not (as in Grillparzer) to each other, but to that which stands over the great and small alike. The powerful, violent expressions of nature—storms, lightning, volcanoes, earthquakes—are, in Stifter’s view, actually smaller than the small due to three factors: First, they are not great in themselves but are “effects of much higher laws.” That is, their greatness is not immanent but lies external to them. Second, their putative magnitude is measured by their effects (destroying houses, nations), whereas the greatness of small events lies precisely in their ability “to have an effect only through that which they are.”62 Great events need to leave a mark to appear as such, whereas small ones can simply be and in this being have their effect—their activity and essence are one (the air flows, the water ripples). Finally and most importantly, the overpowering phenomena of nature are small due to their infrequency and exceptional status. Much like Lessing’s discussion of the two Cleopatras (Corneille’s sublime heroine and his “completely common woman”), Stifter argues for greatness based not on exceptionality (power, strength, etc.) but on regularity. As Eric Downing has argued, Realism

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is determined by the figure of repetition; and, therefore, that which repeats itself most frequently is also the truly great insofar as the regular is the truer representative of and ingress into “how things are.” The common occurrences of nature possess a greater power than the exceptional precisely because the small events occur so often and have an effect by merely “being.” Akin to Grillparzer’s “invisible, unbroken thread,” Stifter does not argue that the great and the small adhere to different orders; rather, the natural force that drives the milk to boil over “is the same as” that which causes a volcano to erupt. If both the great and small are manifestations of the same “higher laws,” why does he privilege the small over the great, since they, too, are an effect of the same law? Why can’t thunder, an earthquake, or a volcano equally reveal the universal? Everything is a question of perception, of vision and thus the difference between what Stifter calls the “gaze of the ignorant and inattentive” and “the mental process of the researcher.” For Stifter, it is actually a rather mediocre gaze that allows itself to be taken in by what is simply “more conspicuous” [augenfälliger, literally, that which “falls into the eyes”]. The properly sublime form of vision attunes itself to quotidian life and is awestruck by its force of regularity.63 Stifter’s one example of the true “researcher’s mental process”—a singularity that raises it to exemplary status—is a man who every day, year in and year out, uses his compass at the exact same hour to observe the small oscillations of the needle pointing north, observations that he then collects in a book. While the ignorant gaze (attuned to the spectacular moments of nature) may take this for an almost dilettantish endeavor, as mere “playing around,”64 Stifter’s true observer notes with amazement that “these observations are really being made all over the world, and from tables compiled from them it is apparent that many little changes in the magnetized needle often occur at all points of the earth and to the same degree.”65 The protocols of research, which are equally the protocols of epigonic artistic production, come to light here and are essential for understanding Stifter’s method. First, the absolute regularity of the observation: the object is not a singular event, nor even a small specimen, but a mass of data assembled over years. Second, it is not the individual data in isolation that are revelatory, but only the tabulated and compared results that proceed from accumulation.66 That is, the small and seemingly insignificant in isolation is just that: small and insignificant. “In time the details pass away.”

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Unlike Büchner, Grillparzer, and many others, Stifter does not propose immersing oneself in the particular for a monadic or hermeneutic image of the whole; rather, only the cumulative force of such minor, individual observations reveals something remarkable: the magnet shiver that encompasses the world. An everyday occurrence is elevated here not for its monadic particularity, but for what it first reveals as an aggregate force. By collecting the common and then abstracting from it, one avoids Grillparzer’s implicit hierarchy of some nonfamous entities being more important, more interesting than others. Viewed as data, all everyday events are equally interesting and important. Stifter’s realist project also differs from his French counterpart Balzac, who famously describes himself in the preface to The Human Comedy (1842) as the “secretary” of French society. Such a social stenographer writes “the history forgotten by historians” by becoming “a more or less faithful, more or less felicitous, patient, or courageous painter of human types, the narrator of dramas of inner life, the archaeologist of social property, the namer of professions, the registrar of good and ill.”67 Like Grillparzer, Balzac wants to compose the lives of the nonfamous, but unlike Grillparzer, not in order to connect them to the lives of the famous as their hermeneutic key, but rather as a necessary supplement to the existing, canonical history. Balzac’s notion of Realism aims for a complete history, for an all-encompassing image of society. Stifter’s method, on the other hand, consists neither in a hermeneutic nor a historical investigation, but in the quasi-scientific attempt to assemble and tabulate data so as to uncover its underlying law. The gentle law, this “world-maintaining” power, may be atemporal, but its perception and deduction demands a patient adherence to the flow of time—days, months, years. Stifter can thus be seen as undertaking a crucial rewriting of Kant’s notion of the sublime. For Kant, the dynamic sublime occurs when the subject is faced with the same natural phenomena (as well as their destructive capacity) that Stifter dismisses as smaller than small. Kant writes in the Third Critique: Bold overhanging and, as it were, threatening cliffs, thunderclouds piled high in the sky and approaching with thunder and lightning, volcanoes in their completely destructive power, tornadoes with the destruction they have left behind, the ocean set into a rage, a powerful river’s high waterfall [. . .] we call these objects sublime, since they raise the powers of the soul above their ordinary measure [ihr gewöhnliches Mittelmaß].68

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Kant locates the sublime in the subject, when the imagination is confronted with a magnitude (mathematical sublime) or power (dynamic sublime) that exceeds its ability to simultaneously comprehend the object and forces it to recoil in impotence and failure. Reason, however, steps in and declares that it is not nature testing the limits of the imagination but reason itself. In the sublime, the imagination excels its “ordinary measure,” falls back on itself, and thereby learns the measure-giving power of reason. In his earlier text, “Solar Eclipse on July 8, 1842,” Stifter still agrees with Kant by locating the sublime in exceptional moments of nature and, in fact, explicitly rejects their calculability as a reason for their sublimity. In defending “the wondrous magic of the beauty that God gave to things,” Stifter maintains that one should not object to such extraordinary magnificence simply because a solar eclipse is “easily calculable via the laws of movement of [heavenly] bodies.” On the contrary, a solar eclipse’s beauty shines forth not because of but “despite the calculations.”69 Stifter ends “Solar Eclipse” with a crucial rhetorical question that a decade later will no longer be rhetorical but an expression of disbelief that such a question can even be posed: “Why do we notice God’s being less in natural laws, since they are also his wonders and creations, than when a sudden change, a disturbance of them occurs, where we, filled with terror, suddenly see Him standing before us?”70 With the preface to Multi-Colored Stones, Stifter radically alters, indeed inverts, this model by unequivocally positing the sublimity of the calculability of the small: from the perspective of the preface, to attribute a solar eclipse’s sublimity to “a sudden change” in natural law (which, it should be noted, isn’t a change or disturbance at all, but calculable) would amount to being fascinated by a “special effect” of nature. Such special effects distract one’s gaze from the true sublimity that can only be revealed in the repeated and largely calculable events of nature. The compass measurements become “awe inducing” [ehrfurchterregend] in the face of the overpowering realization that the same minor deviations are occurring simultaneously throughout the world. One can speak of a cumulative sublime of minutiae, a sublimity felt in the face of the mighty regularity of the world. Stifter therefore privileges the small and seemingly insignificant, since it is only the collective force of such quotidian minutiae—meticulously observed, recorded, and calculated—that offers a negative presentation of the infinite, of the law that stands over the exception and

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the norm alike. What is sublime is regularity itself, particularly the calculability of “the many small changes,” which for Stifter’s “ignorant gaze” would seem to contest such ordered deviations. In Stifter’s sublime, the negative insight into the “world-maintaining” gentle law occurs, then, not through the putatively grand—which as a deviation from the norm is rather insignificant—nor through the small in isolation, but through the sheer force of regularity that is best witnessed in infinitely repeated and thus normative occurrences. The ability to see this, however, requires the nonquotidian skill to observe what cannot be perceived as such.

Perceptions of the Unperceivable If both the exceptional and the ordinary in their isolation are insignificant, then Stifter’s poetics of vision is, as Downing underscores, “not about vision at all, or only in the second place,”71 and this for the simple reason that the true object of inquiry is not something that can be seen or perceived. If Grillparzer follows the invisible thread between the famous and nonfamous via a hermeneutics of part and whole, Stifter’s preface does not display an interest in individual phenomena per se, whether great or small, but rather in what subtends but is ultimately exterior to both. The collective force of the small is simply the access to it. The question then becomes: how does one see the invisible? Just as one cannot see light, one has no eye for magnetic fields. Even though we do not have a “corporeal eye” for such “immeasurable events,” we do have “the spiritual [eye] of science, and this teaches us that the electrical and magnetic power acts upon a monstrous stage.”72 Empirical vision is, then, ultimately only a means to an end, to a higher form of (mental or spiritual) vision, just as the small only serves a greater end: revealing the whole and universal. In espousing scientific observation, Stifter is wholly cognizant of its limits: But because science only secures grain upon grain, only makes observation on top of observation, only compiles [zusammen trägt] the universal out of the particular, and finally because the mass of phenomena and the field of data is infinitely large—God has thus made the joy and bliss of research inexhaustible—we, too, can represent only the particular in our workshops, never the universal, for this would be creation.73

The scientific perspective only consists in individual observations that, even when brought together, never add up to the universal. One can

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and must abstract the universal from the particular data, but only as an approximation. Even the slow, patient gaze of the scientist runs up against its finitude in the face of an infinite project. In reading this passage, Downing arrives at the central issue at stake in Stifter’s desire to perceive the “whole” and “universal”: “As both scientist and realist artist the investigator sees only discrete, unconnected pieces and fragments without immanent, intrinsic meaning or connection. [. . .] From within the realist’s empirical sphere itself, there is no general lawgiving or meaning-giving reality.”74 This issue touches upon the crucial dilemma in Stifter’s thought, which extends to the potential problem of Stifter’s method: if one can “represent only the particular [. . .] never the universal,” there may be no way of getting beyond the piecemeal work of the empirical investigator, who due to finite limits can only observe, tabulate, and calculate isolated phenomena. As with Grillparzer’s invocation of the invisible, unbroken thread, the individual pieces only make sense if they are truly held together. How is one then to arrive at the universal law from discrete, limited data? How can Stifter deduce or presuppose the “gentle law,” if one has no access to it? Stifter’s admission that the true researcher only collects fragments seems to disavow the very significance-lending function that would enable his realist project to succeed, that is, to reveal the universal from the accumulated data. Downing concludes that this threat of a missing whole results in Stifter’s science actually being dressed-up theology: “God supplies the missing unity, or rather Stifter supplies God to supply the missing unity and law—the law of unity—which guarantee that the pieces and fragments function as pieces and fragments, as signifiers of a common but empirically absent reality. [. . .] Realism becomes a matter not of scientifically recording what is there but of religiously believing in what is not.”75 For Downing, Stifter has to rely on God as an original supplement or supplement for the missing origin not only to hold together the disparate phenomena, but more importantly to lend significance to what otherwise is a series of random events. Stifter’s poetics of the gentle law would then be ultimately held together by belief. This interpretation, however, is only implicit in Stifter’s text. This is not to say that Stifter wasn’t rather conservative in his religious belief,76 but in this text God does not function ex verbis as the supplement to the missing unity nor does the divine bestow meaning; in fact, the one thing God does here (if he does anything) is make the task of science infinite and, therefore, guarantee that its joy—the

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joy of discovering the hidden—will be inexhaustible. God doesn’t guarantee knowledge, but the impossibility of its completion.77 As long as the whole isn’t completely discovered (which it never will be), there may be no realized whole, and Stifter’s mentioning of God doesn’t change this. But given that the “gentle law” in nature is deduced from a series of tabulated individual measurements of small phenomena (as the example of the magnet field and the “field of data” attest), there is another possible explanation, another way of seeing the gentle law: to view the gentle law as analogous to statistical probability, in which a large enough field of data performs the awe-inspiring feat of organizing itself into a coherent, normal distribution.

The Statistical Law In statistics, when enough data has been accumulated and tabulated, one can note the sublime regularity that determines natural phenomena (average temperature, rainfall, or terrestrial magnetism)78 and predict with astonishing precision how, on the whole, the general tendencies of nature will be. This regularity in no way precludes the seemingly exceptional event—tornado, thunderstorm, hurricane, and so forth—but as exceptions they fall on the far, small ends of the bell curve and, from a statistical perspective, are both marginal and accounted for in the law of averages. The statistical bell curve, therefore, might help explain Stifter’s predilection for the norm over the exception, since the exception (or the large deviation) plays a minor role in statistical regularity. Hence, Stifter can discount the exceptional as smaller than the small because with respect to the underlying law of regularity, the large exception, precisely due to its deviation from the norm, is indeed (statistically) irrelevant—accounted for but not significant in the final count. While Stifter studied mathematics and physics and successfully completed a course on statistics,79 this is not to suggest that he immediately applies statistical thought in the gentle law. Rather, statistical thought belonged to the discourse of the time, a discourse that Stifter was well aware of and that, together with his defense of the middle versus extremes, offers a moment of clear structural overlap. Moreover, Stifter does not merely allude to scientific data collection in the preface but mobilizes it as the foundation for his method and argument (however precarious this will turn out to be). The suggestion that Stifter’s notion of the gentle law bears similarities to statistics’ normal

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distribution also helps to elucidate one of the more tendentious instances of doubling and repetition in the text: the mapping of the gentle law as a natural force onto the human, social sphere. “Just as it is in external nature,” writes Stifter in an apparently abrupt transition, “so is it also in the inner nature of the human race.”80 This resemblance between the natural and social worlds (i.e., the laws of nature and those of human behavior) is one of the more astounding and debated elements of Stifter’s realist theory. Stifter, however, is fully in line with the thought of his time. In 1835 the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet published A Treatise on Man, his pathbreaking study on statistical regularity in human behavior. Eighteen years before Stifter, Quetelet claims that the regularity in natural phenomena can also be observed in human actions: It would appear, then, that moral phenomena, when observed on a great scale, are found to resemble physical phenomena; and thus we arrive, in inquiries of this kind, at the fundamental principle, that the greater the number of individuals observed, the more do individual peculiarities, whether physical or moral, become effaced, and leave in a prominent point of view the general facts, by virtue of which society exists and is preserved.81

Quetelet’s postulate of a “resemblance” between moral and physical phenomena clearly sets the stage for Stifter’s repetition of the natural and social gentle law. Moreover, Quetelet does not rely on God as meaning-giving instance; he, too, evokes God but does so to declare that it would be an “injustice to the Creative Power” not to suppose that “whilst all is regulated by such admirable laws, man’s existence alone should be capricious, and possessed of no conservative principle.”82 As in Stifter’s example of the compass measurements and tabulations, regularity—and thus meaning—appears for Quetelet solely on a “great scale.” God does not lend meaning or offer regularity where there seems to be none; rather, the apparently chaotic, individual data organizes itself into a regular distribution. Following the law of large numbers, “individual peculiarities” (i.e., deviations and exceptions) can be effaced to reveal what “preserves” society as a whole. In the end, Stifter, like Quetelet, elevates the small and ordinary—not, however, as ends in themselves, but rather for the perspective they open up when collected, tabulated, and processed: the sublimity of regularity. With the rise of statistics in the late seventeenth century, discussions of humanity with respect to the individual slowly gave way to probabilities, expectancies, and risk factors that are first determined by the

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accumulation and averaging of a large data pool. This data-fication83 of the human reached the point of a paradigm shift by 1830: “By around 1830 l’homme éclairé had given way to l’homme moyen.”84 Quetelet coined the term l’homme moyen or “the average man” in 183185 to designate the statistical conglomerate—derived from a given society’s birth rates, height, weight, life expectancy, crime rates, education, and so forth—that crystallizes the tendencies of a society. As the product of a series of numbers and data, Quetelet’s average man is the modern numerical “everyman,” who is at once no one, since no one person will meet the measure of the average. The average man, according to Quetelet, “is a fictitious being, for whom everything proceeds conformably to the medium results obtained for society in general.”86 Quetelet’s average man thereby embodies a paradox: precisely as a fiction—as the aggregated average of society’s tendencies—the average man is more real, more representative of society than any real person can ever be. Despite being averageness personified, l’homme moyen does not mark for Quetelet the lowest common denominator but the social incarnation of Aristotle’s notion of the mean—the perfect balance and ideal of a society.87 Therefore, if the Enlightenment designated the individual as the seat of reason, the emergent field of statistics displaced the locus of ratio from the subject to the social body. Even when the individual does not or cannot follow the dictates of reason, society as a whole (represented by the average man) displays a remarkable regularity and predictability, which forms a sort of universal rationality in the midst of otherwise individual irrationality. For statistics, the chaos of individual information or action recedes when enough data is collected and viewed in the proper perspective. It is precisely this structure of rationality (i.e., predictable regularity) emerging from a vast amount of individual, seemingly capricious data that links Stifter’s thought on the gentle law as a social force to the ascendance of statistical thinking and, in particular, to what Quetelet variously calls “social statistics,” “social physics,” and “moral statistics.” Quetelet’s insight lay in noticing that not only such natural, even occurrences like birth and death rates demonstrate an astonishing regularity, but so do voluntary actions such as marriage, suicide, and murder—which, when viewed from the perspective of free will, should not follow a calculable probability but should fluctuate considerably. With enough data, however, a large aggregate of social behavior, including voluntary acts, will fall into a normal distribution. The tools that allow one to describe rainfall, the earth’s magnetic field, and

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the like are also those that offer insights into social behavior on a large scale. Stifter himself describes the progress of scientific thought as moving away from the exceptional and slowly becoming aware that greatness lies elsewhere. Immediately following the sentence that we “can only represent the particular in our workshops, never the universal,” Stifter writes: “The history of what is great in nature has also consisted in a permanent change of perspectives on this greatness. [. . .] [A]s their [human’s] senses were opened, when they began to direct their attention to the connection [Zusammenhang], the particular phenomena sank ever deeper and the law ascended ever higher.”88 The path of history as the path of its conception follows a trajectory from the great to the ordinary and from the ordinary to the higher law organizing it all. While the law for Stifter does not change, mankind’s limited, finite access to it—and thus the law’s conceptualization—certainly does.89 Eventually, all “particular phenomena sink” in importance in favor of the “connection” of things, the patterns and distribution of events, which make one aware of an “invisible” law. Quetelet shares this method of collecting diverse phenomena in order to arrive at a logic or law governing its connection. Without appealing to history, Quetelet equally maintains that the law first reveals itself when one abstracts from the infinite sense data and gains an overall picture: “By removing oneself still further from the object, the individual loses sight of the individual points, no longer observes any accidental or odd arrangements among them, but discovers at once the law presiding over their general arrangements.”90 Both Quetelet and Stifter look for the “law” that governs the otherwise chaotic, manifold phenomena of everyday life. Therefore, as with Grillparzer, Stifter seeks the nexus, the set of relations that inheres and holds together apparently disparate phenomena. Whereas Grillparzer, however, delves into the particularity of the obscure to discover the monadic relation of connection, Stifter’s “Preface” relegates even the individual to the greater connection between things—the law that holds it all together, the great and the small.

How Gentle Is the Gentle Law? This is not to claim an identity between Stifter ’s gentle law and Quetelet’s social statistics. As will become clear, great differences emerge. For now, two crucial moments of overlap should be highlighted that help elucidate what Stifter wants to achieve with the analogy

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between data collection and the gentle law in the ethical sphere. First, both Stifter and Quetelet map the physical onto the social thereby rendering Stifter’s putatively remarkable doubling not all that remarkable from the perspective of statistical thought. Second, both rely on the law of large numbers to efface individual exceptions and to provide a model of ordered regularity. As the number of instances increase, the collected data follow the pattern of a regular distribution, in which “normal” behavior—small, repeated, and generally nonexceptional events—clusters around the center, and individual idiosyncrasies or deviations fade into the margins. In other words, by collecting enough individual data a pattern emerges that at once effaces exceptions and offers an image of society or nature in its regularity. In Stifter’s case, this preponderance of the normal results in seeing the moral or social phenomena of wrath and revenge (extremes, exceptions) as akin to earthquakes and volcanoes, just as mastering oneself and reasonableness are small, daily, and barely noticeable events like grain growing and stars twinkling. The destructive power of wrath and revenge is, again, smaller than the small, “because these things are as much products of individual and one-sided forces.” While Stifter also dismisses tornadoes and earthquakes, “because they are the results of one-sided causes,” he does not additionally declare that destructive human emotions and social acts are “the effects of much higher laws” (as he does with the correlated natural phenomena). This raises the crucial question of whether wrath and revenge adhere to the same “gentle law” as mild, imperceptible, sustaining human acts. The passage in which he delineates the difference between violent, destructive acts and those “sustaining humanity” is admittedly not easy to interpret: There are forces that aim for the survival [Bestehen] of the individual. They take and use everything that is necessary for their own existence and development. They secure the survival [Bestand] of one and thus of all. But if someone unconditionally grabs everything that his being needs for himself, if he destroys the conditions of another’s being, then something higher grows angry in us; we help the weak and oppressed, we restore the state of affairs. [. . .] There are, therefore, forces that work toward the existence [Bestehen] of humanity as a whole, forces that may not be limited by individual forces, indeed, that, on the contrary, have a limiting effect on them.91

Stifter seems to posit two forces at odds: the forces aiming for individual survival versus those directed toward the survival of humanity as a whole. As such, his mapping of the natural gentle law onto the social

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gentle law appears to collapse under the weight of its own contradiction, since it is precisely the universality of the law (which should account for great and small, the exception and the norm alike) that lends it its meaning-giving function.92 If the two forces—call them the individualistic and the altruistic—arise from different sources, there can be no unity, no coherence, and thus no gentle law in a double respect: first, there would be no one law governing the natural and social alike and, second, there would be no single ethical law that accounts for both destructive and preserving acts. Stifter, however, describes the individualistic force as simultaneously working toward the “survival of one and thus of all.” It is only when (“Aber wenn . . .”) this force lapses into a one-sidedness that “unconditionally” works for its own survival and thus “destroys” another being that one can speak of a destructive force—but then only as a permutation of this same force when it works for the survival “of one and thus of all.” As in Goethe’s notion of a “balanced measure,” it is one-sidedness that leads to a derailment of equilibrium between working for oneself and others in one gesture. The bigger issue—and ultimately the stumbling block—for Stifter’s explication of the gentle law in social interaction (as opposed to in natural phenomena) lies not in deviations from the law, but in the response to such destructive one-sidedness. On the one hand, Stifter declares that “something higher in us grows angry,” which points to the “higher law” naturally and spontaneously asserting itself. In this view, when some deviate from and oppose the gentle law, the majority naturally counteracts to defend and uphold the law, driven it seems by the law itself. If this is the case, the law will always sustain and assert itself, a point Stifter explicitly makes: “The power [Gewalt] of this law of right and morality [dieses Rechts- und Sittengesetzes] is so great that wherever it has been fought, it has always walked away from the battle victorious and glorious.”93 From this perspective, the gentle law is a metaphysical constant throughout history, a description of what “guides the human race.”94 Such a teleological principle, it should be noted, is not entirely foreign to earlier, largely eighteenth-century conceptualizations of statistical thought. In “Idea for a Universal History” (1784), Kant appeals to the regularity in marriage, birth, and death in order to hopefully “discover a natural intention in this absurd course of human things” and, thus, perhaps a telos to history, a definite plan “for creatures who have no plan of their own”:95

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As deeply hidden as its causes may be, history [. . .] allows us to hope that if history observes the play of freedom of the human will on the whole, it may be able to discern a regular course in it, and what seems complex and irregular in the single subject may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steadily progressing, though slow development of its original dispositions.96

While Kant doesn’t come across here as the greatest admirer of humanity and its ability to progress in history, it is precisely statistical regularity emerging from free (i.e., unpredictable) will that offers hope for a providential force guiding the whole, while the individual remains inscrutable. As Theodore Porter underscores, Kant (following Süßmilch) still views statistical regularity as “indicating divine wisdom and planning,” as pointing to a certain divine ordinance and direction to history, which is only revealed when human will is viewed on the whole.97 On the other hand, and opposed to this teleological description of human history, Stifter remarks later in the preface that entire populations can and do lapse into a universal one-sidedness that leads to the downfall of nations: “Measure is the first thing that disappears in peoples in decline.”98 This emphasis on measure and, in particular, on the possibility that a whole nation can lose its measure means that the gentle law doesn’t always maintain itself, much less humanity. After declaring the law “always victorious,” Stifter admits that at times individual people or whole nations meet their demise for the sake of defending the law. He tries to rescue this failure of the law to “maintain” humanity by appealing to a tragic-sublime feeling that views the vanquished as actually not “defeated” but “triumphant” because they fought for the whole. The point nevertheless remains: the law does not always hold and holds no guarantees. From this opposed perspective, the gentle law is not a descriptive but a prescriptive law, that is, a moral imperative—a demand for how one ought to act and, thus, constantly in danger of being violated and neglected. Therefore, it is the human response to the law’s transgression that lays bare the lack of clarity in Stifter’s notion of the gentle law. Why does one uphold and fight for the law? Because the law steers and, as it were, guides human action on the whole, despite deviations, as a teleological form of providence? Or simply because the law is a prescriptive, moral law that commands such behavior? Either interpretation parts ways with Stifter’s initial description of scientific method, which compiles the universal from disparate, individual data. When it

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comes to the human sphere, the gentle law is no longer discovered through the observation, collection, and tabulation of a discrete “field of data” but arrives and is imposed from above. Ultimately, Stifter wants a metaphysical atemporal law that indeed determines the whole of human action (e.g., “something higher in us grows angry”) but can only advocate for a moral imperative, a “moral law” in the social sphere. That the gentle law is not a description of history but rather a veiled appeal (i.e., may something higher in us grow angry) is clear when one reads the ensuing declaration that entire nations can and do collapse as a result of a loss of measure—a danger that amounts to a pressing anxiety for Stifter. Stifter’s paradigmatic example of such national-historic ruin is the Romans, whom he discusses in a series of essays collected as “Vom Recht” (1850, “On Right”). For Stifter, the Romans slowly surrendered to their sensual depravity and “thus the great empire sank ever deeper into softness and addiction to pleasure.”99 In this text written a few years before the preface, Stifter even admonishes contemporary Europe for tending toward the same one-sidedness as the Romans. Conjuring the specter of unnamed “wild peoples” from Middle Asia, Stifter warns that Europe, too, could repeat Rome’s demise if it remains “foolish, amoral, soft, feminine, and non-united.”100 Leaving aside the rather hair-raising politics of this passage, the issue remains: If humans must fight to maintain a balance in the face of one-sidedness and therefore can always succumb to a universal loss of measure, then the gentle law in human interaction does not sustain humanity; rather, and more emphatically, humanity must repeatedly try to sustain the gentle law, which depletes it of its sublime regularity and relation to scientific method. Ultimately, the gentle law for human behavior is simply a moral imperative dressed up as statistical regularity. It is at this juncture that the resemblance between the natural and the social spheres breaks down: that which maintains the world can also fall apart—and therefore it never existed as a universal law in the first place. This threat of collapse is Stifter’s great anxiety, a dread expressed in Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.101

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Stifter, it goes without saying, is an advocate of the middle and mean, a writer who sees his job as fending off and effacing extremes, particularly political extremes such as revolutions, in favor of the slow rhythm of the inauspicious everyday. Therefore, the goal of his poetics lies in prosaic reality itself, in affirming and stabilizing its nonheroic, nonexceptional normality.

The Art of Prosaic Reality It is only after Stifter has (more than precariously) mapped the gentle law of nature onto that of social interaction that he explicitly mentions art—this in a preface to a collection of short stories. The belatedness in arriving at literature raises at least two questions: First, why does the gentle law need literature at all, that is, what does literature do for or how can it reveal the gentle law? Second, what is the relation—however precarious or implied—between literature, scientific method, and the gentle law? Given Stifter’s demotion of the exceptional and one-sided in favor of the small, it comes as no surprise that he is not interested in the heroic genres of epic and tragedy, even when it means meeting one’s demise by defending the gentle law. Rather, Stifter preaches an art of regularity, an art that attunes itself to and records like a compass needle the silent, slow, almost imperceptible repetition of the everyday. Hence, he rejects both tragedy and epic—as exceptional and onesided—in favor of events that recur according to the rhythm of daily life: But no matter how powerfully [gewaltig] and in what great traits the tragic and the epic have an effect, no matter how excellent they are as levers in art, it is generally always the ordinary, everyday, and countlessly recurring human activities in which this law lies most securely as their center of gravity, since these activities are lasting and founding; they are, as it were, the millions of tiny roots of the tree of life.102

This passage is remarkable because it all but declares tragedy and epic to provide better subject matter for art than prose (Stifter’s exclusive métier), which means that more than beauty or aesthetic effect is at stake in Stifter’s reflections on literature. If tragedy and epic make for better art but do not belong to Stifter’s privileged genres (since they feature exceptional figures furthest removed from the center), then Stifter—in a revised version of normative aesthetics—proposes a poet-

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ics of the normal. Like Lessing, Stifter professes a literature of the completely common—without, however, a tragic conflict and end. And in advocating a literature of everyday acts in their countless repetitions, Stifter follows Heinrich Heine’s rejection of idealizing aesthetics—not, however, to expressly engage the first world so as to change it; rather, Stifter raises everyday life to his art because prosaic reality as it is constitutes for him the actual art of the world, what maintains and preserves it. Here Stifter ’s thought on literature remains aligned with statistics: it is precisely the small, ordinary, and recurrent acts that, in their collective force, are at once sublime and preserving. Therefore, Stifter implies that prosaic reality should enter poetry as poetry’s ideal. One needs poetry not to idealize or to offer an alternative to the prose of the world but to affirm it. Whereas Wilhelm Meister’s renunciation of his dilettantish artistic practice allows an affirmation of one’s prosaic soul in the service of poetry, Stifter mobilizes poetry to preserve prosaic reality itself. This inversion of the hierarchy between poetry and prose, the exception and the quotidian, has wide-reaching consequences. The conservative political tenor (in the literal sense of conserving things) has been elegantly delineated by Downing and others. Stifter himself situates the preface in light of “the events of the past years,” which is generally interpreted as the failed revolutions of 1848.103 If there was ever an author of repute who went to great lengths to defend the meaty part of the bell curve and a notion of moderation as a societal, collective ideal, it was Stifter. As Helena Ragg-Kirkby underscores, moderation paradoxically becomes a mania for Stifter.104 Moreover, given that the gentle law in human interaction is ultimately neither the cumulative effect of human action (i.e., a statistical description of society) nor a delineation of human history’s necessary course (i.e., a teleological principle) but a fragile moral imperative, literature should affirm prosaic ordinariness as a bulwark against the disturbances to normality that arise from “poetic”—nonquotidian, nonconforming—acts. Because there probably cannot be a truly statistical literature—one that aggregates a vast pool of data—Stifter’s literary practice, therefore, approaches Büchner and Grillparzer in “penetrating the feelings of the obscure.” The desired outcome of this investment in the ordinary is, however, not to trace the thread of hermeneutic understanding but to present exemplary figures drawn from putatively ordinary life. For Stifter, poetry (in the metaphorical sense of exceptional, worldchanging acts) is potentially destructive because it is an unpredictable,

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original, and originating force, whereas prosaic normality preserves and maintains by offering nothing different. One can speak in Stifter of the desire for an exemplarity of unadorned mediocrity itself, of prosaic reality in its “countless” repetitions. One story from Multi-Colored Stones serves as a perfect example of Stifter’s attempt to render mediocrity itself exemplary: Limestone (1853, Kalkstein). This story is chosen for two reasons: first, because in many ways it is a rewriting of and response to Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician, an elective affinity reflected in the story’s original title Der arme Wohltäter (1847, The Poor Benefactor);105 and, second, because it is precisely the differences between the two stories that reveal the dilemmas of trying to raise unadorned ordinary life to an exemplary status. Limestone begins, as is to be expected, under the dictates of the gentle law: “I relate a story here that a friend once told us, in which nothing out of the ordinary [nichts Ungewöhnliches] occurs and yet I have not been able to forget it.”106 This opening line presents the full paradox of Stifter’s project of elevating unadorned prosaic reality—what countlessly repeats itself—to poetry: If nothing unusual happens and, thus, if the events of the story are interchangeable with any other quotidian events, how can they be unforgettable? What sets them apart that renders them memorable? Or, expressed in terms of exemplarity: how can that which is claimed to be absolutely ordinary be a model for imitation? In his Ästhetik des Häßlichen (1853, Aesthetics of the Ugly), Karl Rosenkranz underscores the problem of the aesthetic representability of the common or ordinary in terms familiar from Hegel, Schiller, and others: “But as that which is present in multiple examples and doesn’t stand out in any way, the ordinary [das Gewöhnliche] is aesthetically meaningless. It lacks a characterizing individualization. [. . .] The frequency of its repetition, the extent of its copious existence renders the ordinary blasé, since a second example is a mere tautology and lacks the allure of newness.”107 If the ruse of Realism—and one of its defining characteristics—is to deny its art (in favor of its claim to be reality), the additional ruse of Stifter’s realism is to act as if the ordinary itself were unforgettable, aesthetically interesting, and thereby worthy of art. In The Poor Musician, Grillparzer skirts this dilemma by foregrounding a process of selection, in which not all common, nonfamous lives attract the narrator’s interest. Only the uncommonly common, the doubly obscure, whets his anthropological hunger and offers the hermeneutic key to the great and small alike. The narrator of Limestone

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seems to recognize this dilemma—the dilemma of Stifter’s art—and complicates the status of this “nothing out of the ordinary” in the very next line: “Among ten listeners there will be nine who reproach the man who appears in the story; the tenth person will think about him often.”108 The narrator posits an opposition not between the unforgettable and the forgettable (which would seem to more adequately characterize the everyday), but between the unforgettable and the annoying. Both possible reactions raise the supposedly ordinary to what one could call “hyperordinary”: something one cannot not emotionally respond to, whether it is in the form of attraction (10 percent) or repulsion (90 percent). The very logic of this calculation defies the putative ordinariness—the interchangeability and repetitive nature—of the story’s main character. In its characters, events, and plotline, Limestone is remarkably similar to The Poor Musician. A narrator meets a curious but common figure in the sparsely populated backlands, a Catholic priest who seems to pose a hermeneutic riddle: the priest’s abject poverty that he literally wears on his back coupled with his fetish for fine white linen undergarments that peek out from under his threadbare black robes. As in Grillparzer, the narrator cedes a great portion of the story to the pastor’s direct narration (though here without the narrator’s compulsion), whose personal history ends up being rather identical to Jakob’s (excluding the family drama and rejection): the pastor is the son of a powerful business man; a slow learner compared to his more intelligent twin brother, the pastor fails at his studies and moves into the backroom of the house, while his brother takes over the family business upon the father’s death; finally, the business fails and the brother dies, leaving the protagonist broke. Whereas Jakob picks up the violin to fulfill his life purpose, the unnamed protagonist becomes a priest. Just as the poor musician’s passion for music can be traced back to his love for a lower-class woman singing a popular song outside his window, the pastor’s fetish for fine white linen is intimately tied to his one failed love object: the daughter of a washwoman, who hung such fine linen for her upper-class clients and wore them herself. The dissonance between the threadbare and the exquisite, however, does not constitute the hermeneutic drive of Limestone. Unlike Jakob, the unnamed priest is not uncommonly common, nor is he selected because he stands apart from other common figures. Although the priest’s “uncommon poverty constantly crosses” the narrator’s mind, and although he is astonished that the priest “wore the finest and most

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beautiful linen,”109 Stifter’s narrator ultimately isn’t driven by “anthropological ravenousness.” Referring to the fine white linen, the narrator comments: “Since he never alluded to the matter, it need hardly be said that I did not mention it either.”110 Without a dissonance or question of connection propelling it forward, Limestone gains its force by what doesn’t happen or, rather, what happens imperceptibly but only is revealed at the end. Limestone takes place over several decades, with long periods of interruption and noncontact between the narrator—a land surveyor— and the pastor. One cannot speak of highlights, tension, turns, or much suspense occurring in the story. For the vast majority of the narrative, not only does nothing out of the ordinary occur, nothing much occurs at all. Not trying to hermeneutically decipher the priest, the narrator seems to be driven by genuine friendship. In the decades of their relationship—largely defined by distance—two encounters are described in detail: The first is their shared experience of a powerful storm that floods the local Zirder River. The storm is presented as an exception that, through observation and its resulting knowledge, can be seen as occurring in congruence with the gentle law of nature, its regular rhythm: “What a storm! Such an uproar is caused by the most tender, the softest elements of nature. [. . .] And once the downpour is over and the air has been thoroughly mingled, the sky is soon there again in its purity and clarity, often on the next day, ready to absorb the vapors that will be produced by the heat, and the process slowly repeats itself.”111 The one “less pleasant” effect of the storm is the flooding of the river, which poses a threat to the children from the neighboring village who must cross the river on their way to school and whom the priest and narrator help across the high water. The second detailed encounter takes place many years later, after the priest falls ill and requests that the narrator keep a copy of his will, upon which the priest narrates his life story as described above. At the end of his life story—told with virtuosity equal to Jakob’s—the priest declares: “In this house I began saving money for a purpose,”112 a purpose that isn’t revealed immediately but becomes clear a few pages later when (after many more intervening years) the priest dies and the testament is opened. From the last will one learns that the priest had been saving what little money he could spare. The goal of this regular investment—often of pennies—was to build an endowed schoolhouse for the children from the neighboring village so that they would not have to cross the Zirder when it flooded. Everyone, writes the priest at the beginning of

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his will, “should find or search for something that he has to perform,”113 and the priest’s life mission was to save the children from this danger. The cumulative force of the priest’s life savings, however, doesn’t amount to much, and nowhere near enough. The amount saved, including the sale of the priest’s possessions after his death, is cataloged by the narrator under the rubric of an ever-increasing notion of “not enough”: The sum saved by the pastor together with the amount taken in by auctioning his possessions were all told far too small to have founded a school. They were even too small to build a mid-size schoolhouse, as was common in the area, much less a schoolhouse with classrooms and living quarters for the teachers, not to mention securing the salaries of the teachers and compensating the existing teachers.114

Were Limestone to end here, the priest’s lifetime of renunciation would have been well intentioned but in vain. Expressed in terms of The Poor Musician: if the story were concerned only with hermeneutic understanding, with “penetrating the feelings of the obscure,” this tragiccomic end of the pastor would more than suffice to comprehend the nexus between the priest’s poverty and his purpose. Just as Jakob dives into the flooded Danube to save a neighbor’s unnecessary tax papers and dies from the resulting illness, the priest would have given his life, albeit for a nobler purpose, but not reached his goal and expired with little effect. Rather bitterly one could say “nothing out of the ordinary.” Limestone, however, doesn’t end at understanding; its realist intention doesn’t lie in a hermeneutics of the obscure, but rather in offering a model of exemplarity drawn from supposedly ordinary life. Parting ways with Grillparzer, Limestone concludes with a final twist—in fact, the only real twist to the story—that borders on kitsch. The priest’s life project succeeds in having an effect, for when word of it spreads, the wealthy locals are inspired to contribute the remaining money to realize his last will: “As the matter of the testament and its insufficiency became known, the well-off and the rich from the area immediately came together and underwrote an amount that appeared sufficient to be able to execute all of the priest’s intentions. And if more was necessary, each declared himself willing to make an additional payment.”115 Whereas Jakob departs with little fanfare (except, of course, Barbara’s tears), the priest leaves his mark. Out of failure springs success, and the narrator explains why: “But just as evil is always intrinsically purposeless and has no effect on the plans of the world, while goodness bears fruit, even when begun with inadequate means, so, too, was the

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case here.”116 This grand claim—spoken with the authority of the gentle law as a metaphysical constant117—perhaps explains what the narrator means when he states that “nothing out of the ordinary” occurs in Limestone: From the metaphysical perspective of goodness’s purported eternal victory, the success of the priest was guaranteed and thus utterly ordinary. The only thing that would have been out of the ordinary would have been if the priest’s purpose hadn’t “bore fruit.” In what amounts to a banal platitude, goodness is the ordinary itself. All it apparently needs are the right exempla, examples drawn from humble, everyday life—a status the priest clearly achieves postmortem, as evinced by the response of the rich as well as the story’s last line: “And many people will stand in front of his grave with a feeling that was not dedicated to the priest while he lived.”118 If Lessing raises common life to the heart of tragedy yet divorces exemplarity from imitation, since the mere capacity to suffer along with other common people renders one exemplary; and if Goethe declares nonexceptional artists exemplary only when they renounce the desire to be exceptional; and finally, if Grillparzer locates the exemplarity of the obscure in their hermeneutic difficulty and not in their imitability, then Stifter delineates in Limestone a rather traditional notion of exemplarity in which literature offers models of “good, simple lives” for imitation—all, one could say, in the service of the law. Since the supposedly world-maintaining law is itself in need of maintenance, the function of literature vis-à-vis the gentle law is to provide exemplary, everyday heroes who can inspire others to conform to the law. The paradox of the priest’s supposed “ordinariness” returns, however, when one recalls the opening lines’ calculation of how most listeners will respond: if the good always bears fruit, if the good, like the priest, is “nothing out of the ordinary,” why do 90 percent take offense at him upon hearing the story? The vast majority, it seems, don’t view him as exemplary—or, at best, see him as a negative exemplum— whether due to his fetish for white linen or, far more likely, due to his squirreling away pennies without a realistic sense of just how much money would be necessary for his life task. The narrator doesn’t leave the latter unnoted: “It lay in the priest’s nature that he didn’t understand worldly matters and had to be robbed three times before he invested his savings.”119 The fact that the narrator expresses the reader’s reaction in terms of probability recasts the relation between an art of the ordinary and scientific method. As with Lessing’s two Cleopatras, Stifter presents Lime-

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stone as a question of probability, but unlike Lessing it is a probability not of presented reality but of the reader’s emotive response to this presented reality. The frame in realist literature generally serves to create the effect of the real by contending the reported authenticity of what is to come. This is also the case in Limestone, since the narrator presents the priest’s story as “once told” to him by a friend. But whereas the earlier version, The Poor Benefactor, mobilizes a form of hyperreality by declaring that the friend’s story needed some literary polishing to work as a story (though the “facts” remain the same),120 Limestone excises this extra appeal to the story’s veracity and thematizes instead its probable effect on the reader, its degree of felt ordinariness: statistically, 90 percent will view the priest as reproachful and thus all but ordinary; only 10 percent will think of him in positive terms. Therefore, it is as if Stifter recognizes the incongruence in his presentation of the gentle law—between its scientific and moral tendencies—and has the narrator mobilize probability to highlight just how “out of the ordinary” the pastor and his project are, despite the simultaneous declaration of his ordinariness. This repetition and open admission of a discrepancy, in which numbers run counter to morality (since the priest is the embodiment of goodness), allows one to read Stifter’s gentle law in a different light. Limestone doesn’t merely claim to present reality (which, like Corneille’s Cleopatra, can be at once exceptional and historically real), but regular, ordinary reality, for here both the gentle law and goodness are said to abide. The narrator’s reference to the probable effect of this reality undermines, however, both its ordinariness and the efficacy of the gentle law as embodied by the priest. Based on the narrator’s calculation, the priest cannot be the norm; in fact, it is only by virtue of his unusualness that he gains his exemplary status. The priest’s exceptional status means several things for Stifter’s project of aspiring to elevate prosaic reality to poetry itself. First, as that which doesn’t stand out, prosaic reality in and of itself cannot be exemplary for the aesthetic reasons outlined by Rosenkranz; exemplarity, like art, demands a “characterizing individuality.” It is as if the narrator has to highlight the priest’s probable, divisive effect to justify why the story is worth relating in the first place. Second, and far more decisive for Stifter’s own work: The ultimate ruse of Stifter’s realism is not that unadorned ordinariness is worthy of art, but rather that the unusual is somehow usual, as gentle and normal as the law itself. By the narrator’s own admission, the gentle law, the law of goodness finds a receptive audience

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in a small percentage of society, which means that it is not the norm that upholds and embodies the law; rather the rare, exceptional, and out of the ordinary do so. The law, in other words, is to be found not in the dead center and regular occurrences of society, but in its margins and in the minority.121 Hence its fragility, its need of maintenance. Therefore, from the perspective of Limestone, Stifter’s evocation of a literature of the gentle law can indeed be read as the literary revelation of what lies hidden from sight—not, however, in the intended sense of the invisible, world-preserving force that is first “seen” in the sublimity of regularity. Rather, Stifter’s realism is the literary revelation of what hides and maintains itself in the margins, deviations, and exceptions. Against Stifter’s will and for the sake of the gentle law, it is a realism of the irregular and out of the ordinary.

Conclusion

There is no greater consolation for mediocrity than the thought that genius is not immortal. Goethe, Elective Affinities1 The Madness of Superior Minds.—Superior minds have trouble freeing themselves from a particular madness: they think that they arouse jealousy among the mediocre and are thus perceived as exceptional. In fact, they are perceived as something superfluous that one wouldn’t miss if they didn’t exist. Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human2

While the dilemma of exemplarity and mediocrity certainly doesn’t end in the nineteenth century, it assumes a different form in the twentieth century for various reasons. First, while forerunners to today’s popular literature, philosophy primers, and entertainment culture already began to emerge in the eighteenth century, it is only with Heinrich Heine’s celebration of the “end of the Goethean artistic period” (as the end of idealizing art) and his turn to journalism in the midnineteenth century (in the hope of having a wider political effect)3 that the line between high and low culture slowly began to be questioned and blurred from within high art. The reasons for “serious” art and artists problematizing this division are various: from wanting to expand art’s political efficacy to trying to increase its relevance in a prosaic world, from aspiring to dismantle aesthetic hierarchies to attempting to rescue art by approximating it as closely as possible to the

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quotidian. The cumulative result of this testing of the limits between high and low is a new aesthetic question that first assumed its full articulation in the twentieth century with the avant-garde: “Is this art at all?” As Peter Bürger has argued, the avant-garde strives to dismantle the “institution of art” that first began to solidify in the eighteenth century with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Whereas art had traditionally exercised system-internal critique (of forms, subject matter, genres, etc.), the avant-garde began the process of art as self-critique (of its autonomy, of its difference from utility, etc.).4 Beginning with the avantgarde, it is no longer a given that there is a distinct form of production and expression called “art.” The question of art thereby shifts from aesthetic to ontological or even nominal categories; at its extreme, art is whatever is called art.5 In Dada poetry, Duchamp’s ready-mades, and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes,6 art radically questions the line between art and nonart (e.g., manufacture, commercial culture, journalism, etc.) so as to maintain itself at the edge of prosaic reality. But when one of the purposes of art is to constantly raise the issue of its existence and “right to exist” (Adorno), then mediocrity is no longer a vital aesthetic category, much less a decisive problem: when it is no longer presupposed that there is something clearly called art, traditional aesthetic judgments of artistic quality (beautiful, sublime, etc.) fall largely by the wayside. An artwork’s demand for beauty becomes the demand to be called art in the first place. With this provocative approximation of poetry and prosaic reality, the artist as a genial creator or natural exception is equally problematized or surrendered, as already discussed with respect to Realism. It is no accident that Dada-Cologne called for an uprising of dilettantes all over the world: “Dilettantes, rise up! The old art is dead; when the artist drowns, art can begin to swim.”7 In an age supersaturated with prose, art can perhaps only survive by surrendering the (bourgeois) institution called “art” along with its genial creators. The second shift in the relation between exemplarity and mediocrity commences with the development of the humanities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through the emergence of art history and literary studies as university disciplines, new critical methods focused on historical trajectories and textual interpretation begin to assume decisive roles in aesthetic thought.8 This focus on understanding (as opposed to judging) art, as well as on tracing its historical development, changes and expands art’s conceptualization, as already seen in Grillparzer. From the perspective of art/literary history, otherwise

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mediocre works can mark crucial, influential moments in an author’s and a tradition’s development as well as test cases for hermeneutic inquiry. Expanding Kleist’s thoughts in “A Principle of Higher Criticism,” one could say that mediocre artworks—ones that mix moments of perfection with disfigurations, derivations, and contradictions— pose the question of understanding to the highest degree. Therefore, art history and literary hermeneutics are predicated upon granting less than perfect art and artists a place in the chain of tradition, even as a broken chain. This is not to say that art history and literary hermeneutics ignore exceptional art; on the contrary. Nor is this to deny that twentieth-century prose in particular has shown an ongoing fascination with common figures, mediocre artists, and rescuing everyday life—from Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger, who is torn between art and ordinary life and longs “to live free from the curse of knowledge and the torment of creation, to live and to praise in blessed ordinariness”;9 to Kafka’s America, where the Oklahoma Natural Theater allows all to play themselves in everyday life as a way of redeeming the quotidian; to Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, which presents an extreme case of Goethe and Schiller’s dilettantism project, for when the aspiring pianist Wertheimer hears a young Glenn Gould play for the first time, it is only a question of when (not if) Wertheimer will commit suicide, since it is certain who will be the genius pianist of the age. Clearly, an obsession with various modes, temptations, and representations of mediocrity remains a central concern of twentieth-century literature, as does Flaubert’s dilemma of how “to write the mediocre well.” What has changed is how one (particularly in the university) increasingly addresses art—not from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics, but using methods that first arose in the nineteenth century and are no longer primarily invested in aesthetic judgment but rather in understanding (or its impossibility) and in artistic influence (or previously unrecognized constellations and affinities). In both cases, either the question of aesthetic quality fades in importance or the otherwise mediocre work is rescued as overlooked, interesting, decisive for a deeper understanding, and so forth. In other words, the disciplines of art history and literary hermeneutics operate with qualitatively different and more elastic categories than the criteria of strict aesthetic judgment. The third and perhaps most important reason that the tension between exemplarity and mediocrity changes in the twentieth century is that Hegel was right—not about the end of art or about Spirit coming

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to itself in philosophical thought, but about prosaic reality placing its stamp on all aspects of modern life from economics to politics, from morality to society. With this everything changes, because mediocrity in power is anything but mediocre;10 mediocrity is a force to be reckoned with. Therefore, while the aesthetic dilemma of devising new strategies for transfiguring the commonplace remains, the bigger (because all-encompassing) theoretical issue becomes mediocrity itself— analyzing, understanding, criticizing, and modifying it—particularly in its social, political, and ethical guises: public opinion, social conformism, homogenization of society, herd mentality, and the leveling of diversity. That is, an expansive critical discourse begins to surround mediocrity, because mediocrity is the discourse of modernity. Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill were two of the earliest thinkers to address this dilemma of mediocrity in power in their respective books Democracy in America (1835/40) and On Liberty (1859). Both aim their critiques at the homogenization and leveling of society that take place with the age of the common man and democracy’s potential for a “tyranny of the majority” (Tocqueville). While Tocqueville clearly saw and elaborated the tendency of democracy (and, though he only alludes to it, capitalism) to promote, endorse, and cultivate mediocrity—in its politicians, commodities, press, and artworks—Mill may be the first to delineate this socio-political homogenization explicitly in terms of the tension between mediocrity and exceptionality. In many ways, Mill anticipates Nietzsche (though Nietzsche will count Mill among the mediocre thinkers)11 by passionately advocating for the rights of what he sees as a newly endangered group: the exceptional. Writing in 1859 Mill declares: “The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.”12 Following Tocqueville, Mill notes that the doubled and often conflicted wish of democracy—liberty and equality—has been decidedly won by equality, resulting in a concentrated effort to eclipse extremes, since what deviates (exceptionality, eccentricity, or simple difference) faces the repressive (not punitive) force of majority opinion. At stake is the effacement of individuality itself (which Mill identifies with liberty), since the majority’s desire is “to desire nothing strongly. Its ideal of character is to be without any marked character.”13 This, one could say, is Mill’s definition of how the regime of mediocrity desires and dreams: by wishing for bland reproductions of itself. What amazes both Tocqueville and Mill is how democratic society’s supposed freedom—of the press, of opinion—results in the same arti-

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cles, the same news formats, and the same opinions being proffered over and over. Despite democracy’s alleged love of freedom, homogenized mediocrity seems to reign supreme. Equality (and one must add here: the marketplace) exercises its power by making everything the same; in the end, one largely has the freedom to be and think like everyone else. For Mill, “it is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we made ourselves all alike.”14 And for Tocqueville, the new power of the majority is remarkably subtle and refined. In words that could come from Nietzsche or Foucault, Tocqueville writes: Chains and executioners are the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but in our day civilization has perfected even despotism itself, which seemed, indeed to have nothing more to learn. [. . .] Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul; and the soul, escaping from these blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.15

Mill calls this refined force of persuasion that leaves the body untouched and the soul in shackles the “despotism of custom,”16 since custom expresses its rule in demanding similitude—nothing and no one should stand out. Therefore, the exception no longer rules and determines, but is determined by the mass, by “collective mediocrity,” and what mediocrity wants and expects is that all be alike, even and especially at the expense of blotting out originality and genius: “Originality is the one thing unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be original.”17 In advocating for the right to originality, individuality, and difference, Mill underscores that he in no way rejects democracy nor, as a libertarian, does he want to abandon it. However, he is quick to add: “That does not hinder the government of mediocrity from being mediocre government.”18 The purpose of On Liberty is not to dismantle democracy but to realign it with liberty and rid it of its obsession with equality, which for Mill amounts to a homogenization and mediocritization of society.19 As we have seen throughout this study, this realignment often requires the education of the average man. Mill’s exemplary average man would mute the desire for equality and seize freedom—not, however, to lead but rather to be led by those who are wiser and more talented. Just as the goal of Goethe’s Bildung can be described as freely allowing oneself to be formed by others, Mill believes that the average

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man should renounce a supposedly exaggerated claim to equality and choose instead to follow the advice of those who know better: “The honor and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative; that he can respond internally to wise and noble things, and be led to them with his eyes open.”20 Here one finds again a notion of exemplary mediocrity that gives up the desire to be exceptional—which includes being the ruling, exceptional power—for the sake of something higher that can only arrive from the work and wisdom of higher, more talented people. Mill rejects hero worship as well as the coercion of the average man; the answer to majority rule stamping everything with similitude is not compulsion but freedom, namely, the freedom to think and act differently from the majority. Therefore, it is the exceptional who are to offer pedagogical exempla for the majority: “It is in these circumstances most especially, that exceptional individuals, instead of being deterred, should be encouraged in acting differently from the masses. [. . .] In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.”21 The proper education of democracy from equality to liberty follows two steps for Mill: first, exceptional individuals must have the freedom of nonconformity and, second, the masses must follow their example—perhaps not in being free themselves but at least in being freely “led with eyes open.” For Mill, one begins to break the tyranny of mediocrity and the hegemony of equality when the majority agrees “that people should be eccentric.”22 While both Tocqueville and Mill recognize democracy as the government of the future and thus aspire not to render the world safe for democracy but rather to make democracy safe for the world, Nietzsche may be called a complete philosopher of mediocrity, a genealogist who doesn’t shy from going to its roots. By necessity, Nietzsche is as much a philosopher of mediocrity as he is a philosopher of the Übermensch. But while one might expect a singular, destructive diatribe against mediocrity in all its diagnosed guises—mediocre art, herd mentality, slave morality, Christianity, democracy—Nietzsche is also perhaps the first to recognize and struggle with the paradox of mediocrity in power. Whereas the young Nietzsche suggests that the true, productive model of history is the timeless dialogue of “a republic of geniuses,” in which “one giant calls to the others through the desolate spaces of time” and pays no heed to the “chattering of the dwarfs that crawl around beneath them,”23 one could say that one of the many consequences of his break from Wagner includes the realization that the

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“chattering of the dwarfs” (and not the Gesamtkunstwerk) is actually the modern discourse of power. Nietzsche learns that one has to listen very closely to what the so-called dwarfs are saying. Nietzsche’s delineation of slave morality and herd mentality in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals is well known, as is his desire to reevaluate all values, including the very value of values. But since slave morality and herd mentality are also expressions of a will to power and, in fact, perhaps the most profound, because self-denying, expression of such a will—a power grab in the name of “weakness”— Nietzsche seems to realize that simple analysis and critique will rarely lead the powerful (albeit mediocre) to surrender power. Therefore, while Nietzsche often speaks of war of the strong against the weak (with the weak having the decided advantage, it must be added) or bringing the ideology of the weak before the court of genealogical critique,24 he also recognizes, if only for moments, that other more subtle forms of insurgency are required. An essential part of Nietzsche’s reevaluation of mediocrity is not merely its examination but also the reinscription of its value; one must render mediocrity productive. Like Mill, Nietzsche is convinced that it is precisely the strong and exceptional who are now in a position of weakness; also like Mill, he pins his hope on Bildung, on cultivation—yet not the cultivation of the mediocre man, as Mill prescribes, but that of the exceptional person. It is not first of all mediocrity that needs to change, but the exception’s relation to it, which can in turn modulate mediocrity itself. This transfiguration of exceptionality first becomes possible with the domination of mediocrity. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche envisions a mode of pedagogy in which his designated exceptional ones can slink into the herd like wolves in sheep’s clothing and thereby receive an unprecedented education: The same new conditions that on average cultivate a leveling and mediocritization of the human into a useful, industrious, abundantly serviceable, and handy herd-animal-man—these same conditions are to the highest degree inclined to give birth to an exceptional human of the most dangerous and attractive quality. [. . .] Therefore, while the democratization of Europe leads to the production of a type prepared for slavery in the finest sense, the strong person, in singular and exceptional cases, will have to get [geraten] stronger and richer than perhaps ever before—thanks to the lack of prejudice in education, thanks to the monstrous multiplicity of practice, art, and the mask. What I wanted to say is this: the democratization of Europe is simultaneously an involuntary event for the breeding of tyrants—the word understood in every sense, also in a spiritual sense.25

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While these may be fragments of Übermensch fantasies, Nietzsche’s argument—for all its problems—is interesting for the relation between mediocrity and exemplarity it poses. When, as Mill says, mediocrity is “the ascendant power,” Nietzsche’s response is not to demand the right to be eccentric, but to turn the mediocritization of society to the advantage of the strong, to enroll the exceptional in the school of mediocrity, which alone offers an exemplary education. When the exceptional ones no longer determine values, they have to learn something that Nietzsche’s famous “birds of prey” weren’t able to express: deception. When the lambs reproach the birds of prey in the Genealogy of Morals for carrying off their ilk, the birds can only respond with mouth-watering honesty: “We don’t bear a grudge at all toward them, these good lambs, in fact we love them: Nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”26 Nietzsche justifies this posture of the birds of prey on the simple premise that one cannot expect the strong to be anything but that—strong. In opposition to this (and for equally good reason according to Nietzsche), the slave morality of the lambs commences with a negation of the stronger, more powerful carnivorous bird. When the strong, however, are no longer strong, when the lambs have won the day and seized power, then the birds of prey have to reconsider what it means to be powerful. The exceptional ones now have to enroll in the school of mediocrity, learn the part of the lamb, adapt, go undercover, and speak the lambs’ language. In other words, when mediocrity is the ascendant power, the strong must learn “the monstrous multiplicity of practice, art, and the mask.” Wearing the mask of mediocrity, the strong can blend in with the herd, study, hone their skills without prejudice, and ultimately emerge as a type of super-superior being. Nietzsche’s vision of society’s mediocritization resulting in a new type of exceptionality arises out of the paradox of powerful mediocrity. In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche recognizes that mediocrity in power necessarily becomes something other than itself, something beyond mediocre. Mediocrity can assume power only under one condition: when it denies itself, when it dissimulates, and this is its creative, indeed, procreative side. The mediocre alone have the intention of continuing on, of reproducing themselves—they are the people of the future, the sole survivors: “Be like them! Become mediocre!” Henceforth, this is the sole morality that still makes sense, that still finds ears. But it is difficult to preach, this morality of mediocrity! It can never admit what it is and what it wants. It has to speak of measure and dignity and duty and love of neighbor—it will have trouble to conceal the irony!27

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Mediocrity as an imperative, as an ideology is essentially duplicitous; it can only stake a claim to power as a masquerade, as irony. The genius of mediocrity—and for Nietzsche the discourse of mediocrity contains a profound element of genius—consists in concealing one’s will to power under the mask of humility, in coaxing weakness into strength itself. Ultimately, Nietzsche has to recognize that the supposedly exceptional people are subdued by the mediocre, because the mediocre people are cleverer, more cunning. The mediocre have outfoxed the strong themselves—a fact that calls into question Nietzsche’s categories of strong/weak and exceptional/mediocre. Consciously or unconsciously, the herd knows how to employ power ironically, to employ the power of irony. The beasts of prey, the birds of prey, the blond beasts—all these representatives of master morality lack irony and thus the ability to deceive. Ergo, their need to learn a few things from the herd. Nietzsche’s view of the regime of mediocrity is therefore double: on the one hand, mediocritization (which Nietzsche equates with democracy, whose roots lie in Christianity) leads to an ever-greater homogenization and enslavement of humanity; on the other, this process also produces the conditions for an elite education of the exceptional, because there is something that only the domination of mediocrity can teach—how to be ironic, how to wear a mask: “Mediocrity as Mask.— Mediocrity is the happiest mask that the superior spirit can wear, because it does not allow the great mass, i.e., the mediocre, to think about masquerade—: and yet the superior spirit wears it precisely for them— in order not to excite them, indeed, often out of compassion and goodness.”28 Rather surprisingly, part of the education of the exceptional consists in not disturbing the mediocre, in not upsetting the existing regime, indeed, in showing the great mass “compassion and goodness.” This sparing of the mediocre seems to be an ethics for Nietzsche and particularly for the philosopher.29 In the context of the education of the exceptional, the “mask of mediocrity” serves multiple functions. First, it is part of the exceptional person’s training; second, the calming effect it has on the mediocre allows the exceptional to complete their Bildung without disturbance; finally, it marks the place of mediocrity in society, culture, and the future: Under such circumstances the greatest weight necessary falls to the mediocre; mediocrity consolidates itself against the rule of the rabble and the eccentric (often allied with one another) as the guarantor and bearer of the future. From this arises a new opponent for the exceptional people—or rather a new

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temptation. Assuming that they won’t adapt to the rabble and entice the instinct of the “disinherited” with songs, it will be necessary for them to be “mediocre” and “solid.” The exceptional people know: mediocritas is also aurea—indeed, mediocritas alone has at its disposal money and gold (—has everything that glistens . . .) . . . and once again the old excellence and, in general, the entire spent world of the ideal wins a talented advocate . . . the result: mediocrity acquires spirit, wit, genius—it becomes entertaining, it seduces. Result—A lofty culture can only stand on a wide foundation, upon a strong and healthy consolidated mediocrity.30

This note from the late 1880s may express a final goal of Nietzsche’s reevaluations of all values: the transformation of the value of mediocrity itself. When mediocrity alone is the “guarantor and bearer of the future,” the one option for Nietzsche’s so-called exceptional humans is to confront this new opponent, a confrontation that consists not in fighting mediocrity but in surrendering to the temptation it poses—to become mediocre themselves. But this giving in to the seduction of mediocrity is not a complete capitulation; when one consciously dons the mask of mediocrity, one doesn’t leave mediocrity untouched. And this might be Nietzsche’s end game: a rediscovery of the golden mean (which was always about selection and singularity) by subverting the regime of mediocrity from the inside, by injecting it with genial, witty elements. When mediocrity becomes a mask, it transforms itself into something other than itself, something more than merely being average, for it is infused with spirit, wit, and even genius. Mediocrity, in a word, becomes an art. For Nietzsche, the future may belong to mediocrity, but precisely for this reason it can be golden.

REFERENCE MATTER

Notes

introduction 1. Letter to Louise Colet from September 12, 1853. Cited in Furst (ed.), Realism, 41. 2. Hegel, Werke 13, 373; Aesthetics, 289. 3. Ibid., 15, 242–43; Aesthetics, 974–75. 4. Ibid., 13, 410; Aesthetics, 316–17. 5. Ibid., 15, 244–45; Aesthetics, 976–77. 6. Ibid.; Aesthetics, 976–77. 7. Hegel’s thesis on the end of art will be discussed in chapter 4. On the never-ending rumor of art’s end that Hegel sets in motion, see Geulen, The End of Art and de Duve, Kant after Duchamp. De Duve writes: “The negativity of the avant-garde, for which tradition had to mean betrayal, is explained by the anticipated retrospection of the verdict thanks to which avant-garde art would, in the end, be incorporated into tradition precisely for first having betrayed it. [. . .] So, modernity seems to be constituted by a forever unending process of ending” (de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 77). As Szondi points out, one problem with Hegel’s thesis on the end of art is that although Hegel produces a historical aesthetics, “his concept of art can scarcely develop, since it is formed according to the singular model of Greek art” (Szondi, Poetik und Geschichtsphilosophie I, 305). 8. Hegel, Werke 15, 393. 9. This is not to claim that all German literature between bourgeois tragedy and Realism strives to simultaneously engage and transform common life. Both the Storm and Stress movement and particularly Romanticism turn to the exceptional, the heroic, the mythic, the magical, and the extraordinary as strategies for trying to extricate art from Hegel’s prosaic reality. For two studies that chart this other track in German letters in this period, see Pikulik, Romantik als

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Ungenügen an der Normalität and von Mücke, The Seduction of the Occult and the Rise of the Fantastic Tale. 10. Goethe, HA 6, 15; Werther, 11. 11. Roland Barthes describes two competing economies in Werther: “On the one hand, a bourgeois economy of repletion; on the other, a perverse economy of dispersion, of waste, of frenzy ( furor wertherinus)” (Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 85). 12. The passage is, of course, still marked by the rebelliousness of the young Goethe of the Storm and Stress movement, for which, as Goethe wrote a year earlier in “Von deutscher Baukunst” (1773, “On German Architecture”), “[W]orse than examples are principles for a genius. A school or a principle fetters all his power of insight and activity” (Goethe, HA 12, 9). While this viewpoint will be modified in Weimar Classicism (see chapter 3), the necessity of genial originality will never be totally abandoned. On the notion of genius for the early Goethe, see David Wellbery, “Genius and the Wounded Subject of Modernity,” in The Specular Moment, 121–86. 13. Goethe, HA 6, 21; Werther, 15. 14. The exemplarity of Werther’s passion for average life has become a staple of letters. Flaubert writes in Sentimental Education: “And it seems that you are here, when I read love stories in books.—Everything that is taxed with being exaggerated, you have made me feel, Frédéric said. I understand how Werther could behave that way about Charlotte’s bread-and-butter” (quoted in Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 191). 15. Goethe, HA 6, 23; Werther, 16. 16. Ibid.; Werther, 16. 17. Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 31. 18. Ibid., 45. 19. Barthes describes the commonality of Werther’s extreme passion and, thus, its seduction for identification on a wide scale: “As a reader, I can identify myself with Werther. Historically, thousands of subjects have done so, suffering, killing themselves, dressing, perfuming themselves, writing as if they were Werther (songs, poems, candy boxes, belt buckles, fans, colognes à la Werther). A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world” (ibid., 131). 20. Vaget suggests that Werther’s “undoing” may be most compellingly explained by “his failure to be a creative artist” (Vaget, “Augenmensch,” 22). 21. Goethe, HA 6, 41; Werther, 24. 22. Cited in Vaget’s article on dilettantism in Werther, “Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers,” 63. 23. Goethe, HA 6, 12; Werther, 8. 24. Ibid., 16; Werther, 11. 25. It should be noted that the oxymoronic phrase “stamp of genius” was somewhat common in the eighteenth century. Woodmansee quotes Bergk’s The Art of Reading Books (1799): “Works that wear the stamp of genius and taste are rare.” Moreover, in her discussion of Wordsworth on Bürger’s poetry (see

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chapter 3), Woodmansee cites Wordsworth calling Bürger “almost always spirited and lively, and stamped and peculiarized with genius.” Wordsworth, however, continues by declaring against Coleridge: “I do not find those higher beauties which can entitle him to the name of a great poet” (Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, 96 and 113). This differentiation between being stamped with genius and being a great poet aligns with Werther. 26. Beginning with Dutch still lifes—which Hegel so admired—painting could be said to assume a similar position as literature. Two crucial differences, however, that make the issue of letters more pressing for the dilemma of exemplarity and mediocrity during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are the painter’s need for training beyond university study and the mass reproducibility of literature, which brings it to a far wider audience. 27. Goethe, SW I/18, 785. 28. See Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur, 45–46. In the years 1740, 1770, and 1800 the number of titles at the Easter Book Fair listed under the rubric “The Fine Arts and Sciences” were 755, 1,144, and 2,569, respectively, which represent the following percentages of total books published in Germany: 5.8 percent, 16.5 percent, and 21.5 percent. Moreover, the total number of authors increased from 2,000 to 3,000 in the 1760s, to 4,300 in 1776, to 5,200 in 1784, to 7,000 in 1791, to a reported 10,648 at the end of the eighteenth century. See von Ungern-Sternberg, “Schriftsteller und literarischer Markt,” in Grimminger (ed.), Deutsche Aufklärung, 134–35. 29. This opening up and expansion of literary production was enabled by the technological advance of the iron printing press, which beginning in 1765 enabled the production and distribution of books on a previously unheard-of scale. See Bürger et al. (eds.), Aufklärung und literarische Öffentlichkeit, 101. 30. Goethe, SW I/18, 765. 31. Heinz Ludwig Arnold writes: “With the emancipation of the writer from the ties to the courts, authors now acting as ‘free’ writers won independence, but found themselves in a new dependence, since they now had to live from their products that were placed on the emerging literary market” (Arnold and Arnold-Dielewicz, Literarisches Leben in der Bundesrepublik, 13). Bourdieu examines this dilemma throughout his book The Rules of Art, and particularly with respect to Flaubert, 91–94. 32. Anne Lounsbery investigates a similar phenomenon of belatedness and epigonism in the United States and Russia in the nineteenth century, in which these two countries were equally faced with the dilemma of establishing “great” literature in the age of the marketplace. Describing Russia and the United States in the nineteenth century, Lounsbery writes that both countries (like Germany) felt “a pervasive sense of cultural lack that was, it seems, exacerbated rather than assuaged by the ever-increasing abundance of printed texts” (Lounsbery, Thin Culture, High Art, 1). 33. Goethe, SW I/18, 765. 34. Werther was translated into French in 1775 (and it was enormously successful in France, as Napoleon’s future visit to Goethe attests), English in 1779,

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Russian in 1781, Dutch in 1790, Swedish and Italian in 1796, and Spanish in 1803. 35. Goethe famously responded to Nicolai’s novel with the poem “Nicolai auf Werthers Grabe” (“Nicolai at Werther’s Grave”), in which Nicolai defecates on Werther’s grave and exclaims: “The good man, how he ruined himself / If he had only shat like me / He wouldn’t have died!” [“Der gute Mensch, wie hat er sich verdorben! / Hätt er geschissen so wie ich, / Er wäre nicht gestorben!”]. 36. Purdy develops this paradox of the Werther complex with respect to individuality and fashion: “The calculated imitation of Werther contradicted the protagonist’s insistence that his feelings were uniquely his own. [. . .] Werther imitators wanted to be publicly perceived as possessing or sharing, in an authentic manner, the literary character’s personality” (Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance, 154). 1. exemplarity and mediocrity 1. Goethe, quoted in Grimm’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, entry: “mittelmäßig.” 2. Benn, “Probleme der Lyrik,” in Sämtliche Werke VI/4, 19. 3. Jean Paul, Siebenkäs, in Sämtliche Werke I/2, 137. 4. On the dialectic of the belatedness of genius, which recodes present failure as future success, Hauser writes: “This estrangement of the artist from the present and his renunciation of a community with the public goes so far that the artist not only accepts a lack of success as something matter-of-fact but also considers success as a sign of artistic inferiority and views the lack of recognition by one’s contemporaries precisely as a precondition of immortality” (Hauser, Sozialgeschichte der Kunst, 1.2, 313). 5. Horace’s “Ode X, To Licinius Murena: The Golden Mean” reads in part: “He who esteems the golden mean [auream mediocritatem] / Safely avoids the squalor of a wretched house / And in sobriety, equally shuns / The enviable palace.” The tenth Ode is the middle poem in the second of three series of odes. In other words, it is placed squarely in the middle of the collection. See Horace, Odes and Epodes, 130–31. 6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1104a 4–9. 7. The entire quotation reads: “In everything that is continuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an equal amount, and this either in terms of the thing itself or relative to us; and the equal is an intermediate between excess and defect. By the intermediate in the object I mean that which is equidistant from each of the extremes, which is one and the same for all men; by the intermediate relative to us that which is neither too much nor too little— and this is not one, nor the same for all” (ibid., 1106a 26–32). 8. Ibid., 1106b 17–24. 9. Ibid., 1109a 24–27. 10. Ibid., 1107a 6–7.

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11. Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 367–73. Brink emphasizes that Horace, contra Cicero, wants to maintain a strict difference between the practical arts, including rhetoric and jurisprudence, “in which mediocrity has a place,” and poetry, which is not a practical art. See Brink, Horace on Poetry, 372–73. 12. Or, at least, a good politician must know how to be average where it counts: in identifying with the common man, feeling his pain, evoking his emotions, and speaking his language. As Senator Roman Hruska (R-Nebraska) once said in support of Nixon’s failed nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Harrold Carswell: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?” (Retrieved on August 12, 2008, from http://query.nytimes .com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E6D7173DF934A15757C0A96F958260). 13. “I also feel aggrieved, whenever good Homer nods, but when a work is long, a drowsy mood may well creep over it” (Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 359–60). 14. Ibid., v. 378. 15. Cicero, Brutus, 125. 16. Ibid., 128. 17. Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 379–81, 414–16. 18. The exact reasons that Horace ironically gives for thinking one can be a poet without training are being a free-born citizen, wealthy, and never convicted of a crime (ibid., vv. 383–84). 19. Ibid., vv. 387–90. 20. Gottsched even provided a translation of Horace’s Ars Poetica at the beginning of his Critische Dichtkunst (The Critical Art of Poetry) from 1730. 21. In sharp contradistinction, the modern advice to poets seemed to be to seek no advice. Goethe writes in “The Experiment as Intermediary”: “The artist does well to not let his artwork be seen publicly until he has completed it, because it is not easy for someone to advise or offer assistance. Once it is completed, he has to consider and take to heart both the praise and the reproach” (Goethe, HA 13, 13). And Rilke, in his letters to a young poet, advises the aspiring writer to decidedly refrain from soliciting the opinion and critique of others: “You are looking outside of yourself and that is above all what you may not now do. No one can advise and help you. No one. There is only one way. Go into yourself. [. . .] Above all ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write?” (Rilke, Briefe I, 45–46; letter to Kappus, February 17, 1903). 22. Even the early German attempts to break free from normative aesthetics, such as Herder’s famous “Shakespeare” essay, proceed by appealing to Aristotle, who was then viewed as authorizing such a historical aesthetic. 23. Horace, Ars Poetica, v. 51 and vv. 119–27. 24. Ibid., vv. 295–308. In his commentary to this passage, Brink writes: “Democritus’ doctrine of inspiration in poetry is made responsible for the alleged poetic success of untutored, soi-disant geniuses. But the same doctrine is said, satirically, to provide the reason for H.’s self-imputed failure as a poet. If he cannot now write (lyric) poetry, he claims at any rate to be able to teach the

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would-be poet how to acquire professional standing” (Brink, Horace on Poetry, 329). 25. Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 408–11. 26. Ibid., vv. 265–68. 27. Ibid., vv. 268–69. 28. The great exception to the Classical tradition of exemplarity is Longinus’s On the Sublime, whose rediscovery in the sixteenth century and growing influence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries played a significant role in the development of the aesthetics of genius. This is not to say that Longinus entirely dismisses the role of exempla, but much more than Horace he emphasizes the necessity of inspiration and risk taking (including making errors) for great art and, thereby, begins to lay the ground for a genial aesthetics. In a crucial passage Longinus writes: Suppose we illustrate this by taking some altogether immaculate and unimpeachable writer. Must we not in this connexion raise the general question: which is better in poetry and in prose, grandeur with a few flaws or correct composition of mediocre quality, yet entirely sound and impeccable? Yes, and we must surely ask the further question whether in literature the first place is rightly due to the largest number of merits or to the merits that are greatest in themselves. [. . .] Now I am aware that the greatest natures are the least immaculate. Perfect precision runs the risk of triviality, whereas in great writing as in great wealth there must needs be something overlooked. Perhaps it is inevitable that the humble, mediocre natures, because they never run any risks, never aim at the heights, should remain to a large extent safe from error, while in great natures their very greatness spells danger. (Longinus, On the Sublime, 217–19, XXXIII, 1–3) 29. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 400. 30. This discussion of exemplarity is indebted to Lausberg’s Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, in particular paragraphs 2, 6, 19, 24, 26, and 29. 31. I am following here Matthew B. Roller’s article “Exemplarity in Roman Culture,” particularly 1–10. I would like to thank Michèle Lowrie for pointing me toward this essay. 32. The locus classicus for the elucidation of both positive and negative exempla is Livy’s History of Rome, which begins by expressing the desire to “commemorate the deeds of the foremost people of the world” and continues: “What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons [exempli] of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument; from these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what is to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result” (Livy, History of Rome, Bk. 1, 3 and 10–11). 33. Roller, “Exemplarity,” 4–5. 34. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, 10.1.2. 35. Ibid., 10.1.20.

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36. Ibid., 10.1.24. 37. Ibid., 10.1.26. 38. This insight is indebted to conversations with Eckart Goebel, whom I would like to thank for proposing the thesis that while the aesthetics of genius discards the Poetics, Aristotle remains quietly present in the form of the Nicomachean Ethics. 39. Kant, KU 134, §33; CJ 165. 40. Ibid., 160, §46; CJ 186. 41. Ibid.; CJ 186. 42. Ibid.; CJ 186. 43. Ibid., 72, §17; CJ 116. 44. Ibid., 49, §6; CJ 97. 45. Ibid., 173, §49; CJ 196. 46. Ibid., 163, §47 and 164, §47; CJ 188 and 189. 47. Ibid., 161, §46; CJ 186. 48. Ibid., 163, §47; CJ 188. 49. Ibid., 78, §18; CJ 121. 50. Ibid., 172, §49 and 161, §47; CJ 194 and 187. 51. Ibid., 173, §49; CJ 195. 52. Ibid., 173, §49; CJ 196. 53. Ibid., 173–74, §49; CJ 196. 54. Ibid., 174, §49; CJ 196. 55. Ibid., 167, §48; CJ 191. 56. Ibid., 175, §50; CJ 197. 57. Ibid.; CJ 197. 58. Ibid.; CJ 197. 59. Ibid., 144, §40; CJ 173. 60. Ibid.; CJ 173. 61. Ibid., 73, §17; CJ 117. 62. Ibid., 75, §17; CJ 118. 63. See Campe, Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit, 391, and my article “Die üblichen Verdächtigen.” 64. Kant, KU 76–77, §17; CJ 119. 65. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 537. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 537–38. 68. Ibid., 537. 69. Hegel, Werke 13, 222; Aesthetics, 169. 70. Ibid., 222–23; Aesthetics, 169. 71. Moretti, The Way of the World, vii. 72. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 538. 73. Ibid., 538. 74. Kleist, Berliner Abendblätter II, 10–11. 75. Kant, of course, does not exclude all argumentation in aesthetic judgment’s claim to universality. Despite emphasizing that he will plug his ear

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when a friend tries to convince him of the beauty of a play via recourse to Batteux or Lessing, he does so out of a rejection of a priori grounds of proof (§33). In The Critique of Judgment’s admittedly difficult antimony of taste (§56 and §57), Kant concludes that debate regarding taste is reasonable but necessarily proceeds without the possibility of finality or proof. The point here is that Kleist much more radically foregrounds the discursive and argumentative element that first arrives with the aesthetic judgment of mediocrity. 2. the average audience 1. Euripides, Medea, vv. 294–97. 2. Quoted in Guthke, Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel, 50. 3. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, 78. 4. Heine, “Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen,” in SäS 7, 209. 5. Nietzsche, KSA 1, 76–77; Birth of Tragedy §11, 55–56. 6. Ibid., 76; Birth of Tragedy §11, 55. 7. Ibid., 73; Birth of Tragedy §10, 53. 8. Ibid., 77; Birth of Tragedy §11, 56. 9. Ibid., 77–79; Birth of Tragedy §11, 56–57. Nietzsche, of course, ultimately denies Euripides’ purported affection for the man of everyday life, since in Nietzsche’s interpretation, Euripides only respects two viewpoints: himself as critic (not as artist) and Socrates. 10. Ibid., 77; Birth of Tragedy §11, 56. Nietzsche’s critique of Euripides is, in fact, already articulated by Aristophanes in the Frogs, which stages a competition in the underworld between Aeschylus and Euripides to see which playwright should be brought back to the polis to rejuvenate Athenian tragedy. Euripides’ arguments from Aristophanes’ play appear almost verbatim in The Birth of Tragedy. Euripides says, for example: “I taught these people here how to talk [. . .] by bringing everyday matters onstage, things we’re used to, things we’re familiar with, things about which I was open to refutation, because these people knew all about them and could have exposed any flaws in my art” (Aristophanes, Frogs, vv. 955–62). Needless to say, Aeschylus wins and Euripides remains banned to the underworld. 11. Szondi, Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels, 15. Hamann, for example, declares the term bourgeois tragedy to be an oxymoron “because the adjective contradicts the elements that explain a tragedy” (cited in Guthke, Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel, 8). The perception that the common man somehow isn’t up to the task of embodying the force of the tragic persists even into the twentieth century, the very “century of the common man.” In his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man,” Arthur Miller feels compelled to again dispute the notion that the age of tragedy has passed, whether due to a lack of heroes or the modern skepticism produced by science: “The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the highly placed, the kings or the kingly [. . .]. I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” (Miller, “Tragedy and the Common

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Man,” 3). For Miller, it is the common man who knows tragic fear, the fear of “being torn away from our chosen image of what or who we are in this world” (ibid., 5). Miller’s conclusion could be taken straight from the theory of bourgeois tragedy some two hundred fifty years earlier: “It is time, I think, that we who are without kings took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possible lead in our time—the heart and spirit of the average man” (ibid., 7). 12. While bourgeois tragedy does not originate in Germany, it is often viewed as a German phenomenon, for no country produced more bourgeois tragedies and has examined it with equal theoretical intensity. Julie A. Carlson points to the continuing legacy of bourgeois tragedy in Germany and German studies: “Then as now, the genre has been associated with, and respected the most in, Germany. Just as Germany produced the most plays and critical discussions of the category then, Germanists produce the richest commentary on it now” (Carlson, “Like Me,” 334). 13. Aristotle, Poetics, V, 1 and XV, 11. 14. See Szondi, who quotes the decisive passage from Diomedes’ fourthcentury text: “Comoedia a tragoedia differt, quod in tragoedia introducuntur heroes duces reges, in comoedia humiles atque privatae personae” (Szondi, Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels, 33). 15. Gottsched, whose Critische Dichtkunst (1730, Critical Art of Poetry) embodies much of what Lessing’s theory of bourgeois tragedy will respond to and in part rebel against, writes that tragedy prefers “the great ones of this world” or “famous people,” while the inverse holds true for comedy: “The people that belong to a comedy are ordinary citizens or people of middle rank” (Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, 157, 161, and 189). Michael Conrad Curtius revised this normative notion of the “class clause” already in his 1753 translation and commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics, an edition read by Lessing. See Schulte-Sasse, “Drama,” in Grimminger (ed.), Deutsche Aufklärung, 425. 16. Kurt Wölfel emphasizes that Lessing is ultimately neither interested in the ascendant middle class nor in questions of class in general, but rather in humanity itself. Lessing aims for a drama, writes Wölfel, “in which the class status of the dramatis personae is unimportant in the face of their ‘humanity’” (Wölfel, “Moralische Anstalt,” 85). 17. In examining sixteen bourgeois tragedies, Pikulik determines that in only three plays does the protagonist come from the bourgeoisie (Pikulik, Bürgerliches Trauerspiel, 6). When simply viewed as “plays founded on moral tales in private life” (Lillo), bourgeois tragedy could indeed include Romeo and Juliet or Medea. It should be noted that neither Lillo nor Diderot subtitled their plays “bourgeois tragedies.” In his theoretical writings, Diderot preferred the terms domestic tragedy and serious drama and spoke of “domestic and bourgeois tragedies.” In the first edition of Miß Sara Sampson, Lessing gave the tragedy the subtitle “A Bourgeois Tragedy in Five Acts” but in later editions simply called the play “A Tragedy in Five Acts.”

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18. In the Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing quotes Marmontel with wholehearted approval: “One does injustice to the human heart, one misrecognizes nature, if one thinks that a title is necessary in order to move and touch us. The sacred names of a friend, a father, a lover, a spouse, a son, a mother, of a human in general: these are always more pathos inducing than everything else. They assert their rights always and forever” (Lessing, Werke IV, 294; HD §14). On the importance of familial relations, gender politics, and in particular fatherdaughter relations, see Kittler, “Erziehung ist Offenbarung” in Dichter, Mutter, Kind; von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion; Hart, Tragedy in Paradise; and Gustafson, Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers. 19. Pfeil, “Vom bürgerlichen Trauerspiele,” in Mathes (ed.), Die Entwicklung, 51–52. 20. Ibid., 54. It should be noted that although Gottsched is often seen as the last great defender of a rule-bound aesthetics, his justification for maintaining the “class clause” recognizes its potential for a lack of identification and nevertheless uses the same language to defend the class clause that will become the cornerstone of bourgeois tragedy’s reason for rejecting it: “Aren’t most events and accidents in this life common to all people? Aren’t we capable of and inclined toward the same virtue and vice?” (Gottsched, Schriften zur Literatur, 9). For Gottsched, the putative universality of human experience trumps the differences acknowledged in the class clause. Therefore, his rule for composing tragedy could be taken from Lessing or Pfeil: “The best general rule that one can give here is to observe the nature of every affect in common life and to imitate it in the most precise way” (ibid., 170). 21. Lessing, Werke IV, 294; HD §14, 38–39. Writing four years after Lessing, Garve makes very much the same argument in 1771: “What should a prince’s name achieve here, if he only acts or suffers as a human being? [. . .] This is the very reason why a heroic tragedy has to be less interesting for us than a bourgeois tragedy. Even kings must first become people like us, if they want to touch us with their fates” (Garve, “Einige Gedanken über das Interessierende,” in Mathes (ed.), Die Entwicklung, 76). 22. In the Hamburg Dramaturgy, Lessing reiterates this point in a different passage: “Gallantry and politics always leave one cold—no poet in the world has ever succeeded in connecting the excitation of [tragic] compassion and fear with them” (Lessing, Werke IV, 603–04; HD §80, 200). 23. One could, of course, add to this triad the necessity of almost perfect theatrical illusion, whereby the play should so approximate real life (in its figures, motivation, gestures, etc.) that the spectator should forget that it is theater. Diderot famously writes in words that Lessing would share: “Whether you compose or act, never think of the spectator’s existence. Imagine along the edge of the stage a great wall that separates you from the orchestra. Act as if the curtain would never rise” (Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, 231). Ideally, the spectator should respond to the perfect illusion as the “I” in the “Conversations” does: “The staging had been so true-to-life [vrai] that I often forgot I was a spectator, nothing more than a spectator, and was about to leave my seat and

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add a real person to the stage” (ibid., 78). This “as-if” quality of bourgeois tragedy, in which the stage approximates as closely as possible lived experience, is essential to its emphatic notion of identification. See von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, 92–95. On the ramifications of Diderot’s theory for painting, see Michael Fried’s famous study Absorption and Theatricality. 24. Lessing, Werke IV, 588; HD §77. In his correspondence with Nicolai and Mendelssohn, Lessing uses a similar, simple definition: “The determination of tragedy is this: tragedy should expand our ability to feel compassion.” And again: “Tragedy should awaken as much compassion as it can” (Lessing, Werke IV, 163–64; Correspondence, 14–15). The German word used by Lessing for “compassion” is Mitleid, which in the context of tragic discourse is often translated as “pity” or “empathy” and forms the pendant to tragic “fear.” There is, however, no exact English equivalent for Lessing’s “Mitleid,” which comes from the German verb Leiden—to suffer, endure. For Lessing, compassion is a passion [Leidenschaft]; when one feels the passion of compassion, one cosuffers [mit-leidet], one suffers along with the afflicted one. Unlike the usual translation of Aristotle’s “eleos” as “pity,” compassion as the translation of Lessing’s “Mitleid” retains both the central element of “co-” as well as its etymological affinity to its status as a “passion.” In addition, whereas “pity” in English often connotes a certain distance as well as looking down upon, compassion puts oneself in the position of the one suffering, identifies so fully that one suffers as well. On the difference between compassion and pity, see Arendt, On Revolution, 85. 25. See Kommerell, Lessing und Aristoteles, 26 and 201. 26. Lessing, Werke IV, 163; Correspondence, 14. 27. Ibid., 172; Correspondence, 19. 28. Ibid., 192; Correspondence, 30. 29. Lessing, Nathan der Weise, II/v. 30. Lessing, Werke IV, 580–81; HD §75, 181. 31. Ibid., 580; HD §75, 181. 32. In Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik I, Jauß delineates five forms of identification between recipient and text: associative, admiring, sympathetic, cathartic, and ironic. His distinction between admiring and sympathetic follows Lessing quite closely. Admiring identification occurs “in the face of the perfection of a model and, thus, remains beyond the differentiation between tragic and comic effect, since the normative admiration of a hero, saint, or wise person proceeds neither from tragic trepidation nor from comic release” (231–32). For these same reasons, Lessing attributes admiration to epic and not tragedy. Sympathetic identification is the “aesthetic affect of thinking oneself into the position of the other, which cancels the distance of admiration and can lead the spectator or reader, by being emotionally moved, to solidarity with the suffering hero” (237). 33. On the difference between the “similar hero” (Lessing) and the “dissimilar hero” (Aristotle), see Kommerell, Lessing und Aristoteles, 85. 34. Lessing, Werke IV, 369; HD §30, 83–84.

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35. See, for example, Gail Hart’s study Tragedy in Paradise: Family and Gender Politics in German Bourgeois Tragedy 1750–1850, in which she examines the removal, effacement, and disappearance of women in bourgeois tragedy. See also Susan E. Gustafson’s Absent Mothers and Orphaned Fathers. 36. See Rüdiger Campe’s thorough examination of the relationship between literature and probability, Spiel der Wahrscheinlichkeit. On the rise of statistical thinking in the seventeenth century see Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability and Lorraine Daston’s Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. 37. Lessing, Werke IV, 177. Lessing’s discussion of the beggar is not included in the English translation of the correspondence. For a full reading of the beggar passage in its historical-political context, see Szondi, Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels, 160–67. 38. Lessing, Werke IV, 177. 39. On the structure of the tragic as the identity of the road to redemption and the road to ruin, see Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, particularly his interpretation of Oedipus Rex. 40. Lessing, Werke IV, 193; Correspondence, 31. Lessing repeats this thought in the Hamburg Dramaturgy: “Why shouldn’t a poet be free to maximize our compassion for such a tender mother by letting her become unfortunate through her tenderness itself?” (Lessing, Werke IV, 408; HD §38, 111). Schiller, too, wasn’t immune to this tragic conception: “The genre of the touching play is surpassed by the one where the cause of misfortune is not only not contradictory to morality but also only possible through morality” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 380). 41. Lessing, Werke IV, 194; Correspondence, 32. 42. Ibid., 180; Correspondence, 22. 43. Ibid., 178. Lessing also imagines the possibility that the beggar goes off the deep-end. After trying unsuccessfully to live from the alms of others or God, the beggar “finally falls into a rage; he kills his wife, his kids, and then himself.—Are you still weeping? Here the pain stifles the tears but not the compassion” (ibid.). 44. Ibid., 186; Correspondence, 26. 45. Ibid., 173; Correspondence, 19. 46. Ibid., 156; Correspondence, 10. 47. Fick, Lessing-Handbuch, 141. 48. Lessing, in the words of Kommerell, doesn’t want to break but “modernize tradition,” while Goethe “re-connects modern literature with tradition” (Kommerell, Lessing und Aristoteles, 236). 49. Lessing, Werke IV, 164; Correspondence, 15. 50. As Hans-Jürgen Schings has pointed out, this discussion of Rousseau and compassion forms a crucial foundation for their thoughts on tragedy and therefore should be considered part of the correspondence on tragedy proper. See Schings, Der mitleidigste Mensch, 33. For counterpositions to Schings, see Michelsen’s Der unruhige Bürger as well as Heidsieck’s “Der Disput zwischen Lessing und Mendelssohn,” where he argues for the influence of Moral Sense thought.

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51. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 160. 52. Ibid., 161. 53. Ibid., 133. 54. Ibid., 184. 55. Lessing, Werke IV, 164; Correspondence, 13 and 15. 56. Ibid., 578–79; HD §75. 57. On this point of difference between Lessing and Aristotle, see Kommerell, Lessing und Aristoteles, 73. 58. Lessing, Werke IV, 585; HD §76, 185. 59. Pfeil, “Vom bürgerlichen Trauerspiel,” in Mathes (ed.), Die Entwicklung, 55. 60. Pfeil, it should be noted, seems to elide Lessing’s maintenance of compassion for the other and prefers to interpret all compassion as “compassion for ourselves” (i.e., tragic fear). Lessing, however, equally runs the risk of advocating egoism disguised as altruism. Lessing’s compassion, writes Pikulik, “grows slowly out of the need for self-pleasure and confirms therefore in a paradoxical way the fundamentally egoistic drive of the sensitive person” (Pikulik, Bürgerliches Trauerspiel, 90). This egoism is derived precisely from the necessity of identification; in identifying with the other, the subject according to Pikulik projects itself into the other (the object) and ultimately feels not the other but itself: “The object serves as the instigator, but doesn’t make its way to experience. The object is the cause, or better, the occasion but not the content of the sensitive feeling” (ibid., 86; see also 91). Following Pikulik’s Nietzschean-inflected reading, Lessing’s compassion is a form of narcissistic autoaffectation and the expression of superiority over the other in the guise of displaying one’s “goodness”; it is not standing with and for the other, but using the other—and worse still, his or her suffering—to pleasurably assert oneself. Schulte-Sasse argues against Pikulik and points out that such egoism and pleasure constitute a tendency that Lessing was not only aware of but incorporates into his theory of tragedy as an integral part, whereby it is the simultaneity of emotive pleasure and social cofeeling that marks Lessing’s compassion. See Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur, 41. Michelsen writes in a similar vein: “Opposed to the danger that the emotional effect is being elevated to tragedy’s proper purpose at the cost of its moral effect, Lessing wants to ‘rescue’ the perspective of its moral usefulness” (Michelsen, “Die Erregung des Mitleids durch die Tragödie,” 565–67). 61. For Mendelssohn, compassion must take a backseat to the more sublime feeling of admiration: “The sensuous feeling of compassion makes room for a loftier feeling; compassion’s soft glow disappears when the light of admiration penetrates our soul” (Lessing, Werke IV, 169; Correspondence, 17). 62. Ibid., 173; Correspondence, 20. 63. See the Hamburg Dramaturgy: “The one unforgivable mistake of a tragic poet is this: that he leaves us cold” (ibid., 306; HD §16, 45). 64. Ibid., 175; Correspondence, 21. Mendelssohn responds by claiming Lessing is using his “own prejudice” as “the basis of this imagined genre distinction” (ibid., 195–96; Correspondence, 21).

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65. Ibid., 168; Correspondence, 19. 66. Ibid., 173; Correspondence, 19. 67. Ibid., 173; Correspondence, 19–20. 68. Ibid., 197; Correspondence, 34. 69. Ibid., 182; Correspondence, 23. 70. Ibid., 175; Correspondence, 21. 71. Von Mücke also examines Lessing’s rejection of the pedagogical efficacy of admiration and rightly concludes: “Since admiration in the service of virtue involves such a highly developed faculty of moral reflection and experience, its potential benefits are limited to an educated elite. But more important, in its complex detour through symbolic understanding, admiration removes the immediate appeal of virtuous examples to the intuitive cognition turning them into more or less abstract maxims” (Von Mücke, Virtue and the Veil of Illusion, 98). Von Mücke, however, follows a different theoretical argument, emphasizing not primarily the proper education of the average spectator but the theater as illusion, whereby Lessing’s opposition to admiration follows “an anti-theatrical argument” (ibid., 97). 72. Lessing, Werke IV, 175; Correspondence, 21. 73. Ibid., 173; Correspondence, 19. 74. Ibid., 180; Correspondence, 22. Mendelssohn’s point here is to underscore that tragedy should not include an immediate moral improvement as part of its definition; the moral value of a tragedy should become clear only after the play, when “reason grabs the wheel again.” Therefore, the question of emulation should arise only when the illusion is over and one can judge whether an action is worthy of imitation: “And this is one of the reasons that moved Nicolai to maintain that the ultimate purpose of tragedy is actually not to improve one’s morals” (ibid., 182; Correspondence, 23). 75. Admittedly, Lessing does eventually grant one pedagogical purpose for admiration, but it is a limited one: in sports and “corporeal capacities” in general. His example consists of a high jumper: “The more perfect the master demonstrates the jump, the more he excites his student’s admiration by his perfection, the easier the student’s imitation becomes.” But that’s it: admiration is good for building the body, but it “can’t make our souls more virtuous” (ibid., 190–91; Correspondence, 29). 76. As Cornelia Mönch has shown with remarkable thoroughness (by examining all German plays counted as bourgeois tragedies), Lessing’s paradigm of “compassion” was the great exception and not the rule for the genre. Most other bourgeois tragedies adhered to the paradigm of exemplarity and imitation by staging models of heroic greatness or human weakness, which the spectators were either to imitate or avoid. See Mönch, Abschrecken oder Mitleiden. 77. Lillo, The London Merchant, 3. 78. Ibid., 3. 79. Pikulik even notes that London shopkeepers sent their apprentices to The London Merchant in order to learn the moral dangers that await them if they are not vigilant. See Pikulik, Bürgerliches Trauerspiel, 128. Pfeil echoes Lillo’s

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notion that bourgeois tragedy offers an expanded field of negative exempla to be avoided: “The main intention of a tragedy is [. . .] to represent virtue, irrespective of its misfortune, as amiable and vice as always abhorrent. [. . .] We see that we are often only a few short steps away from being such a villain as presented in the theater. We can’t do otherwise; we must begin to fear for our own person” (Pfeil, “Vom Bürgerlichen Trauerspiel,” in Mathes [ed.], Die Entwicklung, 55). 80. McCall points out that in bourgeois tragedy “villains have dry eyes, as do those virtual villains of the audience (unmoved spectators)” (McCall, “Liquid Politics,” 596). 81. Szondi, Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels, 223. 82. Lessing, Werke IV, 187; Correspondence, 27. 83. Ibid., 187; Correspondence, 27. 84. Ibid., 187; Correspondence, 27. 85. Ibid., 190; Correspondence, 29. 86. Ibid., 189; Correspondence, 29. 87. Ibid., 163; Correspondence, 14. 88. Ibid., 166; Correspondence, 16. 89. Ibid., 405; HD §38, 109. 90. Ibid., 595; HD §78, 193. 91. In this respect, Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy is in line with the artistic ideal opened up by Winckelmann a few years earlier. Eckart Goebel persuasively argues in his study on aesthetic grace as a form of balance “that already Winckelmann’s essay ‘Grazie’ (1759) characterizes the epitome of successful art and then of a successful life as balance” (Goebel, Charis und Charisma, 18). 92. Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, 196. Schiller comes to the same conclusion toward the end of “What Can a Well-Established Theater Actually Achieve?” (1784): “The sentimental weakling hardens himself into a man, and the raw non-human begins here to feel for the first time” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 831). 93. Lessing, Werke IV, 53. 94. Using the lexicon of sighs instead of tears, Diderot makes this abundantly clear in a text translated by Lessing: “O dramatic poets! The true applause that you must strive to obtain is not the clapping of hands that can be suddenly heard after an illustrious line, but rather the deep sigh that presses out of the soul after the compulsion of a long silence and relieves the soul” (Diderot, Oeuvres esthétiques, 197). 95. McCall, “Liquid Politics,” 598. 96. Lessing, Werke IV, 144. 97. Hobbes, Leviathan, 28. 98. Kant, Werke I, 2, 835–36. 99. In a gesture typical for eighteenth-century critiques of sentimental literature, Sulzer raises the concern that a person enveloped by compassion “lacks the motivation for many important duties and in many situations fails to do good due to a lack of impetus.” An overly compassionate person “can

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degenerate into a soft voluptuary, into a person who is too weak for every important task” (Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, in Mathes [ed.], Die Entwicklung, 83). 100. Moreover, as Peter Fenves has shown, compassion for Kant can never serve as the basis of community, since it dismantles the subject that is to ground community. Analyzing Kant’s discussion of “a pain of participation” (i.e., compassion) in the Third Critique, Fenves writes: “The beautiful soul who participates in the pain of others is itself taken apart; such a soul does not ground itself but always finds itself grounded in something else—and indeed not only in a certain pathos but even in another’s pain” (Fenves, A Peculiar Fate, 262). On pages 263–67, Fenves goes on to elaborate how Kant develops a compassionless form of “participation with the other.” 101. When taking into account the political consequences of this almost myopic, teary gaze of commiseration, Szondi responds with the Brechtianinflected rejoinder: From this sentence of Lessing, “one can draw the conclusion that drama should not depend on emotions” (Szondi, Die Theorie des bürgerlichen Trauerspiels, 167). 102. In On Revolution, Arendt takes Kant’s thoughts a step further and outlines the abyssal stakes of a politics of compassion, “the most devastating passion motivating revolutionaries” (72). For Arendt, because compassion is defined precisely by putting oneself in the place of the other and thus eliminating the space between persons (which is her definition of the world as the “in-between”), compassion is at best politically irrelevant and at worst leads to atrocity. And because it is directed only to the particular person suffering, compassion lacks a dialogical relation to the world and other people. This lack of distance, which renders the compassionate one mute, at once lends compassion its intensity, its force of persuasion, and makes it dangerous, were it ever to lead to political action: “As a rule,” writes Arendt, “it is not compassion which sets out to change worldly conditions in order to ease human suffering, but if it does, it will shun the drawn-out wearisome processes of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence” (86–87). As the title On Revolution evinces, Arendt is concerned with the motivating forces behind such political upheavals, and in this respect condemns the French Revolution’s politics of compassion (whose theoretician was Rousseau and whose practitioner was Robespierre) and praises the American Revolution for not being swayed by pity—“no pity lead them astray from reason” (95)—precisely because, and this is Arendt’s provocative thesis, compassion as politics leads to violence and terror. For Arendt, compassion not only lacks the communicative structure necessary for negotiating and establishing law (and thus resorts to violence to achieve its ends), but also, since it only is concerned with the oppressed, lacks the generality necessary for justice: “Pity may be the perversion of compassion, but its alternative is solidarity. [. . .] [I]t is out of solidarity that they establish deliberately and, as it were, dispassionately a community of

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interest with the expressed and exploited. [. . .] [F]or solidarity, because it partakes of reason, and hence of generality, is able to comprehend a multitude conceptually, not only the multitude of a class or a nation or a people, but eventually all mankind. But this solidarity, though it may be aroused by suffering, is not guided by it, and it comprehends the strong and rich no less than the weak and poor” (88–89). Because it is particular, compassion will always fail as a form of politics; its perversion, pity, as a generalized and more distant form of commiseration, can enter the marketplace of politics, but since it is predicated on suffering, pity lacks the ability to be truly universal and, like compassion, can be enjoyed for its own self-gratulatory sake. For Arendt, then, the only political alternative and only true politics is solidarity. Solidarity possesses the universality that both compassion and pity lack, insofar as it is extended to all fellow beings not despite but because of difference and lack of identification. Moreover, whereas pity and compassion remain entrenched in their state of being feelings, solidarity is deliberative (that is, discursive) and thus participates in reason. It is therefore probably not an accident that in her Lessing-Prize speech, “On Humanity in Dark Times,” Arendt goes to great lengths to distance Lessing from compassion and to emphasize his criticalpolemical work as well as his philosophy of friendship, which unlike compassionate identification is premised on difference and discourse. 103. Lessing, Werke IV, 196; Correspondence, 33. 104. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, in Mathes (ed.), Die Entwicklung, 83. 105. Lessing, Werke IV, 459; HD §49, 154. 106. Nietzsche, KSA 6, 173; The Anti-Christ §7. 107. Greiner, quoted in Sauder, “Der empfindsame Leser,” in Das weinende Saeculum, 9. The other contemporaneous terms used to describe the phenomenon of “chain crying” and the explosion of a reading public include “readingrabies” [Lesewut], a “reading-plague” [Leseseuche], and “reading addiction” [Lesesucht]. See Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, 24, as well as von Ungern-Sternberg, “Schriftsteller und literarischer Markt,” in Grimminger (ed.) Deutsche Aufklärung. Chapter 4, “Aesthetics and Politics of Reading,” of Woodmansee’s book presents an excellent discussion of Bergk’s 1799 book The Art of Reading Books, a popular primer in hermeneutics that warns against bad literature, already fears the decline of reading (although around 1800 only 25 percent of Germany was literate), and encourages the reading public to “be extremely selective in our reading and read only works that are distinguished by richness and originality of thought and beauty and liveliness of presentation” (Woodmansee, 99). That the very beginning of Germany’s reading culture is also the beginning of its decline is indicative of the problem of popularity and success in the age of the marketplace. 108. Schulte-Sasse, “Poetik und Ästhetik Lessings,” in Grimminger (ed.), Deutsche Aufklärung, 318. 109. Schulte-Sasse, “Das Konzept bürgerlich-literarischer Öffentlichkeit,” in Bürger et al., Aufklärung und literarische Öffentlichkeit, 99–100.

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110. Woodmansee clearly states one reason for the break from a reception aesthetics and the move to autonomous aesthetics: “As literature became subject to the laws of market economy, the instrumentalist theory, especially the affective formulation given it by the generation of Mendelssohn, was found to justify the wrong works” (Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, 32). 111. Moritz, “Versuch einer Vereinigung,” in Schriften zur Ästhetik und Poetik, 6. 112. Ibid., 7. 113. Ibid., 7. 114. Ibid., 8. 115. Schiller writes in 1784: “More than any other public institution, the theater is a school of practical wisdom, a guide through bourgeois life, an infallible key to the innermost secrets of the human soul” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 826). 116. Schiller, “Über den Grund des Vergnügens,” in Sämtliche Werke V, 359. 3. the average artist 1. Goethe, HA 10, 172. 2. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften 17, 305. 3. Goethe, HA 6, 9; Werther, 6. 4. Ibid., 9; Werther, 6. 5. As Vaget has underscored, Werther’s recognition of the disconnection between the artistic images in his head and their execution paraphrases the painter Conti at the beginning of Lessing’s Emilia Galotti: “Ha! Too bad we don’t paint immediately with our eyes. How much is lost along the long way from the eye to the arm to the brush!” (I/iv). Because Conti alone sees what is lost between his ideal conceptualization of a work and its realization, he claims he is more proud of what never enters his paintings—the ideal image—than the realized work itself. Every artwork is simply a bad copy of what one initially envisioned. As with Werther, the image Conti initially has in his eye is proof enough “that I am truly a great painter” (I/iv). This parallel is all the more pregnant—as a premonition of Werther’s fate and perhaps, as Vaget argues, a reason for his “sorrows” and suicide—when one recalls that Werther shoots himself alongside an open copy of Emilia Galotti. For a thorough reading of Werther’s dilettantism, see Vaget, “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” in Interpretationen. Goethes Erzählwerk, 37–72. 6. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 686. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 687. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid., 686–87. 12. It should be noted that although “genuine artistic genius” demarcates a rare gift, this innate talent is not sufficient and needs to be developed through

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study and practice. Therefore, Schiller and Goethe in the 1790s and beyond generally speak of the artistic Meister as the ultimate goal of the artist: one who has developed genius (innate talent) to perfection (through industriousness). 13. Vaget’s impressive investigation of dilettantism and the Age of Goethe includes the following works, which have been very helpful for this chapter: “Der Dilettant,” “The ‘Augenmensch’ and the Failure of Vision,” “Das Bild vom Dilettanten bei Moritz, Schiller und Goethe,” and his book-length study Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft. 14. Vaget, “Der Dilettant,” 131. Koopmann also situates dilettantism as a middle position between genial art and complete inability: “Dilettantism is the burdensome profanation of sacrosanct art, always closer to the plain mean [flachen Mittelmaß] than to the entirely failed or the singularly successful artwork. Dilettantes betray talent, not genius” (Koopmann, “Dilettantismus,” 178). 15. On the development of popular entertainment literature in the eighteenth century, see Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market as well as Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur. 16. The question of authorship is difficult to discern in this truly collective project, in which the charts are in Schiller’s handwriting, the notes in Goethe’s and Schiller’s, with some additions by the art historian Meyer. Von Wiese argues for Schiller being the formative force behind the project, while Vaget convincingly argues that Goethe was more likely the leading thinker. See von Wiese, “Goethes und Schillers Schemata über den Dilettantismus” (in Von Lessing bis Grabbe) and Vaget, Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft, especially page 134. Since this chapter is not primarily concerned with the philological question of authorship, it will in general refer to Goethe and Schiller throughout, except for passages where it seems that one of the author’s concerns played a particular role. 17. Goethe, SW I/18, 782–83. 18. The first theorist to address art from the perspective of nonart was most likely Karl Phillip Moritz, whose essay “On the Formative Imitation of the Beautiful” certainly influenced Goethe’s and Schiller ’s thought. See Vaget, “Das Bild vom Dilettanten.” 19. Stenzel locates the first use of “dilettante” in German in 1753. See “‘Hochadeliche Dilettantische Rightersprüche,’” 235. On the explosion of the book market see, Schulte-Sasse, Kritik an der Trivialliteratur, 44–47, and von Ungern-Sternberg, “Schriftsteller und literarischer Markt,” in Grimminger (ed.), Deutsche Aufklärung, 133–85. 20. Goethe, SW I/18, 785. 21. Ibid., 781. 22. While there are clear affinities between the dilettante and the philistine, the crucial distinction, particularly for Goethe and Schiller, seems to be that the dilettante shows a passion for art while the philistine displays a decided indifference or even hostility to it. Following Grimm, the term philistine was first coined by German students in Jena in the seventeenth century to

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designate the noneducated, noncultured townspeople around the university. It is one of the first instances of the town-gown phenomenon. When Nietzsche mobilizes the term cultivated philistine [Bildungsphilister], it is precisely the predicate “cultivated” that separates the “rawness” of the philistine from his supposedly “cultivated” counterpart. The philistine, writes Nietzsche, is “the opposite of the son of the muses, of the artist, of the genuine artistic person” (Nietzsche, KSA 1, 165; David Strauss, §2). This distinction between the dilettante and the philistine, however, doesn’t hold in German letters as a whole, especially in Brentano’s 1811 satire Der Philister vor, in und nach der Geschichte. For Romantics such as Eichendorff, dilettante and philistine are often used as synonyms. See Frühwald, “Der Philister als Dilettant” and Pikulik, Romantik als Ungenügen, 141–49. On the function of the philistine in modern aesthetic theory as the included outsider, particularly in Adorno, see Beech and Roberts (eds.), The Philistine Controversy. Developing Adorno’s dictum that “the philistine is not completely wrong to sneer at art,” Beech and Roberts argue: “In fact, the concept of the philistine is peculiarly well placed, as the definitional other of art and aesthetics, to bring to bear on art and aesthetics the cost of their exclusions, blindness and anxieties. Indeed it could be said that the philistine is the spectre of art and aesthetics” (45). 23. Goethe, SW I/18, 764. 24. On the commodification of the book, see the citations from SchulteSasse at the end of chapter 2 as well as Woodmansee’s The Author, Art, and the Market and Bourdieu, The Rules of Art. 25. Goethe and Schiller, Briefwechsel Schiller–Goethe 2, 768. 26. Goethe, SW I/18, 779. 27. Briefwechsel Schiller–Goethe 2, 768. 28. Goethe, SW I/18, 781. 29. Briefwechsel Schiller–Goethe 2, 770; letter dated June 25, 1799. 30. Goethe emphasizes this mutual relation in his essay “The Collector and his Own”: “The artist depends on the amateur [Liebhaber] of his age, just as the amateur depends on the contemporaneous artist” (Goethe, SW I/18, 680). 31. Goethe, SW I/18, 780–81. For two excellent histories of the term dilettante in Germany see, Vaget, “Der Dilettant” and Stenzel, “‘Hochadeliche Dilettantische Richtersprüche.’” 32. Margherita von Brentano explains this historical distinction: “With the end of the ancien régime and the establishment of bourgeois conditions, the differentiation between the dilettante and the professional becomes more and more an evaluation, indeed, it becomes a devaluation of the dilettante” (Brentano, “Liebhabereien,” in Althaus, Avanti Dilettanti, 44). Mattenklott expresses the same idea in less historically precise terms: “Dilettantes were once respected people. This first changes with dilettantism” (Mattenklott, “Das Ende des Dilettantismus,” 749). 33. Goethe, SW I/18, 782. 34. Vaget, Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft, 195.

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35. After listing the ability to proceed from a total impression to individual differentiations and back to a feeling for the whole as one of the advantages of dilettantish drawing, Goethe and Schiller write: “The dilettante has these advantages in common with the artist, as opposed to the merely inactive observer” (Goethe, SW I/18, 746). In “Über Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit” (1798, “On Truth and Probability”), which Goethe published in the Propyläen, the “common art lover” is described as treating “an artwork like an object that he encounters at the market.” On the other hand, “the true [wahre] art lover sees not only the truth of the imitated but also the excellent features of the select, the ingeniousness of the composition, the supernal nature of the small art world. He feels that he has to lift himself up to the artist in order to enjoy the work; he feels he has to collect himself from his strewn life in order to live with the artwork, to repeatedly observe it, and thereby to give himself a loftier existence” (Goethe, HA 12, 72). While this text doesn’t mention the need for the true art lover to participate in artistic creation, the dilettante project written in the next year seems to prescribe how one can achieve such insight into art, namely, by trying one’s own hand. 36. Ibid., 781. 37. Goethe reiterates this firm belief in the dependence of innate talent on external circumstances in his 1818 essay “Classical and Modern”: “And thus one must always repeat: Born talent is required to produce, but it also requires, on the other hand, a development according to nature and art; it cannot betake its assets and cannot adequately complete them without the external favor of the times” (Goethe, HA 12, 175). 38. Goethe, SW I/18, 766. 39. Géza von Molnár has produced a very careful study, including photomechanical copies of Goethe’s edition of Kant’s Third Critique, which shows how attentively Goethe read Kant. See von Molnár, Goethes Kantstudien. 40. Goethe, SW I/18, 765. Vaget correctly points out that this assertion concerning Germany’s lack of a literary tradition as an impetus for mediocrity stands in opposition to other claims in the notes, in which dilettantism only emerges once a culture has begun to form and is thereby “a necessary consequence of already widespread art” (Vaget, Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft, 169). 41. Goethe, SW I/18, 781. 42. Ibid., 778–79. 43. See Vaget “Das Bild vom Dilettanten.” 44. In his early essay “Nach Falconet und über Falconet” (1776, “After Falconet and On Falconet”), Goethe differentiates between the art lover’s and the artist’s mode of seeing in terms that still apply to the dilettante project: Whereas the art lover only notes the strong effect and details of the world through the lens of art, “the eye of the artist finds it everywhere. He may enter the workshop of a cobbler or a stall, he may look at the face of his beloved, his boots, or antiquity—everywhere he sees the sacred vibrations and the gentle tones with which nature connects all objects” (Goethe, HA 12, 24).

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45. Goethe, SW I/18, 770. 46. In “On the Necessary Limits,” Schiller writes: “The true artistic genius can always be recognized by its ability to maintain coldness and persistent patience even with the most glowing feeling for the whole” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 687). 47. Ibid., V, 430. 48. Avital Ronell has brilliantly examined the phenomenon and paradoxes of being called throughout her work, particularly in The Telephone Book and Stupidity. 49. Goethe to Meyer, April 1, 1799. 50. Schulte-Sasse, Die Kritik an der Trivialliteratur, 13. Schulte-Sasse vacillates a bit in his definition of trivial literature, which ranges from “mass literature” (14) and “emotive mass literature” (29) to the more simple definition of “inadequate literature” (15) that would clearly apply to Goethe and Schiller’s definition of dilettantism as developed in this chapter. The central determination of trivial literature for Schulte-Sasse seems to be an “anti-system that follows different intentions than high poetry” (57): “The dilettantish literature of the eighteenth century becomes a problem for the Classicists, because it adheres to another aesthetic principle” (97). The present study argues dilettantism is a problem for Goethe and Schiller because it adheres to the same aesthetic principles as high art. 51. Goethe, SW I/18, 765. 52. Goethe, HA 11, 207. 53. Ibid., 1, 177. 54. Ibid., 10, 529. 55. Wieland called Bürger’s poetry “so lovely, so polished, so perfect”; Wordsworth and especially Coleridge placed great worth on Bürger. In 1798 Coleridge even claimed: “Bürger of all the German poets pleases me the most.” See Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, 71 and 112–18. 56. Bürger, Sämtliche Werke, 14. 57. Ibid., 726. 58. Dubos, Critical Observations on Poetry and Painting, cited in Wölfel, “Moralische Anstalt,” 49–50. 59. Bürger, Sämtliche Werke, 730. 60. Ibid., 730. 61. Ibid., 730. 62. Ibid., 14. 63. Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 973. 64. Woodmansee, The Author, Art, and the Market, 73. 65. This is, of course, the same Schiller who once wrote in the announcement for his new journal Thalia (1784): “The public is now everything for me, my course of study, my sovereign, my entrusted one. I now belong to the public alone. I place myself in front of this tribunal and no other. I fear and admire only the public” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 856). 66. Ibid., 973.

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67. Ibid., 973–74. 68. Ibid., 976. 69. Ibid., 974. 70. Ibid., 979. 71. Ibid., 974. 72. Ibid., 987. 73. In his discussion of the photography exhibition “The Great Family of Man,” Roland Barthes dissects an ideology of universal humanism similar to that of Schiller’s and Lessing’s still at work in the twentieth century. Barthes describes the myth process in the exhibit as consisting in two steps: an emphasis on difference and exoticism through a plurality of skin colors, bodily features, and customs, followed by the suspension of these differences: “A type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way” (Barthes, Mythologies, 100). In the ideology of humanity as one “great family,” diversity is ultimately viewed as superficial, since upon closer scrutiny one should find “the existence of a common mould” (ibid.). For Barthes this putative universality of the human condition, the bedrock of humanism, only serves as a false mode of identification: “We are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behavior where historical alienation introduces some ‘difference’ which we shall here quite simply call ‘injustices.’” (ibid., 101). The basis of Schiller’s notion of universality becomes in Barthes’s interpretation the very impediment to any real recognition of the other, one that would incorporate the experience of difference. The universality of the “human condition” functions only at the expense of masking differences between cultures, systems, regimes, and epochs. Birth, work, and death may be universal constants for all of humanity, but their modes and conditions are not. “If one removes History from them,” Barthes writes, “there is nothing more to be said about them; any comment about them becomes tautological” (ibid.). It should be noted that many critics come to Bürger’s defense in the face of Schiller’s rather harsh attack, though for different reasons. Berghahn sees a missed opportunity in Schiller’s dismissal of Bürger: “Bürger’s concept of popularity contains a social and political tendency that bursts a pure literary framework: namely, to convey to the common man a consciousness of his own value through popular poetry” (Berghahn, Schiller, 107). Woodmansee goes further and claims that the timing of Schiller’s review—the early, still enthusiastic phases of the French Revolution—announces Schiller’s nonrevolutionary desire “to write the people out of his model of poetry” (The Author, Art, and the Market, 75, see also 78–79). 74. Goethe, HA 12, 240. The author was later revealed to be the poet Daniel Jenisch, who then received Goethe and Schiller’s ire in their Xenien poems. 75. Ibid., 241. 76. Ibid. 77. Goethe differs here not only from Schiller’s critique of Bürger but also from Schiller’s famous passage in letter nine from Aesthetic Education: “The

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artist is indeed the child of his age, but woe to him if he is also its pupil or, worse still, its minion! Let a benevolent deity tear the suckling in good time from his mother’s breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and allow him to reach maturity under a distant Grecian sky. Then, when he has become a man, let him return, a stranger to his own century; not, however, to gladden it by his appearance, but rather, terrible like Agamemnon’s son, to purify it” (Schiller, Sämtliche Werke V, 593). While Goethe would agree with the first sentence and reject the author as a minion of his age, his thoughts in “Literary Sansculottism” preclude the possibility of being nourished with the “milk of a better age.” Rather, the genius is at once an exception to his age and dependent upon it. 78. Goethe, HA 12, 241. 79. Ibid., 242. 80. Ibid., 243. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 240. 85. Goethe, SW I/18, 459–60. 86. Ibid., 467. 87. Ibid. 88. Nietzsche, KSA 1, 165; David Strauss §2, 11. 89. Ibid., 188; David Strauss §6, 32. 90. Ibid., 184; David Strauss §4, 28–29. 91. Ibid., 222; David Strauss §11, 64. 92. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, 25. 93. Ibid., 26. 94. See Vaget, Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft, 208. 95. Goethe, SW I/18, 779. 96. Ibid., 471. 97. Nietzsche, KSA 5, 190; Beyond Good and Evil §247, 139–40. 98. For fuller readings of the relation between dilettantism and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, see Ill-Sun Joo, Goethes Dilettantismus-Kritik and Reincke, “Goethes Roman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre und die Problematik des Kunstdilettanten,” in Stellmacher (ed.), Goethe, 159–82. Moretti’s The Way of the World addresses many of the concerns in this section without discussing dilettantism explicitly. 99. Moretti, The Way of the World, iv. 100. All citations from Novalis are taken from “Fragmente und Studien 1799–1800” in Gille (ed.), Goethes Wilhelm Meister. Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte der Lehr- und Wanderjahre, 60. 101. Pikulik cites the crucial passage from Novalis, where he defines what it means to “romanticize the world”: “By giving a lofty sense to the common, a secretive appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unfamiliar to the famil-

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iar, an infinite semblance to the finite, I romanticize the world” (Pikulik, Romantik als Ungenügen, 13). 102. Goethe, HA 10, 452. 103. Viëtor quotes Goethe: “Wilhelm Student, who—I don’t know how— acquired the name Meister” (Viëtor, Goethe. Dichtung, Wissenschaft, Weltbild, 132). 104. Goethe, HA 7, 78; Wilhelm Meister, 2/2, 42–43. 105. Ibid., 273; Wilhelm Meister, 4/18, 163. 106. Ibid., 469; Wilhelm Meister, 7/7, 287. Later in the novel, after Wilhelm has indeed abandoned the stage, joined the Tower Society, and completed his apprenticeship, Jarno is even more explicit and pragmatic: “One should be wary of a talent that one has no hope of carrying out to perfection. One may develop it as much as one wants, but when the merit of the Meister finally becomes clear, one will painfully regret the loss of time and energy that one spent on such bungling” (ibid., 551; Wilhelm Meister, 8/5, 337). 107. Ibid., 469; Wilhelm Meister, 7/7, 287. 108. Ibid., 496; Wilhelm Meister, 7/9, 303. 109. Ibid.; Wilhelm Meister, 7/9, 303. 110. Briefwechsel Schiller–Goethe 1, 319. 111. Moretti, Way of the World, 21. For Moretti, the tension in Wilhelm Meister is between individuality and normality, whereby the solution to this dilemma is not compulsion to conform but to convince the individual that he or she wants to be normal: “Thus it is not sufficient for modern bourgeois society simply to subdue the drives that oppose the standards of ‘normality.’ It is also necessary that, as a ‘free individual,’ not as a fearful subject but as a convinced citizen, one perceives the social norms as one’s own” (ibid., 16). 112. Goethe, SW I/18, 779. 113. Heine, Die romantische Schule, in SäS 5, 390. Ludwig Börne, Heine’s early friend and fellow member of Young Germany, comes to an equally dismissive critique of Goethe’s literary taste: “Goethe was the king, neither of the common nor of the excellent spirits, but rather the king of bourgeois souls. He was surrounded not by respect and love but by begging and gratitude. [. . .] He protected the mediocrity of literature and let himself be guarded by it” (Börne, “Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde,” in Sämtliche Schriften 2, 858). 114. Goethe, dtv-Gesamtausgabe 21, 23. 115. Goethe, HA 7, 553; Wilhelm Meister, 8/5, 339. 116. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, HA 8, 288. 117. Ibid. Eckart Goebel’s exemplary study, Charis und Charisma, traces precisely this figure of balance (or grace) as the model of the artist from Winckelmann to Heidegger. 118. See Vaget, Dilettantismus und Meisterschaft, 207–8, and “Augenmensch,” 20. 119. Goethe, SW I/18, 764–66. 120. Ibid., 766.

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121. Ibid., 764–66. 122. The one author who to my knowledge mentions this remarkable proximity between the work of genius and the dilettante as well as the anxiety that seems to be motivating Goethe and Schiller is Margherita von Brentano. Goethe and Schiller, she writes, express “the anxiety that the poet—i.e., the artist in the medium of language, which is not a special branch like architecture or music—is difficult to differentiate from the dilettante. For the poet there is no professional training as for the musician or the visual artist; there are no mechanical techniques, whose learning and mastery can belong to an institution and thus be demonstrable. If there are criteria that should differentiate the ‘genuine’ artist from the dilettante in poetry, they are more difficult to render objective or at least more so than in the other arts” (Brentano, “Liebhabereien,” in Althaus, Avanti Dilettanti, 45). 123. I offer two paradigmatic examples of such virtuosity of imitation. The first reveals the great difficulty of distinguishing the work of the Meister from that of the dilettante via Goethe’s own “writing”: his conversations with Eckermann, which are “too good” to be the work of Eckermann (Nietzsche called it the “best German book”) but are generally not counted among Goethe’s oeuvre. Avital Ronell has explored this problem with great lucidity in Dictations: “Eckermann’s style is, in the end, indistinguishable from Goethe’s. Scholars have been unable to determine whether he copied from Goethe’s diary or whether Goethe reconstituted his diary from Eckermann’s notes. The radical copulation of style is one reason that the status of the Conversations must in part remain suspended” (Ronell, Dictations, 78). The second example comes from music and reinscribes this issue of virtuosity in terms of poetry and prose. In her discussion of Liszt and Heine, Susan Bernstein examines how Heine refuses to see Liszt’s art of performance—perhaps the “art” of the virtuoso par excellence—as the poetry of a creative subject and thus relegates Liszt to prose. But, as Bernstein argues, “by the same token Liszt is a figure of the art of prose par excellence, which is of course also Heine’s art—or at least one of them. As technique, prose stands in opposition to art yet has the power, too, to transform itself into art” (Bernstein, Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century, 67). 124. Nietzsche, KSA 2, 610–11; Human All-too-Human, 2/2, §135. 125. Goethe, Goethes Gespräche 2, 323. 126. Goethe, HA 12, 176. 127. Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death,” in The Work of Fire, 303. 128. Nietzsche, KSA 5, 279; Genealogy of Morality, 1/13, 28. 129. Jelinek, quoted in Stanitzek, “Dilettant,” in Verstärker, vol. 3, 1998. 4. average life 1. Nietzsche, KSA 1, 320; Uses and Disadvantages of History, §9, 154. 2. Hegel, Werke 13, 25; Aesthetics, 11. 3. Ibid., 151; Aesthetics, 111.

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4. Even taken on its own terms, Hegel’s thesis on the end of art is admittedly complicated, since he appeals throughout the Aesthetics to epistemological reasons (art is too sensuous for truth now), reception-aesthetic grounds (art no longer speaks to us as to earlier peoples), and the exhaustion of artistic subject matter and forms, which renders art arbitrary, mere play. For a full discussion of these issues, see the first chapter of Geulen’s The End of Art. For a precise reading of the relationship between comedy and the end of art in Hegel, see Hamacher “(The End of Art with a Mask).” 5. “Thought and reflection has outstripped beautiful art” (Hegel, Werke 13, 24; Aesthetics, 10). 6. Ibid., 26; Aesthetics, 11. Danto largely agrees with Hegel’s assessment and posits Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as the moment when art catches up to philosophy: “I should like to believe that with the Brillo boxes the possibilities are effectively closed and that the history of art has come, in a way, to an end. It has not stopped but ended, in the sense that it has passed over into a kind of consciousness of itself and become, again in a way, its own philosophy: a state of affairs predicted in Hegel’s philosophy of history. [. . .] Suddenly in the advanced art of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, art and philosophy were ready for one another. Suddenly, indeed, they needed one another to tell themselves apart” (Transfiguration of the Commonplace, vii–viii). 7. Hegel, Werke 13, 257; Aesthetics, 196. 8. Ibid., 197; Aesthetics, 149. 9. Ibid., 15, 258; Aesthetics, 987. 10. Ibid.; Aesthetics, 987. 11. Ibid., 260; Aesthetics, 988–89. 12. Heine, SäS 5, 360; RS 1. 13. Heine, “Die deutsche Literatur,” in SäS 1, 454. For Heine and the exceptional minds who feel jilted by Goethe in favor of mediocre, nonthreatening authors, there is a secret pleasure in anticipating the Meister’s death, when his adversaries will receive their just admiration: “And so Goethe will not be able to prevent that these great spirits, whom he would have liked to do away with in life, will join him in death and find their eternal place next to him in the Westminster of German literature” (ibid.). 14. Ibid., 445; and Heine, “Französische Maler,” in SäS 5, 72. 15. Heine, for example, remarks on Goethe’s response to the Romantics’ general praise of him: “The new school paid him homage as king, and when he became king, he showed his gratitude as kings are wont to: by insultingly rejecting the Schlegels and kicking their school into the dust” (Heine, “Die deutsche Literatur,” in SäS 1, 445). 16. This discussion of Heine’s critique of Goethe is indebted to Eva Geulen, who kindly sent me her unpublished essay “Nachkommenschaften: Heines Ende der Kunstperiode und die Folgen.” See also Jauß’s discussion of Heine, Goethe, and art in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation, 109–14. 17. Heine, SäS 5, 393; RS 34. 18. Ibid., 396; RS 36.

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19. Ibid., 395; RS 36. 20. Ibid.; RS 36. 21. Heine, “Französische Maler,” in SäS 5, 72. 22. See Jochen Schmidt: “Thus Heine’s entire oeuvre is infused with a longing for genius and ‘art’ in the sense of the idea of autonomy, precisely because of his enmeshment in daily-political engagement” (Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens, II, 64). 23. Heine, Ludwig Börne. Denkschrift, in SäS 7, 141. 24. Mill will be discussed further in the conclusion. 25. Immermann, Werke II, 121. 26. Holub argues against reducing Büchner’s text to one of the first expressions of a realist aesthetics: “The Kunstgespräch is not so much a program for realism as an attempt to define an alternative to what is perceived as idealism in art, an endeavor to explore the manner in which texts refer and relate to the world outside the text” (Holub, Reflections of Realism, 43). 27. Büchner, Lenz, trans. Sieburth, 30–31. 28. Ibid., 30–31. 29. Ibid., 32–33. 30. Holub offers a provocative reading of Lenz that highlights the dilemma of trying to capture everyday, prosaic lives in art, since the figures have to be halted, frozen, and petrified, with the result that “imitation turns into annihilation” (Holub, Reflections of Realism, 56). 31. Erich Auerbach writes that none of the German Realists—including Fontane, whose social realism “still does not go very deep” (452)—managed to produce “serious realism,” which represents man “as embedded in a total reality, political, social, and economic, which is constantly evolving” (Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Trask, 463; cf. 491). 32. Grillparzer began The Poor Musician in 1831, which was completed in 1846 and first published in 1847. 33. Grillparzer, AS, 147–48 and 150; Poor Musician, 216 and 218. 34. Ibid., 146 and 148; Poor Musician, 214 and 216. 35. Ibid., 148; Poor Musician, 216. 36. Seeba, “Wie es sich fügte.” In Interpretationen. Erzählungen und Novellen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Band 2, 99. 37. Holub, Reflections of Realism, 35. In another formulation, Holub writes: “The fiction they [realist texts] perpetuate is that they are not fiction at all” (ibid., 9). 38. Goethe, HA 9, 72. For a fuller reading of this Goethe passage and his notion of childhood, see my article: “The Promises of Childhood: Autobiography in Goethe and Jean Paul.” 39. See Zedler’s Großes Vollständiges Universal-Lexicon (1732 ff.), entry: “obscurae personae.” 40. Grillparzer, AS, 149–50; Poor Musician, 217. 41. Grillparzer, AS, 151; Poor Musician, 219.

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42. The fact that the narrator emphatically retains and desires difference— particularly his distance from the crowd—has been emphasized by many scholars, though usually to comment on the narrator’s character (aristocratic, elitist) and the contemporaneous social relations. Ellis, for example, writes: “This alleged love of the people is a pretentious aristocratic pose; only when safe from them [the people], and feeling superior to them, can the narrator indulge it” (Ellis, “The Narrator and His Values,” in Bernd [ed.] Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann, 36). 43. Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, 12–13. 44. Grillparzer, AS, 150; Poor Musician, 218. Roland Heine has examined the significance of the hermeneutic “connection” in The Poor Musician with great lucidity, including its relation to Dilthey, in his article “Ästhetische oder existentielle Integration?”; the following discussion of “connection” is indebted to his article. 45. The role and character of the narrator have become a central focus of Poor Musician scholarship in recent decades. In general, the narrator doesn’t walk away looking too good. Ellis—rather implausibly—roundly condemns the narrator and sanctifies Jakob: “The two display very much the same contrast as artists that they show as men: the Spielmann technically incompetent, yet completely honest and sincere; the narrator technically slick and clever, conscious of literary effect but without integrity, concerned with applause and a shallow kind of impact rather than with real artistic value” (41–42). Cook equally speaks of the narrator’s “exploitation of the fiddler as a literary subject” (327). Swales offers a more balanced and fitting assessment of the narrator. While the narrator, according to Swales, does not identify with Jakob and indeed distances himself from him, the narrator nevertheless remains “strangely fascinated by him”: “It is almost as if the narrator were ashamed of the moment of weakness for the Spielmann—and immediately adopts an ironic and consciously withdrawn tone in order to distance himself from him” (69 and 70). All citations from Bernd (ed.) Grillparzer’s Der arme Spielmann. 46. Grillparzer, AS, 156–57; Poor Musician, 224. 47. Ibid., 157 and 158; Poor Musician, 225 and 226. 48. Ibid., 159; Poor Musician, 226. 49. Heine, “Ästhetische oder existentielle Integration?” 655. 50. Grillparzer, AS, 160; Poor Musician, 227. 51. See Heine, “Ästhetische oder existentielle Integration?” 656–57. 52. Horace, Ars Poetica, vv. 111–12. 53. Heine, “Ästhetische oder existentielle Integration?” 657. 54. Grillparzer, AS, 161; Poor Musician, 228. 55. Ibid., 161; Poor Musician, 228. 56. Heine, “Ästhetische oder existentielle Integration?” 658. 57. For a different reading of the problem of part and whole (and hole and whole), see Geulen’s “Stellen-Lese,” which argues that it is Jakob’s additive sense of totality, one that rejects any process of selection—and thus allows no

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“holes” [Lücken]—which compels the whole to collapse (Geulen, “StellenLese,” 499). 58. Stifter, Leben und Werk, 234. Hebbel’s bitter epigram is directed not only at Stifter but also Brockes, Geßner, Kompert “and others.” 59. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 9; Preface, 1. 60. “I don’t think I am wrong when I maintain that this little story is a masterpiece” (Stifter, Leben und Werk, 188; letter to Aurelius Buddeus, August 21, 1847). 61. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 10; Preface, 2. 62. Ibid.; Preface, 1. 63. Stifter’s affirmation of the small and insignificant brings him into close proximity to Emerson’s famous evocation of the “common” and “familiar,” which has been so lucidly analyzed by Stanley Cavell. In “The American Scholar” (1827), Emerson writes: “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; [. . .] I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. [. . .] The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the body;— show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law” (cited in Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, 20–21). Throughout his writings on Emerson, Cavell develops what he calls “the extraordinary of the ordinary,” “a perception of the weirdness, or surrealism, of what we call, accept, adapt to, as the usual, the real” (ibid., 39). In so doing, Cavell aligns Emerson’s immersion in the quotidian with Kierkegaard’s “perception of the sublime in everyday life” (ibid., 25) as well as “Wittgenstein perceiving our craving to escape our commonness with others, even when we recognize the commonness of the craving” and “Heidegger perceiving our pull to remain absorbed in the common, perhaps in the very way we push to escape it” (ibid., 64). 64. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 10; Preface, 2. Stifter’s teacher in Krensmünster, Koller, published scientific articles on astronomy, meteorology, and terrestrial magnetism. The textbook for physics included a section on terrestrial magnetism. See the excellent commentary to the preface, in HKG 2/3, 101. 65. Stifter, HKG 2/2,11; Preface, 2. 66. Dittmann also emphasizes that Stifter does not propose an identity of particular and universal, “which would lead to the unity of the Classical symbol, but rather demands a universal that rests on summation” (Dittmann, “Zur Genese des ‘sanften Gesetzes,’” 113). 67. Quoted in Furst (ed.), Realism, 29. 68. Kant, KU, 107, §28; CJ 144. 69. Stifter, Werke VI, 587–88. 70. Ibid., 594. 71. Downing, Double Exposures, 32. 72. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 11; Preface, 2.

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73. Ibid., 11; Preface, 2–3. 74. Downing, Double Exposures, 30. 75. Ibid., 31. 76. In “Vom Rechte” (1850, “On Right”), Stifter asserts: “One of the saddest signs [of the times] is the abatement and decline of religion” (Werke VI, 339). In the next section on “means against the moral collapse of nations,” he lists school and church as the surest way to prevent a nation’s demise and even supports communities that have established a “moral police” (ibid., 345 and 347). 77. In developing the aporias and paradoxes of Büchner ’s Lenz, Holub highlights that while realism in general conflicts with religious thought, “Lenz predicates his doctrine of art on the existence of God as the original Creator. Only then can the writer or artist be called upon to imitate Him. If God does not exist, then presumably there is nothing and no one to imitate. [. . .] God in Lenz is thus both a source of meaning and a mediator of this meaning to the human being” (Holub, Reflections of Realism, 50–51). Despite the evocation of God in Stifter’s preface, the divine performs the opposite function: he guarantees knowledge’s essential incompletion. 78. In her discussion of Quetelet, Lorraine Daston explicitly mentions terrestrial magnetism as a point of reference for early social statistics: “Social phenomena, like the complex physical phenomena of terrestrial magnetism or weather patterns, followed regular periodic cycles: diurnal, monthly, seasonal, and annual” (Daston, Classical Probability, 383). 79. Stifter’s academic transcript from 1827 lists his study of “the theory of statistics,” a test he passed the same year (Stifter, Leben und Werk, 54 and 70). On Stifter’s experience and expertise in teaching mathematics and physics, see Alois Freiherr von Fischer’s letter of recommendation from March 22, 1849 (ibid., 222). 80. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 12; Preface, 3. 81. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man, 6. 82. Ibid., 9. 83. The term data-fication comes from Jürgen Link’s impressive study Versuch über den Normalismus (1997, An Essay on Normalism). For a sample of Link’s work on the various regimes of normalism in English translation, see the interview with him in Cabinet: The Average, vol. 15 (Fall 2004) as well as the essays translated and collected in Cultural Critique, vol. 57 (Spring 2004). 84. Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance, 37. 85. While the birth year of the “average man” is often given as 1835 (i.e., with the publication and success of A Treatise on Man), Stigler dates his actual birthday as March 5, 1831, in a speech Quetelet gave in Brussels. See Stigler “The Average Man Is 168 Years Old,” in Statistics on the Table, 51–65. 86. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man, 8. 87. Quetelet, in fact, identifies his average man as a society’s ideal, its most perfect specimen: “An individual who should comprise in himself at a given period all the qualities of the average man would at the same time represent

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all that is grand, beautiful, and excellent” (A Treatise on Man, 100). For this reason, Quetelet locates a decisive role for the average man in art as the artist’s model: “The necessity of veracity in faithfully representing the physiognomy, the habits, and the manners of people at different epochs has at all times led artists and literary men to seize, among the individuals whom they observed, the characteristic traits of the period in which they lived; or, in other words, to come as near the average as possible” (ibid., 96). Paradoxically, Quetelet’s average man is also the great, world-historical figure. Following Cousin’s thought on the great man, Quetelet calls his statistical average man the “best representative of his age” and the “greatest genius” (ibid., 101). 88. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 11–12; Preface, 3. 89. Downing comes to a different conclusion regarding Stifter’s notion of history: “Stifter manages to depict a natural world that seems to exclude history—by which I mean not any concrete history, but the very idea of history, of temporal unfolding, development, embeddedness or maturation. [. . .] As a result, nature itself in Stifter has no development” (Downing, Double Exposures, 33). While this may be true, one must recall that Stifter is referring to nature and its scientific understanding at the middle of the nineteenth century, whereby a dynamic notion of nature as evolving, as having a history, is first developed with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. 90. Quetelet, A Treatise on Man, 5. 91. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 12; Preface, 3. 92. Downing, for example, argues for a fundamental difference between the “gentle law” as expressed in nature and in the human, social world: “In his human world, we see no such continuity. Instead, Stifter expressly presents two different, opposed forces, one violently individual, the other repressively (and only repressively) social: the idea of the individual force, in all its disruptive violence, as nonetheless a consequence, an effect, or simply a part of the social, general law (of reality) is, apparently, excluded” (Downing, Double Exposures, 35). 93. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 14; Preface, 4. 94. Ibid., 12; Preface, 3. 95. Kant, Werke XI, 196. 96. Ibid., 195. 97. Quetelet also tends at times toward a teleological notion of regularity. In Du système social et des lois qui le régissent (1848), he writes that “nothing escapes the laws imposed by the all-powerful into organized beings. [. . .] All is foreseen, all is law-like: only our ignorance leads us to suppose that all is subject to the whims of chance” (cited in Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 51). The difference between a teleological notion of statistics and a contingent one is crucial. As a contingent phenomenon, statistical constancy only holds sway in the short term, not as a permanent law. If the factors involved in determining human behavior change (e.g., education, income, etc.), the relevant statistical outcome equally changes. The center of gravity embodied by the average man therefore only possesses stability for the present conditions—which, for

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Quetelet, can (and often must) change. Quetelet himself repeatedly underscores the societal causes of individual human behavior, particularly of criminality: “It is the social state, in some measure, which prepares these crimes, and the criminal is merely the instrument to execute them” (A Treatise on Man, 6). For Quetelet, it is not first and foremost the individual that needs modification, but the social forces that condition and in many ways determine behavior. See also my essay “Die üblichen Verdächtigen.” 98. Ibid., 15; Preface, 5. 99. Stifter, Werke VI, 335. 100. Ibid., 336. 101. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems, 184–85. 102. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 14; Preface, 5. 103. The year 1848 marked a break in Stifter’s life, for, as in Yeat’s poem, not only did the center not hold, but from Stifter’s perspective “anarchy” and “the blood-dimmed tide” were also indeed “loosed” upon the world. In a letter to Gustav Heckenast from September 4, 1849, Stifter writes: “As the irrationality, the vacuous enthusiasm, then the badness, the emptiness, and finally the criminality expanded and took the world in its possession, my heart almost literally broke” (Stifter, Leben und Werk, 228). As many scholars now suggest, while Stifter’s defense of regularity clearly opposes political revolution, it does not have to line up with staunch political conservatism. In “On Right” (1850), Stifter rejects the revolutions of 1848 but also proposes the course of slow reform, of changing the system from within: “Therefore the most sacred teaching of history is this: before you hurl yourself into the confusion and misery of a revolution, seek the redress of your malady along an indefatigable but peaceful path, even if it lasts many years” (Stifter, Werke VI, 321). Quetelet seems to be much of the same mindset, in his case as a response to the 1830 revolution in Belgium. The words that Gigerenzer et al. use to delineate Quetelet’s politics could equally apply to Stifter: “Quetelet was more of a bureaucratic liberal than a laissez-faire one, and he had high hopes for statistics as a source of expertise. The legislator must not seek to block the historical path of the social body, but he can hope to avoid the perturbations to which it is subject. It is the task of social physics to identify each force of perturbation, so that it can be nullified with an equal and opposite force. That is, the social physicist can learn how to avoid disorder and social turmoil, which Quetelet assumed to be inessential or perturbational” (Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance, 43). Downing thus rightfully points to Russell Berman’s interpretation of Stifter as a proponent of “cautious liberalism” (Double Exposures, 271). 104. See Helena Ragg-Kirkby, Adalbert Stifter’s Late Prose. The Mania for Moderation. 105. While Stifter read the proofs of Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician in July 1847, most scholars now plausibly argue that the time span between his reading of Grillparzer and the submission of The Poor Benefactor (probably in December 1847) was too short for Stifter to have begun the story only after Grillparzer. Rather, Stifter probably already had a draft of The Poor Benefactor

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finished and then, upon reworking it, was influenced by Grillparzer’s story. See the commentary to Limestone in HKG 2/3, 367–71, and Ward, “Tales of Truth,” in Ward (ed.), From Vormärz to Fin de Siècle, 16–18. 106. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 63; Limestone, 35. 107. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen, 192. 108. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 63; Limestone, 35. 109. Ibid., 70 and 72; Limestone, 40 and 42. 110. Ibid., 72; Limestone, 42. 111. Ibid., 85; Limestone, 51. 112. Ibid., 118; Limestone, 77. 113. Ibid., 128; Limestone, 83. 114. Ibid., 131; Limestone, 86. 115. Ibid., 131–32; Limestone, 86. 116. Ibid., 131; Limestone, 86. 117. This assertion wasn’t part of The Poor Benefactor, but was added for Limestone and is wholly congruent with the context of the preface’s gentle law. 118. Stifter, HKG 2/2, 132; Limestone, 87. 119. Ibid., 131; Limestone, 86. 120. In The Poor Benefactor, the narrator claims to renounce “artistic objectivity” and instead to “narrate through the eye of our friend.” The only two professed literary improvements are, first, to put in a coherent sequence “what the friend related over great periods of time and without order” and, second, to change inessential minor details and subplots so that the living relatives of the priest “don’t feel unpleasantly affected” by the story gaining a wider audience (Stifter, HKG 2/1, 59). 121. The tension in Stifter is thus not only between “the surface and the depths, between moderation and mania” (Ragg-Kirkby, Adalbert Stifter’s Late Prose, 6) but also between “center and periphery” (Metz, “Austrian Inner Colonialism,” 1477). Whereas Metz, however, argues that Stifter participates in a form of inner colonialism, in which the center further marginalizes the periphery (defined by race, religion, etc.), it is also the case that Stifter in many cases (and against his will) must take the side of the margins, for it is here that his ideal of the gentle law—understood as measure, tradition, constancy, and so forth—is represented and has its preserving force. If, as Stifter argues throughout “On Right,” contemporary Europe is threatened with losing its measure and lapsing into one-sidedness, the hope for the gentle law lies in the minority, the exception itself. Geulen makes a similar argument in her unpublished paper “Stifter-Gänge,” delivered at Cornell University’s 2006 conference on Stifter. conclusion 1. Goethe, HA 6, 398; Elective Affinities, 200. 2. Nietzsche, KSA 2, 701; Human All-too-Human, 2.2, §345. 3. On Heine’s journalism, its political ambitions as well as its tension with poetry, see Werner, “Der Journalist Heine,” in Höhn (ed.), Heinrich Heine. Ästhetisch-politische Profile, 295–313.

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4. See Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 28–29. 5. See de Duve on Duchamp’s urinal: “This particular urinal has nothing in common with any of the countless things carrying the name art, except that it is, like them, called art. And nothing distinguishes it from any ordinary urinal, from non-art, except, once again, its name, art. In conclusion, it allows you to administer the striking proof of art’s very autonomy, taking the glorious form of a nominalist ontology” (de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, 13). 6. Danto writes concerning Warhol’s Brillo Boxes: “The Warhol boxes, however, make even this alleged indefinability [of art] a problem, since they so totally resemble what by common consent are not art works and so, ironically, make the question of definition urgent” (Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, vii). At the end of the study, Danto returns to the Brillo Boxes: “The work vindicates its claim to be art by propounding a brash metaphor: the brillo-box-as-work-of-art. And in the end this transfiguration of the commonplace object transforms nothing in the art world. It only brings to consciousness the structures of art, which, to be sure, required a certain historical development before that metaphor was possible. [The Brillo Box] does what works of art have always done—externalizing a way of viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings” (ibid., 208). 7. Cited in Dickerman (ed.), Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris, 230. 8. For two excellent studies on the development of literary studies as a discipline in Germany, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany 1830–1870, and Klaus Weimar, Geschichte der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. 9. Mann, Tonio Kröger, 61. 10. I paraphrase this line from Geulen’s “Middle Men,” 67. 11. Nietzsche lists Mill, Darwin, and Spencer among the “mediocre Englishmen” with “mediocre minds” (Nietzsche, KSA 5, 196; Beyond Good and Evil §253, 144). 12. Mill, On Liberty, 66. 13. Ibid., 69. 14. Ibid., 71. 15. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 244. 16. Mill, On Liberty, 70. 17. Ibid., 65. 18. Ibid., 66. For Mill, no form of majority rule, whether democracy or a numerous aristocracy, “ever did or could rise above mediocrity” (ibid., 66). 19. That Mill places the fault of this homogenization and mediocritization solely on democracy without addressing the role of capitalism and free markets exposes the weakness of his defense of individuality in the name of liberalism. Throughout Democracy in America, Tocqueville alludes to capitalism and market forces without explicitly naming them. 20. Mill, On Liberty, 66. 21. Ibid., 67.

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22. Ibid., 67. 23. Nietzsche, KSA 1, 317; Uses and Disadvantages of History §9, 151. 24. In Nietzsche’s posthumous work, one finds: “A declaration of war on the masses by the loftier people is necessary! The mediocre people come together everywhere to form themselves into an army! [. . .] But we want to practice reprisals and bring to light this entire economy (that arises in Europe together with Christianity) and to summon it before the court” (Nietzsche, Werke III, 430–31). 25. Nietzsche, KSA 5, 183; Beyond Good and Evil §242, 134. 26. Ibid., 279; Genealogy of Morals 1.13, 26. 27. Nietzsche, KSA 5, 217; Beyond Good and Evil §262. 28. Ibid., 2, 627; Human All-too-Human, 2.2, §175. 29. In the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche writes: “For the mediocre, being mediocre is fortunate. [. . .] It would be completely unworthy of a deeper mind to see in mediocrity itself a problem. Mediocrity is the first necessity for the existence of exceptions; a high culture is conditioned by mediocrity. When the exceptional person handles of all people the mediocre with more tender fingers than himself and his own kind, this is not merely politeness of the heart—it is simply his duty” (ibid., 6, 244; Anti-Christ §57, 179). And in his posthumous work from the 1880s, one finds: “The hatred of mediocrity is unworthy of a philosopher; it is almost a question mark placed on his ‘right to philosophy.’ Precisely because he is the exception, he has to protect the rule [Regel]; with all means, he has to maintain good will toward himself” (Nietzsche, Werke III, 573). 30. Nietzsche, KSA 13, 368 (ellipses in original).

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a note on translations Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from German are my own. For the reader’s convenience, I have tried to crosslist the passages with existing English translations; the German source is listed first, followed by the English. In cases where I have relied on previous translations, I have at times silently modified them. For works that are cited regularly, I have used the following sigla: german works: AS

Grillparzer, Der arme Spielmann, in Sämtliche Werke, Ausgewählte Briefe. Ed. Karl Pörnbacher. München: Hanser Verlag, 1960. HA Goethe, Werke. Ed. Erich Trunz. München: C. H. Beck, 1978. HKG Stifter, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Ed. Alfred Doppler and Wolfgang Frühwald. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978. KSA Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. München et al.: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag et al., 1999. KU Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ed. Karl Vorländer. Unveränd. Neudruck der Ausgabe von 1924. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1963. SäS Heine, Sämtliche Schriften in zwölf Bänden. Ed. Klaus Briegleb. München: Hanser Verlag, 1976. SW Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985. english works: Aesthetics Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.

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Index

admiration, 12, 49, 51, 53, 56, 58–60, 62–64, 70 Adorno, Theodor W., 2, 16, 29, 76, 94, 164, 194n22 aesthetic judgment, 19, 29, 30, 33, 34, 41 95, 96, 105, 111, 112, 164, 165. See also taste aficionado, 80, 83, 86, 128, 131. See also Liebhaber anxiety of influence, 117 Arendt, Hannah, 68, 185n24, 190n102 Aristotle: catharsis, 65–66; Nicomachean Ethics, 19–20, 34, 66, 148, 181n38; Poetics, 11, 19, 25, 27, 45, 52, 54, 56, 183n15 art lover, 79, 80, 82, 86, 87, 89, 195n44. See also Liebhaber Auerbach, Erich, 202n31 Balzac, Honoré de, 142 Barthes, Roland: A Lover’s Discourse, 5–6, 176n11; Mythologies, 197n73 Benn, Gottfried, 15–17, 22, 23, 119 Berghahn, Klaus L., 197n73 Bernhard, Thomas, 165 Bernstein, Susan, 200n123 Bildung, 32, 58, 82 108, 111, 119, 167, 169, 171. See also education. Bildungsbürgertum, 80, 82, 102 Bildungsroman, 3, 111 Blanchot, Maurice, 118 Börne, Ludwig, 199n113

bourgeois tragedy, 2, 11–12, 25, 28, 41, 98, 127 Brentano, Margherita von, 194n32, 200n122 Brink, C. O., 179n11, 24 Büchner, Georg, 142; Lenz, 126–27, 134, 135, 155, 205n77 Bürger, Gottfried August, 80, 95–98, 126, 176n25, 197n77 Bürger, Peter, 164 Campe, Rüdiger, 186n36 Cavell, Stanley, 204n63 Cicero, Brutus, 22–23, 95 Cleopatra (Corneille), 43, 49–50, 54, 57, 140, 160–61 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 176n25, 196n55 collecting, 18, 26, 115, 122, 129–32, 140, 142, 145–50, 153; collector, 12, 78, 127, 128, 139 connoisseur, 87, 105–6, 110–12, 113, 114 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 26 Danto, Arthur, 201n6, 209n6 democracy, 22–23, 44, 48, 51, 67, 71, 83, 95, 125, 166–68 Diderot, Denis, 45, 66, 70, 183n17, 184n23, 189n94 dilettante, dilettantism, 8, 10, 12–13, 75, 121, 123, 135, 141, 155, 164, 165 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 134

224

Index

Diomedes, 45 Downing, Eric, 140–41, 144–45, 155, 206n89, 207n103 Dubos, Jean Baptiste, 43, 95 Duchamp, Marcel, 2, 164 Dutch painting, 37–38, 177n26 Duve, Thierry de, 175n7, 209n5 education, 8–9, 12, 73–75, 81–85, 91, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105–6, 110, 113, 115, 168–71 Ellis, John M., 203n42, 45 entelechy, 130, 131 equality, 54, 64, 99, 125, 166–68 Euripidean tragedy, 43–44, 56, 72 failure, 11, 17–18, 25, 91, 104–5, 113, 152, 159 Fenves, Peter, 190n100 Fick, Monica, 54 Flaubert, Gustave, 1, 3, 165, 176n14, 177n31 Flaxmann, John, 92, 94 Foucault, Michel, 167 Fried, Michael, 185n23 Gellert, Christian, 67 genius, 3, 6, 7, 12–13, 18, 28–33, 35, 77–78, 80, 81, 83, 87–88, 90, 92, 99, 102, 103, 105–6, 110–11, 113, 114, 118, 123, 125–27, 167, 168, 172, 176n12; “stamp of genius,” 7, 76, 78–79, 112, 176n25 gentle law, 13, 140, 144, 145, 146–53, 160, 161 Geulen, Eva, 175n7, 201nn4, 16, 203n57, 208n121, 209n10 Goebel, Eckart, 112, 181n38, 189n91, 199n117 Goethe, 3, 8, 10, 12, 15, 23, 75, 165, 167, 179n21, 186n48; “After Falconet and On Falconet,” 195n44; “Classical and Modern,” 117, 195n37; “The Collector and His Own,” 194n30; Italian Travels, 93–94; “Literary Sansculottism,” 95, 98–100, 105; “Self-Portrait,” 94, 104; Sorrows of Young Werther, 3–7, 10, 76–77; “On Truth and Probability,” 195n35; Poetry and Truth, 131; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 106–11, 135, 155 golden mean, 18, 19–20, 24, 27, 34, 66, 112, 134, 172

Gottsched, Johann Christopher, 10, 183n15, 179n20, 184n20 Grillparzer, Franz, 13, 126, 140–42, 149, 155–57, 159, 160, 164; The Poor Musician, 128–39 Hackert, Jakob Philipp, 93 Hart, Gail, 185n35 Hebbel, Friedrich, 139 Hegel, G. W. F., 1, 13, 36, 37, 43, 70, 74, 82, 107, 122, 124, 134, 156, 175n7; Aesthetics, 1, 4, 120; Spirit, 2, 121, 128, 165 Heine, Heinrich, 13, 42–43, 44, 46, 70, 111–12, 126, 155, 163, 200n123; The Romantic School, 122–25 Heine, Roland, 137, 203n44 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 10, 179n22 hermeneutic, 15, 129–40, 142, 144, 155–60, 165 Hobbes, Thomas, 68 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 104, 106, 123 Holub, Robert, 202nn26, 30, 37, 205n77 Homer, 22, 27, 95, 96 Horace, 11, 18–19, 21–26, 27, 29, 134, 137 Hutcheson, Francis, 55 imitation, 21, 30–31, 34, 40, 87, 89–91, 101, 115, 116, 160 Immermann, Karl, Epigones, 125–26 individuality, 44, 72, 98, 161, 166, 167, 178n36 Jagemann, Johann Christian, 85–86 Jauß, Hans Robert, 185n32, 201n16 Jean Paul, 17, 38, 123 Jelinek, Elfriede, 119 judgment, 29, 30, 33, 36, 59, 63, 71, 99, 114, 123 Kafka, Franz, 165 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 11, 16, 19, 36, 39, 67, 68, 69, 71, 88, 104, 112, 113; Critique of Judgment, 26, 28–35, 40, 74, 80, 81, 84, 142, 195n39; “Idea for a Universal History,” 151; Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, 68 Keller, Gottfried, 94, 130 Kleist, Heinrich von, 123; “A Principle of Higher Criticism,” 19, 39–41, 165 Kommerell, Max, 48, 186n48, 187n57

Index Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 3, 11–12, 62–64, 95, 98, 102, 140, 155, 160–61; Hamburg Dramaturgy, 45–74; Laokoon, 58; Miß Sara Sampson, 61, 183n17; Nathan the Wise, 49 Liebhaber, 79–80, 83, 86. See also art lover, aficionado Lillo, George, 183n17; London Merchant, 45, 61 Link, Jürgen, 205n83 literary market, 8, 9–10, 73 Livy, History of Rome, 180n32 Longinus, On the Sublime, 180n28 Lounsbery, Anne, 177n32 lyric poetry, 15–16, 88–89 Mann, Thomas, 7, 165 McCall, Tom, 67, 189n80 Meister, 79, 83, 85, 88, 92, 100, 105–6, 111–12, 115–18, 193n12 Mendelssohn, Moses, 12, 47, 48, 56, 58–59, 60, 62, 64, 66, 70, 71 Metz, Joseph, 208n121 Meyer, Heinrich, 85, 92, 193n16 Mill, John Stuart, 125, 166–67, 169, 170 Miller, Arthur, 182n11 Mönch, Cornelia, 188n76 Moral Sense philosophy, 55, 64 Moretti, Franco, 38, 107, 110 Moritz, Karl Phillip, 74, 89–90, 91 Mücke, Dorothea von, 175n9, 184n18, 184n23, 188n71 Nicolai, Friedrich, 12, 47, 48, 51, 54, 58, 63, 64, 66, 188n74; Joys of Young Werther, 10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 94, 166–68, 172; Anti-Christ, 210n29; Beyond Good and Evil, 106, 169–70; Birth of Tragedy, 43–44, 72, 73, 108; “David Strauss, Confessor and Writer,” 102–3, 193n22; Genealogy of Morals, 118, 169, 170; Human All-tooHuman, 116; “Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 80, 120 normative aesthetics, 11, 18, 24–28, 40, 45, 114; “class clause” in, 45–46 Novalis, 107–8, 110, 112, 123 originality, 1, 3, 11, 18–19, 21, 27, 28–33, 40, 114–15, 126, 127, 167

225

Pfeil, Johann, 46, 57, 188n79 philistine, 4, 82, 102, 114, 193n22 Pikulik, Lothar, 175n9, 183n17, 187n60, 188n79, 198n101 Plutarch, 128, 129, 131, 132, 139 Porter, Theodore, 152 Propyläen, 80, 100, 113, 195n35 prosaic reality, 1, 2, 4, 9, 13, 36, 74, 82, 107, 121, 123, 126, 127, 154–62, 164, 166 Purdy, Daniel L., 178n36 Quetelet, Adolphe, 34, 147–50, 206n97 Quintilian, 27 Ragg-Kirkby, Helena, 155 Realism, 2, 3, 13, 126, 127–32, 135, 140–42, 145, 156, 161, 164 Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 117 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 179n21 Roller, Matthew, 26 Ronell, Avital, 91, 200n123 Rosenkranz, Karl, 156, 161 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 55, 64; Second Discourse, 103–4; 190n102 Schiller, Friedrich, 8, 10, 12, 19, 23, 36–39, 48, 75, 121, 126, 134, 156, 165, 186n40, 189n92; Aesthetic Education, 85, 96, 197n77; “Kallias, or On Beauty,” 90; “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” 96; “On the Necessary Limits in Using Beautiful Forms,” 77–78, 88 196n46; Thalia, 196n65 Schings, Hans-Jürgen, 196n50 Schlegel, Friedrich, 123 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 134 Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, 8, 73, 92, 187n60 sensus communis, 33, 40, 41, 67 Shakespeare, William, 10, 95 Stifter, Adalbert, 13, 94, 126; Limestone, 156–62; “On Right,” 153, 205n76, 207n103, 208n121; Preface, Multi-Colored Stones, 139–52, 154, 155; “Solar Eclipse on July 8, 1842,” 143 Storm and Stress, 101, 175n9, 176n12 sublime, 39, 40, 49, 141, 142–43, 152, 155, 164; sublime failure, 11, 17, 18; heroic sublime, 12, 37, 48, 50–51, 60, 140; sublime regularity, 13, 14, 139–43, 144, 146, 147, 153, 162

226

Index

Sulzer, Johann Georg, 68, 70–71, 79, 189n99 Swales, Martin, 203n45 Szondi, Peter, 44, 175n7, 186n36, 190n101 talent, 7, 8, 12, 22, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 77–79, 81, 83, 87–89, 91–94, 100, 103–13, 117–18, 122–23, 125, 167–68, 172 taste, 16, 29, 31–32–33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 70, 71, 82, 83, 95, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105, 111, 113–14, 116, 117, 127. See also aesthetic judgment Tocqueville, Alexis de, 166 Ungern-Sternberg, Wolfgang von, 177n28

Vaget, Hans Rudolf, 78–79, 87, 92, 94, 104, 113, 176n20, 192n5, 193n16, 195n40 Viëtor, Karl, 109 Wagner, Richard, 72, 168 Warhol, Andy, 2, 164 Werther complex, 5–8, 112; Werther effect, 10, 80 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 112, 189n91 Wölfel, Kurt, 183n16 Woodmansee, Martha, 96, 176n25, 191n107, 192n110, 196n55, 197n73 Wordsworth, William, 74, 176n25, 196n55 Yeats, William Butler, “The Second Coming,” 153 Young Germany movement, 124